The probe lay encased in mud halfway down a hillside. The once-silvery sides were battered and scorched from the long fall through the atmosphere; drying streamers of black earth coated the dented sides. Ghostly heat waves shimmered, and the metallic hull ticked as it cooled and contracted. The echoes of its landing reverberated for a long time among the hills.

Inside the abused shell, timed relays opened and fed power to the positronic circuitry of the robot nestled in its protective cradle. The neophyte mind found itself in total darkness. Had it been a living creature, its birth instincts would have taken over like a sea turtle burrowing from the wet sand to find the shimmering sea. The robot had its own instinct-analogue-the Three Laws of Robotics. Knowledge of these basic rules flooded the robot’s brightening awareness.

First Law: A robot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not interfere with the First or Second Laws.

This was the manner in which most of known human space defined the Laws. Any schoolchild of Aurora or Earth or Solaris could have recited them by rote. But to the fledgling, there was one important, essential difference. To the fledgling, there were no words involved, only deep, core compulsions. The fledgling had no sense that it had been built or that it was merely a constructed machine.

It didn’t think of itself as a robot.

It only knew that it had certain instructions it must obey.

As survival instincts, the Laws were enough to spark a response. Second Law governed the fledgling’s first reactions, enhanced by Third Law resonance. There were imperious voices in its mind: inbuilt programming, speaking a language it knew instinctively. The robot followed the instructions given it, and more circuits opened.

An opening appeared in the probe’s hull, and the fledgling allowed itself to rollout. The skin of its body shimmered, the myriad dodecahedral segments flexing and shifting as it stretched like warm putty. The robot extruded pseudopods to stabilize the round body. Sensory input was taken in through the skin: optical, auditory, tactile, scent. At the same time, a larger store of basic files was released into the receptive mind: a heavily edited encyclopedia of carefully chosen knowledge. It paused, searching the programming as it absorbed impressions of its surroundings.

A voice whispered.

Move away from the landing site. Beings may come to investigate; they may be aggressive and dangerous. Hide.

Which left the problem: how to move? The positronic brain searched the files and found an answer. The skin molded itself further, the pseudopods becoming muscular legs. The robot scuttled away quickly, moving uphill to a stand of coarse, tall grass. Its round body flattened, the legs retracted; it hunkered down, patient.

As it waited, it inventoried itself dispassionately. The Three Laws overlaid everything else in its mind, but there was more. Most of its programming, and indeed this very self-evaluation, seemed to be manifestations of the Third Law. It must protect its own existence; to survive, it must learn as much as possible.

Underneath the Laws was the layer of initial programming, most of which the fledgling had already followed in the first few minutes of life. Beneath that was a substrate of complex if/then branches. The robot ignored most of those-they all fed back into the Laws in any case.

Only one set of impulses was immediately needed, and that flowed directly from the Laws. A robot may not harm a human being. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, the Laws insisted. But what was a human being?

The programming gave an answer, not a definition but a description: A human being is an intelligent lifeform. So the fledgling, not knowing what a “robot” was other than a term that applied to itself, knew it had to find human beings, to protect and serve them. It had to search out an intelligent lifeform.

It began to formulate a strategy.

The fledgling didn’t move; it continued to wait. Intelligence of necessity implied curiosity. An intelligent lifeform in the immediate area would have seen the fiery, noisy descent. It would come to investigate the fall. If no life that met the criterion arrived, then the fledgling would look elsewhere.

The area in which the probe had landed was heavily forested. Tightly packed trees with large, blue-green fronds huddled nearby and surrounded the grassy, hillside meadow. The area was alive with sound now, and the robot could see movement in the twilight under the swaying canopy of leaves. The air was temperate and fragrant with damp earth; the sound of running water trilled not far away. This was a good place, the robot decided. Human beings-whatever they might be-would probably find this location pleasant. Had they come here, they might well have stayed.

Afternoon faded to evening. The robot saw several creatures on the hillside, but none displayed any undue interest in the pod. Once, something with a thin, furred body approached. On muscular hind legs, it stretched out a long, four-fingered hand to touch the pod, and the robot saw a marsupial pouch on its stomach. Though the versatile hand made the robot watch closely, the creature did nothing to reveal more than animal intelligence. It wore no clothing, had no tools, and the robot’s sensitive hearing recorded only meaningless grunts from the beast. The marsupial glanced around with wide, scarlet-pupiled eyes, nostril slits flapping on its wide, flat head. Then it went back down on all fours and bounded off. The fledgling decided not to follow. Not yet.

Nightfall came with a surprising quickness after the sun slipped behind the trees; the air temperature dropped as rapidly. The forest settled into relative quiet as the nocturnal creatures woke and began to prowl. The night was well lit. The larger of the two moons was full; the smaller, at three-quarters, rose not long after full night.

Somewhere under the trees, a series of coughing barks rose, long and highly modulated. The robot began to listen closely as the call came again, slightly changed. Another voice answered the first, shorter and deeper; then yet another, followed by a shivering howl. The intonations were complex and varied, yet obviously from the same species. Already the fledgling had identified repetitive “syllables” in the phrases.

Twin-shadowed creatures moved under the margins of the trees, sleek and fast. The fledgling counted five of them, though more may have been lurking farther back in the forest. One of the pack broke away from the group, moving into moonlight.

The creature was caninoid. At least, it came closest to matching that type in the inbuilt files of the robot’s brain. That meant little in itself. There was nothing in the robot’s programmed knowledge that said a “human being” could not be canine. Standing on four legs, the animal stood a meter from shoulder to ground, powerfully built and broad-chested. The fur was mottled gray and black, glossy with silvered tips; the head was short-muzzled and round, with a large skull and wide-set, light eyes. The tail was long and furless; it looked nearly prehensile. As the robot watched, the creature howled again as if in challenge, revealing molars set well back behind a double rank of incisors-an omnivore, possibly, not strictly a meat-eater. The front legs ended in a clawed paw, but the toes/fingers were long, separate, and articulated, with a definite closing thumb for grasping. The thick elbow joints seemed capable of a wide range of motion.

It stared at the pod gleaming in doubled moonlight. It reared up on its hind legs (a female, the robot noted). With a stabbing motion of her front paw, she gestured: a wave.

Moonlight glinted on something on the creature’s chest, and the fledgling adjusted its vision to see the thing more clearly: a long, curved fang, hanging on a string of braided vine. Artifact! The word screamed in the fledgling’s mind, but she continued to wait.

Four others came out of the cover of the trees now, one gray-furred ancient, two adults, and a youngling. They moved swiftly to the sides of the first but carefully stayed behind her. The adults paced, restless. The ancient jabbered: half bark, half growl. The leader shook her head. The old one barked again, and the leader turned with a growl, showing her teeth. She cuffed at the old one, but the raking claws missed as the elder cowered back and lifted her muzzle to bare the throat in submission. The leader turned her back on the others and stared again at the pod. She approached the crumpled metal, snuffling.

She sat before it.

The tail served as support, and its agile tip curled around the back feet. The creature cocked her head to one side then the other. She sniffed again, leaning closer to the pod, then reached out with her left paw. Talons clicked on metal; she tapped the surface, listening to the faint, hollow ringing.

What she did next made synapses open in the robot’s positronic mind.

The tail flicked and curled around a small stick on the ground near the pod. The stick was brought up; she took it in her paw, clasping it between the thumb and two fingers. Leaning forward, she placed the tip of the stick under a torn flap of metal and levered up a strand of foil insulation. She pulled it loose and sat back to examine it, letting the stick drop.

Tool use. Coupled with the intricate language, the necklace the leader wore and their curiosity about the probe, that was enough evidence. They were intelligent; that also meant that they were human beings.

With that decision, the unformed body of the fledgling began to take on definite shape, as if unseen hands were molding clay while using the creatures before it as models. First, the basic wolf-like shape, the muscular leanness. The head extruded, rounded, then pushed out the snout of a nose and the flaps of ears. Fixed optical lenses focused in deep-set eye sockets, colored the same startling ice blue. It could not fully imitate fur, but the surface texture roughened, and the reflective patterns altered so that it displayed a vaguely similar silver-gray and black pattern. After a moment of pondering, the robot also mimicked the secondary sexual characteristics of the leader. The behavior of the leader suggested that scent was an important sense to them. That was simple enough. A quick sampling of the leader’s pheromones, and tiny artificial glands secreted an artificial wolf scent.