Karel might have expected this many clients, but he was still a little surprised at the startling variety of the station’s occupants. Gates’s team’s normal clientele tended to be the Spontaneous, those robots who had been formed somewhere out in the southern ocean and then walked here along the sea bed. Indeed, Karel could see plenty of examples of these now, sitting or standing or lying about in the various cells. They tended to have heavy iron bodies, simple facial features, their eyes usually recessed behind thick glass. A few of them were humanoid in appearance; most of them were crab-like. They were kept in specially constructed cells, the floors of which were lowered to allow pools filled with salt water. One that Karel spotted was little more than a dark shape in the water: gunmetal grey, biological life clinging to its body – barnacles and limpets – and with green algae staining its underside. Raising its eyes, set below the rim of its shell, it glanced for a moment at Karel and then returned to contemplating the dark patterns below it in the rippling water. Unfused, unsentient, this was just the sort of thing that Karel expected to find here on the south coast.
Karel resumed his progress along the walkway, still surprised by the number of the Made that had turned up here. Such robots had had their minds twisted by their mothers from wire spooled from their father. But the Made were usually seen on the northern borders of Turing City State, as refugees from Bethe and Wien. How had they made it all the way down here, to the southern coast? And there were so many of them…
He saw elegantly engineered robots from Stark, their shiny smooth casings humming with quiet power as they patrolled the confined space of their holding areas with proud dignity. There were short, unassuming robots from Bethe and Segre, sitting in groups, staring out through the bars. And even the peculiar builds of robots from distant Raman and Born could be seen, with their magnetized bodies and overlarge feet and hands.
Most surprisingly, there were the Artemisians. The city state of Artemis was not supposed to recognize any difference between normal metal and the carefully twisted metal of the mind. Robots born into a low rank were held to be expendable in the Artemisian State. Karel guessed that their mothers would have twisted their minds towards thoughts of escape as a more likely means of survival than service at the bottom end of Artemisian society.
Suddenly the sheer number of people in the large room made Karel feel giddy, as if his gyros were spinning too fast. Metal hands, metal feet; metal floors, metal bars. Grilles and wire and water splashing inside and booming beneath his feet and, meanwhile, all that other motion around him. It seemed as if the entire world was pressing in on Turing City. Newly constructed Artemis railway lines were spreading across the land. They brought metal to the Artemis forges that made new robots daily, even hourly, robots that poured in metal waves across the southern part of the continent of Shull. Could little Turing City’s walls really hold up against that encroaching tide? Who knew? If the rumours were true, even mighty Wien looked to be on its last legs, ready to fall at any time.
‘What are you looking at?’
The words jolted Karel from his reverie. The speaker was an Artemisian war robot. A Scout. Her body was made of katana metal, silver grey and hard. Her hands and feet were lean and sharp, mirror-bright blades almost totally retracted, only the very tips emerging to scratch curls of swarf from the metal floor as she advanced. She brought her head right up to the bars, stooped a little so that it was level with Karel’s face. He could see how her eyes were recessed behind their narrow slits, withdrawn beyond the reach of any blade. Now she allowed them to protrude ever so slightly, signalling her contempt.
‘How much longer are you going to keep me in here, Tokvah?’ she whispered.
With a speed that surprised everyone present, Karel slammed a hand into her face, sending her reeling back across the cell, a grinding noise from his arm signifying a stripped gear. All of a sudden everyone else in the holding cells was very, very quiet, all of them staring at Karel, now flexing his hand, flexing his supple, city hand made of light metal, finely engraved with swirling patterns barely seen in the light, then continuing to walk the gangway towards the rear of the vast room. He seemed oblivious to the way the other immigrants drew back in their cells as he walked by.
Gates followed just behind him. ‘Zuse, Karel,’ he swore. ‘I just don’t understand you, I really don’t.’
‘Not in front of the clients,’ muttered Karel, but Gates didn’t seem to hear.
‘I just don’t get the way you’re made. Most of the time you act like a classic Turing City robot: behaving as an individual, but still capable of cooperating for the good of all, and then you turn around and pull a stunt like that.’
‘I don’t see why hitting that Tokvah stops me being a cooperator,’ said Karel.
‘Maybe. I don’t know. Hey, I’m not judging! But there’s just something about the way you’re made. People talk, you know.’
‘Let them,’ said Karel.
They had stopped at the very rear of the holding pens, just before the door that led to the isolation area where Gates and his team kept the special cases.
‘So,’ said Karel. ‘Is there anything I should know about this character you’re holding in here?’
‘There’s nothing really to tell,’ said Gates, still eyeing Karel with a thoughtful expression. ‘I’ve never known a robot like this one
… I think you’d better speak to him yourself.’
Karel folded his hands together, feeling how the right hand was slightly bent out of true from where he had hit the Artemisian. That could be repaired later. For the moment he felt apprehensive, more so than he would have expected. He wondered what lay behind this door that necessitated him being dragged all the way here, away from his work, away from his wife, Susan. Especially when she had been acting so oddly lately, suddenly so emotional. Karel tried to dismiss the thought. She had been like that the last time they were planning a child, he told himself.
‘Very well,’ said Karel. ‘Let me through.’
Gates opened the door.
‘Cell number two,’ he said.
‘What’s the matter, Susan? You look like Oneill herself has just spoken to you.’
Deya’s face was filled with concern. Why can’t we make a face that fully masks our emotions? wondered Susan. We can build blank masks or we can build faces. Why can’t we build a buffer between our feelings and our expressions?
‘Susan, speak to me,’ Deya insisted. ‘Is it Karel? Are you worried about him? I heard he was out at the coast today.’
Deya has such a pretty face. I could never build anything so delicate, or so well formed. The curve of the brows over her eyes, the line of her cheek. When she speaks it’s like a breeze blowing on flutes. No matter how I tune my electromuscle, I can never pull a smile like hers…
‘Susan, stop staring at me like that!’
‘Sorry, Deya. I’m okay. Just a little, I don’t know… angry I suppose. And shocked.’
Deya turned this way and that, looking around the metal and glass arches of the railway terminus, trying to determine what had upset her friend.
‘Susan, is it this?’ She pointed to the letters, engraved on the sheet of steel at the top of the notice board.
Susan nodded.
‘Oh, Deya, I know I’m being silly. I shouldn’t let it affect me like this.’
‘It annoys me too, Susan, but I don’t let it spoil my day.’ She smiled. ‘But then again, I’m not making plans at the moment.’
‘Who told you?’
‘Susan, it’s so obvious. For weeks now you’ve been walking around storing up bits of conversations and mimicking character traits and observing other people’s interactions. You and Karel are going to have another child.’
‘We’re thinking of a little girl,’ Susan admitted.
‘You’re the chief statistician of this state,’ said Deya. ‘If anyone is going to build a successful child, it’s you.’
‘Deya, you’re just like Karel. You make it sound so easy.’
‘It is easy, Susan. Robots have been doing it since Oneill showed them how.’
