Halo

coming from around the corridor's curve.  A little sam, a "semi-

autonomous mobile" robot, came toward him:  teardrop-shaped, it

stood about four feet high and was topped with a cluster of glassy

sensor rings and five extensors of black fibroid and jointed

chrome.  It glided atop a thick network of fiber stalks that

hissed beneath it as it moved toward him.

The sam asked, "Can I be of assistance?"  Like most robots

designed for common human interaction, it had a friendly, gentle

voice, near enough human in timbre and expression to be

reassuring, different enough to be easily recognizable as a

robot's.  Designers had learned to avoid the "Uncanny Valley":

that peculiar region where a robot sounded so human that it

suddenly appeared very strange.

"I'm just looking around," Gonzales said.  The robot didn't

respond.  Gonzales said, "I couldn't sleep."  He said nothing of

how, sweating and moaning, he had come awake out of a nightmare in

which the guerrilla rocket got there, and he and the ultralight

pilot who launched it burned to death in the night.

The sam said, "Much of Athena Station has been closed to

unauthorized entry.  Would you like me to accompany you?"

Gonzales shrugged.  He said, "Come along if you want."

Without more negotiation, the sam followed Gonzales,

periodically announcing rote banalities in a small, soft voice:

"Athena Station was once humankind's most forceful and

successful venture off-Earth.  Here many of the tools for further

population of the Earth-Moon system were developed:  zero-gravity

construction and fabrication techniques, robot-intensive mining

and smelting procedures.  Now projects such as Halo command

attention, but they were made possible by the techniques developed

at Athena "

        Gonzales let the sam natter.  As the two passed through the

corridors, he was reminded of old airports, hotels, malls.  He saw

that most of the station had become dingyworn plastic flooring

and walls, scuffed and marked, unpolished metal trim.  These

dulled and scarred materials and scenes had been meant to be seen

and used only when new, fresh from architect's plan and builder's

hands, never after having suffered the necessary abrasion of human

contact.  All around were logos of vanished firms (McDonald's,

Coca-Cola), along with those of famed multi-nationalsLunar-

Bechtel's crescent, SenTrax's sunburst.

Gonzales felt a ghost-story chill as he realized that this

entire endeavor, indeed all others like it, had been conceived out

of late-twentieth century corporate and governmental hubris, and

so, necessarily, should be regarded with suspicion, as should

anything from the days when it seemed humankind had turned on all

living things like an insane father coming into the bedroom late

at night with an axe.

The stories were part of every schoolchild's moral and

intellectual catechism.  Toxic chemical and radioactive wastes had

bubbled up from the ground and the seas as lame efforts at

disposal foundered on the simple passage of time.  Stable

ecosystems had been altered or destroyed without thought for

anything past the moment's advantage, and species died so quickly

biologists were hard pressed to keep the recordswrite in the

Domesday Book now, mourn later.  Temperature norms and

concentrations of vital gases in the atmosphere had fluctuated in

alarming manner, as though Gaia herself had been taken to the

fever point.

Historians marked the Dolphin Catastrophe as the breakpoint,

the year 2006 as the time of the change.  More than ten thousand

dolphins floated onto the Florida coast near Boca Raton.  Crippled

and twitching, they nosed into the surf and beached themselves in

front of horrified sunbathers, and there they died, as doctors and

volunteers watched, weeping and raging against the chemical spill

that was killing the dolphins, millions of gallons of toxic waste

carried on Gulf Stream currents.  Along with the thousands of

volunteers, most of whom could do little but mourn the dead, info-

nets around the world converged on the scene, and billions

watched, asking, why all together?  why now?  And to most it

seemed that the mammals had come together in intelligent, silent

protest.  Finally, shamed and guilty, humanity had looked at its

planet like a drunk waking up in a slum hotel and asked itself,

how did I get here?  The conclusion had been plain:  unless

humanity really had lost its collective mind, at some point it had

to agree:  enough.

Standing in the shadowy corridor of a space station more than

thirty thousand miles above Earth's surface, Gonzales thought how

difficult it all remained.  Though all nations served the letter

of international laws that put Earth's welfare before their

interests, and Preservationists roamed all of the world's

habitatsthey had "friends of the court" status in all nations

and served as advocates for endangered speciesthe war to save

Earth from humankind was not over.  Grasping, corrupt, self-

centered, the human species always threatened to overwhelm its

habitats and itself with careless, powerful gestures and simple

greed.

However, though this station, like most all of humankind's

settlements aloftthe settlements on the Moon and Mars, the

Orbital Energy Grid, Halo Cityhad been conceived in the bad old

twentieth century, they were sustained as products of New

Millennium consciousness:  contrite, chastened, careful.

He walked on.

#

The junction just ahead of Gonzales and the sam was marked by

blinking red lights.  From around the corner came the sounds of

scurrying small things.  "What's up?" Gonzales asked.

"Follow me," the sam said. "We must not cross the marker, but

we can stand and watch."

A large group of sams, identical to the one next to Gonzales,

filled the hallway beyond.  Some tried to work their way through

informal mazes of furniture and stacked junk, coils of wire and

angle-iron and the like; others worked to assist sams that had

gotten tangled in the sections of the maze.  Still others shifted

pieces of the maze to one side.  Amid clicking extensors and

banging metal, the sams labored patiently, mostly unsuccessfully.

Gonzales was reminded of old twentieth century films satirizing

assembly lines, robots, machines in general.

"A nursery," the sam said.  "This group nears completion of

its education.  This"it pointed with an extensor toward the

struggling robots"is the prerequisite to training.  As small

children must mature in their development, they must learn the

essentials of perception, motion, and coordination.  At the same

time they memorize the ten thousand axioms of common sense, and

then they can develop their linguistic capabilities; at present

they have a vocabulary of approximately one thousand words of

SimSpeech."

"What about thinking?" Gonzales asked.  "Where do they learn

to do that?"

"That comes later, if at all.  For sams as well as humans,

thinking is one of the least important things the mind does."

The two watched for some time, then Gonzales said, "I don't

need any company," and walked on.  When he looked back, he saw the