More Tales of Pirx the Pilot (4 page)

It was as remarkable as it was distressing, the degree to which, with no special effort on anyone’s part, relations between three basically normal, ordinary individuals could become so embroiled in those rocky barrens that were the southern tableland of Iota Aquarius.

To the team belonged one other member, a nonhuman one—the afore-mentioned Aniel, a nondigital robot, one of the latest Earthside jobs to be developed for fully automated land probes. That Massena was there as a cyberneticist was an anachronism—because of a regulation which provided that where there was a robot, there had to be a repairman. Now, regulations, as everyone knows, are seldom updated, and this one was ten years obsolete, since, as Massena himself was often heard to quip, the robot stood a greater chance of repairing
him
than vice versa: not only was it infallible, it was also medically programmed. Pirx had long ago observed that a man could be judged better by his behavior toward robots than toward his fellow man. Pirx belonged to a generation born into a world of which robots were as natural a part as spaceships, though acceptance of robots was tainted with vestiges of irrationality. There were those, for example, more easily infatuated with an ordinary machine—with their own car, say—than with a thinking machine. The era of unbridled modular experimentation was waning, or so it seemed, and construction was now limited to two types: the narrowly specialized and the universal. Only a fraction of the latter were human-shaped, and only because, of all the models tested, those patterned on nature proved the most functional under conditions simulating planetary exploration.

Engineers were never gratified to see their products manifest the kind of spontaneity that grudgingly bespoke an inner life. Popular wisdom held that robots could think but were devoid of any personality. Admittedly, no robot had ever been known to throw a fit, go into ecstasies, laugh, or cry; they were perfectly balanced, just as their constructors had intended them to be. But because their brains were not mass-produced, because they were the product of a laborious monocrystallization susceptible to wide statistical variability and minute molecular shifts, no two were ever created exactly alike. So they
were
individuals, then? Not at all, replied the cyberneticists, merely the products of a random probability—a view shared by Pirx and by just about anybody who had ever rubbed elbows with them, spent years in close quarters with their thinking, with their always purposeful, logical bustle. Though more similar to one another than to humans, they, too, were subject to whims and predilections; some, when called upon to execute certain commands, even practiced a kind of passive resistance—a condition that, if it persisted, was remedied by a general overhauling.

In his attitude toward these quaint machines, so punctilious, at times even ingenious in carrying out orders,
Pirx,
and probably not he alone, had a not altogether clear conscience, perhaps a throwback to his navigational stint on the
Coriolanus.
In Pirx’s mind there was something inherently unfair, something fundamentally wrong, about a situation whereby man had created an intelligence both external to and dependent on his will. A slight unease, difficult to define, yet nagging at his conscience like an unbalanced equation or a bad decision—bluntly put, the sense of having perpetrated a very clever but nonetheless nasty trick. In the judicious restraint with which man had invested these cold machines with his cumulative knowledge, granting them only as much intelligence as was required, and no chance of competing with their creators for the world’s favor, lay a perverse subtlety. When applied to their ingenious constructors, Goethe’s maxim
“In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister
” acquired the ring of a tribute perversely transformed into a mocking condemnation: they restrained not themselves but their own products, and with a mean precision. Pirx, of course, was not about to announce his qualms, knowing full well how preposterous they would have sounded. Robots were not really handicapped or exploited. No, a much simpler method had been found, one that was both more sinister and harder to attack morally: robots were crippled even before they were born—right on the drawing board.

That day—their next to last on the planet—was clean-up day. But when it came time to collate the recorded data, one of the tapes had been discovered missing. They ran a search through the computer, then ransacked all the drawers and files, in the process of which Krull twice made Pirx go through his gear, an insinuation resented by Pirx, who had never laid hands on the missing tape and who, even if he had, most certainly would not have stashed it in his grip. Pirx was itching to pay him back, all the more so because of all the anger he had been swallowing, bending over backward to rationalize Krull’s tactless, even abrasive manner. But, as usual, he held his tongue, volunteering, if worse came to worst, to team up with Aniel and re-record the missing data.

Krull said that Aniel was quite capable of handling it on his own, and after loading him up with camera and film stock, after stuffing his holsters with jet cartridges, they sent him up the massif’s lower summit.

The robot left at 0800 hours, with Massena boasting he would have the job done by lunchtime. The hours ticked by—two o’clock, three, then four… Darkness fell, but still no Aniel.

Pirx sat in one corner of the Quonset hut, trying to read a badly battered book lent him by one of the pilots back at the Base, but was unable to concentrate. He was not in the most comfy of sitting positions. The hut’s thin-ribbed, lightweight aluminum wall dug into his back, and his air mattress was so flat that the bunk’s nut-and-bolt frame kept jabbing him in the behind through the rubberized fabric. But he didn’t change his position; somehow it suited the smoldering rancor building inside him.

Neither Krull nor Massena seemed the least fazed by Aniel’s absence. For some reason Krull, who really was not much of a wit and never made any effort to be, had insisted from the start on the name “Angel,” even “Iron Angel,” and this, though trivial in itself, had rubbed Pirx the wrong way so many times as to be reason enough for disliking the man. Massena treated the robot in a purely professional sort of way and—like every intellectronics engineer who claims to know what responses are caused by what molecular processes and circuits—branded as sheer bull the faintest suggestion of any spiritual life. Still, he was as loyal and solicitous toward Aniel as any mechanic toward his diesel: he made sure he was never overloaded, respected him for his efficiency, and babied him.

By six, Pirx, who couldn’t take it any more—his leg had finally gone to sleep—stood up, stretched till his joints cracked, wiggled his foot and flexed his knee to restore circulation, and began pacing the hut cornerwise, sure that nothing could rile Krull now that he was engrossed in his final tabulations.

“A little consideration, fellas,” Krull said at last, seemingly unaware that the only one on his feet was Pirx, since Massena lay sprawled on his pneumatic couch, a pair of earphones on his head, listening to some broadcast with a look of bemused distraction. Pirx opened the door, felt the tug of a strong westerly wind, and, once the hut’s wind-rocked, sheet-metal wall was at his back and his eyes were accustomed to the dark, gazed in the direction of Aniel’s return route. A few vibrant stars were all he could see as a blustering, howling wind descended on him, engulfing his head like an icy stream, ruffling his hair, and swelling his nostrils and lungs—Pirx clocked it at around forty meters per second. He lingered for a while until a chill sent him back inside, where he found a yawning Massena taking off his headset and running his fingers through his hair, while Krull, frowning, businesslike, patiently went about filing papers in folders, shuffling each bunch to even the edges.

“No sign of him!” said Pirx, startling even himself with his defiant tone. They must have noticed it, too, because Massena skewered him with a brief, cold stare and remarked:

“So? He’ll make it back on infrared…”

Pirx returned the glare but held his peace. He brushed past Krull, picked up the book he’d left lying on a chair, settled back into his corner, and pretended to be reading. The wind was picking up, at times cresting to a wail; something—a small branch?—thumped against the outer wall, and then came a lull lasting several minutes.

Massena, who was obviously waiting for the ever-obliging Pirx to start supper, finally broke down and, after poring over the labels in hope of striking it rich with some hitherto undiscovered delicacy, set about opening one of the self-heating cans.

Pirx wasn’t much in the mood for eating. Famished as he was, he stayed put. A cool and malevolent rage was taking hold of him, and it was directed, God only knew why, against his bunkmates, who, as roomies went, were not even all that bad. Had he assumed the worst? An accident, maybe? An ambush by the planet’s “secret inhabitants,” by those creatures in which no one but a few spoofers claimed to believe? But if there’d been a chance, even a thousand-to-one chance, of the planet’s being inhabited, they’d have dropped their piddling exercises long ago and swung into action, following procedures outlined by Articles 2, 5, and 6 of Paragraph XVIII, along with Sections 3 and 4 of the Special Contingency Code. But there was not a chance, not the slimmest, of that happening. The odds were greater that Iota’s erratic sun would explode. Much greater. So what could be keeping him?

Pirx felt a deceptive calm in the hut that shook now with every gust of wind. All right, maybe he
was
pretending to be reading, to having lost interest in dinner, but the others were playing a similar game, a game as hard to define as it was increasingly obvious with every passing moment.

Since Aniel came under a dual supervision—Massena’s as the intellectronician in charge of maintenance, and Krull’s as the team leader—either man stood to be blamed for any possible foul-up. Negligence on Massena’s part, say, or a badly plotted route on Krull’s, though such mistakes would have been too obvious to have escaped notice. No, that was not the cause of the silence growing more studied by the second.

Krull had, it seemed, deliberately bullied the robot from the word go, putting him down schoolboy fashion, saddling him with errands unthinkable to the others—a universal robot, after all, was not a lackey. It was plain to see that, clumsily but persistently, through Aniel he was out to get Massena, whom he was not man enough to attack openly.

It now became a contest of nerves, the loser being the first to betray any anxiety over Aniel. Pirx felt himself being implicated in this silent game as crazy as it was nerve-racking. What would
he
have done in the team leader’s shoes? Not a whole lot, probably. Send out a search-and-rescue party? A bad night for that. No, a search would have to wait until morning. That left radio contact, on ultrashortwave, even though the densely mountainous terrain made getting through iffy. Aniel had never been sent out on a solo before; though it was not forbidden, the rules made it conditional on umpteen paragraphs. To hell with the regs! Massena could have at least tried radioing—thought Pirx—instead of scraping that can for the rest of his scorched rations. Think: what if I were out there instead of the robot? No, something must have happened. A broken leg? But who ever heard of a robot breaking his leg?

He got up, went over to the plotting board, and, feeling the furtive glances of the others, studied the map on which Krull had charted Aniel’s route. Maybe he thinks I’m checking up on him, Pirx wondered; he looked up suddenly and met Krull’s gaze. The team leader was on the verge of making some crack—his lips were already parted—when he backed down under Pirx’s cold hard stare, cleared his throat, and, hunching over, went back to sorting his papers. Pirx’s steely-eyed glower was not intentional; it was just that at such times he was roused to something that commanded on-board obedience and a respect tinged with anxiety.

He put aside the map. The robot’s route went up to and then skirted the towering rock mass fronted by three precipices. Could he have disobeyed instructions? Impossible. Maybe he got his foot wedged in a crack and sprained it? Nonsense. Robots like Aniel could survive a forty-meter fall. They had something better than brittle bones, were built to endure worse scrapes. So what the hell was it?

Pirx stood up straight and from his imposing height contemplated Massena, who sat wincing and blowing between sips of scalding tea, and then Krull, before making an exaggerated about-face and retreating to their cramped bunk room. He flipped down his bed from the wall, exerting a trifle too much force, shed his clothes in four fluid gestures, and crawled into his sleeping bag. Sleep, he knew, would not come easily, but he’d had enough of Krull and Massena for one day. If he was cooped up much longer with those two, he might really tell them off, but why waste his breath: the moment they boarded the
Ampère,
Operational Team Iota Aquarius would be terminated.

Silvery streaks snaked under his eyelids, fuzzy spots of light flickered and lulled the senses… He flipped his pillow onto its cooler side, then suddenly had a vision of Aniel, now close enough to be touched, looking exactly as he had earlier that day, a few minutes before eight. Massena was fixing him up with the jet cartridges for momentary propulsion—standard equipment, to be deployed under strictly prescribed conditions. It was too quaint to behold, as only the sight of a man helping a robot—rather than vice versa—can be, but Aniel’s hunchlike backpack kept him from being able to reach the cartridge holsters. (He carried a payload heavy enough for two men.) Not that this hurt his pride; he was, after all, a machine, equipped with a micro-strontium battery, capable of delivering sixteen horsepower in a pinch, for a heart. Perhaps just because he was in a semiconscious state, Pirx was repelled by the sight of it. Being heart and soul on the side of the mute Aniel, he was ready to believe that fundamentally the robot was no more the phlegmatic, easygoing type than he was, but that he only made it look that way for reason of expediency. Before dozing off, he had another vision, the most intimate kind a man can entertain, of the sort immediately forgotten on waking. He conjured up that legendary, wordless, mythical situation that everyone—Pirx included—now knew would never come to pass: a revolt of robots. And knowing with a tacit certitude that he would have taken their side, he fell asleep, somehow exonerated.