Chapter 5. Favors

Space travel didn’t seem to affect morning sickness. Derec, lying in bed and listening to Ariel in the Personal, wondered if this was the way their days were going to start for the next nine months or if her body would slowly get used to being pregnant. He was glad it was her and not him. It was an awful thought and he knew it, but all the same that was how he felt. Pregnancy scared him. It was an internal change nearly as sweeping as the one he had gone through when Avery had injected him with the chemfets, and he knew from experience what that kind of thing felt like. The physical changes were nothing compared to what went on in your mind. Watching and feeling your body change and not being able to do anything about it-that was the scary part.

When Ariel emerged, Derec gave her a hug and a kiss for support, then took his turn in the Personal while she dressed. He showered away the fatigue left over from spending most of the night in the control room, standing beneath the cascading water until he was sure he must have run every molecule of it on board through the recycler at least twice. When he emerged, pink and wrinkled, Ariel was already gone, so he dressed quickly and went to join her at breakfast.

He found her arguing with a trio of stubborn robots.

“Because I ordered you to, that’s why!” he heard her shout as she walked down the hallway.

A robot voice, Lucius’s perhaps, said, “We have complied with your order. I merely ask why it was given. Your order to cease our conversation, combined with Dr. Avery’s order to refrain from using our comlinks, effectively prevents us from communicating. Can this be your intent?”

“I just want some quiet around here. You guys talk all the time.”

“We have much to talk about. If we are to discover our place in the universe, we must correlate a great deal of information.”

When Derec entered the common room, he saw that it had indeed been Lucius doing the talking. The other two were sitting quietly alongside him and opposite Ariel at the breakfast table, but they were either following Ariel’s order to keep quiet or else simply content to let Lucius be their spokesman. Mandelbrot was also in the room, but he was having nothing to do with the situation. He stood quietly in a niche in the wall beside the automat.

Lucius turned to Derec as soon as he had cleared the doorway and asked, “Can you persuade Ariel to rescind her order?”

Derec looked from the robot to Ariel, who shrugged her shoulders as if to say, “It’s a mystery to me, too.”

“Why should I do that?” Derec asked.

“It inflicts an undue hardship upon us.”

“Shutting up is a hardship?”

“Yes.”

“I thought it was a courtesy.” Derec went to the automat and dialed for breakfast.

“It would be a courtesy to allow intelligent beings engaged in their own project to do so without hindrance.”

“Ah. You’re saying you have no time to obey orders, is that it?”

“Essentially, yes. The time exists, but we have our own pursuits to occupy it.”

Derec took his breakfast, a bowl of fruit slices covered with heavy cream and sugar-0r their synthetic equivalent, at any rate-and sat down beside Ariel. The robots watched him take a bite, look over to Ariel in amusement, then back to the robots again without saying anything. They seemed to sense that now was not a good time to interrupt.

Derec puzzled it over in his thoughts for half a bowl of fruit before he had sufficiently organized his argument to speak. When he finally did, he waggled his spoon at the robots for emphasis and said, “Duty is a bitch. I agree. But we all have duties of one sort or another. When Adam led his wolf pack against the Robot City on the planet where he first awoke, I had to abandon what I wanted to do and go off to try to straighten out the mess. At great personal danger to myself and to Mandelbrot, I might add. While I was gone, Ariel had to go to Ceremya to try to straighten out the mess from another Robot City. We’d have both rather stayed on Aurora, but we went because it was our duty. We took Adam and Eve back to the original Robot City because we felt it was our duty to give you a chance to develop your personalities in a less confusing environment,”-he nodded toward the two silent robots-”and when we got there we had to track you down, Lucius, because it was our duty to stop the damage you were doing to the city programming. Now we’re heading for Ceremya again because all three of you need to learn something there, and we don’t feel comfortable letting you go off on your own.

“None of this is what we would have been doing if it was left up to us. We’d much rather be on Aurora again, living in the forest and having our needs taken care of by robots who don’t talk back to us, but we’re here because our duty requires it.”

He waved his spoon again to forestall comment. “And even if we had stayed there, we’d still have duties. Humans have to sleep, have to eat, have to shower-whether we want to or not. Most times we want to, but we have to nonetheless. Ariel is going to be carrying a developing fetus for nine months, which I’m sure she would rather not do if there was a better way, but there isn’t, and she’s decided to keep the baby so she’s going to have to put up with being pregnant. That’s a duty. I’m wasting my time explaining this to you, but I do it because I feel it’s my duty to do that, too.

“The point is, we all have duties. When you add them all up, it doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for whatever else you want to do, but you have to put up with that. Everybody has to structure their free time around their duties.”

Lucius shook his head. “You overlook the obvious solution of reducing the number of your duties.”

“Ah,” Derec said. “Now I get it. That explains yesterday. You want to cut down on your duties, but you’ve got a hard-wired compulsion to follow any orders given by a human, so you narrow down the definition of human to exclude Wolruf. Suddenly you have only three-fourths as many orders to follow. That’s it, isn’t it?”

Lucius was slow in answering, but he finally said, “That was not our conscious intent, but now that I examine the incident in light of your comments today, I must conclude that you are correct.”

“It works both ways, you know.”

“What other way do you mean?”

“You thought you were human once. Now you’re excluded by your own definition.”

“Oh.”

Ariel clapped softly. “Touche,” she said.

Avery chose that moment to enter the room. “Sounds like a lively discussion going on in here,” he said, taking the only remaining chair, the one beside Derec. He turned to Lucius and said, “I’ll have a cheese omelet.”

“Ariel and Derec each got their own breakfast,” the robot replied. “Why can you not do the same?”

“Wrong answer,” Derec muttered.

Avery stared in amazement at the root, his mouth agape. “What the-?” he began, then banged his hand down flat on the table. “Get me a cheese omelet, now!”

Lucius lurched to his feet under the force of Avery’s direct command. He took a faltering step toward the automat, and as he did his form began to change. His smooth, humanoid surface became pocked with circles, each of which slowly took on the teeth and spokes of a gear, while his arms and legs became simple metal levers driven by cables and pulleys. His head became a dented metal canister with simple holes in it for eyes and a round speaker for a mouth. The gears meshed, the pulleys moved, and with a howl of unlubricated metal, Lucius took another step. His quiet gait changed to a heavy “clomp, clomp, clomp,” as he lurched the rest of the way to the automat.

“Yes, master,” the speaker in his face said with a loud hum. “Cheese omelet, master.” He poked at the buttons on the automat with fingers that had suddenly become stiff metal claws.