Robert Thurston - Intruder

It was certainly disconcerting to come to consciousness and look down on about a half-dozen of the dancers staring up at you, while the rest played at some game that Ariel had not yet interpreted. (They showed each other their hands, palms up or down, any number of fingers extended, sometimes no fingers extended, sometimes a fist.) There was a questioning look on their faces, as if they’d been curious about why their god seemed to need sleep every once in a while. The dancers themselves never seemed to sleep. Ariel had watched them and delegated the Silversides to observe them, but no sleep had ever been detected. She sometimes wondered what it would be like to be awake for one’s entire life. Would you get a lot done or go mad from being conscious without respite?

As she always did when she hadn’t been studying the dancers for some time, she counted them. There were still fourteen of them. Good. Avery, then, had not somehow eluded Wolruf’s vigilance and, while she was asleep, sneaked to the desk to abduct one of the tiny creatures.

She glanced toward the other side of the room, where Avery slouched in a chair, apparently dozing himself. (When he was Ozymandias, he insisted that he never slept.) Wolruf sat on the floor, keeping an eye on the doctor while thumbing through a picture book about Auroran art that Ariel had found in the small library attached to the medical facility. She was studying it for practice in reading and to learn about human customs. In the time that Ariel had known her, Wolruf’s ability to read standard had improved significantly, as had her command of the language. The task of guarding Avery had given her free time to add to her education in the ways of humans and robots.

Ariel couldn’t think of what to do next with the dancers. She’d been studying their customs for several days, and there didn’t seem to be much more to learn. She had tried to communicate with them, but, except for the hand gestures needed either to get their attention or initiate games, most of her attempts had been unsuccessful.

All the dancers had been examined by a diagnostic scanner, the only piece of equipment in the medical facility that appeared to work successfully. She was not sure why. However, since the only systems Derec had been able to (or been allowed to) restore tended to be life-sustaining, she wondered if the scanner worked because it might be needed in an emergency. Derec was right about the presence in the city, she was sure of it. And that presence was doling out favors, stingily but with some sense. The scanner had revealed nothing new about the dancers. As Avery told her, they were anatomically consistent with full-sized humans. If there was robotic circuitry, the scanner didn’t detect it.

She missed Derec so. They had not really been together since that interlude at the Compass Tower. They checked in with each other every once in a while, but at those times he was detached, more concerned with reviving the city than with reviving their passion. And she couldn’t pin all the blame in that arena of life solely upon him. After all, as Derec had pointed out, her attention was just as fiercely fixed on the dancers, Avery, and the Silversides.

The two of them made a great pair, workaholics without much time for each other. But she did long for a moment alone with him, just a brief time of being held by him, kissing him, feeling his gentle touches upon her back.

Well, there was no time for romance now. Thing to do, she thought, is get the jobs done, restore equilibrium, then grab each other and race to the nearest dark place.

She raised her arms, trying to stretch weariness out of them. As always, the dancers were interested in her movement. Whatever she did, they watched her do it with absolute fascination. This time they imitated her, making ritualistic, slow stretching motions that duplicated her gestures. How, she wondered, could Avery keep saying that they were not living beings? With such grace, such skill, they could be nothing less than human.

Her mouth felt dry, and she was sure that her breath could cause an air-purification system to malfunction. There was the beginning of a headache at the back of her eyes. She needed to use the Personal.

“Eve?”

“Yes, Mistress Ariel.”

“Time.”

The word was all she needed to bring Eve to the desk to take over from her. Ariel stood up.

“Have you conceived a new game?” she asked Eve.

“Yes.”

“Of course. I should have known. Show it to me when I get back.”

When Ariel had left, Eve picked up one of the dancers, a short (for a dancer) stocky female. The female did not resist in any way (none of the dancers did, anymore) and merely sat calmly in Eve’s palm.

“Adam?” Eve called.

Adam, newly returned from his wanderings, stepped out of a dark corner of the room from which he had been watching her.

“Yes, Eve.”

“There seems to be something wrong with the dancers, this one and all of them.”

“I have not seen it yet.”

“You have to examine their faces. This one was young, like Ariel, when we first brought them here. Now look.”

Adam bent down toward the stocky female in Eve’s hand. He hadn’t studied the dancers with the same meticulousness that Eve had and wasn’t certain what she’d meant. Nevertheless, at least he was being asked to do something.

“What do you see, Adam?”

“One of the dancers, female category.”

“Besides that.”

“Her hair. It was once dark-colored and now it is mostly gray. Her face. Once it was unlined, now there are many lines in it. Her mouth. Once it was-”

“That is enough, Adam. It is what I see, too. Not only in this one, but in all of them. They have been here for four days, and none of them is young any more. Look at that one.”

Adam looked where she pointed. A male dancer, one of the game players, had left the group and was sitting alone, his knees pulled up, his arms around his knees. His face was old, pitted, sallow.

“He appears to be unwell,” Adam commented.

“I wonder what it means. Are they changing their shapes like we do?”

“Perhaps, but I do not think so.”

“They are going to die,” Avery said, sitting up in his chair. His movement forced Wolruf to push her book aside and tense her body.

Avery stood up and approached the desk. “I’m not sure why they have to die. I suspect that whoever created them was at least partly interested in human life cycles. Otherwise he could have made them as permanent as robots. That is, after all, one of the advantages we robots have. Their creator wanted them to die, or he messed up, I’m not certain which. When they do go, I hope to find out by examining them.”

“Ariel said ‘u can’t touch them,” Wolruf cautioned.

“Well, she must at least let me examine a corpse or two.”

“No!” Eve said suddenly, unsure of why she had spoken out at all.

The doctor’s eyebrows raised in surprise. “You don’t wish me to, Eve?”

“That is true.”

“How curious. Are you a robot with compassion then?”

“I do not know what you mean.”

“If you are, and I get a shot at you, we’ll have to program it right out. I don’t know sometimes why things happen as they do in Robot City. First we get robots with artistic leanings (another trait I had to get rid of) and now compassionate robots. Is that a tear in your eye, Eve, or just a trick of the light? Don’t respond, I was only joking.”

Ariel returned from the Personal in time to hear the last of Avery’s comments. She was about to speak, to tell Avery to zip up his mouth, when she noticed what was happening to Adam.

Adam stood at the side of the desk, just slightly behind Avery. He was staring at the doctor and at the same time undergoing a transformation, changing shape. It was fascinating to watch. First his body seemed to shrink as he lost a few inches of height. (Was he trying to become a dancer? she wondered. Could that be possible? Wouldn’t his mass have to be concentrated impossibly for him to change to that size?) Then the shrinking stopped, and Adam’s shorter body began to expand outward, making him look rounder. His arms became shorter and hung differently, in a sort of apelike way. Then his face, which had been almost an exact replica of Derec’s, began to undulate slightly, with his chin puffing out and his forehead narrowing, his chin coming to a point, then reshaping itself to a rounder contour. At the top of his head, his metallic version of Derec’s sandy hair lightened to white and got longer, messier. But it was not until the next change that Ariel realized what was happening. Resembling the hair in color and texture, a silver bushy moustache appeared to sprout under Adam’s transformed nose.