The irony of it was, Derec thought, Avery really was trying to be helpful. It was almost as if he wanted to prove to himself that he could still do it. And here the aliens were telling him that the only way he could help was to take his toys and go home.

“May I ask what you intend to do with them?” Synapo asked.

“What does it matter? They won’t bother you anymore.”

“I am curious.”

“All right, since you’re curious; I’ll probably order them to self-destruct.”

Synapo and Sarco exchanged glances. The robots did so as well.

“That would be a great waste;” Synapo said.

“Waste? You just said they weren’t any good to you. With the planet already occupied, they aren’t any good to me, either. If there’s no use for them, then how can it be a waste to get rid of them?”

“They represent a great degree of organization.”

“Who cares? Organization doesn’t mean anything. An apple has more complex organization than a robot. What matters isn’t how sophisticated it is, but how much it costs you to produce. These robots are self-replicating; you can get a whole city from one robot if you’ve got the raw materials, so their cost is effectively zero. That’s how much we lose if we get rid of them: nothing.”

“But the robots lose. You forget, they are intelligent beings. Not creative, granted, but still intelligent. Perhaps too intelligent for the purpose for which you use them, if this is your attitude toward them.”

“They’re machines,” Avery insisted.

“So are we all,” Sarco said. “Biological machines that have become self-aware. And self-replicating as well. Do you maintain that our value is also zero, that we need not be concerned with individual lives, because they are so easy to replace?”

Avery took a deep breath, working up to an explosive protest, but Ariel’s response cut the argument from under him.

“No,” she whispered. “They’re all important.” She turned to Avery, and her voice grew in intensity as she said, “We just went through all this. Didn’t we learn anything from it? Derec and I aborted our own baby because it was going to be born without a brain. Without that, it was just a lump of cells. Doesn’t that tell us something? Doesn’t that tell us the brain is what matters?”

Lucius said to Derec, “You told me that adding a robot brain to the baby at birth would not have made it human.”

Ariel looked surprised, and Derec realized she hadn’t been in on that conversation. Even so, it only slowed her down for a moment. “That’s right,” she said. “It wouldn’t have. I1 would have been a robot in a baby’s body, and we didn’t want a baby robot. But the one question you didn’t ask was whether or not we would have aborted it if it was already as intelligent as a robot, and the answer is no… We wouldn’t have, because even a robot is self-aware. Self-awareness is what matters.”

“You are more civilized than we thought,” Synapo said.

“We try.” Ariel reached out a hand toward Wohler. “Come on,” she said. “I owe you a favor. The original Wohler lost his life saving me from my own stupidity; the least I can do is save his namesake.”

The golden-hued robot alien stepped closer to her, its features twisting from Ceremyon form to humanoid form as it moved, until by the time it stood before her, it was again a normal., Avery-style robot. One of the three others also made the change, becoming the philosopher Plato, formerly Transport Systems Coordinator 45.

Synapo shifted his weight, as if unused to standing so long. “In light of our discussion, I will repeat my question. What do you intend to do with them?”

“Send them back to the original Robot City, I guess,” Avery said. “There’s room for them there.”

“And the city itself?” Synapo tilted his head to indicate the one before them, not the original. “It is self-aware also, is it not?”

“To a very limited degree,” Avery replied. “It’s aware of its own existence, but just enough so it can obey the same three laws the robots do. Everything else; the metamorphosis, the growth, the coordination, is all straight programming.”

“Then you may leave the city, if you wish.”

“What will you do with it? I didn’t think you had any more use for a city than you have for robots.”

“We don’t. But if you remove all but its most basic programming, then it need not remain a city.”

Avery looked back over his shoulder at the grand collection of tall spires, pyramids, geometric solids, and elevated walkways connecting them all. Sunlight glinted off one face of the Compass Tower. Tiny specks of motion on the walkways were robots going about their assigned duties, keeping the city functioning. Derec, watching him, could read Avery, s thoughts as well as if he’ d heard them by comlink.

How can they not need all that?

Avery turned back to the Ceremyons. Shadows with red eyes waited for him to speak. “All right,” he said at last. “What do I care what you do with it? It’s yours.”

“Thank you.”

“You’ll need some kind of control mechanism,” Avery pointed out.

“We have already developed that capability,” Sarco said.

“Oh?”

“Our technology is not as obvious as yours, but that is only because we choose not to let its presence spread unchecked.”

Avery was working himself up to an explosive reply, but he got no chance. Before he could speak, the aliens bobbed up and down once each, turned, and took wing. This time Adam and Eve followed immediately. Lucius watched them rise up into the sky, and as he watched, his arms flattened toward wing shape and his body shrank in size to allow more bulk for the wings. He took a couple of clumsy steps, flapped his wings, and completed the transformation in the air.

“Hey!” Derec shouted. “Where are you going?” Lucius circled around, swooped low, and as he swept past, shouted, “I will return!” Then with powerful strokes he flew off after his two siblings.

“Better return soon, or you’ll be stranded here,” Avery muttered, turning away and heading back toward the transport booths and the city. Without looking back to see if anyone followed, he said, “Wohler! Get our ship ready for space.”

The robots didn’t travel by ship. Under Avery’s direction the city built a new Key center, a factory in which the tiny individual jump motors he called Keys to Perihelion were manufactured, and within hours each robot in the city had his own Key, its destination preset for the original Robot City. On Avery’s command, they all formed up in a line, began marching down the main avenue toward the Compass Tower, and as they reached the intersection directly in front of it, jumped.

Their motion was hypnotic, and it lasted for hours. There had been a lot of robots in the city.

“So why don’t we just use Keys to go back home ourselves?” Derec asked.

“Because I don’t trust them.”

“What do you mean, you don’t trust them? You invented them yourself, didn’t you?”

“An inventor is supposed to trust everything he makes?”

Wolruf, who had just keyed in an order on the automat for something Derec didn’t recognize, looked at her plate with theatrical suspicion. Derec laughed.

“I’d use one in an emergency,” Avery went on, “and I’ve done so in the past, but not without apprehension. If you think getting lost by jumping too far in a ship is dangerous, imagine it with just a key.”

“You mean some of those robots won’t make it home?” Ariel asked, shocked.

Avery rolled his eyes. “Of course they’ll make it home, eventually. Some of them just may have to spend a day or two floating in space while they wait for the Key to recharge for a second shot at it. No problem for a robot, but a little more difficult for a human.”

Derec felt a chill run up his back. He and Ariel had used the Keys half a dozen times, once jumping all the way from Earth’s solar system to Robot City. They had thought they were in perfect safety all the while, but now to find out they weren’t…