Caliban

And yet sooner or later, he would have to come out of his house. He would have to step back into time, back into the world. He knew that. But he knew also that his guilty knowledge, the fact of his guilty action, would keep him inside a while longer.

And Tonya. Tonya. There were two questions about her that swirled about his mind:

What part had she played in the story?

And, once this was over, what time would. she have for a coward too scared to leave his own house?

“ALL right, now, li’l robot-point the blaster at your head.” The small repair-services unit turned the nozzle of the blaster on itself, its glowing green eyes staring right down the barrel of the weapon.

Reybon Derue chortled in drunken hysteria, knowing in some strange, still-sober part of himself how pointless it all was. But, bored with the work, despised by the locals, what else was there for a Settler laborer to do but get drunk? Well, the answer was right in front of him. Robot bashing.

Except they did not do straight bashing. That had been too easy. What challenge in beating a robot down to scrap when the robot would not, could not, resist? No, this way was far more amusing, and took more skill. There weren’t many people who could talk a robot into killing itself.

Except even inducing suicide was getting too easy, at least with certain classes of robots. With the more sophisticated machines, it took a long, elaborate discussion with a robot to get it into a state where it would accept an order to destroy itself. But with a unit as unsophisticated as the one in front of him, long practice had made the game too easy. The only tough part left was remembering to order the robots not to use their hyperwave systems to report bashing incidents to the authorities.

Maybe,Reybon thought,I’ve gotten too good at this to bother with the low-end ones. This one was almost too simple.

“Okay, very good, you tin excuse for a machine,” Reybon said, leaning closer. “Now fire the blaster.”

The robot fired, and its head vaporized. Its body fell to the floor and dropped the weapon. Reybon roared with laughter and kicked the robot’ s ruined carcass.

The floor was littered with the components of shattered robots. Reybon went over to a severed hand and kicked it clear across the floor of the abandoned warehouse. He stepped back, turned to his fellow laborers, who were sitting on packing cases in the middle of the room. He took a bow. They cheered wildly. One of them tossed him a bottle of something, and he caught it with the odd, neat, fluid dexterity some drunks have. He yanked the top off, and took a long pull from the bottle.

“Who’s next?” he demanded. “That one was too easy. Who’s gonna get me some stupid hunka metal ‘n’ plastic that’s gonna betougher to crack?”

Santee Timitz got up. “I’ll go,” she said. “Lemme go find one.” She ambled toward the door of the warehouse, moving a bit slowly. “I’ll get you areally good one.” The rest of the group found that absurdly funny for some reason, and laughed louder and harder than ever.

“Hey, hey, Reybon,” Denlo said. “Maybe it’s time we got going, huh? Deputy’s gonna show up sooner or later. Maybe we quit while we ‘re ahead, huh?”

Reybon walked back to the gang lounging on the packing cases. “Ah, take it easy, Denlo. We’re okay. Santee’ll find us a good one.”

NIGHThad come, and still Caliban walked the streets of the city, watching, thinking, learning. Robots were utterly, totally subservient to humans, that much he was sure of. Whatever a human told a robot to do, that robot did. Why, he could not imagine.

Humans were weaker, slower, in. some ways at least far less intelligent and competent than robots. But even if the datastore contained no information on robots, Caliban had at least the resonances in the datastore, the remnant hints left behind by whoever had assembled the datastore and then excised the robot data. Those hints, those resonances, seemed to confirm his impression that robot subservience was irrational. In fact, the whispering mood-voice went further than that, implying, insinuating, that the situation was actually dangerous. Caliban had no way of judging that, or even of knowing if the whispers were real projections from the datastore’s creator, or a malfunction, a failure in his own perception.

Humans. They were the other side of the equation. Many of them seemed to have vast amounts of time for leisure. They lingered in restaurants, relaxed in the parks, read bookfilms in the backseat while the robots drove the cars. Robots had no leisure.