Jerry Oltion - Alliance

Eve answered before Lucius could. “They found that the modifications were of no more use to them than the original city. They do not need farms. They do not need the produce nor do they wish to have cargo ships disturbing their atmosphere to take the produce elsewhere, nor, for that matter, do they like what the tilled ground does to their controlled weather patterns in the first place. Neither did they wish to undergo the lengthy process of reprogramming the robots to serve a useful purpose, so they sent them ‘back into the city and told them to resume their old programming, with the added injunction to leave them alone. That included the cessation of city expansion, which meant that the Ceremyons could remove the force dome containing it.”

“They just told the robots to do all that, and they did?” Ariel sounded incredulous, and for good reason. No matter how hard they had tried, she and Derec hadn’t been able to get the robots to take the Ceremyons’ orders. Avery’s original programming had been too basic and too exclusive for them to change.

“They had assistance. A human female visited them briefly, and she had considerable skill in programming positronic brains. Indeed, the Ceremyons consider her almost their equal in intelligence, by which they intend a great compliment. When they explained their problem to her, she helped them reprogram the robots to leave them alone.”

Derec felt a surge of excitement run through him. Could it be his mother? It could be her, come to check up on her creations. “Is she still here?”

The robot dashed his hopes with a single word. “No.”

“Where did she go?”

“We do not know.”

“ When did she go?”

“We do not know that, either.”

“Can you ask the Ceremyons?”

“Not until tomorrow, when they become sociable again.”

The Ceremyons spent the nights tethered to trees, wrapped in their heat-retaining silver balloons and keeping to themselves. Derec considered trying to wake one, but decided against it almost immediately. You don’t wake someone up to ask a favor unless you know them a lot better than he knew these aliens.

Mandelbrot was not through speaking. Sensing an ebb in the conversation, he said to the other robots, “I notice that you have carefully avoided saying that you will ask the Ceremyons tomorrow. You still fight your true nature. A robot at peace with itself would offer to do so, sensing that a human wishes it.”

Adam spoke up at last. “You have never experienced freedom. We have, however, and we wish to continue doing so. Do not speak to us about living at peace with our true natures until after you have tasted freedom.”

“I have no desire for that experience,” Mandelbrot said.

Adam nodded as if he had won the argument, as perhaps he had. “That,” he said, “is the problem.”

The discussion went on well into the night, but nothing more of any substance was said. The renegade robots attempted to sway Mandelbrot from his devotion to servitude; he attempted to demonstrate how accepting one’s place in the grand scheme of things made more sense than fighting a losing battle, but neither convinced the other.

When Avery arrived, their argument stopped, unresolved. Derec told him what had happened with the city programming, and he was both pleased and annoyed at the news. The knowledge that the aliens had returned the city to its original programming was a stroke to his ego-his was the better programming!-but the knowledge that his former wife might have been in on it dimmed his enthusiasm considerably. He refused to answer Derec ‘ s inquiries about her, not even relenting enough to give him her first name.

“She abandoned you even more completely than I did, so don’t get any wild ideas about some kind of joyous reunion,” he told him and stalked off to bed.

Even so, neither his words nor the lack of them could quell the yearning Derec felt for her. He wondered why he felt so strongly about someone he couldn’t even remember, and finally decided that it had to be because she was family. Hormones were directing his thoughts again. His own near-death, the thought of becoming a father, and the possibility that he might lose his child before it was even born; all made him instinctively reach out for his own family, such as it was, for support.

Did his mother even know he was here? Probably not. The woman who had helped the Ceremyons might not even have been her, and even if it were, she had come after her robot, not her son. She had no reason to assume he would be here. She might have learned about him from the Ceremyons, but if Avery was to be believed, then she wouldn’t care even so. Why then couldn’t he forget about her?

His and Ariel’s sleep cycles were completely out of sync with everyone else’s; they stayed up late into the night, talking about families and love and what held people together and what didn’t, but when they finally grew tired and went to bed, he was no wiser. He still wanted to meet his mother, but he still didn’t know why.

Morning dawned gray and rainy. Derec’s original intent, to find a Ceremyon and ask it who had helped them reprogram the city, died for lack of Ceremyons to question. They had all inflated their balloons and risen up above the storm, or drifted out from under it, to where they could spread their black mantles and absorb their solar nourishment without hindrance. He could have taken an air car and gone after them, but that seemed a little extreme, given the situation. He could wait for good weather.

Avery was up with the dawn and back in the laboratory, working on his new project with an intensity that had Derec a little worried. It was just such a driving intensity that had shoved him over the edge before and made him decide to use his own son for a test subject. Derec spoke to Ariel about it, but she reassured him that deep interest in something at this stage in his recovery was good for him. He was a scientist; that hadn’t changed before or since his return to sanity, and as such he needed to be working on something to keep him sane. As long as he remembered what constituted an acceptable test subject and what didn’t, there was no need to worry.

He and Ariel had avoided talking about the baby. They wouldn’t know for days yet whether or not removing the chemfets would allow it to recover and develop normally, and there didn’t seem to be anything to say about it until they found out. There was no reason to dwell on the possible outcomes.

The robots didn’t see it that way, of course. They were fascinated by the possibilities. At least Lucius was; Adam and Eve were off in the city on their own pursuits. Lucius, Derec, Ariel, and Wolruf sat in the apartment, watching the rain fall outside on streets nearly devoid of activity. It would have been alarming to see streets so empty on any other day, but Derec supposed that robots didn’t like to get wet any more than anybody else.

“Your baby,” Lucius said, once again getting straight to the point, “presents a fascinating problem in our study of humanics. Specifically, and defining ‘human’ for the purpose of this discussion as any member of your species, then is it or is it not human at its present stage of development?.

Ariel stiffened on the couch beside Derec, but instead of ordering the robot to shut up, she took a deep breath and forced herself to relax. “That’s a good question,” she said. “I need to answer it myself. I’ve been trying to decide on my own ever since I found out I was pregnant, but I still haven’t come up with an answer I like.”

“Perhaps your liking it is not a prerequisite to the truth,” Lucius said.

“No doubt.” Ariel bit her lower lip, looked out the window, and said into the rain, “Okay, so we talk about the baby. Is it human? I don’t know. Nobody does. Some people consider an embryo human from the moment of conception, because it has the potential to become a complete person. I think that’s a little extreme. As you pointed out when we first met, most of the molecules in the universe have the potential to become human beings, but no sane person would want them all to.”