Maverick

“You have done well, Friend LifeCrier. ” She smiled again and looked over the massed faces as if she knew each one. For an instant her eyes paused on Maverick, and he felt as if the goddess’s gaze went right through him.

“Big furry deal,” WhiteTail muttered. “Her eyes glow. ” To Maverick’s utter amazement, WhiteTail was not struck dead, nor did SilverSides seem to notice her blasphemy.

Instead, SilverSides turned back to LifeCrier and draped a companionable tail across his hips. “Come, old friend. We have much to discuss. ” Looking over her shoulder, she said something to the strange beings in the bird. The language was unfamiliar-the only word Maverick caught was “Wolruf”-but whatever she said must have made sense, for one of the exotic beings and one of the GodBeings came over to join SilverSides and LifeCrier, and together the four of them turned away from the bird and began walking toward the city. The crowd parted before them like a field of tall grass before a strong wind.

Glancing at WhiteTail, Maverick found that she was staring back at him with an unreadable expression composed of equal parts of fear, anger, concern, and something else that he didn’t recognize. Before he could ask, though, she turned her face away and started trotting after LifeCrier. “Come on, Mavvy,” she said without looking back, “let’s see if we can’t keep the old boy out of trouble. ”

It gave him a chill, for a moment, to realize just how thoroughly WhiteTail had replaced the i

Chapter 22. Twolegs, Fourlegs

Avery grimaced and put the laser back into his pocket. “Well, that’s that. Here’s hoping we haven’t unleashed a monster. ” He turned to Ariel. “Will you be okay while Derec and I go check out Central?”

She shrugged. “The spaceport’s crawling with security robots. As long as they still obey the Laws, I’ll be fine. “

“All the same, be careful. Mandelbrot, don’t let Ariel out of your sight. ”

“Yes, Master Avery. ”

Avery started to turn to Lucius and then had another thought. “Oh, and Mandelbrot? How’s the translation program coming along?”

Mandelbrot’s eyes dimmed slightly. “Not well. I am optimized for personal defense and valet service, not linguistics. The kin inflections are extremely complex, and morphemic meaning appears to vary depending on the social status of the person being addressed. ”

“It’s not that difficult,” Lucius muttered.

Mandelbrot’s eyes flared brighter, and he swiveled his head to look at Lucius. “Perhaps, Friend Lucius, you use an alternative definition of difficult. I find it almost impossible to tell the difference between bark, meaning ‘Welcome, friend,’ and bark, meaning ‘Strangers attacking. ’ “

Lucius pursed his lips, put his hands on his hips, and shook his head. “Oh really, Mandelbrot. If you’d just listen to the stress modulation on the third harmonic”

“Ahem!” The robots interrupted their embryonic spat long enough to look at Avery, who smiled paternally at them. “I’m sure you two can get this hammered out soon enough. In the meantime, Mandelbrot, stay close to Ariel and keep your personal defense routines at the top of your stack. ”

“Yes, Master Avery. ”

Avery turned to look at Lucius. “Lucius, you’re our relay. Keep your commlink to Eve open at all times and report anything unusual to Derec. ”

The silver Avery frowned. “Are you also ordering me to stay close to Ariel and Mandelbrot?”

The real Avery frowned right back. “Would you even if I did?”

Lucius smiled and shrugged. “Probably not. ”

“Then I won’t waste my breath. Just try to stay out of trouble, will you?”

“I always try, Friend Avery. ”

“Yeah. I know. ” Avery sighed and turned to Derec. “Okay, son, let’s see if we can’t find a groundcar. ”

An hour later, Avery and Derec stood in the atrium of Central Hall, facing Central’s console input/output devices. “So why isn’t it responding?” Avery asked.

Derec broke off commlink contact and shook his head. “I don’t get it. This is weird. ”

“Sensory impairment?” Avery suggested.

“No. ” Derec shot the console an odd look. “Central’s sensories are fine. It knows that we’ re here. ’, Derec paused and scowled. “Let me rephrase that: The information is available to it. It just doesn’t care that we’re here. ”

Avery blinked. “That’s impossible. As a positronic intelligence-”

“Yeah, well, that’s part of what makes it so weird. ” Derec scowled again, and then shrugged and turned to Avery. “The mental impression I keep getting is one of intelligence without sentience. Does that make sense?”

Avery wrinkled his nose. “It isn’t even aw~ of its own existence?”

Derec thought it over a moment, then nodded. “It seems to be fully functional. There’s a tremendous amount of computational power waiting to be applied. But there’s no personality. It simply isn’t… troubledby conscious thoughts. ”

“That’s impossible,” Avery said again. “Try your commlink one more time, and this time tell me exactly what you’re receiving. ”

With a shrug, Derec closed his eyes and invoked his internal commlink. “Okay. Commlink on: Central is acking. I’m picking up some shell primitives-cats, splits-okay, and that’s a t-sort. Now it’s mounting a device. “ Derec broke concentration and opened his eyes. “I know this sounds silly, but it seems to be ru

Avery frowned and scratched his head. “I don’t understand this. ”

“Dad, as I told you on the way over, SilverSides destroyed parts of Central the last time she was here. ”

Avery waved a hand to dismiss that idea. “That was almost a year ago. By now the supervisors should have either repaired the damage or scrapped Central and built a new one. What went wrong?”

Derec cocked his head as a commlink message came in. “We’ll know in a few minutes. A supervisor has just entered the building. ”

Long afternoon shadows reached out from the city and stretched like giant fingers across the spaceport tarmac. The crowd had long since broken up and gone away, save for one mature kin female that lay in the shadow of the boarding ramp and four fat little cubs that rollicked about in the last splash of sunlight on the tarmac. Ears flopping wildly, little tails erect like flagpoles, the cute little furballs darted in and out of the ship, yipping happily and playing hide-and-seek around Mandelbrot’s legs.

Ariel, squatting on the tarmac like a football player, smiled pleasantly and wondered if the cubs’ mother would stop growling before her knees gave out.

“This is strange, Mandelbrot,” Ariel muttered through smiling, clenched teeth. “You don’t bother them a bit, but if I try to touch them… ”

Slowly, gently, she began to reach toward one of the cubs. A deep, guttural growl from the mother reminded Ariel that she was being watched. The growl rose in intensity the closer she got to the pup and stopped only when she stopped.

“The kin seem to accept robots as part of the natural environment,” Mandelbrot observed, “whereas anthropoid humans are a new and unknown thing. ”

“Anthropoid, Mandelbrot?’, Ariel said with a growl.

“I was attempting to distinguish between humans like you and humans like Wolruf. If the term offends you, I will try another. ”

“Never mind. ” Ariel made eye contact with the mother again. The female kin lay on her side in what appeared to be a relaxed position, but her ears were erect and her eyes were wide and filled with an alert, savage intensity. Ariel continued to look the kin right in the eye. She tried another smile. The mother responded by shifting nervously and looking away.

Stepping high to avoid the puppies and their byproducts, Mandelbrot strolled over and touched Ariel lightly on the shoulder. “May I make a suggestion, mistress? Stop staring the mother-her name is BlackMane-straight in the eye, and don’t bare your teeth when you smile. In the body language of the kin, these are hostile gestures. ”