The Robot and the One You Love | Page 3

sat with
her foot touching the white bag of crumpled foam beneath her table.
Her skin was pale white, lightly freckled; her look was vague.
Speaking out of bright sunshine, Jerome said, "Hello." The diener robot
stood beside him. "My name is David Jerome. You have a problem."

Perhaps she thought of running--her knees clattered against metal struts
beneath the table. "Go away," she said, hostile but still sitting,
presumably concluding that he was no threat nor was his robot.
"I don't know what's in the bag," Jerome said, "but it must be perishable,
so you can't carry it around much longer."
"What are you talking about?"
"I.G. Biochemie." He had leaned over the table to whisper the name to
her. "Whatever that is, I guess you stole it from them. If you play
around, they'll find you--"
The diener watched. She was half up from the table now, the muscles
of her face taut with something that could be either fear or outrage.
Jerome still leaned over her, and in that moment the diner's tentacles
moved beneath it in agitation: Something it didn't understand was going
on here.
They sat in Jerome's living room. White light from the walls was
shaded to purple in translucent polycarbonate couch, chair, and settees.
Red speaker film framed in chrome stood next to a clear rack of AV
equipment in matching red and a silver two-meter screen. Purple
holographic letters dangled in space over sliding glass doors, asking
ARE WE NOT MEN?
"You want in on the money," Connie said.
"Sure, but look what I'm worth to you," Jerome said. "You've been
hung up, stuck with whatever you've got there...maybe some help you
were expecting, somebody you were expecting, didn't show." He
waved away her attempt to answer. " That doesn't matter. I can arrange
things so that I.G. Biochemie won't find you, and I can put the money
anywhere in the world you want it. You won't be sorry."
"There's one thing you have to tell me," Connie said. "It's too creepy
otherwise. How did you find me?"

"I saw you on the street...I saw you, and I wondered why you were
carrying that thing, who you were...it's hard to explain. Come here, and
let me show you." In the hallway the decorating program was
restrained--it merely placed a rose tint over white walls, a dark purple
border along the wallboards. Jerome said, "Let me in," and the door
opened. "In here," he said. "Here's where I found you."
Jerome set Connie's two black, hard-shell suitcases on his living room
floor and said, "I'll take them in the spare bedroom later." The cold bag
lay across the living room couch. Connie ran her finger along the bag's
seam, and it split, the sheets of crumpled white foam opening like
petals of a giant flower. Inside lay a black plastic cube the size of a fist,
the compressor that forced cold air into the bag's foam cells. Next to it
was a small sheet of white foam folded around something smaller and
tied off in gray tape. On it in faint red marker was written a single
numeral: 6. The package frosted as she held it out to him. "Do you want
to look?" she asked.
"Is there anything to see?" he said.
"Not really. And you might contaminate it. So here--" She pulled a
small silver disk from a fold in the crumpled white. "Here's all you'll
need Transmit this, and they'll know what you're selling. It's encoded,
of course, but that's all right. Maybe the less you know, the better."
Silver whipspring coils snapped out of section joints in blue porcelain,
and shining steel blades on the coils' tips flashed under fluorescent
kitchen light, slicing away yellow skin and fat, cutting to the bone.
"That's a real floor show," Connie said. She walked out of the kitchen
to find Jerome looking out the window onto R Street ten floors below.
"Probably pretty good for self-defense, too." She sat on the purple
tinged couch.
"Sure," Jerome said, "if I want to stand trial for assault or involuntary
manslaughter. If the diener hurts anyone, I'm responsible, just like I
was driving a car."

The knife blades kept moving, but the diener was having
trouble--inexplicable vertigo of robot visions. Half an ounce of flesh
was sheared away with breastbone.
A new kind of awareness had been growing these past few months, out
of the controller bond between the diener and Jerome, and it thought,
You are responsible, you say, but are you?
Steel clanged against ceramic, blade against countertop.
Jerome called, "You got a problem, diener?"
"No," it said. "There is no problem. I was going too fast."
"Work within your limits, pal," Jerome said, then turned to Connie and
said, "What did you say?"
"How long?"