“Yes,” Feril said. An ornate plaster frieze shaped like a long, flower-filled trellis filled the angle between the wall and the ceiling of half the room, starting in the corner by the door and ending where the android stood on the ladder. It carefully applied the plaster to the end of the frieze.
“I’d like to find out if there have been any androids who’ve suddenly left Vembyr and disappeared recently; especially pairs of androids. Androids who could pass for human at very close range.”
The android was silent for a couple of seconds, patiently using the trowel to keep the drooping lump of plaster in place. Then it said, “No, none have been reported leaving the city for the last nine years.”
“Hmm. Before that?”
The machine paused only briefly. “The city records go back five millennia,” the machine said, sounding regretful. “During that time the android population of Vembyr has remained roughly static at twenty-three thousand, with perhaps a tenth of that number at large in the rest of the system. Only a few hundred androids have ever been constructed who might pass for human. None live in the city, and some-about forty or so-are officially missing, untraced. Indeed the majority of missing androids are human simulacra. They are believed to have been taken unwillingly, probably by rich individuals, and used for… a variety of acts, all of which are illegal when perpetrated against humans.”
“I’ll bet,” she said. She put one hand under her armpit and the other to her mouth, tapping her teeth with her fingers. “Does anyone still make androids?”
“Oh, no,” the machine said, turning to look at her. “That has been prohibited for the last twelve hundred years. Even we may only repair existing examples, though we believe the World Court will grant us permission to manufacture a hundred or so androids from currently available spare parts sometime before the end of the next century.”
It turned back to the plaster and-over the next few minutes, as the plaster began to set-it gradually worked the still soft folds of the material into the shape of a delicate white flower, backed by a section of trellis.
Sometime before the end of the next century, she thought. Certainly that was only a hundred and one years away, but it was still strange to realise the scales the androids thought on. It was as though, with their ability to think a thousand thoughts in the time it would take a human to think one, and yet to exist effectively indefinitely, the androids had abandoned what humanity thought of as the normal calibrations of time, to exist on at what was-again, to the human mind, unless one was a scientist used to working in nanoseconds or billions of years the extremities of temporality.
Feril paused, inspecting its handiwork. It glanced down at her for a moment, then took another scoop of plaster from the bucket it held and applied that to the frieze.
“Do you actually enjoy doing this, Feril?” she asked.
“This?” it said, dabbing at the plaster with its hands. “Restoring the plaster-work?”
“Restoring everything.”
“Yes,” it said, “it is pleasant. I do literally what humans talk about figuratively; I switch parts of my mind off. Sometimes, rather than do that, I think about something else: often when plastering I replay old human adventure yarns, re-experiencing them in old books, or ancient flat-screen works, or more modern pieces.”
“Adventure yarns?” she grinned.
“Indeed,” the android said, patting the drying plaster in such a way as to produce a stipple effect on the surface of a roughskinned, globular fruit it had just sculpted. “It is satisfying in the extreme to have done plastering work, or inlaying, or wood-carving; it is hugely enjoyable to drive a vehicle one has rebuilt, or to walk around or just look at a building one has brought from a shell to habitability, but the processes involved are rarely directly rewarding at the time, and to divert oneself with adventures of derring-do is a nice counterpoint, I believe.” It turned and looked back at her. “Your own life will bean adventure story one day, I don’t doubt, Lady Sharrow. I-” It broke off, turning smoothly and resuming its task.
She frowned, then gave a small smile and looked at the floorboards for a moment.
“Not all humans grudge androids their longevity just because we’ve found we cannot afford to grant ourselves that gift, Feril,” she said. “I am flattered you think my life might ever be worth your perusal, when I am long dead and you are still alive.”
The android paused, then turned to her again. “I beg your pardon nevertheless, Lady Sharrow,” it said. “We were, and I was, made in the image of humanity, and in the enthusiasm of the moment I exhibited what was at least a lack of thought, and could have been construed as cruelty. We have always regarded it as our duty to reflect what is best in humankind, given that we are the work of your intellects rather than the processes of blind evolution, however purposeful in that blindness nature may be, and however noble and sophisticated its results. I am guilty of falling beneath both the standards we set ourselves and those humanity has the right to expect of us, and I apologise.”
She looked up at the machine, poised with perfect stillness on top of the ladder, its body spotted with lumps of plaster. There was a small smile on her face. She might have shaken her head just a fraction.
“Contrition so elegant,” she said after a pause, “needs not the parent of hurt to merit its existence, and what was intended to soothe harm just as fitly pleases contentment.”
The android looked at her for a moment. “Vitrelian,” it said. “The Trials Of A Patient Man; Act Five, Scene Three. Lady Sharrow; I have admired the excitements of your life and even envied you in a way, but now I find you are learned, too.” It made a show of shaking its head. “I am lost in admiration.”
She laughed. “Feril,” she said. “It’s just as well you’re not a man; you would break a thousand hearts, if you had the mind to.”
Feril waved its hand expressively as it turned back to its work. “I believe there are various glands and other appendages which would have to be involved too; the coordination required would baffle my humble personality.”
“Dissembler,” she said, and laughed. The noise, echoing in the bare room, sounded strange. She felt a pang of guilt at having so forgotten Cenuij’s death, however briefly.
She stood up and stretched, watching her shadow move about the room, limbs lengthened and magnified. “I think,” she said, “I shall go for a walk.”
“Please take care,” the android said, glancing at her again.
“Don’t worry about me,” she said, patting the pocket of her jacket where the HandCannon was.
She walked through the dark city for an hour or more, along towpaths and through tunnels, past dark ruins and lit buildings, along deserted roads and boulevards and across tall bridges and aqueducts. She met very few androids and no humans at all. One team of androids was cleaning the face of a tall, stone building in the darkness; another group was lifting an old barge from a canal, using a creaking iron and hawser boat-lift, all lit by floodlights.
She walked, hardly seeing the city. In her mind she replayed the destruction of the Lesson Learned and the events following it, trying to remember everything but sure that she was failing, that there was something in there which was very important and she had missed it.
She had not deliberately recalled the Land Car attack since it had happened; it had been enough to know that each time she slept she would replay those last seconds in the rear door of the old hovercraft, feeling Cenuij slip and fall past her, trying to grab him, calling on Miz, seeing Cenuij’s body lying there in the flickering orange light, and then-even while she knew it was a dream-living it again and again, with Miz falling past her, shot and dying, or Miz and Cenuij somehow changing places as one fell past the other, and looking out from the door to see that although it had been Cenuij who’d fallen past her, it was Miz lying there on the grass. A few times-sufficient to wake her up without fail, brow damp, pulse racing-the body lying by the little waterfall had been hers, and she had looked from the retreating ACV at her own blank face, staring blind and dead into the fiery darkness of the sky.