"Dear Annie, if you were only human."
Anneturned her sensor lights on, all of them. Thought a moment. "Corollary, Warren?"
"To what? To if? Anne, my love, you aren't, and there isn't any." He had confused her. The lights flickered one after the other. "Clarify."
"Human nature, that's all. Humans don't function well alone. They need contact with someone. But I'm all right. It's nothing to concern you."
The motors hummed faintly and Annereached out and let her hand down on his shoulder. The action was so human it frightened him. He looked into her ovoid face at the lights that danced inside and his heart beat wildly.
"Is your status improving?"
Contact with someone. He laughed sorrowfully and breathed a sigh.
"I perceive internal disturbances."
"Laughter. You know laughter."
"This was different."
"The pace of laughter varies."
"Recorded." Annedrew back her hand. "You're happy."
" Anne—what do you think about when I'm not here. When I'm not asking you to do something, and you have thoughts, what are they?"
"I have a standard program."
"And what's that?"
"I maintain energy levels, regulate my circulation and temperature, monitor and repair my component—"
"Cancel. You don't think. Like you do with me. You don't ask questions, decide, follow sequences of reasoning."
The lights blinked a moment. "The automatic functions are sufficient except in an anomalous situation."
"But I'm talking to the AI. You. the AI's something other than those programs. What do you do, sleep?"
"I wait."
Like the pseudosome, standing indefinitely. No discomfort to move her, to make her impatient.
"You investigate stimuli."
"Yes."
"But there aren't many, are there?"
A delay. Incomplete noun. "They are constant but not anomalous."
"You're bored too."
"Bored. No. Bored is not a state of optimum function. Bored is a human state of frustrated need for activity. This is not applicable to me. I function at optimum."
"Functioning constantly doesn't damage you."
"No."
"Use the library. You can do that, can't you? If there aren't adequate stimuli in the environment to engage the AI, use the library. Maybe you'll learn something."
"Recorded."
"And then what do we do?"
The lights blinked. "Context indeterminate. Please restate the question."
"You could know everything there is to know, couldn't you, and you'd sit with it inside you and do nothing."
"Context of doindeterminate. I'm not able to process the word in this context." He reached out, patted her silver leg. The sensors blinked. Her hand came back to him and stayed there, heavy, on his shoulder. Contact.
"That's enough," he said, and removed his hand from her; she did the same. "Thank you, Anne." But he was cold inside.
He relaxed finally, staring out beneath the ship toward the forest.
There was the fear. There was where it sat. He hurt inside, and the healing was there, not sealing himself into the ship. Sterility. Inane acts and inane conversation.
If he feared out there, the fear itself proved he was alive. It was an enemy to fight. It was something he did not program. It held the unanticipated, and that was precious. Anne, waiting forever, absorbing the stimuli and waiting for something anomalous, to turn on her intelligence. He saw himself doing that, sitting in the ship and waiting for a human lifetime—for some anomaly in the wind.
No.
6
He came this time with a different kind of attack, slowly, considerately, the crawler equipped with sensor box and sample kits and recorders and food and water, rope and directional beeper, anything that seemed remotely useful. With the film camera. With a rifle with a nightscope. Overequipped, if anything, in which he found some humor. . . but he felt the safer for it. The raft was still securely tied to the branch, the sand about it unmarked by the passage of any moving creature, even void of insect tracks. On the far bank the forest waited in the dawn, peaceful—dark inside, as it would always be.
Someday, he promised it. He loaded the raft, trip after trip from the crawler parked up on the bank. Annewas with him, disembodied, in the incarnation of her sensor box, in the com unit. She talked to him, telling him she detected vegetation, and he laughed and snugged the box into the bottom of the raft.
"Reception is impaired," Annecomplained.
"Sorry. I don't want to drop the box into the river."
"Please don't do that, Warren."
He laughed again, in a good humor for Anne's witless witticisms. Piled other supplies about her sensors. "I'll pull you out if I need you. Take care of the ship. I'm shutting you down. Your noise is interfering with my reception."
"Please reconsider this program. The river is dangerous. Please reconsider."
"Quiet." He shut her down. There was a reciprocal turn-on from her side, but she took orders and stayed off this time. He piled the last load in, coat and blanket in case it grew chill on the water.
He untied the raft then, nudged it out a little, stepped in and sat down, taking up the paddle. It was not one of his skills, rafting. He had read the manual and thought it out. Drove against the gentle current, no great work: he reasoned that he could paddle upstream as long as he liked or wanted to, and return was the river's business.
He passed the landing site on the far bank, passed an old log and wound along with the grassy bank on one side and the forest on the other. The river was so still on most of its surface it was hard to see in which direction it flowed. Shores turned to marsh on either side, and at some time unnoticed, the trees on the right, which had been growing thicker and thicker, closed off all view of the grasslands where the ship had landed. The banks began to have a thick border of reeds; some trees grew down into the water, making an obstacle of their knobby roots, making curtains of moss hanging almost low enough to sweep his shoulders as he passed. Green lilies drifted, beds of pads through which he drove the raft with shallow strokes, not to tangle the blade of the paddle in their tough stems. In places the navigable channel was no more than three meters across, a weaving of reeds and sandbars and shadows between banks a good stone's throw from side to side. It was a sleepy place, all tones of green and brown. . . no sky that was not filtered by leaves. A certain kind of tree was in bloom, shedding white petals as large as a man's hand on the water: they drifted like high-stemmed boats, clouds of them afloat, fleets and armadas destroyed by the dip of his paddle and the raft's blunt bow. The full flower had long stamens and pistils so that they looked like white spiders along the branches when they had shed, and like flocks of bird's before. Lilies were rife, and a fine-leafed floating weed grew wherever the water was shallow. It was worse than the lilies for tangling up the paddle: it broke off and hung, slick brownish leaves. It was not, he decided, particularly lovely stuff, and it made going very slow in the narrowest channels.
His shoulders began to ache with the long effort. He kept going long after the ache became painful, anxious not to give ground. . . decided finally to put ashore for a space, when he had seen an area not so brushy and overgrown. He drove for it, rammed the bow up and started pulling it about with strokes of the paddle.