Caliban

The silence dragged on, until Tonya took it as an answer.

“I thought so,” she said at last. “Gubber, it just won’t work.” She sat down next to him and put her arm across his shoulders. “Dearest Gubber, youare a wonder. Back home on Aurora, I must have known a hundred men full of thunder and bluster, always ready to show me just how big and brave they were. But none of them hadyour courage.”

“Mycourage!” Gubber looked sadly at Tonya. “Hah! There’s a contradiction in terms.”

“Is it? No big burly Settler man would dream of confessing a crime, going to a penal colony, for the sake of the woman he loved. And you’d do it, I know you would. But you can’t. You mustn’t.”

“But-”

“Don’t you see? Kresh is no fool. He’ll be able to crack through a false confession in a heartbeat, and you don’t know what to confessto. We have the police report, but he’s not fool enough to tell us everything he knows. Once he’s cracked you, he’ll ask himself why you’d confess to what you hadn’t done. Sooner or later, he’ll find out you did it to protect me. Then we’ll both end up in trouble.”

Something deep inside Gubber froze up. He hadn’t thought that far ahead. But no, wait. There was one thing she hadn’t thought of. “That won’t happen, Tonya. After all, no one knows about us-”

“But maybe they will, Gubber. Odds are Kresh will find out sooner or later. I’ve done what I could to protect you, and I know you’ve done the same for me.But we dare do no more. If we’re lucky, and we don’t draw attention to ourselves, we’ll be all right. But if either of us does anything to draw Kresh’s attention-”

Tonya let the words hang in the air. There was no need for her to complete the sentence. Gubber turned to her, put his arms around her, and kissed her, passionately and for a long while. At last he drew back, just a bit. He looked her in the eye, stroked her hair, whispered her name. “Tonya, Tonya. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you. You know that.”

“I know, I know,” Tonya said, her eyes bright with loving tears. “But we must be careful. We must think with our heads, not our hearts. Oh, Gubber. Hold me.”

Then they kissed again, and Gubber felt passion sweeping away his fears and worries. They reached for each other, eagerly, urgently, pulling their clothes off, falling back onto the bed, their bodies coming together in desire and need.

Gubber glanced up and saw Ariel standing, motionless, in her wall niche. For a split second he worried, wondering if her being there would bother Tonya. A robot in the bedroom meant nothing to a Spacer, of course

The devil take it. It was more than obvious that Ariel was the furthest thing from Tonya’s mind. Why bring her attention to it? He reached out to the side of the bed and jabbed down the manual switch, shutting off the overhead lights, and gave no more thought to it.

Ariel stared blankly at the opposite wall, pale green eyes dimly glowing, as the two humans made love in the darkness.

NIGHT had come, and there was darkness, and shadow, but no quiet, or rest, or safety. Whatever else changed, danger was the constant. Of that much Caliban was sure.

Caliban walked the busy downtown, ghost-town streets of Hades. The place was bustling with energy, and yet there was a feeling of the tomb about the place, as if it were a busy, active corpse, not yet aware of its own death, hurrying about its business long after its time had come and gone.

Night and day did not seem to matter so much here, in the heart of town. Here, the streets were just as busy now as they had been when he had passed this way in daytime.

But no, it was inaccurate to say that there was no difference between day and night. There was no change in theamount of traffic on the streets and walkways, but there was a huge change in thecharacter of that traffic. Now, late at night, the people were all but gone, but the robots were here.

Caliban looked about himself, at the proud, brightly lit, empty towers of Hades, the grand boulevards of magnificent and failed intentions. But the heart of that world, that city, was empty, barren.

Yet the unpeopled city was still crowded. Humans had been a sizable minority during the day, but in the wee hours of the night, it was robots, robots, everywhere. Caliban stood in the shadow of a doorway and watched them all go by. These robots of the night were different from the daytime robots. Almost all of those had clearly been personal servants. In the night, the heavy-duty units came out, hauling the heavy freight, working on construction jobs, doing the dirty work while there were fewer humans around to be disturbed by it.