Jerry Oltion: Alliance

“Where?”

“She has gone to the planet of the Kin, where Adam was born.”

“How long ago?”

“Just before we arrived here.”

Derec looked away out the window, down at the line of robots queuing up for their trip to a home they had never seen. He felt a kinship with each of them, for he knew what their feelings were at this moment, if indeed they had feelings. He turned around to face Avery.” We’ve got to go after her. I remember what you said, but I still want to find her.”

Avery’s brow furrowed in thought, then he said, “Oddly enough, so do I. I have a few words on the subject of robotics to say to the creator of these three.”

Derec sighed in relief. He had expected a struggle. “Ariel?” he asked. “What about you? You don’t have to go if you don’t want to. We can keep a few robots here, have them build you another ship before they-”

Ariel cut him off. “I want to be with you. I’ll go where you go. Besides, I don’t want to go home just yet. Not until I sort out a few things in my mind.”

Wolruf waited until Derec looked over at her, then said, “Somebody’s got to keep ‘u out of trouble. Count me in.”

“And now we come to the favor we ask of you,” Lucius said. “We would like to come with you as well.”

“To find your creator?”

“Yes. Failing that, we would study the Kin to see if they can offer us more insight into the question of humanity.”

“Why should we take you along?” Avery asked. “You’re nothing but trouble. You don’t follow orders, and twice now you’ve almost killed us because of it.”

“We would promise to consider more carefully the consequences of our actions. We will follow your orders when they seem reasonable. We would, in short, consider you our friends, and act accordingly.”

“Friends. Ha.”

“It might interest you to know that we now have three laws which we feel cover the interactions between sentient beings and their environment. The first is the Ceremyons’ law: All beings will do that which pleases them most. The second is the law we formulated on our journey here: A sentient being may not harm a friend, or through inaction allow a friend to come to harm. The third, which we have formulated after watching the interaction among you four and among the Ceremyons, is this: A sentient being will do what a friend asks him to, but a friend may not ask him to do unreasonable things. With that in mind, we ask that you allow us to travel with you, as friends.”

“Your ‘laws’ seem awfully vague,” Avery growled.

“Sentient beings are vague. We believe that to be an inherent quality of sentience.”

“Ha. Maybe so.” Avery glared at the robots a moment longer, then shook his head. “What the hell, it’ll make for an interesting trip. Okay. You’re on.”

“We thank you.”

“Yeah, yeah. Get on board. The ship leaves as soon as we get there. And hey, ‘friends,’ I’ve got three bags in my room. Since you ‘re already headed that way, why don’t you each grab one on the way out?”

Lucius glanced over to Adam and Eve. They returned his glance, then they all three looked momentarily at Avery. At last Lucius nodded. “We would be glad to,” he said.

Derec took one last look at their apartment as the transport booth whisked him away for the last time. It was already just one among hundreds of elaborate but now completely empty buildings in a city all but devoid of life. When he and the others crossed its bounds at the spaceport, it would be just that.

The city robots were already gone. The city itself had stopped its transformations, was now locked into the shape it had held when Avery cancelled its program. The only motion besides their transport booths were the half -dozen Ceremyons circling overhead, watching. Waiting.

The booths slowed to a stop at the terminal building. Their ship, the Wild Goose Chase, waited only a short walk away, repaired and gleaming in the sunlight. Derec took Ariel’s hand and together they walked toward it, enjoying the warmth of the sun and the smell of unfiltered air one last time before boarding.

A soft whisper of movement behind them made them stop and look around, just in time to see the last of the city buildings dissolve. The spaceport terminal building was the only structure left; all the others had melted down into a pool of undifferentiated city material the moment they had crossed the boundary. Tiny ripples spread across the silvery surface, like ripples in a lake but propagating much faster in the denser liquid. There was a hush of expectation in the air; then a jet of silver sprayed upward at an angle, arching over to splash back into the surface nearly halfway across the lake. The beam must have been a meter thick, Derec supposed.

Where it met the surface, a disturbance arose, and a familiar sight climbed back up the beam: the splashing, outward-spraying point of contact between the downfalling jet and a new one spraying upward at the same angle from the same point. The meeting point reached the top and stopped there, a vertical sheet of liquid silver spraying out from what appeared to be a solid arch. The noise of it splashing back into the lake was the roar of a waterfall. Derec recognized in an instant what it was: a copy on an enormous scale of the fountain in the entryway to their apartment in the original Robot City, the fountain he called “Negative Feedback.”

How had the Ceremyons learned of that? he wondered, but the answer came almost immediately. Lucius had no doubt told them about it, possibly to ask them its significance. Derec had ordered him to think about it, after all.

He turned to see the amusement on Ariel’s face, and found himself grinning as well

“Think they’re trying to tell us something?” he asked.

Jerry Oltion is the author of Frame of Reference , a novel about a generation-style starship that isn’t. He is currently at work on Paradise Passed , an interstellar colony novel. His short stories appear frequently in Analog magazine, two of them winning first and third prizes in the 1987 Readers’ Choice Awards. His stories have also been nominated for the Nebula Award.