Caliban

CALIBAN came to another tunnel intersection and hesitated for a moment before deciding which way to go. He had yet to see a single human in the underground city, but it seemed unwise to be in the company of robots, either. There seemed to be less traffic on the left-hand tunnel branch, and so he went that way.

There had been moments, more than a few of them, since his awakening, when Caliban had experienced something very like the emotion of loneliness, but he certainly had no desire for companionship at the moment. Right now he needed to get away, to put as much distance and as many twists and turns as possible between himself and his pursuers. Then he needed to sit down somewhere andthink.

The robots here underground were quite different from those he had seen on the surface. No personal-service robots down here, no fetchers and carriers of parcels. These passages were populated by burlier sorts, lumbering heavy-duty machines in dun colors. They had little resemblance to the brightly colored machines overhead. Compared to these robots, the ones above were merely toys. These underground robots were closer kin to the maintenance units that toiled on the surface only by night.By night, and underground, do the true workers toil, Caliban thought to himself. There was something disturbing about the thought, the image.

He was coming to understand that this was a world where real labor, work that accomplished something, was distasteful, something that had to be done out of sight. The humans seemed contemptuous of the very idea of work. They had taught themselves it was not a proper thing to see, let alone do. How could they live, knowing themselves to be useless, pampered drones? Could theytruly live that way? But if they allowed themselves to be waited on hand and foot, then surely they must, as individuals, and as a people, be losing even the ability to do most things for themselves. No, it could not be. They could not possibly be making themselves so helpless, so vulnerable, sodependent on their own slaves.

The ways under the central part of the city were clean, dry, and bright, bustling with activity, robots going off on their errands in all directions. None of that suited Caliban’s purposes. He consulted his on-board map and headed toward the outskirts of the system.

The main tunnels and the older tunnels were lit in frequencies visible to humans, Caliban noticed. Perhaps that was some sort of holdover from the days when humans had trod these ways. The newer ones were lit in infrared, offering mute testimony to the absence of human use in these latter days.

Caliban moved farther and farther, out into the outskirts of the system, where even the infrared lighting got worse and worse. Infrared lights were supposed to come on as he approached, and cut off as he left, but fewer and fewer of the sensors seemed to be working. At last he was walking in complete darkness. Caliban powered up his on-board infrared light source and found his way forward that way.

The condition of the tunnels was deteriorating as well. Here, well out from the center of town, most of the tunnels were semi-abandoned, cold, dank, damp, and grimy. Perhaps the surface of Inferno was bone-dry, but clearly there was still deep groundwater to be found. Tiny rivulets of water ran here and there. The walls sweated, and drips of water came down from the ceiling, their splashing impacts on the walkway echoing loudly in the surrounding silence. Out here, on the perimeter, only a few lowly robots ventured, scuttling through the darkness, intent on their errands, paying Caliban no heed.

Caliban turned again, and again, down the tunnels, each time turning in the direction with the least traffic. At last he walked fully in the dark, fully alone. He came to a tunnel with a glassed-in room set into one side of it, a supervisor’s office, from back in the days when there was enough work of whatever sort had gone on here to justify such things. Or at least back in the days when they could imagine a future with an expanding city that would need a supervisor’s office out here.

There was a handle on the door, and Caliban pulled at it. He was not oversurprised to find that the door was jammed shut. He pulled harder and the whole door peeled away, hinges and all. He let the thing drop on the ground with the rest of the debris and went inside. There was a desk and a chair, both covered with the same moldering grit that seemed to be everywhere in the unused tunnels. Caliban sat down at the chair, put his hands flat on the desk, and stared straight ahead. He cut the power to his infrared light source and sat in the featureless blackness.