to agree: enough.
Standing in the shadowy corridor of a space station more than
thirty thousand miles above Earth's surface, Gonzales thought how
difficult it all remained. Though all nations served the letter
of international laws that put Earth's welfare before their
interests, and Preservationists roamed all of the world's
habitatsthey had 'friends of the court' status in all nations
and served as advocates for endangered speciesthe war to save
Earth from humankind was not over. Grasping, corrupt, self-
centered, the human species always threatened to overwhelm its
habitats and itself with careless, powerful gestures and simple
greed.
However, though this station, like most all of humankind's
settlements aloftthe settlements on the Moon and Mars, the
Orbital Energy Grid, Halo Cityhad been conceived in the bad old
twentieth century, they were sustained as products of New
Millennium consciousness: contrite, chastened, careful.
He walked on.
#
The junction just ahead of Gonzales and the sam was marked by
blinking red lights. From around the corner came the sounds of
scurrying small things. 'What's up?' Gonzales asked.
'Follow me,' the sam said. 'We must not cross the marker, but
we can stand and watch.'
A large group of sams, identical to the one next to Gonzales,
filled the hallway beyond. Some tried to work their way through
informal mazes of furniture and stacked junk, coils of wire and
angle-iron and the like; others worked to assist sams that had
gotten tangled in the sections of the maze. Still others shifted
pieces of the maze to one side. Amid clicking extensors and
banging metal, the sams labored patiently, mostly unsuccessfully.
Gonzales was reminded of old twentieth century films satirizing
assembly lines, robots, machines in general.
'A nursery,' the sam said. 'This group nears completion of
its education. This'it pointed with an extensor toward the
struggling robots'is the prerequisite to training. As small
children must mature in their development, they must learn the
essentials of perception, motion, and coordination. At the same
time they memorize the ten thousand axioms of common sense, and
then they can develop their linguistic capabilities; at present
they have a vocabulary of approximately one thousand words of
SimSpeech.'
'What about thinking?' Gonzales asked. 'Where do they learn
to do that?'
'That comes later, if at all. For sams as well as humans,
thinking is one of the least important things the mind does.'
The two watched for some time, then Gonzales said, 'I don't
need any company,' and walked on. When he looked back, he saw the
sam remained motionless, fascinated by the progress of its
fellows.
Gonzales returned to his small room, where a night-light
glowed softly, and returned to bed. He fell asleep quickly, oddly
comforted by thinking about the robots busy at their school.
8. Halo City
Blue jump-suited Halo personnel led Gonzales and Diana
through the micro-gravity environments at Halo's Zero-Gate, then
to an elevator at the hub of Spoke 6, where Tia Showalter,
Director SenTrax Halo Group, and her assistant, Horn, were waiting
for them. The shuttle had arrived at Halo an hour before, late
afternoon local time, and its passengers had waited impatiently as
it went through docking and clearance procedures, all eager to
leave the ship after a week spent climbing the long path from
Athena Station to the city.
Showalter was just under six feet tall, and had green eyes
above broad Slavic cheekbones, a wide mouth and pointed chin. Her
fine brown hair was cut short in a style Gonzales later discovered
was common to many long-term Halo residents, for convenience in
micro-gravity environments. Gonzales knew that as director of a
major SenTrax operation, she had to be wily and tough.
Horn was a tight-lipped, sallow-skinned man in his
fifties, skinny and anxious, with iron-gray hair pulled tight
against his skull in a kind of bun. The man spoke some variety of
New YorkeseGonzales didn't know which, but he could feel the
harsh nasal tones beneath his skin.
The warning gong sounded, then the elevator's vault-like
doors slid closed with a great hiss, locking in more than a
hundred people for the trip from axis to rim. Above their heads
the wall screen read SOLAR FLARE CONDITION GREEN. The elevator
dropped into one of the city's spokes like a shell into the barrel
of a gun, down a tube a quarter of a mile long and into a well of
increasing gravity.
Against one wall, a group of sams were clustered around a
charge-point, black leads extended to the aluminum post. They
stood silent and motionlesstalking among themselves? Gonzales
wondered.
Horn saw where Gonzales was looking and said, 'We'd like to
assign each of you a sam for your stay in Halo.'
'Really?' Gonzales said.
Diana said, 'No thank you.' Quickly.
Right, Gonzales thought. No point in putting ourselves under
surveillance. He said, 'I'll pass, too.'
Horn paused, looking a bit miffed, as if he wanted to argue.
He said, 'Very well. Then be sure you always wear the
communication and i.d. module you were given when you came off the
shuttle.' He held up his own wrist to show the small bracelet, a
closed loop of plain silver that bulged just slightly with the
electronics inside. 'If you have a problem, just yell and help
