Chapter Fifty-Five
A thought has no dimensions, no weight, no color, no texture, no way to look at it, touch it, or hold it in your hands. And yet, it has substance. It is the spark of every galactic race, the flame of their hopes and dreams. It is the spark of the robot race.
—Thinker, Contemplations
It looked like no more than a dull gray metal box, sitting on an observation deck at the Inn of the White Sun. Inside, a sentient robot was in deep contemplation, having folded himself inward to avoid distractions and interruptions.
In the decades since Hibbils had manufactured him on their Cluster Worlds, Thinker had interacted with countless Humans. Some he liked and some he did not, but always he treated them with deference and respect, since Humans had designed him and paid for his manufacture and he was honor-bound to serve their needs. Even now, after they discarded him in a trash heap, and he and others like him had to regenerate themselves, he bore no feelings of malice toward the people who threw him away.
That may, in fact, have been a blessing to him.
By virtue of his own ingenuity and perseverance, Thinker had developed a considerable degree of independence from Humans. Certainly, he did not serve them on a daily basis anymore, and saw far fewer of them than he used to. In addition, he had discovered new abilities that he didn’t know he had, and which he didn’t think had ever been programmed into him.
He had thought up the idea of creating a machine army out of discarded robots, and for more than a year they had been training down on the surface of Ignem. Not so long ago, Jimu led a squad of his soldiers on a mission to save Doge Lorenzo from an assassination attempt, and they were so gloriously successful that the Doge had invited them to join his special force, the prestigious Red Berets.
Sensing something, Thinker unfolded himself into the familiar form of a flat-bodied robot, the way he had looked when Humans first designed him, before he later added the folding feature himself.
Out in space not far from the inn, he saw a burst of green luminescence as a podship arrived, seeming to pop out of another dimension into this one. The gray-and-black vessel, making one of the stops on its route, proceeded to the pod station.
Thinker hurried to the lobby of the inn, to see if there were any guest arrivals. He was not the innkeeper; other robots did that for him. But as one of the machines who founded the inn, he liked to break his intense contemplation routines on occasion to see the colorful galactic races and robots that stopped off here on their various personal, business, and government missions.
Ten minutes later, only one passenger stepped into the lobby of the machine-run lodge in the orbital ring, having taken a shuttle from the pod station. Carrying no luggage, he strode to the registration desk, and spoke to the robot clerk. Curious, Thinker eavesdropped from a short distance away.
“My name is Giovanni Nehr,” the man said. “I’m on my way to Timian One, but first I need a little R and R.”
Searching his data banks, Thinker found entries about this tall, sharp-featured man, and visuals to confirm the identity. This was the younger brother of the famous nehrcom inventor, Jacopo Nehr. He had a healing pad on his left arm, over the bicep.
“Seven nights, please,” the visitor said. Reaching into his pocket, he dumped a handful of lira chips into a hopper. The alloy pieces rattled around, and the machine dropped his change into a tray. Nehr stuffed the smaller denominations into his pocket.
“I see you are hurt,” Thinker said, stepping closer with a clatter.
After looking him over, Nehr said, “It’s nothing. Just a nick.”
“Would you like us to look at it?”
“No, thank you.” The smile was stiff, making Thinker suspicious, as if he might be hiding something.
“That looks like a Mutati healing pad,” the robot observed. “It has a distinctive fold and color.”
“Oh? I wasn’t aware of that. A passenger on the podship handed it to me.”
“A Mutati passenger?”
The man reddened. “If so, I wasn’t aware of it. He looked Human to me. He seemed kind enough, and wouldn’t have cared about me if he really was a Mutati. Would he?”
“You wouldn’t think so. Unless he was trying to get information out of you. Did he ask a lot of questions?”
“Like you, you mean?” Nehr smiled stiffly.
“Yes.”
“Well, come to think of it, he was rather curious.”
“And what did you tell him?”
“Mmmm, not much. The cross-space journey was brief, only a few minutes.”
“Forgive my questions, but we are very security conscious here, and our data banks require information.”
“I am quite tired,” Nehr said, “so if you will forgive me, I’d like to go to my room now.”
But Thinker took a step closer, and his voice intensified, since he always worried about what Mutatis were up to, and the harm they constantly inflicted on Humans. “Did you see any Mutatis that were recognizable?”
“By name, you mean? I’m not personally acquainted with their kind.”
“By race, Mr. Nehr. Did you see any shapeshifters in their natural, fleshy form, perhaps in the neutral confines of the podship?”
“Yes. They travel, as all of the races do.”
“I’m sensing something more. Forgive me, Mr. Nehr, but I am very perceptive. I have developed my mind and senses to very high levels. Sometimes I wonder if I have what you Humans refer to as a sixth sense. Am I mistaken about you?”
Chewing at the inside of his mouth, Nehr said, “Not exactly.” He paused, and leaned back against the registration desk. “I went to a planet called Nui-Lin for a vacation, and found out it was a Mutati front. They took me prisoner and put me on a prison moon. I barely escaped with my life.” He touched his injured arm.
Thinker detected a mélange of truth and fiction, but didn’t press any more, and bade the man good day. As Nehr followed a bellhop robot to his room, Thinker sorted through what he had just heard, and combined it with what he had been learning from other travelers. The Mutatis were more active along the space corridors than they had been in many years. Historically, this meant they were up to something big, perhaps a surprise military attack. They were a race of devious tricksters, able to assume many guises and sneak behind enemy lines to learn information.
Quickly, Thinker dictated a letter into his internal word processor and transferred it to a disk cylinder, for delivery to the Doge Lorenzo del Velli. With no nehrcom transmitter available at the Inn of the White Sun, the missive would go out on the next podship, carried to the merchant prince capital by Agar, a repaired messenger robot.
Unfortunately, due to a programming glitch, Agar would become lost in deep space and never make it to his destination. No one ever would ever hear from him again.