Derec wouldn’t approve-he’d been the one who convinced Avery not to the first time, pleading with him not to interrupt their development-but Avery really couldn’t care less about Derec’s wishes now. Not any more. For a while there he’d come close to thinking he might actually care about his son again, but to discover that all this time the boy had been deceiving him, distracting him with his silly trip off planet while his insidious program wiped out Avery’s greatest creation-that betrayal extinguished any feeling he may have had for him.
And by association, for Janet as well, though he had never fooled himself into thinking he cared for her again.
Her robots, on the other hand…
Yes, he cared a great deal about her robots. Not necessarily for them, but definitely about them. Such strange creations they were! Infinitely malleable, even more so than his own proteiform robots; these three robots of Janet’s were not only physically mutable but mentally mutable as well. You never knew what strange notion they might come up with next. Their initial programming was radically different from a normal robot’s, and they had the uncanny ability to integrate their life’s experiences directly into that programming, modifying their basic motivations with each new situation they faced. They were the first truly heuristic learning machines Avery had ever seen.
They weren’t without flaws, of course. Janet’s typically scatterbrained execution of a brilliant idea had left their psyches scarred beyond repair, but the idea itself was exquisite. Like the concept of cellular robots in the first place, the possibilities it opened up were endless, but it would take Avery’s own genius to realize them.
The general service robots emerged from the wreck in pairs, each pair carrying an inert robot like a rigid statue between them. Avery examined each one as they brought it past.
First came Lucius II, the self-named successor to Robot City’s first creative robot. Since the original was gone, no one bothered with the numeral. Lucius looked a little like the robots carrying him: smooth and featureless in the torso and limbs, little more than an idealized humanoid figure optimized for efficiency. He wasn’t quite as well defined as they, though. Without conscious direction, his physical form had begun to drift back toward the shape of his first imprinting, but for Lucius that had been late in coming. He had spent his first few weeks as a formless blob, and that experience showed now in the rounded, almost doughy shape of his body.
His face was better articulated. It, too, had smoothed somewhat, like that of a wax figure left too long in the sun, but it was still recognizably based upon Derec’s.
Avery wasn’t surprised. The boy had always been a strong influence on the robot. Lucius had even proposed that the two treat one another as friends, with all the rights and obligations that entailed; it was no wonder the imprinting process had gone down to the instinctual level.
Next came Adam. A casual examination would have led an observer to believe that Adam had first imprinted on Wolruf, for that was who the robot most resembled, but the casual observer would have been mistaken. Adam’s canine features came from his early imprinting on the Kin, the backward, Stone Age, wolflike aliens who even now marked their territory in one of Avery’s cast-off cities. Wolruf’s resemblance to the Kin was purely coincidental-unless one considered parallel evolution to be something other than coincidence.
Perhaps it was, Avery thought. The separate evolution of two wolflike species-three actually, if you counted wolves themselves-was fairly good evidence that the canine form was an efficient housing for at least moderate intelligence. Avery doubted that it was better than the human form, but he was scientist enough to realize that was his own prejudice showing. Maybe the canine form was more efficient. Right now the evidence stacked up three against one. One and a half, maybe, if you counted the pirate Aranimas as marginally humanoid, but humanoids were still outnumbered.
It was a pitifully small sample to be making a judgment, though. They needed to study far more aliens before they could be sure.
Was that what Janet had been trying to do with these robots of hers? Had she stranded them, formless and with only the most basic programming, on what she thought were empty worlds in order to see what shape they would eventually mimic in intelligent form? Was she making her own aliens to study?
If so, then she had succeeded at least partially in that ambition. Her robots certainly behaved strangely enough to be aliens.
The service robots brought the third inert one out of the ship. This one, Eve, looked most human of all, but Avery knew that was only a surface phenomenon. Her first encounter with an organic being had been with Ariel, and that was who she resembled now, but her experiences from then on had been largely the same as the others ‘. She was just as dangerous, just as unpredictable, as either of them.
With the robots out of it, Avery had no more use for the ship. “Tell Central to clear the wreckage,” he told one of the service robots.
“Yes, sir,” the robot replied, and almost immediately the starship began to slump down to a puddle of undifferentiated dianite, the robot cells which made up the city. The cells from the starship joined the cells of the tower, returning to the general inventory. The few parts that weren’t made of dianite-mostly engine parts-were swallowed whole, to be transferred internally to a recycling center.
Avery didn’t stay to watch. He followed the robots back into the elevator and took them down, far below the tower to the transport level, then along the moving slidewalks toward his newly fabricated lab. He snorted in disgust as he stepped from the slow outer walk to the inner, faster ones, then waited impatiently for the fastest to carry them to their destination. Earther technology! Slidewalks were fine for moving huge crowds of people, but they were ridiculously inefficient for a city of robots. Avery looked to both sides, ahead and behind, and saw only three other passengers, far enough away to be merely specks in the distance.
Why had they built slidewalks? he wondered, but he came up with the answer almost immediately. Because they had put the city underground to implement Derec’s orders, and the only underground city on record-Earth’s planet-wide megalopolis-had slidewalks.
Another bit of proof that robots weren’t good at independent thought, as though Avery needed the reminder.
He considered ordering them to rebuild the city on the surface the way he had originally designed it, but after a moment’s thought decided against it. He was too busy to fool with details. Let Derec have his ecosystem, if it would keep him occupied.
He led the robots through an interchange with a wide cross-corridor, traveled that one for a while, then stepped to a slower strip to make a connection with a smaller corridor running parallel to the first. This one had only a single slidewalk running in each direction, and as they proceeded down the northbound one Avery counted doorways, at last stepping off onto static pavement in front of an unmarked door about two thirds of the way down the length of the block.
Behind that door should be his new laboratory. Avery had instructed the central computer to build it here in this thoroughly anonymous location and then forget that location-and to fend off any inquiry about it as well-hoping to keep his inquisitive son from tracking it down quite so easily as he might otherwise. Avery knew that Derec would find it eventually, but he only needed secrecy for a short while. Just long enough to take these three robots of Janet’s apart and see what made them tick.