A World Called Solitude

Chapter 1-1

Chapter 1

“Arthur, how many times this month have I wished I were a poet?”

The robot barely hesitated. “Seventeen, sir.”

Birk Aaland nodded absently. “Make that eighteen now. This world inspires poetry—or it would if I were any good at it. And I remember so damned little of the poetry I learned in school. It only goes to show that a good technical education can still have drawbacks.”

The man and the robot were standing atop a rounded hillock overlooking a broad plain. The purple-shading-into-green flatlands stretched before them until the horizon stole it from view—a horizon that was clear and sharp, free of the haze and pollution of a human-occupied world. Low scrub dominated the scene, with some prickly pseudocactus and misshapen purple trees giving counterpoint.

The hot yellow sun rose behind Birk, warming the back of his neck. It cast long shadows of the two figures on the hill, the tall, robust man and the cylindrical robot beside him. Overhead, the gray of the dawn sky was bleached to the pastel shade of day.

It was not a still life Birk observed. The creatures he thought of as birds—even though they bore their young alive and had no feathers—filled the sky. Dawn and dusk were their prime hunting hours in this part of the world, though already most of the night-flying insects they preyed on had found their havens for the day—much to Birk’s relief. Smaller creatures scampered about, little blurs at the edge of his peripheral vision. The air was clean, smelling refreshingly of herbs and damp leaves.

Two kilometers away was a herd of the animals Birk had named “lopers,” already awake and grazing on the vegetation. The lopers were lumbering four-legged beasts nearly as tall as a man, two and a half meters long and weighing upward of two hundred kilos. They had tawny yellow fur clumped in odd patches over their skins, and long, flat tails dragging awkwardly in the dirt behind them. Their faces were piggish, their eyes dark and stupid. But despite their ungainly appearance, Birk knew they could move swiftly when alarmed.

“I tried writing poetry when I was in college,” Birk continued, his gaze never wavering from the vista before him. “I suppose everyone does. I tried to fill it with passion and imagery, expressing the innermost secrets of my soul. Only my soul didn’t have any secrets; not then, anyway. So my passion came out as pretension and the imagery came out as clichés. I had a problem, too, with lapsing into doggerel at the most inopportune places.”

“‘Doggerel,’ sir?” From Arthur’s inflection, it was clear Birk had used a word beyond the robot’s vocabulary.

Birk turned from the landscape to look at his partner. Arthur was a tall, silvery cylinder of metal and plastic with a variety of arms and sensors scattered over the upper half of his body. He was supported by four legs that could extend at will from a dozen centimeters to more than two meters. The legs could also be flexible or rigid, whichever was more useful at the moment.

“Yes,” Birk said. “Doggerel is considered a bad sort of poetry, when your lines take on a singsong quality and content is sacrificed for meter; I can’t define it any more precisely than that, I’m afraid. It’s too bad I didn’t save my old poems—you could have seen it in a minute.”

He shook his head. “It’s a shame I can’t do more justice to this place. Sometimes the urge is overwhelming, it’s all so beautiful. Look at the yellow and blue of those birds flying over that green patch of ground. Well, I can’t do it any justice by just talking about it; let’s move in closer and see if we can bag a loper for dinner.” He gave a friendly pat to the spot where Arthur’s shoulder would be if Arthur had shoulders.

They started down the hill at an easy pace. Birk couldn’t have taken the delta any closer to the herd without spooking them, but a walk of two kilometers would be good exercise. Beside him, Arthur matched the pace, equally unhurried. Arthur had a patience no mere human could attain; after all, hadn’t he waited here two thousand years with nothing to do until Birk’s arrival?

They reached the bottom of the hill and had started toward the herd when Birk suddenly began to laugh. “What’s funny?” Arthur asked him.

“My own egotism,” Birk said. “You write poetry to express your feelings to someone else—and there is no one else except you and the other robots. I already know what my feelings are, and you could never understand feelings or emotion. It would be a colossal conceit and a waste of time—an intellectual form of masturbation.”

“You masturbate quite frequently,” the machine commented.

“You have neither tact nor delicacy, do you know that?” Birk didn’t even break stride, but smiled anyway. “I shall attribute it to jealousy, because you were created less than a eunuch and cannot enjoy the Supreme Pleasure. Yes, of course I masturbate; otherwise the pressure would build up until even you looked good to me. And I like you too much to rape you.

“There is another alternative… in the Black City.”

Birk stopped and turned abruptly to face the robot. His teeth were suddenly clenched, his voice harsh, his hands balled into fists. “I know there is. And I’ve told you not to bring that subject up again.”

Undaunted, Arthur stopped as well. “Yes, you’re right. I apologize.”

“And don’t apologize so quickly. How can I get a good argument started if you apologize at the first little outburst?”

“I’m sor—”

“There you go again! Damn it, stop being so perfect.”

“I am what I am. I can’t help that.” The robot extended one flexible arm and laid it gently on Birk’s shoulder.

Birk shrugged away the touch with a sharp gesture and stalked forward angrily. “Forget it. We’ve got lopers to hunt. Let’s go.”

He strode across the plain at a pace nearly double his former easy gait, swerving every so often to avoid the larger rocks or bushes. Arthur would have had no trouble keeping up, but decided it would be more prudent to stay a few steps behind the human. He had seen Birk fly into these sudden rages before, and knew that the wisest course was to let the anger burn itself out and maintain a low profile in the meantime.

The trek across the open ground took twenty minutes, all of it in stony silence as Birk refused to acknowledge the robot’s presence. The herd moved little from its initial spot; none of the lopers’ natural enemies were in the area, and they did not recognize the two approaching figures as a threat. The strong, musky odor of the animals filled Birk’s nostrils as the hunters closed to within thirty meters of the grazing herd. Birk stopped and unslung the gun from his shoulder.

The weapon was left over from the reign of the Makers—Birk’s name for this planet’s original inhabitants. It looked like a slightly squashed, yellow plastic volleyball with a vacuum-cleaner nozzle attached at the front. It weighed only a few grams, yet because of the awkward size and shape Birk had found it necessary to use both hands when firing. It had not been designed far a human’s easy grip.

He stood there for a moment, eyeing the herd and choosing his victim carefully. His needs were modest, so he disdained the larger males, and he did not want to upset the breeding pattern by taking a nursing mother. He finally selected an immature female as his prey. Having made his selection, he aimed his weapon carefully and fired.

The gun emitted a series of high-pitched bleeps and a thin blue line of energy flew from the nozzle. The energy projection streaked through the air to its target. There was a crackling that reminded Birk of static electricity, and the loper cow collapsed onto the ground. The rest of the herd, on hearing the bleeping sounds, looked around in confusion and, at the instigation of one large male who seemed to be the leader, moved at a fast walk to a spot a few dozen meters away, leaving their fallen comrade behind.

Satisfied with his kill, Birk turned to Arthur and finally spoke. “All right, call the delta over and let’s get our catch home.”

Arthur obediently beamed out a radio signal and, from the other side of the hill on which they’d originally landed, their hovercraft lifted into sight and zoomed toward them. It had the triangular shape of an arrowhead without a shaft, ten meters from tip to base and nearly two meters high. It flew soundlessly, but its large bulk and quick motion startled the grazing herd. As a unit they bolted northward at a surprising speed.

Within seconds the delta was hovering overhead and, at another silent radioed command from Arthur, it floated gently to the ground three meters away. The cargo door in the back slid open, as did the plastic bubbles over the passenger seats on either side of the forward vertex. The ship turned off once more, awaiting further instructions.

Birk grunted as he bent down to drag, with Arthur’s help, the heavy loper carcass over to the craft. They lifted the animal into the cargo section, and Arthur tucked it neatly away while Birk brushed the dirt he’d picked up from the body off his rough-skinned leather jacket. The two hunters climbed into their own seats and closed the plastic bubbles again. Though Birk had learned to pilot the delta, he preferred to let Arthur do the actual work today. He gave the robot a curt nod, and their craft lifted gracefully into the air to begin the long flight home.

The delta flew at the leisurely—for it—speed of 2,000 kilometers an hour. The character of the land beneath them changed as they passed over, progressing from purple scrub plains to brown wooded hills to tangled and overgrown green patches of level land. Birk stared stonily ahead, at first, but his anger faded gradually as the ground passed beneath him,

On Earth, he mused, all that would have been parceled out and divided into farm sections, all under cultivation to make maximum use of the resources. There’d be squares and rectangles of different colors, all neatly plowed and carefully tended. Here—nothing but wild, uncontrolled growth.

He grinned, taking a perverse satisfaction in the untamed quality of this planet. It was as though living on a savage world made him something of a savage himself.

Occasionally they passed over some of the smaller towns and villages the Makers had left. Years ago, Birk’s curiosity might have compelled him to interrupt his journey and investigate these hamlets on the outskirts of the “civilized” world. But he’d seen enough of them in his eleven years here; with few exceptions, the smaller towns in this region followed a similar pattern. He would never have time to explore them all, but his early investigations told him that he didn’t really want to.

After an hour’s silent flight, the nature of the land below them softened, became more regular. Soon the outer fringes of the city he called Beta-Nu were passing beneath their craft. The delta began to slow its flight and drop lower. The sun was now well above the horizon, and Birk gazed out over the city where, in recent weeks, he’d been residing.

The Makers had chosen to lay their city plans out in diamond patterns rather than rectangular grids as was customary on Earth. They loved to build tall and slender, so that many of their cities resembled pincushions: flat-topped buildings, needle slim, pierced the sky, thousands of them clustered together in impressive array. The Makers had loved colors, too, and each city was a rainbow of towers. Some of the buildings were even made of materials that changed their hue depending on the angle of the sun.

The delta homed in on the tallest building in Beta-Nu. Birk always chose to live in the tallest building of any city he was exploring; he could then look down from his tower and plot the course of his inspections. Plus, he’d be able to find his way around in a strange city by using his home as a reference point.

This tower of stone, steel, and plastic was eighty-seven stories tall, small for a skyscraper on this world—but then, Beta-Nu was a small city. Arthur had said that Beta-Nu’s population was only four hundred thousand at the peak period in its history.

The robot now settled the delta gently down atop the tower’s flat roof and sent out another radio signal. Within seconds, a swarm of small gray helper robots appeared at the back end of the craft, unloading the dead loper and carrying it to the service lift. They would take it to the kitchen, Birk knew, where the carcass would then be skinned, cleaned, dressed, and prepared for half a dozen different meals. The kitchen robots were very efficient.