Maverick

A half -dozen goo-covered crackers later, Avery took a slurp of coffee and turned to Derec. “Well, any lint yet?”

. Derec checked his terminal screen. “Nope. ”

Avery frowned. “I hate sitting through yaccs. I mean, I just feel like I should be doing something constructive with this time. ”

. Derec looked up and gave his father a bleary-eyed stare. “Such as?’’

“Oh, talking, maybe. Finding out the answers to some questions that have been bothering me for a long time. ”

. Derec yawned. “Okay. ” There was a long pause. “Anything in particular you wanted to talk about?”

Avery closed his eyes, stroked his whiskery chin, and thought it over. “Yes,” he decided. “This Aranimas fellow: Who is he, and why is he trying to kill you?”

. Derec shrugged. “You want the full story or the condensed version?”

“Depends. Where’s the yacc at?”

. Derec rubbed his eyes and checked the terminal one more time. “About twenty percent, I’d guess. ”

“That far already? Better condense it. ”

“Okay. ” Derec took a deep slug of his coffee and closed his eyes in thought. Just when Avery was starting to wonder if he should give the boy a little nudge to wake him up, Derec opened his eyes and began speaking in a low, raspy voice.

“Aranimas is an alien, from somewhere outside Settler space. You could call him a humanoid, depending on how loosely you define human, but when I finally got a close look at him, the first thing I thought of was a plucked condor with fisheyes. ”

. Derec took a nip of his cracker, chewed it thoughtfully, and swallowed. “His species call themselves the Erani. They’re a wonderfully simple people: vicious, brutal, and utterly without empathy. In a couple years you’ll be able to look up ‘cruel’ in the dictionary and see a picture of an Erani. You‘d get along great with them. ” Derec paused to sip his now-cold coffee.

Avery bristled at the boy’s cheap shot, but held his tongue.

“The Erani claim to control about two hundred worlds, but I think they must be counting every rock, asteroid, and moonlet in their solar system. That ship of his-did you happen to get a look at his ship before we jumped?” Avery shook his head. “Oh. Well, that ship of his appears to be one-of-a-kind, the first hyperdrive the Erani ever developed. I don’t know whether Aranimas built it or stole it, but the first thing he did when he got to human space was hijack a good Auroran hullto put it in. Wolruf tells me the Erani hyperdrive is fantastically unstable, and that being in the engine room of their ship is almost as dangerous as being on the wrong end of their guns. ”

Avery interrupted. “What is Wolruf, anyway? A genetically engineered dog or something? And how’d you hook up with it?”

“Her,”. Derec corrected. “No, Wolruf-that’s not her real name, by the way, that’s just as close as the human voice can pronounce it. I guess our mouths aren’t the right shape, or we don’t have the right ultrasonic frequency components in our speech and hearing to really get her name right

“Anyway, Wolruf was Aranimas’s navigator. She was basically a sort of indentured servant on board that ship; I counted at least four different species of intelligent aliens on board Aranimas’s ship, and they were all conquered subjects of the Erani. I suspect that if we humans ever have a real confrontation with the Erani, we’re going to find a lot of allies on their subject worlds. I met Wolruf when

“But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me put this story in linear order, okay?” Derec gave Avery a questioning stare; Avery didn’t respond, so Derec finished off the last of his coffee and caught his breath.

“Now, this whole thing starts with that asteroid you dumped me on after you wiped my memory. You remember that asteroid?”

Avery looked down. “I-I was insane then, Derec,” he said softly. “I’m not sure what I remember and what I hallucinated. ”

“Well, I was still trying to figure out your asteroid when Aranimas showed up and started shooting the thing to pieces. You see, there’s three things the Erani don’t have: a fleet of hyperdrive ships, a key to Perihelion, and a glimmer of understanding about robotics. They have a slave culture, you see, and since organic slaves are free for the taking, they’ve had no incentive to develop mechanical ones.

“On the other hand, while they don’t know a thing about robotics, they apparently know a lot more about hyperwave than we do. Aranimas was able to identify and track the hyperwave interference caused by a key to Perihelion. ”

. Derec abruptly realized that he’d been getting excited and lowered his voice. “That’s what brought him to the asteroid. Once there, I guess he saw all those robots and decided to do a little old-fashioned Erani slave-raiding. It’d never occurred to him that the robots would self-destruct instead of surrendering. Capturing me was just an accidental bonus.

“Not that he was happy about it. Apparently he’s been skulking around human space for a few years, hijacking the occasional ship and trying to pick up robots. When he captured me he was convinced that I’d cheated him out of a good load of slaves, and he-” Derec faltered a moment and winced at the memory of the torture he’d suffered at Aranimas’s hands. “Let’s just leave it at that, okay?” Derec found another cracker, loaded it up with Magellanic fromage, and resumed talking around the mouthful of cheese.

“Wolruf, as I said, was part of the crew. Ariel was a prisoner, although I didn’t find that out for a while. Mandelbrot was a collection of junk parts in a locker. ”

Avery interrupted again. “Mandelbrot? Isn’t he at least three-quarters Capek, Ariel’s old valet robot from back on Aurora?”

. Derec scowled at Avery. “Beats me. You gave me amnesia, remember?”

“Sorry. I forgot. ” Derec took another bite of the cracker and continued. “Dad, I don’t know what kind of crazy experiment you really had in mind when you dumped me on that asteroid-”

“I’m not sure I remember either,” Avery muttered, “although I think I remember trying to explain it. But that may have been an hallucination. I was crazy. ”

“-but Aranimas had been doing his share to foul it up. By the time we got away from him, I had no memory, of course, and Ariel was losing hers to the amnemonic plague. I’d cobbled together Mandelbrot and programmed him with a pretty restrictive definition of human, which may have influenced some of the Robot City developments along that line. And Wolruf had finally gotten fed up with the Erani and decided to jump ship. With her help we got away while Aranimas was on a raid on a Spacer station, and then we had to steal the key to Perihelion back from the robots before we could use it to escape-and that’s how we got. to Robot City. “

Avery was silent. Derec ran his fingers through his greasy hair, leaned forward, and shook his head.

“Y’know, Dad, as experiments go, yours didn’t go too well. ”

Avery sighed and nodded. “No. No, it didn’t, son, and maybe someday I’ll be able to apologize for putting you through it. But right now it’s just too big, and I have too much trouble coming to grips with the idea that I actually did that to you. I’m sorry. ” Then an idea hit Avery, and he frowned.

“But before I get too sorry, I’d like to remind you that you still haven’t answered my main question: Why is Aranimas still trying to kill you?”

. Derec shrugged. “ An Erani never forgets. ” He helped himself to the last cracker and then looked at his terminal screen. “Oops. We’re just about done yaccing. Better finish that coffee and get back to work. ”

“Okay. ” Avery hurriedly drained the cup, tossed it into the disposal chute, and then slipped into his chair.

. Derec checked his screen again and turned to Avery. “Seriously, Aranimas is desperate for robots. That’s why he follows me, I think; he knows that wherever I go, there are bound to be lots of robots.