“Who wants them to solve everything?” Janet asked. “If they did, then we’d really have problems.”

That seemed to mollify Ariel considerably. She nodded and said, “Yeah, well, that’s something to think about, all right. “

No one seemed inclined to carry the discussion any further. Wolruf and Ariel exchanged glances but didn’t speak. The robots all held that particular stiff posture they got when they were using their comlinks. Now that he had removed Basalom’s shoulder joint, Derec was holding the two sections of arm together to see how easy they would be to repair.

Janet turned her attention to Mandelbrot. She looked him up and down, noticing that while most of him was a standard Ferrier model, his right arm was the dianite arm of an Avery robot.

Mandelbrot suddenly noticed her attention and asked, “Madam?”

“Let me guess; you got your name all of a sudden, with no explanation, and had a volatile memory dump at the same time, all when you made a shape-shift with this arm. “

“That is correct,” Mandelbrot said. “You sound as if you know why.”

“I do.” Janet giggled like a little girl. “Oh dear. I just never thought I’d see the result of it so many years later.”

She looked to Derec, then to Ariel, then to Wolruf. “Have you ever thrown a bottle into an ocean with a message inside, just to see if it ever gets picked up?”

Derec and Ariel shook their heads, but Wolruf nodded and said, “Several times.”

Janet smiled her first genuine smile for Wolruf. Maybe she wasn’t so alien after all. She said, “Mandelbrot was a bottle cast in the ocean. And maybe an insurance policy. I don’t know. When I left Wendell, I took all the development notes for the robot cells I’d created with me. I took most of the cells, too, but I knew he’d eventually duplicate the idea and use it for his robots, so since he was going to get it anyway, I left a sample behind in a comer of the lab and made it look like I’d just forgotten it in my hurry. But I altered two of the cells I left behind. I made them sterile, so it would just be those two cells no matter how many copies he made of them, but programmed into each one I left instructions set to trigger after they registered a thousand shape-changes. One was supposed to dump the robot’s onboard memories and change its name to Mandelbrot, and the other was supposed to reprogram it to drop whatever it was doing and track me down wherever I’d gone.”

“I received no such instructions,” Mandelbrot said.

“Evidently the other cell was in the rest of the robot you got your arm from,” Janet said. “I didn’t tell them to stay together; I just told them to stay in the same robot. “

Wolruf nodded. “None of my bottles came back, either.”

Janet laughed. “ Ah, but this is even better. This is like finding the bottle yourself on a distant shore.” She sobered, and said to Mandelbrot, “I’m sorry if it caused you any trouble. I really didn’t intend for it to happen to a regular robot. I figured it would happen to one of Wendell’s cookie cutter clones and nobody’d know the difference.”

Derec was staring incredulously at her. “Any trouble!” he said. “When your…your little time bomb went off, Mandelbrot lost the coordinates to the planet! We didn’t know where we were, and we didn’t know where anything else was, either. We had a one-man lifepod and no place to send it. If we had we probably could have gotten help and gotten away before Dad caught up with us, and none of-” He stopped suddenly, and looked at Ariel. She smiled a smile that no doubt meant “private joke,” and Derec said to Janet, “Never mind.”

“What?”

“If you hadn’t done that, none of this would have happened to us. Which means Ariel would probably be dead by now from amnemonic plague, and who knows where the rest of us would be? Dad would still be crazy. Aranimas would still be searching for robots on human colonies, and probably starting a war before long. Things would have been a real mess. “

At Derec’s words, Janet felt an incredibly strong urge to gather her son into her arms and protect him from the indifferent universe. If she felt she had any claim on him at all, she would have, but she knew she hadn’t built that level of trust yet. Still, all the things he’d been through, and to think she’d been responsible for so many of them. But what was he saying? Things would have been a mess? “They’re not now?” she asked.

“Well, they’re better than they might have been.”

There was a rustling at the door, and Avery stood there, bare-footed, clothed in a hospital robe, his arm with its dianite regenerator held to his chest in a sling, with a medical robot hovering anxiously behind him. “I’m glad to hear somebody thinks so,” he said.

“Dad!”

The sight of his father in such a condition wrenched at Derec as nothing had since he’d watched Ariel go through the delirium of her disease. A part of his mind wondered why he was feeling so overwhelmed with compassion now, and not a couple of hours ago when he’d first seen Avery in the operating room, but he supposed it had just taken a while to sink in that his father had been injured. Maybe being with his mother for the last couple of hours had triggered something in him after all, some hidden well of familial compassion he hadn’t known existed.

Avery favored Derec with a nod. “Son,” he said, and Derec thought it was probably the most wonderful thing he’d ever heard him say. Avery took a few steps into the room and made a great show of surveying the entire scene: his gaze lingering on Janet perhaps a fraction of a second longer than upon Derec, then shifting to Ariel, to Wolruf, to the inert robot on the exam table and to the other four standing off to the side. He locked eyes with Lucius, and the two stared at one another for a couple of long breaths.

Lucius broke the silence first. “Dr. Avery, please accept my apology for injuring you.”

“I’m told I have no choice,” Avery said, glancing at Janet and back to Lucius again.

“Oh,” Lucius said, as if comprehending the situation for the first time. He hummed as if about to speak, went silent a moment, then said, “ Accepting my apology would help repair the emotional damage.”

“Concerned for my welfare, are you?”

“Always. I cannot be otherwise.”

“Ah, yes, but how much? That’s the question, eh?” He didn’t wait for a reply, but turned to Janet and said, “I couldn’t help overhearing your little anecdote as I shuffled my way down here. Very amusing, my dear. I should have guessed you’d do something like that.”

Janet blushed, but said nothing.

“I came to discuss terms,” Avery said. “You have me over a barrel with your damned patent and you know it. You said you didn’t like what I’m doing with my cities. All right, what do you want?”

Derec hadn’t heard about any patent, but he knew immediately what had to have happened. Janet had patented dianite when she’d left home, or else Avery in his megalomania had neglected to do it later and she had done so more recently. Either way it added up to the same thing: Avery couldn’t use the material anywhere in the Spacer-controlled section of the galaxy, or use the profit from sales to outside colonies, for fifty years.

Janet didn’t gloat. Derec Was grateful for that. She merely said, “We were just discussing that. Ariel and Wolruf just brought up an intriguing problem, but we think we may have solved it. Why don’t we run it past you and see what you think?”

“I know already what I’m going to think,” Avery said. He folded his good arm over his injured one, which brought the medical robot a step closer, checking to make sure he hadn’t bumped any of the regenerator settings. “Back off,” he told it, and it stepped back again, but its gaze never left his arm.

Derec could see him counting to a high imaginary number, but when he spoke it was only to say, “Give me a chair here.”