The Robot and the One You Love | Page 3

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?" she asked again. "How long before you can finish this?"
"Hard to say. Could go a week if their security shells are really good, and they might be, especially now. But more likely we'll get in within the next thirty hours. No special reason for them