Jerry Oltion - Alliance

He gently shook Ariel awake. “We’re there.”

“Mmm?”

“Clean air! Breathe deep.” He rolled out of bed, dressed quickly, and headed for the hatch.

He found Wolruf already outside and Mandelbrot as well. The ship had landed at a spaceport almost identical to the one from which they had taken off nearly a week ago. Derec wouldn’t have been able to tell it from the original save that this one was at the end of a long arm of building-material pavement reaching out from the edge of the city instead of surrounded by it, and the sky here was a subtly different shade than that over the original Robot City.

That wasn’t the way it should have been. The last time he had been here-the only time, before this-the city had been under a dome, a force dome dark as night with a single wedge-shaped slit in it. The Ceremyons had been about to enclose it completely, but Ariel had made an agreement with them to leave the city as it was if Derec stopped its growth and turned the robots into farmers for them. He had done that, but now it looked as if all his changes had been undone. The dome was gone and the city before him was bustling with robots again, and none of them looked like farmers.

“What happened?” he asked softly.

“They left before you awoke,” Mandelbrot said. “I was unable to stop them.”

“Who? What are you talking about?”

“The experimental robots. They are gone. “

“Oh. I wasn’t talking about-gone?”

“Yes.”

“Did they say where they were going?”

“No, they did not.”

Wolruf said, “I came outside just in time to see them all grow wings and fly off that way.” She pointed toward a line of hills in the distance, above which Derec could see a horde of tiny dark specks: the Ceremyons. The dominant lifeforms on the planet were night-black, balloon-shaped things with bat wings, electrically powered organic beings that converted solar energy or thermal gradients into electricity, with which they powered their bodies as well as electrolyzed water for the hydrogen that gave them lift. They spent their days in the air and their nights tethered to trees, and as far as Derec knew they spent all the time-day or night-thinking. Philosophers all, and the robots had come here to philosophize with them.

Small wonder they had gone off to do so at their first opportunity. Their duty to the humans over once they had delivered them safely to the city, they had taken off before they could be ordered to do something else that interfered with their wishes.

On a hunch, Derec sent via comlink, Adam, Eve, Lucius. Answer me.

He got no reply, which was just what he expected. Still under Avery’s orders not to use their comlinks among themselves, they had shut them off entirely.

He shrugged. “Let them go. They’ll come back when they’re ready.” Until then Derec had other things to do, like figure out what had happened to his careful modifications to the city.

Ariel came down the ramp, shaking her head and tugging at her hair with a brush. “I vote we go find us a shower,” she said vehemently.

“Food first, then shower,” Avery said from behind her. He stepped carefully down the ramp, holding onto the railing for support. Three and a half days without food was probably longer than he had ever fasted before, and his unsteadiness showed it.

Mandelbrot went to his side at once and helped him the rest of the way down to the paved ground. A row of transport booths waited patiently beside the terminal building, only a few paces away, and Mandelbrot led the way toward them without waiting to be ordered.

Another booth came out of the city, moving down the center of the road toward them. It arrived just as they reached the other booths, and a golden-hued robot stepped out of it. Derec recognized the robot immediately by its color and the distinctive markings on its chest and shoulders. He had dealt with this particular robot before, and one of his predecessors before that. This was a supervisor, one of the seven charged with keeping the city functioning smoothly.

“Wohler-9!” he said.

“Master Derec,” Wohler-9 replied. “Welcome back. We were not aware that you were returning.”

“We almost didn’t. We had a fire on the ship and lost our recycler. We just barely made it.”

“I am glad that you are safe. The entire city is glad and eager to serve you. What do you require?”

“Is our apartment still here?”

“It is being re-created at this moment.”

“Modify it for three bedrooms. Personals in all three. We’re all staying together.” Derec indicated with a nod Ariel and Wolruf and Dr. Avery.

Wohler-9 was obviously surprised to see Avery in their midst, but he said only, “It is being done.”

Ariel broke in. “What happened to the changes we made when we were here before?”

“That programming was eliminated.”

“I gathered that. Why?”

“We do not know.”

“Who did it?”

“The beings you call Ceremyons.”

Derec shook his head. “Evidently they didn’t like robot farmers any better than they did robot cities.”

“Not surprising,” Wolruf put in. “They’re finicky creatures for all their high-powered thinking.”

Derec could certainly agree with that. But why they would return the city to its original state rather than modify it further to suit their needs was beyond him. He said so.

“ Let’ s worry about it after dinner,” Avery said, climbing into a transport booth.

“If you do not require my services at your apartment, I will stay and direct the repairs to your ship,” said Wohler-9.

“Good enough,” Derec said. He got into a booth of his own, directed it and the others to the apartment, and relaxed for the ride.

A hot shower and a hot meal restored all four of them to near normal, though the meal was not what any of them had hoped for. Wohler-9 had alerted the city’s medical robots that the humans were nearly starved, and the medical robots were waiting for them at the apartment. They allowed them only tiny portions, claiming that overeating after a prolonged fast was dangerous. Worse, they insisted on complete checkups immediately after dinner, and no amount of protests would counter their First Law demand. So, within an hour of arriving on the planet, all four travelers found themselves flat on their backs on examining tables while diagnostic equipment clicked and whirred and scanned them for potential problems.

The robots finished with Avery first. “You may sit up,” his robot said to him. Derec looked over and saw it hand him a glass with nearly a liter of clear liquid in it. “Drink this.”

“What is it?”

“An electrolyte mixture. You are unbalanced. “

“We knew that,” Derec said with a chuckle.

“Funny.” Avery set the glass to his lips, sipped from it, and made a sour face. “Thought so,” he muttered, then tipped the glass back and bolted the rest of its contents without tasting.

“Hold still, please,” the robot working on Derec said to him. “I am trying to make a high-resolution, high-density scan.” It moved his head back upright until he was staring at the ceiling again. One of its instruments hummed for a few seconds, and a few seconds after that the robot said, “You seem to have tiny metallic granules all through your body.”

“They’re chemfets,” Derec said. “Self-replicating Robot City cellular material. They’re normal.”

“Surely not in a human.”

“They are in me.”

“How can that be so?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I would like to hear it, please,” the robot said. It folded its arms over its chest in a gesture so like a human doctor that Derec couldn’t help laughing. That little detail had so obviously been included in its programming that Derec wondered if it was taught intentionally to human medical students as well.