David Brin - The Practice Effect

The other jailer smiled. ‘Tell ya’ what, though. We’ll letcha have some brandy" —he said the word with hushed reverence— “if you’ll promise to keep us safe from those devil-spawned critters you’ve let loose around here. I got a friend on the still detail, an’ he sneaks me some.” He held up a flask that sloshed.

Dennis shrugged as the man poured a cupful and passed it between the bars. He hadn’t the slightest idea what the fellow was talking about. Devil-spawned? Critters? It sounded like a load of superstitious nonsense.

He took a swallow of the wonderfully vile liquor. After the fire had settled warmly into his stomach, he asked the guards about Arth.

They told him the little thief had been placed in charge of the distillery. Dennis suspected Arth had actually bribed the guard to pass the entire flask on to him.

Another swallow of the horrible stuff made him cough. But he swore he’d make it up to Arth someday.

The jailers knew nothing of Linnora. Mention of the L’Toff Princess made them nervous. They made small warding motions with their hands and claimed pressing duties elsewhere.

Dennis sighed and returned to the straw pallet. At least the spot where he lay was getting slowly more comfortable. It had to.

He tried practicing a small stone into a chisel, to pry apart the stones of his cell. But he knew he was really only practicing the dungeon itself. The pebble wasn’t anywhere near as good at chiseling as the wall was at being a wall. No doubt it was an old story on this world. Unless he came up with something unusual, a prisoner was stalemated.

He awakened suddenly from a dream about monsters.

There was a feathery touch of vague horror to the images that clung to Dennis’s mind as he blinked in the darkness… scrabbling shapes and sharp, ominous claws. For a long time after waking, he felt filled with a heavy lethargy.

In the dark silence he thought he heard something. Then, for a time, he dismissed the faint scratching sound as a lingering remnant of his nightmare.

Then it changed and became a soft hissing.

Dennis shook his head to free it of mental cobwebs. He turned in the gloom and then blinked. A fiery spark had appeared at one corner of the door to his cell, a bright speck in the almost total blackness.

The spark climbed slowly, leaving a glowing line behind it, until it reached a height of about two feet. Then the hot glow jogged right. Faint light from the hallway shone through the charred trail the flame left behind.

Dennis backed away, suddenly remembering what the jailers had said about “devil-spawned critters” loose in the castle. They had blamed him, but Dennis knew he had nothing to do with demons. Something was cutting its way into the cell, and it was not of his liking!

The burned trail turned another right angle, descending at an even pace toward the floor. Dennis clutched his sharpened stone as the wooden segment finally fell away, leaving an opening in the door just above the floor.

Dennis tried to call out, to summon the guards— anybody— but he couldn’t find his voice.

For a moment the new opening was dark and empty. Then two gleaming red eyes appeared in the smoking opening— eyes larger than ought to belong to any living thing. They shone at him in the dimness for several heartbeats.

Then the thing that owned them moved slowly forward into the cell.

In his half-starved condition, with the catalepsy of sleep still in his muscles, Dennis felt far from ready for a fight. Against his will he closed his eyes, holding his breath as the softly chittering monster approached.

Then it stopped. He could sense it poised only a few feet away, muttering slowly to itself.

Dennis waited. Then his lungs started to burn. He couldn’t hold his breath any longer. He opened one eye to look, ready for anything…

… and exhaled in a long sigh. “Oh, lord—”

There, waiting patiently on the cool stones, was his long-missing Sahara Tech exploration ’bot. It sat complacently, its sensors whirring quietly, ready—at last—to follow his instructions, to report.

Even in the dim light he could tell that the thing had changed. It rode lower, sleeker, with a sly pattern of coloration on its back. It had been… practiced… become better at the job he had assigned it. His most recent instructions, shouted briefly several weeks ago, had been to come and report to him. No Earthly robot could have managed it. But here it was, hardly “Earthly” anymore.

The thing must have followed his trail ever since that escapade on the rooftops of Zuslik, patiently working past obstacles until it overcame them, one by one.

But how? A tool had to have a user to benefit from the Practice Effect, didn’t it? Could he really be thought to have been using the ’bot when it was out of sight and mind?

This played havoc with the theory he had formed, that the Practice Effect was at least partly a psi power exercised by humans on this world.

Then he remembered. The last time he had seen the robot it had been accompanied by a living thing—someone who loved to watch tools being used, the more complicated the better.

“Come on in, Pix,” he whispered. “All is forgiven.”

Two bright green eyes appeared in the little gap in the door. They blinked, then were joined by a Cheshire grin of needle-sharp teeth.

The little animal launched itself into a short glide and landed on Dennis’s lap. It purred and snuggled as if it had left him only hours ago.

Dennis sat there, stroking the little creature’s fur and listening to the quiet hum of the robot. Unexpectedly, tears welled. Hope seemed to fill him suddenly. After so long alone in the dark, to have companions and allies again… for a few minutes it was too good to be endured.

In the corridor outside, he found one of the jailers sprawled unconscious next to a bench. Dennis stripped the man of his clothes and left him inside his own cell, bound and gagged. He propped the rectangular piece of doorway into place. It was crude, but it was all he could do.

There was a bowl of stew and a slab of bread by the guard’s bench. Dennis wolfed them down while he hurried into the jailer’s clothes; they were too tight around the shoulders for him and too wide around the girth. When he finished, the pixolet took its old place on his shoulder, grinning at everything.

The robot had originally been equipped with a small stunner to acquire specimens of animal life. Apparently it had improved the device through practice and now was capable of knocking out anyone who stood between it and its job. Undoubtedly that ability would come in handy during the hour’ ahead.

Dennis knelt and spoke clearly and carefully to the machine.

“New instructions. Take note.” The ’bot hummed and clicked in response.

“You are to accompany me now, and zap unconscious anyone I point at like this.”

He demonstrated, cocking his thumb and miming a pistol firing. It was a pretty complicated concept, but he was wagering the machine had grown sophisticated enough to comprehend.

“Indicate if you understand and are capable of carrying out this function.”

The green assent light on the machine’s turret winked. So far so good.

“Secondary orders. Should we become separated, you are to preserve your existence and make every effort to discover my whereabouts again and report.”

Again the light flashed.

“Finally,” he whispered, “should you find that I am dead, or in any event after three months, you will go back to the zievatron and await anyone from Earth. Should such a person arrive, report what you’ve observed.”

The robot assented. Then across its tiny display screen came a request to begin its encyclopedic report on the denizens of Tatir. The ’bot seemed quite anxious to discharge its duty.