Conrad nodded impatiently. “Yes, I understand that. You're being directed by a hypercomputer, yes? Please inform it that you have been detained. It can juggle the work schedules accordingly. Meanwhile, I require your assistance.”
The robot considered this, and then asked, “On whose authority?”
“My name is Conrad Mursk.”
“First Architect Conrad Mursk?”
There was no surprise or admiration in the robot's voice; it was merely checking a record somewhere, and verbally confirming that it had identified the right individual.
“That's correct,” he told it.
There was another pause as the robot weighed this information, or checked with a computer somewhere, but finally it said, “By ‘this place' I assume you mean the Bohobe Plate Manufactory as a whole. By ‘director' I assume you mean the company president. Do you wish to visit with Brenda Bohobe?”
“I do.”
“Then I will make an appointment. An appointment has been made. You will come with me, please.”
Although he was in a bad mood, Conrad chuckled at that. “Will I really? Or what?”
“Or you will miss your appointment,” the robot replied, with no particular emphasis.
Robots were funny that way: an inhuman combination of brilliance and absolute witlessness. They were so serious about everything, it was difficult sometimes to avoid teasing, but of course you did that for your own benefit, not theirs. They didn't care one way or the other. You couldn't make them feel teased.
But then the robot did do a peculiarly human thing. It looked at Conrad and said, “Will you release my arm, please? You are impeding my progress.”
“Very well,” Conrad said, letting go, and then followed the thing along a sidewalk, and into a building marked PLANNING OFFICE. From there, they followed a surprisingly long and twisting set of corridors to a wall marked B. B., PRESIDENT.
“You may wait here until your appointment,” the robot told him. “Your appointment is in two minutes. If you wish reading material, music, or other entertainments, you may request them from the wall.”
“I'm familiar with the principle, yes,” Conrad answered testily. Although, to be fair, that sort of enlivened, enlibraried wellstone surface had become rather rare in the colony of late. And the world was full of children who probably had no idea how things were supposed to work. He waved a hand at the robot and said, “You're released. Sorry to have bothered you.”
“It is never a bother to serve,” the robot answered dutifully. And although it is well known that robots possess no emotion and little self-awareness, they do have different operating modes and different levels of priority or urgency, and the thing did seem inclined to hurry away from Conrad, lest its morning rounds be further disrupted.
It was a foolish prejudice for an overgrown Irish lad to harbor, but Conrad had given up all hope of ever liking robots, or even pretending to. And why should he? No matter where he traveled or how much he saw, he never felt too far removed from Camp Friendly, where it seemed to him that his adult life had begun. Where the Palace Guards had ruled humorlessly, with the constant threat of revoked privileges and the painful sting of tazzers. And worse. The very last thing you needed was something brilliant and inhuman running your life for you, and if the bad taste had not left Conrad's mouth by now, then surely it never would.
Damn the King and Queen of Sol, anyway, for imposing that final injustice upon him. More than any other single thing, that act had precipitated the Revolt and thus given birth to this struggling colony. Because of them, he was standing here now.
But this reflection had little to do with the business at hand, so Conrad faced the word “President” on the wall and said, “Door, please.”
Obligingly, a rectangular seam appeared in the wall around the sign's lettering, and the material within it folded aside like a thick, stiff curtain. Inside was an office, surprisingly small in comparison to the building around it. It was dominated by a large wellwood desk, with Brenda Bohobe sitting behind it in a red-black chair with spreading, highly stylized wings at the top. Not the wings of an angel, but those of a really fast aircraft.
Brenda herself had a swelled head—literally, almost half again as big as a normal human's. Nor was that the only change; since Conrad had last seen her she'd given up her blue skin in favor of a rich, deep brown, and behind her eyes Conrad thought he could see a faint glow of wellstone. Hypercomputers on the brain? She wouldn't be the first person to try it.
She looked up, unsurprised because of course the robot had told a computer who was coming, and the computer had told Brenda. Her studying gaze made a piece of equipment out of Conrad, ruling and measuring, judging his quality and condition.
“Conrad Mursk. Well, well. I haven't seen your shadow across my path in dog decades. Didn't you give it all up to become a fisherman or something?”
“Marine wildlife ecologist,” he corrected. “But that was years ago. I've given myself a new assignment now.”
And Brenda, the same as ever, favored him with a sly, sour look, all-knowing and preemptively displeased. “And it brings you here to me. How very fortunate, and surprising. Let me guess: you're investigating the fax shortage.”
“You always were a smart one,” he told her honestly. “But really, do you get outside the cities much? Because life has gotten pretty bad out there in the countryside. And brief.”
She absorbed that without surprise, and then said, less acerbically, “I'm aware of that, yes. All I can tell you is, we're doing all we can. Did you seriously believe otherwise?”
Well . . .
“In hindsight,” she continued, “our economy is frightfully small for this sort of undertaking. Faxware production has always been a small fraction of the Queendom's total industry, but out here, one way or another, over half the population is tied up in it. And that's too much; it leaves too many holes. I suppose that wasn't evident two centuries ago, but gods, is it evident now.”
“I don't understand.”
Brenda sighed, the reflexive sourness dropping away from her face. She looked tired, and truthfully a little bit scared. “Oh, Conrad. The issues are complex, really.”
“There's an angel outside, by the way. Said he needed help.”
“Don't they all? We get them here sometimes: pilgrims expecting to be healed. We shoo them onward to the Domesville hospital.”
“Where they can wait their turn like good little troopers?”
She sighed again. “I'll give you a tour of the facilities, all right? And then maybe you'll understand what I'm talking about.”
“Are you sure you can spare the time? Things seem rather busy around here.”
“I'll print a copy.”
Conrad raised an eyebrow, suddenly feeling somewhat sour and accusatory himself. “‘Well, well, rank doth have its droit du seigneur, don't it just?'”
That was a quote from Wenders Rodenbeck. Conrad couldn't remember which play, but Rodenbeck was considered the premier wordsmith and storyteller of the age—or had been when Newhope left the Queendom, anyway—and such memorable lines were instantly recognizable to anyone who'd grown up with them. That one came from a scene much like this, a citizen confronting a bureaucrat of some sort, and finding a whiff of corruption. Tilly and the Don of Chefs, in Midcentury Blah?
Brenda was not amused. “Just shut up, Conrad. Don't you come barging in here with that shit. Do you want the tour, or not?”
And in reply, all that occurred to Conrad was another ill-advised line from Rodenbeck: “‘I would, madam, that every entity in this sphere were as helpful as thy smallest nail.'”
The tour was in fact illuminating. The print plates were “stitched” together atom by atom, in house-sized vacuum chambers, by crossed beams of laser light playing over silicon chips covered in tiny, tiny manipulator arms. The process was invisible to the naked eye, but the walls of the assembly building were covered in a bewildering variety of sensors and indicators, including little holie screens which showed the atoms coming together in a blur that was almost, but not quite, too fast to see.