Robots

by Jack Dann

  Isn't that a sour and cynical thing to say, Andrew?

  He smiles. The robot is glad that it has found a way to make Andrew smile.

  Gurney does tag show up for work the next day, and Andrew gives his crew the week off. The men who are from logging families demand that they be paid, that Codependence Day, the first anniversary of the Protectorate's founding, means nothing to them. The robot listens to the discussion and hears many terms that are incomprehensible, abstract. There are times the robot wishes that Victor Wu were directly accessible. Victor could at least explain what humans argued about, if not the reasons that they argued in the first place.

  The robot spends the day traveling in the mu, searching for crystals and collecting mushrooms up a stream that flows into the Quinault, near where it passes beneath Low Divide. Andrew is gone for the day, arranging supplies and making sure the dig's legal work is in order, whatever that may mean, under new Protectorate regulations. When he returns in the evening, he has received no assurances and is unhappy. The robot waits for him to have a cup of tea and to take off his shoes, then speaks.

  Andrew?

  Yes. What?

  Are you all right?

  Huh? Oh, I'm fine. It's just today. What is it, robot?

  I thought of something today, when I was looking at a map so that I could take the mu to where I wanted to go. What did you think of? Andrew speaks in a monotone voice and does not seem very interested. He sips his tea. I realized that I can read.

  Of course you can. Glotworks has a reading module as part of the software. - No. I mean, could I read?

  I don't follow you.

  A book.

  Could you read a book?

  Andrew is sitting up now. He stares at the internal monitor that is also one of the robot's eyes.

  Yes. One of yours, perhaps. Which would you recommend?

  The books are kept nearby, in a hermetic box in the room the robot occupies during off-hours.

  Well. Let me. Hnun. Most of them are geology texts. Should I read a geology text?

  Well, sure. Why not?

  Can I get one now, with the mu?

  Of course. Go ahead. Try the Owsley. It's about the most exciting of the lot. It's about the Alvarez event and the search for the big cauldera. It's a synthesis of other works, but brilliant, brilliant. Pretty much confirms the meteor theory, and gives a good argument for a Yucatan crash site. Made a big sensation in 04.

  The robot switches its awareness to the mu and picks out the book. It reads the first paragraph, then comes back inside the housing, back to the place where Andrew lives.

  Andrew?

  Yes.

  What are dinosaurs?

  Summer days lengthen, and Andrew often goes to town—to Port Angeles or Port Townsend, and once making the trek around the peninsula to Forks—all to sort out legal details for the mohole dig. From each of these trips, he returns with a book for the robot. The first book is a Webster's Dictionary, on bubble-card. Andrew plugs the card into a slot and the robot begins to read the dictionary. The robot finishes with a page of A, then scrolls through the remainder of the book. Here are all the words. Here are all the words in the language. All the robot has to do is look them up and remember them. The robot spends a happy day doing that.

  The next day, Andrew returns with the poems of Robert Frost. The robot pages through the book using the mu, accessing the dictionary card to find words that it does not know. The first word the robot looks up is "poem."

  After a week, Gurney returns to work, and the robot digs once again. The days pass, and the mohole twists deeper, like a coiled spring being driven into the earth. It only deviates from a curving downward path when the robot encounters fault lines or softnesses whose weakness the robot's cutters can exploit. But, in general, the hole descends in a loose spiral.

  Andrew is anxious, and pushes everyone harder than before. Yet, Andrew himself works the hardest of all, poring over data, planning routing, driving to meetings in Forks and Port Angeles. He is often not in bed before one or two in the morning.

  The robot fills the time with reading. There are so many books—more than the robot ever imagined. And then the robot discovers Andrew's record collection, all on two bubble-cards carelessly thrown in with all the technical manuals and geology texts. For the first time since the summer when the teenagers came and plugged into the robot and had their parties, the robot listens to music.

  What the robot loves most, though, is poetry. Beginning with Robert Frost, the robot reads poet after poet. At first, there are so many new words to look -up that the robot often loses the thread of what the poem is about in a morass of details and definitions. But gradually, the poems begin to make more sense. There is a Saturday morning when, while diligently working through an Emily Dickinson poem, the robot understands.

  There's a certain Slant of light,

  Winter Afternoons-

  That oppresses, like the Heft

  of Cathedral Tunes—

  Heavenly Hurt, it gives us—

  We can find no scar,

  But internal difference,

  Where the Meanings, are—

  The robot has never seen a cathedral, but that does not matter. The robot realizes that it has seen the light, in the deep forest, among the three-hundred-year-old trees. It's thick, the robot thinks. That's what Emily Dickinson is talking about. Thick light. Light that makes the robot thread softly through the twilight, with the mu's pads fully extended. Light that, for no reason the robot can name, is frightening and beautiful all at once.

  From that moment on, the robot begins to grasp most poems it reads, or, if not, at least to feel something after reading them, something that was not inside the robot's mind before—something the robot had not felt before—but knows, as if the feeling were an old friend that the robot recognized after many years of separation.

  The robot does not particularly care whether or not the feelings are right and true for everyone else. For humans. But sometimes the robot wonders. After reading a fair number of poems, the robot delves into criticism, but the words are too abstract and too connected to humans and cities and other things that the robot has no experience of, and so the robot puts aside the books of criticism for the time being, and concentrates on the poetry itself, which the robot does not have the same troubles with.

  The robot finds that it most enjoys poetry that is newer, even though Andrew is disbelieving when the robot tells him of this. After a time, poetry is no longer a mass, and the robot begins to pick out individual voices whose connotations are more pleasing than others.

  I like William Stafford better than Howard Nemerov, the robot says to Andrew one evening.

  You like him better?

  Yes.

  Andrew laughs. Neither one of them was in the canon when I was in school.

  Do you think it funny that I used the word like?

  Yes, I suppose so.

  I do like things, at least according to the Turing test. Poetry goes into me, and what comes out feels like liking to me.

  It satisfies the criteria of appearances.

  Yes, I suppose that is the way to say it.

  Where have you heard about the Turing test?

  I read it in a book about robots.

  The robot reads to Andrew a William Stafford poem about a deer that has been killed on a road. Andrew smiles at the same lines that had moved the robot.

  You pass the Turing test too, the robot says.

  Andrew laughs harder still.

  The robot is digging entirely through basalt flow now, layer upon layer.

  It's the bottom of the raft, Andrew says. It is dense, but the plates are as light as ocean froth compared to what's under them. Or so we think.

  The temperature increases exponentially, and the humans in the support wagon would be killed instantly if they did not have nuclear-powered air conditioners.

  The robot does not become bored at the sameness of the rock, but finds a comfort in the steady diggin
g, a rhythm, as the robot comes to call this feeling. Not the rhythm of most music, or the beat of the language in poetry—all of these the robot identifies with humans, for when they arise, humans have been doing the creating-but a new rhythm, that is neither the whine of the robot's machinery nor the crush and crumble of the rock, nor the supersonic screech of the pile making diamond glass from the rock's ashes. Instead, it is the combination of these things with the poetry, with the memories of the field and the forest.

  So it is one day that the robot experiences a different rhythm, a different sound, and realizes that this rhythm is not the robot's own, and does not belong to the humans. At first, it is incomprehensible, like distant music, or the faded edges of reception just before a comlink relays to satellite or to groundtower. The robot wonders if the rhythm, the sound, is imaginary. But it continues, and seems to grow day by day in increments almost too small to notice, until it is definitely, definitely there, but where, the robot cannot say. In the rock. That is the only way of putting it, but says nothing.

  Andrew does not know what it could be. So there is nothing to do but note it, and go on digging.

  The robot b Ins to read fiction. But the feelings, the resonances and depths of the poetry, are not so much present in prose. There is the problem of knowing what the author might be talking about, since the robot's only experience living in the human world is the field and now the dig. Dickens leaves the robot stunned and wondering, and after a week attempting Oliver Twist, the robot must put the book aside until the situations and characters become clearer. Curiously, the robot finds that Jane Austen's novels are comprehensible and enjoyable, although the life of English country gentry is as close to the robot as the life of a newt under a creek stone. The robot is filled with relief when Emma finally ceases her endless machinations and realizes her love for Knightley. It is as if some clogged line in the robot's hydraulics had a sudden release of pressure or rock that had long been hard and tough became easy to move through.

  For some time, the robot does not read books that were written closer to the present, for the robot wants to understand the present most of all, and reading them now, the robot thinks, much will go unnoticed.

  You can always reread them later, Andrew says. Just because you know the plot of something doesn't mean it isn't worth going through again; even though sometimes it does mean that.

  I know that, the robot says. That is not what I'm worried about. Then what are you worried about?

  The old books get looser, the farther back in time they go, like string that's played out. The new ones are bunched and it's harder to see all of them.

  What?

  For the first time, the robot feels something that either cannot be communicated or, nearly as unbelievable, that Andrew cannot understand. Andrew is a scientist. The robot will never be a scientist.

  Two months After the robot has walked along the Quinault with Andrew, it is July, and Andrew tells the robot that Laramie will visit over the weekend.

  The robot is at first excited and thinks of things to ask her. There are so many memories of Laramie, but so much is blurred, unconnected. And there are things the robot wishes to tell her, new things about the land that Victor never knew. So much has happened. The robot imagines long conversations between them, perhaps walking in the woods together once again.

  Andrew tells me that you may not be happy with the enthalpic impression of your father being downloaded into me. No, that wouldn't be the way to say it. But getting too metaphorical might upset her, remind her of ghosts. Of Victor Wu's death.

  No. That's all right. Go on, says the imaginary Laramie.

  Well, I don't know what to tell you. I remember you, Laramie. I remember you and I would be lying if I didn't say that your being here profoundly affects me.

  I can't say how I feel about this, robot. What should I call you, robot?

  But just as quickly, the robot puts aside such hopes. I am a robot, all of metal and ceramics. I am not Laramie's father. There are only vague memories, and that was another life. She may not even speak to me. I am a ghost to her. Worse than a ghost, a twisted reflection. She'll hate me for what has happened to her father. And again the robot imagines Laramie's disdain, as just and foreseeable as the man's death in "To Build a Fire," but cold in that way too.

  Finally, the robot resolves not to think any more of it. But while Andrew sleeps on the Friday night before Laramie's visit, the robot inhabits the mu, and goes roaming through trackless woods, along criss-crossed deadfall and up creeks, for at least a hundred miles. Yet when the mu returns to the living area, the robot can only remember shadows and dark waters, and if asked, could not trace on a map where the mu has been.

  Laramie arrives at eleven in the morning. She drives a red hum-vee. Andrew and the robot, in the mu, step out of their cavern's entrance to greet her. Laramie steps out. She is wearing sunglasses. She takes a quick look at them, then turns back to the hum-vee and, with a practiced jerk, pulls out her old Scoopic. The robot suddenly remembers the squat lines of the camera. Victor bought the Scoopic for her, along with twelve cans of film. It was her first sixteen millimeter, and had set him back a good three month's wages. Laramie had shot up seven rolls within a week, and that was when Victor discovered that there would be fees for developing, as well.

  Andrew steps forward, and so does Laramie. The robot, feeling shy, hangs back in the mu. Andrew and Laramie do not meet, but stay several paces apart.

  So, she says. It is her voice. Clear as day.

  Yep. This is it.

  Well, looks ... nice. Is this?

  Yes, the robot. This is the mobile unit. The robot is inside, really. Well, sort of. We're going inside the robot.

  No words for a space. Still, they move no closer.

  Well then. Let's go inside the robot.

  Laramie, inside the protecting ribwork of the robot. She is safe. Nothing will harm you here, Little Bulge. But the robot calms such thoughts. She takes one of the two chairs that are around Andrew's work and eating table in the control room. Abide, the robot thinks. Let her abide for a while.

  Do you want tea? I can make you tea.

  Yes. I drink herb tea.

  Um. Don't have any.

  Water?

  Yes, water we have.

  L.A.'s tastes like sludge.

  No wonder. They're even tapping Oregon now.

  Really? I believe it.

  Andrew pours water for Laramie in a metal cup. He puts more water on a hot plate that sits on top of a monitor, and heats the water for tea. Where have you been, he says.

  Port Townsend. Doing background and logistics. My sound guy's laying down local tone and getting wild effects.

  Wild?

  Unsynced, that's all it means.

  I see.

  Using Seattle labs is going to be a bitch. The Matties have set up goddamn border crossings.

  Tell me about it.

  Andrew's water boils and he fills another cup with it, then hunts for a tea bag in a cabinet.

  You left them on the table, the robot says.

  Laramie gasps, sits up in her chair sharply, then relaxes once again. That was the robot, she says.

  Yes. Thank you, robot. Andrew finds the box of tea bags among a clutter of instruments.

  Do you. Do you call the robot anything?

  Hmm. Not really.

  Just call me robot, the robot says. I'm thinking of a name for myself, but I haven't come up with one yet. Well, then. Robot.

  Andrew makes his tea, and they talk more of logistics and the political situation on the peninsula. The robot feels a tenseness between them, or at least in Andrew. His questions and replies are even more terse than is usual. The robot doubts Victor Wu would have noticed. Thinking this saddens the robot. More proof that the robot is not Victor Wu, and so can have no claim on Laramie's affection.

  The robot listens to Laramie. Since she and Andrew are speaking of things that the robot knows little about, the robot concentrates on her spe
cific words, on her manner of expression.

  Lens. Clearness in the world. Sky. Vision. Spread. Range. Watershed.

  I thought for two weeks about color or black and white, Laramie says. I don't like colors except for the world's colors that are underneath the ones on film, the ones we see.

  I don't follow, Andrew says. The robot has never thought of colors this way, but resolves to spend a day banding out frequencies and only observing intensities of black-and-white tones.

  I'll have more water, if you don't mind. This is clear.

  L.A. water really is as thick as sludge and I don't like it. After three hours, Laramie leaves, with promises to return and film the site as part of her documentary. Robot?

  Yes.

  Do you think I might interview you. I guess if we could use the mobile unit, that would look better on film. More action. Do you ever come out of here?

  Every day during the week, to work in the dig.

  Well, then. That must be quite a sight. Maybe I can get that.

  Of course you can. That would be fine.

  Well. Then.

  She says good-bye to Andrew, and with her Scoopic, unused, but always present, gets back into the red humvee, crusted with a layer of settled road dust, and turns around in the dirt road that ends at the living area. More dust rises; Laramie departs. Andrew coughs, brushes dust from his arms. He looks at the mu, shakes his head, but says nothing. He goes back in and makes a third cup of tea.

  With the mu, the robot follows easily behind the humvee, even though Laramie is driving very fast. The robot follows the billowing cloud of dust for twenty-four miles—until the hum-vee turns onto the asphalt, and heads north toward Port Townsend.

  The robot syends the next day, Sunday, away from books. The robot takes advantage of the melting away of the high snows and takes the mu up ridges where before that was no foothold or too much threat of avalanche. The mu skirts along the Bailey Divide with a sure movement, above the tree line and in rolling tundra meadow. Marmots are here, and they squeak and whistle from under big rocks. Picas have divided the land into separate kingdoms, each to a pica, and they call out their territory over and over, until their voices attract the wolves.