Caliban

come here tonight,” she announced. She turned and looked about the aircar’s cabin, as if seeing it for the first time. “I will contact you tomorrow, Sheriff,” she said. “And I will expect full and complete reports of your progress on a regular basis. Come, Ariel.”

And without another word, she stepped out of the car, her robot following. Alvar Kresh watched them go, wondering just what exactly Tonya Welton was up to. Her performance tonight was odd, to put it mildly. Putting aside the fact of her magically appearing almost before Kresh got to the crime scene, there was something else: the way she had latched on to the possibility of a political motive. It almost made Kresh think she wanted to draw attention toward that idea and away from something else. But what the hell could that something else be?

All he knew for sure was that whatever was going on, he was already stuck, deep inside it.

3

CALIBAN walked the night, burning with curiosity. He was a great distance from his starting point, in a quiet residential area, the walkways all but completely deserted at this hour. The homes were large and widely scattered. Great lawns, some of them getting a bit dry, scruffy, and thin-looking, separated the houses. In this part of town, it seemed there was little ground traffic to speak of. Judging from the absence of a road wide enough for large vehicles, travel to and fro was by aircar or by foot.

But a dying lawn was no less wondrous than a live one to Caliban. All the world was new to him, everything that he saw was a fresh and vibrant wonder. He saw the bright pinpoints of light in the sky and wondered what they were. He noticed a few bits of litter blown against a fence and wondered how such a strange combination of objects had come to be there. His datastore was mute on both of those subjects, and many others besides, but on the whole it was a splendid guide, telling him any number of things about the city through which he walked. He wandered everywhere, eagerly looking about at everything, marveling at all things. And if stars and litter were not explained, many other things were. More often than not, he could look at a thing, and wonder about it, and find that the datastore could identify it and explain it for him.

He was content for some time to wander the city, passively absorbing whatever the datastore saw fit to tell him about what he saw. Then Caliban had an idea. If the map and the datastore could work to tell him about what was before him, could they not also guide his steps? Perhaps he could examine the datastore’s map, select an interesting destination, and travel to it.

He stopped in his tracks and tried the experiment. The outside world seemed to fade from his sight. Suddenly he was looking down on a map-schematic of the area he was in, done in bold primary colors and carefully designed symbols.

He tried to push outward from that point and was greatly pleased to discover that the simple act of wishing it to be so allowed him to visualize the entire city map, or focus in on any portion of it. Nor, he found, did his virtual viewpoint have to stay above the map. He could move down to ground level and see the buildings and hill tower over him. He could visualize the map data from any angle or position.

A few moments of experimentation confirmed it: He could manipulate his viewpoint to any spot in or over the map, look at the lay of the land from a bird’s-eye view, or from ground level at any position, with the buildings and streets presented in the proper shapes and sizes. His vision swept along great swatches of the city, across the parks, the buildings, the great roads. It was as if he were traveling through those places in his mind. The sensation was exhilarating, almost one of flight.

There were datatags on the map, offering information on the buildings—their names and addresses, and in many cases the names of whatever businesses went on there.

Suddenly he got a splendid idea. He could use the datatag information to learn more about himself. He manipulated his viewpoint within the map and brought it back to his present position. Then he proceeded to retrace his steps back to the building he had started out from. He could read the datatags connected to the building and learn what sort of place it was, see what other information the map held concerning it. Certainly he could find clues to his own identity, his place in the world. Eager to find out more about himself, he moved his viewpoint rapidly across the map, back the way he had come.

The map imagery rushed past him at a breakneck pace, twisting and turning violently, reversing his movements at tremendous speed. At last the images came back to his starting place. He made a strange discovery: The image of the building was incomplete. Nearly every other building was shown in great detail, with doors and windows and basic elements of the architecture clearly shown. But the map showed this building as nothing but a featureless grey rectangular solid, a low, long shape on the land.

Confused, Caliban accessed the datatag system.

And discovered that the map had no information whatsoever about the building inside which he had awakened.

Stunned, surprised, Caliban shut down the map display system. The bright colors and symbols of the map faded from his vision, and he found himself once again standing in the darkness, alone on an empty pathway in a quiet residential district.

Why was there no information about that building? Perhaps he should go back there, examine the place firsthand. He of course had a perfect, detailed memory of what he had seen there, and no doubt he could work his way back through those memories for information. But he had not been looking for anything when he awakened, had not even been fully aware that he should have known more than he did. If he went back, he would learn more.

He turned around, was about to head back the way he had come, toward the lab. But then he stopped. Wait a moment. There was another factor. One he had not considered yet. He recalled that first moment of awakening, the sight of the woman unconscious at his feet, the blood pooling about her head. The cross-index system of his datastore flitted through a whole series of things even as he thought about that moment.

And it settled at a quotation from the Legal Code that leaving the scene of a crime before being interviewed by the police was itself a crime. His mind flittered through all the datastore had to say about the Legal Code, the concept of crime, and the idea of punishment and rehabilitation. All of it seemed to relate to humans, but it was not a great leap of reasoning to assume that committing a criminal act could mean trouble for a robot as well.

No, he could not go back there.

Wait a moment. Were there other blanks on the map? Other places where detail was limited in some way? Perhaps other places with limited information on the datastore would have something in common with the building he had left. Perhaps examining one of them would offer some clue; perhaps some thought or image would stimulate the datastore to offer some sort of information that could tell him about himself.

Caliban looked about the area and decided it would be best to get off the pathway while he was examining the map. He stepped off the path and walked a short way, until he found a slight depression in the rolling landscape. He sat down in it, reasonably sure he could not be seen from the path.

He returned his attention to the datastore map. At first, his mind cast back and forth across the map in random, swooping passes, trying to cover as much ground as quickly as possible while still keeping track of any building or place that seemed suspiciously blank. Then he resolved to quarter the whole city and go block by block, in an orderly manner. Perhaps there was something he could learn from the pattern of blanked places, something he could discern only when he had located them all.

The map of the city had definite edges to it, precise boundaries beyond which was nothingness. Caliban’s knowledge of the world, the universe, stopped at those borders. For a moment, Caliban toyed with the idea of venturing to the closest of those boundaries, just to see what it was like. He imagined himself standing on the edge of the world, looking down into nothingness. The idea was exciting and disturbing.

But no. It would not do to get sidetracked. First he must get answers about himself and about what had happened at the building where he had awakened. After those two mysteries were resolved, he could take the time to indulge his idle curiosity.

He set to work at the southern edge of the map and began to work across it methodically, examining a strip from east to west, then moving northward to examine the next strip, west to east.

And then he found it. Not far from the southern edge of the map was a great void, an emptiness a thousand times, ten thousand times larger than the blank, unmarked building in which he had awakened. But this was no area