Jerry Oltion - Humanity

“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?”

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-”

The robot at Ariel’s side interrupted. “I do not think it would be wise to revive him. He is dangerous.”

“I agree with Mandelbrot,” the wolflike learning machine beside him said. “Much as we regret the loss of our companion, his experiences have damaged him beyond repair. It would be best to let his pathways randomize.”

Janet looked at the old, Ferrier-model robot. Mandelbrot? She’d thought she’d heard that name shouted earlier. Could this be the one? It seemed impossible, but he did have a dianite arm…

“Maybe so,” Derec said, “but not until I get a recording of them first. Now where is his body?”

“In the lab next door,” said Mandelbrot.

“Great.” Derec turned to go, but stopped and looked at Janet again. “I, uh, could probably use your help if you want to come along.”

She felt the tension in the room ease slightly. She looked from him to Ariel to Wendell in the operating room, wondering if she should go. She didn’t want to leave Wendell, but the medical robot had given him a general anesthetic in order to stop him from thinking about his injury, so it really made no difference to him. Going with Derec, on the other hand, might matter to him. A little stunned that she might actually care about what either of them felt, or that she might feel something herself, she said, “I don’t think I’m doing anyone any good here, so sure, why not?”

“I’ll stay here,” Ariel said.

Janet couldn’t tell if she meant that angrily or helpfully. She didn’t suppose it mattered much; the same response would work for either case. “Thank you,” she said, and let Derec lead her from the room.

Basalom followed along, as did the two learning machines. They found the remains of the third, Lucius, resting like a battered starfish on the floor just inside the door to the lab. It looked as if part of the battle had gone on in there as well, but Derec, stepping over Lucius’s body, said, “1 guess I forgot to clean up. Central, fix these exam tables, please. And go ahead and reabsorb the loose cells on the floor. All but what belongs to Lucius, of course.”

The sandy grit surrounding the pedestals on the floor sank into the surface, and the pedestals simultaneously grew taller and spread out at the top to form three separate exam tables. Janet nodded to Basalom and said, “Go ahead and put him on one. Then go out and scrape up what you can from outside.”

Basalom lifted Lucius easily with his one remaining hand and deposited him on the middle table, then left the room. The Ariel-shaped learning machine went with him. Janet was itching to speak with one of the learning machines, but she supposed there would be time for that later. She was itching to speak with Derec as well, but he was already absorbed in the task of hooking up a variable power supply and a brain activity monitor to Lucius.