She shivered. Things never worked the way they were supposed to. Not with robots and certainly not with people. She wouldn’t try fooling herself into believing things were all suddenly reconciled. She had left a terrible scar in both her and Wendy’s lives when she’d chosen to run rather than face the daily torment of living with a perfectionist, and she knew that scar would never heal completely. The healing had hardly begun, actually. Last night had been more the result of elation at their success, plus simple drunkenness and a long, long time between bedmates for both of them, rather than a sign of true compassion.
Still, they had shared something positive for the first time in years, and there would be no ignoring it when they faced one another again in the clear light of day.
A day that was still comfortably far away. Janet lay her head back against the pillow, considering whether she should get up quietly and leave Avery to wake on his own or if she should just go back to sleep.
There was a third alternative, she realized. Smiling, she slid over and rested her head against his chest, closed her eyes, and waited for him to make the next move.
Ariel watched the sunrise through the window-a real window, this time-and wondered if she had been wise in accepting her mother’s hospitality. It hadn’t been a big thing; just the offer for her and Derec to stay there in the house after the party rather than go out through the cold night air to another house somewhere else. No, the act itself was nothing, but the hidden implications were something else again.
Juliana was offering to take Ariel back in, to forget the sins of her youth and accept her as an adult now. She was even, by implication, offering Derec the same deal. That by itself wasn’t even such a big thing, since as adults the two of them could come and go as they pleased. No, the big thing was that Ariel would have to forgive her mother for kicking her out in the first place, and Ariel just didn’t know if she was ready to do that.
The party had been exactly the sort of thing she’d rebelled against. The ostentatious show of wealth, the pointless formality of it all, the silly social maneuvering that in the end amounted to nothing more than an extended game of king-of-the-hill; Ariel was tired of the whole business already, and she’d only been subjected to it for a few hours. What would it mean to once again become Juliana Welsh’s daughter? If Ariel forgave her, would she have to endure her as well?
She got up and showered, ordered the closet to produce a pair of simple blue pants and a matching shirt, dressed, and began walking the seemingly endless corridors of the gaudy castle her mother had designed. Unlike the other building interiors in all the robot cities she had ever seen, this one was flashy, ornate, overblown-yet still just as empty as all the others. It came to Ariel that the building was a reflection of her mother’s lifestyle: all show, but under the surface not really that much different. Juliana Welsh still had a private life, however much she tried to hide that fact.
Ariel wondered what it might be like to be included in that life. It would no doubt mean taking part in at least some of the public displays as well, but she supposed nothing was free. If she demanded the same thing from Juliana that Juliana demanded of everyone else-a fair return on her investment-then it might even work out. She stopped at a window and looked out at the footpath leading to the immense front gate, imagining it full of friends come to take her shopping for clothing for the next big social event. She smiled. It might at least be worth a try.
Avery drifted upward from the lower levels of consciousness, the last fading impressions of a disturbingly realistic dream close behind. He’d dreamed he’d driven his wife away with his nagging perfectionism, then gone completely insane, nearly killed his son, and wasted over a decade of his life building a city that would never be used. The horrible chain of events chased him all the way into groggy wakefulness in an unfamiliar room, but in that half-second after waking when nightmares begin to crumble, he felt the warmth and the weight of Janet’s head on his chest, felt her soft breath tickling his skin, and knew it all for a paranoid fantasy.
Sighing softly, he put his arms around her and drifted back to sleep.
Derec awoke to the sound of someone pounding on his door. He pitched upward, overbalanced, and slid off the edge of the bed to land with a thump on the floor.
“What?” he said. Then, louder, “Who is it?”
“Who do you think it is?” a male voice shouted back. “You promised to take us fishing at dawn, and the sun’s already up. Come on!”
Fishing? Had he said something last night about fishing? Oh, frost, given the stories flying around toward the end there, he’d probably claimed he could catch a twenty-pound brookie or something. He looked to the bed, hoping to see Ariel there and ask her if she knew anything about it, but she was already up and gone.
“Just a minute!” he shouted.
“Thirty seconds or we go without you!”
Derec snagged his tie-died pants off the back of a chair, made a hopping spiral around the room as he pulled them on, grabbed the matching shirt from the floor and slipped it over his head on the way to the door. “Open,” he commanded, and it slid aside to reveal Jon and Ivan, dressed all in green and brown camouflage and carrying long flycasting rods in their hands.
“Time’s a-wasting,” Jon said as he handed Derec a rod of his own.
“What about breakfast?” Derec asked.
“What do you think we’re going fishing for? Come on!”
Waiting barely long enough for Derec to grab the rod, they turned and strode off down the hallway, ignoring his protests about showering and getting a camouflage suit of his own and telling people where they’d gone. He had no choice but to follow his two newfound friends through the corridors of the enormous mansion, out through a back door that opened onto a leaf-strewn footpath, and down the grassy hillside toward the pond. The cool ground against his bare feet woke him right up, and the sight of mist rising from the water, red-tinged in the morning light, stilled his babbling tongue.
Maybe Ariel was right, he thought as he watched the other two strip line out of their reels and make a few exploratory casts out over the water. Derec mimicked their motions and saw with delight that he evidently knew, on some instinctive level, how to cast a fly into a pond. He watched the fly settle through the mist and touch the water, sending a single ripple out like an ever-widening target for the fish to zero in on.
Yes indeed. Maybe Ariel was right. Maybe there was more to life than robots after all.
Jerry Oltion
Jerry Oltion, the author of Frame of Reference, a novel about a generation-style starship that isn’t, is also the author of Alliance, book four in the Isaac Asimov’s Robots and Aliens series. He is currently at work on Paradise Passed, an interstellar colony novel. His short stories appear frequently in Analog magazine, two of them winning first and third places in the 1987 Reader’s Choice Awards. His stories have also been nominated for the Nebula Award.