Michael Kube-McDowell - Odyssey

Unable to either resist or help, he was taken to another section of the subdivided compartment and laid on a thinly padded board. He lay there drifting in and out of consciousness, sometimes aware of the caninoid crouching solicitously beside him, sometimes aware of nothing but his own confusion and fatigue.

In one of his lucid moments he became aware that the alien was holding a cup of clear liquid for him, and struggled up on one elbow.

“ ’U bettrr tell Aranimas what ‘e wants to know,” the caninoid whispered as it offered the cup.

Derec tipped his head forward and reached for the cup. His right hand trembled uncontrollably, so he had to use his left to steady the cup as he sipped at the cool liquid. It was sweet, like a thin honey, and bathed his ravaged throat with relief.

“How tough do you think humans are?” he croaked. “If I knew anything I’d have told him in the first five minutes. If he keeps this up he’s going to kill me. Why won’t he believe me?”

The caninoid glanced nervously around before answering. “Do ‘u know Narwe?”

Derec could not tell if the name was of a species or an individual, but it did not matter to his answer. “No.”

“Aranimas knows Narwe. Narwe ‘ass to be forced to be honest. If ‘u ask Narwe a question, it will lie or pretend it doesn’t understand or hass forgotten. Hurt Narwe enough and it always tell.”

“I’m not a Narwe!” Derec protested weakly. “Is he too stupid to see that?”

“Aranimas thinks ‘u use the Narwe trick,” the caninoid said. “Besides, Aranimas iss very angry.”

“Why is he angry at me? I didn’t do anything to him.”

“When Aranimas iss angry, everyone in trouble,” the alien said. “Gunners werr not supposed to destroy robot nest.”

“They didn’t. The robots did it themselves.”

“Doesn’t matter. Aranimas wanted to capture robots to work forr ‘im.”

Derec closed his eyes and laid back. “I’m afraid there won’t be much to capture.”

“Aranimas went to see what salvage team brought back,” the alien said. “Eff truly not much, ‘e’ll be worse when ‘e comes back.”

“Can’t you help me?” Derec pleaded. “You believe me, don’t you?”

“Not my job to believe or not believe,” the caninoid shrugged. “Can’t ‘elp.”

With a sigh, Derec lowered himself back to a reclining position and closed his eyes. “Then he is going to kill me, because I don’t have anything to tell him. And maybe that’s just as well.”

The caninoid reclaimed the cup from Derec’s hand and stood up. “Perfect Narwe thought. Don’t let Aranimas ‘ear ‘u.”

Dozing, the first Derec knew of Aranimas’s return was when the alien seized him by the arm and hauled him roughly to a sitting position.

“It’s time to stop playing,” Aranimas said. “I grow impatient.”

“That was playing?” Derec said lightly. “You people have some funny ideas about games. Remind me not to play cutthroat eight-card with you.”

At that, the caninoid, crouching in a doorway a few meters away, closed its eyes and began to shake its head. Aranimas’s answer was to reach inside his clothing for the stylus.

“Wait,” Derec said quickly, holding up a hand palm out. “You don’t need that.”

“Have you decided to share your knowledge after all?”

“I always was willing to. You just didn’t want what I had to offer.”

“I will know who you are and what you know about the object you brought aboard,” Aranimas said.

Derec slid off the edge of the bench and found his feet. Aranimas still dwarfed him, but even so, he felt better standing. “The fact is, you know as much as I do about who I am, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you knew more than I do about the silver box. But there is something I know more about than you do, and that’s robots. How did your prospecting go?”

One of Aranimas’s eyes cast a baleful glance in the direction of the caninoid, which hunched its shoulders and retreated from the doorway. “They brought back fragments only,” Aranimas said. “Your robots were very efficient about destroying themselves.”

“They weren’t my robots,” Derec said. “But why don’t you show me what you have?”

Aranimas lowered his arms to his side and slowly massaged his knees with his hands while he weighed Derec’s proposition. “Yes,” he said finally. “That will be a good test of your intentions and usefulness. I will have you build me a robot.”

Derec’s face paled. “What?”

“If you truly do not know who you are, then you have no loyalties or obligations to any other master. When you have built me a robot servant I will know that you have accepted your place serving me.”

Derec knew better than to pick that moment to make a noble speech about freedom and choice, but he still could not simply accept Aranimas’s terms. “What if I can’t build you a robot out of what you have? I said I knew a lot about them. I didn’t say I could manufacture one out of good intentions. I need certain key parts-”

“If you fail, I will know that you are either unreliable or have no usefulness to me at all,” Aranimas said, “and that I should not waste valuable consumables keeping you alive.”

Derec swallowed hard. “What are we waiting for? Show me your inventory.”

Aranimas had not been minimizing the problem when he termed what the scavengers had recovered from the asteroid “fragments.” I would have said scrap, he thought as he stood in the ship’s hold surveying the raiders’ paltry booty. The largest intact piece was the one Derec himself had brought aboard-Monitor 5’s arm. The next largest was a Supervisor’s knee joint. Chances were that it was from Monitor 5 as well.

No other piece was bigger than the palm of Derec’s hand: a badly scorched regulator, an optical sensor with a cracked lens, bits of structural forms like shards of broken pottery. There were no positronic brains and no microfusion powerpacks-the two absolutely indispensable items.

And all the Crown’s horses and all the Crown’s men couldn’t put the robots together again , he thought. “Is this all you have?” he asked with a heavy heart.

Mercifully, it was not. In one of the storage corridors, he was shown two tall lockers, each of which contained a nearly intact robot.

“I see this isn’t a new hobby of yours,” Derec said, stepping forward to examine the collection. The new robots were of a familiar domestic design. He would know more about where they had come from and what they had been used for when he used a microscanner on the serial number plates found at various sites on the robots’ bodies. Clearly, though, he was not the first human the raiders had encountered.

There seemed to be enough good parts to make about one and a half robots. One of the robots was headless, and the mounting circle on the neck was twisted and deformed. That told Derec something about the circumstances under which the robots had been acquired.

More important at the moment, it meant there was only one positronic brain. But there was no guarantee that it was functional. The upper torso of the other robot was torn open at the chest as though by some sort of projectile weapon, and the right shoulder area was rippled as though it had been seared by intense heat. Not only did that hold out little hope for the key components located in the torso, but it also virtually guaranteed that the brain’s powerdown had been anything but orderly.

But at least there was something to work with, and an outside chance, at least, of success. Derec stepped back from the lockers and turned to look up at Aranimas.

“So what do you have in the way of an engineering lab around here?” he asked with a breeziness that was more show than real. “I’m ready to get to work.”