Cursing once more, Bruno waved the floor and ceiling lights back up. Glass windows appeared in the walls, admitting the morning sun once again. His furniture reverted to wood— wellwood, anyway—its colored controls and displays vanishing, leaving smooth surfaces behind. A couple of murals appeared beneath the stenciled images of telescopes and rocket-ships on the walls. This was a plain room—small, uncluttered and maybe a little old-fashioned—-exactly as Bruno felt a study should be.
“I apologize for not detecting the vessel sooner,” the house said with quiet, reflexive contrition.
“It’s all right,” Bruno grumbled, and surprised himself by meaning it. Nothing genuinely new had happened around here for a very long time. There’d been no reason to expect… anything, really.
“The vessel is approaching much faster than a neutronium barge would do,” the house went on, as if feeling the need to explain itself. “Anticipating nothing of the kind, I’d set the detection radü much too close. The failure of your experiment was likely a direct result.”
Bruno waved himself a door and exited into the living room, a mess of models and food containers and discarded clothing, which was exactly as that should be, but seeing it now he nodded, pursed his lips and said, “Stop apologizing and clean this up. If we’re to have company, we must be presentable, yes? What’s the ID on the ship?”
“None available, sir. Our network gate is nonfunctional. For four years now.”
“Oh. Right.”
The robot servants were neither wholly autonomous nor wholly appendages of the house software, neither self-aware nor rigidly programmed. Creatures of silent intuition, they danced through their chores like dreams, like puppets in some tightly choreographed ballet. They knew just what paths to take, what joints to swivel or extend, their economy of motion perfect. They knew just where to put everything, too; most of the clutter was faxware and went back into the fax for recycling, but some objects were original or natural or otherwise sentimental, and each found a place on a shelf or table, or in his bedroom closet around the corner. Speaking of which…
“Seal that,” he said, gesturing at the bedroom door. It slid closed at once, merged with the wall, sprouted bright mural paints—nonrepresentational.
He grunted his approval, then asked, “ETA?”
“Five minutes, twenty seconds.”
He grunted again, less approving this time. The house had standing orders never to mark time in seconds—there were just too many of them, a whole eternity’s worth. But under the circumstances, he supposed it had little choice.
Visitors.
Visitors! Suddenly alarmed, he sniffed himself. “Damn, I probably stink. These clothes are probably ugly. Bathe and dress me, please. Quickly!”
The robots were there so fast they might well have anticipated the request. Cap and vest and tunic and breeches were torn from Bruno’s body and hurled into the fax orifice for recycling. He forced himself to relax, to let his arms be lifted, his torso turned. The robots, with their faceless expressions of infinite gentleness, would rather die than cause him the slightest injury or discomfort, and any resistance on his part would only slow them down, make them gentler still. He let them work, and in another moment their metal hands were buffing him with sponges and damp, scented cloths. A well-stone grease magnet was stroked seven times through his hair, becoming a heated styling comb on the eighth stroke. The fax produced fresh clothing—suitable for company— that smoothed and buttoned itself around him as the robots fussed.
He refused an application of blush.
“Is it landing here? Nearby?” he asked.
“Its course indicates a touchdown in the meadow, forty meters to the east. It is recommended that you remain indoors until this procedure is complete.”
“Hmm? Yes, well. Full transparency on the roof and east wall, please.”
Obligingly, a third of the house turned to glass. To actual glass, yes—wellstone was an early form of programmable matter[2]—and if danger threatened it could just as easily turn to impervium or Bunkerlite, or some other durable super-reflector.
“There’s a good house,” he murmured approvingly, his eyes scanning the now-visible sky.
Despite the interruption, despite the loss of his collapsium and the rudeness of this too-swift approach, Bruno found himself almost anticipating the landing, the arrival of visitors. Almost. It was a long time since he’d last had company, and that had just been the men from the neutronium barge, eager for a breath of fresh air before turning their ship around and faxing themselves back home.
One of them, newly rich and bursting with gratitude, had given Bruno a gift: a neuble-sized diamond ball filled with water instead of neutronium. There’d been algae and bacteria and near-microscopic brine shrimp inside, a whole ecology that needed only light to function, perhaps eternally. “In case you get lonely, sir,” the man had said. Indoors, though, Bruno’s light-dark cycles were irregular, and the thing had died on his shelf in a matter of weeks. His last human interaction. A lesson?
The morning sky shone brightly through the glass. Bruno asked for a reticle to indicate the ship’s position, and the house obligingly cast up a circle of green light the size of a dinner plate, which barely moved and inside which he could see nothing. Soon there were glints of yellow-white at the center, though, sunlight reflecting from bright metal, and in another minute he could see an actual dot beyond the shallow blue-white haze of his atmosphere. The dot resolved into a little toy ship, then a big toy ship drifting high above the sky—a wingless metal teardrop spilling outside the boundaries of the green reticle—and finally, with alarming swiftness, it swelled to something the size of his house and burst though the feathery cirrus layer and the haze beneath it. Clouds rolled off its bright burnished skin, seeming to wrinkle and snap in the blur of a gravity deflection field. Jets fired, little blasts of yellow-hot plasma that scorched his meadow grass white, then black, in tight bull’s-eye circles. A shadow raced from the horizon to throw itself beneath the vehicle as the space between it and terra firma shrank to meters, centimeters, nothing.
There was no thump of impact, no solid confirmation of landing until the maneuvering jets darkened and the shimmer of the deflection field snapped away into clear focus. The sounds of reentry and landing had been no louder than a breeze through the treetops. Skillfully done.
What fixed Bruno’s attention, though, was the seal imprinted on the side of that gleaming hulclass="underline" a blue, white, and green Earth shaded by twin palms, with three more planets hovering in the background. And hanging above them all, a crown of monocrystalline diamond.
“Door,” he said, standing in front of a row of shelves, looking past them at the landing site. The house seemed to hesitate for a moment, as if wondering whether to open the wall right there—carefully, of course, so as not to drop or break anything—or to make him go a few steps around. Which choice would minimize his inconvenience and displeasure? But the decision itself, teetering precariously at a balance point, took long enough that Bruno became annoyed anyway.
“Door!” he snapped, when almost two seconds had expired. The wall before him opened instantly, robots rushing quietly forward to steady the shelved vases and picture frames, to whisk the little drink table out of his way. He stepped through the opening, out into dewy, meadow-fragrant air.
The side of the ship was marred by a rectangular seam, ringed all around with rivets. No wellstone, that, but honest metal, a passive device for containing air, for holding out vacuum. A hatch. Presently, light fanned from its upper edge, and the hatch swung downward, revealing a carpeted staircase affixed to its inner surface. This made contact with the ground, forming a perfect little exitway.