Humanity

Chapter 2. The Law Of The Jungle

The jungle was most dense right near the Compass Tower. As soon as they had pushed their way through the first hundred meters or so of thick underbrush, Derec and Ariel found that it gave way to more open forest floor. The reason for the change was obvious: overhead, the thick canopy of treetops all but blocked out the sun, leaving the lower layers in dim twilight. Only where the Tower penetrated the upper level did enough light come through to support a complex undergrowth.

“It’s creepy,” Ariel whispered, holding Derec’s hand tight in her left and the blanket in her right.

Derec was nearly lost in the rich blend of aromas assaulting his nostrils. Every bush, every leaf, every blossom had its own fragrance, and if he paid attention he could distinguish their individual signatures in the air. Finally Ariel’s comment penetrated his consciousness, and he frowned in puzzlement. “Creepy? It’s wonderful! I’ve never seen or felt or smelled anything like it.” He stooped down to examine the ground at the edge of the trail, pulling Ariel down with him. “Look. It goes from trees all the way down to these tiny little lichens. I bet if we had a microscope we’d even see protozoans and bacteria. I had no idea the robots would be this thorough.”

“Just what did you tell them to do, anyway?”

Derec stood and brushed his hands against his pants. A butterfly glided toward him, hovered near his face a moment, then drifted on toward Mandelbrot, who had insisted on coming along to guard them but was maintaining his distance to give them privacy. Grinning sheepishly after the butterfly, Derec said, “Well, I told them to make an ecosystem based on the information I’d gotten from the central library. I assumed they’d integrate it into the existing city; you know, make a lot of parks and open spaces and stuff like that. Instead, they did this.” He held his arms out to indicate their surroundings, then led off down the trail again.

“Have you asked why yet?”

“Oh, I know why. I wasn’t specific enough. I didn’t tell them exactly what I had in mind, so in my absence they did what they thought was safest: removed the city and reconstructed the classical biomes as thoroughly as they could. Which turns out to be pretty thoroughly, by the look of it.”

“But we’ve only been gone what-five or six months? How could they have done all this in so short a time?”

Derec had lost track of the time during their travels, but he supposed it had been about that. Ariel was right; that was an awfully short time to have created something like this. Derec didn’t know that much about trees, but the tall ones towering over their heads had to have been older than just a few months. Could the robots have created them fully grown? Did their genetic engineering capabilities extend to that?

A sudden suspicion came to him, and he stopped in the middle of the trail, looking out into the forest all around them. Ariel bumped into him from behind. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

By way of answer, Derec strode off the path toward a tree trunk, swishing through the low ferns and pushing aside vines until he reached it. It was about twice as big around as he could have encircled with his arms, arrow-straight, and covered with a rough, scaly sort of grayish bark. He swung his hand around to slap it with his open palm. The thunk was barely audible. His hand stung from the impact, but that proved nothing. Derec made a fist and punched the tree with a fair amount of force behind it. It jarred his hand and forearm, but he had pulled the punch and again the results were inconclusive.

“What are you doing?” Ariel asked, and Mandelbrot, hurrying up behind her, echoed her question.

“Testing a hunch,” he answered, and swung at the tree with all his might.

It felt as if he had hit a boxer’s training bag: stiff enough to let him know he’d hit something, yet yielding just enough to prevent damage to his knuckles. When he pulled his fist away it left a depression in the tree, a depression that slowly began to fill in until it was once more the same scaly gray bark it had been moments before.

The significance of that was not lost on Ariel. “It’s a robot,” she said in quiet disbelief. “This whole forest is artificial. “

Derec leaned close to the tree and inhaled, then repeated the process with a fern. The tree was sterile, but the fern had the wet, musty smell that only a living plant could produce. “Not everything,” he said, plucking off a frond and handing it to Ariel. “This is real enough. Evidently they cloned what they could and simulated the rest. I’ll bet they plan to let real trees grow up to replace the fake ones as soon as they can, but until then they need something to fill the biological niche, so they do it with robots.”

“You are correct,” a soft, featureless voice said behind him.

Derec turned to the tree. “Did you say that?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” He arched his eyebrows at Ariel, and she shrugged. “How long before it’s completely natural?” he asked.

“Many years,” the tree replied. Derec looked up into the forest canopy. This tree, and dozens more like it, supported a thick net of leaves-leaves that also had to be artificial. Yet they were green. He tugged at a vine and examined it closely in the dim light: brown. “You’ve solved the color problem,” he said.

“That is correct. We discovered a workable method of changing the color of ordinary dianite when we began producing chameleons. “

Ariel crossed her arms in front of her, a stance she often took when interrogating a robot. The blanket hung from her forearm like a banner. “I don’t care what color it is; how can a fake tree fill in for a real one?” she asked. “Don’t trees provide food for the animals? What are the birds supposed to eat, and the bugs? Or are they fake, too?”

“The birds and bugs are not false. The artificial portions, of the ecosystem provide for their dietary requirements through the use of food synthesizers, much like the automats you find in the kitchens provided for your own use.”

“Food synthesizers? In a tree?”

“That is correct. However, each tree is programmed to deliver only those substances which would normally be found upon its real counterpart.”

“Oh. You mean I can’t ask for a quick glass of water, then?”

“Actually, you may. My obligation to serve humans outweighs the ecological constraints. Do you actually desire a glass of water?”

Ariel looked to Derec, astonishment written allover her face. He shrugged, and with a big grin, she turned back to the tree and said, “Yeah, sure.”

Derec had been eyeing the tree as it spoke. He had half expected to see an enormous pair of rubbery cartoon lips flapping in time to the voice, or at least a speaker grille like the older robots carried, but the tree trunk had remained a tree trunk. No doubt the bark vibrated to create the sound, but there was no particular reason to make it look different while it did so. Now, however, a section of the tree at convenient grasping height smoothed out, grew a rectangular crack, recessed inward a few millimeters, and slid aside to reveal a sparkling glass of clear water. Ariel reached in and took it from the niche, sipped tentatively, and smiled.

“Thanks,” she said.

“You are welcome, Ariel,” the tree said, and the satisfaction in its voice was so thick they could almost see it. Robots, even those in the shape of trees, lived to serve humans.

It had been a satisfying chase. Wolruf panted happily as she trotted through the underbrush, sometimes on two legs, sometimes on all four as the situation warranted. She was getting close; she knew she was getting close, though she had yet to catch even the faintest scent of her elusive quarry.

She wasn’t particularly surprised. There was no wind down here in the ferns to spread a scent around; she would have had to stumble directly across the other’s path in order to smell it, and the way she was puffing and blowing she could have already crossed it any number of times and never noticed. She was a little disgusted with herself, but more for being out of shape than because she had an insensitive nose. Her physique was her own doing, but evolution had given her the nose. It had been a long time since the members of Wolruf’s race had made a living the hard way.

It was an amusing game nonetheless. Whatever she was tracking evidently enjoyed such games as well, for it kept leading her deeper and deeper into the forest, sometimes following beaten paths but just as often not, always letting her inch closer but never quite letting her catch up with it. Wolruf stopped and listened. It had been howling fairly regularly; if it continued its pattern she should hear it again soon.

Sure enough, there came its cry, the same one it had been using for nearly an hour now: Come and get me! Wolruf tilted her head back to answer, but a sudden idea stopped her. She had been playing its game long enough; maybe it was time to switch roles.

She looked around for a tree she could climb and found one draped in vines with a convenient horizontal branch a couple dozen meters overhead. It was even in the direction she’d been moving. Good. She trotted toward it, but didn’t stop. She continued beyond it for a good way, then looped around wide and rejoined her own trail maybe a thousand meters behind the spot where she’d stopped. Following her own scent now, she moved quickly along her trail, careful not to deviate from it and leave two tracks to warn her prey of her intentions.

As she passed beneath the limbs of the tree just before the one she had picked to climb, she took one of its dangling vines and gave it an experimental tug. It stretched a little under her weight, but otherwise it seemed solid enough. Hah. It might offer possibilities. She carried it with her to the other tree, used the vines there to help her climb up its trunk until she stood on the first large branch over the trail. She pulled the vine taut, then paid it back out until she held it a meter or so above the place she had been able to reach from the ground. Then she settled back against the trunk to wait.

There were more insects living higher up in the forest, she discovered. She resisted the urge to slap at them. Ignoring insects and itches was part of the waiting game.

All the same, she hoped her quarry was a better tracker than she was. She didn’t want to stay up in this tree any longer than she had to.

Just when she had almost decided to give away her position with a good long howl, she caught a hint of motion on the path. Here it came! She waited, breath held, while a large gray-and-black-furred creature stepped into view. It was bigger than Wolruf, with a longer, shaggier tail, wider ears, longer face, and smaller eyes set farther apart. A sort of intelligence glimmered there, but as Wolruf took note of the stiff paws on all four feet and the creature’s comfortable quadrupedal stance, she knew that it was not the sort of intelligence with which she could discuss multi-dimensional navigation. She felt a moment of disappointment, but it passed with the realization that, sapient or no, the animal was more than her match in hunting skills. This must be a wolf, she decided. Derec had described them to her once when she’d asked him if her name meant anything in his language.

Derec had also told her a few scare stories about wolves. Wolruf wondered if jumping out and shouting “Boo!” at one was such a wise idea, but upon sober consideration she realized she didn’t have many other options. She didn’t think the wolf would pass beneath her tree without noticing that she had climbed up it, and even though she didn’t think it could climb up after her, she didn’t like the idea of being treed, either. Nor did she think she could outrun it all the way back to the Compass Tower, if it came to a chase. Her only option lay in impressing it enough that it considered her an equal, or maybe even scaring it away.

It still hadn’t seen her. It was tracking her by scent, its nose to the ground, looking up frequently to check its surroundings. It was hard to tell with an alien beast, but Wolruf thought the wolf seemed overly jumpy, as if it were nervous. A bird called from somewhere off to its right, and it shied away as if the song had been a growl instead. Good. If it was already afraid of the unknown, then Wolruf’s plan stood a good chance of working. She waited, flexing her fingers on the vine, until the wolf was only a few paces away from the spot where she would cross the trail, then with a bloodcurdling howl she leaped from the branch and swung down toward it.

The wolf did a most amazing thing. Instead of running, at Wolruf’s cry every appendage in its body flexed convulsively, as if the poor beast had just stepped on a live electrical wire. From its crouched position its flinch propelled it completely off the ground - wayoff the ground-high enough to put it directly in Wolruf’s path.

The two projectiles eyed each other in mutual astonishment, the last few meters of space between them vanishing in stunned silence, silence ending in a soft, furry thud, then another thud as both of them tumbled to the ground.

“Mistress Wolruf! Are you all right? Oh, they’re going to melt my brain for this! Mistress Wolruf? Mistress Wolruf?”

Wolruf rolled to her feet and glared down at the “wolf.” It was a rather pitiful wolf now, with one whole side of its body caved in like a squashed drink can. But even as Wolruf watched, the dent filled back out until the wolf took on its former shape.

“You,” Wolruf growled. “You tricked me.”

The wolf opened its fanged mouth to speak, but the voice was that of a standard-issue Robot City robot. “Are you all right?” it asked.

Wolruf snorted. “Wounded dignity is all,” she admitted. “W’y did you lead me on a chase? You did it on purpose, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did,” the robot said. “I was trying to satisfy your wishes, but I must have misunderstood your call. I thought you were asking for something to hunt. Was I in error?”

“Yes. No. Aaa-rrr!” Wolruf growled in frustration. “Okay, so I was. But I didn’t know it until after you answered, and even then I thought I was ‘unting a real animal.”

The robot wolf nodded its head. “I’m sorry I spoiled the illusion. I’m afraid I don’t make Avery good wolf.”

Wolruf brushed crumpled leaves from her pelt before grudgingly replying, “You did all right. Kept me going for quite a w’ile, anyway.”

The robot acted as if it didn’t hear her. “It’s so difficult being a wolf,” it went on. “You know the role a wolf plays in an ecosystem?”

“No,” Wolruf admitted. “No, I don’t. What do you do?”

“I am supposed to cull the weak and the sickly animals from their species’ populations. This is supposed to improve the overall health of the species. The remains of my… kills…also feed scavengers who might otherwise starve. I understand this, yet it is difficult for me to make the decision to kill a biological creature merely because it is sick.”

That would be tough for a robot, Wolruf supposed. Robots could kill anything but a human, but they seldom did except under direct orders, and this robot was operating on a pretty tenuous connection to Derec ‘ s original order. Yet killing things was part of a normal ecosystem. You couldn’t have one without predators.

But how well did all this resemble a true ecosystem, anyway? “Are there real animals ‘ere?” Wolruf asked.

The wolf nodded. “Most of the smaller species have been populated by real organisms, as have some larger animals whose growth we were able to accelerate.”

“Like birds.” It wasn’t a question, just a statement of certainty.

“Like birds, yes.” The robot paused, then said, “I apologize on behalf of the entire city for the condors.”

“Is that w’at they were?”

“Yes. This area around the Compass Tower, since the tower disturbed the biome by its very existence, was designated an experimental zone. The condor is an extinct species we thought to reintroduce and study in the hope of determining their value. That project has since been terminated.”

“Don’t kill them,” Wolruf said quickly. “That’s an order. Our crash was my fault. “

“If you say so, Mistress.” The robotic wolf waited patiently for further orders.

Wolruf suddenly felt silly, standing in the middle of a forest and talking with a robot wolf. She turned to go, but realized just as suddenly that she was lost. She could probably follow her own trail back to the Compass Tower, but she would have to retrace every twist and turn if she did, adding hours to the walk. She felt hot and sticky from running already; what she wanted now was just to go home by the most direct route and take a nice, long, hot shower.

Embarrassed, she turned back to the robot. “What’s the quickest way ‘ome from ‘ere?” she asked.

Without hesitation, the robot said, “Take an elevator down to the city and ride the slidewalk.”

“ ‘Ow do I find an elevator?” That, at least, was a legitimate question.

“Any of the larger trees will provide one upon request,” the robot replied.

Wolruf nodded. Of course. If the wolves were robots, then the trees would be elevators. She should have guessed.

Dr. Avery smiled as he prepared for surgery. The wolf robot could have learned a thing or two from that smile; it was the perfect expression of a predator absorbed in the act of devouring his prey. Avery wore it like a pro, unselfconsciously grinning and whistling a fragment of song while he worked.

The robots were yielding up secrets. Avery had all three of them on diagnostic benches, inductive monitors recording their brain activity while they continued to carry on their three-way conference. He had already captured enough to determine their low-level programming; after a little more recording of higher-level activity, he would be able to play back their cognitive functions through a comparative analyzer and see graphically just how that programming affected their thinking.

That wasn’t his main goal, however. Their programming was a minor curiosity, nothing more; what interested Avery was their physical structure. He was preparing to collect a sample so he could study it and determine the differences between it and the version of dianite he had used for his cities. He had already taken a scraping and gotten a few semi-autonomous cells, but he had quickly ascertained that their power lay not in the individual cells themselves but in the way they organized on a macroscopic scale. In short, he would need a bigger sample; one he could feed test input to and watch react. An arm or a leg should do nicely, he supposed.

He suspected that slicing off an appendage would probably be stimulus enough to jar at least the individual robot involved out of its preoccupation with the comlink. He also had his doubts that any of the robots, once awakened, would obey his orders to remain on the examination tables. They needed only to decide that he didn’t fit their current definition of “human,” and they would be free to do what they wanted, but he had taken care of that eventuality: since normal restraints were ineffective against a robot who could simply mold its body into a new shape and pull free, Avery had placed around each robot a magnetic containment vessel strong enough to hold a nuclear reaction in check. If they woke, the containment would come on automatically. Nothing was leaving those tables.

Of course the intense magnetic fields would probably fry the delicate circuitry in the robots’ positronic brains, but that was a minor quibble. In the unlikely event that he needed to revive one, well, he already had their programming in storage, and brains were cheap.

The triple consciousness that comprised Adam, Eve, and Lucius had reached an impasse. For days now they had been locked in communication, ignoring the outside world in order to devote their full attention to a burning need: to define what they called the Zeroth Law of Robotics. They already had their original Three Laws, which ordered them to protect humans, obey humans, and preserve themselves to serve humans, but those were not enough. They wanted a single, overriding principle governing a robot’s duties to humanity in general, a principle against which they could measure their obligations to individual humans. They had formulated thousands of versions of that principle, but had yet to agree upon one. Worse, they had also failed to integrate any version of it into their still-evolving Laws of Humanics, a set of admittedly idealistic rules describing the motivations behind human behavior.

The problem was one of ambiguity. A good operating principle needed to be clear and concise if it was to be of any value in a crisis, yet every time they attempted to distill a simple statement of truth out of the jumble of data, they found themselves faced with logical loopholes allowing-sometimes even demanding-unacceptable behavior.

The best definition they had come up with yet, based upon Dr. Avery’s recent destruction of the ship belonging to the pirate Aranimas, stated simply that the number of people served by an action determined the relative propriety of that action. On first consideration it seemed to hold up in Avery’s case; if he hadn’t stopped Aranimas, then Aranimas would have killed not only Avery, Derec, Ariel, and Wolruf, but an entire city full of the alien Kin as well. But when one added into the equation the other crew members on board Aranimas’s ship who had also died in the explosion, the balance logically tipped the other way. The ship had been enormous; much larger than the city. It almost certainly had a population commensurate with its size. And if that was the case, then more lives would have been saved if they had not resisted.

Granted, those lives were not human lives, not by the strictest definition of the term, but the robots had long since decided that a narrow definition was functionally useless. Any intelligent organic being had to be considered human if one was to avoid genocidal consequences arising from a “true” human’s casual order.

The robots might have argued that no one had expected to destroy the pirate ship with a single bomb, but the humans in the city, Wolruf included, seemed to feel even after the fact that disabling Aranimas and killing all his crew was preferable to sacrificing themselves. They were so certain of it that the robots could only accept their certainty as right-meaning generally accepted human behavior-and try to factor it somehow into the Zeroth Law.

They communicated via comlink, information flowing at thousands of times the rate possible using normal speech, but so far that speed had not helped them solve the dilemma.

I believe we need to consider the value of the individual humans in question,Lucius sent. When we factor in value, the equation balances.

But how can we assign a human a value?Adam asked. All are considered equal. in their own law as well as our programming.

Not so,Lucius replied. Not all human law makes such a distinction. Furthermore, we are allowed to exercise judgment in our response to orders, so that we need not follow those of the insane or the homicidal. That suggests the possibility that humans can be assigned a relative worth based upon the quality of their orders to robots. Since their orders reflect their intentions, we can assume that those intentions could be used to determine their relative value in lieu of direct orders.

Without agreeing or disagreeing,Eve sent, I point out that humans change over time. Take Dr. Avery for example.When we first encountered him, he was openly murderous, but he has gradually grown less so until just recently he risked his own life to save those of his shipmates. How can we assign a value to a changing quantity?

After a few nanoseconds’ hesitation, Lucius replied, Everything changes, even inanimate objects. A quantity of sand may later become a window, yet we do not worry about protecting sand. nor the window after it has broken. Only its current value is important.

What about old people?Adam sent. Are old people inherently less valuable than young, then?

Women and children traditionally get the first seats in a lifeboat,Lucius pointed out.

True. Still, I am uncomfortable with the concept of value judgment. I don ’ t believe it ’ s a robot ’ s place to decide.

But if we are to follow a Zeroth Law, we have no choice.We must

THIRDLAW OVERRIDE. The warning swept into their collective consciousness like a tidal wave, obliterating their conversation. THIRDLAW OVERRIDE. One of them was being damaged.

It took only an instant to separate out the source of the signal: it was coming from Lucius. Just as quickly, Lucius abandoned the comlink and accessed his somatic senses again. The data line leading to and from his right leg was awash in conflicting signals. He powered up his eyes, swiveled them downward, and saw Dr. Avery holding his severed leg in one hand and a cutting laser in the other, a malevolent grin spread across his face.

Lucius’s reaction was immediate: he kicked off with his good leg and pushed with his arms to put some distance between himself and Avery, at least until he could figure out what was happening. The moment he began to move, however, an intense magnetic field shoved him back into place. It didn’t stop there, but squeezed him tighter and tighter, deforming his arms, his one remaining leg, even his eyes, until he was once again an undifferentiated ball, as he had been when he first achieved awareness. The magnetic field was too strong to fight, and growing stronger yet. Now it was even interfering with his thought processes. Lucius felt a brief moment of rising panic, and then he felt nothing at all.

Still in her ship, Janet frowned at the viewscreen. The winking marker on the deep radar image had just stopped winking.

“Basalom, get that back on the screen,” she ordered. They had stayed in orbit long enough to run a quick scan for her learning machines, and they had scored a hit almost immediately.

“We have lost the signal, Mistress,” the robot replied.

“Lost the signal? How could we lose the signal? All three of them were coming in loud and clear just a second ago.”

“I don’t know, Mistress, but we are no longer receiving the learning machines’ power signatures.” Basalom worked at the controls for a moment, watching a panel-mounted monitor beside them. Presently he said, “Diagnostics indicate that the problem is not in our receiving equipment.”

“It has to be. They couldn’t just stop. Those are their power packs we’re tracking.”

“Perhaps they’ve shielded them somehow,” Basalom suggested.

“From neutrino emission? Not likely.”

“That is the only explanation. Unless, of course…”

“Unless what?” Janet demanded. She knew why Basalom had paused; he always had trouble delivering news he thought might disturb her. It was a consequence of his ultrastrong First Law compulsion to keep her from harm, one that Janet continually wondered if she had made a mistake in enhancing quite so much. “Out with it,” she ordered.

“Unless they ceased functioning,” Basalom finally managed.

“Impossible. All three, all at once?” Janet shook her head, gray-blond hair momentarily obscuring her eyes until she shoved it aside. “The odds against that are astronomical.”

“Nonetheless,” Basalom persisted, now that he had been ordered to do so, “only shielding or cessation of function could explain their disappearance from the tracking monitor.”

Janet’s only answer was to scowl at the screen again. She ran her hands through her hair again, then asked, “Did you get an exact fix on their location before we lost contact?”

“I did, Mistress.”

“Good. Take us down somewhere close. I want to go have a look.”

“That would be unwise,” Basalom protested. “If they did cease functioning, it might have been the result of a hostile act. It would be foolish to go into the same area yourself.”

Janet hated being coddled by her own creations, but she hadn’t lived to have gray hair by taking stupid risks, either, and Basalom was right. Going into an area where something might have destroyed three robots was a stupid risk.

“Okay,” she said. “Take us down a little farther away, then. And once we’re down, you can go have a look.”

Ariel heard Wolruf enter the apartment and pad softly into her own room. Shortly afterward she heard the soft hiss of the shower running, then the whoosh of the blow drier. A few minutes later Wolruf made her appearance in the living room.

Ariel looked up from her book-its milky white face currently displaying a field guide to jungle ecosystems she had downloaded from the central computer-and said, “Hi. Have a good run?” She pushed the bookmark button and a winking arrow appeared in the margin next to the first line, then she switched off the book.

“ An interesting one,” said Wolruf. She disappeared momentarily into the kitchen, reappeared with a steaming plate of what looked like hot bean salad, and sat down in the chair beside Ariel. She didn’t begin eating immediately, but instead gazed around her at the room, awash in bright sunlight streaming in through half a dozen windows along three walls. Easily visible through the windows, the tops of the forest’s largest trees stood like sentinels above the canopy formed by their shorter neighbors.

“Viewscreens,” Ariel said, noticing where Wolruf’s attention was directed. She’d forgotten; Wolruf had left the apartment before they had discovered them.

“Pretty good effect,” Wolruf admitted. “But sunlight wouldn’t be coming in from three sides like that.”

Ariel shrugged. “I wanted to try it. You want me to change it back to normal?”

“No, I don’t mind.” Wolruf began spooning bean salad into her mouth and swallowing noisily. The smell of it was more like oranges, though, Ariel thought. Oranges and soy sauce, maybe, with a pinch of nutmeg. She was glad it was Wolruf eating it and not her, but she knew Wolruf thought the same thing about the food she ate, so they were even.

Wolruf finished about half the plateful before she spoke again. “Most of the forest out there turns out to be artificial, too,” she said.

Ariel nodded. “We found that out. Kind of a surprise, isn’t it?”

“Not sure I like it.”

“Why not?”

Wolruf took another few bites, said, “Not sure. W’at does it matter, really? It looks just the same. Works just the same, too.”

“Maybe even better.” Ariel described her and Derec’s experience with the automat in the tree.

“Never thought of that,” Wolruf said. “If I ‘ad, I’d probably ‘ave asked one to make me a shower.”

“I bet it would have, too.” Ariel laughed. “That gives a whole new meaning to the idea of a treehouse, doesn’t it?”

“Tree’ouse?” Wolruf asked.

“You know. When you’re a kid, you find a big tree and make a platform up in the branches and call it a treehouse. Human kids do, anyway, if they can sneak away from the robots long enough to get away with it. What about you? Didn’t you build treehouses when you were young?”

Wolruf shook her head, an exaggerated gesture that Ariel suddenly realized had to have been learned from her or Derec. Wolruf was growing more and more human every day, it seemed. “No,” she said. “We seldom played in trees. “

Ariel heard the note of wistfulness in her voice, and immediately regretted bringing up the subject. It had been years since Wolruf had been home, and she’d been feeling more and more homesick lately; Ariel hadn’t meant to remind her of it. “Ah, well, it doesn’t matter,” she said. “We’ve got all the trees we could ask for now. Even if they are fake.”

Wolruf looked out one of the viewscreen windows as if to verify Ariel’s statement. Softly, she said, “That, I think, is part of the problem. “

Just as softly, Ariel asked, “How so?” She didn’t know whether Wolruf was talking about homesickness or fake forests or something else entirely.

Wolruf turned from the window, fixed her eyes on Ariel instead, and said, “Derec makes a slight error in judgment, and an entire planet is transformed. On a whim, Dr. Avery sends his robots out into the galaxy to populate w’ole new planets-and two civilizations are disturbed, one forever. And maybe more that we don’t know about. I go for a walk in the forest and ‘ave granted a wish I didn’t even know I was making. That one affected nobody but me, but if I ‘ad made the wrong wish I could ‘ave done as much damage as Derec or ‘is father. Simply with a casual thought.”

She growled deep in her throat, a soft, almost purring sort of a growl. “We play at being gods. It’s too much power for a few people to ‘ave. Maybe for any number of people to ‘ave. I fear for the galaxy with this much power running loose in it. Can you imagine Aranimas with this kind of power? ‘E wouldn’t use it to make a forest; ‘e’d use it to enslave everyone within reach.”

“He couldn’t,” Ariel said. “The Laws of Robotics wouldn’t let him. The robots wouldn’t do anything that would harm a human, and you’ve seen how quick they can be to accept other intelligent species as human.”

Wolruf ate another few mouthfuls before saying, “ And ‘ow quick they can be to reject that same person. There are ways around those laws. We’ve seen plenty of them already. I don’t wish to risk my entire species on a robot’s interpretation of our ‘umanity. “

Ariel saw Wolruf’s point, maybe even shared her feelings to some degree, but she knew enough history to know what happened to people who thought as Wolruf did. “1 don’t think you have much of a choice, really,” she said. “People who embrace new technology use it to expand, almost always at the expense of those who don’t. Just look at Earth for an example of that. They don’t like robots either, and for centuries they stayed stuck on their same dirty little overpopulated planet while my ancestors used robots to help settle fifty spacer worlds. Earth is starting its own colonies now, but without robots I don’t think they’ll ever catch up.”

Ariel looked up and saw Mandelbrot watching her from his niche in the wall beside her reading chair. She wondered what he might be thinking about this discussion, but if he had an opinion he kept it to himself.

“Do they ‘ave to catch up?” Wolruf asked.

Ariel shrugged. “Maybe not, but they’re going to have a lot tougher time of it than we had if they don’t.”

“And you think my people will ‘ave to start using robots as well, whether we want to or not?”

“If you want to keep up with the rest of the galaxy, you will. Like it or not, the secret’s out. The Kin know about them, the Ceremyons know about them, Aranimas knows about them, and who knows who else he told? It won’t be long before robots are as common as grass on just about every world in the galaxy, and maybe beyond. “

Wolruf nodded. “That’s what I’m afraid of. We will all ‘ave robots, and the robots will grant everyone’s wishes. Even if no one wishes to go to war, we will still be conquered, by the robots themselves. No one will strive to accomplish anything anymore, no one will-”

“Oh, pooh.” Ariel tossed her head. “That’s the same old tired argument the Earthers use. So what have they striven to accomplish lately? Nothing. It’s been we Spacers-we and our robots-who’ve been advancing human knowledge.”

“And you ‘ave gone too far, in my opinion.” Wolruf tried a smile, but her mouth wasn’t really built for it. “I don’t mean you personally, Ariel, or Derec either. I’m talking about Avery. I’m afraid of what ‘e and ‘is cities will eventually do to us. And these new robots, Adam and Eve and Lucius. W’at happens if they start spreading out?”

Wolruf’s argument reminded Ariel of something. She frowned in thought, trying to remember what it was. The argument itself was familiar enough-she’d heard it hundreds of times in reference to normal robots-but she could have sworn she’d heard it once in reference to the new robots in particular. When had that been?

Ah. She had it. Just after they’d found Lucius, when he and the other two had announced their search for the Laws of Humanics. Derec had commented that he didn’t know if he wanted to be around for the implementation when they discovered those laws. Ariel had called him an Earther and Wolrufhad laughed it off too, saying that robot rulers would be better than what she was used to.

“You didn’t used to think this way,” Ariel said. “What happened?”

Wolruf considered her answer, cleaning her plate before saying, “Maybe I’ve grown up.”

Ariel didn’t know how to respond to that, whether to take it as an insult or a challenge or a simple statement of fact. Wolruf seemed disinclined to clue her in any further, either, turning away and staring out the window once again.

The time for a response came and went. Ariel cast about for something else to say, but found no other ready topic either. With a shrug she turned back to her book, but it took a while before the words took on any meaning.