The First Law

Chapter 1

A light shone in the sky.  Every night and every day it scudded from one horizon to the other, speeding past stars, planets, and suns, and as it swept overhead it muttered its songs to the world beneath, whispering the cacophony of a civilization in pallid radio light.  The triumphant crowings of a victorious politician filtered down through the waves of a vast world-ocean, and were silenced in the deeps.  The chatter of commentators and entertainers, boisterous and loud, plunged past the outspread fronds of lichen-trees and vanished into the undergrowth.  The spartan, economical clickings of one machine relaying data to another sank into a deep gelatinous sea of algal and bacterial slime, and like the rest were scattered and refracted away into meaninglessness.  Everywhere it fell, the light was absorbed, ignored, forgotten, as ephemeral as a single glowing cinder drifting among the trees of an ancient and vast forest.

One particular radio pulse, sliding obliquely out from the orbiting point of light, happened to strike something other than water, stone, or wood as it dove planetward: a pair of slender metal antennae, rising up from the curved wooden carapace of an old and mossy-backed robot built like a bizarre wheeled crayfish.  Electrical waves shimmered up and down the metal, and the robot twisted her body up, angling glassy lenses to peer at the sky.  For a moment she remained poised like that, the starlight--and the distant, orbiting space station--reflected in her lenses, and then the rough plates of her body slid past one another as she ratcheted herself back down.  The stars would keep, and the station would keep.  Servos whirred, and she trundled forward, bumping her way over the flaking cobbles of her little island with a bundle of rags and other detritus clutched in three of her front graspers and a torch clasped in the fourth.  She had an errand to run, and the errand most certainly would not keep.

The wooden robot rolled to a halt at the island’s shore, her wheels sending a few small flecks of stone skittering down to the pale green ooze of the inland sea.  Moored in front of her was a skeletal framework of spars and ribbing--a catamaran, floating on a pair of pontoons in the gelatinous slime.  Numerous boxes were attached to the peculiar boat’s sides, and into one of these the robot dropped her armfuls of trash.  Raising herself up, she examined the box’s contents with critical eyes.  Shameful, that she’d allowed that much to pile up.  With a sighing release of pneumatic pistons, she idly tightened one of the braces holding the boat together--not that it really needed tightening, but it didn’t hurt to be careful--and was just moving on to give the rest of the boat a quick inspection when she heard a voice calling from a little half-buried hut perched up the hill.

“Mama!”  With a rattle and clatter, a kite-shaped, canvas-backed robot rocketed out of the hut’s low door, wheels spinning on the uneven ground.  “Mama, wait!  I want to see!”

The older robot started forward, and then pulled herself to a halt.  It was a lovely night, and her daughter couldn’t be cooped up forever.  She remembered when she was young and had just gotten her first real body; every moment of movement was a joy, and every place that wasn’t the lab bench where her mind had first been grown was a wonder.  So instead of telling her daughter to go back inside, to close the door, to stay still and safe, she settled for calling, “Careful, Sessé!  Go slow, child, go slow.”

“But that takes too dark,” protested Sessé, bumping forward over rocks and ridges. “And I want to see what you're doing now.”

Her mother's antennae twitched in amusement. “Sometimes it's worth taking a dark time to do something, child.”  She cast a glance skyward, and continued, “The stars are beautiful tonight.  Go slow, and let the light settle in your eyes so you can enjoy them.”

“They’re always beautiful,” said Sessé, but she slackened her pace, nonetheless.  After a bit more scraping and clattering, and a few accidental upsets that sent her rolling over sideways two or three times before she was able to catch herself, the fidgety little construct wheeled up alongside the older robot, sporting a few new dings and scrapes on her wooden framework.  For a moment she remained silent, staring up at the catamaran through pinhole camera eyes, and then turned to her mother.  "Mama, I want to come."