Robert Thurston - Intruder

The dancers reformed themselves into a line. With the leader in front, they began a quite lovely quickstep dance following the figure-eight with more precision than Ariel could with her finger. Tears now fell from her eyes, and Eve noticed them.

“What is it, Mistress Ariel? Are you injured?”

Ariel was touched by Eve’s First Law reaction. “No, I’m fine. I’ve always done this-bawled like a baby when I see anything done with any artistry. I mean, this is almost like dancing, ballet even, the way they move so delicately. Sometimes people think I’m reacting with sentimentality, but that’s not it at all. It’s just the way I respond to the beauty of it, even more the fact that such beauty is possible. Maybe it’s a kind of sentimentality, but it comes from admiration and not from tender feelings. You don’t understand very much of this, do you, Eve?”

“No, I do not.”

“Nor do I,” Dr. Avery said, stepping out-as usual-without warning from a hiding place. He had stepped through the doorway, which had been left open after the Silversides brought the desk through it. Ariel was so startled she didn’t know what to say, although she was already calculating how to make him stay So she could, as ordered, try to cure him.

“If there is anything to your theories of art, Ariel, or to anybody ’ s theories, for that matter, it is not in intakes of breath at seeing something well-performed or sighs of admiration at a work well-executed. But that is unimportant to me, actually, since I don’t believe there is anything to theories of art. I believe imagination is a curse, unless it is used for applied science. Works of art are garbage unless they demonstrate a useful theorem.”

Ariel, recalling Lucius’s sculpture called “Circuit Breaker,” the one authentic piece of art produced by a Robot City robot, and the doctor’s hatred of it, knew that Avery was speaking the truth. He truly despised artistic creations.

“Was not that idea once called utilitarianism?” Eve asked.

Avery seemed impressed. “My, she does look amazingly like you, Ariel, doesn’t she? And is, perhaps, smarter. At any rate, that ancient philosophy, utilitarianism, does perhaps vaguely resemble the assumptions behind what I said.”

He walked to the edge of the desk and stared down at the tiny figures. When he had started speaking and Ariel had stopped singing, they had ended their dancing. Now, they looked up at Avery. Fear had returned to their faces.

“I can see why playing with them made you feel like God, my dear,” he said.

“I never said it did.”

“Oh, but I could see a godlike look in your face. You were looking for ways to send down tablets from the mountain or part a body of water for them, were you not?”

“No, I was not!”

“I wasn’t speaking literally. But I think you’re trying to establish a relationship with them that is godlike, studying them and finding ways to improve their meager existence.”

“I requested Mistress Ariel to study them,” Eve said.

“Is that so? You continue to amaze me, what’s your name, Eve? You are quite a feat of robotics. While we’re on the subject of gods, who made you?”

“I do not know that.”

“Some fancy piece of programming blocking out the information?”

“No,” Adam interjected. “We do not know our makers. Each of us appeared on a planet in an egglike, embryonic form with no awareness of where we came from.”

“Embryonic? How did you come to look as you do now? Derec and Ariel did not cause you to be formed in, as it were, their own images.”

“We imprinted on them and thus resemble them. I have been many other forms.”

Avery was impressed. “Hmmm, I must pursue all this with you soon, but one experiment at a time. I try not to divide my concentration. It’s destructive to my work. And my work at present is these well-made little toys. I need one to take apart and find out what makes it tick.”

“Don’t be callous,” Ariel said angrily. “You can’t just take one of these and kill it.”

“That’s exactly what I plan to do. How are we to discover anything about them otherwise?” He looked around the room. “And this place is ideal, with all the right tools for dissection. I won’t waste time by returning to-”

“No!” Ariel shouted. “You can’t do it. I won’t let you.”

“My dear, your tears were sentimental enough. Forget any gallant defenses of these things. They are merely mechanical devices. Fairly sophisticated ones, yes, but-”

“Can’t you see? Look at them. They are sentient human beings.”

Ariel’s dislike of Avery had made her choose one side of the issue when, only moments ago, she had been contemplating just the point of view that the doctor was now suggesting.

“Not at all. They are, I am certain, genetically engineered experimental figures. Some miniaturized human cells have been grown to form an incredibly accurate framework but they are not alive.”

“They danced. They communicated with me.”

“I am sure they make decent substitutes for pets, but what you saw was the result of some impulses of cybernetic origin.”

“I don’t care what the hell is inside them or even if they were made in a lab. They are real people with a genuine culture.”

“Just some anthropological factors put into the design.”

Moving quickly, Avery reached down and picked up one of the figures, a chubby man with puffy cheeks. It began squirming in his hand, while the others scattered across the desktop.

Derec wondered why, at a time like this, he so often felt a need to use a Personal. There were none here at the computer center. There was no need for one, since humans did not generally come here. He would have to ascend to the surface to find one (they were in almost all Robot City buildings), but when he got there he no doubt would find out that all the Personals were, like the rest of the city’s systems, out of order. And he dreaded even imagining what a non-working Personal would be like.

Tentatively he touched a shard of the hanging moss. He was surprised to find it smooth instead of slimy, dry and not wet. It ’ s fake, he thought, but why would anyone make fake moss and hang it on a computer in big bunches like this?

“This part’s definitely out,” he said out loud. “Maybe I can juice it up.”

He looked around for a typer, the kind of keyboard designed to communicate with the core computer. There was a bank of view-screens along one wall, but all the keyboards had been removed.

“It would take somebody to disconnect them,” he said. “No computer could do this to itself. Somebody’s monkeying with things. But who? If not my father, who? There’s got to be somebody I don’t know about.”

As he said this, he leaned against the hiding place of the Watchful Eye, who might have been amused by the irony of Derec’s words if it had comprehended irony. It studied Derec closely (the haven did not block out sensory information), discovering much about him that it had not perceived when observing him through the city’s spy systems. There was apparently a musky odor to his body, perhaps caused by the fact that he had not had time to bathe since arriving on the planet. Since none of the spray-bathers worked, the chances were that Derec would get muskier.

And there was a surprising heft to the young man. He was thicker than he’d appeared, and inside the thickness, there was much more concentrated weight. Derec’s outer shell, what they called skin, was more softly textured than had been expected, at least by the Watchful Eye, who up till now had been knowledgeable only about the hard surfaces of robots.

It was tempted to reveal itself but was taken aback by Derec’s sudden curse. The man ran to the center of the room and looked up-where the Watchful Eye had hung the keyboards in clumps around cables. There were three clumps, all looking like some odd kind of fruit.