James P. Hogan (19 page)

“About six months. I used to manage a laundry on Siden, but it got boring. Back on Earth I always liked gardening, so I figured why not give Plantation a try? I wasn’t so sure about the going-primitive part, though. But I had some friends who’d moved here, and they said, ‘Dari, you know, when you’ve gotten used to the pace of things and find you don’t need all the junk, and you get to know some of the people, you won’t want to go back.’ And you know what? They were right. I love it out here.”

“That’s good,” Korshak agreed.

While Dari was talking, she ushered him into a chair in the cluttered office and took her own on the far side of a desk strewn with papers. The surroundings seemed oddly incomplete without datacommunications and other kinds of equipment that would normally be standard in an office – although concession had been made to a text-processing screen and a photocopier, so there were some conveniences that had come to be regarded as indispensable. Korshak remembered realizing with surprise on his first trip to Plantation with Mirsto Junior how much he had come to take
Aurora
’s advanced living for granted over the years. There wasn’t even a phone service here. The only external communications were from the administrative center located in the hub.

Dari turned to one side and opened a drawer of a small filing unit standing on a side table. She drew several record cards from the indexed sections contained in it, and set them down in front of her. “What did you have in mind?” she asked. “Anything in particular? The warden for the park areas has a slot, if you know anything about animals. There’s always room for field hands, and pick-and-shovel work. Or if you’re mechanically inclined, there’s a shift available to learn something about climate-control maintenance.”

“Actually, I was also looking for some information,” Korshak said, coming to the point.

Dari eyed him with immediate suspicion. “Oh?”

“About somebody who we think might have come here about two or three weeks ago, looking for the same kind of thing. I need to find out where he went.”

Dari sighed and put down a further card that she had been reading. “Now, you know, Mr….”

“Korshak.”

“… that I can’t…” Her voice trailed off as the name registered. The look in her eyes softened to a shine of adulation. “
Of course!
But coming here like this?”

“Everyone needs a break and a change sometimes.”

“I suppose so. We do get them all. You’d be surprised.”

“I doubt it.”

“No, I guess probably not.” Dari gave a quick laugh, then switched to an apologetic expression. “But I still can’t divulge information on individuals we’ve dealt with – even for you. There are standards. I’m sure you understand.”

Korshak had been expecting as much, and he wasn’t looking for special treatment. “Okay, never mind individuals. Let me ask you a general question.”

“Okay.”

“Has anyone unusual been through here in, say, the last two weeks or so?”

“How do you mean, ‘unusual’?”

“Distinctly unusual. In fact, not the kind of individual that you’ve probably got in mind at all. I’m looking for a robot that’s gone missing.”

“A robot.”

“Yes.”

Dari’s eyelids fluttered for a moment like spinning wheels going nowhere as she strove to process the information. “You mean artificial people? Like the ones we see documentaries about sometimes? You think one might have come
here
, looking for a slot?”

Korshak nodded. “I know it sounds crazy. But that’s what we have reason to believe.”

Dari shook her head helplessly and showed her hands. “Well, that wouldn’t be something it would be exactly easy to miss. All I can tell you is no, we haven’t had anybody… anything, whatever, like that coming through here. If we had, I’d have notified hub Control and have them check around to see what was going on.”

Korshak had been prepared for that, too. He couldn’t really see Tek walking in as itself, metal alloys and polymer, and asking for a job. “Well, think of a different kind of unusual,” he suggested. He gestured with a thumb at the doorway behind where he was sitting. “The people who got off the ferry with me just now were all out on day trips or come to spend time in outdoor settings – shirts and sandals, sun hats and shorts. Just out of curiosity, have you had anyone through recently who was decidedly different, that you couldn’t even see? Muffled up in a coat, with a big hat and a beard, maybe. Possibly talked a little strangely, for example by not making connections that most people wouldn’t think twice about.”

Even as he spoke, Korshak could tell from the changes in Dari’s posture that he was close. All the same, she remained hesitant. “Well, I don’t know,” she answered dubiously. “Now it’s getting individual, isn’t it? I can’t give out privacy-breaching information. It’s code.”

“Personal privacy, yes,” Korshak tried. “But we’re not talking about a person, are we? It’s a machine that someone has lost from a lab” – he gestured across the office —” like a copier or a crawler out on one of the construction sites. Privacy is an issue that has to do with humans.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Dari said again. There was a pause. “Even if somebody unusual-looking – in the way you said –
had
been here, I wouldn’t have any way of knowing for sure if it was your robot or not, would I? It could just as well have been somebody” – she sought for a word —” unusual. A person. See what I mean?” Dari was clearly torn between not wanting to be obstructive, and upholding professional principles. “Could there be a risk of any danger with this thing running around loose?” she asked finally, offering an easy way out.

“Not that I know of,” Korshak replied candidly. He had his principles, too.

Dari thought for a few seconds longer. Then she turned to the file unit again, ruffled among the cards, and drew out another one. She read it over, and her voice changed to a lighter, more casual note, as if she had dismissed the previous topic and moved on to something else. “How about trying something a little different, Mr. Korshak? There’s somebody called Melvig Bahoba, who cultivates trees and supplies timber. He’s at a place called Highwood, up on the East Ridge. That’s just over a quarter of the way around Ringvale going north from here, just past the Forest.” Ringvale was the name of Plantation’s central valley. “In fact, it’s really a part of it.”

“Yes, I know the Forest,” Korshak said. It was the fanciful name given to Plantation’s quarter-mile strip of high-density woodland. “Can’t say I’ve come across Highwood before, though.”

“You probably wouldn’t unless you were looking for it. It’s right at the top of the wall, buried among the trees. You won’t get many visitors wandering that far off the circuit, either.” She looked at him pointedly over the top of the card. “A good place to pick if you were looking for privacy or wanting to remain anonymous.”

Korshak got the message and nodded, keeping a straight face. “It sounds just fine. How do I find it?”

Dari gave him directions, at the same time sketching the details on a slip of paper, and passed it across. “That should get you there. Good luck.”

The building Korshak emerged from was the largest of several facing an open space that served as Jesson’s central square. They were styled after the fashion of early town housing in Sofi – complete with roofs, since artificially induced rain provided the easiest means for keeping things clean and getting dust out of the air. However, the premium on space resulted in their being limited in expanse and of exaggerated height. Together with the narrowness of the thoroughfares leading away to the open areas a block or so distant in every direction – they could hardly be called streets – the impression was of an oversize toytown. But for now the sky with its peculiar striplight sun was clear and blue, and the people in their summer clothes added to the color of flowers and fruit blossoms visible among the greenery of the valley walls rising on two sides. Korshak set off at a leisurely pace, resolved to make the best of the break that the opportunity offered.

Ringvale was an arresting sight. With its floor facing outward toward the sky, the downward curvature of the torus along which it lay resulted in “horizons” that were unnaturally close in the directions defined as north and south – as if Jesson and its immediate locality were situated atop a domed mountain with the land falling away sharply on two sides. The east-west curvature, by contrast, was in the opposite direction – concave upward – and tighter, forming an immense saddle-shape of walls rising steeply to become vertical at the “ridges” marking the halfway levels where the sky began.

The synthesized gravity could be made to act perpendicularly to the ground everywhere, which meant that someone standing at the top of a ridge, and hence turned ninety degrees with respect to the floor, would see the floor as vertical, while the wall below the ridge on the opposite side would appear and feel overhead, with its inhabitants standing upside down. In practice, the effect of a mild slope was maintained to impart a sense of “naturalness” that conformed to the visual impression, while at the same time facilitating the drainage of water off the valley sides. Interestingly, youngsters like Mirsto, who had grown up among such geometries, saw nothing unusual in them. On the other hand, they found the notion of landscapes without enclosure difficult to visualize, and were unable to comprehend unlimited “flatness” in every direction at all.

Two tracks wound their way northward out of Jesson – straight lines and other echoes of artificiality were avoided wherever possible. Korshak would need to take the eastern one, which was known as Orchard Trail after the plots of fruit trees and shrubs that began immediately past the last houses. The plants represented a small sample of the seed collection carried by the mission and were genetically modified for reduced size yet increased yield, thanks to concealed subsurface hydroponic and aeroponic networks. Intentions were to restore the natural strains on arrival at Hera. In the meantime, what Plantation offered was not a completely accurate reconstruction of how parts of Earth had really been – but it gave an idea.

The next of Plantation’s spokes going northward from Jesson joined Ringvale at the local administrative center called Huan-ko. Helmut and Sonja Goben lived just outside it. Since the Forest lay beyond Huan-ko, and Melvig Bahoba’s place as Dari had described it was on the far side of that, it seemed that this would be as good a time as any to make good on the promise in his letter to stop by.

An interesting thing about young humans, Tek had observed, was that they didn’t seem to possess inherently any of the judgmental predispositions that caused adult humans to read “good” or “bad” into each other’s ways of thinking, when mere thinking couldn’t affect the world in any way at all, and to presume motives in others that they had no way of knowing. Its conclusion, therefore, was that they had to be taught such things by the humans who had matured. Why the matured ones should want to do this was still a mystery, since from what Tek had been able to glean of the history of humans in their former world, the consequences had been nothing but trouble. Indeed, if the legend was to be believed, escaping from the specter of all their self-inflicted problems of old arising again had been the reason why
Aurora
was built. The conundrum of it all was how humans could have devised beings in the form of Tek and its kind, that were able to apprehend logic on a level that the humans themselves seemed incapable of applying.

Tek turned over the partly cut board from one of the pines that had been scheduled for felling, tightened the holding clamp, and engaged the screw to feed the board through the rotary saw. A plume of sawdust flew as the pitch rose to a shriek and then fell again. Tek flipped the motor off, released the strips, picked one of them up, and turned to lay it along with the others making up the current quota. The working area at the rear of Melvig Bahoba’s house was covered by a roof and open on two sides, the fourth side formed by the tool shed. Beyond the roofed area was a yard stacked with timbers and bounded by the closely spaced trees at the very top of Forest. Two children sat watching, perched on a trestle table by the tool-shed wall. The girl was called Theis, and the boy, Uggam. They were from somewhere near Huan-ko, on the valley floor on the far side of Forest, and had run into Tek in Forest a couple of days previously, when the robot was out recording growth data on a new stand of mixed saplings.

“Was that what you did back on Earth, too?” Theis asked. “Cutting wood and knowing all about trees?”

“I don’t think anyone can ever know all about anything,” Tek replied. “And I was never on Earth. Why do you assume that I was?”

“Oh. It’s just that you’re grown up. I thought everyone who was grown up came from Earth.”

“That’s just because he’s big,” Uggam said. “Robots are big right from the start. They don’t have to grow bigger from being small, the way we do.”

“Oh. Is that right?” Theis asked Tek. “So, where were you born?”

“They don’t get born,” Uggam put in.

“He’s right,” Tek said, moving back to pick up the other strip from the board. “I was fabricated…”

“What?”

“Put together,” Uggam said.

“Oh.”

“… on
Aurora
. In a laboratory on Jakka.” Voicing an untruth was something that Tek had found he couldn’t do, although he was aware that humans sometimes did, for reasons that largely escaped him. He attributed it to the basic programming that his faculties were rooted in. The children had promised not to spread word of his presence at Bahoba’s around. The air of mystery and being asked to keep a secret seemed to excite them.

“So, how old are you?” Theis asked. “Do you have a birthday?”

“I suppose you’d say about two,” Tek replied.

“
Two?
That’s amazing! How can anyone know so much if they’re only two?”

But it was evidently perfectly acceptable. Tek felt a fond sense of fellowship with this ability to accept unexpected facts uncritically – something that again seemed to be lost as humans attained adulthood. He had found the same thing with Masumichi’s cousin Hori, and Hori’s friend Mirsto.