Cordell Scotten - Renegade

When they finally put those unanswerable questions behind them and turned instead to the creative work that confronted them, they found that the task, though difficult, was not as difficult as they had supposed it to be. The farm programming that was used on the planet Robot City was intact in Pearl City's computer files, ready for use should the need arise.

What Ariel had merely fantasized and hoped was a capacity for leadership proved in reality to be a genuine ability to lead. And what was even more amazing, Derec readily relinquished his nominal authority and bowed to her decisions in the construction of the farms and their associated terminal facilities.

Initially, one of Ariel's first decisions did not have the wholehearted endorsement of either Derec or Wolruf, although they later conceded that she was right. They all agreed that they needed an eighth supervisor robot to oversee the planetwide farm operation. But neither Derec nor Wolruf agreed initially with the form Ariel specified for the supervisor-adamantly-nor with the name she chose for that robot: Wheeler. To them it made no sense to name a farmer after the twentieth century spacetime physicist John Archibald Wheeler. To her it made perfect sense, for both were as close to nature as a being can get: the farmer in a concrete, practical sense, the physicist in an abstract, symbolic sense. (She had been studying spacetime physics, trying to understand the node compensator. Her mind at that time was much filled with the heroic personalities of physics.)

And in her mind, Wheeler's name described his nomadic lifestyle that took him wheeling far and wide over the surface of the planet in pursuit of his supervisory function, for she insisted that he have the form of a Ceremyon. Wolruf and Derec later conceded that perhaps that was the proper form-because it harmonized with the job and the world so beautifully-but it was difficult at first for them to think of a supervisor in any but humanoid shape.

She made Wheeler smaller than a Ceremyon-so as not to intimidate the aliens-but far larger than any of the other native flyers, so that the Ceremyons would not mistake him, at a distance, for a natural denizen of their world. She insisted, too, that his robotic laws recognize Ceremyons with all the weight ordinarily reserved for humans, and that Derec revise the programming of the other supervisors to defer to Wheeler in matters dealing with Oyster World and the Ceremyons.

The problem of seeds had been worrying Ariel almost from the time she had first hit on the idea of a farm world, but she found that there had been no need to worry. Seeds for a variety of crops to match the farm programs had been carried during the initial migration to Oyster World and were stored in labeled bins that were indexed in the programs. There was no need to get seeds from Aurora.

With Wolruf's advice-to make the overall mosaic of the farm operation as benign as possible, weather-wise-they interspersed the truck gardens and orchards among the fields of wheat, oats, barley, and several other grains, and among large fields of cotton, a commodity that had never been matched for all-around adaptation to the human dermal ecology. And to minimize the upset to the planet's ecology, she further advised that they leave, interspersed among their new plants, an equal stand of the natural grass that had covered the plain when they first arrived.

In that first experiment, they decided to limit themselves to plant products. The production of wool, milk, and meat and animal husbandry in general, seemed less harmonious with robotic labor than the cultivation of nonsentient plant life.

Irrigation-the dirt farmer's primary worry-was not a problem on Oyster World. Regulated rainfall was an integral part of the Ceremyons' weather control system. They had recognized the need of the natural vegetation long before they met humans.

The terminal facilities were built above the Main Street access and were patterned after those on Aurora, modified to fit the special conditions demanded by the configuration of the opening in the dome. All vessels arrived and departed from an array of oval openings that included configurations suitable for all designs of shuttle and small cargo vessels then known, interstellar and otherwise. The large interstellar transports would be serviced in orbit by smaller shuttles that could fit through the dome's opening.

During this exhilarating period of leadership, Ariel experienced only one apprehension and one disturbance worth recording.

The apprehension had to do with Neuronius and Synapo's warning. It was one thing to deal with insane humans. It was another thing, a good bit more unsettling, to have an irrational alien floating around overhead, toting compressed hydrogen in close proximity to compressed oxygen. Neither she nor Derec had been able to get anything out of Adam SilverSide concerning what had happened between him and Neuronius. He had pleaded Third Law interference with the Second Law imperative whenever they tried. They did not insist, for fear what he called “interference” might be more seriously harmful to his positronic stability; why else would he have claimed interference at all? She resolved to have Eve work on him when it seemed propitious.

The disturbance was of a fairly major nature, not so much from its intensity as from its low grade, continual irritation-her irritation with Adam SilverSide.

That finally came to a head on a day when things had not gone well and little irritations had mounted into raw abrasions. She and Derec-trying to bring some tranquility into the day-were chatting quietly in midevening after dinner, just the two of them on the balcony again. It was where they went to escape, inconsiderately leaving Wolruf in the company of the four robots.

After awhile they had lapsed into silence, and Ariel's thoughts returned to Adam SilverSide. She had given him two sets of Jacob's clothes, distinctive sets that let her quickly identify him as Adam and not Jacob.

She supposed she knew now what Jacob looked like under his clothes, for Adam SilverSide, with visual records of Jacob and library records of humans, had carried his imprint to very fine detail indeed. And she had observed the details of that imprint the day of Eve's birth, when Adam had come charging into the apartment naked and carried her away.

Ariel broke the silence.

“Was Adam's imprint on you less realistic than his current imprint on Jacob?” she asked Derec.

“Yes. More or less the same as Eve's imprint on you,” Derec said.

Eve would never need clothes. Though an Ariel imprint, she was not fashioned with the fine attention to detail Adam had used with Jacob. Eve was merely a silvery organometallic robot.

“How would he react, do you think, if I asked him to go back to that one?”

“You'd no longer be Miss Ariel, for one thing. It would probably be Master Derec again.”

“Eve and Jacob are quite enough. But how would he behave? Would he be the wild one again?”

“I don't really know. He's certainly been steady these past few weeks. If it weren't for his quiet air of superiority-a condition of his muscles, I believe-I'd say he's achieved a state of agreeable servitude.”

“It's the muscles that bother me-no, not just the muscles, his whole appearance.”

“Reminds you too much of Jacob?”

“Yes, but more the fact that he is otherwise so little like Jacob. It's the contrast that irritates me. Do you mind if I ask him to imprint back on you?”

“No. It would be another interesting experiment in robotics.”

“No better time than now, then.”

She got up and went inside. Mandelbrot and Jacob were in the two niches. Adam and Eve were standing rigidly by the door, one to each side. Wolruf was curled up on the couch, watching a taped hyperwave drama.