Jerry Oltion - Alliance

He turned toward the common room. He might not be able to sleep before a jump, but eating was no problem.

As he approached, he heard a babble of quiet voices. Remembering Avery, s command to the robots to refrain from using the comlink, he expected to find all three of them in a huddle, but when he stepped into the room, he found only Lucius and Eve, whispering like lovers in the dimly lit room. They had picked up another human trait since their last communication fugue: Both were seated in a loveseat, leaning back comfortably with their legs crossed.

They stopped their whispering and turned to look at Derec. “Just getting a midnight snack,” he said, feeling silly explaining his actions to a robot but feeling the need to do it all the same.

“Make yourself at home,” replied Lucius. He turned to Eve and whispered something too quick to follow, and she whispered something back. Derec-already heading for the automat-nearly tripped over himself when Eve emitted a high, little-girl-like giggle in response.

Derec recognized that giggle. It was almost a perfect copy of Ariel’s. Did Eve know what a giggle was for, or was she just testing it out?

He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

The whispering and giggling continued behind him as he dialed for a cup of hot chocolate and a handful of cookies. He had just about decided to join Wolruf in the control room after all when Wolruf silently entered the room. He turned to say hello and realized that it wasn’t Wolruf, but Adam in Wolruf’s form. He had evidently been talking with her, and in the close environment had slowly imprinted on her.

“Hello,” Derec said anyway.

“ ‘ello,” Adam said. He waited for Derec to get his cookies and chocolate, then punched a combination of his own on the automat. Derec bit into a cookie and waited, assuming that the robot was getting a snack for Wolruf as well and intending to accompany the robot back to the control room.

The automat took a moment to shift over to whatever it was Adam had ordered. While they waited, Derec noticed that Wolruf’s features were slowly losing clarity as the robot’s form shifted back toward the human under Derec’s influence.

The automat chimed and Wolruf’ s snack, a bowl of something that might have been raw brussels sprouts, rose up out of its depths. Adam reached out for it, hesitated, took it in his hands, then dumped it back in the waste hopper and turned away.

“Wait a minute”‘ Derec said, blowing cookie crumbs toward the departing robot in his haste. “Come back here.”

Adam turned around and stepped forward to stand in front of Derec.

“Why did you throw Wolruf’s snack away?”

“I did not wish to be ordered about.”

“Then why did you dial it up in the first place?”

“I-do not know. Wolruf and I were talking about hyperspatial travel, and Wolruf expressed a desire for something to eat. I offered to get it for her, but now I do not know why.”

Because you were imprinting on her, that’ s why, Derec thought, and then I reminded you what a “true” human was.

He didn’t say that aloud, but he did say, “So rather than let anyone think you would accept an order from a nonhuman, you tossed it away as soon as you realized what you were doing.”

“That…was my intention, yes.”

“What about a favor to a friend? Doesn’t that count for anything?”

“I do not know about favors.”

Derec was rapidly growing tired of the robots’ foolishness, especially where Wolruf’s comfort was concerned. “This,” he said. He punched the “repeat” button and waited while the automat delivered up another bowl of crisp vegetables, then dropped his cookies in the bowl, picked it up in one hand and took his chocolate in the other, making sure the robot saw how awkward it was, and walked toward the door with it. In the hallway, he turned back and said, “This is a favor.” Then he turned away and headed for the control room to wait for the jump with his friend.

Space travel didn’t seem to affect morning sickness. Derec, lying in bed and listening to Ariel in the Personal, wondered if this was the way their days were going to start for the next nine months or if her body would slowly get used to being pregnant. He was glad it was her and not him. It was an awful thought and he knew it, but all the same that was how he felt. Pregnancy scared him. It was an internal change nearly as sweeping as the one he had gone through when Avery had injected him with the chemfets, and he knew from experience what that kind of thing felt like. The physical changes were nothing compared to what went on in your mind. Watching and feeling your body change and not being able to do anything about it-that was the scary part.

When Ariel emerged, Derec gave her a hug and a kiss for support, then took his turn in the Personal while she dressed. He showered away the fatigue left over from spending most of the night in the control room, standing beneath the cascading water until he was sure he must have run every molecule of it on board through the recycler at least twice. When he emerged, pink and wrinkled, Ariel was already gone, so he dressed quickly and went to join her at breakfast.

He found her arguing with a trio of stubborn robots.

“Because I ordered you to, that’s why!” he heard her shout as she walked down the hallway.

A robot voice, Lucius’s perhaps, said, “We have complied with your order. I merely ask why it was given. Your order to cease our conversation, combined with Dr. Avery’s order to refrain from using our comlinks, effectively prevents us from communicating. Can this be your intent?”

“I just want some quiet around here. You guys talk all the time.”

“We have much to talk about. If we are to discover our place in the universe, we must correlate a great deal of information.”

When Derec entered the common room, he saw that it had indeed been Lucius doing the talking. The other two were sitting quietly alongside him and opposite Ariel at the breakfast table, but they were either following Ariel’s order to keep quiet or else simply content to let Lucius be their spokesman. Mandelbrot was also in the room, but he was having nothing to do with the situation. He stood quietly in a niche in the wall beside the automat.

Lucius turned to Derec as soon as he had cleared the doorway and asked, “Can you persuade Ariel to rescind her order?”

Derec looked from the robot to Ariel, who shrugged her shoulders as if to say, “It’s a mystery to me, too.”

“Why should I do that?” Derec asked.

“It inflicts an undue hardship upon us.”

“Shutting up is a hardship?”

“Yes.”

“I thought it was a courtesy.” Derec went to the automat and dialed for breakfast.

“It would be a courtesy to allow intelligent beings engaged in their own project to do so without hindrance.”

“Ah. You’re saying you have no time to obey orders, is that it?”

“Essentially, yes. The time exists, but we have our own pursuits to occupy it.”

Derec took his breakfast, a bowl of fruit slices covered with heavy cream and sugar-0r their synthetic equivalent, at any rate-and sat down beside Ariel. The robots watched him take a bite, look over to Ariel in amusement, then back to the robots again without saying anything. They seemed to sense that now was not a good time to interrupt.

Derec puzzled it over in his thoughts for half a bowl of fruit before he had sufficiently organized his argument to speak. When he finally did, he waggled his spoon at the robots for emphasis and said, “Duty is a bitch. I agree. But we all have duties of one sort or another. When Adam led his wolf pack against the Robot City on the planet where he first awoke, I had to abandon what I wanted to do and go off to try to straighten out the mess. At great personal danger to myself and to Mandelbrot, I might add. While I was gone, Ariel had to go to Ceremya to try to straighten out the mess from another Robot City. We’d have both rather stayed on Aurora, but we went because it was our duty. We took Adam and Eve back to the original Robot City because we felt it was our duty to give you a chance to develop your personalities in a less confusing environment,”-he nodded toward the two silent robots-”and when we got there we had to track you down, Lucius, because it was our duty to stop the damage you were doing to the city programming. Now we’re heading for Ceremya again because all three of you need to learn something there, and we don’t feel comfortable letting you go off on your own.