That thought made Derec ask, “What were our house robots like?”
Avery looked up momentarily in surprise. “What do you mean, ‘what were they like?’ Like robots, of course. Old-style robots. I didn’t develop the cellular robot until after you’d left home, and your mother stole her design from me.”
“That’s what I thought. The point is, they did the mundane work for you, right? Cooking and cleaning and changing diapers and emptying the trash.”
“Of course they did,” Avery said. He sounded indignant, as if the very thought that he would have done any of those chores was obscene.
“They were useful, then.”
“What are you getting at?”
“I’m getting at the obvious observation that the robots around here, despite their advanced design-maybe because of their advanced design-aren’t as useful as the older models. They’re more trouble. Too much independence.”
Avery moved the scanner a fraction and keyed the display again. Another view into the nerve and musclelike masses of Lucius’s interior appeared on the screen. “Maybe my definition of useful is different from yours,” he said.
They had already had that conversation. Avery was simply not interested in immediate utility, and Derec was. There was no sense arguing over it. Derec got up off his stool with a sigh, stretched, and said, “I’m about to fall asleep here. Are you going to keep at it all day?”
“Probably,” Avery replied. “I think I’ll leave you to it, then.”
“Fine.”
“Just don’t cut any of them up, okay?”
Avery looked pained. “I’ll do with them whatever I please. If that includes cutting them up, then that’s what I’ll do.”
Derec and Avery stared at one another across the unmoving robot’s body for long, silent seconds. One of the cargo robots near the wall took a step toward them. Derec looked up at the robot, then back to Avery. He considered ordering the robot to keep Avery from harming the others, but decided against it. It would just escalate the war between them. Besides, there were better ways.
He shrugged and backed off. “It’s your conscience. But I’m asking you, please don’t cut any of them up. As a favor to me.”
Avery frowned. “I’ll think about it,” he replied.
Derec nodded. Now it was up to Avery to decide whether or not to escalate the war. It was a risk, but a calculated one. Derec had felt a spark of humanity in Avery a couple of times today; he was willing to bet his father was sick of confrontation, too.
“Thanks.” He turned away and said to the cargo robots, “Come on, the rest of you. You can take me back home and then get on with whatever else you were doing.”
He really had intended to go home, but on the way there the sight of Lucius’s creatures still scavenging in the streets reminded him that he still had to do something about them, and soon, or they were going to start eating each other. With Lucius himself out of commission, there was only one good place to start, and it wasn’t at home. “I’ve changed my mind,” he said to the robot driving the truck. “Take me to Lucius’s lab instead.”
The robot hesitated a long time-nearly the length of a block-then asked, “Which one do you wish to visit?”
“How many has he got?”
“The central computer lists thirty-seven separate laboratories.”
“ Thirty-seven?”
“That is correct.”
“What did he do with that many labs?”
The cargo robot was silent for a moment as it conferred with the computer again, then said, “Fifteen were dedicated to fabricating the artificial humans he called ‘homunculi’ and are now abandoned. The other twenty-two are engaged in fabricating humans.”
“ Areengaged? Still?”
“That is correct.”
“We told him not to continue with that!”
“That is also correct.”
The cargo robot offered no more explanation, but Derec could see plainly enough what the situation was. Lucius had interpreted his orders to mean only him, leaving the other robots who had been helping him free to continue the project. Well, he would put a stop to that soon enough.
But twenty-two labs! No wonder the city was full of rats.
“Take me to the one he showed us yesterday,” Derec said.
The driver evidently had no problem with Derec’s inclusive “us,” nor with finding the appropriate lab in the computer’s records. It slowed the truck and turned left at the next corner, made another left turn at the next block and they went back the way they had come for a while, then turned right and went on for block after block through the city. The rat population on the streets dwindled, then grew larger again as they left the sphere of influence of one lab and entered another. Evidently Lucius had felt no need to cluster his workplaces.
Derec, watching the towering buildings slide past, felt again how empty the city was without people in it. None of these buildings had any real purpose, nor did the robots in them, save for Avery’s nebulous experiment in social dynamics. And what could possibly come of that? The robots weren’t creating a society of their own; they were instead simply building and rebuilding in anticipation of someday having humans to serve. And some of them, he thought wryly, were busy building those humans. All because of the Three Laws of Robotics and the poorly defined quantity, “human,” those Laws directed them to protect and obey.
Derec had felt a great sadness pervading the city since he first arrived. It felt almost haunted to him, the robots wandering about like lost souls, purposeless. He was attributing human qualities to inhuman beings, he knew, but Frost, they didn’t have to be human to be lost, or to feel sad about it. Robots were intelligent beings, no matter what their origin, and it behooved their creators to treat them kindly. That included giving them a sense of purpose and letting them fulfill it. It seemed clear to Derec that none of these Robot City robots, nor the ones lying inert in Avery’s lab, had been treated well by their creators.
Humans make poor gods, he thought wryly.
The cargo robots dropped Derec off outside a low, nondescript warehouselike building. If it was the same one Lucius had shown them the day before, then it had been repaired, but not before a veritable horde of the rat-creatures had escaped. Two hordes, Derec decided as he watched them scurrying about through the streets. They had been thick in the other parts of town, but this was ridiculous.
He ran from the truck to the main door, sending rats squealing off in all directions, but none chased after him.
Yet, he thought.
Directly inside the main door a hallway led down the length of the building, with doors opening to either side. Derec walked down the hallway, expecting to find a laboratory sufficient in complexity to support a complete genetic engineering project, but when he peered through the first doorway to his right, he couldn’t help laughing. Avery was the mad scientist, but Lucius’s lab-at least this part of it-was the typical mad scientist’s lair. Vats of bubbling brew stood in various stages of incubation or fermentation or whatever was going on along one wall, while electrical devices of various natures hummed and clicked contentedly over them. A bank of cages along another wall held a bewildering array of small creatures, ranging from insects to something that might have been a mouse to one of the rodentlike creatures now overrunning the city. Another wall held trays of growing plants. In the center of the room, table after table held enough interconnected glassware to distill a lake. From the entire collection came a mixture of smells stronger and more varied than from an explosion in a kitchen automat.
The necessity of dealing with organic material had forced the lab into the configuration he saw, but Derec found it funny nonetheless. The gleaming robots who tended the equipment made it even more so by contrast. They should have been wearing dark robes and walking with stooped posture.