“Let me have this one,” he said softly, sounding quite sane about it. “She is our last chance to find out something about them.”

“No,” Eve said. “I must take care of her.”

“Your care of them has been admirable, Eve,” Avery said, “but we shouldn’t waste this one on mere ritual, especially on ritual misunderstood by a robot. Ariel? It’s your decision really.”

“And you’ll abide by it?”

He sighed theatrically, as if assuming any judgment would be against him. “I will.”

Ariel looked from Eve to Avery, not certain how to say what she had been planning to say for some time.

“Eve, Dr. Avery is right. We must know about them, we-”

“But I must bury her.”

In a quick move, she picked up the last dancer from the desktop and held it close to her chest.

“Eve, put her back. You can’t bury her right now. She is still alive.”

“Alive is not the correct word,” Avery said.

“Shut up with your logic for once,” Ariel said. “Eve, I order you to return the dancer to the desk. You must obey my order. That is the Second Law, and the Laws are part of you, isn’t that true? You sense them inside you, don’t you?”

“No. Yes. I cannot be sure. Something seems to tell me to obey you, but I am not sure that I can.”

“You must. It is Second Law.”

“It is not just Second Law,” Adam said. He was standing behind Avery. “It is what we must do. We cannot continue if we do not discover what is wrong with the city, and the dancers are part of the mystery. Return the dancer, Eve.”

Eve gently settled the dancer back onto the desktop, then resumed her customary vigil.

“Eve,” Ariel said gently, “it is important to me to know whether or not these tiny creatures are living beings or merely some kind of experimental robots or even, as Dr. Avery has suggested, toys.”

“They are robots,” Eve said. “I have sensed no life in them, the kind of life I have felt coming from you, Derec, Wolruf. What I detect in them is the same as what comes to me from Mandelbrot and the other robots.” She pointed to the last dancer. “This, I believe, is a robot.”

Ariel was shocked. “You mean, you’ve known this all the time and not said anything about it?”

“You did not request it from me. And no, I did not know it all the time. Or even most of the time. When I first encountered these creatures in the vacant lot, I received my first glimmerings. As Adam did at the time, I felt little life in them. But I had not experienced much of this world, or any other world, and I was not sure at the time what constituted a living being and what constituted a robot. As I watched the dancers, I understood more and more what they were. My certainty has only come recently.”

“Eve, I-”

“Eve,” Avery interrupted, “what do you feel coming from Adam, coming from inside yourself? Do you feel, as you say, a living being or robot?”

“I cannot say. It is different. We are different.”

“That is so,” Adam said. “Since I came to awareness on the kin’s planet, I have not been certain what I am. I accept that we are robots, but actually, inside myself, I feel neither living being nor robot.”

“Fair enough,” Avery said.

“Eve,” Ariel said, “If you knew the dancers were not human, why did you treat them as humans?”

“I was not aware I was.”

“You cared for them, awarded them human death rituals, buried them as if they’d died. If they’re robots, then they didn’t really die and didn’t need to be treated as such.”

“They ceased to exist,” Eve said. “Isn’t a robot’s death as significant as a human’s?”

“Mistress Ariel,” Adam said, “you buried the robot Jacob Winterson on the blackbodies’ planet, did you not?”

“But that’s-I was about to say it was different, but you’re right, Adam, it’s not. I cared about Jacob the way Eve apparently cared for the dancers. You did care for them, didn’t you, Eve?”

“I am not sure what you mean. I performed rituals that I believed were appropriate.”

“Don’t go robotic on me now, Eve. You did feel compassion for them, sadness when they died.”

“There was an awareness of loss. Is that sadness, Ariel?”

“I don’t know, Eve. I’m not even sure I can get a sense of it.”

They watched each other silently for a time, then both looked down at the last dancer. She was still breathing.

“I must still order you, Eve,” Ariel said, “to allow Dr. Avery to perform his examination without interference. We need to know the facts that his work will show us.”

“Yes. That now seems logical.”

“Logical. Why logical now?”

“Enough information has been presented to me, and I understand the need. So I conclude agreement.”

“No wonder you are not sure what you are. I’m not sure what you are, both of you.”

When the last dancer had died, hours later, Avery gently picked it up from the desktop and went to a far comer of the room. A few minutes later he came back with a number of slides. Placing them under a microscopic scanner and transmitting images of his findings onto its large screen, he showed Ariel the infinitesimal microchips and circuit boards, miniature servo motors, linkages, wires.

“As I suspected,” Avery said, but without his usual smugness, “they are cleverly designed albeit ineffective robots capable of limited humanlike behavior. The use of genetic materials was skillful, but the maker could not compensate for their rapid aging process. If he had, these might have been quite successful little humaniform robots.”

Ariel stared at the screen without visible emotion. She didn’t know what to feel. Relief that they were not tiny humans or sadness that, whatever they were, they had existed and only for a very short time.

Finally, she took a cloth and wiped off the desktop. “Well,” she said, “that’s it then. Let’s go see if we can help Derec.”

Before they left, Avery handed Eve a small box. When Eve asked what it was, he said it was the remains of the last dancer. He was turning it over to her for whatever disposal she chose. She carried it away.

The Watchful Eye realized as it left Derec that its disguise had not fooled him. It had come to that conclusion by analyzing the purposes of his probing questions, reading his facial expressions, and interpreting his body language. (In its studies of humans, it had called up from the computer a file on metalinguistics and paralanguage.)

As it fled, the Watchful Eye wondered just where it had gone wrong in its Bogie portrayal. Perhaps the mistake had been to try to imitate a robot in the first place. After all, it was too complicated a being, too powerful an intellectual force, to get away with posing as a mere robot. On the other hand, the flaw in its behavior may have been an error of pride. It may have felt too easily superior to Bogie, and robots in general, to pretend to be one effectively. Somewhere in the research, it had read that actors often succeeded because they immersed themselves in their roles, losing their real identity in them. It should have studied Bogie more. Oddly enough, it thought, its failure in the robot guise reinforced its belief that it was definitely not a robot itself.

Perhaps its real error had been in leaving the safety of its haven in the computer chamber. The haven was where it belonged. Perhaps it was never meant to leave it, or at least not to stray too far from it. Perhaps its existence was that of an armchair observer, participating at a distance, pulling strings like a puppetmaster.

What should it do now? it wondered. Derec had ordered it to find Wolruf, but Wolruf was too much of a threat, and the caninoid alien might be with the other humans, all of whom might be able to detect that it wasn’t what it seemed to be. For a moment, as it had left the room, it had felt a compulsion to do what Derec said, treating it as a Second Law command. But if it wasn’t a robot, why should it obey Derec? It couldn’t even be sure Derec was a proper human, or a human at all.