"As you wish. But it is perhaps unnecessary to add that our study of the Laws of Humanics would benefit greatly from any creation you'd attempt."

"If you say so," replied Derec absently, looking up at the clouds reflecting the colors of Circuit Breaker and seeing only the outline of Ariel's face looking down on him.

Chapter 4. Ariel And The Ants

Ariel wandered the city alone. Bored with the discussion between Derec and Lucius, she had discovered she cared little about the robotic reasoning behind the building's creation. She had seen it and been moved by it, and that was enough for her. I guess that puts me in the I-know-what-I-like category, she had observed as she slipped away into an alley.

It was a few moments later, as she walked beside a large canal (currently dry, since it hadn't rained for days), when the strange things started happening again to her mind. Well, not to her mind exactly, she decided upon further consideration, but to her mind's eye. She never had any doubt about who she was or what her real circumstances were, but nevertheless she saw menacing shadows flickering between the buildings beyond, in places so dark she shouldn't have been able to distinguish shades in the first place.

And the shadows were flickering toward her. They reached out with long, two-dimensional fingers across the conduit and disappeared in the lights on the sidewalk. The streetlamps switched on and off, matching her progress. She was constantly bathed in light, forever beyond the grasping fingers' reach, yet she was always walking toward the darkness where the danger was. Ariel wasn't sure how she felt about that. It certainly aggravated her sense of insecurity.

On Aurora, the existence of a solid building had been a dependable thing. Change there happened rarely and gradually.

And her life since she had been exiled from Aurora presented her with a decided contrast. Like Derec and his Shakespeare, she had been doing a little reading on her own lately, on subjects of her own choosing. In a book of Settler aphorisms she' d read an ancient curse: "May you live in interesting times."

Well, interesting times were what she had wished for all those years on Aurora, where something moderately interesting happened once a year if you were lucky. From her earliest memory she had yearned to break free of the boredom and sterility.

And now that she had succeeded beyond her wildest expectations, she wished for nothing more than a little peace and quiet-for nothing more than a period of flat-out boredom, where she had nothing to do and no one to worry about, not even herself. Thanks in part to the disease ravaging her, she was finding it difficult to know just how to act and what to do-a problem she had never had on Aurora, where customs and ethics provided a guide for virtually every social situation.

She imagined herself not in Robot City, but in the fields of Aurora, walking at night, alone but not alone, followed by unseen, loyal robots who would ensure, to the best of their abilities, that she would not come to harm.

Instead of buildings closing in around her there were expansive, open fields of grass and trees, plains whose consistency was broken only by occasional buildings of a more familiar, safer architectural style. The clouds above inspired thoughts of the tremendous Auroran storms, when the thunder rumbled like earthquakes and the lightning exploded from the sky in the shape of tridents.

During such storms the rain flowed as if a dike in the sky had been punctured. The rainfall drenched the fields, cleansed the trees, and she could walk in it and feel it pounding against her all day if she liked-well, at least until her unseen robots would fear she might catch cold and insist she seek shelter.

Here the rain only inspired the gutters to overflow. Here the rain could be a harbinger of death and destruction, rather than of life.

Now where's Derec,she suddenly thought, now that I need him?

Oh. That's right. Talking to Lucius. That's just like him, to be so self-absorbed in things that don't matter, when he should be trying to find some way for us to get off this crazy planet.

Doesn't he understand how badly we both need help? Him for his amnesia. Me for my madness.

Madness? Was that what it was? Wasn't there some other word she could use for it? An abnormality or an aberration? A psychoneurosis? A manic-depressive state? Melancholia?

Where were the fields? she wondered. They had been here just a few moments ago.

Where had these buildings come from?

Were the fields behind them?

She ran around the buildings to take a look. There were only more buildings, extending as far as she could see, until they merged into a flattened horizon. A wall of blackness. More shadows.

She shook her head, and a few mental mists dissipated long enough for her to remember that there were no fields on this planet, that there'd just been desolate rock here before the city had arrived. A city that grew and evolved just like life.

A new kind of life.

She was like a microorganism here. A germ or a virus, standing in the middle of a creature that only let her live because of a few wires and a few bytes of binary information.

Her throat itched. She rubbed her neck. Was she becoming sick? If she was, would a robot notice and medicate her? Would the medication cloud her thinking even more? If it did, would it be a good or bad thing?

Her elbow itched. She scratched it, the effect of her sharp fingernails somewhat muted by her suit. The itch stayed.

She stopped scratching. Maybe it would go away if she ignored it.

It didn't. It got worse. She tried not to think about it, but the sole result was another itching. On her chest. She scratched her breastbone. That itch, too, remained. Neither showed the slightest sign of diminishing.

Where was Derec? she wondered as her fear of losing control aggravated her sense of helplessness, which in turn aggravated her fear of losing control.

Oh, that's right. He's still with the robot.

Hey, I'm all right. I know where I am. I was somewhere else a few seconds ago and I couldn't get back. Come to think of it, is there someplace else I should be rather than here? Shouldn't I be in the future somewhere?

Then she tried to think of her name, and discovered she could not remember that, either. A name seemed like such a basic thing to forget. Nor did it seem that far away. But it wasn't where it was supposed to be: uppermost in her mind, where she could find it whenever she wanted. It was buried in her pathways.

Pathways. Robots had pathways. Was she very much like them?

Was she still alone? If she wasn't, would it make any difference? She felt like her mind was made up of discarded scraps of ideas and impressions that long ago, maybe, had made sense. Right now they just made a junk heap.

She sat down, trying to focus her thoughts and her vision. Without realizing it, she had walked all the way to the reservoir. An ecological system that had been created-but not nurtured-by Dr. Avery. A world that had been left alone to create itself.

She pondered the edible plants growing on the banks. A clear-cut case of evolution in action. Had Dr. Avery envisioned the possibility?

What if other meta-life forms were evolving as well?

Now her stomach and crotch itched. Painfully. Her skin felt like it was burning from spilled acid.

She buried her head in her hands. Her temples throbbed and she feared every artery in her brain was about to burst. It was easy, all too easy, for her to imagine a hemorrhage, the blood seeping everywhere, destroying her involuntary processes, drowning her thoughts.

Had she really wanted to be alone? Where was Derec?