Humph.
He waved for lights, for windows. The study brightened with warm, incandescent yellows and whites, but where stone wall faded to glass window there were only reflections of those same lights against darkness. It was nighttime outside.
He realized he was famished, and wondered how long it had been since he’d eaten. A full day? He hoped not, else gas and bellyaches would follow soon after any meal.
“Good evening, sir,” the house said through extruded wall speakers, as if he’d just arrived and required a greeting.
“Hmm, yes. Door, please.”
Obligingly, a rectangular seam appeared in the wall plaster; the space within it darkened, turned to wood, acquired picturesque brass hinges, and swung outward.
“Sir, you have—”
He held up a hand. “Actually, I need something to eat before I hear the day’s problems.”
“Yes, sir,” the house replied, a bit uneasily. “There’s a bowl of peeled grapes ready for you. Chilled. But you have—”
“Grapes?” Bruno passed through the doorway, into the darkened living room. “Grapes? Where? No, don’t turn on the lights, just tell—
His shins collided with something knee high and solid, something that felt cool and smooth through the silk of his pajama breeches, felt in fact like the torso of a robot that was resting on its hands and knees. At least, that’s how it felt for the moment it took Bruno to lose his balance and spill over sideways.
“Hugo! Blast it!” he called out.
Can a house gasp in dismay? Bruno’s seemed to for a moment. Beneath him there was the crackle of programmable matter shifting substance at maximum rate; he landed on a thick, yielding carpet of foam rubber. Not real rubber, of course, but wellstone rubber, a structure of designer electron bundles alternating with superfine silicon threads. Presently, the foam grew patchy beneath him, as if dissolving; two seconds later he lay in a Bruno-shaped depression, his left side resting directly against the granite of the house’s foundation. A cloud of silicon dust rose up all around him.
The foam had yielded too far, lost structural integrity, broken the fine mesh of circuits that gave it the illusion of substance. Had the floor changed to iron instead, he’d have been the one to yield, but as it was he’d probably been saved from a cracked elbow. Of course, in the Queendom of Sol “breaking the floor” was the very metaphor for foolish clumsiness. Or had been, once upon a time; he didn’t get down there much anymore.
“Declarant-Philander!” the house cried out, using the longest and most formal of his titles, though he’d told it a thousand times not to. “Are you all right? Are you hurt?”
He didn’t speak at first, fearful of inhaling the fine silicon dust. Instead he sat up, brushing himself off, breathing lightly—experimentally—through his nose. At once, small multilegged robots scuttled forth from the shadows, undulating, wrapping sinuously around him and racing over his skin and clothing with tiny vacuum-cleaner probosci. They raced around the edges of him as well, finding the dust where it lay. Two seconds later they were finished and gone, scuttling back into hiding like fast-motion figments of his imagination.
“Sir?” the house prompted again, anxiously. “My humblest, humblest apologies, sir. Are you all right? I tried—
Bruno sighed. “I’m fine. Hugo?”
The robot he’d tripped over, perched there in the darkness on its hands and knees, looked up slowly at the sound of its name. Its neck joints clicked, golden bands sliding one inside the other, as it turned its blank metallic face toward him. A faint mewling sound emanated from somewhere in the vicinity of its nonexistent mouth.
“Your robot is in need of recycling,” another voice, a female voice, said from deeper in the living room’s darkness.
Startled, Bruno rose to his feet, spied a silhouette there on the divan. Long hair, long dress, a sparkle of diamonds at the waist.
“Lights,” he said, though he knew at once who it must be.
“I tried to tell you, sir,” the house complained. “You have a visitor.”
The lights came up softly, illuminating the form of—who else?—Her Majesty Tamra Lutui, the Virgin Queen of All Things. Bruno had known no other visitor for years, and even she’d been here only the once. She’d been desperate, then, in need of his help. And in the here and now, her posture gave the impression that she’d been sitting there in the darkness for some time. Fair enough; the house had standing orders never to disturb him in his study unless his safety or his work were in immediate danger. Had it made her wait? Had she agreed to, when Royal Overrides could compel any software to her immediate bidding?
“Malo e lelei,” he said, as prelude to his many questions.
She inclined her head slightly, acknowledging the greeting. No crown adorned her tonight; her black hair spilled out over bare, walnut-colored shoulders. Her dress was of crimson suede, with round black shoes sticking out underneath. Casual attire, even for a figurehead ruler of billions. Especially for a figurehead, he supposed. The only concession to her station was a wide bracelet of porcelain bearing the traditional plus sign and six-pointed star of Tongan heraldry, half smothered in laurels and filigree.
“You’re quite welcome here, Highness,” he went on, now a bit testily. “I’m at your disposal, as always, but I’m afraid I wasn’t prepared for a visitor this evening.” He glanced around at the floor and furnishings. “I see the house has cleaned up, at least. By choice, I wouldn’t inflict my usual housekeeping on you.”
“Your robot,” she said, pointing, “is defective. I nearly tripped over it myself.”
Beside him, Hugo had moved, slowly, to the side of the Bruno-shaped dent in the floor, and was probing the edges of it with slow, tin-gray fingers capped in gold. The faint mewling sound had never quite stopped.
“Not defective,” Bruno said wearily. “Free. I wanted one animate object around here that wasn’t simply a house appendage. Do you realize there isn’t a single animal on this planet? Not a bird to sing, not a fish to poke ripples in the water’s smooth surface. Did I really do that, craft an entire world, landscapes and biomes and evaporation cycles, and then forget to populate it? Someone gave me a little toy ocean once, alive with miniature creatures, and even then I didn’t take the hint. I suppose I sought to correct the oversight. I have entirely too many servants as it is, so I decided to free one.”
She frowned. “Free it?”
He nodded. “Yes. I severed its link to the house software.”
Her Majesty looked aghast. “Robots have no volition, Declarant, no desire to do anything but fulfill. Nor do they possess intelligence, unless you’d count raw intuition as such. You severed the link to its processor, its ability to grasp and assess the very needs it must fulfill?”
He nodded again. “Just so.”
“How… unkind. You leave it helpless and confused, in an environment beyond its comprehension.”
Bruno shrugged. “Such is the nature of freedom, Highness. I’ve often said that life is nothing more than the choices thrust upon us when ability and incident collide. Which of us truly knows our course? Generally, we don’t even know the landscape beneath our course. It’s a terrible gift, in some ways, but a great one as well. Hugo is more fortunate than some.”