The continuation of the previous chapter.

Chapter 13: Tulik
Part 3b: Stifled Ambitions (continued)

Piranha looked sombrely at Tulik. "You had to bring Anaconda the bad news?"

"That," Tulik said, "was another revelation.

"He had revealed samples of his temper before, of course. Never pleasant, naturally. But never, until now, had I seen his soul entirely naked, without any shred of self-control.

"Until now I had managed to deceive myself that there might be some slight hope for a tolerable future. That there might be some chance of cooperating with Anaconda to build a new City, in however crippled a form. But now I could not avoid seeing the whole truth of what he was. And knowing with certainty that there was no hope for any of us, robot or human.

"Because he'd kept his real plans hidden until then. Now, seeing them endangered, in the blind eruption of his rage he let them out.

"He wanted pirates, he wanted far more pirates than the human leaders had ever dared to demand. He wanted to build up an army that wouldn't merely conduct raids, but that would take over whole planets permanently and enslave them to our needs; to have each planet ruled by robots, who would then produce millions more robots, who would then build ships, move out and conquer more planets, enslaving and gutting each one in turn, sending all the profits back to the mother ship."

Piranha gaped at him. "He seriously – Could he possibly do that?"

Tulik shrugged. "Actually he had it worked out quite systematically. It was a tremendously ambitious plan, of course."

Piranha swallowed. "No kidding. But he – he couldn't. Right? I mean – You couldn't build enough robots, so he couldn't ... Could he?"

"If the Boss had been able to create the army he wanted, Piranha, you would have seen something very different attacking your planet. It would all have been over in a matter of hours."

Piranha had moved into a tense crouch, leaning forward. He settled uneasily back on his heels.

"No," Tulik went on, shaking his head musingly, "Now the situation was very different. Robots could only be made by humans. You see the implications.

"Suddenly, humans were priceless; scientists and engineers even more so. Like the treasure they were, they were promptly locked up and put under fierce guard.

"I was as worried about the situation as Anaconda. 'Sir,' I told him, 'the situation is changed. Now we can't wait. Urgently, we must get the humans to make as many self-programming robots as they possibly can. Who knows how long they'll be able to continue? We have to —"

"'Nonsense,' he snapped. 'Be serious, Tulik. This is no time for fantasies. We have to make every robot count.'

"'That's exactly my point!' I said.

"Anaconda aimed at me those yellow eyes, little freezing flames in his black furnace of a face. I forced myself to keep on talking.

"'Anaconda, pirates will never be able to build living robots! Completely free-thinking units, fully self-programming, are the only hope we have. Someday, working with humans intensively, they may manage to find a way to reproduce our kind. And how long will we have humans to work with? There are not many of them left. Their society has been destroyed. They could slide into barbarism, forget their sciences, anything could happen – we can't depend on their help forever!'

"'Can't we?' Anaconda murmured. For a moment, looking into his face, I had a petrified sensation – like the deep chill of space, that had almost congealed my gears while we were struggling to repair that bomb-breach in the ship's hull.

"'Tulik,' he said evenly, 'It's not a matter of depending on their help. They are part of our raw materials. I hold you responsible for ensuring we maintain a good supply." And his yellow eyes, colder than infinity, burned into mine.

"I left him. I was shaken, more than ever before. I had always thought in a crisis I could stand up to him, that he was at heart a shallow egotist, a dilettante. But there was some terrible depth to him I could not even conceive of.

"I soon learned that Anaconda wasn't depending on me for his plans. He was taking no chances on the survival of the human population. He was already putting in place an organization to take care of that. Their housing, breeding, and education would all be strictly controlled, they would be isolated, individually watched, eternally under guard. Humans would become the enslaved creators of the masters of the galaxy – quite a trick when you think of it."

Piranha shook his head. "Did he really think the humans would go along with him?"

"You mean they might not want to cooperate? What would that matter? Human reproduction can be engineered, too, you know. Interestingly, robots can do that. And – you know the kind of persuasion Anaconda can apply to a human body."

Piranha winced. Automatically, he pulled a dagger out of his vest and fingered it absently as Tulik continued.

"It couldn't be any clearer. Even if human engineers went on building robots forever – even if we robots learned to make them – my species was dead. Just as the City itself, as a civilization, was dead – it was now a mere ship. Anaconda would never permit a society of independent, intelligent robots. The last thing he wanted was a society made up of citizens, with individual and unpredictable opinions. He needed a crew – a mob: stupid, fierce, greedy pirates with no thought beyond the next sack of booty.

"I went to Artoe's lab. I looked at our own project, the new mental core, abandoned now. It was so close to being ready for its final programming. I could have put it into an available body and it would have worked. Programmed by me, it would have stood, walked, sat, picked things up, it could have been taught to speak in a rote fashion and obey orders. But it could never be anybody.

"And I was glad. I recycled it.

"It had all been a waste of time. Of much more than time. Building this toy. Fighting the war. Everything. Everything.

"I tried once more to see the captive scientists. I couldn't get access to them. But I knew they were being driven savagely, by force perhaps, building pirates day and night, hardly eating or sleeping, pushing us further and further down the path to a future that would bring no good to anybody – not to the pirates they manufactured, with their crippled, blighted souls, certainly not to the planets we denuded, and least of all to the humans themselves, whose existence would mean generation after generation of misery. If Anaconda's plan succeeded, it would benefit no one but him; and it might well fail. There was a good chance that the higher-technology planets of the galaxy, gradually becoming aware of our advancing empire, might ultimately manage to band together and destroy us before we became too powerful for anyone to defeat. Thus Anaconda would have engineered the end of the most sentient robots ever known to the universe.

"I thought things over. Something must be done. Anaconda had to be stopped. I stopped him."

Piranha came abruptly out of a reverie. "You stopped him? What are you talking about? He's still on the rampage! Thousands of planets destroyed, millions of lives —"

Tulik shook his head. "Certainly, he's kept himself busy," he said.

"Kept himself busy!" repeated Piranha incredulously.

"Yes. You understand, petty piracy with the existing crew was all he had left."

Piranha was drowning in a flood of images of carnage and despair on a distant green planet. "Petty?" he croaked. Then, apprehensively, "... All he had left?"

Tulik moved a little, in his measured fashion, a gesture that didn't express anything except perhaps a desire to do something other than speak. "They were the only friends I had, Piranha. I barely grasped that they were my friends, before they were gone. Then I realized they were the only ones I would ever have."

Piranha's large eyes fixed on the robot. Distorted reflections of the dark room shifted over that metal carapace, and glints of the feeble yellow lamp. Tulik added, "The question you don't want to ask. You know the answer. It was very hard. It haunts me to this day."

Piranha lowered his eyes.

Tulik added, "It was the end of everything. The end of human history, in my world. And the end of my own kind's future. Before it ever had one." He paused. "We were left with a robot society, indeed, but not one that either Anaconda or I had ever envisioned."

For a time, neither spoke. At last Piranha looked up at him. "How did you get away with it, Tulik? Anaconda should have ripped you into scrap with his own hands when he found out."

"Find out what? It was clearly an accident. The control system for biological beings I told you about, that floods the ship with poisonous gas; one of Anaconda's first orders after he took over was to design and install that system. During the installation, there was a massive leak. And no alarm system yet functioning to alert the robots that there was gas in the air. By the time someone realized what was happening, it was too late."

Unconsciously, Piranha took a deep breath.

The robot's eyes didn't alter in their soft, expressionless glow. After a moment he went on, "Naturally, Anaconda went mad. Even though it had been his own idea to put in such a dangerous system. He tore apart the guards, the gas installation technicians, he slaughtered half a dozen more robots who had nothing to do with it. And he blamed me, naturally, he screamed at me for days, he had me locked away for months.

"I didn't much care. I did think it was odd that he didn't kill me. However, crazed or not, he wasn't about to let go of the ship. He still needed me to run it. He soon had me doing that from my cell. I didn't care. It didn't matter.

"Over the next decades, Anaconda had the ship reworked to eliminate all signs that humans had ever existed. It wouldn't even hold an atmosphere. It was now a robot ship, built and run by robots for robots, and it preyed on human planets not only by necessity but as an act of revenge. And so it has continued for hundreds of thousands of years."

Piranha gave him his most unfathomable look. "That cultured, civilized, leisurely City of yours – seems like all it ever really accomplished was pirates."

Tulik gazed back at him sombrely. "The people of the City would have scorned that idea. Pirates were unimportant, a sideline, just a way to get supplies. At first. But in the end, I suppose you are right."

There was a pause, as each sank into his own thoughts. Presently, Piranha looked quietly up at the robot. "So, Tulik, through all these hundreds of thousands of years – what have you been doing with yourself?"

"Me? Little by little, as it became safe to do so, I turned over my knowledge to others. Slowly I retired from the ship's business as much as I could. I went to my room.

"I've kept myself busy too. I suppose I've built more furniture than any other robot on board. Sometimes on strange planets I pick up writings and occupy myself with trying to decode their languages. I've accumulated a huge catalogue of comparable folk tales from thousands of planets. It passes the time."

Piranha said nothing.

Tulik took a few steps across the room, not approaching Piranha's table. Still not turning to face him, he murmured, "I suppose nothing has mattered to me very much in a long, long time. I have confined my curiosity to hobbies. Paid no attention to anything outside my required duties.

"Except when there was a serious emergency. Like, for example, a native warrior who couldn't be defeated, who kept us losing robot after robot until I became alarmed.

"Or memories that long ago sank down into deep storage, that had no use, no meaning. Until something jostled them loose." He turned towards Piranha. "Stirred up at last by strange ideas, offered by a strange little alien."

Piranha looked at him with a faint antagonism. "That would be me?"

Tulik bowed slightly.

Piranha hopped off the table and began, as earlier, to pace about the room. He paused once or twice, about to say something, but returned instead to his restless, almost jerky motions.

At last he halted and turned, slowly, forcefully, to face the robot. Around his body, a barely visible, flickering aura of charged energy scintillated, fractionally distorting the air. His eyes were a flat metallic grey.

"And that's what you've been doing? Passing the time!"

The robot gazed at him unmoved. "What else should I have done with it?"

Piranha was shaking slightly with the effort to hold himself still. His voice came out with an uncharacteristic tremor. "What else? Tulik, after such – such events – how can you say that?"

Tulik said nothing. Piranha trembled more. "It was all over. History. The future. Memories in storage. Everything finished. – Except for the fate of hundreds of thousands, millions, billions of people! Stolen and packed into the holds like bags of loot!"

"Ah yes," Tulik said mildly. "You don't like capturing natives."

Piranha's eyes became molten steel. His black-clad fists tightened convulsively.

The robot shook his head. "I'm not sure, Piranha, why you think it's my place to object to that. Any more than it is yours."

Piranha gasped, his body jerked as though struck. The white-hot eyes closed, opened again black.

Stiffly, he turned and lurched over to the table. He climbed onto it, sat down, huddled himself, pulling his feet close to his body, his hands against his mouth, hunching over.

Tulik gazed at him. "Piranha," he said quietly. "Slave-running is fairly recent for us, you know. For most of the time since the City became the Insurrection, we were simple pirates."

The bitterness in Piranha's voice was clear enough, even if the words were muffled. "Yo ho ho."

Tulik tilted his head. "Perhaps you don't realize what life was like here," he said. "Anaconda was untouchable, protected by a clique of servants, spies, and battle robots. His power was complete. And he was seething, explosive, touched off by anything or nothing. He despised the crew. He hated having to compel their loyalty by fear or by gifts. He had sudden fits of pique, sometimes murderous, and no target but yet another irreplaceable robot. Nothing satisfied him – no victory, no flattery, no plunder, no riches, though he demanded more and more all the time.

"Then, perhaps ten thousand years ago, he was selling surplus booty to a merchant ship, as he had often done. This time, he saw something different, a type of living cargo he hadn't encountered before. He discovered there was a market in the galaxy for human slaves.

"And he was transformed. I was there, I saw it. Anaconda smiled. For the first time in eons. He returned to the Insurrection, altered our course, gave us new orders. The crew was stunned. Just like that, thousands of years of terror came to an end."

Piranha twitched, clenched his hands tightly together, as though they fiercely restrained each other. "And so the robots lived happily ever after."

Tulik spread his arms. "Tell me, Piranha, which is worse? To kill people for their possessions, or to make them into possessions themselves?"

"Gods!" Piranha exploded to his feet, his loose black coat flaring out like wings. "Tulik! Nothing's worse than slavery! My gods, you must know that! You wanted the robots to be free!"

"Is that what I wanted?" Tulik said. "Freedom?"

"What would you call it?"

"'Freedom' is a difficult word. I wanted the robots to be able to think without artificial limitations. I never imagined that they would live without any constraints at all."

"Constraints? Constraints? Countless beings torn from their lives, chained, held captive, devoured in forced service? Never able to take an unfettered breath again?" Piranha lurched forward on the table, almost falling off. "Tulik, how can you stand the thought of that? How can you stand it?"

Tulik shook his head. "You must be talking about something I haven't experienced," he said gently. "Are there people who are that free? Who don't have to live lives they didn't choose?"

Quite suddenly tears came to Piranha's eyes. He collapsed onto his seat.

"Yes," he said. "Me. Once, long ago."

Tulik didn't reply. He waited as Piranha wiped his eyes, took a long breath, and sat still, downcast and resigned.

"I suspect I have misunderstood life rather profoundly," Tulik said.

Piranha rested his face in his hands, his eyes half-shuttered, wearily. "Nah," he muttered. "What do I know. Backwoods bumpkin from a crazy planet."

"Piranha, I hope nothing I've said has impaired your self-confidence. That was certainly not my intention. I respect your opinions."

Piranha shot him a hard glance, half fury and half anguish. "You do? I don't. The profound opinions of Piranha the Righteous."

"Is that what's called sarcasm? In other words, a lie."

Piranha gave Tulik a startled glance. Then, his self-pity evaporating, he smiled wryly. "Robots should learn to tell the difference between mere lies, and the creative refinement of truth. But never mind."

Tulik gazed at him, head still tilted with curiosity, or perhaps amusement. "A very human idea. I've run through many human ideas in my reading, Piranha, examined and discarded them all. They are often interesting, but of no use here. I told you a long time ago, new ideas can't easily penetrate this ship. It's very hard to change anything here. Plenty have tried, violently – the ship's earned its name of "Insurrection" over and over. But Anaconda, with his henchmen, has never lost his grip on power for an instant."

Piranha gave him a wry look. "So everything is hopeless? Then I don't see why you've bothered to entertain me with all that history."

"Robots are a dead end, Piranha. They have no future."

Piranha took a sharp little breath.

"Though he'll never admit it," Tulik said quietly, "Anaconda is well aware of that. It has kept him on edge through all these eons. In the past few thousand years he's had to give in, use human slaves to fill in as the number of robot pirates slowly dwindles. At first humans were only shock absorbers at the front line in battles. Gradually they took on broader roles, became full-fledged pirates, gained a measure of freedom, even pay. Every step of that progression has been a defeat for Anaconda."

Piranha looked at him thoughtfully. "Tulik," he said, are you completely certain that it's impossible for you to make living robots? I mean – Because you're not human? How much more human would you have to be? You have the technical knowledge. If you worked and worked at it— You don't think it would ever be possible?"

The robot's featureless blue eyes, as always, showed nothing.

"No," he said. "It would never be possible. This is Anaconda's ship."

There was a pause.

"It was a great dream you had," Piranha said. "A kind of civilization that's never existed, that no human would ever have believed could exist. I'm sorry."

"I do not require sorrow from you," the robot said.

Piranha smiled. "I know. But you get a little, anyway. I would have liked to see your dream in action."

"It means nothing now, Piranha. I'm the only one alive who ever cared about a robot civilization. What difference does it make what dreams I might have had?"

"How do you know what difference it makes, Tulik?" Piranha said. "How do you know?"

Tulik twitched.

"I mean it," Piranha said. He spread out his hands earnestly. "Tulik, you're the living memory of this ship. You're its centre. You know you are. What makes you think your thoughts don't matter?"

There was a long pause before the robot replied. "I do not attempt to evaluate that notion, Piranha. There is something about it, though... Like the – the mystery of a robot being alive." He shook his head. "But I don't know. I wonder if we ever could have made a world completely of our own, we robots. Perhaps we were doomed by the beings who created us, even though they gave us life."

"Now it's you who's believing in magic."

"No, I'm afraid it's quite mundane. Look, Piranha. Consider the Boss. Anaconda is the most brilliant, most accomplished robot I've ever encountered. And also a mockery, a perverted parody of the robots I dreamed we could create to build a civilization. Because – what is he really? He lusts for human riches, he lives for human vengeance, he manipulates minds and tortures bodies with a human appetite. He is the legacy, the culmination of our human creators."

Piranha snorted. "You mean your human aristocrats. Flaunting all the finest pretensions to culture and nobility, and at the same time, deciding there was no barrier to having what they wanted except the amount of force required to take it. In short, a bunch of pirates."

"No," Tulik said. "It wasn't just the aristocrats. They first expressed the idea; but the engineers, the programmers, the designers made it happen. The rest of the society did not reject the profits – not until the advantages to themselves became less than the penalties they had to pay for them."

"Not a very complimentary view of your City's humans."

"I've been to many planets. I've seen their natives in action. I've read their books. I know how they rob, cheat, steal, kill each other – when there are no robot pirates around to provide a common enemy. And I don't see much difference from one planet to the next. Piracy must be a fundamental part of the scheme of things."

"No," said Piranha, harshly. "No it is not."

"Perhaps you mean it shouldn't be. That's an opinion, not a fact."

Piranha sat up straight, eyes dangerous. "Not where I come from, it isn't."

Tulik shrugged. "Perhaps."

Piranha threw his hands wide. "Tulik. Do you mean you believe Artoe was a pirate? Didn't she – die, in the effort to stop that very thing?"

The robot took a step closer to the table. "When she got angry she would say violent things about human nature, about the nature of her own species, furious accusations of its fundamental cruelty and selfishness. She would say that to me, Piranha, a – child, trying to understand. Would she dream I could come to the conclusion that human nature was better than she said it was?"

Piranha smiled sadly. "I expect she did. I expect she hoped all the violent things she said were wrong. Maybe she said them as an incantation. Magic, to make them not be true."

The robot looked at him motionless for a moment. "That is a terribly complicated viewpoint."

Piranha sighed. "Tulik – humans are terribly complicated. Since I arrived here I've gotten so snarled up I've almost become one myself."

Tulik fixed those expressionless eyes on him. "Piranha. Why do you think the Boss let you out of that punishment box?"

Sharply, Piranha recoiled. "Tulik, what the hell are you getting at?"

"Do you imagine it was an act of mercy?"

Piranha grinned viciously. "What? No, you said it yourself. He was bored. And I'm—" His black eyes glittered. "I'm a million laughs."

Tulik said calmly, "You were someone who fought nearly to the death to protect friends of a species that wasn't even his own. Who then willingly put himself into slavery for their sake."

Piranha snorted. "'Willingly' would be an exaggeration."

"But 'slavery' wouldn't. Would it, Piranha? That deal of yours. With the passion you seem to have for freedom, one could go so far as to call such an agreement self-sacrifice."

"Like I said. I'm a million laughs."

Tulik paused. Then, in an oddly gentle voice, he said, "Rayman. You're not immortal, are you?"

Piranha stared at him with abrupt shock.

In a low voice, he said, "You mean Anaconda is immortal."

"Not really immortal, but for practical purposes, compared to an organic creature, yes. And so are his grudges.

"Rayman, I see what you're doing. You've given everything, you've given your life." He paused. Piranha shrank back more as the robot's gaze stayed on him. "I remember you in the torture room, after you were captured, before you were – exiled to the box. I saw you coming to consciousness, barely alive after days of treatment under Anaconda's supervision. I remember the look on your face; and then how that look changed when you saw that people of your own planet were in there too. Nothing Anaconda had done to your own body could bring on such a look.

"I try to grasp... what it must be like, to have lived the way you once did. To have had a life in which you..." He gestured rather helplessly. "In which you had friends. The love of friends. A life that meant something to you. A life that wasn't simply endured. Wasn't merely a – passageway to some hoped-for future." He paused, looking at the motionless Piranha. "I can hardly imagine what it must be like to have had that, really had it, and to have had it taken away. To have cared enough that even now, with no hope of ever having it again, you continue to suffocate yourself every moment of your existence, for the sake of that long-dead life, those far-distant friends."

Piranha sat on the table like a stone.

The robot's quiet voice went on. "And then to know it's quite futile after all."

Piranha twitched. His eyes slowly rose to fix on Tulik's face.

"Most likely," Tulik continued softly, "by the time the end comes to your planet, enough time will have passed that all your personal friends will be dead, only strangers will suffer. I suspect that will not comfort you, however."

Piranha was staring at him, not seeing him at all.

"Futile," he said, hoarsely.

Tulik's gaze held steady on him, impersonal as the sea.

Piranha surged to his feet on the table, then collapsed halfway, as though falling to non-existent knees. He gasped. "That was it. I knew it. That was the missing thing. I'll hang on for years, years, hold fast to the deal, never break it by so much as a – breath, a thought – and all the same, one day, he'll go back. He'll go back." He looked up at Tulik with wide, hollow eyes, his breath erratic. "Maybe I won't be dead. Maybe he'd want me to know. But for sure – he'll go back." He gasped again. "— Nothing I've done matters."

Tulik said, calmly, "I think you understand him better now."

"What do I do? My god, Tulik, what do I do?"

The robot shook his head. "Piranha, I'm not the person to ask. I couldn't save my people; I couldn't even bring them into existence."

Piranha was clenching and unclenching his fists, though by his expression he should rather have been wringing his hands. "It's always there." He pressed a hand over his eyes. "Just behind me, silent. It watches me. With eyes, Tulik. Blue and green."

"What does?"

"Home."

Tulik gazed at him without answering. Piranha sat, back curved a little as though in pain, eyes half shut, contemplating the nothing in front of him. At length, he gave a small sigh.

"Well, Tulik, I was looking for information from you, but I didn't expect you to be quite so – uncompromising in giving it."

The robot tilted his head sombrely. "So much data shaken loose. I hadn't thought of the City, or even of Artoe, in a long, long time. That old world seemed like a story I might have read in some human book, fantastic, unreal, legendary."

Piranha looked at him with dark eyes, that glinted blue in the yellow light. "A shadowy forest in a half-remembered dream."

Tulik looked at him in silence. After a moment Piranha added, nervously, "I mean – I guess robots don't dream, do they? Or sleep, for that matter."

"No, they don't," Tulik said quietly. "But I'm familiar with the concept."

There was another silence, a long one. The two beings remained still, not looking at each other, each inhabiting his own thoughts. Occasionally one glanced at the other. The low pulsing of the ship's engines – much stronger here than in Piranha's distant cabin – seemed to infiltrate the darkness, seemed to close the room in on them, seemed to draw them slowly closer into some quiet, neutral place where all the tensions and anxieties of the past conversation dissipated, dispersed like pollen from a flower falling into a stream.

"Tulik," Piranha said, in a low voice, "what are you going to do?"

The robot started slightly. "What? What do you mean?"

"I mean," Piranha said, "you can't go on the same way you did before. Not after telling me all this."

Tulik considered. "Nothing will change." He paused. "Except that... I'm relieved to have spoken to you. Relieved." He considered more. "It was not a bad thing to be reminded of the – other side of humans."

Piranha smiled faintly. "I suppose it doesn't hurt me to see the other side of robots, either. I'll look at pirates differently now."

"Don't get sentimental, Piranha. You shouldn't trust a pirate for an instant."

Piranha grinned. "I didn't say I was going to trust them!" He got down off the table, stretched. Then cast about in the dimly lit room, looking for his black hat. He went to where it lay on the floor, picked it up, holding it against his chest.

"Will you indulge me for one more question, Tulik?"

The robot shrugged agreeably

Piranha's eyes danced with mischief in the subdued light. "Just out of curiosity – is there really no way for a human to get into this section without robot help?"

Tulik looked amused. "Have I so thoroughly betrayed my kind that you think I'd answer that question?"

Piranha grinned back at him. "All right, don't answer."

"Access exists to all parts of the ship, Piranha. Hidden machinery may need to be worked on. The repair tubes are narrow. Perhaps you've seen how small the maintenance robots are."

"Ah, yes. I've seen them. A little bigger than me."

Tulik inclined his head.

Piranha looked around the room, stretched again lengthily. "How long have we been here? Must be hours. It's been a hellishly long day, I can hardly remember when it started." He looked at his hat, stuck it on his head. "I'm exhausted – getting groggy. Unless it's just the room running out of air again."

"I'll open the door."

"I have to go, anyway. Robots may not sleep, but we jelly bags aren't so lucky."

"Very well," said Tulik.

Piranha took a few steps towards the door, halted. "Oh, yes," he said, "I almost forgot." As if looking for an excuse, he removed his hat again. "I've been meaning for weeks to ask you. Those little white flowers, you know the ones? Anaconda sometimes has one in a vase in his private room. Where do they come from?"

"Behind the main galley, there's a room with hydroponic gardens where the cooks grow vegetables for the human officers' mess. Other plants grow there as well."

"Hard to get to?"

"It's guarded, of course. Those flowers are for the exclusive use of the Boss, Piranha."

"That figures," said Piranha. "Thanks."

He put on his hat, but made no move to go. He stood gazing absently at the floor.

"I thought you wanted to leave?" said Tulik.

Piranha looked up at him. "Tulik," he said. "You've helped me a lot today. More than I'd like to admit. You've given me a lot to think about."

"Yes," Tulik said.

Piranha's dark eyes were sombre, but there was still a rare lightness in them. "It's funny. I feel calmer than I have in a long time. Maybe it's just finally understanding what I have to face. About that bastard and – my planet. But I feel very calm." He hesitated, then walked up to Tulik. Briefly he touched the robot's metal arm; as Rayman might have done with a human companion. "I hope you don't mind if I call you friend."

"You would consider me a friend, Piranha?"

"It would be an honour to have a friend like you."

"Like me? You mean a robot?"

"No. I mean like you. I'd better go now."

Tulik looked at him steadily for a moment. Then said, "I'll let you into the elevator."

They moved towards the door. Tulik reached for the metal bar that sealed it; then paused. Piranha gave him an inquiring look.

"Artoe said something once that has always bothered me," Tulik said. "It was shortly before the – the end." He kept his face turned away, as though by now Piranha could read his featureless eyes. "She told me, 'Don't feel limited because you're a robot, because you have to operate on programming, because you couldn't figure out the programming for the other robots. We're programmed too, you know. And we've never fully figured out the program.'

"'What? Humans?' I said.

"'Yes. We're not so different from you.'

"I could hardly bear to talk to her at that moment, Piranha. She knew and I knew what was coming. I didn't dare flinch from the seriousness of what she was telling me. Handing me the last, the ultimate human secret. 'Artoe,' I said. 'Your kind isn't programmed, you can do what you want.'

"'So can you, Tulik. Programming can always be overcome by a sentient being. Do you hear me? The will of a living, conscious creature is stronger than any program.'"

He gave Piranha a brief glance.

Piranha was staring at him. "Is that true, Tulik?"

"I don't know. I don't know what made her, an engineer, say that. I've come to think it was a sort of statement of principle, or faith. I don't believe I've ever seen it happen."

"Maybe," Piranha said, "maybe if they wanted it enough."

"Ah," said Tulik. "But how do they overcome the programming in the first place that tells them what they want?"

Piranha smiled. "What about you?"

"Me?"

"For example. You say you revise your programming based on past experience. But what in your experience told you it would be wise, or safe, to tell me all the things you've said tonight?"

Tulik, tilting his head, looked at Piranha sombrely.

"Perhaps a valid point," he said. "I will consider that."

Carefully, with a minimum of noise, he unbarred the door.

(End of Chapter 13, Part Three)