Clifford Simak - A Heritage of Stars

They traveled up the river, moving in daylight now since there were two of them to watch the prairie—either Cushing or Rollo scouting the bluff tops, on lookout for war parties or for other dangers. In the first few days they spotted several bands; none of these were interested in the river valley, but were moving eastward. Watching them, Cushing felt a pang of worry about the university, but told himself it was unlikely it would be attacked. Even if it were, its high wall would hold off any attacker except one that would be more persistent than a nomad band.

The Minnesota River, up which they moved, was a more placid stream than the Mississippi. It meandered through its wooded valley as a lazy man might walk, not exactly loitering, but in no hurry either. By and large it was a narrow stream, although at times it spread out through low-lying marshes and they were forced to make their way around.

To begin with, Cushing fretted at tile slow time they' were making. Alone he could have covered twice the ground in half the time, but as the days went on and no more war bands appeared, the urgency fell away. After all, he realized, there was no time limit imposed upon the journey.

Having shed his fretfulness, he settled down to enjoying the trip. During the years at the university, he somehow had forgotten the exhilaration of the free life that he now followed once again: the early, foggy chill of mornings; the climb of the sun up the eastern sky; the sound of wind among the leaves; the V-shaped wake traced by a swimming muskrat; the sudden beauty of a hidden patch of flowers; the hooting of the owls once dusk settled on the river; the whicker of raccoons; the howling of the bluff top wolves. They lived high on the hog: fish from the river, squirrel and dumplings, plump fried rabbit, an occasional partridge or duck.

"This is better eating, laddie boy," said Meg, "than chewing on that chunk of jerky you carry in your knapsack."

He growled at her. "There may come a time," he said, "when we'll be glad to have the jerky."

For this was the trip's easy part, he knew, the fat time. When they had to leave the river valley and strike west across the plains, they would face hard going.

After a few days Rollo's Shivering Snake came back again and danced around him. It was an elusive and ridiculous thing, a tiny pinch of stardust shimmering in the sunlight, shining with a strange light of its own in the darkness of the night.

"Once I thought it was a friend of mine," said Rollo. "A strange thing, you might say, to look upon a little shimmer of light as a friend, but to one who has been alone and friendless over many centuries, even such an unsubstantial thing as a sparkle in the sunshine can seem to be a friend. I came to find, however, that it was a fair-weather friend. When I was pinned beneath the tree, it deserted me and did not come back till now. During all those days, I could have used it; had it been there, I could have told myself that I was not alone. Don't ask me what it is, for I have no idea. I have spent many hours puzzling out some sort of rationalization so I could put an explanation to it. But I never found one. And don't ask me when it first attached itself to me, for the time runs back so far that I would be tempted to say it was always with me. Although that would not be right, for I can recall the time when it was not with me.

The robot talked incessantly. He ran on and on, as if all the years of loneliness had dammed up a flood of words that must now come out.

"I can recall what you term the Time of Trouble," he told them, sitting around the meager campfire (meager and well hidden, so it would not show too great alight), "but I can throw no great understanding on it, for I was in no position to know what the situation might have been. I was a yard robot at a great house that stood high on a hill above a mighty river, although it was not this river you call the Mississippi, but another river somewhere in the East. I'm not sure I ever knew the river s name nor the name of those who owned the house, for there were things a yard robot would not have been required to know, so would not have been told. But after a time, perhaps some time after it all started, although I can't be sure, the word came to me and other robots that people were smashing machines. This we could not understand. After all, we did know that everyone placed great reliance on machines. I recall that we talked about it and speculated on it and we found no answers. I don't think we expected any answers. By this time the people who lived in the house had fled; why they fled or where they might have gone we had no way of knowing. No one, you must understand, ever told us anything. We were told what to do and that was all we ever needed to know. We continued to do our familiar and accustomed tasks, although now there was no one to tell us what to do, and whether we did our tasks or not did not really matter.

"Then one day—I recall this well, for it came as a shock to me—one of the robots told us that after some thought upon the matter he had come to the conclusion that we were machines as well, that if the wrecking of machines continued, we, in our turn, also would be wrecked. The wreckers, he said, had not turned to us as yet because we were of less importance than the other machines that were being wrecked. But our time would come, he said, when they got through with the others. This, as you can imagine, caused great consternation among us and no small amount of argument. There were those among us who could immediately perceive that we were, indeed, machines, while there were fully as many others who were convinced that we were not. I remember that I listened to the arguments for a time, taking no great part in them, but, finally taking private counsel with myself, came to the conclusion that we were machines, or at least could be classified as machines. And coming to this conclusion, I wasted no time in lamentation but fell to thinking, If this should be the case, what course could I take to protect myself? Finally it seemed clear to me that the best course would be to find a place where the wreckers would not think to look for me. I did not urge this course upon my fellows—for who was Ito tell them what to do? — and I think I realized that one robot, acting on his own, might have a better chance of escaping the wrath that might come upon us if he were not with the other robots, since a band of us might attract attention while a single robot had a better chance of escaping all detection.

"So I left as quietly as I could and hid in many places, for there was no one safe place to hide. Finally, I gained confirmation from other fugitive robots I met that the wreckers, having smashed the more important machines, were hunting down the robots. And not, mind you, because we posed any great threat to them, but because we were machines and the idea seemed to be to wipe out all machines, no matter how insignificant. What made it even worse was that they did not hunt us down in the same spirit, in the rage and fanaticism, that had driven them to destroy the other machines, but were hunting us as a sport, as they might hunt a fox or coon. If this had not been so, we could have stood the hunting better, for then we would at least have been accorded the dignity of posing a threat to them. But there was no dignity in being hunted as a dog might run down a rabbit. To add further indignity, I learned that when we were run down and disabled, our brain cases were seized as trophies of the hunt. This, I think, was the final thing that heaped up the bitterness and fear that came to infuse us all. The terrible thing about it was that all we could do was run or hide, for we were inhibited against any kind of violence. We could not protect ourselves; we could only run. In my own case, I broke that inhibition, much later and more through accident than otherwise. If that half-mad grizzly had not attacked me, I'd still be saddled by the inhibition. Which is not quite right, either, for if he'd not attacked me to break the inhibition, I never would have been able to obtain the grease I use to protect myself from rust and would be, by now, a rusted hulk with my brain case waiting for someone to find and take home as a souvenir.