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When they arrived at the forest, he braked to a halt, jumped out, and opened the door for Ariel. She got out calmly. She must have thought about what he had been shouting at her, for she didn't object when he gently took her hand to help her from the car.

That gave him confidence that she would follow him without being forced, and he let go of her hand and started into the woods. She stayed close behind him for the short, hurried walk it took to reach the egg.

SilverSide guided Ariel gently until she stood two meters from the egg, directly in front of the hatch, and then he left her there and hid behind the pink-flowered bush behind her.

The hatch began to open with a soft grinding sound.

SilverSide could look through the lower branches of the tall bush, past Ariel's right side, and see the hatch himself.

A silvery-gray, amorphous mass heaved itself above the bottom of the hatch and formed, in that part of its mass that hung over the edge of the opening, a shiny, multifaceted, grayish-green orb that it rotated slowly around-much like an eye rotating in its socket-as though it were surveying the entire landscape. The inspection narrowed then, and starting at Ariel's feet, the orb slowly scanned up until it was gazing at her head.

With that inspection completed, the blob elongated and pulled itself through the hatch as though it were one large muscle, like the foot of a huge snail. It slithered out of the hatch, coming to rest on the ground in front of Ariel like a thick pancake with the orb still intact in the center.

The facets of the orb slowly disappeared, absorbed into a grayish-green ring surrounding a black pupil, while the bulk of the orb turned white. A spherical mass the size of a small bowling ball began to rise from the pancake, lifting the eye-for it was clearly that now-and a second eye took shape, forming the first aspects of a face.

Slowly then, head, shoulders, arms, breast-mounded chest, hips and buttocks and legs, all reared up out of the puddle until there was no puddle left-the last sucked up into a pair of shapely ankles and feet-and a silvery likeness of Ariel stood before Ariel.

SilverSide stepped from behind the bush then and silently inspected the new arrival. Ariel had stood transfixed, mute and motionless, during the whole process.

Now SilverSide spoke up, proudly, christening this delightful new creation.

“You are the female, Eve SilverSide.”

After allowing a moment for that to sink in to both Ariel and Eve, he spoke again, triumphantly, feeling as though he had found his true identity at last.

“And I am the male, Adam SilverSide.”

They stood like that, no one saying anything, and then the sound of Jacob's voice came to them and the sound of feet pounding the ground.

“Miss Ariel, where are you?”

And then the pounding stopped, and they could hear him thrashing through the shrubbery.

“Miss Ariel,” he kept calling, coming closer and closer.

“Here, Jacob,” Ariel called.

Chapter 23. A Final Imprint

After the excitement of Eve's birth and the brief period it took for Eve to become properly functional and subservient to Ariel under Adam's guidance, everything seemed to fall into place except for the uncertainty of how that enigmatic event could have taken place. To discover Adam SilverSide on an alien planet was certainly unexpected, an inexplicable robot on an inexplicable planet. But to personally midwife the birth of another of the creatures was something altogether different; it raised so many questions, with the degree of involvement of the erratic Dr. Avery heading the list.

When they finally put those unanswerable questions behind them and turned instead to the creative work that confronted them, they found that the task, though difficult, was not as difficult as they had supposed it to be. The farm programming that was used on the planet Robot City was intact in Pearl City's computer files, ready for use should the need arise.

What Ariel had merely fantasized and hoped was a capacity for leadership proved in reality to be a genuine ability to lead. And what was even more amazing, Derec readily relinquished his nominal authority and bowed to her decisions in the construction of the farms and their associated terminal facilities.

Initially, one of Ariel's first decisions did not have the wholehearted endorsement of either Derec or Wolruf, although they later conceded that she was right. They all agreed that they needed an eighth supervisor robot to oversee the planetwide farm operation. But neither Derec nor Wolruf agreed initially with the form Ariel specified for the supervisor-adamantly-nor with the name she chose for that robot: Wheeler. To them it made no sense to name a farmer after the twentieth century spacetime physicist John Archibald Wheeler. To her it made perfect sense, for both were as close to nature as a being can get: the farmer in a concrete, practical sense, the physicist in an abstract, symbolic sense. (She had been studying spacetime physics, trying to understand the node compensator. Her mind at that time was much filled with the heroic personalities of physics.)

And in her mind, Wheeler's name described his nomadic lifestyle that took him wheeling far and wide over the surface of the planet in pursuit of his supervisory function, for she insisted that he have the form of a Ceremyon. Wolruf and Derec later conceded that perhaps that was the proper form-because it harmonized with the job and the world so beautifully-but it was difficult at first for them to think of a supervisor in any but humanoid shape.

She made Wheeler smaller than a Ceremyon-so as not to intimidate the aliens-but far larger than any of the other native flyers, so that the Ceremyons would not mistake him, at a distance, for a natural denizen of their world. She insisted, too, that his robotic laws recognize Ceremyons with all the weight ordinarily reserved for humans, and that Derec revise the programming of the other supervisors to defer to Wheeler in matters dealing with Oyster World and the Ceremyons.

The problem of seeds had been worrying Ariel almost from the time she had first hit on the idea of a farm world, but she found that there had been no need to worry. Seeds for a variety of crops to match the farm programs had been carried during the initial migration to Oyster World and were stored in labeled bins that were indexed in the programs. There was no need to get seeds from Aurora.

With Wolruf's advice-to make the overall mosaic of the farm operation as benign as possible, weather-wise-they interspersed the truck gardens and orchards among the fields of wheat, oats, barley, and several other grains, and among large fields of cotton, a commodity that had never been matched for all-around adaptation to the human dermal ecology. And to minimize the upset to the planet's ecology, she further advised that they leave, interspersed among their new plants, an equal stand of the natural grass that had covered the plain when they first arrived.

In that first experiment, they decided to limit themselves to plant products. The production of wool, milk, and meat and animal husbandry in general, seemed less harmonious with robotic labor than the cultivation of nonsentient plant life.

Irrigation-the dirt farmer's primary worry-was not a problem on Oyster World. Regulated rainfall was an integral part of the Ceremyons' weather control system. They had recognized the need of the natural vegetation long before they met humans.

The terminal facilities were built above the Main Street access and were patterned after those on Aurora, modified to fit the special conditions demanded by the configuration of the opening in the dome. All vessels arrived and departed from an array of oval openings that included configurations suitable for all designs of shuttle and small cargo vessels then known, interstellar and otherwise. The large interstellar transports would be serviced in orbit by smaller shuttles that could fit through the dome's opening.