Jerry Oltion - Alliance

“None of this is what we would have been doing if it was left up to us. We’d much rather be on Aurora again, living in the forest and having our needs taken care of by robots who don’t talk back to us, but we’re here because our duty requires it.”

He waved his spoon again to forestall comment. “And even if we had stayed there, we’d still have duties. Humans have to sleep, have to eat, have to shower-whether we want to or not. Most times we want to, but we have to nonetheless. Ariel is going to be carrying a developing fetus for nine months, which I’m sure she would rather not do if there was a better way, but there isn’t, and she’s decided to keep the baby so she’s going to have to put up with being pregnant. That’s a duty. I’m wasting my time explaining this to you, but I do it because I feel it’s my duty to do that, too.

“The point is, we all have duties. When you add them all up, it doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for whatever else you want to do, but you have to put up with that. Everybody has to structure their free time around their duties.”

Lucius shook his head. “You overlook the obvious solution of reducing the number of your duties.”

“Ah,” Derec said. “Now I get it. That explains yesterday. You want to cut down on your duties, but you’ve got a hard-wired compulsion to follow any orders given by a human, so you narrow down the definition of human to exclude Wolruf. Suddenly you have only three-fourths as many orders to follow. That’s it, isn’t it?”

Lucius was slow in answering, but he finally said, “That was not our conscious intent, but now that I examine the incident in light of your comments today, I must conclude that you are correct.”

“It works both ways, you know.”

“What other way do you mean?”

“You thought you were human once. Now you’re excluded by your own definition.”

“Oh.”

Ariel clapped softly. “Touche,” she said.

Avery chose that moment to enter the room. “Sounds like a lively discussion going on in here,” he said, taking the only remaining chair, the one beside Derec. He turned to Lucius and said, “I’ll have a cheese omelet.”

“Ariel and Derec each got their own breakfast,” the robot replied. “Why can you not do the same?”

“Wrong answer,” Derec muttered.

Avery stared in amazement at the root, his mouth agape. “What the-?” he began, then banged his hand down flat on the table. “Get me a cheese omelet, now!”

Lucius lurched to his feet under the force of Avery’s direct command. He took a faltering step toward the automat, and as he did his form began to change. His smooth, humanoid surface became pocked with circles, each of which slowly took on the teeth and spokes of a gear, while his arms and legs became simple metal levers driven by cables and pulleys. His head became a dented metal canister with simple holes in it for eyes and a round speaker for a mouth. The gears meshed, the pulleys moved, and with a howl of unlubricated metal, Lucius took another step. His quiet gait changed to a heavy “clomp, clomp, clomp,” as he lurched the rest of the way to the automat.

“Yes, master,” the speaker in his face said with a loud hum. “Cheese omelet, master.” He poked at the buttons on the automat with fingers that had suddenly become stiff metal claws.

Too stunned by his performance to do more than stare, Derec, Ariel, and Avery watched as he took the plate from the automat, clomped back to Avery’s side, and set it down in front of him. The speaker hummed again, and Lucius said, “I may have to follow your orders-it may be my duty to follow your orders-but I don’t have to like it.”

The explosion Derec expected never came. Avery merely said, “That’s fine. Everybody should hate something. But from now on you are to consider my every whim to be a direct order for you to perform. You will be alert for these whims of mine. You will neither intrude excessively nor hesitate in carrying them out, but will instead be as efficient and unobtrusive as possible. Do I make myself clear?”

“You do. I wish to-”

“Your wishes don’t concern me. My wishes do. And I preferred your former shape.”

Lucius became a blur of transformation, the gears and pulleys blending once again into a smooth humanoid form.

“There, you see?” Avery said to Derec. “You just have to know how to talk to them.” He picked up his fork and stabbed a bite of egg, put it in his mouth, and said around the mouthful, “I’ve had lots of practice. You were a lot like that as a child, you know. Rebellious and resentful. A parent has to learn how to handle that early on.”

“May I speak?” Lucius asked.

“Not for a while. Use this time to think instead. And get me a cup of coffee.”

Lucius moved at once to obey. Avery looked over to Adam and Eve, still sitting silently at the table. Their eyes had been upon Avery all along, though, and it was obvious they were waiting for him to lower the boom on them as well.

He held their gaze for what seemed an eternity even to Derec, who felt that he could cut the tension between them with a knife.

At last Avery broke the spell. “Boo,” he said and turned his attention back to his breakfast.

It was a quiet day on board the Wild Goose Chase. The ship had made its first jump on schedule in the night, and was now coasting at high speed through the waypoint star system toward the next jump point, which it would reach early the next morning. There was little to do in the meantime save look out at the stars, read, or play games. The robots were making themselves scarce, save for Lucius, who followed Avery like a shadow wherever he went. Even Mandelbrot was more taciturn than usual, no doubt trying to decide for himself where he fit into the general scheme of things as they now stood.

Derec decided to show Wolruf how to play chess, but gave it up when the alien insisted that the pieces should move in packs. He spent the rest of the day with a book, and went to bed early. Wolruf also went to bed, expressing her faith in the automatic controls to make the jump on schedule without her.

Derec surprised himself by actually being able to sleep with no one at the helm. Evidently boredom was a stronger force than worry. He managed to escape both in dreams, but his dreams ended suddenly in the middle of the night when he awoke with a start to the shrill howl of an alarm. He sat up and called on the light, trying to shake the sleep from his head enough to decide what to do next.

“What’s the matter?” Ariel asked sleepily. She sat up beside him, gathering the sheet around her as if for protection.

“I don’t know. I’ll go see.” Derec made to get out of bed.

“Why don’t you just ask?” Ariel was always quicker to wake up than he was.

“Oh. Yeah.” What ’ s going on? he sent out over the comlink.

General alert, a featureless voice replied. The autopilot, no doubt. Life support system failure.

Life support! Derec suddenly felt his breath catch. What happened to it?

The oxygen regeneration system has failed.

He let his breath out again in a sigh of relief. Oxygen regeneration was serious, but not as serious as, say, a breach in the hull. They weren’t actually losing air, at least.

“There’s a problem with the oxygen regenerator,” he said to Ariel. “Come on, let’s see how bad it is.”

As they pulled on their robes and stepped out into the hallway, Derec realized that the best thing to do in a case like this was to go back to sleep and reduce their oxygen consumption while the robots fixed the problem, but the time to think of that would have been before the alarm woke everyone up, not after. He couldn’t have slept now unless he were drugged, and he had no intention of drugging himself in the middle of an emergency.