New Writings in SF 10 - [Anthology] Read online

  Rentarobot Ltd.

  Dear Sir,

  You will be pleased to hear that the operation was carried out successfully. The look on my neighbour’s face when confronted by myself and your robot had to be seen to be believed. The difficulty then was convincing him that the model was not my identical twin.

  There is one slight snag. I have set the homing device but the robot seems reluctant to leave. However, this is causing no inconvenience at the moment but I welcome your advice.

  Thank you for your co-operation and please submit invoice on the return of the robot.

  Yours faithfully,

  Arthur Willis

  * * * *

  Rentarobot Ltd.,

  London, W.15.

  23rd September, 1979

  Arthur Willis, Esq.,

  15 Slimbridge Gardens,

  Bath.

  Dear Sir,

  I am delighted that the “operation” was a success. We always hope to oblige our customers and in this case the charges will be waived.

  Do not be unduly concerned about the laggardly manner of your model. Normally we re-tune the homing device after each mission. Due to the urgency in your case this was not done as we dispatched quickly and no doubt the mechanism is slightly run down. It should take effect but if it does not operate within forty-eight hours of the receipt of this letter please contact me again.

  Yours faithfully,

  Oscar P. Flavenbaum

  (Managing Director)

  * * * *

  15 Slimbridge Gardens,

  Bath, Somerset.

  23rd September, 1979

  Managing Director,

  Rentarobot Ltd.

  Dear Sir,

  Further to my letter of the day before yesterday, will you note that your robot is still here and, since its behaviour is not normal, I shall be pleased if you will have it collected as soon as possible.

  To tell the truth, I may be imagining things, but it seems to wear a superior look on its face and is almost dominating the household. I think the mechanism needs inspecting thoroughly.

  Although your service fulfilled a very necessary need at the time, in view of recent events I shall not engage the service of a robot in the future. Even as I write it is peering over my shoulder, which is quite disconcerting.

  Yours faithfully,

  Arthur Willis

  * * * *

  15 Slimbridge Gardens, Bath.

  Saturday

  Dear Tilly,

  Oh, I have so much to tell you that we must get together soon. We had a marvellous holiday on the continent. I hope you got my card from Venice. The weather was glorious all the time and the hotel was fabulous. Even Arthur thawed out a bit—and on the days when he had business appointments (he could never have just a holiday) I went with a gorgeous Swede for trips in his launch . . . Well I can’t tell you everything of course, but he was blond and beautifully tanned ... all over. Yes he was a Viking to my liking!

  I thought it would seem very dull when we got back but at least one interesting thing has happened. You know we were going to have one of those robot things to look after the house (I shouldn’t have told you really so don’t say anything about it to You-Know-Who) well we had one and Arthur had to ask for it back because it had misbehaved itself and our neighbour had thought that it was Arthur ogling his wife. Arthur! Can you imagine it? The funny thing is that now we’ve got him (I mean it) and everything has been straightened out, he won’t go!

  He loafs around the house all day and of course he looks just like Arthur. As if one of him wasn’t enough! But from the way he looks at me I don’t think he’s such a cold fish as dear A. himself!

  Well Tilly, as I said we must meet and you can tell me all your adventures. I’m sure that you didn’t go to Nice for nothing!

  Lots of Love,

  Patty

  * * * *

  Rentarobot ltd. Internal Memo. Date: 24,/9/79 URGENT

  From : Managing Director. To: Robot Mortician

  Seymour Dent

  Please collect Model RR/1307 from:

  Arthur Willis, Esq.,

  15 Slimbridge Gardens,

  Bath,

  Somerset.

  Model to be disposed of upon your return.

  * * * *

  Flat 12,

  Westall House,

  S.W.6.

  25th September, 1979

  Dear Mr. Flavenbaum,

  I did not come to work this morning as I was not well. That last job of collecting a model from Bath took a lot out of me as it did not want to come.

  I have worked for you for several years now and liked the job very much but now I’ve had enough. When the robots were just models it was all right but now they are more like us it’s different.

  The last one really turned me up. I didn’t mind him struggling, but that last scream as I pushed him into the incinerator went through me like cold steel. I wish I had been told that he had been modified as much as that and anyway I can’t see any need to build in such life-like things and so I give in my notice.

  Yours truly,

  Seymour Dent

  <>

  * * * *

  BIRTH OF A BUTTERFLY

  Joseph Green

  Author Joseph Green has become something of a specialist in depicting human beings faced with utterly alien life forms. In this latest story he describes the adoption of a tiny Sun—who decides on the adopting is all part of the story.

  * * * *

  PINK-Beam-of-Terror: The Wild-Flames! Far out over the death-liquid, searching, from lost Hot-Home the Wild-Flames have followed us! Flee! Flee!

  Blue-Beam-of-Courage: No! Hold, we cannot! Our built-up heat would slow us! We must discharge-by-creation first! Discharge! Create!

  Pink-Beam: Time? Time? The young-flame to come, the savages behind us disrupting?

  Blue-Beam: Time enough! The young-flame? The Aliens, the Aliens! Attach it, attach it! Their great powers protect! Must save our own Consciousness-of-Being!

  Pink-Beam: Cruel, cruel! A young one, a new-flame!

  Blue-Beam: We must, we must! Give me the White, the White!

  White-Beam-of-Creation: In sore distress, in agony of mind, I give you White!

  White-Beam-of-Creation: And I return, in feelings strained, the White! Heat, heat! The smallest alien approaches this place of birthstones! Create, create! our young-flame of trouble born!

  * * * *

  “Momme,” said little Dickie solemnly, “I saw two butterflies eat up a great big diamond and make a baby butterfly.”

  “Did you dear?” asked Irma without looking up from the synthesizer. The contrary thing was mixing too many lipids with the amino acids again and at dinner Hammond would stare unhappily at the fat in his steak. “You didn’t bring more of those diamonds inside?”

  “The two big ones’ wings got all dim, and the diamond went whoof! and there was another butterfly, just like the first two only not as bright,” Dickie rattled on, and when Irma glanced sternly at him he hung his head guiltily and extended a hand. She inspected the gem, and sighed.

  “All right, dear, you may keep it. Now tell Daddy to clean up for dinner.”

  He trotted off happily, short legs churning, and Irma shook her head in loving exasperation and returned to the synthesizer. Just like his father, a toy a minute . . . though of course Hammond did not consider his gadgets toys. But when marvellous science, with all its wonders, couldn’t design a simple little intra-uterine safety that would stay inside . . . she hummed as she took up the meat, secretly glad they hadn’t. This barren world of rock and water was the eighty-first planet on which they had landed. She and Ham had been in space over five years now, with another five scheduled. Dickie-bird had become a stronger interest-in-common than all the psycho-computers on Earth could have found when they were matched for this trip.

  Both her men attacked the fat steaks, which had entered the scout as very nasty seaweed and slime three systems back, with admirable gu
sto. When Hammond finished he said, “I’ll rig the imprinter for Dickie’s next learning-set and we’ll lift. Are you going to deep-sleep?”

  “Not for a one-week trip. I have mending to do.” Their clothes had been designed to last indefinitely, but the planners hadn’t anticipated a baby. The garments she had laboriously cut-down for Dickie kept coming apart on him.

  She cleared the galley while Hammond went through his pre-lift checks, watching his broad back more than her work. She could usually manage the programmed-imprinted-analytical lug, but the fit he had pitched last night when she suggested they have a second child. . . . Dickie had been an easy birth, but the thought of delivering another baby sent Hammond into a virtual panic. Midwifery was not on his programme of skills and his fear of her becoming pregnant again had lowered their ratio of sexual synthesis for the past four years. But Dickie needed a baby sister. Growing up with an improvised imprinting machine and your parents was no life for a child.

  Hammond fastened Dickie in his accel-decel couch and attached the cap. Irma turned away, to avoid seeing the child pass out, and got them an after-dinner cup of stim-caf.

  Alpha Crucis Number Two was a virtual copy of One, the same lifeless bare rock and salt-free seas. The air was thin but breathable and Irma happily turned Dickie free outside. Her nerves needed a rest.

  It was only a few minutes before the little fellow returned. Hammond had sent the detectors out immediately and was manually scanning with one. He looked up in mild surprise when Dickie said, “Momme, the baby butterfly followed us here. I think it’s ‘dopted me.”

  Irma smiled and hastily bent to press her cheek against his fair head, one wary eye on his father. She saw Hammond put the machine on automatic scan and braced for trouble. Now he would pin the child down on his fantasy and there would be another lecture on reality and illusion, and how you must always distinguish between the physically real and the mentally unreal, Richard.

  But a moment later Dickie was saying, “I’ll show you, Daddy,” and leading a reluctant Hammond towards the air-lock. Irma dropped her needle and thread and followed. Dickie was going to be needing her very shortly.

  It hovered in the air by the outer door, so close the detectors had missed it, a head-sized core of opaque white light surrounded by multi-coloured streamers of fire that curled, dipped and moved like burning wings. It reminded her irresistibly of textbook illustrations of old Sol in a tantrum, with huge clouds of flaming hydrogen thrusting into space. It even gave off a gentle warmth.

  Irma looked away from the too-bright ball. “What in the world is it, Hammond?”

  He closed his eyes for two seconds, opened them and said, “It resembles nothing in my memory-banks. Logic indicates it might be some local form of coherent illuminated gas. Dickie says he saw others on Alpha Crucis One.”

  “I saw this one, Daddy,” insisted Dickie shrilly. “I saw its momme an’ daddy, an’ it ‘dopted me.”

  Hammond smiled briefly and reached to pat the small head, but Dickie darted away. He vanished behind a nearby rock outcropping. When Irma turned back towards the gas-cloud it had also disappeared.

  Hammond shook his head in resigned patience and walked back to the scout. He was at the scanner again when Irma entered, lost in the useless and foolish task that had engaged Earthmen now for most of a hundred years, the search for another intelligent race. Another? Personally she wasn’t satisfied that their own should make the claim!

  Dickie’s ship-finder brought him back unharmed except for a few bruises, which scarcely mattered where there were no bacteria. She sprayed skin on the damaged areas and got dinner. After the meal she put him to bed and relaxed for an hour with the impressor, but the sensory images had just become interesting when the detectors returned and Hammond decided to lift. Planet Number Three was in conjunction, or some-such and it would be a two-day trip at sub-light speed. No deep-sleep again. Dickie wouldn’t even have time to digest a new learning set.

  They were barely clear of gravity and accelerating for the short hop when the main computer, the bio-brain, jelled its central bank again. Hammond glared at its bland glass face as though ready to give it a good swift illogical kick, then went after the imprint cap without a word. It had been a part of the brain’s emergency circuits until he removed it to build an imprinter for Dickie and had to be restored each time the bio-brain was to be bypassed.

  When Hammond was ready Irma sat demurely in the co-pilot’s chair and let him attach the cap. He checked each minute detail with his usual machine-like thoroughness before throwing the switch. Despite long familiarity she stiffened when the current hit, then slowly grew accustomed to it and relaxed. It was nice to be able to do something with her brain that Hammond, with all his force-fed knowledge, could not do half as well. He had tried to explain once that her brain made a better emergency circuit-box than his simply because it hadn’t been imprinted with knowledge. Something about several billion of his available circuits being “tied down” by established synaptic connections, the neural paths used up by the immense amount of information crammed into his head, and so on.

  It was true that Hammond’s brain had been used virtually to capacity. These small scouts had to be prepared for every possible emergency and only a man with an excellent grasp of dozens of basic sciences could keep the complicated machines going for the thousand years they would stay in space ... or was it ten? They would return twelve years after departure, since everyone came back on a schedule designed to let new knowledge be absorbed systematically, but they would have aged only ten. Hammond had carefully explained that exceeding the speed of light moved mass backward in time and they would spend so many days travelling at high speed and so many years at sub-light, to balance the book. It was when he said they would move through space for a thousand years but it would seem like only ten because most of the sub-light travel time would be spent in suspended animation that she began to wish she had declined this assignment.

  Hammond had been programmed for exploration scout, ten years of dangerous work and all the world had to offer ever afterwards, by a doting mother. He had gone under the cap at the age of two. Irma’s father, an imprinted neurologist himself, had decided to raise his daughter the old-fashioned way. He had theories about heavy imprinting destroying certain desirable characteristics in the human personality, and stifling creativity. And perhaps he was right.

  It was true that all the world’s original artists, writers and musicians were non-imprints. But in the technical world the immense task of mastering just one science, much less a dozen, made imprinting mandatory. They had reached the physical limit with people like Hammond . . . but she had heard dark rumours of idiot babies with oversized heads being born in labs ... if controlled mutation could increase the size of a baby’s brain, make even more circuits that could be imprinted with even more knowledge ... if one extra-large brain reached a sane maturity and they imprinted it to its new capacity with neurology and genetics and its owner set out to mutate an even larger brain in some child . . . she shuddered as she began to drift off into the lazy torpor that was her usual state when half her brain was loaned out

  She was a very ignorant woman by today’s standards, but the psycho-matchers had selected her as a compatible mate to one of the world’s greatest brains . . . and they had been right. She and Hammond were going to convert their temporary marriage to a permanent one if they lived to reach home. But she didn’t want to wait that long for a second baby and she always got her way in the end. Einstein equals Motherhood times Children by a square Father, she thought sleepily.

  There was life on the third planet, just microscopic stuff and a little jelly in the seas, but Hammond wouldn’t let Dickie out without a spacesuit. He was always worrying about bacteria. Dickie had to wear the improvised contraption his father had made out of spare parts.

  They were sitting on a barren rock plain not far from a small lake. Irma worked in the galley and watched Dickie on the ship’s viewers, while Hammond monitored b
oth detectors. She was the one who saw a butterfly descend out of the clear sky and hover over Dickie’s head.

  “Hammond,” she said softly, and when he looked up, visibly annoyed, she pointed silently to the viewscreen.

  Hammond reached for the radio mike immediately. Irma could see nothing particularly dangerous in the situation, but her brain had not been programmed and imprinted to capacity. Hammond frequently made decisions and took actions that seemed senseless to her and proved right in the end.

  There was a short but intense argument with Dickie. The little fellow returned to the scout, hot rebellion in his eyes. When Irma glanced at the screen again the butterfly was hovering just outside.

  Hammond informed Dickie that in the future he was to return to the scout immediately when a gascloud appeared and was told in turn that this was the same butterfly which had ‘dopted Dickie two planets back, that it was his personal friend, and not dangerous at all. In the end big tears were streaming down Dickie’s face in a most unprogrammed way. As he crawled into his couch to cry in privacy he lifted a wet face and got in the last word: “An’ it‘ll be on the next planet, too!”