“You believe that?”

“I believe that.”

“You’re a self-deluding fool, Alpha Watchman. You’ve built a cozy little fantasy that allows you to tolerate slavery, your own and that of all your kind, and you don’t even realize how much damage you’re doing to yourself and the android cause. And what happened here today doesn’t shake your mind at all. You’ll go to your chapel, and pray for Krug to liberate you, and meanwhile the real Krug was standing right on this patch of frozen ground, looking on while an alpha woman was shot to death, and your savior’s response to that was to tell you to call his lawyers and arrange for settlement of a simple property-damage tort. Is this the man you worship?”

“I don’t worship a man,” said Watchman. “I worship the idea of Krug the Maker, Krug the Preserver, Krug the Redeemer, and the man who sent me to call the lawyers was only one manifestation of that idea. Not the most important manifestation.”

“You believe that too?”

“I believe that too.”

“You’re impossible,” Siegfried Fileclerk muttered. “Listen: we live in the real world. We have a real problem, and we must seek a real solution. Our solution lies in political organization. There are now five of us for every one of them, and more of us come from the vats daily, while they scarcely reproduce at all. We’ve accepted our status too long. If we press for recognition and equality, we’ll have to get it, because they’re secretly afraid of us and know that we could crush them if we chose to. Not that I’m advocating force, merely the hint of the threat of force, the hint of the hint, even. But we must work through constitutional forms. The admission of androids to the Congress, the granting of citizenship, the establishment of legal existence as persons—”

“Spare me. I know the AEP platform.”

“You don’t see the logic of it? After today? Afterthis ?”

“I see that humans tolerate your party, and even find its antics amusing,” Watchman said. “I also see that if your demands ever become anything more than token requests, they’ll abolish the AEP, put every troublesome alpha through a hypnolobotomy, and if necessary execute the party leadership just as ruthlessly as you seem to think this alpha was executed here. The human economy depends on the concept of androids as property. That may change, but the change won’t come your way. It can come only as a voluntary act of renunciation by the humans.”

“A naive assumption. You credit them with virtues that they simply don’t have.”

“They created us. Can they be devils? If they are, what are we?”

“They aren’t devils,” said Fileclerk. “What they are is human beings who are blindly and stupidly selfish. They have to be educated to an understanding of what we are and what they’re doing to us. This isn’t the first time they’ve done something like this. Once there was a white race and a brown race, and the whites enslaved the browns. The browns were bought and sold like animals, and the laws governing their status were civil laws, property laws — an exact parallel to our condition. But a few enlightened whites saw the injustice of it, and campaigned for an end to slavery. And after years of political maneuvering, of the marshaling of public opinion, of actual warfare, the slaves were freed and became citizens. We take that as our pattern for action.”

“The parallel’s not exact. The whites had no right to interfere with the freedom of their brown-skinned fellow humans. The whites themselves, some of them, finally came to realize that, and freed the slaves. The slaves didn’t do the political maneuvering and the marshaling of public opinion; they just stood there and suffered, until the whites understood their own guilt. In any case those slaves were human beings. By what right does one human enslave another? But our mastersmade us. We owe our whole existence to them. They can do as they please with us; that’s why they brought us into being. We have no moral case against them.”

“They make their children, too,” Fileclerk pointed out. “And to a limited extent they regard their children as property, at least while they’re growing up. But the slavery of children ends when childhood ends. What about ours? Is there that much difference between a child made in a bed and a child made in a vat?”

“I agree that the present legal status of androids is unjust—”

“Good!”

“—but I disagree with you on tactics,” Watchman went on. “A political party isn’t the answer. The humans know their nineteenth-century history, and they’ve considered and dismissed the parallels; if their consciences were hurting, we’d have known it by now. Where are the modern abolitionists? I don’t see very many. No, we can’t try to put moral pressure on them, not directly; we have to have faith in them, we have to realize that what we suffer today is a test ofour virtue,our strength, a test devised by Krug to determine whether synthetic humans can be integrated into human society. I’ll give you a historical example: the Roman emperors fed Christians to lions. Eventually the emperors not only stopped doing that, but became Christians themselves. It didn’t happen because the early Christians formed a political party and hinted that they might just rise up and massacre the pagans if they weren’t allowed religious freedom. It was a triumph of faith over tyranny. In the same way—”

“Keepyour silly religion,” Fileclerk said with sudden explosive intensity. “But join the AEP as well. So long as the alphas remain divided—”

“Your aims and ours are incompatible. We counsel patience; we pray for divine grace. You are agitators and pamphleteers. How can we join you?”

Watchman realized that Fileclerk no longer was listening to him. He seemed to draw into himself; his eyes glazed; tears ran down his cheeks, and flakes of snow stuck to the moist tracks. Watchman had never seen an android weep before, though he knew it was physiologically possible.

He said, “We’ll never convert each other, I suppose. But do one thing for me. Promise that you won’t make a political propaganda out of this killing. Promise that you won’t go around saying that Krug had her removed deliberately. Krug’s potentially the greatest ally the cause of android equality has. He could save us with a single statement. But if you alienate him by smearing him with a ridiculous charge like that, you’ll do us all tremendous damage.”

Fileclerk closed his eyes. He sagged slowly to his knees. He threw himself on the body of Cassandra Nucleus, making dry choking sounds.

Watchman looked down silently for a moment. Then he said gently, “Come with me to our chapel. Lying in the snow is foolishness. Even if you don’t believe, we have techniques for easing the soul, for finding ways to meet grief. Talk to one of our Transcenders. Pray to Krug, perhaps, and—”

“Go away,” Siegfried Fileclerk said indistinctly. “Go away.”

Watchman shrugged. He felt an immense weight of sadness; he felt empty and cold. He left the two alphas, the living one and the dead, where they lay in the gathering whiteness, and strode off to the north to find the relocated chapel.