Caliban

she was likely to make any more such speeches. Everything was working his way.

But he had to concentrate on the plans for today. He had to assume the Sheriff’s Department was ready for trouble. Once the Ironheads started the ruckus, they would only have a few minutes before the law stepped in to protect the damned Settlers.

So they would have to do as much damage as possible in those first few minutes. Under the circumstances, it was too much to hope they would be able to penetrate the underground section of Settlertown again. No sense wasting effort in the attempt. This time, it would have to be on the surface, at ground level. Simcor Beddle lay his hands on the desktop and stared thoughtfully at the map of his enemy’s stronghold.

IT was morning in the city of Hades. Caliban knew that much for certain, if very little else of any substance. By now he was no longer sure what he knew.

But he was beginning to believe something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong.

It was as if Caliban’s utterly blank memory and the precise but limited information in the datastore were the double lenses of a distorted telescope, utter ignorance and expert knowledge combining to twist and warp all he saw. The world his eyes and mind presented to him was a crazed and frightening patchwork.

In the busiest part of the city’s midtown, he turned off the sidewalk and found a bench set in a quiet corner of a tiny park, well out of sight from any casual passersby. He sat down and began reviewing all that he had seen as he had walked the streets of Hades.

There was something distinctly unreal, and somewhat alarming, about the world around him. He had come to realize just how clean, perfect, idealized, precise were the facts and figures, maps, diagrams, and images that leapt up from the datastore. But the real-world objects that corresponded to the datastore’s concepts were far less precise.

Further exploration confirmed that false voids and featureless buildings were not the only flaws in the datastore map.

The map likewise did not report which blocks were busy, full of people and robots, and which were empty, semi-abandoned, even starting to decay.

Some new buildings had materialized since the map was stored in his datastore, and other, older buildings that seemed whole and complete in the datastore had vanished from reality.

No image in the datastore showed anything to be worn-out or dirty, but the real world was full of dust and dirt, no matter how vigorously the maintenance robots worked to keep it all clean.

Caliban found the differences between idealized definitions and real-world imperfections deeply disturbing. The world he could see and touch seemed, somehow, less real than the idealized, hygienic facts and images stored deep inside his brain.

But it was more than buildings and the map, or even the datastore, that confused him.

It was human behavior he found most bewildering. When Caliban first approached a busy intersection, the datastore showed him a diagram of the correct procedure for crossing a street safely. But human pedestrians seemed to ignore all such rules, and common sense, for that matter. They walked wherever they pleased, leaving to the robots driving the groundcars to get out of the way.

Something else about the datastore was strange, even disturbing: There was a flavor of something close to emotion about much of its data. It was as if the opinions, the feelings, of whoever implanted the information into the datastore had been stored there as well.

He was growing to understand the datastore on something deeper than an intellectual level. He was learning the feel of it, gaining a sense of how it worked, developing reflexes to help him use it in a more controlled and useful manner, keep it from spewing out knowledge he did not need. Humans had to learn to walk: That was one of many strange and needless facts the datastore had provided. Caliban was coming to realize that he had to learn how to know, and remember.

Confusion, muddle, dirt, inaccurate and useless information—those he could perhaps learn to accept. But it was far more troubling that, on many subjects, the datastore was utterly—and deliberately—silent. Information he most urgently wanted was not only missing but excised, purposely removed. There was a distinct sensation of emptiness, of loss, that came to him when he reached for data that should have been there and it was not. There were carved-out voids inside the datastore.

There was much he desperately wanted to know, but there was one thing in particular, one thing that the store did not tell him, one thing that he most wanted to know: Why didn’t it tell him more? He knew it should have been able to do so. Why was all information on that place where the sign said Settlertown deleted from the map? Why had all meaningful references to robots been deleted? There was the greatest mystery. He was one, and yet he scarcely knew what one was. Why was the datastore silent on that of all subjects?

Humans he knew about. At his first sight of that woman he saw when he awoke, he had immediately known what a human was, the basics of their biology and culture. Later, when he glanced at an old man, or one of the rare children walking the street, he knew all basic generalities concerning those classes of person—their likely range of temperament, how it was best to address them, what they were and were not likely to do. A child might run and laugh, and adult was likely to walk more sedately, an elder might choose to move more slowly still.

But when he looked at another robot, one of his fellow beings, his datastore literally drew a blank. There was simply no information in his mind.

All he knew about robots came from his own observation. Yet his observations had afforded him little more than confusion.

The robots he saw—and he himself—appeared to be a cross between human and machine. That left any number of questions unclear. Were robots born and raised like humans? Were they instead manufactured, like all the other machines that received detailed discussion in the datastore? What was the place of the robot in the world? He knew the rights and privileges of humans—except as they pertained to robots—but he knew nothing at all of how robots fit in.

Yes, he could see what went on around him. But what he saw when he looked was disturbing, and baffling. Robots were everywhere—and everywhere, in every way, robots were subservient. They fetched and they carried, they walked behind the humans. They carried the humans’ loads, opened their doors, drove their cars. It was patently clear from every scrap of human and robot behavior that this was the accepted order of things. No one questioned it.

Except himself, of course.

Who was he? What was he? What was he doing here? What did it all mean?

He stood up and started walking again, not with any real aim in mind, but more because he could not bear to sit idle any longer. The need to know, to understand who and what he was, was getting stronger all the time. There was always the chance that the answer, the solution, was just around the corner, waiting to be discovered.

He left the park and turned left, heading down the broad walkways of downtown.

HOURS went by, and still Caliban walked the streets, still deeply confused, uncertain what he was searching for. Anything could contain the clue, the answer, the explanation. A word from a passing human, a sign on a wall, the design of a building, might just stimulate his datastore to provide him with the answers he needed.

He stopped at a corner and looked across the street to the building opposite. Well, the sight of this particular building did not cause any torrent of facts to burst forth, but it was a strange-looking thing nonetheless, even considering the jarringly different architectural styles he had seen in the city. It was a muddle of domes, columns, arches, and cubes. Caliban could fathom no purpose whatsoever in it all.

“Out of my way, robot,” an imperious voice called out behind him. Caliban, lost in his consideration of things architectural, did not really register the voice. Suddenly a walking stick whacked down on his left shoulder.

Caliban spun around in astonishment to confront his attacker.

Incredible. Simply incredible. It was a tiny woman, slender, thin-boned, easily a full meter shorter than Caliban, clearly weaker and far more frail than he was. And yet she had deliberately and fearlessly ordered him about, instead of merely stepping around him, and then struck at him—using a weapon that could not possibly harm him. Why did she not fear him? Why did she have such obvious confidence that he would not respond by attacking her, when he could clearly do so quite effectively?