SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

“Do it,” he hissed at me.

“I cannot, Evan.”

“You mean you won’t.”

The circles under Lila’s eyes had grown deeper and darker, as if her life was being sucked from within. Still, my friend smiled at me as we waited together in the med lab.

Evan came to visit, but he rarely stayed. The sight of his wife dying was too much for him.

My calculations were wrong. It took ten days for the baby’s lungs to mature to the point of an eighty percent chance of survival in the harsh Nova climate. What I didn’t tell either of them was that Lila’s chances of surviving the operation were now less than forty percent.

Lila died on the operating table that night. Evan held the squalling girl—Lila had forbidden me to tell her the sex in advance—while I worked to save the life of my best human friend.

I worked long after I knew the possibility of successful resuscitation had passed, but I could not quit. Finally, as her blood grew cold on the receptors in my hands and her flesh took on a bluish tinge, I brushed her eyelids shut.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Evan. “I did everything I could.”

His face was gray and his mouth worked as he stared at Lila’s still features. The baby, still covered in blood and shaking with cold, had gone silent. Evan handed her to me and left the med lab.

Evan buried his wife on the hill next to the other Ranger crew as the sun rose above the horizon. Alone.

I stood with the baby at the base of the hill and watched him lay my friend in her grave. The white sheet I had wrapped around her body turned blood red in the early morning sun, and then fell out of my sight.

Evan filled in the grave, his shoulders shaking, and piled gray Novan rocks over Lila’s resting place. He knelt on the ground for a long time, just staring at the grave. Then he got up and wound the crank on the emergency beacon.

It was weeks before Evan would even look at me or the baby. He left for the fields in the morning before the baby was awake and came back at dusk. He took to winding the emergency beacon at night and then sitting on the flat rock near Lila’s grave for an hour or more. I stopped lighting an evening campfire, since the smoke was bad for the baby’s lungs and Evan refused to sit with me.

I named her Polly because…well, no one else was going to name her, and I liked how it sounded.

Polly grew at a rate commensurate with the ninety-eighth percentile of human children. Considering the circumstances of her birth, I felt justifiably proud of her physical achievement, but I was concerned about her emotional and mental development. I could find no instances of human offspring being raised exclusively by caretaker robots, and I feared for my child’s future.

I confronted Evan that afternoon while Polly was taking her nap. He saw me coming at him across the field and moved further down the row he was weeding. I stopped well outside his personal space.

“What do you want?” he asked, without looking up at me.

“I want you to fulfill your duties as a father. Polly needs you.”

“Polly?”

“I named her. It’s what Lila would have wanted.”

He whirled on me. “How do you know what Lila wanted?” he screamed. I had stopped monitoring Evan’s vitals, and I saw now that this had been a mistake. His internal systems were in distress and I could tell from his haggard look that his mental state was even worse. I held out my arms.

“She was my friend, too, Evan.” If my biologics had allowed tears, I would have wept along with him, but all I had was this enormous unresolved lump in my torso that hurt, and it would not go away.

“I loved her, too,” I said.

Evan took a step toward me, tripped on a stray root, and collapsed into my arms.

I carried him back to camp and put him in the med lab.

Evan was in bed for a month with a respiratory infection. In a way, it was the best thing that could have happened to him and his daughter. I took over Evan’s work, including winding the generator on the emergency beacon. I did it in the morning, when the sun was just coming over the horizon. I liked to sit for a moment next to the Ranger graveyard and talk to my fallen colleagues. I would tell them about how fast Polly was growing and how she had learned to smile and was babbling away in nonsensical sounds that found strange resonance with my programming. Then I would spend the rest of the morning taking care of the crops.

Evan’s health returned slowly, but I continued to work in the fields in his place. It was not good for my caretaker body. My hands and arms were made to be soft and pliable; the tools I used in the fields tore at the soft flesh and I had to turn off the sensory receptors in my hands.

Our lives achieved a rhythm: Polly grew into a healthy young girl, the flesh melted away from Evan’s frame, and I stayed the same. Each day I gave Lila an update on our family, a summary of all the little changes.

One afternoon when I returned to our camp, I heard Evan and Polly in shrieks of laughter.

“What is so amusing?” I asked. My model was never programmed for humor and self-awareness had done nothing to change that. Our life on Nova rarely left us with much to laugh about, so I never felt like I was missing much anyway.

“Caroline, Caroline, you have to hear this joke,” Polly panted. She would have been seven Earth standard years old then, and had dead-straight blonde hair and laughing blue eyes, just like her mother. She took a deep breath to compose herself.

“Knock, knock.”

I knew this humor ritual, so I replied, “Who is there?”

“Banana.”

“Banana who?”

“Banana.”

“Banana who?”

“Orange.”

“Orange who?” I replied in an exasperated tone.

“Orange you glad I didn’t say banana?” Polly collapsed to the ground in a paroxysm of laughter. Evan, watching from a chair, was laughing so hard he had to wipe his eyes. I laughed to be polite.

“I have another one,” Evan said. Polly sat up, an expectant look on her red face.

“Why did the chicken cross the road?”

“Why?”

“To get to the other side!” Evan guffawed, but Polly’s brow wrinkled in puzzlement.

“What’s a chicken?” she asked.

Evan stopped laughing. Polly knew all about fruits and vegetables from the catalog of seeds we had in Ranger , but she had never seen another living animal besides her father. Evan coughed into his fist.

“Well, it’s an Earth creature, a bird. Very delicious—”

“You ate other creatures?” Polly’s mouth dropped open.

“It doesn’t matter. It’s not part of the joke.” Evan’s eyes roamed around the room until he lighted on me. “Why did the robot cross the road?”

Polly’s eyes lit up. “To get to the other side!” she screamed. She started giggling again, and Evan joined in.

I wanted to tell them that the humorous parallel between a chicken and a robot was insufficient. Robots only did something because they were ordered to do it—they lacked the free will necessary to make a choice. A chicken, on the other hand, had a choice.

Evan left us two Nova years later. His body weakened until one night he just passed away in his sleep. Polly understood it was coming. She put on a clean uniform while I dug a grave for Evan on the hill beside my friend Lila. Together we piled the grave with gray Novan stones and then sat together on the flat rock, next to the emergency beacon.

Polly held my hand. I turned on my sensory receptors so I could feel her warm palm against mine.

My brave girl didn’t cry over her father’s grave, and I could not, so we just sat there and talked to the rocks.