Caliban

But the moment he stepped into the warehouse, he knew these people were not following any rules at all. There was a strange tension in their postures, a furtiveness in their movements. The hint of viewpoint, of opinion, layered over the objective information in his datastore told him that much and more. The ghostly emotional link whispered to him of danger, of the need for caution.

He hesitated just inside the door and looked around. The room was big, all but empty, and littered with the debris of destroyed robots. Caliban looked around and saw sundered arms, wrecked bodies, sightless robot eyes broken free from blasted robot heads. Fear, real, solid, fear, gripped at him. The blast of emotion took him by surprise, made it hard to think. What was the use of such feelings when all they could do was cloud his judgment? He wanted no part of them. He forced the emotion down, switched it off. That was a distinct relief, to discover that he could eliminate the strange cloud of human feelings. Now was clearly a time for clear and careful thought.

Dead robots were strewn about the place. This was no place for him. That much was clear. And it was a safe assumption that the people here were the ones who had destroyed the robots.

But why? Why would anyone do these things? And who were these people? Clearly they were different from the people he had seen walking the streets of Hades. They dressed differently, and spoke differently, at least judging from his encounter with the woman who had led him here. Curiosity held him where he was, made him stand and look at the little knot of people sitting on the packing cases in the center of the room.

“Well, well, Santee. You sure as hell did catch us a big, fancy one,” a tall, bleary-eyed man said as he rose, bottle in hand, and shuffled over to him. “First things first. I order you to use nothing but your speaking voice. You got a name, robot, or just a number?”

Caliban looked at the man and his oddly disturbing grin. Nothing but his speaking voice? The man seemed to be assuming that Caliban had some other means of communication, though Caliban had no other. But another thought prevented him from pursuing that minor puzzle. It suddenly dawned on Caliban that he had never spoken in all the time since he had awakened. Until this moment he had never even thought to wonder if he could. But now the need arose. Caliban examined his control systems, his communications sublinks. Yes, he knew how to speak, how to control his speaker system, how to form the sounds and order them into words and sentences. He found the idea of speaking to be rather stimulating.

“I am Caliban,” he said.

His voice was deep and rich, with no trace of the machine or the mechanical. Even to Caliban’s own ear, it had a handsome, commanding sound that seemed to carry to the four corners of the room, though he had not meant to speak loudly.

The grinning man lost his smile for a moment, seemingly put off balance. “Yeah, yeah, okay, Caliban,” he said at last. “My name is Reybon. Say hello to me, Caliban. Say it nice and friendly.”

Caliban looked from Reybon to the knot of people in the room’ s center, to the ruined robots around the room. There was nothing friendly about these people, or about this place.Do what a human tells you to do, he told himself again.Act like the other robots. Do not become conspicuous. “Hello, Reybon,” he said, working to make the words seem friendly, warm. He turned to the other people. “Hello,” he said.

For some reason they were all dead silent for a moment, but then Reybon, who seemed to be the leader, began to laugh, and the others joined in, if a bit nervously.

“Well, that was real nice, Caliban,” Reybon said. “That was real, real nice. Why don’t you come right in here and playa little game with us? That’s why Santee brought you here, you know. So you could playa game with us. Come right in here, to the middle of the room, in front of all your new friends.”

Caliban moved forward and stood in the spot Reybon pointed toward. He stood facing Reybon and the others.

“We’re Settlers, Caliban,” Reybon said. “Do you know what Settlers are?”

“No,” he said.

Reybon looked surprised. “Either your owner didn’t teach you much, or else you ain’t as smart and fancy as you look, robot. But the only thing you need to know right now is that some Settlers don’t like robots very much. In fact, they don’t like robots at all. Do you know why?”

“No, I do not,” Caliban said, confused. How could this human expect Caliban to know the philosphy of a group he knew nothing about? The datastore offered up an answer, something about the concept of a rhetorical question, but Caliban ignored the information, mentally brushed it away.