Robots

by Jack Dann

  This is what the robot has been waiting for. The mu sits still by a still lake, as motionless as any other thing that is not alive can be. The wolves come slinking, low and mean, their heat traces preceding and hovering over them like a scudding cloud. Again, they are five, with the old gray leader, his left ear bent, torn, and ragged, like a leaf eaten by caterpillars. Swiftly, they are upon the picas, chasing the little rodents, yipping, cutting them off from their burrows, gobbling one or two down for every ten that escape. Then the gray leader has had enough to eat. He raises up his head and, instantly, the other dogs heed him. Off they run, as silent and warm as they had come, but now followed by a robot.

  Down the tundra meadow of the Divide, through boulder shadows and over sprays of tiny wildflowers nestled in the green, the wolves themselves shadows, with the robot another shadow, down, down the greening land. Into the woods, along game trails the robot can barely discern, moving generally north, generally north, the mu barely keeping pace with the advancing wolves, the pace growing steady, monotonous even to the robot, until—

  Suddenly, the gray leader pulls up, sniffs the air. The robot also comes to a standstill some hundred feet behind the pack. If they have noticed the robot, they give no sign. Instead, it is a living smell that the gray leader has detected, or so the robot thinks, for the wolves, whining, fall into a V-shape behind the leader. The wolves' muscles tense with a new and directed purpose.

  And they spring off in another direction than the one they had been traveling, now angling west, over ridges, against the grain of the wheel-spoke mountains. The robot follows. Up another ridge, then when on top of it, down its spine, around a corner-cliff of flaking sedimentary stone, and into a little cove. They strike a road, a human-made track, and run along its edge, carefully close to the flanking brush and woodland. Winding road, and the going is easier for wolves and mu. In fact, the robot could easily overtake the wolves now, and must gauge how much to hold back to avoid overrunning them.

  The track becomes thin, just wide enough for a vehicle going one way, with plenty of swishing against branches along the way. Ahead, a house, a little clapboard affair, painted once, perhaps, blue, or the blue-green tint may be only mold over bare wood. The ceiling is shingled half with asbestos shakes, and half with tin sheeting. Beside the house is a satellite dish, its lower hemisphere greened over with algae. There is an old pickup truck parked at road's end. The road is muddy here from a recent rain, and the tire markings of another vehicle, now gone, cross the top of the pickup's own tracks. All is silent.

  Instead of giving the house a wide berth, the gray leader of the wolves stops at the top of the short walkway that leads to the front door. Again, he sniffs for scent; circling, whining. There is only a moment of hesitation, and he snakes up the walkway, and slinks to the door. The door hangs open. The other wolves follow several paces back. Another hesitation at the door, then the gray leader slips over the threshold and inside. Even with their leader gone into the house, the other wolves hang back, back from this thing that has for so long meant pain or death to them and their kind. After a long while, the gray leader returns to the door, yips contemptuously, and one by one, the other wolves go inside.

  The robot quietly pads to the door. Inside is dark, and the robot's optics take a moment to iris to the proper aperture. There is a great deal of the color red in the house's little living room. The robot scans the room, tries to resolve a pattern out of something that is unfamiliar. The robot has never seen inside a real human dwelling before. But Victor Wu has. The wolves are worrying at something.

  The wolves are chewing on the remains of a child.

  Without thinking, the robot scampers into the room. The mu is a bit too large for the narrow door and, without the robot's noticing, it tears apart the doorframe as it enters. The wolves look up from what they are doing.

  Wolf and robot stare at one another.

  The robot adjusts the main camera housing to take them all in, and at the slight birring noise of the servos, the gray leader bristles and growls. The mu takes a step farther into the room, filling half the room. It knocks over a lamp table, with a shadeless lamp upon it. Both the bulb and the ceramic lamp casing shatter.

  I don't want to hurt you, but you must leave the child alone, the robot says.

  At the sound of what they take to be a human voice, the wolves spring into a flurry of action. The gray leader stalks forward, teeth bared, while the others in the pack mill like creek fish behind him. They are searching for an exit. The small, young one finds that a living-room window is open. With a short hop from a couch, the wolf is outside. The others follow, one by one, while the gray leader attempts to hold the robot at bay. The robot does not move, but lets the wolves depart. Finally, the gray leader sees from the corner of his eye that the other wolves have escaped. Still, he cannot help but risk one feint at the robot. The robot does not move. The gray leader, bolder, quickly jumps toward the robot and locks his jaws on the robot's forward leg. The teeth close on blue steel. The gray leader shakes. There is no moving the robot.

  In surprise and agitation, the wolf backs up, barks three times. I'm sorry to embarrass you. You'd better go.

  The wolf does just that, turning tail and bounding through the open window without even using the living-room couch as a launch point. The robot gazes around the silent room.

  There is a dead family here. An adult male, the father, is on one side of the couch, facing a television. Part of his neck and his entire chest are torn open in a gaping bloody patch. Twisted organs glint within. The television is off. Huddled in a corner is the mother and a young boy. Their blood splatters an entire wall of the living room. A shotgun, the robot decides. First the man, and then the mother was shot with her children all at once, with several blasts from a shotgun. There are pepper marks in the wall from stray shot. Yes, the killing was done with a shotgun. The wolves must have dragged one child away from the mother. The robot sees that it is a little girl. The mother's other child, an older boy and a bit large for even a large wolf to handle, is still by his mother, partially blown into his mother's opened body.

  The blood on the walls and floor has begun to dry and form into curling flakes that are brown and thin and look like tiny autumn leaves. There are also bits of skin and bone on the wall.

  The robot stares at the little girl. Her eyes are, mercifully, closed, but her mouth is pulled open and her teeth, still baby teeth, exposed. This is perhaps caused by her stiffening facial muscles. Or she may have died with such an expression of pain. The robot cannot tell. The girl wears a blue dress that is now tatters around her tattered, small body. One foot has been gnawed, but on the other is a dirty yellow flip-flop sandal.

  The robot feels one of the legs of the mu jerk spasmodically. Then the other jerks, without the robot wishing it to do so. The robot stares at the young girl and jitters and shakes for a long time. This is the way the robot cries.

  Deeyer in the earth, very deep now, and the rock, under megatons of pressure, explodes with a nuclear ferocity as the robot cuts away. For the past week the robot has thought constantly of the dead logger family, of the little dead girl. The robot has tried to remember the color of the girl's hair, but cannot, and for some reason, this greatly troubles the robot.

  One evening, after a sixteen-hour workday, the robot dims the lights for Andrew. Outside the digger's main body, but still in the home cave, the robot inhabits the mu. The robot takes pen and paper in the dexterous manipulators of the mu and begins to write a description of the little girl. Not as she was, twisted and dead, but of how she might have been before.

  The robot told Andrew about the family, and Andrew called the authorities, being careful to keep the robot out of his report.

  They'll disassemble you if they find out, Andrew said to the robot. At least in the United States, they'd be legally required to do it. God knows what the Protectorate will want to do.

  There are accounts in the newspapers of the killing. The sheriff's department
claims to be bewildered, but the robot overhears the technicians who come from logger families muttering that the Matties now own the cops, and that everybody knew who was behind the murders, if not who actually pulled the trigger. And the Matties who worked under Andrew, led by Gurney, spoke in low tones of justice and revenge for the killings in Port Townsend on Codependence Day.

  I am a witness, the robot thinks. But of what?

  Andrew? ew? Yes.

  Are you tired?

  Yes. What is it?

  She would have grown up to be part of the loggers, so killing her makes a kind of sense.

  The little girl?

  The Matties and the people who used to be loggers hate each other. And they can't help the way they are because they are like stones in sediment that's been laid down long before, and the hatred shapes them to itself, like a syncline or an anticline. So that there has to be new conditions brought about to change the lay of the sediment; you can't change the rocks.

  I don't know about that. People are not rocks.

  So if she wasn't killed out of an ignorant mistake, then I don't understand why.

  I don't either, robot.

  Why do you think?

  I don't know, I said, I don't know. There isn't any good reason for it. There is something dark in this world that knows what it's doing.

  Is it evil?

  There is evil in the world. All the knowledge in the world won't bum it away.

  How do you know?

  I don't. I told you, I don't. I look at rocks. I don't have very many theories.

  But.

  Yes?

  But you think it knows?

  I think the evil knows what it's doing. Look at us in this goddamn century, all going back to hatred and tribes. You can't explain it with economics or cultural semantics or any system at all. Evil and plain meanness is what it is.

  Andrew, it's not right for her to die. She hadn't lived long enough to see very many things and to have very many feelings. Those were stolen from her.

  That's what murderers steal.

  The future?

  Yes. Even when you're old, it still isn't right.

  Yes. I can see that. It's clear to me.

  Well. Then.

  I'll turn down the lights.

  Well. Good night.-.

  Brown. What?

  Her hair was dark brown.

  And the robot digs deeper and deeper, approaching the Mohorivicic layer, with the true mantle not far beneath, seething, waiting, as it had waited for four billion years, would wait should this attempt fail, should all attempts fail. And again, the foreign rhythm appears, hums along with the glade and bale of the robot's cutting, but distinct from it, distinct from the robot and all human-made things.

  What is it? Andrew does not know. But there is something at the edge of the robot's consciousness, at the edge of Victor Wu's unconscious presence, that does know, that hears something familiar, as a whisper when the words are lost, but the meaning remains.

  One day, the alien rhythm is louder than ever, and for a fleeting moment, the robot recognizes it.

  Strong harmonies from the depths of the planet. Maude under the full moon. Magmas rising.

  Victor you can feel it. How can you feel it?

  f don't know, Maude, the robot thinks. Maude among the instruments. I remember, thinks the robot, I remember what it felt like to walk the earth and let it show itself to me. There is a showing. Something is showing itself. Something is being revealed. Just as the St. Helens eruption was a revelation, with portents, with auguries that were plain to a man who cared for the earth.

  Something knows we're here, the robot tells Andrew one night.

  Andrew is tired from a half-day underground, and the afternoon spent explaining the dig to yet another Mattie committee in Port Angeles, but he listens to what the robot has to say.

  What? How can you know?

  I do though.

  Then you do. Victor would know.

  Andrew shucks the soft-sole walking shoes he wears in the city, and climbs onto the little cot inside the robot.

  Everyone else wants me to stop digging. Do you want to stop digging?

  No, Andrew.

  Then what shall we do about it?

  Listen, says the robot. Listen. But Andrew has fallen asleep and does not hear. The robot dims the lights inside, adjusts the temperature for Andrew, then goes out into the mu to read.

  The robot listens. The rhythm grows stronger, and now there are variations, windings among the background vibration that is the feedback from the robot's own cutting of the rock and thumping against the earth's insides. It is like a song, but not a song.

  There and there, the robot tells Andrew, but Andrew cannot hear it, encased as he is in the service wagon, and he cannot detect the rhythm on his many instruments.

  I believe you, Andrew says, but I simply can't find it

  The robot considers saying no more. What if Andrew really came to doubt the robot's sanity? Would that not mean powering down, rebooting. Or perhaps never coming back up again. Dying.

  Andrew will not kill me, the robot thinks. And I will say what it is I hear.

  And slowly, day after day, the rhythm develops into an ... other. The robot is not sure how else to think about it. It is the feeling that a—one—someone, is here, even when no one is in view. It is a sense of presence that the robot feels. The robot doesn't know Andrew cannot discover a way of knowing. But the feeling is not some erratic wiring, or even the robot's developing imagination. It is either a madness or it is a real presence.

  And I am not crazy.

  Which is a sure sign of madness. Andrew laughs his dry laugh.

  Yet again, because of Victor Wu, because Andrew has come to trust the robot in all other things, he takes the robot seriously. In the few spare moments he has for experiments not directly related to the mantle-goal, Andrew and a graduate student make coding modifications to the robot's language software.

  We're wiring perfect pitch into you, the graduate student, Samantha, says, to go along with your ear for good music. Samantha explains more of what she is doing, but the robot does not follow. Samantha understands the robot's mechanism as a surgeon might a human being's. As she works at an internal keyboard, she tells the robot of her own past, but again the robot has trouble understanding.

  I grew up in virtual. I was practically born on the Internet. But by god I'm going to die in the forest, Samantha tells the robot. That's why most of us are out here with Dr. Hutton, she says.

  There is only a trace of a smile on Andrew's face, but the robot knows him well enough now to see it. Well this sure as hell ain't virtual, he says.

  Laramie returns. she has not called Andrew. One Saturday the hum-vee crackles down the dirt and gravel road to the living area, and Laramie has come back. Andrew is away, at a meeting, and at first the robot is flustered and bewildered as to what to do. The robot has been reading, with a mind still half in the book.

  Laramie pulls out her camera and some sound equipment and comes to the entrance to the living cavern. The robot, in the mu, meets her, and invites her inside. That much the robot is able to manage.

  I'm sorry I didn't clear my visit with Andrew first but you said it would be all right.

  It is all right.

  I thought it would be. Do you mind if I record this?

  No. I keep something like a journal myself. Would you care for some tea? Andrew bought some herbal tea after your last visit.

  The robot thinks that the words sound stiff and overly formal, but Laramie says yes, and settles down at the interior table and sets up her equipment. There is a kettle on the hot plate, and the robot turns on the burner. Laramie takes a microphone from a vinyl case and unwinds its cording. The robot watches her, watches Laramie's hand move. Her fingers are as long as Maude's.

  The robot suddenly realizes there may be no water in the kettle. But there is steam rising from around the lid—which means that there is water and that the water is
hot enough to drink.

  Laramie. May I call you Laramie?

  Sure. Of course.

  I cannot make your tea.

  What? That's fine, then. I'm fine.

  No. I mean that it's difficult for me to get the mu inside.

  I don't understand.

  I'm sorry. I mean the mobile unit. If you don't mind, you can get a cup and a tea bag out of the cupboard. The water is ready.

  Laramie sets the microphone down, gazes around the room.

  Is it in that cupboard?

  Yes. Bottom shelf.

  Laramie gets the cup and tea, then pours some water. Andrew is a careful pourer, but Laramie spatters droplets on the hot burner and they sizzle as they evaporate. She takes her tea back to the table. She jacks the microphone into a small tape recorder that is black with white letters that say Sony. From the recorder, she runs a lead to the Scoopic sixteen-millimeter camera.

  Where's that adapter? Oh. There. I had this Scoopic souped up a little, by the way, since my father. Since I got it. Has a GOES chip. Uplinks and downlinks with the Sony. I could record you in Singapore, and not get a frame of drift. But I'm not a pro at this. My sound tech bugged out on me last week. That's one reason it's taken me a while to get back over here. He got scared after the riot. Let me voice slate and we'll be ready.

  Laramie?

  Hmm?

  Are you safe? I mean, where you are staying in Port Townsend—is it guarded in any way?

  No. I'm fine. It's the loggers and the Matties who want to kill each other.

  They might mistake you for a logger. You spent a lot of time in the bush.

  At this expression, which is Victor Wu's, Laramie looks up. She finds nothing to look at, and turns her gaze back down, to the Sony.