Avery drifted upward from the lower levels of consciousness, the last fading impressions of a disturbingly realistic dream close behind. He’d dreamed he’d driven his wife away with his nagging perfectionism, then gone completely insane, nearly killed his son, and wasted over a decade of his life building a city that would never be used. The horrible chain of events chased him all the way into groggy wakefulness in an unfamiliar room, but in that half-second after waking when nightmares begin to crumble, he felt the warmth and the weight of Janet’s head on his chest, felt her soft breath tickling his skin, and knew it all for a paranoid fantasy.

Sighing softly, he put his arms around her and drifted back to sleep.

Derec awoke to the sound of someone pounding on his door. He pitched upward, overbalanced, and slid off the edge of the bed to land with a thump on the floor.

“What?” he said. Then, louder, “Who is it?”

“Who do you think it is?” a male voice shouted back. “You promised to take us fishing at dawn, and the sun’s already up. Come on!”

Fishing? Had he said something last night about fishing? Oh, frost, given the stories flying around toward the end there, he’d probably claimed he could catch a twenty-pound brookie or something. He looked to the bed, hoping to see Ariel there and ask her if she knew anything about it, but she was already up and gone.

“Just a minute!” he shouted.

“Thirty seconds or we go without you!”

Derec snagged his tie-died pants off the back of a chair, made a hopping spiral around the room as he pulled them on, grabbed the matching shirt from the floor and slipped it over his head on the way to the door. “Open,” he commanded, and it slid aside to reveal Jon and Ivan, dressed all in green and brown camouflage and carrying long flycasting rods in their hands.

“Time’s a-wasting,” Jon said as he handed Derec a rod of his own.

“What about breakfast?” Derec asked.

“What do you think we’re going fishing for? Come on!”

Waiting barely long enough for Derec to grab the rod, they turned and strode off down the hallway, ignoring his protests about showering and getting a camouflage suit of his own and telling people where they’d gone. He had no choice but to follow his two newfound friends through the corridors of the enormous mansion, out through a back door that opened onto a leaf-strewn footpath, and down the grassy hillside toward the pond. The cool ground against his bare feet woke him right up, and the sight of mist rising from the water, red-tinged in the morning light, stilled his babbling tongue.

Maybe Ariel was right, he thought as he watched the other two strip line out of their reels and make a few exploratory casts out over the water. Derec mimicked their motions and saw with delight that he evidently knew, on some instinctive level, how to cast a fly into a pond. He watched the fly settle through the mist and touch the water, sending a single ripple out like an ever-widening target for the fish to zero in on.

Yes indeed. Maybe Ariel was right. Maybe there was more to life than robots after all.

Jerry Oltion, the author of Frame of Reference, a novel about a generation-style starship that isn’t, is also the author of Alliance, book four in the Isaac Asimov ’ s Robots and Aliens series. He is currently at work on Paradise Passed, an interstellar colony novel. His short stories appear frequently in Analog magazine, two of them winning first and third places in the 1987 Reader’s Choice Awards. His stories have also been nominated for the Nebula Award.