“Well, it’s frosted well about time. ” She reacted as if surprised by the tone of her own voice, rubbed the bags under her bloodshot eyes, and smiled apologetically. “I’m sorry, Basalom. I’ve shot the messenger again, haven’t I?”

Basalom blinked nervously and did a quick scan of the room, but found no evidence of an injured messenger or a recently fired weapon. “Mistress?”

She dismissed his question with a wave of her hand. “An old expression; never mind. Is the scanning team ready?”

Through his internal commlink, Basalom consulted the rest of the crew. The reply came back as a dialogue box patched through to the scanning team, and a direct visual feed from a camera on the dorsal fin. From Basalom’s point of view he saw Mistress Janet’s image in the upper right corner and the scanning team’s input/output stream in the upper left corner. Both windows overlaid a view of the ship’s top hull gleaming brightly in the reflected planetlight, and as he watched, a long slit opened down the spine of the ship, and a thin stalk somewhat resembling an enormous dandelion began rising slowly toward the planet. At the tip of the stalk, delicate antennae were unfolding like whisker-thin flower petals and dewsparkled spiderwebs.

“They have opened the pod bay doors,” Basalom said, “and are erecting the sensor stalk now. ” He shot a commlink query at the scanning crew; in answer, data from the critical path file flashed up in the scanning team’s dialogue box. “The stalk will be fully deployed in approximately five minutes and twenty-three seconds. ”

Dr. Anastasi made no immediate reply. To kill time while waiting for something further to report, Basalom began allocating every fifth nanosecond to building a simulation of how Dr. Anastasi saw the world. It had often puzzled him, how humans had managed to accomplish so much with only simple binocular vision and an almost complete inability to accept telesensory feeds. How lonely it must feel to be locked into a local point of view! he decided.

At last, Dr. Anastasi spoke. “Five minutes, huh?” Basalom updated the estimate. “And fourteen seconds. ”

“Good. ” She leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes, and tried to work a kink out of her neck. “Boy, will I be glad to get this over with. ”

Basalom felt a tickle in his Second Law sense and formulated a suggestion. “Mistress? If there is another place you’d rather be, we can leave for it right now. ”

Dr. Anastasi opened her eyes and smiled wistfully at the robot; the expression did interesting things to the topography of her face. Basalom quickly scanned and mapped the wrinkles around her eyes, stored the image for later study, and then backed down to normal magnification.

“No, Basalom,” Janet said, in that curiously slow output-only mode that humans used so often. “This is where I want to be. It’s just… ” Her voice tapered off into a little sigh.

Mistress Janet’s last sentence didn’t make immediate sense, so Basalom tried to parse it out. It ’ s just. That broke out to It is just. Substituting for the pronoun, he came up with Being in orbit around Tau Puppis IV is just. Quickly sorting through and discarding all the adverbial meanings of just, he popped up a window full of adjective definitions. Reasonable, proper,righteous, lawful, see Fair

Ah, that seemed to make sense. Being in orbit around Tau

Puppis N is fair.Basalom felt a warm glow of satisfaction in his grammar module. Now if he only understood what Mistress Janet meant.

Janet sighed again and finished the sentence. “It’s just, I’ve been thinking about old Stoneface again, that’s all. Sometimes I swear that man is the albatross I’ll be wearing around my neck the rest of my life. ”

Basalom started to ask Janet why she wanted to wear a terran avian with a three-meter wingspan around her neck, then thought better of it. “Stoneface, mistress?”

“Wendy. Doctor Wendell Avery. My ex-husband. ” Basalom ran a voiceprint across the bottom of his field of view and watched with familiar alarm as the hostility markers erupted like pimples in Or. Anastasi’s voice. “Derec’s father. My chief competitor. The little tin god who’s out to infest the galaxy with his little tin anthills. ”

“By which you mean the robot cities, mistress?” Janet put an elbow on the table and rested her chin in the palm of her hand. “I mean exactly that, Basalom. ” She sighed, frowned, and went silent again.

Basalom stood quiet a moment, then switched to thermographic vision. As he’d expected, Or. Anastasi’s skin temperature was rising, and the major arteries in her neck were dilating. He recognized the pattern; she was building up to another angry outburst.

He was still trying to sort out the First Law implications of defusing her temper when it exploded…

“Oammit, Basalom, he’s an architect, not a roboticist!” Janet slammed a wiry fist down on the table and sent her smartbook flying. “That’s my nanotechnology he’s using. My cellular robots; my heuristic programming. But do you think he ever once thought of sharing the credit?”

She kicked the leg of the table and let out a little sob. “The Learning Machine experiments were beautiful. Three innocent, unformed minds, experiencing the universe for the first time. Unit Two, especially; growing up with those brilliant, utterly alien Ceremyons. Just think of what we could have learned from it!

“But instead, old Stoneface dropped one of his architectural nightmares not ten kilometers away and ruined the whole frosted thing. Now Unit Two is traveling with Derec-Ghu knows what kind of hash is in its brain now-and the Ceremyons won’t give us a second chance. ” Janet closed her eyes, plunked her elbows on the table, and put her face in her hands. “I don’t know what I did to deserve having that man in my life, but you’d think I’d have paid for that sin by now. ” Her voice fell silent; a little sound that may have been a sob slipped through her fingers.

Basalom watched and listened, the mass of chaotic potentials that symbolized uncertainty surging through his positronic brain. Mistress Janet was in some kind of pain; he understood that. And pain was equivalent to harm, that was also clear. But while the First Law kept demanding that he take some action to remove that pain, seven centuries of positronic evolution still hadn’t resolved the question of how to comfort a crying woman.

He was saved from further confusion by a message from the scanning team that came in over his commlink accompanied by the video image of the sensor stalk at full extension. “Mistress? The sensor pod is deployed and operational. ”

She did not respond. A minute later, an update followed. “The scanning team reports contact with the transponder on the aeroshell, mistress. The flight recorder appears to be intact. ” Pause. More data flashed through Basalom’s mind, and a tactical plot of the planet with projected and actual reentry curves popped up in his head. “The pod made a soft landing within 200 meters of the planned landing site. Learning Machine #1 was discharged according to program. Preliminary imprinting had begun. All indicators were nominal. ”

After a few seconds, Dr. Anastasi asked, “And then?”

“The umbilical was severed, as programmed. There has been no further contact with Unit # 1 since that time. ”

Janet sat up, brushed back a few loose strands of her grayblond hair, and dabbed at the corner of one eye with the cuff of her lab coat. “Very good,” she said at last. She pushed her chair back from the table and stood up. “Very good indeed. Basalom, tell the scanning team to begin searching for the learning machine. Contact me the moment they find any sign

of it. ” She began moving toward the door. “I’ll be, uh, freshening up. ”