“Bound to seem fragile. Anyone of us could crush anyone of them.”
“Do you have to say things like that?” Ariel said.
“Sorry, thought you were tougher.”
She looked ready to slug him for making that remark.
“Since when does good taste indicate weakness? Huh, Derec, huh?”
“Okay, you made your point. I’m a bit dense when my world is disrupted this violently, okay?”
She touched his cheek with the back of her hand. Her touch was so gentle, he immediately wished he could devote all his time and energies to her.
“Adam,” he said, “you seem to have imprinted partially on the corpse. Have you learned anything from that?”
“Only that I cannot do it very well. Before it died, I started to study it. I found I couldn’t imprint on it successfully. It was as if there was very little life in it when it was alive.”
Derec nodded. “Well, it was already dying perhaps.”
“Yes, but it was more than that, Master Derec. There was simply very little awareness inside here.” He held out the corpse. Derec flinched a bit. The corpse’s tiny, delicate face was twisted in pain. “The impression I had was similar to what I have received from small animals. What I concluded was that they resembled humans but were not human.”
“I do not agree,” Eve said. Adam looked toward her. Derec wondered if Adam could possibly feel the discomfort that he always felt when Ariel challenged his opinion. There was a sense of competitiveness between him and Ariel that sometimes interfered with their ability to communicate. But Adam and Eve should not, as robots, have that kind of communication difficulty, and there was no reason for them to compete with each other.
“We saw very little of them,” Eve explained, “but there was a definite society here. They interacted with each other, joined in a complex ritual together, did indeed combine together into a sort of colony. They had a need to dispose of their dead. Are not these proofs that they had at least a rudimentary society?”
“She’s got a point there,” Ariel observed.
Derec glanced at Eve. Her face seemed to alter slightly, becoming even more like Ariel’s whenever Ariel talked.
“What matters right now,” he said, “is not what they were, but why they were here.”
“Do you have any answers?” Ariel asked.
“Not many. Only my father. These creatures may be the result of some lousy experiment he’s done down in his mysterious underground laboratory. He’s let them loose to-to do I don’t know what. With him how can you-”
“Let’s not give you too much rope to hang yourself with,” Avery said, as he strolled into the lot, again emerging from some dark place. “Yes, don’t say it, son-your old dad was eavesdropping again. I would have remained hidden, but I’m tired of your trying to hang the blame on me for everything that goes wrong here. After all, you’re the one in charge, Derec. Try considering it could be you who’s to blame.”
“I haven’t even been here since-”
“I know, I know. And of course you’re not at fault. But I was away, too, remember.” He sauntered around the lot, examining the ugly scene. “This place was once a small park as I recall. I remember programming these for the city, soil and all. I never expected the dirt to be used for burials.” He wrinkled his nose. “They’re decaying at an above-normal rate, these corpses.” He reached down, picked up one of the bodies. “Interesting workmanship,” he muttered.
Ariel charged forward, angry. “Workmanship! How can you-”
“How can I analyze this dead thing so coldly? Objectivity. I am a scientist, my dear. It’s my mind-set, if you will. Anyhow, this was not a true living being. Although realistic and cleverly designed, with a great deal of genetic accuracy, I suspect this is merely an android, a kind of dime-story copy of a humaniform robot, with admirably realistic detail.”
Ariel thought of Jacob Winterson and how he was just as “dead” as the tiny body Avery held so casually in his hand. “I don’t believe you,” she said, although to herself she admitted the doctor might be right.
“Well, my dear, of course I can’t be sure. I admit I can detect no mechanisms in this particular miniature. But a well-crafted miniature has to be what this is. Do you know about miniatures in art? They’re quite wonderful. On a small surface, sometimes made of vellum, sometimes ivory or copper, the artist would render exquisitely detailed little landscapes or portraits or whatever. Often the painting was done with the patient strokes of a single-strand brush. The details might astound you. You’d swear that you were looking at an intricate painting that had been mechanically reduced or done with microsopic brushes.”
“What was the point of them? I mean, why choose a small area when you could have a whole canvas?”
“Perhaps the challenge, perhaps the artistry of working on a small scale, or perhaps commercial motives. You see, miniatures were often encased in jewelry-lockets and such-and so a pretty penny could also be earned from such a specialized craft. When photography came in, and you could place a small photo in a locket, the need for miniatures diminished and painters had to look elsewhere for pla(;es to cash in on their talents”
“You sound bitter, Dr. Avery,” Ariel said. “As if you were an artist yourself.”
“I am, in a way. I started out as an architect, and architecture, when done right, is an art form, too. Robot City was my masterpiece-until my son allowed it to get out of hand.”
“Don’t say that!” Derec shouted. “It wasn’t my fault, what happened to the city.”
“I didn’t mean to say it was. All I meant is that it is your responsibility. Please excuse me now. I want to get this specimen to a laboratory to examine it before it is fully decayed.”
Holding the tiny figure aloft, the way he might have held a beaker with volatile contents, Avery rushed off the lot. Derec, his eyes glowering, stared after him.
“Don’t let him get to you,” Ariel said.
“He hasn’t gotten to me,” Derec said sullenly.
“Sure, and this place doesn’t stink. Let’s get out of here.”
Derec and Ariel led an entourage that included Wolruf, Mandelbrot, Adam, Bogie and Timestep out of the lot. Eve insisted on staying behind to finish the burials. Although Derec found her behavior peculiar, especially for a robot, he did not argue with her. There were, after all, more important problems to occupy his mind, and anyway, the task would keep her out of trouble for a while.
When he looked back at her, she was gently placing a body into a minuscule grave in the delicate way a child might put a doll into a toy crib.
Bogie and Timestep took up the rear of the bizarre little march through the dark city streets.
“Hey, kid,” Bogie said, “whattaya make o’ that scene back there?”
“I did not know I was supposed to interpret it,” Timestep said. “None of the humans made that request of me.”
“Yeah, I know. But I just wanna know about these little people so we can figure out our duties if we ever meet any live ones. Are they human and covered by the Laws, or what? After all, these guys don’t seem to know what they are. If they’re human, they’re our concern, too, right?”
“It would seem so.”
“On the other hand, if their fate is inevitable, as Derec and the others seem to be saying, there’s not much we can actually do for them. If they live a very short time then pop off, no interference or help on our part is going to stave off their destiny. Then we may not have to help, except perhaps to protect them from immediate dangers.”
“That may be true.”
“So what do we do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Me neither. We’ll have to wait and see, just chug on up the river and hope the leeches don’t suck us dry.”