Caliban

Grieg paced back and forth again, stepping through the edge of the simglobe hologram, his shoulder brushing through the ghostly-real image of a dead world to come. He crossed to Kresh and put his hands on the arms of Alvar’s chair. He leaned his face down close to Alvar’s, so close the Governor’s breath was warm against the Sheriff’s cheek. “Solve this case, Kresh. Solve it quickly and neatly and well. Solve it without complication or scandal.”

He spoke the last words in a whisper, the light of fear bright in his eyes. “If you do not,” he said quietly, “you will doom this planet.”

11

SENIORSheriff’s Deputy Tansaw Meldor leaned back in his seat. He idly watched Junior Deputy Mirta Lusser flying the aircar through the darkness just before dawn. She was a typical newbie, he decided: conscientious as all hell, overly determined to do every part of her job perfectly, almost touchingly devoted to duty. Ithad taken a direct order before she would call him by his first name. She took the regs seriously and was burningly anxious to do everythingright.

All of which meant that she usuallywanted to fly the aircar, which suited Meldor just fine. He had had his fill of manual flying years ago. Robots could not fly Sheriff’s patrol aircraft, not when many Sheriff’s Department duties had at least the potential for causing harm to humans. So human deputies were forced to do robots’ work, flying the damned aircars for themselves instead of letting the robots do it, the way civilians could.

The joke of it was the Spacers had never gone in much for automating their equipment, because it was the robots who were going to operate it, anyway. Anything that could be done manually was done that way, making the job of flying a car far more complex than it had to be. Not for the first time, Meldor found himself wishing they could use Settler aircars. He had got a look inside one or two of them during some of the Settlertown dustups, and even ridden in one of them. The damn things could fly themselves, with no need for a human or a robot at the controls. The autopilots on those things went far beyond the rudimentary systems on Spacer aircars.

But no, they were stuck with Spacer-style controls. In which case, it suited him just fine to have Lusser do the flying, if they had to be up at this hour, anyway. Damn Kresh! Why did he have to bump up the rapid-response patrols? Meldor wanted to be home in bed, asleep, not up here watching the dust blow in from the desert.

Oh, well. Maybe they’ d get lucky, and something worthwhile would happen.

Meldor had missed the latest Ironhead riots. He could do with a little excitement.

DAWN lit the sky.

Caliban had quartered the city during the night, walked through every district, up and down streets of all descriptions, wandered many grand, empty avenues and boulevards. Some part of him knew that it was madly dangerous to be out on the streets. He had to assume that whoever those people were who ordered him to kill himself would try again. He had to assume that there were others who wished him no better fate.

He knew he should hide, duck away out of sight where no one could find him. But he could not bring himself to do that. He was gradually coming to realize that he was searching for something without knowing what that something was. An object, an idea, a bit of knowledge his datastore did not possess.An answer.

He knew not what he sought, and that alone made him hunger for it all the more.

But daytime was here. The robots of night-the laborers, the builders-were giving way to the robots of morning. Personal servants, messengers, aircar drivers were starting to appear-and in their wake, humans were arriving as well, more and more of them as daytime drew them back to the center city.

Thus far, no robot had paid him the slightest attention. But humans.They were the danger. He had to hide. But where? He had no idea of what made a good hiding place, where he might be safe.

Again he had one of those strange moments of sensation, wherein he felt some internal whisper that his thought processes were skewing to one side. Somehow he knew that fear of personal danger was abnormal, all but unheard-of, in a robot. It was another leakage from the emotion-set that seemed to hover around the edges of his datastore. He might well be the first of his kind to be a fugitive.

But where to hide, and how? In the sections of the city he had explored, or in the parts he had not yet seen?