Utopia Read online

Chapter 12

  DAVLO LENTRALL'S EYES snapped open. He sat bolt upright in bed. He had gone from stone cold asleep to quiveringly awake and alert in the flicker of a heartbeat. He knew. He knew. But he would have to proceed carefully. Very carefully indeed, or it would all be lost, all be over. He forced himself to think it through, work out all the logical consequences in his head. There was only going to be one chance to do this thing, and it was clear the odds were against him. He was going to have to move carefully, and act as normally as possible. Davlo knew he could not give his quarry any reason at all to suspect him.

  Well, if he were going to have to act normally, there was no time like the present to start. He pushed the button by his bedside, and, after the briefest of delays, Kaelor came in. "Good morning," the robot said. "I hope you slept well. "

  "Very well indeed," said Davlo in what he hoped was a light and casual tone of voice. "I certainly needed it after yesterday. "

  "One or two things did go on," Kaelor said, the familiar sardonic tone in his voice.

  "It wasn't an easy day for you, either," said Davlo. "And I never did get to thank you for all you did. "

  "I couldn't help but do it, sir, as you know perfectly well. "

  "Yes," said Davlo. "But even so, I want you to know it is appreciated. " He got out of bed, and Kaelor produced his robe and slippers from the closet. Davlo shrugged the robe on over his shoulders and knotted the tie loosely in front of him, then stepped into the slippers. He yawned strenuously and walked out of the bedroom, Kaelor following and shutting the door behind him.

  Davlo had long ago decided that breakfast was a meal best consumed in the most soothing surroundings and circumstances possible. Therefore, contrary to the custom in most Infernal households, he did not bathe or dress before going down to breakfast, but instead ate in his pajamas and robe. On the same principle of informal comfort, his breakfast room was large, cool and shady, with the table facing large bay windows that looked out over a meticulously well-kept garden. There were two robots at work pruning the shrubbery, and a third on its knees by one of the flower beds, apparently doing some sort of work by the roots. Most mornings Davlo enjoyed watching the garden robots at their tasks, and used the time to decide what else needed doing about the place, but this morning he hardly paid the yardwork any notice at all.

  But then he reminded himself it was important, above all things, to act normal, to do all the things he would normally do. He sat down at the table in his usual chair facing the window, and watched carefully as the robots trimmed back the hedges. "Make sure the garden staff checks carefully for storm damage, and clears out any storm debris," Davlo said. "That was a devil of a rain last night. "

  "So it was," Kaelor responded as he put down the tray and served breakfast to his master. "I have already seen to it that the outdoor staff will attend to the matter. "

  "Very good," said Davlo, and yawned. "Mmmph. Still a little sleepy. I might need an extra cup of tea to wake up this morning," he said. Could he really bring himself to act against the robot who had saved his life the day before? He thought back to the day before, and the way he had fallen apart in the face of danger and disaster. He shook his head. No. Not today. He would show the world he could take action, and act decisively. He was on the verge of congratulating himself on his newfound courage when he reminded himself that there was not much risk involved when one attacked a Three-Law robot.

  "I'll bring the tea at once, sir," Kaelor said, "assuming you really want it. "

  "Hold off on it just a bit," Davlo said. Was it his imagination, or was Kaelor a bit overalert, oversolicitous? For the average robot, his behavior this morning would have been borderline rude, but for Kaelor it was sweetness and light.

  "Very well," said Kaelor, in a tone of voice that made it clear what he thought of Davlo's indecisiveness. In a strange way, that made Davlo feel better. After all, Kaelor was normally rather curt. Or was Kaelor just "acting" normal, in the same way Davlo himself was? Davlo did not dare ask. Better just to eat his breakfast and wait for his moment. He turned to his food and did his best to notice what it was he was eating. After all, Davlo Lentrall was a man who normally enjoyed his food.

  His chance came as Kaelor was clearing away the last of the breakfast dishes, and Davlo had pushed back his chair from the table. Struggling between the need to be on the alert and the need to seem at ease, Davlo nearly missed the opportunity. But when Kaelor reached across the table to collect the last glass, just as Davlo was standing up, the robot had to turn his back completely on his master.

  The golden moment lay open to Davlo, and he moved with a smooth and focused speed. He flipped open the door over the compartment on Kaelor's back, and revealed the robot's main power switch underneath. Kaelor was already turning to react, to get away, when Davlo threw the switch down.

  His power cut, overbalanced as he leaned over the table, Kaelor fell like a stone, dropping the dishes he held and crashing into the wooden tabletop with enough force to break it in two. Davlo moved back a step or two, hating himself for what he had just done to the robot, the sentient being who had saved his life the day before. But it was necessary. Absolutely necessary. He felt anything but heroic.

  He turned his back on the collapsed robot and the debris of the ruined table, and went to the comm center. There was a chance, at least a chance, that he could extract the knowledge he needed. The knowledge that might well save Inferno. It was just barely possible that he had saved the world by turning off a robot. There was a lot to think about in that idea, but there was no time for it now. He had to call Fredda Leving.

  If anyone could get the information out of Kaelor, she could.

  FREDDA LEVING WATCHED as her four service robots unpacked and set up the portable robot maintenance frame in the middle of Davlo Lentrall's living room. Once it was assembled, they lifted Kaelor's still-inert form up onto it and attached it firmly to the frame with the use of hold-down straps.

  The maintenance frame itself was attached to its base by a complex arrangement of three sets of rotating bearings, built at right angles to each other, so that the frame could be spun around into any conceivable orientation. Thus, a robot clamped into the frame could be spun and swiveled and rotated into whatever position was most convenient to the roboticist doing the work. Once the service robots had Kaelor up on the frame, Fredda stepped in and went to work. Not that she had much hope of success, but with the stakes this high, one had to at least try.

  She swiveled Kaelor's body around until he was lying facedown, his unpowered eyes staring blankly at the floor. She found Kaelor's standard diagnostic port at the base of his neck and plugged in her test meter. She switched from one setting to another, watching the display on the meter. "No surprises there," she said. "The standard diagnostics show that his basic circuits are all functioning normally, but we knew that. "

  "Can you tap into his memory system through that port?" Davlo asked, leaning in a bit closer than Fredda would have preferred. He was nervous, agitated, his face gaunt and pale. He kept rubbing his hands together, over and over.

  "I'm afraid not," said Fredda, trying to assume a cool, professional tone. "It's not that easy. This just shows me the basic systems status. Even though he's powered down, there are still lots of circuits with trickle-charges running through them, things that need power to maintain system integrity. This just shows me he hasn't blown a fuse, that his basic pathing is stable. Now I know we're not going to harm him accidentally as we proceed. " Whether or not we decide to harm him deliberately is quite another story. she thought. No sense saying any such thing out loud. Lentrall was in a bad enough state as it was.

  Fredda left the test meter plugged in and hung it off a utility hook on the side of the maintenance frame. She got in a little closer, adjusted the position of the table slightly, and undid the four clampdown fasteners that held on the back of Kaelor's head, and carefully lifted the backplate off. She took one look at the circuitry
and cabling thus revealed and shook her head. "No," she said. "I was afraid of that. I've seen this setup before. " She pointed to a featureless black ball, about twelve centimeters across. "His positronic brain is in that fully sealed unit. The only link between it and the outside world is that armored cable coming out of its base, where the spinal column would be on a human. That cable will have about five thousand microcables inside, every one of them about the diameter of a human hair. I'd have to guess right on which two of those to link into, and get it right on the first try, or else I would quite literally fry his brain. Short him out. Space alone knows how long it would take to trace the linkages. A week probably. The whole brain assembly is designed to be totally inaccessible. "

  "But why?" asked Davlo Lentrall.

  Fredda smiled sadly. "To protect the confidential information inside his head. To keep people from doing exactly what we're trying to do-get information out of him that he would not want to reveal. "

  "Damnation! I'd thought we'd just be able to tap into his memory system and extract what we needed. "

  "With some robots that might be possible-though incredibly time-consuming," Fredda said as she reattached the back of Kaelor's head. "Not with this model. "

  "So there's nothing we can do," Lentrall said. "I mean, on the level of electronics and memory dumps. "As he spoke, his face was drawn and expressionless, and he seemed unwilling to meet Fredda's gaze, or to look at Kaelor. He was the portrait of a man who had already decided he had to do something he was not going to be proud of. And the portrait of a man who was going to crack before very much longer.

  "Nothing much," said Fredda.

  "So we're going to have to talk to him-and we know he doesn't want to talk. "

  Fredda wanted to have some reason to disagree, but she knew better. Kaelor would already have spoken up if he had been willing to speak. "No, he doesn't," she said. She thought for a moment and picked up her test meter. "The two things I can do is deactivate his main motor control, so he can only move his head and eyes and talk. And I can set his pseudoclock-speed lower. "

  "Why cut his main motor function?" Davlo asked.

  So he won't tear his own head off or smash his own brain in to keep us from learning what he wants kept secret, Fredda thought, but she knew better than to tell that to Davlo. Fortunately, it didn't take her long to think of something else. "To keep him from breaking out and escaping," she said. "He might try to run away rather than speak to us. "

  Davlo nodded, a bit too eagerly, as if he knew better but wanted to believe. "What about the clock speed?" he asked.

  "In effect, it will make him think more slowly, cut his reaction time down. But even at its minimum speed settings, his brain works faster than ours. He'll still have the advantage over us-it'll just be cut down a bit. "

  Davlo nodded. "Do it," he said. "And then let's talk to him. "

  "Right," said Fredda, trying to sound brisk and efficient. She used the test meter to send the proper commands through Kaelor's diagnostic system, then hooked the meter back on to the maintenance frame. She spun the frame around until Kaelor was suspended in an upright position, eyes straight ahead, feet dangling a half meter off the floor. He stared straight ahead, his body motionless, his eyes sightless. The test meter cable still hung from his neck, and the meter's display showed a series of diagnostic numbers, one after the other, in blinking red.

  Seeing Kaelor strapped in that way, Fredda was irresistibly reminded of an ancient drawing she had seen somewhere, of a torture victim strapped down on a frame or rack not unlike the one that held Kaelor now. That's the way it works, she thought. Strap them down, mistreat them, try and force the information out of them before they die. It was a succinct description of the torturer's trade. She had never thought before that it might apply to a roboticist as well. "I bet you don't like this any better than I do," she said, staring at the robot. She was not sure if she was talking to Kaelor or Davlo.

  Now Davlo looked on Kaelor, and could not take his eyes off him. "Yesterday, he grabbed me and stuffed me under a bench and used his body to shield mine. He risked his life for mine. He'd remind me himself that the Three Laws compelled him to do it, but that doesn't matter. He risked his life for mine. And now we're simply going to risk his life. " He paused a moment, and then said it in plainer words. "We're probably about to kill him," he said in a flat, angry voice. "Kill him because he wants to protect us-all of us-from me. "

  Fredda glanced at Davlo, and then looked back at Kaelor. "I think you'd better let me do the talking," she said.

  For a moment she thought he was about to protest, insist that a man ought to be willing to do this sort of job for himself. But instead his shrugged, and let out a small sigh. "You're the roboticist," he said, still staring straight at Kaelor's dead eyes. "You know robopsychology. "

  And there are times I wished I knew more human psychology, Fredda thought, giving Davlo Lentrall a sidelong glance. "Before we begin," she said, "there's something you need to understand. I know that you ordered Kaelor built to your own specifications. You wanted a Constricted First Law robot, right?"

  "Right," said Lentrall, clearly not paying a great deal of attention.

  "Well, you didn't get one," Fredda said. "At least not in the sense you might think. And that's what set up the trap you're in now. Kaelor was designed to be able to distinguish hypothetical danger or theoretical danger from the real thing. Though most high-function robots built on Inferno are capable of distinguishing between real and hypothetical danger to humans, they in effect choose not to do so. In a sense, they let their imaginations run away with them, worry that the hypothetical might become real, and fret over what would happen in such a case, and treat it as if were real, just to be on the safe side of the First Law. Kaelor was, in effect, built without much imagination-or what passes for imagination in a robot. He is not capable of making that leap, of asking, 'What if the hypothetical became real?'"

  "I understand all that," Davlo said irritably.

  "But I don't think you understand the next part," Fredda said with more coolness than she felt. "With a robot like Kaelor, when the hypothetical, the imaginary, suddenly does become real, when it dawns on such a robot that it has been working on a project that is real, that poses real risks to real people-well, the impact is enormous. I would compare it to the feeling you might have if you suddenly discovered, long after the fact, that, unbeknownst to yourself, some minor, even trifling thing you had done turned out to cause the death of a close relative. Imagine how hard that would hit you, and you'll have some understanding of how things felt to Kaelor. "

  Davlo frowned and nodded. "I see your point," he said. "And I suppose that would induce a heightened First Law imperative?"

  "Exactly," Fredda said. "My guess is that, by the time you switched him off, Kaelor's mental state was approaching a state of First Law hypersensitivity, rendering him excessively alert to any possible danger to humans. Suddenly realizing that he had unwittingly violated First Law already would only make it worse. Once we switch Kaelor back on, he's going to revert to that state instantly. "

  "You're saying he's going to be paranoid," Davlo said.

  "It won't be that extreme," said Fredda. "He'll be very careful. And so should we be. Just because his body is immobilized, it doesn't mean that he won't be capable of committing-of doing something rash. "

  Davlo nodded grimly. "I figured that much," he said.

  "Are you ready, then?"

  He did not answer at first. He managed to tear his eyes away from Kaelor. He paced back and forth a time or two, rubbed the back of his neck in an agitated manner, and then stopped, quite abruptly. "Yes," he said at last, his eyes locked on the most distant corner of the room.

  "Very well," she said. Fredda pulled an audio recorder out of her tool pouch, switched it on, and set on the floor in front of Kaelor. If they got what they needed, she wanted to be sure they had a record of it.

  She stepped a
round to the rear of the maintenance frame, opened the access panel, and switched Kaelor back on. She moved back around to the front of the maintenance frame, and positioned herself about a meter and a half in front of it.

  Kaelor's eyes glowed dimly for a moment before they flared to full life. His head swiveled back and forth, as he looked around himself. He looked down at his arms and legs, as if confirming what he no doubt knew already-that his body had been immobilized. Then he looked around the room, and spotted Lentrall. "It would appear that you figured it out," Kaelor said. "I was hoping for all our sakes that you would not. "

  "I'm sorry, Kaelor, but I-"

  "Dr. Lentrall, please. Let me handle this," said Fredda, deliberately speaking in a cold, sharp-edged, professional tone. This had to be impersonal, detached, dispassionate if it was going to work. She turned to Kaelor, up there on the frame. No, call the thing by its proper name, even if she had just now realized what that name was. The rack. The torturer's rack. He hung there, paralyzed, strapped down, pinned down. an insect in a collector's sample box, his voice and his expressionless face seeming solemn, even a little sad. There was no sign of fear. It would seem Kaelor had either too little imagination, or too much courage, for that.

  Suddenly she felt a little sick, but she forced herself to keep all hint of that out of her voice and expression. She told herself she was imposing human attributes on Kaelor, investing him with characteristics and emotions he simply did not have. There was no practical difference between having him up on that rack and having a malfunctioning aircar up on a hydraulic lift in a repair shop. She told herself all of that, and more, but she did not believe a word of it. She forced herself to look steadily, coolly, at Kaelor, and she addressed him. "Kaelor, do you know who I am?"

  "Yes, of course. You are Dr. Fredda Leving, the roboticist. "

  "Quite right. Now then, I am going to give you an order. You are to answer all my questions, and answer them as briefly as possible. Do not provide any information I do not ask for, or volunteer any information. Regard each question by itself. The questions will not be related to each other. Do you understand?" she asked.

  "Certainly," said Kaelor.

  "Good. " Fredda was hoping, without much confidence, that she would be able to ask her questions in small enough pieces that no one question would present a First Law violation. And of course the questions would be related-that part was a baldfaced lie. But it might be a convincing enough lie to help Kaelor live through this. She knew for certain that asking, straight-out, the one big question to which they needed an answer would be absolutely catastrophic. She dared not ask for the big picture. She could only hope Kaelor would be willing and able to provide enough tiny pieces of the puzzle.

  The trouble was, Kaelor had to know what she was doing as well as she did. How far would he be able to go before First Law imperative overrode the Second Law compulsion to obey orders?

  There was one last thing she could do to help Kaelor. Fredda did not have any realistic hope that the Third Law's requirement for self-preservation would help sustain Kaelor, but she could do her best to reinforce it all the same. "It is also vital for you to remember that you are important as well. Dr. Lentrall needs you, and he very much wants you to continue in his employ. Isn't that so, Doctor?"

  Lentrall looked up from the hole he was staring at in the floor, and glanced at Fredda before settling his gaze on Kaelor. "Absolutely," he said. "I need you very much, Kaelor. "

  "Thank you for saying so," Kaelor said. He turned his gaze back on Fredda. "I am ready for your questions," he said.

  "Good," said Fredda. It might well help Kaelor if she kept the questions as disordered as possible, and tossed in a few unrelated ones now and then. "You work for Dr. Lentrall, don't you?" she asked.

  "Yes," said Kaelor.

  "How long have you been in his employ?"

  "One standard year and forty-two days. "

  "What are the specifications for your on-board memory system?

  "A capacity of one hundred standard years non-erasable total recall for all I have seen and heard and learned. "

  "Do you enjoy your work?"

  "No," said Kaelor. "Not for the most part. "

  An unusual answer for a robot. Generally a robot, when given the chance, would wax lyrical over the joys of whatever task it was performing.

  "Why do you not enjoy your work?" Fredda asked.

  "Dr. Lentrall is often abrupt and rude. He will often ask for my opinion and then reject it. Furthermore, much of my work in recent days has involved simulations of events that would endanger humans. "

  Uh-oh, thought Fredda. Clearly it was a mistake to ask that follow-up question. She would have to reinforce his knowledge of the lack of danger, and then change the subject, fast, before he could pursue that line of thought. Thank Space she had turned down his pseudo-clock-rate. "Simulations involve no actual danger to humans," she said. "They are imaginary, and have no relation to actual events. Why did you grab Dr. Lentrall and force him under a bench yesterday?"

  "I received a hyperwave message that he was in danger. First Law required me to protect him, so I did. "

  "And you did it well," Fredda said. She was trying to establish the point that his First Law imperatives were working well. In a real-life, nonsimulated situation, he had done the proper thing. "What is the status of your various systems, offered in summary form?"

  "My positronic brain is functioning within nominal parameters, though near the acceptable limit for First Law-Second Law conflict. All visual and audio sensors and communications systems are functioning at specification. All processing and memory systems are functioning at specification. A Leving Labs model 2312 Robotic Test Meter is jacked into me and running constant baseline diagnostics. All motion and sensation below my neck, along with all hyperwave communication, have been cut off by the test meter, and I am incapable of motion or action other than speech, sight, thought, and motion of my head. "

  "Other than the functions currently deactivated by the test meter, deliberate deactivations, and normal maintenance checks, have you always operated at specification?"

  "Yes," said Kaelor. "I remember everything. "

  Fredda held back from the impulse to curse out loud, and forced herself to keep her professional demeanor. He had violated her order not to volunteer information, and had volunteered it in regard to the one area they cared about. Only a First Law imperative could have caused him to do such a thing. He knew exactly what they were after, and he was telling them, as best he could under the restrictions she had placed on him, that he had it.

  Which meant he was not going to let them have it. They had lost. Fredda decided to abandon her super-cautious approach, and move more quickly toward what they needed.

  "Do you remember the various simulations Dr. Lentrall performed, and the data upon which they were based?"

  "Yes," Kaelor said again. "I remember everything. "

  A whole series of questions she dared not ask flickered through her mind, along with the answers she dared not hear from Kaelor. Like a chess player who could see checkmate eight moves ahead, she knew how the questions and answers would go, almost word for word.

  Q: If you remember everything, you recall all the figures and information you saw in connection with your work with Dr. Lentrall. Why didn't you act to replace as many of the lost datapoints as possible last night when Dr. Lentrall discovered his files were gone? Great harm would be done to his work and career if all those data were lost for all time.

  A: Because doing so would remind Or. Lentrall that I witnessed all his simulations of the Comet Grieg operation and that I therefore remembered the comet's positional data. I could not provide that information, as it would make the comet intercept and retargeting possible, endangering many humans. That outweighed the possible harm to one man's career.

  Q: But the comet impact would enhance the planetary environment, benefiting many more humans in the future, a
nd allowing them to live longer and better lives. Why did you not act to do good to those future generations?

  A: I did not act for two reasons. First, I was specifically designed with a reduced capacity for judging the Three-Law consequences of hypothetical circumstances. I am incapable of considering the future and hypothetical well-being of human beings decades or centuries from now, most of whom do not yet exist. Second, the second clause of the First Law merely requires me to prevent injury to humans. It does not require me to perform any acts in order to benefit humans, though I can perform such acts if I choose. I am merely compelled to prevent harm to humans. Action compelled by First Law supersedes any impulse toward voluntary action.

  Q. But many humans now alive are likely to die young, and die most unpleasantly, if we do no repair the climate. By preventing the comet impact, there is a high probability you are condemning those very real people to premature death. Where is the comet? I order you to tell me its coordinates. mass, and trajectory.

  A. I cannot tell you. I must tell you. I cannot tell you-

  And so on, unto death.

  It would have gone on that way, if it had lasted even that long. Either the massive conflict between First and Second Law compulsions would have burned out his brain, or else Kaelor would have invoked the second clause of First Law. He could not, through inaction, allow harm to humans.

  Merely by staying alive, with the unerasable information of where the comet was in his head, he represented a danger to humans. As long as he stayed alive, there was, in theory, a way to get past the confidentiality features of Kaelor's brain assembly. There was no way Fredda could do it here, now, but in her own lab, with all her equipment, and with perhaps a week's time, she could probably defeat the safeties and tap into everything he knew.

  And Kaelor knew that, or at least he had to assume it was the case. In order to prevent harm to humans, Kaelor would have to will his own brain to disorganize, disassociate, lose its positronic pathing.

  He would have to will himself to die.

  That line of questioning would kill him, either through Law-Conflict burnout or compelled suicide. He was still perilously close to both deaths as it was. Maybe it was time to take some of the pressure off. She could reduce at least some of the stress produced by Second Law. "I release you from the prohibition against volunteering information and opinions. You may say whatever you wish. "

  "I spent all of last night using my hyperwave link to tie into the data network and rebuild as many of Dr. Lentrall's work files as possible, using my memories of various operations and interfaces with the computers to restore as much as I could while remaining in accordance with the Three Laws. I would estimate that I was able to restore approximately sixty percent of the results-level data, and perhaps twenty percent of the raw data. "

  "Thank you," said Lentrall. "That was most generous of you. "

  "It was my duty, Dr. Lentrall. First Law prevented me from abstaining from an action that could prevent harm to a human. "

  "Whether or not you had to do it, you did it," said Lentrall. "Thank you. "

  There was a moment's silence, and Kaelor looked from Lentrall to Fredda and back again. "There is no need for these games," he said. "I know what you want, and you know thhhat I I I knowww. "

  Lentrall and Fredda exchanged a look, and it was plain Lentrall knew as well as she did that it was First Law conflict making it hard for Kaelor to speak.

  Kaelor faced a moral conundrum few humans could have dealt with well. How to decide between probable harm and death to an unknown number of persons; and the misery and the lives ruined by the ruined planetary climate. And it is my husband who must decide, Fredda told herself, the realization a sharp stab of pain. If we succeed here, I am presenting him with that nightmare choice. She thrust that line of thought to one side. She had to concentrate on Kaelor, and the precious knowledge hidden inside him. Fredda could see hope sliding away as the conflicts piled up inside the tortured robot's mind. "We know," she said at last, admitting defeat. "And we understand. We know that you cannot tell us, and we will not ask. " It was pointless to go further. It was inconceivable that Kaelor would be willing or able to tell them, or that he would survive long enough to do so, even if he tried.

  Lentrall looked at Fredda in surprise, and then relief. "Yes," he said. "We will not ask. We see now that it would be futile to do so. I thought Dr. Leving might have some trick, some technique, some way of learning the truth without destroying you, but I see that I was wrong. We will not ask this of you, and we will not seek to gain the knowledge from you in other ways. This is our promise. "

  "I join in this promise," Fredda said.

  "Hu-hu-humansss lie," Kaelor said.

  "We are not lying," Fredda said, her voice as urgent as she could make it. "There would be nothing we could gain by asking you, and thus no motive for lying. "

  "Yourrrr promisse does-does-does not apply to other humans. "

  "We will keep the fact of what you know secret," Lentrall said, a note of hysteria in his voice. "Kaelor, please! Don't!"

  "I tried tooo kee-keep the fact of wwwhat I knewww secret," said Kaelor, "but yoooou realized that I had seeen what I saw, and that I woullld remember. " He paused a moment, as if to gather the strength to speak again. "Othhers could do the same," he said in a voice that was suddenly little more than a whisper. "I cannot take thhat channnce. "

  "Please!" Davlo cried out. "No!"

  "Remaininng alivvve represents inaction," Kaelor said, his voice suddenly growing stronger as he reached his decision. "I must act to prevent harm to humans. "

  His eyes glowed brighter, his gaze turned from Davlo to Fredda, as if looking at each of them one last time, and then he looked straight ahead, at the wall, at nothing at all, at infinity. There was a low-pitched hum, the smell of burning insulation, and suddenly the light was gone from his eyes. His head sagged forward, and a thin wisp of smoke curled up from the base of his neck.

  The room was silent. Fredda and Davlo looked at each other, and at the dead thing hanging on the frame in the center of the room.

  "By all the forgotten gods," Fredda whispered. "What have we done?"

  "You did nothing, Doctor," said Davlo, his voice nothing but a whisper as he fought to hold back a sob. "Nothing but help me do what I would have done. But as for me," he said, his voice close to cracking, "I'll tell you what I've done. "

  He moved a step or two forward, and looked up at Kaelor's body.

  "I've just killed the closest thing to a friend I've ever had. "