The two of them made a great pair, workaholics without much time for each other. But she did long for a moment alone with him, just a brief time of being held by him, kissing him, feeling his gentle touches upon her back.

Well, there was no time for romance now. Thing to do, she thought, is get the jobs done, restore equilibrium, then grab each other and race to the nearest dark place.

She raised her arms, trying to stretch weariness out of them. As always, the dancers were interested in her movement. Whatever she did, they watched her do it with absolute fascination. This time they imitated her, making ritualistic, slow stretching motions that duplicated her gestures. How, she wondered, could Avery keep saying that they were not living beings? With such grace, such skill, they could be nothing less than human.

Her mouth felt dry, and she was sure that her breath could cause an air-purification system to malfunction. There was the beginning of a headache at the back of her eyes. She needed to use the Personal.

“Eve?”

“Yes, Mistress Ariel.”

“Time.”

The word was all she needed to bring Eve to the desk to take over from her. Ariel stood up.

“Have you conceived a new game?” she asked Eve.

“Yes.”

“Of course. I should have known. Show it to me when I get back.”

When Ariel had left, Eve picked up one of the dancers, a short (for a dancer) stocky female. The female did not resist in any way (none of the dancers did, anymore) and merely sat calmly in Eve’s palm.

“Adam?” Eve called.

Adam, newly returned from his wanderings, stepped out of a dark corner of the room from which he had been watching her.

“Yes, Eve.”

“There seems to be something wrong with the dancers, this one and all of them.”

“I have not seen it yet.”

“You have to examine their faces. This one was young, like Ariel, when we first brought them here. Now look.”

Adam bent down toward the stocky female in Eve’s hand. He hadn’t studied the dancers with the same meticulousness that Eve had and wasn’t certain what she’d meant. Nevertheless, at least he was being asked to do something.

“What do you see, Adam?”

“One of the dancers, female category.”

“Besides that.”

“Her hair. It was once dark-colored and now it is mostly gray. Her face. Once it was unlined, now there are many lines in it. Her mouth. Once it was-”

“That is enough, Adam. It is what I see, too. Not only in this one, but in all of them. They have been here for four days, and none of them is young any more. Look at that one.”

Adam looked where she pointed. A male dancer, one of the game players, had left the group and was sitting alone, his knees pulled up, his arms around his knees. His face was old, pitted, sallow.

“He appears to be unwell,” Adam commented.

“I wonder what it means. Are they changing their shapes like we do?”

“Perhaps, but I do not think so.”

“They are going to die,” Avery said, sitting up in his chair. His movement forced Wolruf to push her book aside and tense her body.

Avery stood up and approached the desk. “I’m not sure why they have to die. I suspect that whoever created them was at least partly interested in human life cycles. Otherwise he could have made them as permanent as robots. That is, after all, one of the advantages we robots have. Their creator wanted them to die, or he messed up, I’m not certain which. When they do go, I hope to find out by examining them.”

“Ariel said ‘u can’t touch them,” Wolruf cautioned.

“Well, she must at least let me examine a corpse or two.”

“No!” Eve said suddenly, unsure of why she had spoken out at all.

The doctor’s eyebrows raised in surprise. “You don’t wish me to, Eve?”

“That is true.”

“How curious. Are you a robot with compassion then?”

“I do not know what you mean.”

“If you are, and I get a shot at you, we’ll have to program it right out. I don’t know sometimes why things happen as they do in Robot City. First we get robots with artistic leanings (another trait I had to get rid of) and now compassionate robots. Is that a tear in your eye, Eve, or just a trick of the light? Don’t respond, I was only joking.”

Ariel returned from the Personal in time to hear the last of Avery’s comments. She was about to speak, to tell Avery to zip up his mouth, when she noticed what was happening to Adam.

Adam stood at the side of the desk, just slightly behind Avery. He was staring at the doctor and at the same time undergoing a transformation, changing shape. It was fascinating to watch. First his body seemed to shrink as he lost a few inches of height. (Was he trying to become a dancer? she wondered. Could that be possible? Wouldn’t his mass have to be concentrated impossibly for him to change to that size?) Then the shrinking stopped, and Adam’s shorter body began to expand outward, making him look rounder. His arms became shorter and hung differently, in a sort of apelike way. Then his face, which had been almost an exact replica of Derec’s, began to undulate slightly, with his chin puffing out and his forehead narrowing, his chin coming to a point, then reshaping itself to a rounder contour. At the top of his head, his metallic version of Derec’s sandy hair lightened to white and got longer, messier. But it was not until the next change that Ariel realized what was happening. Resembling the hair in color and texture, a silver bushy moustache appeared to sprout under Adam’s transformed nose.

Ariel laughed abruptly, pleased at the first hint of merriment in her life for some time.

Adam had changed himself from a mimicry of Derec to a nearly exact rendition of the short, round, wavy-haired and moustachioed Dr. Avery!

Avery didn’t notice Adam’s transformation until Ariel laughed. At first he thought she was laughing at him, and he prepared a withering comment. (Avery could not abide being laughed at. The mockery of too many colleagues had made him sensitive to criticism and developed in him a lightning reflex to respond as cruelly as he could.) Then he saw where Ariel’s attention was directed.

He saw Adam’s robotic and (to him) nightmarish version of himself, and he screamed in anger. It was the kind of scream that rattled any loose item or emotional equilibrium in its vicinity. On the desktop the dancers scattered in fear.

Adam had not expected such a violent reaction from Avery, and it shocked as well as intrigued him. He had imprinted upon Avery several times already, but only twice in Avery’s presence. Each of those times the self-centered doctor had not noticed or even looked at him.

Although Avery knew about the Silversides’ shape-changing abilities, this was the first time he had observed an actual transformation.

“I won’t have this!” Avery yelled. “It is mockery! You have no right to take my shape! How is it possible even? What kind of material are you made of?” He touched Adam on his arm, his chest, his face. Adam’s skin was still like the syntheskin on any robot, except the few humaniforms. “There’s no human texture to your skin, no-”

Ariel stepped forward. “That’s because Adam is a robot.” She searched Avery’s face for reactions and saw deep confusion in his eyes, so she added slyly, “Like you, Ozymandias.”

Avery seemed momentarily confused. “Of course,” he said. “Like me.” He examined Adam more closely. “And robots are fixed, permanent. Not like humans, not like animals. Then Adam can’t be a robot. He’s something else in a robot’s clothing.”

“What am I?” Adam asked.

“I don’t know what you are.”

“If not human, what? If not robot, what?”

“Yes,” Ariel said, moving closer to Avery, “what is Adam?”

“Some new kind of creature, but I don’t know what. He is capable of changing his shape?”

“Yes, he is. He can be human, robot, animal, alien. But he is robot, Ozymandias.”