The Warlock's Companion wisoh-9

by Christopher Stasheff

"You do not yet live in a glass house, Dar," Fess's voice said in his earphones.

  "Then I'd better toss rocks while I can. And the house is glass, on the outside, after we get done slagging it. Or at least obsidian—and if it's not, it's too close to tell." He powered up the crane, checked its water level, turned up the hold-down jets, and retracted the anchor. Then he dipped the arm, lifted a block of stone in its tongs, and turned to trundle over to the wall of the house.

  Fess was there before him, fitting a block onto the top of the wall, interlocking it into the corner beside it. He stepped back. "Clear, Dar."

  "Going in." Dar eased the crane forward and lowered his block into place. Nothing another robot couldn't have done, of course—but one more brain in the crane meant one less they could sell to a company on Terra. It was cheaper for Dar to do the guiding himself, boring as it might be.

  As he trundled away, Fess came up with his next block—and so it went, the two of them taking turns for an hour and a half, as the wall grew higher and higher.

  Eventually, Fess said, "Midday, Dar."

  "Gotcha." Dar threw the crane into neutral and glanced back at the cutter. "Timed out just right; it's only three blocks ahead of us. Okay, faithful worker—let's slag."

  "I shall assume a discreet distance, Dar."

  "Please do." Dar turned the crane to face away from the wall, turned his seat around, and took hold of the torch's controls.

  "Good thing we've got a decent water supply on this asteroid." He pressed the on patch for the big laser.

  "I believe that was one of the factors in the founders' selection of Maxima as a dwelling place, Dar."

  "Yeah. It wasn't for aesthetic factors, that's for sure."

  "That statement is debatable, Dar. I find great satisfaction in contemplation of the mathematical interrelationships of the landforms in our vicinity."

  "I'd like to say it's the kind of vista only a robot could love—but I know that some of our more eminent members think this stark, harshly lit landscape is the epitome of beauty."

  "It is not your aesthetic ideal, though, Dar."

  "No." A brief vision of Lona flashed before his mind's eye. "My notion of beauty runs more to curves than to planes." He felt a surge of frustration-charged irritation, knew it for what it was, and tried to quell it. "Come on, let's spit."

  All the meters were in the green—at least, he knew it was green, though it looked more like charcoal gray, between the glaring sunlight and the filter in his faceplate. He thumbed the pressure point at the top of the handle, and a bolt of coherent light stabbed out at the wall, searing the shadows and darkening his faceplate. He yelled for the sheer joy of it and moved the beam slowly back and forth over the rocks he'd just been stacking, watching the cold rock glow red, then begin to flow. He panned the beam over to the next area, and the stone congealed as the beam left it, glowing an angry ruby, darkening as it cooled.

  Off to his right, Fess's laser seared the adjacent wall.

  They kept it up until sunset forced them to stop, darkness hiding their target; the laser beam lit only the stone it was currently melting.

  Dar shut down his systems and climbed down from the crane, feeling stiff but satisfied, recognizing the sublimation involved, but happy about it anyway. He went toward the new wall.

  "Please be careful, Dar," Fess reminded him.

  "Don't worry, I'm not stupid enough to touch it." In fact, Dar stopped a good five feet away from the wall. Without air, there was no possibility of the heat reaching out to him—but he was planet-born, and inbred caution held him back. He could admire his handiwork, though, by the light of his headlamp—the first section had cooled into darkness now. It was a great effect—a towering wall of wax left too near the fire, melted into drips and runnels. He stepped back, then remembered what tripping and falling might do to a pressure suit and turned away, stalking off fifty meters before he turned back to take in the whole of the shelter he and Fess were building.

  "It is good to take pride in your handiwork, Dar."

  "Thanks." Dar grinned. "Though I wasn't about to squelch the feeling, Fess—I'm not that much of a Puritan."

  Fess didn't respond.

  "Besides, it's not my design—though I can't see why Lona wants another room for the factory. We can just barely sell the dozen brains we make in a month, as it is." Dar cocked his head to the side. "But I think I'm beginning to see the effect she's trying for, now."

  He was silent long enough so that Fess prompted him: "And that effect is?"

  "A castle." Dar turned away. "Not that she doesn't deserve it—but she also doesn't have to let everybody know."

  The call light on the console was blinking as Dar stepped in from the airlock. He pulled his suit open just enough to tilt back the helmet as he stepped over to punch for playback. The comm screen lit up with the face of Maxima's Director of Imports. He knew Myrtle was plain, as women go, but she looked very attractive at the moment. Dar remembered his vision of Lona, and realized how much too long she'd been away.

  "Shipment coming in, Dar," Myrtle's face said. "A miner's trying to make a few kwahers on his way back out from Ceres. He's bringing in the usual mixed bag—silicon, metals, and replacement parts. If you're interested, he'll be opening shop about 1600. 'Bye, now." She favored him with her favorite sheep's eyes just before the screen went dark.

  "She'll never stop," Dar sighed. "I swear that woman has given me the best leers of her life."

  "No doubt because she is certain it is safe to do so," Fess assured him. "Will you go, Dar?"

  "Are you kidding? We've only got a month's supply of pure silicon left! And the aluminum and gold are getting low, too." Dar stripped off his suit in a hurry and hung it on its peg in passing, heading for the shower.

  "You could buy a smelter," Fess reminded him, "and buy raw minerals much more cheaply, from the local miners."

  His answer was a blast of water-noise—Dar preferred the sensation of spray to the admittedly quicker supersonic vibration that shook dirt loose; and why not use water, when it was only going to be purified and fed into the fusion reactor, anyway? His voice rose above the burble. "Don't trust 'em, Fess. The big one on Ceres does a better job than any home bottle could do—and I can buy an awful lot of pure minerals for what a smelter would cost."

  Besides, with his own furnace, he wouldn't have as many occasions to go into town and see other people.

  Dar headed out a half-hour later, cleansed, depilated, and anointed, with a hot meal in his belly and Lona's shopping list in his pocket. He knew well enough what they were low on, of course, but she always hit a few things he wouldn't have thought of. He had to admit she was more experienced at shopping.

  Of course, it could also be that she knew more about building and programming computers.

  "No question there," he said, holding up a hand and closing his eyes. "I defer to your superior wisdom." It was galling to have to admit it, but he did. "I scarcely know how to grow rock candy, let alone a molecular circuit."

  "But there's nothing to it," she'd said. "You see, this little sawtoothed line means a resistor, and the number over it tells you how many ohms it has to be."

  Dar frowned and peered over her shoulder.

  "The paper," she reminded him.

  "I am looking at the paper."

  "But I want you to concentrate, too." Lona pushed her chair aside so that the schematic was between them. "And these parallel lines show a capacitor."

  "But how do I tell how many ohms the resistor is? The real one, I mean, not the one in the drawing."

  "It's printed on the side of the box."

  "Yeah, but we're talking about me being able to make sure the robots are using the right ones. What if the wrong number gets stamped on the side? Or if it's the right number, but a stray resistor is in there with the wrong number of ohms?"

  "Hm." Her brow knit (she had a very pretty frown, Dar thought). "That is a good point, my love. So that's why Mama taught me how to read the color cod
e."

  "Color code?"

  "Yes. You see how each of these rings painted on the resistor has a different color? Well, each color is equivalent to a number…"

  And so it had gone—electronics, chemistry, particle physics, with Lona always impatient, always trying to breeze past and hit only the points absolutely necessary for the job, and Dar always doggedly pulling her back to the part she'd skipped, knowing that if he didn't keep asking "Why?" it wouldn't be very long before he wouldn't understand what she was talking about.

  When you're trying to learn, it helps being a teacher.

  She'd taught him enough to be able to supervise the factory, which meant that he knew how to do every job himself, if he had to—but he still didn't know enough to plan a job, and certainly couldn't have designed anything more complicated than an autobar. He was studying whenever he could, of course—and she'd been delighted, when she had come home from that third trip to Terra and had found the hard copy sitting out on his desk…

  "Dar! You've been studying!"

  "Huh?" Dar had looked around in panic. "I won't do it again! I promise!"

  "No, do!" Lona bent over to look more closely, and Dar bad a dizzy spell. "It's about wave propagation!"

  Dar glanced at his desk, irritated; waves were the last thing he'd wanted to propagate, just then. "Well, sure. I promised you I'd learn enough to run the factory, remember?"

  "But I already taught you enough for that. This is above and beyond the call—and it's all on your own! Oh, you wonderful man!" And she turned to him, hauling his face up to hers for a kiss that was so deep and dazzling that he began to think maybe he was pretty wonderful, after all.

  When she let him up for air, he gasped, "You keep that up, and I'll have to study all the time."

  She did it again, then propped him up before he could slide to the floor. "All right, I'm keeping it up—and you! So start studying. Even when I'm around. Why didn't you before?"

  "Uh…" Dar bit his lip. "Well, uh… I kinda thought you might feel like I was, uh…"

  "Poaching on my territory?" She shook her head (her hair bounced so prettily when she did that!), eyes shining up at him. "Knowledge is free, sweetheart—or at least, the price is limited to how much studying you're willing to do to gain it. And the more you know, the prouder I am to be with you." Then she'd co-opted his lips again, to show just what form her pride took.

  Well, she was body-proud, Dar reflected—and had a perfect right to be. She'd sure given him reason to keep his nose in the books when she was gone. He'd learned calculus and was beginning on some of the more esoteric branches of mathematics, and was almost up to date on wave mechanics—but that still left an awful lot he didn't know: circuitry, information theory, particle physics… "I wonder if I'll ever be able to learn it faster than the scientists are developing the knowledge," he wondered aloud.

  "That is possible, Dar." Fess lay in the cargo hold, his computer plugged into the car's controls. "The rate of new discoveries is slowing down, on Terra. There are as many articles published as ever, but they are increasingly derivative. The number of original concepts published and tested declines every year."

  Dar frowned. "Odd, that. I'd heard the universities were graduating more Ph.D.s than ever."

  "True, Dar, but they no longer require truly original work for their dissertations. Nor will they—bureaucracy tends toward stability, and truly new ideas can upset that stability."

  "Well, the Proletarian Eclectic State of Terra is bureaucratic." Dar frowned. "But its most prominent characteristic is that it's one of the tightest totalitarian governments ever seen. I thought dictatorships wanted research, to give them new and better weapons."

  "Only if there is an enemy who threatens the dictator's rule, Dar—and PEST has no rivals for the government of the Terran Sphere, at the moment. Such weapons research as is done, is only a seeking after new applications of existing principles. A dictatorship does not encourage the discovery of new ideas."

  "I can understand their viewpoint; I'm a little reluctant to try coming up with new ideas, myself."

  "That is only because you know enough to know how little you know."

  "In which case, I'll probably never outgrow it. Still, I'll be glad when I've learned enough to understand why Lona tells me to do something a certain way. It'd be nice to know what I'm doing, instead of just following her directions blindly."

  "That will boost your self-esteem, Dar, perhaps to the point of developing the occasional idea or two, yourself."

  Dar shuddered. "Please! I want to court Lona, not disaster. I'm not about to start trying to do things my own way for a long time, yet."

  "I think you have Lona on a bit of a pedestal, Dar."

  "No, I'm only awed by her knowledge. Well, maybe by her business instincts, too. All of her instincts, in fact…"

  He stifled the thought. Later, boy, he told himself sternly. When she comes home. Let's keep to the business at hand here.

  Unfortunate turn of phrase.

  "Your attention is drifting again, Dar."

  "That's, why I've got a robot pilot." But Dar reluctantly hauled his mind back to business. "In the meantime, if I don't follow Lona's instructions to the letter, our little five-robot factory will break down or start producing defective computers."

  "True, Dar, and you will start losing sales."

  Dar nodded. "No sales means no money—and on Maxima, no money means no food."

  "That statement is true in any civilized society, Dar."

  "True. But on an asteroid, 'no money' also means no water after we finish mining the ice on our own homestead—and there're only two pockets left, scarcely ten years' supply. And no water means no oxygen to breathe, and no hydrogen for fusion, which means no electricity."

  "True—and, though our airproofing is very good, there is always a slight loss from day to day."

  "Yes, and 'No money' also means no nitrogen or trace gases for the atmosphere, and no replacement parts for the life-support machinery. 'No money, no life,' as the Chinese say."

  "I do not think Maxima is in any economic danger, though, Dar."

  "Not as a whole, no." Dar gazed at the Ngoyas' house, off in the distance. It was a French chateau that could have rivaled Versailles. In fact, it was a copy of Versailles, on a smaller scale (but not much smaller). "The Ngoyas don't seem to be doing too badly. Of course, their factory is almost as big as their house, now." He could see its skylights poking above the ground behind the mansion. (That was the nice thing about ice pockets—when you mined them out, you had great underground chambers for automated machinery). "Their sales have to be over a million therms a year.''

  "One million three hundred sixty-eight thousand, Dar. It is a matter of public record."

  "Which means our income is, too." Dar winced. "No wonder they're being patronizing toward us."

  "I still believe that to be primarily a matter of your perception, Dar. An analysis of speech patterns and facial expressions does not reveal any such attitude in any of your neighbors but the Laurentians, the Mulhearns, and the Bolwheels."

  "Those are definitely the worst of them, yes.'' Dar watched a small mountain of a house come into view. "There's the Mulhearns' palace, now." It was Buckingham Palace, in fact—the Maximans were not shy in their pretensions. "Remind me to try to stay away from them."

  "If you insist, Dar, though they are relatively harmless."

  "Which means they won't harm me, if I don't come near them. Oh, don't worry, I won't insult them. They are human, after all."

  "You must not sneer at your neighbors, Dar, if you plan to co-exist with them."

  "Come on, Fess! You know I get along okay with most of 'em. I just don't particularly have a yen to build a palace in a vacuum, that's all."

  "But you would, if you could surround it with atmosphere and a grassy park?"

  "Well, maybe." Dar frowned. "There must be some way to enclose those mansions. Maybe if we built underground…"

  Fess made a
buzzing noise, the robotic equivalent of clearing his throat.

  Dar looked up sharply, startled. "Was I drifting again?"

  "Yes, Dar, and such speculation is to be encouraged—but within the context of the present discussion, I would like to point out that you are not entirely out of sympathy with the pretensions of your technocratic fellows.''

  "Well, maybe a little." Dar frowned. "But then, I'm only skilled labor so far."

  "Yes, and you have not yet begun your own dynasty."

  The simple thought of offspring made Dar's head whirl.

  "Town" was a cluster of one-story basalt buildings in three concentric circles; at their hub was a spaceport. The structures were almost all shops—ship repair, retail import/export, and recreation. There was even a small hotel mixed in with the three bars, but it was only for genuine lodging. The good citizens of Maxima were all engineers, scientists, programmers, and other high-tech workers; none of the women had the time, or the need, to be prostitutes. They had also been very successful in keeping professionals from moving in; the last entrepreneur who had tried it had been chained to a desk with a computer terminal which was hooked to an autochef. The 'chef wouldn't supply food unless the prisoner took, and passed, a computerized exam.

  She dug in her heels and maintained the pride of her calling—but after three days of nothing but water, she caved in and learned how to study. A "C" in a basic algebra lesson won her a bowl of chili and a glass of milk. Thus fortified, she plowed ahead through history, algebra, plane geometry, basic chemistry, and a survey of Terran literature, working her way up to pot roast and stringbeans. By the end of three months, she had saddle sores and a high school diploma, at which point she was released from durance vile and packed aboard the next Ceres-bound burro-boat. She spread the word, and Maxima rarely had trouble with women in her line again. She, however, had come back five years later and applied for a job. She turned out to have a talent for organization and was currently coordinating the import-export trade.

  "You know," Dar said, as he watched the blocks of the town grow, "these people haven't done all that badly, in some ways."