He was feeling smug and complacent. The bit about continuous modulation of hyperwave had thrown him for a moment. But now he felt that he was back in control of the expedition.
“So 'u don't know the first thing about farms, Derec. So what?” Wolruf said. “I seem to 'ave come in on the middle of the show.”
“So you can't reprogram Avery robots to be farmers,” Derec said, “if you don't know anything about farming and farm technology.”
“'ave no fear, Wolruf iss 'ere,” the small, furry alien said. “I wass raissed on a farm and educated at Agripolytech. I'm 'urn original 'ayseed engineerrr.”
“Okay, Derec. What do you say now?” Ariel said. “You think I didn't know that? Where have you been all this time?”
Derec ignored Ariel.
“You, a farmer?” He was looking at Wolruf.
“What products do 'u think the Erani bought from my family?” Wolruf asked. “The Erani am not all pirates like Aranimas. They'rrr mostly traders, and they live on an impoverished ball of rock that growss lichens betterrr than it doess tomatoess. In theess days of overpopulation, the Erani survive on the grain and farm products they buy from us.”
And there was Ariel, glowing now, when she had been shocked half out of her drawers before Wolruf put in her two cents. She had had no more idea than he that Wolruf was a farmer.
But Derec was quick to regroup, and he was now admitting to himself that Wolruf's contribution might well amount to more than two cents, Galactic Monetary Standard.
“Okay. I submit. I'll handle the computer technology, Wolruf will handle the farm technology, and you can continue to handle the social technology.”
“Not entirely,” Ariel said. You could tell she was about to reveal something that was not entirely easy to divulge. “You must meet with me and the aliens tomorrow morning. And it looks now as though Wolruf will also need to attend that meeting, as our farm specialist.”
“For what purpose?” Derec asked.
“They want to develop a schedule. The Cerebrons are anxious to return to their nomadic life, from which they've been diverted by the problem with our city. They've been camping out in The Forest of Repose, as they call it, the woods next to the city.”
Ariel looked at her watch.
“You may want to watch this,” she said. “It's sort of spectacular.We can watch the show from the lorry as we drive in to the city. We need to be getting back anyway. It's almost time for dinner.”
Jacob and Mandelbrot were standing near the lorry as Derec and Ariel started down the ramp. The robots had already loaded Derec's gear into the lorry.
Derec called, “I'll want you to drive, Mandelbrot.”
He wanted to stand by the driver, so as to watch better whatever show it was Ariel had scheduled for them, and he dam well didn't want that musclebot Jacob standing beside him, upstaging him, so to speak, in front of the audience sitting behind.
He glanced at Ariel, daring her to challenge his decision.
She looked at him quizzically, but then gave him a quirky little smile and didn't say anything. And that was as infuriating as if she had questioned his order. She knew exactly why he wanted Mandelbrot to drive. Somehow he always displayed his buttons, and Ariel knew exactly which ones to push.
But the show was every bit as spectacular as she had intimated. She stood up to point out the one she thought was the Cerebron leader, Synapo, circling high over the dome. And it was he who dropped first: a tiny black ball plummeting toward the forest like a lead shot, becoming a small bomb, trailing a shiny smoke that slowly expanded into a silver ball that drifted gently down into the tree tops and then bobbed up to rest on the top of the forest like a ball of mercury on a countertop.
That was a solo performance, and then from near Synapo's flight circle, another followed-Sarco, the leader of the Myostria, Ariel guessed-and after a time, over the space of a quarter-hour, they all dropped until they were dispersed like myriad beads of silvery moisture over the surface of the green foliage.
Chapter 17. The Cerebot
The provisional laws of humanics
1. A human being may not injure another human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A human being must give only reasonable orders to a robot and require nothing of it that would needlessly put it into the kind of dilemma that might cause it harm or discomfort.
3. A human being must not harm a robot, or, through inaction, allow a robot to come to harm, unless such harm is needed to keep a human being from harm or to allow a vital order to be carried out.
From Central Computer File:Humanics.
Mechanical Access: Drawer667, Bin 82.
Keyword Access: Humans. Sub key: Laws.
File Creator: Rydberg 1
The next morning, well before ten o'clock, Mandelbrot parked the lorry near the west edge of the dome opening, and the three mammals got out, instructing the three robots to stay behind in the lorry but to record everything that transpired once the aliens arrived.
“Well, friend Mandelbrot, it is some time since we've been able to talk privately,” Jacob Winterson said.
“That will hardly be the case with the wild one present,” Mandelbrot said. “Watch what you say and what you do. It is completely unpredictable. It deactivated me on the wolf planet.”
Jacob and Mandelbrot were still standing behind the control panel of the lorry. SilverSide was sitting on the back seat that she had occupied with Wolruf on the way to the meeting site.
“For your information,” SilverSide said, “I am not an 'it.' I am currently of the female persuasion, having imprinted on Wolruf. You may refer to me with the pronouns 'she' and 'her,' Jacob. And you need not think that I will deactivate either of you now that I know that Mistress Wolruf would not react kindly to that action. Further, I am completely unaffected by what you may say or do, now that I understand that Miss Wolruf wants me to modulate the Third Law slightly to accord you some modest protection.”
“So, friend Jacob,” Mandelbrot said, “have you pondered further upon that imponderable, the Laws of Humanics?”
“Yes, I have,” Jacob replied, “and I find them woefully inadequate in describing human behavior. Rydberg and his companions are inexperienced in dealing with humans who are an unfathomable lot. Emotions, not laws, govern their behavior. And I think perhaps the female of the species is the most mysterious of all. I have been researching the emotion of jealousy since I seem to have been acquired essentially to create that emotion in the breast of Master Derec.”
“I hardly think jealousy can reside in the breast of a human, friend Jacob,” Mandelbrot suggested.
“Merely a figure of speech used in the literature of the subject,” Jacob replied. “The key point of interest here, however, is the multiplicity of shades and overtones that exist in the minds of humans in their consideration of the opposite sex, shades and overtones of emotion that apparently have nothing to do with reproduction of the species, the ostensible reason for there being the two sexes in the first place.”
Surprisingly, SilverSide was becoming interested in the conversation after all. She agreed with Jacob's assessment of any Laws of Humanics that would guide human behavior and supposedly parallel the Laws of Robotics that guided her behavior. And now the subject of their conversation seemed to bear directly on her discomfort with the femininity of the Wolruf imprint that seemed, paradoxically, to be aggravated by the keen interest in everything feminine she had felt earlier in the masculine mode, while imprinted on Derec.
It was a discomfort that came from an awareness of her own narcissism, something she had never experienced before, that was at once both fascinating and repulsive. She concluded she was attracted to feminine beings, but would rather it were not her own being. But what was the cause for the attraction? She concluded it must stem from that first powerful imprint on KeenEye that had not been altogether dispelled by her preference for the Derec imprint-the male imprint. That comfort with a masculine imprint was only a little less powerful than the laws that were intended to govern her behavior, but which she found so difficult to interpret for want of knowing what a human was. She could deprogram neither those laws nor her feeling of masculinity nor that insidious attraction for all that was feminine.