Ariel raised her voice, as if arguing could make it not so. “How can you be so sure? You’ve never even seen a human before, much less an embryo.”

“The information is all in the central computer library.”

Derec could hardly remain standing. His chemfets had destroyed their baby! He closed his eyes to keep from looking at the monitor, but the vision still haunted him.

You!he sent, directing his thoughts inward. He had communicated with the nebulous robot entity within him once before, when he had taken control of it, and though he had never again reestablished direct contact, he railed at it anyway.

You destroyed my baby! It wasn ’ t enough that you invadedmy body, but you had to invade my child ’ s as well! You ’ ve killed it! You ’ ve killed a human being!

He didn’t expect a reaction, but once again the tiny robot cells surprised him. His body suddenly stiffened as if jolted by electricity, and he lost the sensation in his arms and legs. His eyes snapped open, but he had only time enough to glance at Ariel and whisper, “Oh oh,” before he lost them and the rest of his body as well.

The dreams were unpleasant. He knew them for dreams, but even so he had no control over them. It felt as if they were controlling him instead, but not with any purpose. It was as if he were a puppet in a stage play in which each member of the audience had a control unit, but none knew how the play was to proceed. He kept receiving conflicting signals, but these were not the normal signals a puppet received. These were commands to his heart, directing it to beat, to his lungs and diaphragm, directing them to breathe, to all his major organs and glands, but each one received dozens of commands at once and the combination reduced them to chaos.

Derec tried sending commands of his own, but he had no connections to send them through. He was isolated, a brain and nothing more. A point of view.

He had memory, at least, but when he began to explore it he found it to be an abandoned city. The buildings that should have held thousands of inhabitants were instead barren and cold. Here and there a light burned in a window, but when Derec would investigate it, he invariably found only a hint of human occupation; the scraps of a meal left behind or the faint scent of perfume in the air.

Through one window he could see a lush jungle growing, but he could find no door to the building containing it. He could only stand outside and watch the motions of the gardeners as they tended their charges. One gardener, a silver reflection of a godly being, glowing so brightly that it hurt Derec’s eyes to look upon him, plucked a leaf from one of the trees, blew into its stem, and the leaf took on the shape of a bird. The gardener released it and the bird flew away to join a whole flock of its fellows on a branch of another tree, but to Derec’s horror, he saw an insidious mold that had been waiting on the branch begin to grow up over the birds’ feet. They flapped and struggled to get away, but the mold grew over them until it covered them completely, then slowly dissolved them to nothing. The gardener looked toward Derec and shrugged as if in apology. He plucked another leaf, blew into it, and this time it became a baby. The gardener set it on the same branch that had eaten the birds.

Derec screamed.

He awoke in a hospital bed. That was no surprise. What surprised him was how good he felt. He felt rested and alert, not groggy and full of pain the way most people who awaken in hospital beds feel. He remembered that he had had a troubling dream, but it was already fading. He sat up and looked around him and received his second surprise of the day.

Dr. Avery was sitting before a computer beside his bed, from which wires ran to a cuff on Derec’s left arm. Avery was looking at Derec with satisfaction, even pride.

“Feeling better?” Avery asked.

“I feel great! What happened?”

“I convinced your chemfets that life was worth living.”

Derec suppressed the urge to say, “You what?” Instead he asked, “How did you do that?”

“Remember who created them in the first place. I know how to talk to them. I convinced them that locking up was harming another human, so they were just going to have to carry on with a guilty conscience. They didn’t know how to do that, of course, but I’ve had some experience with it. I told them how to deal with it.”

Half a dozen thoughts chased through Derec’s mind. He voiced the last of them. “I thought once a robot froze up, it was dead for good.”

Avery nodded. “An ordinary robot is, but chemfets aren’t ordinary robots. There isn’t a centralized brain. They don’t have any intelligence except as a group, so when they locked up all that really happened was they lost their organization. I just built that back up and programmed them to serve you again.”

Just. Derec had no idea how to even start such a process, yet Avery sat there with his hands behind his head and dismissed it as if it were no more difficult than ordering a robot to tie one’s shoes. He wasn’t boasting, either; Derec was seeing true humility and he knew it.

“It sounds like you saved my life,” he said softly.

Avery shrugged. “Probably. Least I could do, since I endangered it in the first place.” He turned to the terminal, eager to change the subject. “Let me show you something here.”

Derec swung his feet down over the edge of the bed so he sat facing the computer. Avery tilted the monitor so he could see it, pointed at a menu on the touch-sensitive screen, tapped a few keys, pointed again, and an outline of a human body appeared. A network of lines that Derec guessed to be blood vessels filled the figure.

“This is where the chemfets have concentrated in your body,” Avery said. “Mostly in the bloodstream. But not entirely. Look here.” He tapped another few keys and most of the major lines disappeared, but a network of finer ones still filled the body.

“I deleted the blood vessels from the picture. What you see here are nerves. Or what used to be nerves, anyway. Your chemfets have been replacing them.”

“Replacing my nerves?” Derec looked to the top of the human outline, but was relieved to see that the brain didn’t appear in the picture. They’d left that alone, at least.

Avery turned back around to face him. “I told them to stop while you’re still ahead. They thought it would make you more efficient, and they’re probably right, but I think there’s a limit to how far that sort of thing ought to go without your approval.”

This was Avery speaking? The man who had introduced them into his system in the first place? Derec could hardly believe his ears. “I-thanks,” he said. Then, as the idea sank in, he asked, “How far do you think they’d have gone?”

“I don’t see any reason why they would have stopped until there was nothing left to replace.”

“Brain and all? I’d have become a robot?”

“I don’t know if your personality would survive the transition. It’s an interesting question, though, isn’t it?”

Derec eyed the computer, Avery sitting before it, the wires leading from it to the cuff on his wrist. He suppressed a shudder. If ever he needed proof that Avery was cured, waking up in his own body when Avery had had such an opportunity was that proof.

“I don’t think I want to know the answer,” he said.

Avery grinned. “I do, but I’ll start with lab rats this time. Speaking of which, we found out what happened to our ship.”

“What did happen?”

“One of Lucius’s rats got on board before we left and evidently started getting hungry. It ate through the wiring in the recycler, shorted it out, and caught the whole business on fire.” Avery snorted in derision. “Somehow I don’t think we’ll have to worry about Lucius locking up on us when he hears about it.”