She was in one more chute, twisting in a tight downward spiral. Just as it began to level off, the dark space ahead of her irised open into light. She spilled out onto a polished hardwood floor.
Shaken by the ride, she lay still for a moment gazing at a very high beamed ceiling that was nearly lost in shadows. She turned her head to the side and found walls of gray stone, precisely chiseled and fit again in the modular shape of the Key to Perihelion. The room was huge, stretching meters on each side of her.
She raised onto her elbow, still getting her bearings. The end of a large, intricately carved table was in front of her. Its legs and feet were sculpted in the shape of some furry, clawed animal she did not recognize. It was made of a dark, deeply polished wood.
Struggling to rise, she reached up and grabbed the edge of the table. She pulled herself up to lean on it and then froze in surprise. At the far end of the table, many meters away, a man sat in a high, straight-backed chair with a gigantic fire blazing behind him in a stone fireplace twice her height.
“Welcome, Ariel. I am Dr. Avery.”
She stared at him with nothing to say. After all the effort to find him, landing here like this was so unexpected that she hadn’t formed any plan of attack, any arguments to use with him. She wasn’t ready to talk to him.
“You are welcome to warm yourself by the fire,” said her host.
She was willing to stay chilly to keep away from him, but she wanted to stall a little if she could, without getting too close. Slowly, she moved around the corner of the table and began to walk down the side of it. Dr. Avery seemed relaxed, even unconcerned, as he fingered some small object in front of him on the table.
The long, narrow table had all kinds of articles on it: flowers, dishes, trinkets, small sculptures. She didn’t dare take the time to look. Her eyes remained on Dr. Avery.
He was short. looking especially so in the high-backed chair. His build was stocky. Wavy white hair framed his face, which was also adorned with a bushy mustache. He looked friendly and benign.
His coat was too big, as she remembered from the other times she had seen him, and he still wore a white shirt with a ruffled collar.
He didn’t look crazy.
Ariel stopped a good four meters away, still watching him. What was a crazy man supposed to look like?
“I was not expecting visitors, Ariel,” said Dr. Avery. He was still studying the object in front of him. “Though I had warning that oddities, shall we say, were occurring in this vicinity.”
He didn’t sound crazy, either.
“Ariel, you don’t remember me, do you?” His gaze remained on the table.
“Yes,” she said timidly.
“No, not really. You remember me after the performance of Hamlet and when the Hunter robots located all of you in the passageways beneath the city and you remember me from when they brought you to me. That’s all.”
“That’s when we met.”
He smiled and picked up the little object. “Automatic alarms were triggered tonight. A couple of them, in fact. When a man who enjoys his privacy feels it may be disturbed, he likes to have alarms installed. Did you trigger them, Ariel?”
She watched him silently, surprised by his changing subjects so quickly.
“A humanoid robot mysteriously shut down completely just a short distance from here. Then a shift in the soil was reported. Did you do those, Ariel?”
“Kind of. I guess.”
“You guess. I guess, too. Violations of the provisional Laws of Humanics? Perhaps. I haven’t yet investigated the details. But how did you enter my abode?”
Derec was lying helpless along her route. She didn’t dare answer that question.
“One of the few weaknesses in my security here is in my emergency ventilation system. It opens when unexplained malfunctions occur in this valley.” He sighed. “I could have had the robots make it entry-proof, but it happens to represent my escape routes, as well. If no one could get in that way, then I couldn’t get out that way, could I?”
“What do you want?” she demanded, hoping to get him off that subject. “What is all this about, anyway?”
“Of course, I do have a maze that one must negotiate. It acts as a buffer zone. Perhaps you managed that.”
She was shaking with tension, unable to get a handle on a conversation that kept jumping topics.
“By the way, I’ve misplaced a couple of items. Have you seen them? One is an antique menorah crafted in the ancient Earth empire of the czars. The other is a Ming Dynasty bowl.”
She stared at him, vaguely remembering a fancy bowl.
“You really don’t remember me, do you, Ariel?”
“Why do you keep saying that?”
“You have new memories now, clearly. You are not the Ariel I last saw. You are again the real Ariel, if you only knew it. A few more accurate memories will trigger the rest, I believe.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your memories now are accurate. It is the real you. The one you thought was you…no. You never knew a Spacer who contaminated you. You never had a disease. You will, I sadly suppose, recall the name…David Avery.” For the first time, then, he looked up and met her eyes.
David Avery. David. Derec…?
Suddenly memories did come flooding back. “David! Derec is David! And you hated me!”
“Oh, now, now. What I attempted with you failed. Bygones are bygones, eh?”
“You…what have you done?” She was horrified, yet fascinated. Finally, after such a long time, the mysteries were being answered. “Oh, no. Wait a minute. Is Derec really David…or what about the corpse? Was that David? Did you kill him?” She was nearly hysterical, partly from the shock of understanding.
“No, no, of course not.” He waved a hand in dismissal. “The corpse, as you call it, was merely a synthetic physical imitation of David. A good one, of course, that used genuine human blood. I used him in a dry-run test of David’s encounter with Robot City.”
Ariel, still quivering with tension but now composed again, leaned against the table for support. “So you planted memory chemfets and disease in me a long time ago to give me a false memory. Memories of events that never existed to replace my memories of real life. And…Derec is David.”
“And you were his lover. Oh, by the way, didn’t you ever wonder what happened to the corpse? The cleaning robots recognized it as nothing more than waste material and hauled it away.”
“You destroyed my memory,” she said again, slowly. “And his. The amnemonic plague was artificial, created by chemfets. It was you. To separate David and me. You must have given him his amnesia for the same reason.”
“I always knew you had intelligence. My son’s taste was always exceptional.”
“And ever since my memory returned on Earth, I withheld telling Derec the truth because I was afraid these memories might not be correct. All this time, I could have put his mind at ease if I had only trusted my memories.”
“A compliment. Consider my actions a compliment. Breaking your hold on my son’s will required extreme measures. Judge it as the extent to which he cares about you.” He leaned back in his chair, holding the little item he had been playing with. “Cared, I should say. He doesn’t remember even now, of course…but he does seem to have formed an affection for you allover again, seen by the way you two have remained a team.”
“You practically destroyed two people just to keep them apart.” Her anger was mixed with sheer astonishment.
“Ah, no. Sorry. You are not so important as you think. My other motive was to test my son’s resourcefulness. You see, if he succeeded in manipulating and controlling Robot City, then he was truly worthy of my final plan for him.”
“Final plan…? Do you mean to say,” she said slowly, “that you wiped his memory and placed him on that asteroid as a test?”
“It is what I mean to say and what I have said.” He sat up and for the first time his face reflected enthusiasm. “You see, Robot City has been finished. Now each of the humanoid robots here has had implanted in his body…one or two duplicate Keys to Perihelion. Even now, they are marching to predetermined sites around this planet from which they will launch themselves to different galaxies. In each galaxy, they will begin replication of themselves and construction of more Robot Cities. And David, my son who has now earned the right to act as my son, will control each and every robot in every Robot City…making him the most powerful man in the universe!”