Wolruf laughed aloud. When the robot asked her to explain, she said, “You’ve ‘eard the cliche about the blind leading the blind?”
“No, but I have accessed the appropriate files. I fail to see the application here.”
Wolruf laughed again. “ ‘umans, at least my particular breed of them-and to all appearances Derec ‘ s breed as well-don’t pay much more attention to long-term problems than you do.”
“Oh,” the wolf said. “We will have to take this under consideration. “
The elevator came to a stop and the doors opened onto the underground city. Wolruf stepped out ahead of the robot. “Good,” she said. “I was ‘oping you’d say that.”
The city built the hospital in the suite of rooms just down the corridor from the lab. Medical robots arrived while it was still differentiating, took Avery inside, and made quick work of preparing his wound for surgery. The operating room grew around them while they cleaned the wound, and within minutes they had him anesthetized and were hard at work grafting his hand back on.
Ariel watched in morbid fascination from behind the sterile room’s transparent wall. To her left stood Derec ‘ s mother and her companion robot, to her right Adam and Eve and Mandelbrot. The robots were watching the operation with the same fascination as Ariel, but Derec’s mother was watching Ariel as much as anything else.
“You’re David’s lover, aren’t you?” she finally asked, her tone less than approving. It was the first thing either of them had said to the other.
“That’s right,” Ariel said without looking away from the window. Where did this woman get off? she wondered. No introduction, no apology, just “You’re David’s lover.” She didn’t know a thing about the situation, yet she still acted as if she were in control. Ariel turned her head enough to address the reflection beside her own in the window and said, “His name is Derec now.”
“I heard. I’ve never liked it. It sounds like a spacesuit manufacturer.”
“Exactly,” Ariel said around a smile.
“Why did he change it?”
“Long story.”
“I see.”
The medical robots were using some sort of glue on hold the ends of bone together. Lucius’s weapon had been sharp and moving fast; the severed edges were smooth and easily repaired. He had probably done that on purpose, Ariel realized. She wondered why he had bothered. She watched the robots spread the glue on either end, press the two together, and hold them rigid until the glue set. She hoped they’d checked to make sure it was aligned properly; something about the glue looked permanent.
“You’re not worth the effort he’s put in on finding you,” Ariel said suddenly.
“What?”
“You heard me. As soon as he hears about this, Derec is going to come running in here all ready for a big reconciliation. He wants his family back, and he’ll take what he gets, but you’re no prize. Neither of you. You two are living proof that scientists shouldn’t have children. “
“I suppose you’re an expert on the subject.”
“I know how to treat one.”
“How could you? You don’t-Do you?” The woman was clearly horrified at the thought.
“What’s the matter, don’t like the idea of being a grandmother?” Ariel snorted. “Relax, you’re safe. He took care of it for you.” She tilted her head toward the window. “One of his wonderful experiments ran amok and killed the fetus while it was still only a few weeks old. “
“You sound as if you hold me responsible.”
“You ran off and left your son in the hands of a lunatic. What am I supposed to think?”
“I couldn’t take him with me. I-I needed to be alone.”
“You should have thought about that before you had him.” Ariel looked directly at Derec’s mother for the first time since they had begun speaking to one another. If she had looked earlier she might have held her tongue; the woman’s skin was gray, and she looked as if she had aged twenty years in the last few minutes.
Her robot was growing concerned, too. It said, “Mistress Janet, Mistress Ariel, I don’t believe this conversation should continue.”
Janet. That was her name. Ariel had been struggling for it since she’d first seen her.
Janet said, “It’s all right, Basalom. Ariel isn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know.” She smiled a fleeting smile. “I’ve had plenty of time to dwell on my mistakes.”
Looking back through the window at Avery and the medical robots, she said, “We thought having a child might save our marriage. Can you imagine anything sillier? People who don’t get along in the first place certainly aren’t going to get along any better under the stress of having a child, but we didn’t see that then. We just knew we were falling out of love, and we tried the only thing we could think of to stop it from happening.”
Ariel felt herself blush guiltily at Janet’s admission. She’d been thinking along similar lines herself just yesterday, hadn’t she? She hadn’t actually come out and said that a baby would bring her and Derec closer together again, but she’d been working toward that concept. Was it so surprising, then, to find that Derec’s parents had done the same thing?
“Treating the symptoms doesn’t often cure the disease,” Ariel said, her tone considerably softer than before. “I guess you should have looked for the reason why you were falling out of love in the first place. “
“I know that now.”
More softly still, Ariel asked, “Why do you think you did fall out of love?”
Janet’s laugh was a derisive “Ha!” She nodded at Avery as Ariel had done earlier. “He was out to transform the galaxy; I wanted to study it first. He wanted a castle for everyone and a hundred robots in every castle, but I wanted to preserve a little diversity in the universe. I was more interested in the nature of intelligence and the effect of environment on its development, while he was more interested in using intelligence to modify the environment to suit it. We argued about it all the time. Small wonder we started to hate each other. “
Derec spared Ariel from having to reply to that. He burst into the room at a dead run, skidded to a stop just in time to avoid crashing into the windowed wall, and demanded of anyone who would answer, “What did you do with Lucius’s body?”
Chapter 7. The Thud Of One Dropped Shoe
Janet could hardly believe her ears. “What kind of a way is that to greet someone you haven’t seen in years?”
Derec looked properly sheepish. He also looked as if he’d slept in his clothing and hadn’t bothered to look in a mirror before he’d left the apartment. One lock of hair stuck straight out from his right temple.
“Sorry,” he said. “Hello, Mother. I’ve missed you. How’s Dad?” He looked through the window, but before Janet could answer him he lost his sheepish look and said, “Looks like he’ll live. But without a power pack Lucius won’t last more than an hour or so. I’ve got to get enough power to his brain to keep him going or we’ll lose the chance to find out what made him do this.”
Janet couldn’t suppress a grin. He sounded just like his father. Or maybe like herself, she admitted, if she’d been thinking a little more clearly.
Ariel wasn’t as amused. “Robots, robots, robots! Is that all you can think about?” she nearly screamed at him.
“There’s more to life than robots!”
Derec shook his head, but Janet could see the determination in his eyes. “No, that’s not all I think about. It’s just that this happens to be about the most important thing to happen in the entire history of robotics. If we lose this chance to study it, we may never get another. “
“Derec’s right,” Janet said. “If I hadn’t been so rattled I’d have thought of it myself. Basalom, where-”