Caliban

and presuming on the power of the gods. The magician in the story reached for powers that could not be his, and, in most versions of the tale, received the fitting punishment of complete destruction at the hands of his creation.

And Caliban had struck her down in his first moment of awareness, had he not? She had given him that carefully edited datastore, hoping that coloring the facts with her own opinions would help form a link between the two of them, make him more capable of understanding her.

Had he understood her all too well, even in that first moment? Had he struck her down? Or was it someone else?

It was impossible for her to know, unless she tracked him down, got to him before Kresh did, somehow, and asked Caliban herself.

That was a most disconcerting idea. Would it be wise to go out looking for the robot that had seemingly tried to kill her?

Or was that the only way she could save herself? Find him and establish his innocence? Besides, it was not as if Caliban was the only threat she faced, or that simple physical attack was the only way to destroy a person.

The whole situation was spiraling out of control. It would not need to go much further in order to destroy her reputation altogether. Perhaps it was too late already. If her reputation collapsed, she would not be able to protect the New Law robots for the Limbo Project. There was a great deal of infighting left to do before the NLs would be safe. Rebuilding Limbo would require robot labor; there simply weren’t enough skilled people, Spacer or Settler, available to do the work. But Tonya Welton had made it clear that it was New Law robots or nothing for Limbo. Without the New Law robots, the Settlers would pullout; the project would die.

And so would the planet.

Was it sheer egotism, hubris on a new, wider, madder plane, to imagine herself as that important? To think that without her there to protect the New Law robots, the planet would collapse?

Her emotions told her that must be so, that one person could not be that important. But reason and logic, her judgment of the political situation, told her otherwise. It was like the game she had played as a child, setting up a whole line of rectangular game pieces balanced on their ends. Knock one down, and the next would fall, and the next and the next.

And she could hardly save the New Law robot project from inside a prison cell.

There were other versions of the old Frankenstein myth that she had found in her researches. Rarer, and somehow feeling less authentic, but there just the same. Versions where the magician redeemed himself, made up for his sins against the gods, by protecting his creation, saving it from the fear-crazed peasants that were trying to destroy it.

She had choices here, and they seemed to be crystallizing with disturbing clarity. She could find Caliban, take the risk that he had done no harm and that she could prove it, and thus redeem herself and save Limbo. It was a risky plan, full of big holes and unsubstantiated hopes.

The only alternative was to wait around to be destroyed, either by Caliban or by Kresh or sheer political chaos, with the real possibility that her doom spelled that of her world as well.

She straightened her back and dug her fingers deeper into the armrests of her chair. Her way was clear now.

Strange, she thought. I’ve reached a decision, and I didn’t even know I was trying to decide anything.

ALVAR Kresh lay down gratefully, painfully, in his own bed. It had been another incredibly long and frustrating night. After the robots had quelled the riot, and he had revived Donald, there had been the whole weary task of cleaning up after a riot. The night had been given over to handling arrests, tending to the injured, evaluating property damage, collecting statements from witnesses.

It was not until after it was all done and he was sitting in his aircar, allowing Donald to fly him home, that he even found the time to think over the things Fredda Leving had said. No, more than think; he had brooded, lost himself in a brown study, all the way home, scarcely aware that he had gotten home and into bed.

But once in bed, with nothing to stare at but the darkness, he was forced to admit it to himself: The damnable woman was right, at least in part.

Put to one side the utter madness of building a No Law robot. His whole department was already at work, doing all they could, to track down Caliban and destroy him. That was a separate issue.

But Fredda Leving was right to say Spacers let their robots do too much. Alvar blinked and looked around himself in the darkness. It suddenly dawned on him that he had gotten into bed without any awareness of his actions. Somehow he had been gotten into the house, changed out of his clothes, washed, and put into bed without being aware of it. He considered for a moment and realized that Donald had done it all.

The unnoticed minutes snapped back into his recollection. Of course Donald had done it, guiding Alvar through each step, cuing him with hand signals and gentle touches to sit here, lift his left foot, then his right foot, to have his shoes and pants removed. Donald had led him into the refresher, adjusted the water stream for him, guided him into it, and washed his body for him. Donald had dried him, dressed him in pajamas, and gotten him into bed.

Alvar himself, his own mind and spirit, might as well not have been there for the operation. Donald had been the guiding force, and Alvar the mindless automaton. Worrying over Fredda Leving’s warning that the people of Inferno were letting their robots do too much for them, Alvar Kresh had not even been aware of how completely his robot was not merely caring for him, but controlling him.

Alvar suddenly remembered something, a moment out of his past, back when he had been a patrol officer, sent on one of the most ghastly calls of his entire career. The Davirnik Gidi case. His stomach churned even as he thought of it.

In all places, in all cultures, there are aspects of human nature that only the police ever see, and even they see only rarely. Places they would just as soon not see at all. Dark, private sides of the human animal that are not crimes, are not illegal, are not, perhaps, even evil. But they open doors that sane people know should be closed, put on display aspects of humanity that no one would wish to see. Alvar had learned something from Davirnik Gidi. He had learned that madness is troubling, frightening, in direct proportion to the degree to which it shows what is possible, to the degree it shows what a seemingly sane person is capable of doing.

For if a person as well known, as much admired as Gidi, was capable of such—such deviations—then who else might be as well? If Gidi could drop down that deep into something that had no name, then who else might fall? Might not he, Alvar Kresh, fall as well? Might he not already be falling, as sure as Gidi that all he was doing was right and sensible?

Davirnik Gidi. Burning hells, that had been bad. So bad that he had blocked it almost completely out of his memory, though the nightmares still came now and then. Now he forced himself to think about it.

Davirnik Gidi was what the Sheriff’s Department primly called an Inert Death, and every deputy knew Inerts were usually bad, but it was universally agreed that Gidi had been the worst. Period. If there was ever a case that warned of something deeply, seriously, wrong, it was Gidi.

The Inerts were something Spacers did not like to talk about. They did not wish to admit such people existed, at least in part because something that is appalling only becomes more so when it is also dreadfully familiar. Nearly every Spacer could look at an Inert and worry if the sight was something out of a distorted mirror, a twisted nightmare version built out of one’s self.

Inerts did nothing for themselves. Period. They organized their lives so that their robots could do everything for them. Anything they would have to do for themselves they left undone. They lay on their form-firming couches and let their robots bring their pleasures to them.

So with Gidi, and that was the frightening thing. Inerts were supposed to be hermits, hiding away from the world, lost in their own private, barricaded worlds, deliberately cutting themselves off from the outside world. But Gidi was a well-known figure in Inferno society, a famous art critic, famous for his monthly parties. They were brilliant affairs that always started at the dot of 2200 and ended on the stroke of 2500. These he attended only by video screen, his wide, fleshy face smiling down from the wall as he chatted with his guests. The camera never