It was not that Adam felt hurt, or even annoyed, at the way he had been ignored. A robot does not feel the pangs of rejection that trouble humans in such matters. A robot would, under normal conditions, not feel left out or even ignored. After all, a robot can even stand alone without anything happening for a long, long time.

What Adam perceived essentially, and in a logical way, was that he served no purpose in their work. It seemed to him that since Robot City was in crisis and Derec and Ariel were in turmoil about how to solve their respective problems, there should be something he could do. It would be a terribly inefficient use of his time and abilities for him to stay where he was not needed. Their maker, whoever he or she was, had evidently planned them to be special. They were compelled to serve and be useful through the direct or implicit order of humans, a Second Law imperative.

He came to the lot where they had discovered the first group of dancers. It was completely empty now, with no traces left of its former inhabitants. That was, in itself, another anomaly. Who had taken away all traces of their lives, even including the remains of the campfire around which they had danced? Who had smoothed over the ground so that even the graves could not be detected? Some of the city’s robots were, it seemed, functional.

He came to a parkland, where precisely sculptured bushes were placed at even distances along a smoothly raked path. There were no footsteps on the path, and no people to sit in the benches under the park’s towering trees. It seemed anomalous to Adam that a park like this, and several other Robot City areas, were so obviously built for human habitation, and there had been as yet so few humans upon the planet. The city itself seemed useless, as useless as he now believed himself to be.

He came to an area where buildings stretched in a long semicircle around a nonworking fountain. Shops with blank signs were neatly arrayed along the street level of the semicircle.

The few robots walking through the streets were intent on their own goals. None stopped at any of the buildings. (Adam wondered why he felt no sense of belonging when he saw these robots. How could he be a robot and be so separated from other robots?) There were no goods in any of the shops, no shoppers to select items in the first place. Like the park, another Robot City anomaly.

Shops and parks with definite purposes and no way to fulfill them. The problem was similar to his own, he thought. He had not only an ability to imprint upon living creatures, but to become astonishingly like them, adopting the patterns and characteristics of their lives as well as their physical appearance. He could even lead them, as he had with the kin. Was this to be his life or, if not life, the parameters of his existence within the universe? He felt compelled to change his shape into that of another; he needed to keep doing it until his dilemma of interpreting what a human was had reached a conclusion. There was no purpose for him in Robot City, no one on whom to imprint. (He did not realize that this frustrating state had been planned by Derec and Wolruf, and they in turn did not know what an astonishing success the plan had been, at least in Adam’s case. It would not have occurred to Adam that he was being tamed. If it had, he would have resisted it firmly.)

As he had on the blackbodies’ planet, he changed into the kin shape and began to run down the streets of Robot City; then he tried the blackbody shape and clumsily flapped his wings, knocking them against the walls of buildings; then he was a function-robot, picking up debris and depositing it in a sewer grating; then he took on Derec’s shape; then Ariel’s; then Avery’s.

But all the transformations did not satisfy him. He had done them all before.

He needed a new creature to imprint on.

He changed back to kin shape so that he could howl at the stars spread in the sky over the city.

Then he was Derec again, walking the streets back to the medical facility, his mission in the city unfulfilled. He realized that, in a way, he was acting like the men in some legends he had read in computer files, the kind of legend where men shook their fists at the sky and castigated the universe.

He found the image odd. He could shake his fist at the sky, but, sadly perhaps, he could not really feel the emotion that inspired the gesture. The human emotion behind the gesture.

Ariel awoke with a start. She hadn’t realized she’d been asleep, must have dozed off with her head on the back of the cushioned chair she’d drawn up beside the desk.

It was certainly disconcerting to come to consciousness and look down on about a half-dozen of the dancers staring up at you, while the rest played at some game that Ariel had not yet interpreted. (They showed each other their hands, palms up or down, any number of fingers extended, sometimes no fingers extended, sometimes a fist.) There was a questioning look on their faces, as if they’d been curious about why their god seemed to need sleep every once in a while. The dancers themselves never seemed to sleep. Ariel had watched them and delegated the Silversides to observe them, but no sleep had ever been detected. She sometimes wondered what it would be like to be awake for one’s entire life. Would you get a lot done or go mad from being conscious without respite?

As she always did when she hadn’t been studying the dancers for some time, she counted them. There were still fourteen of them. Good. Avery, then, had not somehow eluded Wolruf’s vigilance and, while she was asleep, sneaked to the desk to abduct one of the tiny creatures.

She glanced toward the other side of the room, where Avery slouched in a chair, apparently dozing himself. (When he was Ozymandias, he insisted that he never slept.) Wolruf sat on the floor, keeping an eye on the doctor while thumbing through a picture book about Auroran art that Ariel had found in the small library attached to the medical facility. She was studying it for practice in reading and to learn about human customs. In the time that Ariel had known her, Wolruf’s ability to read standard had improved significantly, as had her command of the language. The task of guarding Avery had given her free time to add to her education in the ways of humans and robots.

Ariel couldn’t think of what to do next with the dancers. She’d been studying their customs for several days, and there didn’t seem to be much more to learn. She had tried to communicate with them, but, except for the hand gestures needed either to get their attention or initiate games, most of her attempts had been unsuccessful.

All the dancers had been examined by a diagnostic scanner, the only piece of equipment in the medical facility that appeared to work successfully. She was not sure why. However, since the only systems Derec had been able to (or been allowed to) restore tended to be life-sustaining, she wondered if the scanner worked because it might be needed in an emergency. Derec was right about the presence in the city, she was sure of it. And that presence was doling out favors, stingily but with some sense. The scanner had revealed nothing new about the dancers. As Avery told her, they were anatomically consistent with full-sized humans. If there was robotic circuitry, the scanner didn’t detect it.

She missed Derec so. They had not really been together since that interlude at the Compass Tower. They checked in with each other every once in a while, but at those times he was detached, more concerned with reviving the city than with reviving their passion. And she couldn’t pin all the blame in that arena of life solely upon him. After all, as Derec had pointed out, her attention was just as fiercely fixed on the dancers, Avery, and the Silversides.