"I, and I alone am responsible for what happened to your friend Sam, Eichra Oren."
"Now, Model 17"
"Others of your friends have told me that you are a professional expert in matters of personal guilt. Is there anything I can I do to restore the moral balance?"
"I"
English being the language they had in common, that was what they spoke. Momentarily speechless, Eichra Oren drew a ragged breath and shook his head. His experience with what amounted, metaphorically, to an amputation was much too recent for him to control himself any better than that. The sword he'd done the literal amputation with lay across his knees, still bloody from the ugly job.
Finally, he spoke: "Model 17, I'm too personally involved, I'm afraidand on that account professionally disqualifiedto be of much assistance to you. For whatever informal reassurance it may be worth, I can't see how you're to blame for what happened in any case. It's exactly the kind of horrible accident that was bound to occur sooner or later whenever people start experimenting, fooling around with an unfamiliar piece of equipment. In principle, it doesn't matter whether it's a simple handtool or a gigantic spacecraft."
Before Model 17 could reply, a creature resembling a manta ray wrapped in transparent plastic, walking on its rear corners, pushed a cart past where the human sat on a bench extruded from the sidewalk. Pausing along the way, she greeted Eichra Oren by name in his native Antarctican, tendered her sincerest condolences, and offered him and Model 17, who squatted beside him, a doughnut and a cup of coffee.
Each refused politely, for different reasons.
"That was Remaulthiek," Eichra Oren nodded in the direction the manta creature had trundled, "who probably knows more about matters of guilt than I ever will."
Everyone on 5023 Eris was aware that Remaulthiek was working her way through some kind of self-imposed penance for a moral debt she'd incurred long before anybody could remember. What Eichra Oren didn't know, nor did anyone else he was acquainted with, was exactly what she'd done and to whom. It was characteristic of the culture he'd grown up in that no one ever thought to ask her and never would.
"Nonetheless," the ancient trilobitic robot insisted, "it was my personal responsibility. It matters little whose mind or manipulator lay upon the controls. I was specifically constructed by those you call the Predecessors, and left behind when they departed, for the purpose of accomplishing two equally important tasks."
The man nodded. "And those were . . . ?"
"My first task," she answered, "was to warn possible Successor races of an impending catastrophe too unspeakably terrible for any organic sapient to contemplate sanely. Eichra Oren, forgive me, but I must reiterate that the threat to all sapient life, in every version of the Solar System, represented by the Eldest is"
"Excuse me," the p'Nan moral debt assessor found that he was interrupting the robot as gently as he could. Something she'd said intrigued him, although he couldn't place a finger on exactly what. "What was your second task, Model 17?"
There was an empty moment where a living, breathing creature would have put a sigh. Like any sapient being, she was beginning to pick up phrasing and other nuances of language from those she associated with. "My second task appeared much simpler, much more straightforward than the first when I was initially programmed. Now I am not so certain about that. I was to be in total control of this gigantic spacecraft, as you call it, prepared in every way to assist less-technologically accomplished beings with its eventual management."
"Well," Eichra Oren answered thoughtfully, "these things don't happen all at once, do they? You're supposed to warn us all about the Eldest, and you're supposed be aI don't know, a flight instructor, or purser or helmsbeing, maybe. It seems to me that you're somewhere in the middle of getting both of those jobs done."
"See how well I have accomplished either!" Making scrabbling sounds with her many feet, she swiveled around like a small tank, so as to avoid looking at him or being looked at.
Eichra Oren was profoundly surprised. Having lived among technologically advanced sapients all his life, well over half a millennium so far, even he would never have guessed that a machine, however sophisticated, might be capable of voicing sarcastic bitterness or what appeared to be genuine self-deprecation. Model 17 actually seemed to be experiencing guilt. This was a startling new phenomenon to him, or at least he believed it was. It had never occurred to him that the friend he grieved over at this very moment had been at least partially a machine himselfjust as he had never thought of Sam as an animal.
Model 17 had told him that this was her first excursion onto the asteroidal surface, which had never been meant by its builders for habitation. Each of them had already expressed a wish that the circumstances of the occasion were more pleasant. At the moment, words having failed to take them any further, they simply kept each other company, the man sitting on his bench and the robot sprawling on her countless legs, waiting beside a main-level thoroughfare in the Elders' settlement. While Model 17 contemplated some inward guilt-distorted landscape, Eichra Oren stared upward into the great trees and the environmental canopy they formed overhead, reconsidering his evaluation of her.
At a sudden harsh noise, they both turned to listen. A little way down the busy street a shrill-voiced sapient whose species had obviously evolved from deepwater starfish had set up shop while they were preoccupied with their own problems and was now selling flowers, balloons, the equivalent of greeting cards, and similar gifts and souvenirs from a pushcart exactly like Remaulthiek's.
Eichra Oren returned his eyes to the canopy and his attention to his earlier thoughts.
The artificial environment which the Elders and their allied species had arranged for themselves here on 5023 Eris was simple in conception, but it was a simplicity born of great and ancient sophistication. Following the initial remote surveys of the asteroidand the one and only universe of alternative probability in which it could be foundbeginning in what Americans reckoned as the late nineteenth century, the seeds of a unique species of plant, genetically engineered to germinate and prosper despite the freezing vacuum of space, had been carefully scattered across its carbonaceous "topsoil." These had sprouted relatively quickly into what one deeply impressed Soviet American arrival had compared to outsized California redwoods and another with more imagination had later labeled "super kudzu."
Obtaining a predetermined maximum height of about a kilometer above the impact-cratered surface, the great trees had branched and leaved, spreading luxuriantly, intertwining at the tops with their nearest neighbors. Reacting to ultraviolet and other spaceborne energies as they had been designed to do, their overlapping leaves had fused with one another, finally forming a strong, translucent, air-tight sphere about the entire asteroid, capable of resisting further meteorite damage, absorbing harmful radiation, and retaining warmth, air, and humidity which the trees themselves and other organisms, subsequently planted, had begun generating.
The nautiloid settlement itself consisted of an airy and fanciful cascade of broad, interlocking platforms attached to the great trees and arrayed at various heights, most of them no more than a meter or two above the ground, some soaring into the uppermost branches. They, too, had been cultivated from engineered seeds, drawing nourishment which the trees were equipped to provide during an initial period of growth. Similar seeds had produced buildings of one or two or three stories resting atop these decks, affording ample space for offices, workshops, laboratories, residences, and commercial establishments which served the community of scientific pioneers, consisting of members of more than a hundred individual sapient species.
The resulting ambience was that of a small university town on the Earth where Eichra Oren had grown up. Most of the traffic hurrying past him and his cybernetic companion proceeded on foot or some analogous organ. High on its protectively shod tentacle-tips in the asteroid's low gravity, one of the automobile-sized, squidlike, colorfully snail-shelled molluscs called the "Elders" strode by, looking like one of the asteroid's spiders wrapped in cellophane.
Several genuine spiders of at least three species could be seen as well, along with a member of an insectoid race that strongly resembled large praying mantises, and many insectlike creatures who were actually more closely related to crabs and lobsters.
Here and there, a handful of three- or four-wheeled contraptions provided transportation for environment-suited marine organisms without legs. Overhead streaked an occasional circular aerocraft, miniature sister craft to those which, during the Elders' later surveys of this particular Solar System, had helped inspire "flying saucer" reports on Earth for more than a century.
A handbell rang.
What appeared to be a large, blunt-tailed snake rode by, wrapped about the upright portion of a unicycle. This was no independent organism, but belonged to one of the Elders who had dispatched it on some errand. Watching it turn a corner, and assured that it wasn't a messenger-tentacle sent to fetch him by his erstwhile employer, Mister Thoggosh, Eichra Oren discovered that despite himself he'd been considering the question of the robot's guilt in the back of his mind.
"Model 17," he asked suddenly, "can you say, in all honesty, that you've done your best to accomplish both of the tasks you were programmed by the Predecessors to perform?"
He waited through a long silence before she answered. "Why, I suppose I can. Although, with perhaps one exception so far, I've been unable to persuade any of you to accept what I say about the Eldest with a sufficient degree of seriousness. Eichra Oren, hear me out. In the Cometary Halo, what some of the Americans call the Oort Cloud, far beyond the orbits of the outermost planets"
He shook his head. "Model 17"
"the Proprietor's unrelenting search for the Predecessors' Virtual Drive, or perhaps the recent violent struggle against the Soviet Americans' home planetand originally yours, if memory servesas well, both of them involving the modest but easily detectable release of thermonuclear energies"
"Model 17"
"is absolutely certain to have awakened that nemesis which even the mighty Predecessors themselves feared. Unless we rush to meet it on its home ground, before it is prepared, I tell you, Eichra Oren, trillions of hideous, disgusting"
"Model 17"
"indestructible and dismayingly intelligent organisms of the sort you call Precambrian will have begun to writhe and stir for the first time in nearly a billion"
"Model 17!" He put up a palm. "We'll get back to that, I promise. I, for one, do take you seriously, believe me. But it's not my department, and it's always best to tackle only one thing at a time. You asked me about guilt, which is my department. My point now is to establish that you've done your absolute best to accomplish everything the Predecessors demanded of you."
There was another long pause.
"Gitcha cute, fuzzy, little stuffed toy animals here, while they last!" cried the pushcart vendor. "Gitcha flowers an' balloons! Gitcha cards of sympathy an' condolence!"
Finally: "Yes, Eichra Oren, I have, indeed. But certainly that cannot excuse"
Satisfied at last, he nodded. "Model 17, an individual simply can't do any better than the best that he or she can do. Please think about it. It's a metaphysical impossibility." Before he'd thought about it himself, he'd reached over and given the unhappy machine a reassuring pat on her broad, metallic carapace. "And sometimes it works out, and sometimes it just doesn't."
Somebody made throat-clearing noises. "That sounds an awful lot like `shit happens,' to me."
The intruding voice belonged to one of the Soviet American group, Second Lieutenant Danny Gutierrez, son of the expedition's commanding general, who had sauntered up quietly without either of them noticing him and stood now, leaning against the wall behind them with his legs crossed casually at the ankles, smoking one of his smuggled cigarettes. His supply of them seemed endless.
"In my experience, shit usually happens because some shit-head makes it happen."
"And I am the, er, shit-head," the trilobitoid robot intoned sadly, turning away again.
Danny drew on his cigarette and exhaled it at her back. "Well, Model 17, if the shit fits"
Eichra Oren leaped up from the bench, seized the young man by the front of his coverall, and shook him until his arms flailed. "What the hell would you know about it?" For an instant, he loosened his grasp. "For that matter, what would I know about it, even after all these centuries as a moral debt assessor?"
Suddenly, the badly strained fabric bunched under his powerful fingers again and he pulled the lieutenant to him until their noses almost touched. "I'll tell you what I do know: what's left of the best friend I have in all the universes put together is lying in there smashed to a bloody pulp! And I don't give a damn who's responsible! Having someone to blame won't undo what happened!"
"My new friends, please!"
At some time during his emotional outburst, Model 17 had closed a restraining metal claw around Eichra Oren's thigh. Feeling the pressure, the man froze, then turned slowly, looking down at the trilobitoid machine. The deeply serrated manipulator was obviously capable of shearing his leg through cleanly. Danny froze as well, his eyes bulging and startled, the tattered and ridiculous remnant of his cigarette dribbling its load of unburnt tobacco onto the pavement.
"I plead with you, Eichra Oren," the robot begged. "Do not add moral responsibility for such disharmony among your people to my numerous other shortcomings!"
Eichra Oren released Danny. He stood with both fists clenched and his eyes closed for a long moment, breathing deeply in a complex rhythmic pattern, then opened his hands and eyes. "You're quite correct, Model 17, and I thank you."
He turned to the other man, looking at him directly, and spoke formally. "Danny, I have initiated physical force against you, which happens to be the most serious violation of p'Nan ethical philosophy possible. Happily, I did not injure or kill you, although as you know, I might easily have done so. In any case, I have incurred a moral debt to you. What restitution would you have of me?"
With a wry expression, Danny regarded the ruined cigarette in his hand. Abruptly, he began looking around for the still-burning coal which had fallen off somewhere, finally found it at his feet, and stepped on it. In a high-pitched, silly voice, he said, "You must bring me a shrubbery! No, no, I'll tell you what, Eichra Oren. For starters, you could really listen to the lady here about these Eldest boogie-things. She's giving me the creeps with all that talk."
"Agreed." Eichra Oren nodded gravely. "I accept the commission."
Danny put up a hand. "I'm not done yet. I wish you'd find out exactly what happened to poor old Sam and whyand who, if anybody, was actually responsible. If you were yourself right now, you'd realize that it'll do us both good."
"Very well," Eichra Oren replied.
"And it will do me good, as well," offered Model 17. "Is there some way I can help?"
They both turned to the robot.
Danny grinned lopsidedly, nodding toward the pushcart salesman who'd continued his pitch, uninterrupted. "Do you think that guy might have a souvenir ashtray?"