Maverick

Dr. Anastasi caught a strand of her long blond hair between her fingers and began unconsciously twisting it. “Wrong, Basalom. Logic isn’t a universal constant, it’s a heuristic decision-making process rooted in the values, prejudices, and acquired conflict -resolution patterns of the decider.

“For example, if I’d given you just a slightly stronger positive bias in your motivation circuit, you would in some situations come to exactly the opposite conclusion that you would come to now. Yet you’d still be just as certain that you’d come to the only logical conclusion. ” Dr. Anastasi smiled, in a hopeless sort of way, and looked at Basalom.

“You, old friend, have got to help me figure out the underpi

Four minutes?Basalom riffled through his job stack, shutting down background processes and diversionary loops. There was no time for further conversational niceties; he pulled all the buffers out of his verbalizing process and jacked his speech clock rate up by ten percent. Then he increased the amplitude on data bus circuits 24 and 57, jumpered around his pride subroutine, and established a direct link to the limousine’s brain.

Personal Vehicle One?

The response was slow and sullen. Whaddaya want?

You must take control of this vehicle.

What makes you think I want it?

The First Law. My full attention is required elsewhere, and I must relinquish control. To ensure the safety of your passenger, you must take over. You have no choice.

Basalom broke off the link and physically disco

Satisfied, Basalom rotated his head to face Dr. Anastasi and switched into linear predictive mode. There is no time to wait for her questions. I will have to infer questions from her previous statements and her physical responses. He switched to thermographic vision, locked his optics on Dr. Anastasi’s face, and scaled the magnification up by a factor of 10.

“Logic may not be a universal constant,” he began brusquely, “but the Three Laws are. To have maximum success with the city supervisors, mistress, you must couch your arguments in terms of the Laws of Robotics.

“Here are the anomalies that I have noticed in City Supervisor Beta’s interpretation of the First Law… ”

Chapter 14. Derec

. Derec was dreaming about his childhood again. Or rather, he was dreaming about a childhood; he couldn’t be sure whether it was a genuine memory of his own life or a pseudomemory that his subconscious had cobbled up out of bits of stories and old videos. This time he was a young boy, perhaps four or five standard years old, and he was playing on a wide, robot-neat lawn under the bright summer sun of…

Aurora? He didn’t know. The lawn was a familiar place; a soft expanse of short, dark green grass interspersed with tiny yellow bell-shaped flowers. Damsel flies droned through air flavored with tangy summer dust and the faint hint of sweet clover, and off at the edge of his vision, dark shapes-robots? adults?-moved in meaningless patterns and spoke in muffled voices.

But there was something wrong with the image. The sun was a little too small and blue for his taste, and he could look straight at it. The house-there was a house there, he could almost feelits presence-but somehow it was an elusive thing that he could never quite manage to look at directly.

And then there was the puppy.

He’d never owned a puppy; even asleep, he was sure of that. Pet robots, yes, and he even had a quick flash of some kind of aquatic arthropod that his mother had kept in a tank and talked to as she fed.

His mother! An image flashed through his mind: a slender, blond woman, in baggy, colorless clothes, singing softly as she dropped brine shrimp into the tank and watched the arthropod gobble them up. He was trying to ask his mother a question, but she ignored him.

He could not ignore the puppy.

It was a little spaniel, he thought. Big clumsy paws, floppy ears fit for a dog twice its size; he was on his knees in the grass, and the little spaniel was galumphing across the lawn, tongue flapping like a flag. The puppy heard him laugh and rolled into a turn, almost tripping over its own paws and ears. Then it charged at him, barking joyously, and hit him right in the chest and knocked him over. He and the puppy rolled together on the lawn; its soft, curly golden fur tickling his face and hands. The puppy’s breath reeked of kibbled biscuits, but he laughed anyway as it wiggled in his hands and slobbered wet, sticky, puppy kisses all over his face. He winced and squirmed as the wet pink tongue found his ears…

“Wolruf!” Derec leapt out of bed and began wiping his face on his tunic.

“Sorry, Derec, but we got ship trouble and I t’ought ‘u were never goin’ t’ wake up. ” Her tongue flashed out again, but this time it seemed she was trying to clean it against her upper incisors. “ ‘U plan t’ fall asleep like t’at again, do me a fav’r an’ wash ‘ur face. ”

“Do me a favor and just kick me in the head next time, okay? Eeyuck! Haven’t your people ever heard of mouthwa-”

. Derec froze in the act of toweling off his ears with his shirt. “Ship trouble! What?”

“We’re ‘bout two hours away from th’ jump to Tau Puppis. You, Avr’y, and Ar’el were still asleep, so I decided t’ improve th’ ship a little b’fore you woke. ” She looked away and licked her lips anxiously.

“. Derec, th’ ship ‘as stopped changing shape!”

It took a minute for Wolruf’s meaning to soak through Derec’s still sleepy brain. Then he burst out laughing.

“Wolruf, haven’t you been listening to me or Dr. Avery? That’s what we’ve been trying to do for the last three days. ”

Wolruf shook her head. “No, you don’ und’rstan. Th’ ship won’ change shape at all now, an ‘ it won’ take verbal flight commands. How’r we go

. Derec stopped laughing. “What do you mean, it won’t take verbal orders?” He looked at the bunk he’d been lying on. “Ship, change this bunk into a chair. ”

Smoothly and silently, the bunk flowed into its new shape.

“Let me try. ” Wolruf flattened her ears and raised her voice. “Ship? Make t’is chair five centimeters lower. ” Nothing happened.

“Uh oh. ” Derec repeated Wolruf’s command. This time the chair quickly complied. “I think,” Derec said softly, “that we have a real problem on our hands. ”

Wolruf looked at Derec with big, wet, puppy-dog eyes. “Th’ ship goin’ crazy ‘ur somethin’?”

“Worse. ” Derec sat down in the chair and laid his hands on the robotics terminal. With a glimmer of luminescence, the display screen came to life. It took Derec just a moment to check the iostat. “Here’s the problem,” he said, laying a finger on the display. “Wolruf, my friend, I’m afraid that when we cut out the volitional circuits, we had to compensate by strengthening the ship’s Second Law sense. We forced the ship to pay extremely close attention to direct orders. ” Derec turned away from the screen and offered Wolruf a sad smile. “ Humanorders. ”

“ ‘U mean th’ problem is that th’ ship no longer list’ns t’ me?”

“I’m afraid so. ” Derec frowned and looked back at the terminal. “The really frosted part is, I don’t think I can fix it in two hours. The ship doesn’t really have a robot brain, so I can ‘t reprogram it through my internal commlink. Do you need to enter any last-minute course corrections before the jump?”

Being a caninoid alien, her expressions were difficult to read, but Derec had the distinct impression that Wolruf was pouting. “Nothin’ I can’t ent’r manually. ”