Writers of the Future, Volume 30

  The Baroni burbled again. “You are hopeless,” he said at last.

  We had one of the mechs bring us our lunch, then sat with our backs propped against opposite sides of a gnarled old tree while we ate. I didn’t want to watch his snakelike lunch writhe and wriggle, protesting every inch of the way, as he sucked it down like the long, living piece of spaghetti it was, and he had his usual moral qualms, which I never understood, about watching me bite into a sandwich. We had just about finished when Mech Three approached us.

  “All problems have been fixed,” it announced brightly.

  “That was fast,” I said.

  “There was nothing broken.” It then launched into a three-minute explanation of whatever it had done to the robot’s circuitry.

  “That’s enough,” I said when it got down to a dissertation on the effect of mu-mesons on negative magnetic fields in regard to prismatic eyes. “I’m wildly impressed. Now let’s go take a look at this beauty.”

  I got to my feet, as did the Baroni, and we walked back to the concrete pad. The robot’s limbs were straight now, and his arm was restored, but he still lay motionless on the crumbling surface.

  “I thought you said you fixed him.”

  “I did,” replied Mech Three. “But my programming compelled me not to activate it until you were present.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Wake him up.”

  The little Mech made one final quick adjustment and backed away as the robot hummed gently to life and sat up.

  “Welcome back,” I said.

  “Back?” replied the robot. “I have not been away.”

  “You’ve been asleep for five centuries, maybe six.”

  “Robots cannot sleep.” He looked around. “Yet everything has changed. How is this possible?”

  “You were deactivated,” said the Baroni. “Probably your power supply ran down.”

  “Deactivated,” the robot repeated. He swiveled his head from left to right, surveying the scene. “Yes. Things cannot change this much from one instant to the next.”

  “Have you got a name?” I asked him.

  “Samson 4133. But Miss Emily calls me Sammy.”

  “Which name do you prefer?”

  “I am a robot. I have no preferences.”

  I shrugged. “Whatever you say, Samson.”

  “Sammy,” he corrected me.

  “I thought you had no preferences.”

  “I don’t,” said the robot. “But she does.”

  “Has she got a name?”

  “Miss Emily.”

  “Just Miss Emily?” I asked. “No other names to go along with it?”

  “Miss Emily is what I was instructed to call her.”

  “I assume she is a child,” said the Baroni, with his usual flair for discovering the obvious.

  “She was once,” said Sammy. “I will show her to you.”

  Then somehow, I never did understand the technology involved, he projected a full-sized holograph of a small girl, perhaps five years old, wearing a frilly purple-and-white outfit. She had rosy cheeks and bright shining blue eyes, and a smile that men would die for someday if given half the chance.

  It was only after she took a step forward, a very awkward step, that I realized she had a prosthetic left leg.

  “Too bad,” I said. “A pretty little girl like that.”

  “Was she born that way, I wonder?” said the Baroni.

  “I love you, Sammy,” said the holograph.

  I hadn’t expected sound, and it startled me. She had such a happy voice. Maybe she didn’t know that most little girls came equipped with two legs. After all, this was an underpopulated colony world; for all I knew, she’d never seen anyone but her parents.

  “It is time for your nap, Miss Emily,” said Sammy’s voice. “I will carry you to your room.” Another surprise. The voice didn’t seem to come from the robot, but from somewhere … well, offstage. He was recreating the scene exactly as it had happened, but we saw it through his eyes. Since he couldn’t see himself, neither could we.

  “I’ll walk,” said the child. “Mother told me I have to practice walking, so that someday I can play with the other girls.”

  “Yes, Miss Emily.”

  “But you can catch me if I start to fall, like you always do.”

  “Yes, Miss Emily.”

  “What would I do without you, Sammy?”

  “You would fall, Miss Emily,” he answered. Robots are always so damned literal.

  And as suddenly as it had appeared, the scene vanished.

  “So that was Miss Emily?” I said.

  “Yes,” said Sammy.

  “And you were owned by her parents?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have any understanding of the passage of time, Sammy?”

  “I can calibrate time to within three nanoseconds of …”

  “That’s not what I asked,” I said. “For example, if I told you that scene we just saw happened more than 500 years ago, what would you say to that?”

  “I would ask if you were measuring by Earth years, Galactic Standard years, New Calendar Democracy years …”

  “Never mind,” I said.

  Sammy fell silent and motionless. If someone had stumbled upon him at just that moment, they’d have been hard pressed to prove that he was still operational.

  “What’s the matter with him?” asked the Baroni. “His battery can’t be drained yet.”

  “Of course not. They were designed to work for years without recharging.”

  And then I knew. He wasn’t a farm robot, so he had no urge to get up and start working the fields. He wasn’t a mech, so he had no interest in fixing the feeders in the barn. For a moment I thought he might be a butler or a major-domo, but if he was, he’d have been trying to learn my desires to serve me, and he obviously wasn’t doing that. That left just one thing.

  He was a nursemaid.

  I shared my conclusion with the Baroni, and he concurred.

  “We’re looking at a lot of money here,” I said excitedly. “Think of it—a fully functioning antique robot nursemaid! He can watch the kids while his new owners go rummaging for more old artifacts.”

  “There’s something wrong,” said the Baroni, who was never what you could call an optimist.

  “The only thing wrong is we don’t have enough bags to haul all the money we’re going to sell him for.”

  “Look around you,” said the Baroni. “This place was abandoned, and it was never prosperous. If he’s that valuable, why did they leave him behind?”

  “He’s a nursemaid. Probably she outgrew him.”

  “Better find out.” He was back to sentence fragments again.

  I shrugged and approached the robot. “Sammy, what did you do at night after Miss Emily went to sleep?”

  He came to life again. “I stood by her bed.”

  “All night, every night?”

  “Yes, sir. Unless she woke and requested pain medication, which I would retrieve and bring to her.”

  “Did she require pain medication very often?” I asked.

  “I do not know, sir.”

  I frowned. “I thought you just said you brought it to her when she needed it.”

  “No, sir,” Sammy corrected me. “I said I brought it to her when she requested it.”

  “She didn’t request it very often?”

  “Only when the pain became unbearable.” Sammy paused. “I do not fully understand the word ‘unbearable,’ but I know it had a deleterious effect upon her. My Miss Emily was often in pain.”

  “I’m surprised you understand the word ‘pain,’” I said.

  “To feel pain is to be nonoperational or dysfunctional to some degree.”

  “Yes, but it’s more than that. Didn’t Miss Emily ev
er try to describe it?”

  “No,” answered Sammy. “She never spoke of her pain.”

  “Did it bother her less as she grew older and adjusted to her handicap?” I asked.

  “No, sir, it did not.” He paused. “There are many kinds of dysfunction.”

  “Are you saying she had other problems, too?” I continued.

  Instantly we were looking at another scene from Sammy’s past. It was the same girl, now maybe thirteen years old, staring at her face in a mirror. She didn’t like what she saw, and neither did I.

  “What is that?” I asked, forcing myself not to look away.

  “It is a fungus disease,” answered Sammy as the girl tried unsuccessfully with cream and powder to cover the ugly blemishes that had spread across her face.

  “Is it native to this world?”

  “Yes,” said Sammy.

  “You must have had some pretty ugly people walking around,” I said.

  “It did not affect most of the colonists. But Miss Emily’s immune system was weakened by her other diseases.”

  “What other diseases?”

  Sammy rattled off three or four that I’d never heard of.

  “And no one else in her family suffered from them?”

  “No, sir.”

  “It happens in my race, too,” offered the Baroni. “Every now and then a genetically inferior specimen is born and grows to maturity.”

  “She was not genetically inferior,” said Sammy.

  “Oh?” I said, surprised. It’s rare for a robot to contradict a living being, even an alien. “What was she?”

  Sammy considered his answer for a moment.

  “Perfect,” he said at last.

  “I’ll bet the other kids didn’t think so,” I said.

  “What do they know?” replied Sammy.

  And instantly he projected another scene. Now the girl was fully grown, probably about twenty. She kept most of her skin covered, but we could see the ravaging effect her various diseases had had upon her hands and face.

  Tears were running down from these beautiful blue eyes over bony, parchmentlike cheeks. Her emaciated body was wracked by sobs.

  A holograph of a robot’s hand popped into existence, and touched her gently on the shoulder.

  “Oh, Sammy!” she cried. “I really thought he liked me! He was always so nice to me.” She paused for breath as the tears continued unabated. “But I saw his face when I reached out to take his hand, and I felt him shudder when I touched it. All he really felt for me was pity. That’s all any of them ever feel!”

  “What do they know?” said Sammy’s voice, the same words and the same inflections he had just used a moment ago.

  “It’s not just him,” she said. “Even the farm animals run away when I approach them. I don’t know how anyone can stand being in the same room with me.” She stared at where the robot was standing. “You’re all I’ve got, Sammy. You’re my only friend in the whole world. Please don’t ever leave me.”

  “I will never leave you, Miss Emily,” said Sammy’s voice.

  “Promise me.”

  “I promise,” said Sammy.

  And then the holograph vanished and Sammy stood mute and motionless again.

  “He really cared for her,” said the Baroni.

  “The boy?” I said. “If he did, he had a funny way of showing it.”

  “No, of course not the boy. The robot.”

  “Come off it,” I said. “Robots don’t have any feelings.”

  “You heard him,” said the Baroni.

  “Those were programmed responses,” I said. “He probably has three million to choose from.”

  “Those are emotions,” insisted the Baroni.

  “Don’t you go getting all soft on me,” I said. “Any minute now you’ll be telling me he’s too human to sell.”

  “You are the human,” said the Baroni. “He is the one with compassion.”

  “I’ve got more compassion than her parents did, letting her grow up like that,” I said irritably. I confronted the robot again. “Sammy, why didn’t the doctors do anything for her?”

  “This was a farming colony,” answered Sammy. “There were only 387 families on the entire world. The Democracy sent a doctor once a year at the beginning, and then, when there were less than 100 families left, he stopped coming. The last time Miss Emily saw a doctor was when she was fourteen.”

  “What about an offworld hospital?” asked the Baroni.

  “They had no ship and no money. They moved here in the second year of a seven-year drought. Then various catastrophes wiped out their next six crops. They spent what savings they had on mutated cattle, but the cattle died before they could produce young or milk. One by one all the families began leaving the planet as impoverished wards of the Democracy.”

  “Including Miss Emily’s family?” I asked.

  “No. Mother died when Miss Emily was nineteen, and Father died two years later.”

  Then it was time for me to ask the Baroni’s question.

  “So when did Miss Emily leave the planet, and why did she leave you behind?”

  “She did not leave.”

  I frowned. “She couldn’t have run the farm—not in her condition.”

  “There was no farm left to run,” answered Sammy. “All the crops had died, and without Father there was no one to keep the machines working.”

  “But she stayed. Why?”

  Sammy stared at me for a long moment. It’s just as well his face was incapable of expression, because I got the distinct feeling that he thought the question was too simplistic or too stupid to merit an answer. Finally he projected another scene. This time the girl, now a woman approaching thirty, hideous open pustules on her face and neck, was sitting in a crudely crafted hoverchair, obviously too weak to stand any more.

  “No!” she rasped bitterly.

  “They are your relatives,” said Sammy’s voice. “And they have a room for you.”

  “All the more reason to be considerate of them. No one should be forced to associate with me—especially not people who are decent enough to make the offer. We will stay here, by ourselves, on this world, until the end.”

  “Yes, Miss Emily.”

  She turned and stared at where Sammy stood. “You want to tell me to leave, don’t you? That if we go to Jefferson IV I will receive medical attention and they will make me well—but you are compelled by your programming not to disobey me. Am I correct?”

  “Yes, Miss Emily.”

  The hint of a smile crossed her ravaged face. “Now you know what pain is.”

  “It is … uncomfortable, Miss Emily.”

  “You’ll learn to live with it,” she said. She reached out and patted the robot’s leg fondly. “If it’s any comfort, I don’t know if the medical specialists could have helped me even when I was young. They certainly can’t help me now.”

  “You are still young, Miss Emily.”

  “Age is relative,” she said. “I am so close to the grave I can almost taste the dirt.” A metal hand appeared, and she held it in ten incredibly fragile fingers. “Don’t feel sorry for me, Sammy. It hasn’t been a life I’d wish on anyone else. I won’t be sorry to see it end.”

  “I am a robot,” replied Sammy. “I cannot feel sorrow.”

  “You’ve no idea how fortunate you are.”

  I shot the Baroni a triumphant smile that said: See? Even Sammy admits he can’t feel any emotions.

  And he sent back a look that said: I didn’t know until now that robots could lie, and I knew we still had a problem.

  The scene vanished.

  “How soon after that did she die?” I asked Sammy.

  “Seven months, eighteen days, three hours, and four minutes, sir,” was his answer.

  “She was very bitte
r,” noted the Baroni.

  “She was bitter because she was born, sir,” said Sammy. “Not because she was dying.”

  “Did she lapse into a coma, or was she cogent up to the end?” I asked out of morbid curiosity.

  “She was in control of her senses until the moment she died,” answered Sammy. “But she could not see for the last eighty-three days of her life. I functioned as her eyes.”

  “What did she need eyes for?” asked the Baroni. “She had a hoverchair, and it is a single-level house.”

  “When you are a recluse, you spend your life with books, sir,” said Sammy, and I thought: The mechanical bastard is actually lecturing us!

  With no further warning, he projected a final scene for us.

  The woman, her eyes no longer blue, but clouded with cataracts and something else—disease, fungus, who knew?—lay on her bed, her breathing labored.

  From Sammy’s point of view, we could see not only her, but, much closer, a book of poetry, and then we heard his voice: “Let me read something else, Miss Emily.”

  “But that is the poem I wish to hear,” she whispered. “It is by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and she is my favorite.”

  “But it is about death,” protested Sammy.

  “All life is about death,” she replied so softly I could barely hear her. “Surely you know that I am dying, Sammy?”

  “I know, Miss Emily,” said Sammy.

  “I find it comforting that my ugliness did not diminish the beauty around me, that it will remain after I am gone,” she said. “Please read.”

  Sammy read:

  “There will be rose and rhododendron

  When you are dead and under ground;

  Still will be heard from white Syringas …”

  Suddenly the robot’s voice fell silent. For a moment I thought there was a flaw in the projection. Then I saw that Miss Emily had died.

  He stared at her for a long minute, which means that we did too, and then the scene evaporated.

  “I buried her beneath her favorite tree,” said Sammy. “But it is no longer there.”

  “Nothing lasts forever, even trees,” said the Baroni. “And it’s been five hundred years.”

  “It does not matter. I know where she is.”

  He walked us over to a barren spot about thirty yards from the ruin of a farmhouse. On the ground was a stone, and neatly carved into it was the following: