Mike McQuay - Suspicion

“But there are no humans here,” Derec said.

“No.”

“Are you expecting any?”

“We have no expectations.”

“Oh.”

Euler directed the spider-like robot guiding the mover, and the machine turned dutifully at the next corner, taking them down a double-width street that was bisected by a large aqueduct, whose waters had turned dark under the ever-deepening twilight.

Derec sat back and stole a glance at Katherine, but she was busily pulling bits of paper from her hair and didn’t notice him. He had a million questions, but they seemed better left for later. As it was, he had conflicting emotions to analyze and react to within himself.

He was a nonperson whose life had begun scant weeks before, when he’d awakened without past or memory to find himself in a life-support pod, stranded upon an asteroid that was being mined by robots. They had been searching for something, something he had accidentally stumbled upon-the Key to Perihelion, at least one of the seven Keys to Perihelion. It had seemed of incredible import to the robots on the asteroid. Unfortunately, he had had no idea of what the Keys to Perihelion were or what to do with them.

After that was the bad time. The asteroid was destroyed by Aranimas, an alien space raider, who captured Derec and tortured him for information about the Key, information that Derec could not supply. There he had met Katherine, just before the destruction of Aranimas’s vessel and their dubious salvation at the hands of the Spacers’ robots.

The Spacers also wanted the Key, though their means of attaining it seemed slightly more civilized and bureaucratic than Aranimas’s. Katherine and Derec were polite prisoners of bureaucracy for a time on Rockliffe Station, their personalities clashing until they were forced to form an alliance with Wolruf, another alien from Aranimas’s ship, to escape their gentle captivity with the Key.

They found that if they pressed the corners of the silver slab and thought themselves away from the Spacer station, they were whisked bodily to a dark gray void that they assumed to be Perihelion. Pressing the corners again, another thought brought them to Robot City. And then their thinking took them no farther, stranding them in a world populated by nothing but robots.

And that was it, the sum total of Derec’s conscious life. He had reached several conclusions, though, scant as his reserve of information was: First, he had an innate knowledge of robots and their workings, though he had no idea from where his knowledge emanated; next, Katherine knew more about him than she was willing to tell; finally, he couldn’t escape the feeling that he was here for a purpose, that this was all some elaborate test designed especially for him.

But why? Why?

It was worlds that were being turned here, physical and spatial laws that were being forced upside down-all for him? Nothing made sense.

And then there was the Key, the object that everyone wanted, the object that was safely hidden by the person who couldn’t control it. The robots here didn’t know he had it. Were they looking for it, too? He’d have to find out. The Key seemed to be the one strain that held everything else together.

Keeping that in mind, he determined to move slowly, to try always to get more in the way of information than he gave. He’d been at a disadvantage for the entire length of his memory. From this point, he wanted to keep the upper hand as far as possible.

But there was, of course, the murder.

Derec stood on the balcony of the apartment given to him and Katherine by the robots, looking out over the night city. A stiff, cold wind had come up, the starfield totally obscured by dark, angry clouds that seemed to boil up out of nowhere. Lightning flashed in the distance, electrons seeking partner protons on the surface. It was a beautiful sight, and frightening. Derec watched the distant buildings light to near daytime before plunging once more into darkness.

“There,” he said, pointing to a distant tower. “It wasn’t there a centad ago.”

Katherine walked up beside him, leaning against the balcony rail. “Where was it?” she asked, mocking.

“It wasn’t anywhere,” he replied, turning to take her by the shoulders. “It didn’t exist.”

“That’s impossible,” she replied, then turned and walked back into the large, airy apartment that sat at the top of another tower like the one Derec said had sprung from nowhere. “I wish they’d get here with our food.”

“They’re probably fixing us something extra special,” Derec said, joining her in the living room. “And impossible seems to be the way of our lives right now, doesn’t it? I’m telling you, Katherine, that along with everything else that doesn’t make sense, this… city is growing, changing right before our eyes.”

“How can that be?” she asked, and looked around uneasily. “I mean… cities are built, aren’t they? They don’t just grow.”

Derec stared a circle around the room. It was hexagonal, like standing on the inside of a crystal, with no visible line of demarcation for the ceilings and floor. The furniture seemed to flow from the walls, as the table seemed to flow upward from the floor. Light concentrated from the ceiling and lit the room comfortably, but it seemed the ceiling itself that was alight, with no external apparatus to make it happen.

“Look around you,” Derec said. “Everything’s connected to everything else, and connected seamlessly. And it all seems to be made from the same material.” He walked to a sofa that flowed out of the wall and sat on the cushion that formed its base. “Comfortable,” he said, “but I think it’s made from the same material as the harder stuff-some kind of steel and plastic alloy-just in different measure.”

Katherine had walked to the table and was staring at it. “If you look closely,” she said, “you can see a pattern to the material.”

Derec stood and walked up beside her, leaning down on the table to get a close look. The pattern was faint, but readable. The table was made up of a collection of trapezoidal shapes, interwoven and repeated over and over.

“Interesting,” Derec said.

“How so?”

“Is the shape familiar to you?” She narrowed her brows in concentration for a moment, then looked at him with wide eyes. “The same shape as the Key,” she said.

He nodded.

Katherine left him standing there and hurried back out to the balcony.

“It’s almost like individual pieces stuck together,” he called to her. “I wonder how they connect… ”

“It’s gone!” she shrieked, and Derec hurried onto the balcony. “Your tower from before, it’s gone!”

“No it’s not,” he said, pointing farther to the east.”

It’s moved?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so.” He pointed to the huge, pyramidal structure that dominated the landscape to the west. It was at the top of that place where they were first brought by the Key. “That’s the only building I think doesn’t change. And we couldn’t see it from the balcony a moment ago.”

“You mean, we’ve changed?”

“Something like that.”

She put a hand to her head. “I didn’t see… feel, I… ”

“It’s kind of like watching clouds,” he said. “If you stare at them from moment to moment, they seem to be solid and stationary, but once you turn away and then look back, they’ve changed. It’s almost like some sort of evolutionary growth… ”

“In a building?”

“If you stay out there much longer, you will probably get wet,” came a voice from behind them. They turned to see Euler’s glowing eyes staring at them in the darkness.

“We’ve gotten wet before,” Katherine returned, looking past Euler to the food being set out on their table. “Ah, a last meal for the condemned.”