Which, come to think of it, didn’t necessarily mean no more trouble. No amount of orders could cover every eventuality, not even a blanket order like, “Don’t cause any more trouble.” Not even the Three Laws, built into the very nature of their brains, could keep them from occasionally damaging themselves, or disobeying orders, or even harming a human, however inadvertently. It kept such harm to a minimum, surely, but it didn’t prevent it entirely. Nor would anything Derec could do keep these robots from letting their curious nature draw them into unusual situations. They were like cats; only dead ones stayed out of mischief.
“So,” Derec said, stretching out and putting an arm around Ariel. “What are we going to do with you three?”
Ariel snuggled into Derec’s side. The robots looked to one another, then back to Derec. At last Eve spoke. “You need do nothing. We are perfectly capable of taking care of ourselves.”
“And causing all sorts of problems in the process. No, sorry, but I think I want to keep an eye on you from now on.”
“As you wish.”
Lucius said, “I am happy with that arrangement. I will be glad for the opportunity to observe you as well. You are the first humans I have encountered, and since I have been ordered not to create any more, it seems likely that my time will be most profitably spent in your presence.”
Still operating under the decision to use speech rather than comlink when with humans, Adam turned to Lucius and said, “Eve and I have observed them for some time now. We are attempting to use our experience to determine what makes humans act the way they do. We intend to formulate a set of descriptive rules, similar to our own Laws of Robotics, which will describe their actions.”
“That was one purpose of my project as well.”
“When you get it figured out, let us know, okay?” Derec said facetiously.
“We will.”
Lucius fixed his eyes on Adam. “What have you learned about them?”
“We have learned that-”
“Hold it,” Ariel interrupted. “New datum for all of you. Humans don’t like being discussed by robots as if they weren’t in the room. If you’re going to compare notes, do it somewhere else.”
“Very well.” The three robots got up as one and walked silently out of the living room. Derec heard footsteps recede down the hallway, pause, then a door that hadn’t been there before closed softly. The robots had evidently ordered the building to make them a conference room at the other end of the apartment from the humans.
“Those robots are spooky,” Ariel whispered.
“ ‘Ur rright about that,” Wolruf said.
“If they really are my mother’s creations, then I’m not sure I want to meet her,” Derec added. “They’re so singleminded. Driven. And once they do figure out their ‘Laws of Humanics,’ I’m not sure if I want to be around for the implementation, either.”
“What do you mean? No robot can disobey the Three Laws, not even them. We’re safe.”
“Famous last words. What if they decide we’re not fit to be our own masters? What if they decide-like Adam did with the Kin on the planet where he awoke-that they would make wiser rulers than we could? The First Law would require them to take over, wouldn’t it?”
“You sound like an Earther. ‘Robots are going to take over the galaxy!’”
Derec grinned sheepishly, but he held his ground. “I know, it’s the same old tired argument, but if it was ever going to happen, now’s the time. Avery’s robot cities were spreading like cancer before we stopped them, and for all I know they could take off and start spreading again. Now these robots show up, and one of them has already made itself leader of an intelligent race. It wouldn’t take much for them to combine their programming and come up with robots who could reproduce themselves faster than humanity can, and who think humans need supervision.”
“Not much, except that they can’t do it. The first time a human told them they were hurting its normal development, they’d either have to back off or go into freeze-up with the conflict.”
“That’ s the theory, anyway,” said Derec.
“Gloom an’ doom!” Wolruf said with a rumbling laugh. “‘Uthink ‘u ‘ave trouble; what about me? I don’ even have that defense.”
“You don’t sound very worried about it.”
“ ‘Ulive where I come from, ‘u’dknow why. Robots-even alien ones-would make better rulers than what we’ve got.”
She had a point, Derec thought. When he had first encountered Wolruf, she had been a slave on an alien ship, using her servitude to payoff a familial debt. He doubted that a robot government would allow that kind of arrangement to continue.
But would they allow creativity? Adventure? Growth? Or would there be only stagnation under the robots’ protective rule? Derec spent the rest of the day wondering. They were all just abstract questions at this point, but if his parents, reckless experiments got any farther out of hand, the entire galaxy might have the chance to find out the answers.
Chapter 2. The Robotics Laboratory
Derec awoke to find himself in a splash of sunlight coming in through the window. So east is that way today, he thought automatically. In a city whose buildings moved about and flowed from shape to shape, orienting himself in the morning was a habit he had quickly gotten into. Directions-and landmarks-were too temporary to rely on from day to day.
He became aware that he was alone in the bed. Ariel’s absence from his side wasn’t surprising, since she tended to be more of a morning person than he was, but the sounds coming from the Personal were. Someone-presumably her, since Avery and Wolruf had their own Personals-was being quite sick.
He got out of bed and padded to the closed door. “Ariel?” he called out hesitantly.
“Don’t come in here!” she shouted. There came a sound of rushing water, not quite loud enough to drown completely the sound of her being sick once again.
Derec stood by the door, feeling helpless and, now that he was uncovered, cold. He took his robe from its hook by the door, put it on, saw hers still there, and took it down as well.
The Personal was silent now. “Are you okay?” he called.
“I am now. Give me a minute.”
Still worried, but unwilling to risk Ariel’s wrath by opening the door, Derec crossed to the window to look out at the spires and rooftops of Robot City. It looked completely healed now from Lucius’s destruction, healed and full of robots going about their normal duties. Derec could see hundreds of them in the streets, on elevated walkways, in transport booths, in maglev trucks, all moving purposefully once again. From this height-twenty-five stories today, Derec guessed-it was hard to tell that all the activity wasn’t the ebb and flow of humanity in a fully populated human city.
Behind him he heard more water running, some soft bumping around, the cabinet opening and closing: all normal Personal noises. Then the door opened and Ariel stepped into the bedroom.
She was unselfconsciously nude. Derec turned away from the window, smiled as he always did to see how beautiful she was by light of day, and held out her robe. She let him help her into it.
“You sure you’re all right?” he asked.
“Fine, now,” she said. “I just woke up feeling sick. Must have been something I ate.”
“Maybe.” Derec knew she was probably right, but a remnant of the old worry had crept back to haunt him. She had been sick once, deathly sick, and before she had found treatment for it on Earth, Derec had learned what it was to worry about someone’s health. That was before they had become lovers; now his concern for her was even more intense.
There might have been another possibility, now that they were sharing a bed again, but her disease had ruled that out.
“I feel fine,” she said with exasperation. “Really. And I don’t want you telling the robots about this, or they won’t rest until they’ve had me in for a full-blown exam and proven to themselves that I’m healthy.”