“And who has detailed technical knowledge of the system?” Ariel asked. “User's manual, wiring diagrams, maintenance manual?”
“Avernus-8 and the technician on each of the two computer platforms.”
“I'll bet a pewter button that Derec's special link does use hyperwave, but unlike it's ever been used before. It's not common, ordinary discrete modulation.
“Dr. Avery has beat us to it, dam it. He's already invented the aliens' continuous modulation.
“Jacob, hook Keymo into your comlink connection, and tell Avernus to describe Derec's monitor system to him. See if the two of them don't agree that it's continuous modulation of hyperwave as Keymo would define it. “
That connection and analysis took a little longer than quick, but still consumed less than two minutes.
“Avernus-8 replies in the affirmative,” Jacob said. “To communicate with all robot cities, Master Derec's internal monitor metabolically manipulates hyperwave in a manner similar to what Keymo describes as continuous modulation.”
“Bingo,” Ariel said. “Derec does it and doesn't even know how he does it. And I don't need to know anything about engineering to do engineering. Tell Avernus to ring up Derec and give him this message:
“CRISIS HERE ON OYSTER WORLD. YOU MUST IMMEDIATELY REPROGRAM AVERY ROBOTS. I ALSO HAVE A BIT OF IMPORTANT ENGINEERING TECHNOLOGY TO TEACH YOU, DUM-DUM. IN FACT, YOUR OWN INTERNAL ENGINEERING, SO COME AT ONCE.
“Sign it: LOVE, ARIEL, and ask for confirmation.”
For ten minutes Jacob said nothing while Ariel forked salad into her mouth and mooned over Derec. With that wild imagination one has when extrapolating hope, she visualized Synapo meeting with her before Derec arrived, telling her the aliens had changed their minds and would accept her proposal. She would then be the aliens' kind of Leader.
No matter what, the robots would have to be reprogrammed. They weren't going to build any robot city on this planet.
While they were finishing their lunch, Jacob broke the silence. “
Avernus-8 has received this reply from Master Derec:
“ON MY WAY, SMARTY PANTS. LOVE, DEREC.”
She spent the rest of the afternoon on the balcony, which overlooked Main Street, sitting in the subdued light of the perpetual dusk under the dome, reading a book of poems she took with her whenever she traveled: Selected Poetry of Old Earth.
It was an ancient book, bound in soft brown imitation suede, and printed in a small, graceful font on one side of thin, translucent, parchment-like paper. It was the only thing her mother had ever given her that she truly treasured. Juliana Welsh had given her a lot of expensive things: clothes, jewelry, cars, fliers, jumpers, but seldom anything with the taste and thought that was reflected in the selection of that little book. She wondered if her mother had picked it out or had merely asked one of their robots to pick up something via the hyperwave shopping service.
She came to a very short poem she had forgotten, but when she reread it, it seemed like a piece of wisdom that might apply at almost any time in a person's life-Robert Frost wisdom:
That's what she seemed to be doing. Dancing around the solution to the problem. She had come so close to the answer in that meeting with Synapo and his lieutenants. He had said as much with that elaborate apology he had left her with, as though he would have done things differently if it had been left up to just him. In that case, would he really have bought her proposal?
She looked up every now and then to stare at the opening in the dome. It made her uneasy. What if they could suddenly close it and trap them all inside that insidious blackness? There would be no way out, no way that human technology could provide.
But she didn't want to camp out, and she certainly didn't want to spend any more time in that tiny, cramped, two-passenger jumper than she absolutely had to.
After dinner Jacob rigged a viewing screen on the balcony so she could spend the evening keeping an eye on that critical opening in the dome while she watched a library tape of an old hyperwave drama involving Elijah Baley, Gladia Solaria, and the robot Daneel Olivaw…
She could not see the dome opening when she looked up. The starshine in the black sky was not bright enough to be seen through pupils contracted by the illumination required to present Elijah Baley in all his glory. But she could see the lights of the robot traffic far out on the plain, traffic that was now diminishing as the materiel transfer neared completion.
When she went to bed, she posted Jacob on the balcony with instructions to call her immediately if he saw any change in the size of the dome opening.
In the middle of the night, she dreamt that she was trying to escape from that black void inside the dome, piloting her hyperspace jumper with the monster Synapo sitting beside her in the cockpit, heading on a course that would take them down Main Street with the Compass Tower far in the distance. But she was still out in the void, hanging motionless at least a kilometer from where Main Street began, with her throttle pushed to its limit; and stretching away from her toward Main Street were long, long rows of waving green corn; and standing at the end of Main Street, far away down those rows of corn, was Derec waving and beckoning for her to come to him. She turned to look at Synapo in the midst of a feeling of disoriented horror, and a crimson flame shot out of the blackness beneath his luminous green eyes and bummed her hand.
She awoke drenched in perspiration, her hand resting painfully on the sharp corner of the nightstand beside her bed. She finally drifted back to sleep, yearning for Derec to be there in bed beside her, but back on Aurora, not there on Oyster World.
By ten o'clock the next morning, the materiel transfer dwindled to a halt, and with their limited possessions piled in the runabout beside them, Ariel and Jacob stood outside the dome at the meeting site, keeping vigil with Wohler-9 and his lorry, waiting to witness the final closure of the dome.
Five minutes passed-10:05 AM-and no blackbodies had shown up to send their shimmering additions down the edge of the dome, then a half hour, and then an hour, and still no construction activity.
There weren't even any signs of preconstruction activity like the long line of blackbodies that had formed on other mornings heading toward the apex of the dome opening, like an outspiraling thread unwinding from a black hole, from a spherical black mass that from far away could not be resolved into individual blackbodies basking on the wing in the light of the sun.
There was no dull black ball in the sky this morning. The blackbodies were up there like every other morning, but unlike construction days, they were loosely dispersed from horizon to horizon, languidly circling, soaking up the sun's radiation.
Ariel and the two robots sat there all day waiting for something to happen and nothing did: no construction activity and no visit from the aliens to explain the lack of activity.
Ariel ate lunch and dinner from supplies Wohler-9 had stashed in the lorry for her, supplies that were to last a month to give them time to get the Oyster World dilemma resolved.
Derec was due to arrive in three days: one day to get far enough away from that other planet to allow the jump through hyperspace, and two days to travel in from the jump arrival point, the nearest clearsafe in the Oyster World zone.
They spent the night in the open. Ariel slept on the long back seat of the open lorry under the stars of a cloudless sky. She refused to spend another night under the dome with the threat of its imminent closure literally hanging over her. One night like that was enough.
Chapter 12. Wolruf Stands Inspection
They arrived at the clearing well before noon, following a large animal trail Derec had discovered and explored with Mandelbrot a few days before. Although the forest cover discouraged the growth of dense underbrush, there were scattered patches that occasionally blocked the trail for homo sapiens, low branches that the animals who had made the trail-possibly SilverSide's erstwhile associates-simply walked under.