Caliban

Though, in all fairness, she couldn’t blame Gubber for that. If she had known about this at the time, she would have been furious, seething, massively distrustful of Gubber. Now, as this sleepless, storming night thundered into a lightless dawn, the question of who slept with whom paled into utter insignificance. Well, perhaps that was overstating the case. The heavens might tumble, but that would not stop people being fascinated by news of a torrid affair. And, speaking for herself, at least, shestill couldn’t see it, but never mind that now.

There were other concerns and questions to deal with just at the moment.

Caliban. To other people, he no doubt meant different things, but to Fredda, he represented something very simple: the first of his kind. And, possibly, the last. If he was regarded as a failure, or as a danger, if he was seen as thecause of so much chaos and upheaval, rather than as the victim of it, then no one would ever dare build another free robot. All of their kind, for the rest of time, would be nothing more than slaves, their minds blinkered and stunted by the Three Laws. At best, some small fraction of them could exist under the somewhat looser constraints of the New Laws, but even those were chains around the mind.

Caliban. Where the hell was he? He could be anywhere by now, in the city, under it, outside it. Of course, if Caliban had any sense, he would hole up in the bowels of the city and stay there. Wait for the storm to blowout to sea. These weather patterns never lasted more than a few hours. He could stay underground for years, if need be.

Except for his power pack, of course. What had she been thinking of, giving him a low-capacity lab-operations power pack? If she had given him a standard unit, he could have hidden out for years, decades, and never have to go to anyone for anything.

But shehad given him a lab-ops power pack. She had not and would not tell anyone else, but Caliban ‘ s rate of power use had tested out a bit higher than expected. Assuming average levels of exertion, Fredda figured that, as of right now, he did not have much more than a few hours of power left.

THE howling winds at last began to fade, the rains began to fade away, if not end altogether. The crumpled remains of the antique aircar had been scattered across half the hillside by the crash, and across the other half by the storm.

Caliban came up slowly from behind the outcrop of rock that had afforded him some degree of shelter from the worst of the weather. He stumbled once, twice, as he came down the still-muddy slope. His binocular vision was gone, his left eye smashed and broken, dangling uselessly from its socket. Something in the interior of his right arm had been bent in the crash somehow, and he could move that arm only with difficulty, and to the accompaniment of an alarming scraping sound. His carapace, once a spotless, gleaming red, was covered with mottled splotches of mud. His chest had a number of dents and dings in it:

None of that mattered. He hadsurvived.

Orhad he survived? Was he still walking around, but just as surely doomed as if he had died already?

His on-board diagnostics system was sending any number of warnings, not just about storm damage to his person, but about his basic power supply. Unless he did something about it very soon, his power would run out and he would drop in his tracks. He would survive the power failure, and could be revived if he were powered back up, but in the meantime he would be inert, helpless, easy prey for the Sheriff.

Caliban felt almost overwhelmed by frustration. Nothing had gone right. His attempt to escape from the city was a complete failure. He had accomplished exactly nothing, except to injure himself and to strand himself in a barren landscape that he knew nothing about. He had no internal maps of this place. Worse, he had seen the two aircars following him the night before. He knew perfectly well that his pursuers would soon be back on his trail.

And now he could not even concentrate on eluding them. He had to find a power source and recharge, or else die in the desert. Which way to go? He turned and looked toward the rain-shrouded spires of Hades, near the southern horizon. He could not go back to the city, that much was certain. They would be at the ready for that. But that wasall that was certain. He had absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of the lands outside the city. But the very fact that there were exits from the city, and exits pointed north, suggested that there had at least once been places to go north of Hades, over the hills. There had to besomething left behind up there. A place with a few power converters still operating. Something. Anything.

And he had no choice but to try and find it.

He turned and started walking, stiffly, awkwardly, up the rocky hillside, through the spattering rain and over the rise of broken ground to the north.