“Guilty,” she said.
“You were trying to produce human minds?” Adam asked.
Janet looked as if she wouldn’t answer, but after a moment she sighed and said, “ Ah, what the heck. Looks like that aspect of the experiment’s over anyway. Yeah, that’s one of the things I was trying to do. I was trying to create intelligence. I gave you what I consider the bare minimum in a robot: curiosity and the Three Laws, and I turned you loose to see if any of you would become anything more. Of course I didn’t count on you all getting together, but that doesn’t seem to have hurt anything. You’ve all surpassed anything I expected. Welcome to the human race.” She held out her hand.
Adam reached out gingerly, as if after all this time spent searching for the truth, he was now unsure he wanted the honor she conveyed. He took her hand in his and shook it gently. and still holding on, he asked, “What about Basalom?”
Janet shook her head. “The jury’s still out on him. I think I gave him too much initial programming for him to develop a human personality. “
“But you’re not sure?”
“No, I’m not sure. Why?”
“Because if you ’ re not sure, then neither could Lucius be, and he was right in protecting Basalom’s life.”
Derec had to admit that Adam’ s argument made sense. So why were the hackles standing up on the back of his neck? He looked back to the monitor, saw the fuzzy yellow glow that Adam said indicated anger. That was why. With only five volts going to his brain, Lucius was effectively in suspended animation at the moment. He was still furious at Avery, and if they woke him up, he might very well continue to be furious. If they were going to reanimate Frankenstein’ s monster, Derec wanted to calm him down first, at least. If possible, he wanted to do even more.
“What can we do to make sure it doesn’t happen again?” he asked aloud.
“Treat him better,” Janet said. “Follow the Laws of Humanics they’ve set up for us.”
Derec couldn’t suppress a sardonic laugh. “That may be fine for us, but what about Dad? He’s not going to do anything he doesn’t want to.”
His mother tossed her head, flinging her blond hair back over her shoulders. “Leave your father to me,” she said.
Avery woke from the anesthetic with the impression that his tongue had swollen to twice its normal size. He tried to swallow, but his mouth was too dry for that. His vision was blurry, too, and when he tried to raise his right hand to rub his eyes, it didn’t respond.
He was in bad shape, that much was clear. Damn that meddlesome robot! Damn him and damn Janet for building him.
He was evidently sitting up in bed, judging from the few somatic clues he could gather. He opened his mouth and used his swollen tongue and dry mouth to croak out the single word: “Water.”
He heard a soft clink of glassware, the blessed wet gurgle of liquid being poured, and then a dark shape leaned over him and held the glass to his lips. He sipped at it, blinking his eyes as he did in an effort to clear them so he could see his benefactor.
She spoke and saved him the effort of identification. “Well, Wendy, it looks like we have a lot to talk about, and finally plenty of time to do it in.”
Turning his head away from the glass, he said, “We have nothing to discuss.” It came out more like, “We a uthi oo ithcuth.”
She understood him anyway. “Ah, well, yes we do. There’s us, for instance. I can’t really believe it’s just coincidence that brought us back together after all this time. “
Avery blinked a few more times, and his vision finally began to clear. Janet was sitting on a stool beside his bed, wearing a soft, light blue bodysuit with a zippered neck, which she’d pulled strategically low. Watch yourself, he thought as his eyes immediately strayed to the target she’d provided.
She smiled, no doubt recognizing her slight victory.
“I don’ know wha’ you’re talking abou’, “ he said carefully.
Her smile never wavered. “I think you do.” She held the glass to his lips and let him drink again while she said, “Face it; this whole city project of yours seems almost designed to attract my attention. You didn’t really think I’d ignore it once I heard about it, did you?”
Avery, s tongue seemed to be returning to normal. When Janet removed the glass, he said, “I tried not to think about you at all.”
“Didn’t work, did it? I tried the same thing.”
Her question made him distinctly uncomfortable. “What do you want from me?” he demanded. “I’m not going to take you back, if that’s it.”
“I didn’t ask that,” she said, frowning.
“What, then?”
Janet set the glass down. “Ah, Wendy. Always business. All right, then, we’ll start with my learning machines. I want you to leave them alone.”
“I told you I would before you had Lucius attack me. I’ll be glad to be rid of them.”
“I didn’t have Lucius attack you. He decided to do it on his own. Considering the provocation, I think he showed admirable restraint. “
“He injured a human to protect a robot. You call that restraint?” Avery looked down to his right hand, found the reason why it didn’t respond. I1 was encased in a sleeve of dianite from his elbow to the ends of his fingers. Tiny points of light winked on and off along its length, each one above a recessed slide control. No doubt tiny robot cells were busy inside his arm as well, repairing the damage Lucius had done.
“He injured a human to protect another human,” Janet said. “Or so he thought. Evidently that’s a trick you taught him.”
“Another of my many mistakes.”
Janet laughed. “My, how times do change us. The Wendell Avery I knew could no more have admitted a mistake than he could fly. “
“And the Janet Anastasi I knew could no more have cared about a robot than she did about her son. “
She blushed; he had scored a hit. She didn’t back away, though. “Let’s talk about David for a minute,” she said. “You wiped his mind after I left. Care to tell me why?”
Avery looked around for the medical robot, thinking maybe he could claim fatigue and get it to usher Janet out, but there was no robot in sight. No doubt she had given it some line of rationalization to convince it to leave them alone. He wished he’d had the forethought to hide a Key to Perihelion in his pockets; he’d have gladly taken his chances with the teleportation device rather than face any more of Janet’s questions. It looked like he was going to have to, though. She didn’t look like she was prepared to let him off the hook just yet.
Sighing in defeat, he said, “I wish I could tell you. I… went a little crazy there for a while, I’m afraid. He says I told him it was a test to see if he was worthy of inheriting my cities, but whether that was really it, or if I had a different reason, I don’t know.”
“You don’t suppose you could have been trying to eliminate his memory of me, do you?”
Avery shrugged. “I have no idea. Possibly. I was quite…angry with you.”
“Ah, yes, anger. 1t makes people do things they later regret. We’ll return to that in a minute, but let’s not change the subject again just yet. You and David had pretty much patched things up again, hadn’t you? You were getting along pretty well. Almost like a normal father and son. What happened to that?”
“He betrayed my trust,” Avery said. His voice came out harsh, and he held out his left hand for more water.
Pouring, Janet asked, “Betrayed how? What did he do?”
Avery accepted the glass and drank half of its contents in two gulps. “He turned my city into a zoo, that’s what. Worse, he turned it into a caricature of a zoo. Behind my back.”
Janet’s laugh was pure derision. “You were ready to sacrifice everything you’d gained with him because of that?”