“That’s because you’re so eaten up with your robot friends you can’t think of anything else!” She suddenly jerked her head toward the wall. “If the walls are robots, I wonder if they can hear us now?”
Just then the screen on the table came to life, Rydberg’s face filling it. “So, you are back, Derec,” he said. “Good. Prepare yourselves. An honor guard is coming right now to bring you to your preliminary trial.”
“Trial?” Derec said.
“Uh oh,” Katherine said, putting a hand to her mouth. “That may be my fault. I all but dared them to put us on trial.”
“But we haven’t had a chance to investigate yet.”
She shrugged. “I was trying to find if we could have access to outside communications.” She snapped her fingers. “Maybe this means we’re going to get it.”
“Yeah… maybe,” Derec said, but he was skeptical. Robot City was too precious a gem to be hanging out in the ether for anyone to pluck. At this point, he wasn’t even sure if he wanted to communicate with the outside.
He looked at the screen. It had already gone blank. “Whatever the reason,” he said, “I believe we’re going to get some answers at this point.”
“Let’s hope they’re answers we can live with,” she sighed. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life here.”
Within minutes, the utility robot was knocking on the door. Derec hurried to open it. Euler greeted him, accompanied by a supervisor robot he’d not seen before. This one was the robot most closely molded to a human that Derec had seen, with chisled, though blank, mannequin-like features.
“Friend Derec,” Euler said, “Friend Katherine Burgess, may I present Arion, who will be in attendance at our meeting.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Derec said.
“Rydberg called it a trial,” Katherine said.
“This is a great moment for us here,” Arion said. “I trust that your stay so far has been satisfactory. I am doing my best with what little time I have to try and prepare some entertainment for you. We know that humans enjoy mind diversions.”
“We’d appreciate anything you could do,” Derec said.
“Sure,” Katherine said. “How about conjuring up a radio for us to call the outside for help?”
“Oh, that’s quite impossible,” Arion said.
“That’s what I thought,” Katherine answered.
“I have a present for each of you,” Euler said, extending his right arm. “Then we must be off to the meeting.”
Derec moved to the robot. His pincers held two large watches, dangling on gold chains. “You may know the time here now,” Euler said. “It is of importance to humans, and so, to us. We will do more to make you feel comfortable in this regard.”
Derec took the watches, giving one of them to Katherine. They had square faces encased in gold. On both of them, the LCD faces read 3:35. “They run on a twenty-four hour day,” said Euler. “We thought it would be more comfortable for you if we adjusted the length of our hour than if you had to adjust to a twenty-and-one-half hour day. Our hours, decads, and centads are approximately eighty-five percent of standard.” Derec walked out onto the veranda and looked into the sky. The sun had already passed its apex and was slowly crawling toward the eventual shadows of evening.
“Right on the money,” he said, returning to the apartment.
“You doubted it?” Arion asked, looking at Euler.
“Do you understand now?” Euler said to him.
“Interesting,” Arion said, cocking his head in an almost human fashion.
“We must go,” Euler said and hurried out of the apartment, the others following.
They rode the elevator to street level and boarded a multi-car tram that had no apparent driver. It started off immediately when they were seated. Euler turned to Derec, who sat, with Katherine, behind him and Arion. “You put yourself in extreme danger last night,” the robot said. “Why?”
“I’ve a better question,” Derec returned. “If this is such a perfect human world, why was it so dangerous?”
“Spacer worlds conquered weather problems eons ago,” Katherine interjected. “For you to have them in such an advanced culture makes no sense.”
Arion turned to her and bowed his head. “Thank you for calling our culture advanced.”
“The weather,” Euler said, “is quite honestly part of our overall problem right now. It is under our control, but also not under our control. Unfortunately, for security reasons, we cannot discuss it in detail.”
“Great,” Katherine said. “Everybody can do something about the weather, but nobody talks about it.”
“To answer your original question,” Derec told Euler, as he watched them move in a direct line toward the tower where they had initially materialized, “I have no memory and no past. My curiosity, my search for answers about myself, leads me to do things not necessarily in my best interest.”
“Amnesia?” Euler asked. “Or something else?”
Derec looked at him in surprise. “What else?”
The robot answered his question with another question, an old one. “How, then, did you come to our planet?”
Derec realized that the robot was playing word games with him that tied directly to the word games Derec had initiated the night before. He decided to keep playing. “What did the dead man, David, say when you asked him that question?”
“He said he didn’t know,” Euler replied, and turned back around in his seat. Over his shoulder, he said, “He claimed he’d had amnesia.”
The tram came to a halt beside the mammoth pyramid that dominated the landscape of Robot City, the place the inhabitants called the Compass Tower. Katherine put a hand on Derec’s arm, squeezing, and he knew she had the same fear that he’d felt. Here, about halfway up the tower, was where they had hidden the Key to Perihelion that had brought them to the city. Had the robots found it? Were they confronting them with the evidence, or, worse yet, taking it away?
But Euler said nothing of the Key. Instead, he simply climbed from the tram and led them directly to the base of the tower, a tower that Derec had surmised was solid.
He’d never been more wrong.
At the robot’s approach, an entire block of the solid matter that formed the base simply melted away, leaving a gently sloping runway leading into the structure, another example of Derec’s theory about the intelligence of the building materials themselves.
They moved into the pyramid through a short, dark hallway that emptied into a maze of criss-crossing aisles and stairs that, in turn, led off in all directions within the structure.
“Try and memorize our path,” Derec whispered to Katherine. “Just in case.”
“In case of what?” she asked. “In case you haven’t figured it out, we’re not going anywhere.”
“This is the most important building in our city,” Euler said, as he took them up a series of stairs and escalators that zig-zagged at every landing and culminated in a long, well-lit hallway. “This is where decisions are made, where… understanding takes place.”
They walked the hall, Arion hurrying ahead and disappearing down some stairs. The surrounding walls glowed lightly, with connecting hallways intersecting every ten feet.
They followed Arion’s path, changing direction several times before finding themselves standing in a large, well-lit room whose four walls angled in toward a ceiling, fifteen meters above, that poured in sunshine like a skylight.
The floor of the room was tiled in the form of a large compass, its four points forming the cornerstones of Robot City. In the center of the compass, under the direct rays of the sun, stood six robots in a circle, arms outstretched, their pincers grasping those of their neighbors on either side with space left for one more-Euler.
“This is the place where we seek perfection,” Euler said, and joined the circle, closing it.
“It’s almost religious,” Derec whispered to Katherine.
“Yeah,” she replied. “It give me the creeps.”
Derec looked around the room. There were no chairs or tables, nothing upon which a human being could rest. The walls were inset with CRTs jammed side to side around the entire perimeter. Each screen showed its own view of Robot City. Many showed excavation sites, the large movers pushing and leveling soil. Other pictures were of the extrusion plant he had visited, and he was led to conjecture that there might be more than one. There were pictures of the reservoir he had splashed into, and strange, underground pictures taken through the eyes of roving cambots that showed mining tunnels, kilometer after kilometer of deserted tunnel. And finally, many of the screens simply showed the pinktinged blue of the sky.