“I didn’t know,” he replied. “I guess we’re really stuck.”
She nodded. “Did you hear what… what Wohler did for me?”
“Yes.”
“I never understood your… feeling for the robots,” she said, eyes welling up with tears. “But his life was as important to him as mine is to me, and he… he gave it up… so I could live.”
“He was burned out completely,” Derec said. “They’re trying to reconstruct him now.”
She looked up at him. “Reconstruct?”
“It won’t be the same, of course. We are, all of us, a product of our memories. The Wohler you knew is, for the most part, dead.”
“But if they reconstruct,” she said, “something of him will remain.”
“Yes. Something.”
“I want to go there,” she said. “I want to go where he is.”
She tried to stand, Derec gently pushing her back in the chair. “You’re still a sick girl,” he said. “You can’t be running around doing… ”
“No,” she said, a spark of the old Katherine already coming back. “He died so that I could live. If there’s anything of him left, I want to be there.”
Derec drew a long breath. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said, knowing how stubborn she could be.
And so, thirty minutes later, Katherine, wrapped in a sterile suit, wheeled herself into the dust-free repair chamber where six different robots were working diligently on the body of Wohler, the philosopher. Derec walked with her.
Most of his plating was gone, circuit boards and relays hitting the floor with clockwork regularity, a small robot wheeling silently around and sweeping up the discards.
“Can I get closer?” she asked Derec.
“I don’t see why not,” he answered.
Just then, Euler came into the chamber and walked directly toward the couple. “Friend Derec,” he said. Derec smiled at the reuse of the title before his name. “We are just completing work on the connecting tunnel to the runoff cavern and would very much like you to be present for the opening.”
Derec looked down at Katherine. “Well, I’m kind of busy right now, I… ”
“Nonsense,” Katherine said, reaching out to pat his hand. “I’m just going to stay around here for a while. One of the robots here can get me back to medical.”
He smiled broadly. “You sure it’s okay?”
She nodded, smiling widely. “I understand completely,” she said.
He grinned at Euler. “Let’s go,” he said, and the two of them moved quickly out of the room.
Katherine listened to their footsteps receding down the hall, then wheeled her chair closer to the work table. Her anger at Derec along with a great many other conflicting emotions, had died along with Wohler on the Compass Tower. Because of her thoughtlessness, a life had been lost. All her other emotions seemed petty in the face of that.
She wheeled up near the golden robot’s head. Most of his body was exposed in pieces on the table, but the head and upper torso were intact. The robots working on the body moved around the table to accommodate her presence.
She stared at his head, reaching out a finger to gingerly touch him. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
Suddenly, the head turned to her, its photocells glowing brightly. “Were you addressing me?” he asked her.
“Wohler,” she said, jumping. “You’re alive.”
“Do we know one another?” he asked, and she realized that this was a different Wohler, a newly programmed Wohler who knew nothing of their previous experience.
“No,” she said, choking back a sob. “My name is Katherine. I’m… pleased to make your acquaintance.”
“A new friendship is like new wine,” Wohler said.
“When it has aged, you will drink it with pleasure. Katherine… Katherine. Why are you crying?”
Only a small dam held back the waters in the trench from the tunnel that Derec and Avernus had dug to the cavern. The supervisors and as many of the utility robots as could clusters in the opening were there, Derec holding the electronic detonator that would blast away the dam and open up the new waterway.
“This is the first day,” Euler told him, “the first day in a truly unified city of humans and robots. The beginning of the perfect world.”
“We have reacted synnoetically to make this day happen,” Rydberg said. “Working together we can accomplish much.”
“While we still have a great deal to learn about one another,” Derec said, “I, too, believe that we have proven something of value here today.”
“Then open the floodgate, Friend Derec,” Euler said, “and make the connection complete.”
“With pleasure.”
Derec flipped the toggle on the hand control. A small explosion made the wall of dirt and rock jump. Then it crumbled, and rapidly flowing water from the trench finished the job that the explosive had begun.
And as the waters rushed past, he thought of all the things still unresolved, still rushing, like the waters, through his confused brain. Who was he? Who was the dead man? Who put this all together, and why?
And then there was Katherine.
In many ways, he still felt as if his journey had just begun, but he couldn’t help but feel he had accomplished something major with the breaking down of the dam. He couldn’t help but feel that something good, something positive had been accomplished. And that made him feel just fine. Maybe life was nothing so much as a succession of small battles, small victories to be won.
“Derec,” came a voice behind him, and he turned to see Avernus standing there.
“Yes?”
The robot, so large, spoke with a small voice. “I do not know that I can understand why you did what you did to me last night,” he said, “but I cannot help but feel that we did the right thing, and that doing the right thing is what is important.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Derec said, smiling widely. “Friends?”
Avernus nodded solidly. “Friends,” he said, as he laid his pincer in Derec’s open palm in the universal gesture of peace and good will.
It wasn’t going to be such a bad day after all.
Data Bank
KATHERINE ARIEL BURGESS, “KATE”: Kate is a native Auroran, banished from her homeworld because of an incurable disease. Despite her illness and a pampered upbringing, Kate is headstrong, tough, demanding, and resourceful. On the advice of the medical robot Galen, she refuses to tell Derec what she knows of his past life.
ROBOT CITY: The city is a unique blend of visionary architecture and state-of-the-art robotics, designed to accommodate both its robot and (eventual) human populations in the areas of safety, movement, and easy access. The city material is an iron-plastic-carbon alloy using carbon monoxide as a reducing agent. This raw material is etched with micro-circuits. The result is an artificially intelligent “City” capable of pre-programmed movement and structural change, but still reactant to stimuli. The city material is strong yet flexible, each cell (approx. 1/16” x 1/32”) able to interact in a variety of ways with its brother cells. The cells bear a striking structural relationship to the Key to Perihelion.
The city architecture is based on combinations of the “perfect” geometric solids, and is constantly changing as the city grows and adapts. Entire new buildings can spring up overnight, and disappear just as suddenly.
WITNESS ROBOTS: These robots contain specialized sensor equipment and are equipped to function only as event witnesses and reporters. Capable only of first-level (observation) connections, the witness robot has no lifting appendages, in order to maintain detached objectivity.
EULER: One of the main Supervisor robots of Robot City, Euler possesses a bipedal, bilaterally symmetrical structure covered with a metallic skin. Supervisors control the basic functions of the city and constitute the central computer. They have access to the central data core and are capable of second-level connections, drawing conclusions from existing data.