“And what would you have done, KeenEye? Would you let us slowly starve to death? At least SilverSide is trying to do something about the WalkingStones.”
Their argument went no further. The youngling came back panting. “They are workers,” he gasped, his head lolling and his tongue out. “But one of them has hands like the Hunters. That one walks in front, like a leader.”
“SilverSide had said that Central might send workers,” LifeCrier said.
“She didn’t say that they would have the weapons of the Hunters, though, did she?” KeenEye glowered. “If they’re workers, then we will destroy them as we did the others. They will be expecting us here. LifeCrier, you will go to the west and circle to come behind them; I will go east and do the same. The rest of you will hide in the trees until these workers begin to dig. Then we’ll hit them from all sides at once. Make sure the first one attacked is the one with Hunter’s hands.”
KeenEye looked at each of the small group of kin and lapsed back into KinSpeech, gruffly affectionate. “We must stop them from unearthing the Hunters. We must try to give SilverSide the time she asked for.” She looked at LifeCrier last of all. “Even if it means nothing,” she added. “Nowgo!”
KeenEye and LifeCrier streaked away as the others melted into the cover of trees around the glade.
Chapter 18. Encounter With Kin
The wolf-creatures did not attack again that day, though Derec and Mandelbrot heard them often or glimpsed them shadowing their progress through the trees. Derec watched them, his weapon at ready but not certain that he could fire it again, not with the knowledge that they were intelligent. Once or twice, he called out to the wolves or gestured to one of them slipping past, but they never responded.
By noon, the calls had faded behind them, and they were left alone in the forest.
“I think we must have passed only through a far comer of their territory,” Mandelbrot said. “The attack was simply to ensure that we came no closer to their den or whatever, and they stayed with us to be certain that we left. It is a lucky accident that our path did not lead us in the wrong direction.”
“It would have been luckier if it hadn’t led us to them at all,” Derec answered morosely.
“We must be very careful,” Mandelbrot said. “There are likely to be more tribes in the area. Master Derec, do you think that perhaps these wolf-creatures would be able to help us? Perhaps we do not have to find the Robot City.”
“No,” Derec replied, but the question made him glance over to Mandelbrot. “We need Robot City. Stone Age technology won’t do either of us any good. Are you going to repair your knee with a flint joint? Are you going to find servos and high-grade lubricants and a new optical circuit?”
Mandelbrot was silent after that, but Derec knew that the robot was experiencing a mental quandary after their encounter with the wolf-creatures. Mandelbrot was obviously troubled by their sentience. It showed in the questions he asked, in the way that he looked at Derec’s weapon, in the attention the robot paid to the movement of the wolf-creatures watching them.
Knowing the robot as he did and having seen the reactions of the original Robot City robots to Wolruf, Derec knew where the problem lay. He could almost hear balances shifting within the robot’s mind.
“Mandelbrot,” he said as they walked, “how do you regard the wolf-creatures? How do the Laws apply to them?”
“Are you asking if I consider them ‘human,’ Master Derec?”
“Yes. I suppose that’s the basic question. Are they human? I know you came to class Wolruf as human.”
“Positronic minds are as variable as those of humans, Master Derec. What is human? There are many ways to answer the question, all of them valid and all of them with shortcomings. Certainly it is more than simply the way a being looks; even among the humans I have seen there is a great variance.”
Derec was shaking his head. “But every one of them you’ve encountered has been Homo sapiens, a bipedal, upright-walking mammal descended from apes and able to trace their ancestry back to Earth. These wolf-things, whatever they are, aren’t bipedal, aren’t apes, and aren’t descended from anything on Earth.”
“That description fits Wolruf as well.”
“Point taken. But you haven’t answered my question yet. Let me give you a hypothetical situation: If I told old Balzac back on Aurora that Wolruf was a great danger to me and the only way to remove the danger was to kill her, would Balzac do it?”
“The danger would have to be demonstrated, Master Derec. Your word would not be enough.”
“All right, assume it was. Assume I can convince Balzac of the imminent risk. I know I couldn’t order Balzac to kill a human, but what about Wolruf? Balzac’s seen her walk and talk and use the computer and pilot a ship. Would he still be able to protect me?”
Mandelbrot’s eyes gleamed. His bad leg dragged through underbrush, and the robot came to a halt alongside Derec. “You are asking this because you are concerned that I will not be able to protect you should these wolf-creatures attack again.”
Derec shrugged. He patted his broken arm, then waggled the gun in his hand. “We’re not in the greatest of shapes, Mandelbrot. Neither one of us. First, I don’t want to have to use this thing, not after what we know now, but if I have to in order to stay alive, I probably will. What about you, Mandelbrot?”
The robot seemed to consider that for a long moment, and for a moment Derec was afraid that he might have inadvertently driven the robot into positronic lockup. Then servo motors whirred as it began walking again. “I have searched my data banks and checked the functions of my logic system, Master Derec, and the readouts are very erratic. My priority circuits are almost in balance. Had I never met Wolruf, had I never seen sentient alien lifeforms, and did I not have memories of Robot City in my mind, I am sure it would be different.”
“What are you saying, Mandelbrot?”
“That I do not know what I would do, Master Derec. I do not know.”
He could have insisted. He could have made it a direct question and stressed the importance of an answer-the Second Law would have forced Mandelbrot to answer. “Mandelbrot, do you consider these wolf-creatures to be as human as me?”
But somehow it didn’t seem right to ask.
After all, Derec wasn’t sure of the answer himself.
All of the sudden, it was too late to ask.
They had continued to walk even after the sun had set. The moons were up and bright, and Derec wanted to cover as much ground as they could before settling for the night.