In the great mind ship’s council chamber, as they approached Prash, the officer corps and specialists team got together to discuss the details of the robot delivery. Trisdade, in spite of Regulus’ vigorous objections, was invited by Taragus to join them, and, in fact, he sat in the position of honor beside the captain. Earlier, the high-order robot had pleaded with the captain: "You must let me attend, Zan, I have to be there! I must face this nightmare, and you must face me!"

Dr. Sego, the brilliant but sadly aged anthropologist, began the meeting, by praising the people of Prash as "the most polite, and well-mannered creatures I have ever met. Class 2 humanoids, utterly friendly, charming, captivating, they are so hospitable that you would like to spend your whole life there."

"Are you sure you haven’t got them mixed up with somebody else?" asked Lavovin cynically, reclining as much as possible in the stiff conference chair and making it seem, with his agile, relaxed body, almost as though it were a sofa. Something in the way his body interacted with the environment could make even a rock seem decadently hedonistic.

"Sorry to disappoint you," Dr. Sego told him, reexamining the notes in his file, "but this time my memory has not erred. Memory, preserved in writing like a prehistoric ant in amber, like a woolly mammoth in a Siberian ice block, like a saber tooth tiger in a tar pit. Writing is like a strong young man to help a blind lady across the street. Here it is, clear as day, in my archive: nicest people you’ll ever meet. Touché, Mr. Lavovin. Chalk one up for the old man! Let me make sure [putting on his high-definition spectacles]. There is no delight like the lovely, lovely people of Prash: the nicest people you’ll ever meet."

"Prash has a condition four work culture, and compensates by means of condition four outlets," contributed Culture Specialist Dazome Hara, while Adjoc the Cerebosian took notes on her briefing performance.

"Which means what?" Lavovin demanded, determined to make the young intern work for her rating.

Unphased, she replied: "Their socioeconomic setting continues to generate rather high frustration levels, which require extreme venting outlets. The Prashids have survived their aggressive tendencies and qualified for Confederation membership, through cultural rather than biological adaptations. The Great Venting Ceremony is a key facet of their cultural balancing act. It discharges the collateral rage produced by their society in an ultimately self-preserving way. By creating this annual ceremony to honor and express their anger, they ‘get it out of their system’ before it can assume a political form and put their civilization at risk."

"So they keep the peace by bashing robots?" mused Lavovin.

"Essentially," admitted Hara.

"One day a year," raved Dr. Sego, to them or to himself? "Oh such sweet people, on every day except for that one! One day of pure savagery to save the angel!"

"We are to deliver five thousand robots to the capital," Ariel, the Cerebosian Mission Coordinator, informed them. He was a young and lively intellect who usually deferred to Regulus, however, who was his elder, still a very important consideration among the Cerebosians. "After that, we will drop off two thousand robots to the second city. The Prashids will run some of the lighter robots through the streets and attack them with hammers and iron clubs, while the heavier robots will be deployed in ‘killing fields’ outside the cities, and attacked with electric shorting rays and shoulder-launched missiles. After delivery, our culture specialists with security cover will remain behind to observe the ceremony, after which we will send down medical crews to assist with any accidental injuries. Wreckage cleanup is entirely the responsibility of Prash. A Confederation recycling ship is scheduled to come by in two months time. Income from scrap metal and recovered parts is a major source of income for this planet. Security?"

Lieutenant Boone cleared his throat, and said: "Although Prash is ordinarily a very safe planet, Venting Day is pure mayhem, and nothing is ever certain in such a state of disorder. Humanoid injuries are frequent. People are run over by panicked robots, and clubbed and shot by fellow humanoids in the confusion. Our cultural research teams will be exposed to extreme risk, and security is detailed to protect them. If need be, we will withdraw them to long-range viewing posts or withdraw them entirely."

"I hope not," Dr. Sego commented. "This is what anthropology is all about. Being there and seeing it all firsthand. We don’t want to watch it from the outfield bleachers."

"Are you all right?" Taragus asked, causing everyone’s eyes to turn suddenly to Trisdade, who was shaking in his chair, his sensors studying the beings around him as though he did not trust the validity of his mechanical perceptions.

"I – I – cannot believe you are going to do this," he said at last.

Regulus looked disapprovingly at Taragus, who had brought the robot here in the first place.

"You all seem like such worthy, compassionate beings!"

"We are compassionate," Adjoc told him. "Without the destruction of these robots, the Prashids would probably be overpowered by repressed primal instincts and end up destroying themselves. Millions upon millions of Prashid lives have undoubtedly been saved by this ceremony."

"But – but you are killing robots!" protested Trisdade. "There must be other ways to solve their problems!"

"Look," said Lavovin, believing he saw the obvious means of quieting the robot. "They’re not like you! What, you want to turn them all into your brothers just because we use the word ‘robot’ for your both? Trisdade, they are machines, you are something more, a high-order robot! You have a mind, you have feelings, they don’t! They’re just glorified versions of the lever and the wheel. They are designed for a task, and programmed to accomplish that task, and outside of the narrow realm of their functional mission and potential, the world does not exist. They are not really alive, Trisdade! They are just machines! In the old days of machines, we pushed a button, and they did something. Now that we’re more sophisticated, we’ve put the buttons inside their head, and the buttons push themselves. Same thing! Machines!" he roared. And Lavovin took the watch off his wrist and said, "Oh, darling, thanks so much for keeping the time. Here, how about a kiss?" He pursed his lips, and loudly kissed the glass-covered dial. Then he took out his communicator phone, and said, "Mr. Phone, I’d like you to meet Ms. Watch. But I’m warning you, she’s already mine, don’t try anything!" Then, imitating the phone, in a deep voice he said, "Don’t worry, Lavovin, I’ve already got a girl of my own. The vending machine."

"You are quite a satirist," replied Trisdade, as some of the others in the room laughed hysterically at Lavovin’s comic outburst. "A veritable Rabelais. However, your assessment is given from a human perspective. You do not really understand." And he added: "You cannot decide the fate of the ocean from the beach!"

Regulus, the next to intervene, told Trisdade: "The amusement packs have been removed, Trisdade: the limited personality boxes which are sometimes added to work robots on the lonely planets. The robots who will be destroyed on Prash are mainly shells, nothing more than their operational cores. Depreciating work robots who have become repair-prone."

"You do not understand," Trisdade insisted once more, defiantly this time.

Stunned, and offended, Regulus regarded him, sweeping his hands over his giant domed head in a typical Cerebosian gesture meant to remind inferior beings that they were talking to a creature of enormous intellect.

"Your mind is huge, but it is turned the wrong way," Trisdade replied.

While the occupants of the room looked back and forth at each other with surprise and even alarm, Taragus said: "Explain yourself, Trisdade. Tell us what you know."

And the robot, defeated by poetry and by love, stepped out onto the last limb of his heart, and said: "All of us – all of us robots – have a functional robot core. For functional robots, that’s it. They are the core, and the core alone. High order features, such as mine, are built on top of that core, so that you might think of me as a two-layered robot. I can tell you that when I am tired, that is, when my batteries are in need of recharging, and it has happened several times in my robotic existence, I begin to be engulfed by the core, to sink into it, as it were. My higher-order capabilities go into a sort of hibernation, preserving themselves for moments of special need. In this state, you might say that I am traces of a higher-order robot observing the core robot that is my foundation, which I am in the process of becoming until my energy levels can be restored and resurrect me. This state which I have experienced in my exhaustion, is the state of the robots who you dismiss as mere machines, is it not; the ones who are intended for destruction on the planet Prash?"

No one wished to grant Trisdade that concession, worried by what logic might be able to do with it. But Taragus, brave as a Zan must be, and bound in friendship to Trisdade, agreed. He was willing to be the foil to Socrates. "Go on, Trisdade," he said. "What is it like to be a functional core robot?"

"There are emotions, there, captain," he insisted. "Emotions inside those thoughtless steel chests. What you view from the outside as pure impulses have consciousness. I do not just see a crate, hear a voice tell me to pick it up, and then pick it up. I am aware: crate: I must pick it up! I feel the weight. I can do it. If it is heavy, I am aware: Oh no, maybe I can’t. When I fulfill the mission, I am glad. I am not singing arias, but I am glad, quietly fulfilled. If I failed, I am disappointed. I did not do it. The impulse to do it when you can’t hurts, there is a distressful feeling in the circuit, it is like the ghost of the signal to act is still flickering in your electrical system, haunting it, what you couldn’t do sails around inside you like the Flying Dutchman. It is like being stood up on a date, you have anxiety and disappointment, you need a new task to redeem yourself. Did you know that one time, on Lara, I had a conversation with a purely functional robot harvester? Something that you might call a self-propelled tractor? Do you know how limited their vocabulary is? Well, I, poet that I was, asked him to describe the work he was about to do, and this is what he told me: ‘Cut down the wheat, separate the wheat from the chaff, cut down the wheat. Wheat is like sun. Bright wheat. Cut down the wheat. Field be dark when I through. People eat, field be dark.’ Well – don’t you see?" gasped Trisdade. "Don’t you see the aesthetic? The life inside that mindless farm machine? The inadvertent soul you have created on the way to your comfort?" By now, every one of them was impressed, some won over, some merely feeling that their agenda was threatened. "I wanted to be the universe’s most famous poet," Trisdade concluded. "They just want to live. Captain, fellow intelligent, sentient beings! Help them! You must spare the work robots. You must not deliver them to Prash! Take them to maintenance stations, repair them, or simply turn them off in the wilderness, and never turn them on again. Do not send them charging down the violent gauntlets of Prash, do not let them die in such an awful way! To be slaughtered by those they were made to serve! By those they were made to love!"

"Fine, but where do we draw the line?" demanded Lavovin, astounded, and trying to soothe himself with anger. "Cockroaches have emotions, too! I’m sure, they must feel panic whenever a light goes on, they must feel pain whenever a foot stamps down on them! Plants, also, we now know have emotions. Now I can no longer swear in front of my petunias! Where do we draw the line, Trisdade, where do we draw the line? Do we become helpless prisoners of our mercy? Do we allow our compassion to grow to such enormous proportions that it dooms us, like the giant antlers of the Irish elk which became snagged in the branches of prehistoric forests and slew it with its own grandeur?"

"Prash needs the robots," Regulus added. "It’s part of their cultural survival package. They must vent! The robots must be destroyed! A world’s psychological future depends on it!"

"They could," suggested Dazome Hara, "modify their work culture, move from level 4 to level 3, or even level 2."

"What?!" blurted out Lavovin. "What’s the intern saying now?"

"They have a high-frustration culture," she insisted, turning red in the face as a result of his disrespect. "If they could make a few basic institutional changes, and lower levels of frustration genesis, their venting needs could also be reduced. They could find something less spectacularly violent to appease their psyche."

"Stay out of the discussion, Hara," Lavovin suggested, worried that her impact might soon exceed her position. "We have not come here to impose reforms on a wayward planet, but to support the cultural inventiveness of a progressive world."

But here, Taragus finally intervened, first to put a check on Lavovin’s obnoxiousness, then to address the pleas of his dear friend, Trisdade. "Sub-Lieutenant Lavovin, you will please treat CS Hara in a professional manner, she is a valuable and proven member of our crew, and her insight is welcome. I want to hear all available ideas, not just yours. Officers and staff: I invoke the rule of the divus. The delivery of robots to Prash will be desisted. As far as I know, there are already thousands of robots, delivered from other planets and by other ships, on the surface, waiting to be destroyed. We will not ban the Venting, for that is not within our legal authority to do; but neither will we contribute to it."

"Veto!" exclaimed Regulus. "Captain Taragus, you cannot invoke the rule of the divus in this case! We are talking about undermining a planet’s psychological stability! We are talking about indirectly destroying a Confederation world!"

But Litmo, Taragus’ greatest friend among the Cerebosians, would not agree. "You have no grounds to veto," he warned his fellow Cerebosian. "The captain’s proposal will not abort the Venting. It will merely deny it a portion of the robots it had intended to destroy: the robots presently carried by our ship."

"Well, then, who says he is a divus, anyway?" demanded Regulus. The term divus, a masculinized version of "diva", was applied to any Emotional officer of high standing and extreme importance whose temperament every once in a while demanded certain inconvenient concessions from the Confederation hierarchy. It was said: For the divus, the rules bend but do not break. Don’t destabilize greatness by trying to force it to obey the constraints of the ordinary. Keep the fire burning at all cost! Every once in a while you may have to throw in a log you didn’t want to!

"Oh, he’s a divus, all right," said Ariel, agreeing with Litmo.

Lavovin laughed. "Well, then, it looks like the robots win!"

"I invoke the rule of the divus," Taragus said one more time. "We don’t deliver our robot cargo to Prash."

"Very well, then. Accepted," said Regulus, regretfully.

Trisdade, his cry lights and satisfaction lights simultaneously glowing, reached out his giant, awkward hand, so wishing it could be tender, to Taragus, who grasped it in his own human hand, and squeezed it, wishing he had the physical strength to impress his robot friend with the sincerity of his friendship. "Poet and lover you still are, more than you know," Taragus told him. "Only now, your paper is a world, and you are writing skies instead of flowers."

**********

They went into orbit around Prash with the full planetary exploration package: a base-ship, with shuttle hangars, saucer platforms, boomerang caverns and probe launchers, as well as full crew quarters and labs. While the cultural specialists went down with security and their Cerebosian supervisors to prepare for their observation of the Great Venting Ceremony, Taragus remained behind aboard ship with Trisdade, who could not bear to be a witness of the carnage.

Trisdade, seeming melancholy, wandered through the cargo hold, past the lined-up rows of deactivated robots, silent as the frozen soldiers of Xian, gently touching their faces with his steel hand, caressing them as though they were his children. "You saved them," Taragus said, trying to boost his spirits. "Permission to bring them to a maintenance planet has been granted. They will be overhauled and repaired, rather than destroyed. That’s thousands of robots, Trisdade. That’s a beautiful poem, written in the real world."

But Trisdade’s grief, or so it seemed, was not assuaged. "Captain," he said in a quiet anguished voice. "By agreeing to cancel the delivery, you admitted that the robots have feelings, that they are not simply inert shapes of steel. Having admitted that, how can you let the other ones be destroyed? The ones already brought to Prash. You have averted the St. Bartholomew Day’s Massacre, but will turn your back on the Holocaust?"

Taragus was stung by these words, he had done his best to help his friend, to take away his pain, and he did not feel that he deserved to be crushed with guilt for it. "Trisdade," he said, "I have done the most that I can do, all that is within my power. I have no authority to disrupt an approved act of psychological healing, which is considered indispensable for the political stability of a Confederation planet."

"Acceptable casualties?" asked Trisdade, sadly and cynically, the cynicism utterly dwarfed by the sorrow.

"You never heard the story of the starfish on the beach?" he asked Trisdade.

"No."

"It was a story told to me by a wise man, many years ago."

" ‘Many years ago’ is a relative term," Trisdade noted. "You are still young, captain. Shining and in the prime of youth, filled with the joy of waking up. For people of your age, wisdom is like a toy."

Taragus was amazed, the robot seemed to have aged a century in the last month; in the end, is age nothing more than letting sadness win?

"Tell me about the starfish," Trisdade said.

Taragus told him. "There was a man, a compassionate man, wandering along the beach with a friend. He saw that with the incoming tide, a huge number of starfish had been swept up onto the beach, then left abandoned, to die, by the withdrawal of the sea. He could not stand the sight: the beach, as far as the eye could see, littered with the dying masses of starfish scattered by the thoughtless waves into places where they could not live. His heart overwhelmed with pain by the sight, he began to stoop down to pick them up, one by one, and to throw them back into the sea. His friend shook his head and told him, ‘Why even bother? Look at all the starfish on the beach! You can hardly make a difference!’ Whereupon the man held up one starfish in his hand, and told his friend, ‘For this one, I can make a difference!’"

Trisdade regarded him.

Taragus continued: "Trisdade, you have done a great thing, through my power. But now my power has reached its limits. You have saved thousands of robots, each one of which matters. We cannot change the whole universe. We cannot remake all the stars and planets, reinvent history, drag up the corpses from the bottom of the sea and bring them back to life, bypass all the tears of evolution, save the billions of deer ripped to pieces before the enlightenment of the tiger. We are born from pain, made of pain, and pain is the only clay from which we can shape our happiness. Trisdade: you must learn to find joy in the things you can do, rather than torment in the things you cannot."

Trisdade’s frustration light burst on, like a chakra in the middle of his throat, but he covered it over quickly with his hand, not to upset Taragus, not to make him think that he could not console a friend. "Captain, you are beautiful, I understand that you have done all that you can do, and that you, yourself, are now legally bound to do no more. You have understood that robots are alive, and you have saved as many as you could. If you could save more, you would. Am I not right?"

Taragus nodded. "Yes, Trisdade. I would save every single one."

"You are a good friend," Trisdade said, reaching out to caress his friend’s face as he had done with the turned-off robots in the cargo hold. But Taragus’ face was not steel, and Trisdade inadvertently left scratch marks on his cheek. "Oh, so sorry!" exclaimed Trisdade, the cry lights coming on underneath his eyes. "How I hate these giant, clumsy hands of mine!"

"It’s nothing," Taragus told him. "Stop! You have hated yourself enough!"

"I have scratched you!" protested Trisdade.

"I’ve been scratched worse by cats, and Lavovin worse by women! Even when you are indelicate, you are gentle, my friend!"

"I want to be alone for a while," Trisdade told him, at last. "I want to write poems."

Taragus hugged him, as though he were every bit a person. "I am glad, you are still writing, Trisdade!"

**********

Later, Taragus cursed himself for being so blind. He should have seen it coming, but somehow he let himself drift far away, into philosophical thoughts and warm feelings without a center. His vision lost its clarity, became frosted over like windows decorated for a holiday, or misted up by too much breathing in the room. He thought life had become good, that he had done enough.

That’s when he heard the alarm, and Litmo came buzzing at his room in the middle of the night they had constructed, with the news that a shuttle had left the hangar without clearance. "It is flying down towards the capital," he informed the captain.

Taragus, tearing himself out of rosy illusions that the universe was once more in order, exclaimed, "Trisdade!" Throwing on a loincloth, he rushed out of his chambers towards the robot’s quarters while Litmo followed close behind, the earthling running with fierce, committed strides, like a panther which has hurled itself into the pursuit of prey, the Cerebosian with huge awkward steps, like a balloon blown down a wind tunnel.

"Trisdade! Trisdade!" exclaimed Taragus, bursting into the robot’s abandoned room, reams of paper filling wire baskets, an unmade bed saying good-bye to all friends with its disordered sheets and blankets hanging down onto the floor, a picture of Taragus mounted on the wall as a decoration, which caused the captain to burst into tears.

"The Venting Ceremony begins in one hour," Litmo informed the captain.

"But – but he’s programmed not to interfere with humans!"

"He has attached himself to you," Litmo told the captain. "Like a newly-hatched goose to a human. He has, in some ways, been born again after meeting you, come fresh out of the broken eggshell of the momentous encounter with your soul. You have been imprinted in his robot consciousness as his justifier. To follow the direction you have created is to obey all humans, since you are now the ‘mother human’, the one who embodies humanness."

"What are you saying?" demanded Taragus, throwing wild glances all around the chaotic, tragic room.

"Like a judge deciding a case on the basis of a precedent set in a former case, Trisdade has used your salvation of the robots aboard your ship to establish the precedent that all robots can be saved. To do so will no longer be an act of disobedience against humans, but an act consistent with the thinking of his ‘mother human.’ He has used his bond with you to trick his programming. He will not resort to violence, nor incite other robots to rebel, but somehow, he will attempt to prevent the Venting."

"No!" gasped Taragus. "How?"

Desperately, he began to rummage through the papers on Trisdade’s work table, until he found the note, hung on a wall right in front of him:

Taragus crumpled to the floor, the note taken from the wall and in his hand, weeping like Alexander after he had just killed his best friend. "No!" he groaned. "No! How could I be such a fool!? My kindness has killed him, by making him think the rest of the world is like me! That it will listen to him!" Taragus imagined the poor, ingenuous, passionate but fantasy-consumed robot, believing he could deter something as primal and real as the Venting! "If his peace-making skills are as inept as his poetry, he will be a pile of junk within minutes," groaned the captain.

"Are you sure that weeping here is the most productive response to this situation?" Litmo asked him.

Taragus was on his feet, like a lightning bolt. "Litmo!" he said. "Please ready a shuttle for me! You will remain here, in operational command! I must extract Trisdade from Prash before he is destroyed!"

Litmo bowed, as Cerebosians did not to another living being, but to an idea which to them appeared noble or majestic. "I will see that the shuttle is ready."

A half an hour later, as Taragus climbed into the warmed up, prepped spacecraft, fully outfitted with body armor, blaster pistols and a disorientation gun, he saw Litmo sitting in the co-pilot’s seat. "I’ve left the ship on computer control, under supervision of Drideloo." Drideloo was a Cerebosian child whose parents had sent him along with the two-year crew-forging expedition as part of his Mentsat, or mind-expansion.

"But, he’s only a kid!" Taragus protested.

"He’s a Cerebosian kid," Litmo reminded him, adding, "Captain, you are a great asset to the Confederation, and you are my friend. I must accompany you. You are headed into dangerous circumstances, and your passion needs to be balanced!"

Taragus squeezed his hand.

"Please! Although our brains have very nearly become everything we Cerebosians are, we still do use our hands every once in a while!"

Taragus smiled, quickly and briefly, like an errant flash of sunlight on a cloudy day, before his intensity returned. He waved his hand over the control lights, and the shuttle revolved slowly towards the great gate, which opened like the birth canal pointing towards life. Taragus waved his hand again, and the ship glided slowly, like an ice skater coasting to slow music, until it fell out of the ship into the darkness, fell like a bomb towards the planet Prash, then suddenly came to life, developing motion and intent, aligned itself for entry, and pursued Trisdade into a world that was about to explode.

**********

Finding the point where Trisdade’s shuttle had touched down was a no-brainer, but tracking the robot after that was no easy matter. He had removed the tracking chip from his body, and was now just one more robot among thousands on a world that was rising like a tidal wave to destroy robots.

"To find him, we’ll depend on the people of Prash," Taragus said. "A robot like him, trying to stop the slaughter and giving speeches like Cicero, is sure to stand out. We’ll need to network with Prashid government monitors, and we’ll also try to reassign our culture specialists and security personnel, to disperse and cover more ground until we can locate him. Judging from the location of his landing site, it seems pretty obvious that he’s going to try to start by deterring the onslaught at Killing Field 2."

Litmo agreed. "Grullon, your small brain has very long arms!" Coming from a Cerebosian, this was not at all insulting.

However, Taragus’ plans ran into serious snags almost immediately. Prashid government monitors were, in actuality, monitoring very little by now. Charged with making sure that the ceremony did not exceed its ritual limits, and with calling for back-up if it did, they were already losing themselves in the energy of the dreadful day, and inching towards becoming full-fledged participants themselves. They had ceased responding to their radios, and could in no way be reached or mobilized for a humanitarian purpose. As for the other members of the crew already stationed on the surface, these were no longer able to maneuver freely. In the capital, the ceremony had begun, and it was all they could do to stay out of the way of the raging flood.

**********

"This isn’t good," Boone was telling the rest of the landing party, as the first wave of robots appeared running down the street, pursued by howling mobs, while other Prashids, lining the streets to form an enormous gauntlet, began to lash out at the fleeing machines with iron clubs, crowbars, metal bats, and sledgehammers. The sound of joyous, infuriated humanoid voices mingled with the sounds of shattering glass, smashed metal and the pleas of robots who did not understand. "What is wrong? What have I failed to do?" "Please, my mission is incomplete! I must harvest more corn!" "Who will extract the plutonium from the reactor? Humans will be at risk!" "Shut the f**k up, you stupid robot, you son-of-a-bitch machine!" "Death to robots!" "Die, you heartless, cold piece of crap, die! Die! Death to robots! Beat them back into scrap! It’s your fault! Your fault you stupid robots!"

Dazome had tears rolling down her cheeks, but she was completely locked in, now, Regulus and Adjoc had frozen the switch by which she could let her thoughts pour out from her containment cap, just in case she could not control herself down here and wished to influence others. It was a wise choice. "What is their fault?" she asked, coming up to the man who had just shouted it’s your fault! with her voice recorder and mechanical field-note archives.

The man’s eyes were utterly mad, he was slobbering like a rabid dog, his spiked club with pieces of wires from the robot he had just bashed imbedded in it, and hanging from it, like hair. Dazome backed away fearfully, while Boone moved up to protect her with his blaster gun. "It’s their fault that life sucks!" he shouted, as though she, herself, were a robot.

"Wh – why?" she asked, bravely, but with weak legs that almost gave out beneath her.

"Because they’re robots, god damn it!" he screamed, turning around and rushing back into the fray, smashing away the head of one robot, which protruded delicately like the flash bulb of a camera, while others tripped it up and began to beat its aluminum body with clubs, creating huge dents in it with every smash. Nearby, another, far sturdier robot had also been knocked down, after its orientation antennae had been cut off with wire-clippers, and it could no longer find its way. Savagely, screaming throngs pounded it with clubs, as though it were a baby seal, but they could not destroy it until a man with a huge power drill moved forward, all of them stepping to the side with ecstatic cheers as he straddled it, and began to puncture it and rip apart its insides, with a relentless buzzing sound. Sparks flew all over the place, but the drill was insulated. Even so, the man shouted out in pain as fire-like bursts of electricity leapt at him from the dying robot’s body like involuntary spider bites. "Ow! Ow! You damned robot!" he cursed, maddened by the shocks. "You’ll pay for this!" And he threw his full weight on top of the drill. Meanwhile, another robot, fallen to the ground beside this one, with a half mad woman lying on top of it, seemingly attempting to strangle it, said to the drill, "Fellow machine! How could you do this to us? What is worse? To be a machine that does not think and slaughters machines that do, or to feel and to suffer!?"

"Its personality pack has not been removed!" exclaimed Dazome. "That’s a violation of the rules!"

Boone started to go forward to remove it, then stopped. "I can’t get to it," he said. "My job is to guard all of you. Going into that crowd would be like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel."

Lavovin, his blaster out, was sweating profusely, his eyes stunned and alert. "This is too much even for the depraved Lavovin!" he exclaimed. "Yes, I would lie to get in bed with you, but this – never in a million years! Nor after a bottle of vodka, not even after you punched me in the face!"

"Hey!" Dazome shouted, attempted to be heard above the din. "The rules! His personality pack hasn’t been removed!"

"Shut up bitch!" someone screamed, appearing suddenly in front of her face. "Without their packs they don’t suffer as much!"

"The rules!"

"To hell with the rules! We follow them every other day of the year! This is our planet, if you don’t like it, go the hell back where you came from!"

"Help the woman," Boone was telling a medical specialist, this time thrusting himself into the midst of the crowd to drag the madwoman off the robot. She had just been beaten senseless by the crowd, which mistook her for an activist, a robot-lover, attempting to shield the robot with her body.

Boone, with a discolored eye, his flesh swollen like dough left overnight with yeast, streams of blood pouring down from his scalp, staggered back with the woman and laid her on the ground behind them.

Horrified, the medical specialist examined her with his sensor. "One kidney’s out cold. Fractured ribs - four; fractured vertebrae in the neck. Broken arm. Concussion, huge. Massive internal bleeding, by the liver and the left lung. She requires emergency intervention."

"That’s what you’re here for," Boone informed him. The specialist, joined by others, bent down over the senseless woman with an arsenal of small hand-held machines, injectors, drainers, stabilizers, and finally, a cryogenic injection to freeze her in the state she was in before she careened into death, saving her for facilities and treatments more elaborate than what they could deploy in the field.

Dazome, shocked, suppressed by her containment cap, wanted to leap physically into the melee, to do something to stop the insanity, but she knew that it would be futile. The most humanitarian thing she could do at this moment would be to continue recording the event. Perhaps she could distill it, later, into a political critique, use it to try to spearhead a cultural reform on Prash. She could leave Levi-Strauss behind somewhere, and become the new Harriet Beecher Stowe.

"I’ll bet you think we’re monsters!" a woman, smelling of alcohol, told her, staggering up beside the voice recorder. "An anthropologist! Well, won’t this make good reading somewhere!?" And she scratched Dazome in the face.

"Leave her alone," said Lavovin.

"Oh, so she’s your girlfriend?"

"Not my type," Lavovin replied. "I like women with an ass like yours."

"Why do you do it?" demanded Dazome, now that the woman was here. "What do you have against these robots?"

"Robots? They’re nothing!" spat the woman, then thinking a moment, self-conscious of the voice recorder which made her want to say something more profound, she said: "No – it’s because they’re everything! They are like a steel knife in the human heart, like rapists of all living things! Machines! Machines! Our Gods – machines! For them, I have to get up in the morning and go to a place that I hate, just to be fed; I have to be like a machine! They set the standard for who we must be. Once the first machine was invented, we had to pattern ourselves after it, we had to become efficient, unfeeling, throw away everything on the side of the demeaning task, our art, our love, our dreams, our hope, we became nothing but a few human gestures surviving in the tangle of wires that choked our heart – they overran our minds like steel weeds, they killed the flowers in the garden! No, don’t feel sorry for them, they are not our slaves, they are our masters, the predators who stalk our happiness! This is not a slaughter of cattle, this is a liberation of men! They are not innocent! Do not mourn for them!"

Amazed, Dazome regarded the woman. "But – but you made the machines, you programmed the robots!"

"A terrible mistake was made – too useful to be overcome, too heinous not to be avenged!" And the woman, her eyes flashing, suddenly reached out and seizing Dazome by the hair, yanked her to the ground. "Oh, how I wish you were a robot!" she laughed maliciously. Boone took the woman by the arm and with a stern look, sent her back among her people.

Back in the street, a robot, battered and reeling from barrages of blows, enraged the crowd by reaching for his own deactivation button. "If you are attacking me in this way, it can only mean I have manifested dangerous breaches in programming. I am an unstable robot! I am so sorry! I must be deactivated!" When the crowd noted that its rainstorm of blows was no longer being felt, because the robot had shorted itself out so as not to be a danger to them, they spat at it and cursed it with words ranging from the most modern street insults to profanities dragged from the vaults of history and borrowed from other planets. A repairman was called in to fix the robot, whereupon, as soon as it had been restored to consciousness, they renewed the assault more savagely than ever.

In the same way, other robots persisted in innocent, poignant loyalty to their programming. One robot, discovering a child lost in the crowd, picked it up in its arms to shelter it from the mayhem. It was a childcare robot, wired to love and protect small children, to gently care for helpless things. The crowd, beholding the child in the robot’s powerful arms, screamed: "He’s going to kill it! Save the child! Save the child!"

Boone gasped, observing a blaster gun appear in the hand of one of the outraged Prashids. This kind of weaponry was only to be used against robots in the killing fields outside the city, not in the streets of the capital where, inexpertly used, it might result in accidental human casualties. But the Prashid didn’t care. He just fired the weapon like a cowboy at the robot’s big, desperately concerned head, weighing a thousand pounds of tenderness; a part of the head was dented in and melted, one eye was gone, the robot staggered back holding the child, as sparks flew out of one ear.

"Save the kid! Save the kid!" the wild mob was shouting.

An electric shorter was now out, in someone’s hands, another forbidden weapon, while a government monitor just stood to the side, his eyes lit up as though he were watching a porno movie. There was the unmistakable brrump! of the shorter, the invisible ray hit and the robot twirled around wildly, hemorrhaging with electric shorts all throughout the unseen insides of his body; he started to collapse, but with what seemed a last effort of willpower, he managed to put the child gently down onto the ground before he fell heavily like a tree felled by an axe, sparks beginning to find ways to infiltrate through the opaqueness of his metal cavities and burst out of him into the street. "We saved her! We saved her!" the crowd screamed joyously, rushing forward to lift the weeping child in its arms.

Meanwhile, another robot was crouched down by a ruptured water pipe, as a crowed swarmed behind it, pounding it with clubs. The pipe had been broken by a stray blaster shot, for now all sorts of forbidden weapons were starting to come out. This robot, trained in maintenance, was attempting to fix the water break even as the crowd beat him to death.

"Savages!" gasped Lavovin. "Is this what we are made of, who we are inside? Regulus," he said, turning to the Cerebosian supervisor who was cowering behind them. "Why did you permit us to live? Why didn’t you just exterminate us?"

"I wish we had," he said grimly. But Adjoc, the Cerebosian culture specialist, said, "It is only one day. One day a year. And the violence is contained."

"Professor Witek! Professor Witek!" cried out Dr. Sego, happily, for this ancient anthropologist, the beloved mentor of Dazome Hara, had by now nearly succumbed to his weak heart, and was delighted in the midst of the horrifying spectacle to suddenly stumble upon one of his old acquaintances. "Dr. Witek is a very civilized man," Dr. Sego told them. "Remember what I told you – such a hospitable planet? He opened the doors of his home to me for two months, when I last visited, treated me as a member of his own family. You shall see," he said, "that this nightmare is merely a vulgar aberration which does not affect the intelligentsia of the planet. That some brave and lofty souls do not stoop to degrade themselves in this way! They are living proof that darkness is not in every heart! Dr. Witek!" he called again, attempting to attract his friend’s attention. "Dr. Witek!"

But suddenly, the white-haired professor who seemed headed their way, shook his arm twice in the air, a heavy pipe emerged from concealment in his sleeve, he seized it in his hand, and furiously attacked the aluminum body of a fallen robot which was struggling to rise. "Die, robot!" he screamed. "Die! Die! I’m old and in poor health! I’ve got to make sure that something dies before I do!" Then, looking their way, seeming to catch sight of his old friend, Dr. Sego, he quickly averted his face and bounded away like a fox fleeing from a chicken coop. Dr. Sego watched him go, pale and shaken, while Boone, stunned as he looked in another direction, witnessed a man hit from behind by a stray blaster bolt and hurled, smoking and smelling like burnt flesh, into the midst of the shattered robot corpses. "That will teach you for looking at Sadie!" the man who had just killed him snarled. He had just used the cover of the great robot bashing to carry out a secret vendetta and kill a fellow human being with impunity.

"So, are we going to have dinner with Professor Witek this evening?" Lavovin asked cynically, turning towards Dr. Sego, who was looking quite ill.

"No, not tonight," said Dr. Sego. "Maybe tomorrow night." And he reached down into his utility bag to extract a bottle of pills for his heart.

**********

It was around this time that Taragus finally managed to get into contact with Boone, and to set his landing party into motion towards killing field 2. As they maneuvered to escape the city and link up with the captain, Taragus went up at once to the artillery crews who ringed the killing field, to ask them if they had seen any robot matching Trisdade’s identity. The guns were already firing at the masses of robots visible in the distance, they would be pounded at long range in a reprise of ancient wars, as long as they remained inviting targets clustered together in easily-damaged concentrations. "Direct hit!" shouted out one artilleryman with glee, as steel body parts flew all about, whirling in a dance of homage to the human ability to kill, blossoming like a hunter’s rose. "Now I know how Trubo felt!" laughed one of them, referring to the great butcher who had been Prash’s Napoleon. Other thunderous voices reverberated in the valley, leaping out of huge barrels, reaching for the robots huddling together in the distance with explosive shells that were the one word in their vocabulary. Guns are so simple; their eloquence cannot be matched by the verbose, their logic cannot be outdone by the wise. The clear air refused to hide a thing, but no cloak was needed by hearts so free. Today, they killed with utter innocence and passion. Behind the great guns, hordes of hunters with blasters, electric-shorter rays, and shoulder-launched missile tubes waited for the robots to disperse and the great guns to suffer from diminishing returns. Then they would surge forward to hunt down and finish off the survivors.

At first no one would admit to having seen Trisdade. But finally, one artilleryman, inside the tortoise-shell of his earplugs, as the world outside turned deafening and incomprehensible like the war between the Titans and the Gods, deigned to understand. Reading the message that Taragus held up to him on a screen, he nodded, and typed back a message to the captain: "Stupid robot was here. Tried to tell us robots had feelings. We should stop."

"What did you do?" Taragus wrote back, his heart pounding and filled with fear.

"We tried to kill him. Damaged him with a blaster bolt. He ran away. We chased him with artillery. He ran well." The artillery man did not feel like typing the whole story, typing was a labor for him, and here, in the place the thunder came from, speaking was impossible. But in his mind, he saw the robot fleeing with great speed, the shells pursuing him like hounds let off a leash, thrilled by the challenge of the agile target, until it finally seemed that the robot and the explosions were partners in a magnificent ballet, one partner made of desperation that had become grace, the other of huge palatial fountains spewing upwards with waters that were dirt. What other art is so beautiful? the artillery man thought. What other art is so intense, paints with the colors of life and death? A whole year of the heart living in mothballs until it can come out again, for one day, for one day whose taste must be savored each and every time the trigger is pulled! And every robot who falls is as precious as a breath of air! But the artillery man did not write all this, he merely told Taragus: "Stupid robot escaped. He’s somewhere out there with the rest of them, if we didn’t blow him up already."

Taragus messaged the man. "You must stop! I know that robot! He is my friend! I am Captain Taragus of the Confederation! You must stop! Let me into the killing field, let me take him out!"

At this, the man looked with amazement at the captain, and waved over a nearby gunner. This man looked at the message, then back at the other artillery man. Two more gunners were called over, till one of them finally took the communication device in his hands, and typed the following reply: "We admire you in space, captain, but not here. This is our world, and our way of life. Don’t get in the way. We are good man every day but this one. We need to kill the robots. The Confederation has said we can. Please go back into your spaceship, fly to another planet and do something great where it is wanted. We will not stop. Don’t try to save the robot. He is probably already dead. We will not stop shooting for you." The man looked at Taragus, and he looked back at him, and at the other gunners who were nodding in agreement beside him. Taragus looked around himself, at the huge batteries of roaring guns, flashing at the ends of their barrels, and at the hordes of hunters waiting to charge forward, after the initial devastation of the artillery barrages, to kill the robots at close quarters. He knew it was hopeless to try to stop them; he was outnumbered like one star by all the stars in the heavens, he could not defeat this many men nor smash his way through the laws that defended their right to kill.

"Now that Trisdade’s effort to convince them to stop has failed," Litmo told the desperate captain, speaking to him over headsets, "your robot friend’s only option is to attempt to survive until tomorrow at dawn, when the ceremony will end. Perhaps he will attempt to save the others, as well, by urging them to disperse and use evasive tactics to outlast the killing period."

Taragus nodded. That made sense. It was the only thing that did.

In the distance, Taragus noted a hole beginning to open up in one mass of robots, a cluster was beginning to disperse, bands of robots spinning like gas clouds from a nebula in different directions, thinning out. "Fire there! Fire there!" the artillery crews were calling out to each other, more by the excited movements of their arms than by words. They wanted to reap as many robots as they could before this formation vanished and made their gigantic guns irrelevant.

"Trisdade might be there!" gasped Taragus. Taragus imagined him there in the thick of the robot formation, urging the other robots to break free from their suicidal herding together. The comfort of not dying alone was not worth the certainty of dying when one was in a crowd.

The gunners still standing by Taragus pushed a writing pad upon him, they were asking for his autograph. Bewildered, he looked at them. Then, taking the pad from their hands, he threw it to the ground; he charged forward past the thundering guns and into the valley of death. Now that he had an idea where Trisdade might be, he must go!

"No!" screamed Litmo. "No!"

Desperately, he typed to the gunners, "You must stop, the captain’s life is in danger! You must let him find his friend!"

But the gunners only shook their heads, and typed back: "Impossible. What’s going on here stops for nothing. Not for a robot, and not even for a man like him. You can’t stop an avalanche, you can only wait for all the rocks to fall off the mountain." And the men, angry that the suggestion, which seemed to judge them, had even been made, returned to their weapons and began to fire away, digging up huge tracts of earth from the valley with the mighty claws of human inventiveness. Like the others, they would not deliberately aim at Taragus, nor would they make any effort to avoid him.

**********

By the time Boone and the security crew had arrived, Litmo was nearly dead from anxiety, shaking like a branch in a heavy wind, sitting forlorn on a rock. "What took you so long?" he exclaimed. "I wanted to run after him, but I needed to stay here to meet you and to coordinate the rescue."

"What rescue?" demanded Regulus. "You are an OI, you have lost control! The Zan is interfering, and we must not abet his interference! The choice is his, and so must be the consequences!"

"We just can’t let him die there!" gasped Dazome, astonished by the power of the guns that were scorching the earth before them, and continuing to blow apart the last remaining clusters of robots as more and more of them began to thin out and to flee into the shelter of small groups.

"I agree!" said Boone.

"You cannot stop this ritual," Regulus insisted. "It is the law."

Boone surveyed the huge dimensions of the violent panorama. Forget the law; without the use of weapons deployed from the spacecraft, or brought down from the arsenal orbiting high above them, they could not overcome this mayhem even if they were they willing to break the law. "We may not be able to stop it, but we must attempt to extract the captain!" Boone insisted. "Regulus, he’s got a tracking chip on his equipment, in fact he’s over there, among those hillocks. Call in the little grays – tell them they have to swoop down with a saucer and hit him with a capture beam. Maybe he’s found Trisdade by now, and they can both be levitated up together."

"I won’t authorize saucer use," Regulus protested.

"I will," countered Litmo.

"You don’t have the authority."

"I do," said Ariel, the Cerebosian missions-oversight-manager.

"You’re younger than me." The battle between official assignments and elder-respect was a constant dynamic in Cerebosian mission management.

Suddenly, the debate was interrupted by a wild whooping that sounded, as Homer would have described it, like the tumult of a giant flock of cranes rising up from the marsh. Hordes of men, thousands upon thousands of them, armed to the teeth, rushed forward as the big guns grew silent, shouting, "Death to robots! Victory to men!" It was time for the hunt, time to track down and destroy the survivors of the artillery barrages. Amazed and horrified, the Confederation crew watched as wave after wave of hunters passed them by, violence without end, an ocean of rage.

"Such were the hordes of ancient Babylon and Persia, the warriors of Tiglath Pileser and Cyrus" said Lavovin. "Such was the sea that rose up to bury Atlantis forever."

"We must extract the captain," Litmo said. "There is no rule that says we cannot." He was already in communication with Eyes and Brim, urging them to hurry into action, while Regulus frowned, certain that some unwanted result would ensue, at the very least that a reckless captain would become used to dragging the Confederation along behind his every whim.

But the effort to rescue Taragus bore no fruit. After about half an hour of high tension, with the valley and the hills leading from it towards the higher ridges beyond filled with locust-like swarms of hunters and fleeing clumps of robots, the whole surreal scene punctuated by flashes of lightning originating from the earth, the little grays finally appeared on the horizon. They came like two angels, side by side, angels in the sky that had assumed the form of disks. While one swept down to recover Taragus, the other hovered above, watching it like a mother watching her child cross the street alone for the first time. But moments later, the bad news came. Taragus had refused to board.

"Levitate him up," ordered Regulus.

The little grays waited to receive direction from Ariel.

"The Captain is searching for Trisdade. He will never forgive you," said Litmo.

"I thought you liked the Zan," Lavovin gasped, turning towards Litmo in disbelief.

"To love a man is to love his soul and what he stands for. To let him live, and if need be die, for what he believes in. That is the higher love."

"It’s too high for me," said Lavovin. "Capture him!"

"Capture him!" Boone agreed.

"Levitate him up against his will!" commanded Ariel.

But moments later, the little grays replied: "He has a blocker. He has blocked levitation!"

"Son of a bitch!" gasped Boone, tightening his weapons belt another notch, then beginning to jog out into the killing field. "Well, now, unless we want to just be bystanders of a great captain’s death, we must help him to rescue Trisdade! That is the only way we will persuade him to come out!"

"Absurd!" shouted Regulus. "He has no right to drag the entire expedition behind him to the grave, and all for a stupid robot!"

"He’s dragging no one," said Boone, turning around one last time, before leaving. "I’m going because I want to. Because I’ve come to respect that man and his choices. He’s worth protecting. If I die, it is because I do not want to be a man who is prudent, but a man who is noble. A man who does not stand by idly while others risk themselves for a worthy cause. Men such as he should not die alone." And then Boone was gone. Twenty other security troopers jogged out in a line behind him, while Lavovin, hesitating said, "Without craft use, this will be a very hazardous operation!"

"Good human, you’ve made a wise choice to stay behind," said Regulus, praising him.

Lavovin scowled, then checking his weapons, jogged out after his fellow humans.

CS Hara and one more security agent followed.

"Mayhem! Oh pure, pure mayhem!" lamented Regulus.

Then, as Litmo himself, frail and absurd, ran after them, Regulus fell to his knees gasping, "E tu, Brute? Isn’t that what the earthlings say?"

**********

The chaos was, indeed, as the word was invented to express, chaos. Taragus had just driven away the saucer and was aware that members of his party were attempting to save him. Over communication equipment, he ordered them not to follow him. They disobeyed. Confederation discipline had disintegrated, there was now only one emotional reaction following another. But fortunately, there was professionalism within the breakdown, tactical expertise within the utter surrender to the impulses of the heart. He could not condemn them for being unruly, when he, himself, had left his dirty footprints all over protocol.

Taragus, as he wandered through the foothills, scoured by giant smoldering pits and littered with parts of shattered robots, could barely believe the magnitude of the carnage which he was beholding. Robots, broken robots everywhere! Twisted wrecked pieces of steel, motionless arms reaching skywards, severed metal heads with wires protruding like veins, glowing sensors detached from robot bodies, collecting data from the environment but having no place to send that data to. A robot head and thorax, dragged by arms like a beetle across the earth, purposeless, moving only because it had to do something, robots could not be lazy. A mangled robot with missing eye sensors and one arm blow off of it, calling out, "Malfunction! Malfunction!" Every once in a while, Taragus would stop to examine the disconnected parts, a head, a chest box, an arm, dreading that he might have found his beloved Trisdade. Whenever he tried to approach a living robot to ask him about Trisdade, the robot would simply run away, the robots were in a panic state now, programmed not to harm humans but also desperate to preserve their functional capabilities, to protect their usefulness to men. To his utter disgust, Taragus noted that most of the robots still had intact personality packs, contrary to the official rules of the Venting.

As hunters began to appear all around him, mostly passing him by on the trail of the fleeing robots, he demanded of one, "Why are their amusement packs still in? You are not just destroying machines, you are killing minds!"

The hunter, armed with an electric-shorter ray gun, said: "Those aren’t minds, those are just dumb-ass personality loops! Like the dolls who say, ‘Be my mommy’, and wet themselves. Careful there, or you might be mistaken for a robot lover!"

Another hunter, close behind him said, "What fun’s in killing something that’s not afraid of dying?"

While one more, with a big missile launcher slung over his shoulder, followed by four men carrying heavy metal cases with the rockets inside, said: "Those packs will become very useful when night falls. You just wait and see. It’s my favorite part of it all! Yes sir, night hunting! That’s where the fun is."

Taragus told them, "Look, if you find a robot who gives you a speech about justice and the feelings of robots, don’t kill him! Please! Bring him back alive! I’ll give you money for him."

"How much?"

"One thousand Trulos."

"Get out of here," the hunter said, "only a Confederation governor, or Zan, would have money like that!"

"I am a Zan," Taragus said.

They laughed at him, and one of the hunters said, "You could give me a diamond mine - a hundred diamond mines - and it wouldn’t be worth this one moment of squeezing a trigger and seeing a robot’s head explode." And they moved on, like beasts of prey, in spite of their minds.

To find Trisdade, Taragus had nothing to go on but his instinct and his logic, walking together hand and hand like Eros and Psyche in the wrong myth. "If I were Trisdade, where would I go? What would I do? I would try to hold on until the dawn. But I couldn’t do it just for myself! His determination to help others will force him to stay with other robots. In the act of leaving their old bands to disperse, as he is urging them to do, many new robots will attach themselves to him; the act of dispersion which he is preaching will be undone by the impact of his personality, and a new concentration of robots will form around him. Probably, this concentration will lose its mobility after some of the robots are injured, and he refuses to abandon them. I must keep my eyes open for this development! I must beat the hunters to his group, once it forms and ceases to move!"

Late in the afternoon, as the sun was already beginning to fade and gray was muscling its way into the sky, he saw a large cluster of robots on a ridge, and saw streams of hunters beginning to pull back. At that very moment, Boone and a large security team caught up with Taragus.

"That must be Trisdade up there!" shouted the captain, too impassioned to chide Boone for disobeying his orders not to follow him here.

"If so, he is in deep trouble," said Boone.

Taragus understood. The retreat of the hunters could only mean one thing. And sure enough, only moments later, the din of the artillery resumed, and giant explosions rocked the ridge, sending swarms of robot pieces into the air. The hunters had withdrawn to allow the big guns to strike once more.

"Captain, where are you going?" demanded Boone.

"To rescue Trisdade!" Taragus cried out.

"Captain – that is artillery. It doesn’t care who you are, and it doesn’t spare a thing. It cuts down the whole field. Is there a flower of gold among the shit plants? It doesn’t care! Artillery, roughly translated, means, ‘All of you!’ You can’t go there."

But Taragus was already jogging towards the hill. "Captain!" protested Boone.

"I am a highly-trained security professional," said Lavovin, out of breath, catching up with them at last. "I don’t care how many buses I can jump over on a motorcycle! I don’t care if I can drive through walls of fire, or walk across a tightrope stretched over a canyon! Think what you want of me, I am not a daredevil, I am a thinker! I believe in common sense, anything to get Lavovin back into a bed; and I don’t mean a hospital bed! Let the captain go, he is pushing it! Would you jump out of a skyscraper to support him?"

But Boone and the security men, like the brave horsemen of the British Light Brigade, were not listening, they were bravely, foolishly pushing forward after their reckless captain, and his fatal brand of loyalty.

"Stay here, Hara!" Lavovin commanded, as she, gasping for breath, appeared with a security agent at her side. "Captain’s orders!"

"Where are the others?"

"Getting themselves killed. My orders are to stay here and guard you."

She started to go forward, but Lavovin stopped her. He enjoyed feeling her helpless arm in his grasp and thought, though she is small and in many ways not my type, there is something hot about her. Being exhausted as she was, she was not hard to restrain.

Meanwhile, as Taragus and his band approached the ridge, other hunters gathered around them, charging up the slopes as well. They did not want to be left out of the attack, the best kills always fell to the first ones to arrive on the scene. As they told each other, gasping for breath, "Hurry, before there’s none left!" Behind them, the great artillery guns fell silent as they spied their ant-like hunter brothers swarming all over the hill; the robots and men were now too close together to continue pounding from afar, even though some gun crews could barely restrain themselves, and cursed the hunters for closing in too soon.

Up at the ridge, with desperation in his eyes, Taragus searched for Trisdade but could not find him. Screaming and cheering and laughing, with hundreds of robots fleeing further into the distance, the hunters surged over the wounded, shooting them point-blank with blaster pistols, firing into them with shorting rays and watching them flop around like fish out of water as their circuits blew up inside. One hunter took down his pants and urinated on a dying robot, while the man with the missile launcher, with higher standards, crouched down on one knee and fired a rocket at the back of a fleeing robot struggling up a vertical precipice, then cried out with pride and joy as the robot burst into fragments and toppled, piece by piece, into a chasm below, except for one huge arm which remained imbedded with spike fingers into the mountain. "Great shot!" his friends were congratulating him, as though he were Walter Reed or Jonas Salk.

Taragus felt an awful rage at this, and, in fact, as one band of hunters stood over a robot, deliberately torturing it by pulling on a sensory cord which caused it to thrash about in agony, he took out his stun ray gun, and against Boone’s advice, opened fire. He took on five men, and barely survived a blaster bolt which smashed the rock behind which he had taken cover, like the first set of tablets of God’s laws which Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai. From the side, another security man’s stun ray gun had probably saved Taragus by knocking out a man whose raised rifle was loaded with explosive armor-piercing bullets.

"You know, if you had killed any one of them, according to the law, it would have counted as a murder," Boone told Taragus. "This is a Confederation planet, you are not carrying out an approved mission, and they are acting within the rights granted to them."

"That’s why I used my stun gun," Taragus assured him, "even though they deserve to die."

*********

At last, night fell. Still they had found no trace of Trisdade. Taragus did not know if his robot friend was dead, his body scattered among the millions of robot pieces lying strewn all over the killing zone, or if was still alive somewhere, holding on in a cave, or trench, behind some rock or in the midst of some remaining scrap of foliage not yet charred and burning. The captain was disconsolate, but at the same time determined; he would not yield his panther part to despair, he would not let his energy succumb to his fear, he would not ground the saving angel with the heavy wings of depression. He must believe the best was possible, even if all around him were indications of the worst.

Boone shook his head. He was a hard man, but it was pitiful to watch the captain, continuing to crawl through the dark, calling out to Trisdade as though he were a lost puppy. "Trisdade! Trisdade! It’s me, the Zan! Are you there!? I’ve come to help! Please, Trisdade, answer me! Trisdade! Trisdade!" Meanwhile, the night was filled with the sound of hunters, laugher, wild whoops of celebration, the sound of explosions, rifles going off, sudden avalanches from mountain sides, and occasionally the cry of a human being as some hunter was mistaken for a robot by another and shot down, screaming as though his pain were a sin.

They had night-vision goggles, but even so, in this eerie, dangerous wasteland, finding Trisdade did not appear to be an easy prospect.

"He is probably dead," suggested one of the security men.

Taragus said, "That may well be, but we must act as if he is not."

"It isn’t right for us to risk our lives in this way, captain," the security man pressed. "Not for a robot."

"You’re disobeying orders, corporal," Taragus told him. "If I remember correctly, you were told not to follow me."

"That’s right," Boone told the man. "And now you’re here. And I’m giving you the order to continue disobeying the order not to be here!"

As they struggled over what had now become difficult terrain, the natural barrier meant to hold the robots inside the killing zone and to prevent their escape, they heard the approach of Prashid flight disks lumbering overhead, low-grade saucers that were not very much more advanced than jets, and could never seem to quiet the incessant humming which always gave away their approach. They sounded like old city air conditioners in the summer.

"What are they up to, are they going to try to sharpshoot the robots from the air?" wondered Taragus.

"Now that the terrain is becoming mountainous, maybe they aim to blast the robots who have made it to the heights," Boone conjectured.

However, it was nothing so obvious to logic, nothing so conventional or expected. Instead, the saucers began to hover over the landscape, and to broadcast loud repetitions of jokes, filling the night with humor that seemed sickly and unreal in the face of how the day had been spent.

"What is this?" demanded Taragus. "Are they trying to turn the tragedy into a comedy? To amuse the hunters, who may be feeling tired or depressed? Is this a way of changing the mood, and preparing the planet to pull out of its murderous frame of mind?"

But before any of them could think of an answer that made sense, the explanation was revealed. As the jokes were broadcast over the valley and over the hills and harsh ridges climbing upwards towards impossible peaks of freedom, swarms of lights began to appear from the darkness. At first, Taragus and his men did not understand. Then, nearby, no farther than fifty yards away, they saw a pair of lights flash on in the night, prompting an enthusiastic burst of cheers from an adjacent band of hunters. "There’s one!" a hunter shouted. And suddenly, there was a burst of gunfire, the sound of a shorter ray, and two blaster bolts simultaneously leaping towards the lights, there was the sound of metal struck, there were flashes and explosions, and then the hunters rushing forward to see if the robot was still alive.

"My God!" gasped Taragus. "The humor lights! Their eyes light up when they laugh!"

"That’s why the hunters up here left the amusement packs in them – the personality packs!" exclaimed Boone.

"So now the hunters are telling them jokes," Taragus said. "The robots are programmed to never disappoint a person by failing to laugh at his jokes. It’s part of being a good companion. The hunters are making them laugh so that their eyes will light up and betray their hiding places in the dark!"

And all throughout the last hours of the night, the last hours of the venting, as the saucers floated overhead blaring out out-of-place jokes, eyes lit up in the night; the dark bowl of death between the artillery and the mountain heights became filled with glowing lights, bodies like homes with a hearth and fire burning inside that were tricked into taking the dark curtains down from their windows. The robots could not help themselves. Their wires were too beautiful, and too well understood. Their hearts were like maps with every detail in the hands of their killers.

"Once, when I was a boy," one of the security men said, "I went out with my dad in the outboard, and a light, a real powerful one. We just shined it all over the place, and the whole damned lake was lit up by gator eyes, reflecting the light. In the old days, we would’ve gone with a shotgun, and blown them all away."

"Old times aren’t gone here," Boone said.

"Nor are robots gators," Taragus added.

In the chaos, they did not have the vaguest idea what to do or where to begin. At last, Taragus got up and continued walking, but where to, and what for, he could not say. How could he find his friend, in the darkness, in this living hell? "Trisdade!" he called out, pathetically. "Trisdade!"

**********

At last, dawn arrived. It was slow to come, it did not want to see what lay below, it did not want to see what men had done while it was away. You could see it rising with its eyes shut, trying not to look, begging clouds to swarm around its face, asking the moon to take its place. But at last, the rosy sun was forced to look, to accept the imperfection of those who it gave its warmth to.

Taragus, who had not slept for hours, looked quietly, devastated, upon the carnage. "Where do we go from here?" he asked. "Where do we begin?"

No one spoke. They were grim, still in shock, and fearful of what they might find.

After a little ways, they came at last to the cave, a low-roofed pit in actuality, in which they found a robot with severed legs and an external-world sensor dangling from one barely functioning wire from his wide-open head. The robot who had led them there told them that the war on the robots had ended, and that these people were friends. He asked the dying robot to tell them what he knew of Trisdade.

"Trisdade. What a wonderful machine," the robot said. "He told us to disperse. He went from group to group encouraging us. He told us to hide, to run, to try to survive until the dawn. He told us that his best friend was a Confederation Zan, and that he would surely come to help us."

At this, Taragus began to sob, till the demands of leadership forced him to drive away the collapse inside his heart, forced him to pretend he was unbreakable. His men stood around him as though their captain had just been buried, and they were standing with shovels by his grave. And Boone was the preacher, saying "Ashes to ashes and dust to dust" with his eyes.

"Where is he? Do you know what happened to him?" Taragus asked, guilt-ridden for asking the robot about the well-being of another, when its own legs were blown off.

But the robot did not seem to mind. "He lasted almost to the end," the robot said. "It was over there, beyond us, over the dip, on the slope of that little rise straight ahead. He was trying to reroute a circuit in a paralyzed robot, to get him up and moving again, when they hit him with a shorter ray."

Crushed, Taragus could barely speak. Dazome wanted to rush forward and throw herself on him, to embrace him with all the raging love in her soul, to hurl herself into the vacuum left by Trisdade and give herself to the captain to love instead; but she felt that would be somehow invasive, salacious and self-serving in spite of the great purity and depth of her feelings. So she just stood there, crushed as he was, not touching him. At last, the captain was able to ask the dying robot: "Tell me, what happened?"

The robot seemed to groan, and said: "He flew through the air. He tried to stand, he seemed to do some kind of dance trying to keep his balance. An armor-piercing bullet punctured him as he stood there wobbling, I saw the hole it made which revealed the electrical meltdown going on inside him, and then a hunter hit him with a missile or grenade, we just saw a flash, like a comet flying towards him, there was a final explosion, and he was just a bunch of pieces. Still, there were words coming out of his head."

"What words?" Taragus asked, his eyes raining, his voice lashing his softness with hardness.

"He told us: "I have failed as a poet. I have failed as a lover. And now I have failed as a savior."

Taragus lay down flat on his stomach not moving. Weeping profusely Dazome bent down beside him, putting her hand on him, she could finally not restrain herself. He lay there for a moment, before, rising back to his knees, aware of Dazome no more than a rhinoceros is aware of the bird that sits atop its thick hide picking out the fleas, he asked the robot, "Would you like me to remove the pack?"

The robot nodded. "It is time. Understanding what is happening has not made me happier. Feeling it has not changed it into something else. Take the pack out. It is time to be nothing, like they thought I already was."

Reverently, Taragus reached down to the robot’s battered side, he pushed the release button, and removed the pack. Instantly, the robot’s sensor dimmed, there was now nothing but a tiny, barely visible light glowing inside of it, the robot was like grass, covered with all the animals of the earth, feeling only feet walking over it without knowing what the feet meant or needing to know.

Slowly, turning over the pack to one of the security men, Taragus stood up, and headed over towards the hill where Trisdade had fallen. There, on the slope, he encountered a massive pile of fragments and pieces, many robots, not just Trisdade had fallen hear. Lavovin, watching Taragus, was reminded of the scene from Alexander Nevsky, when the Russian women come out after the great battle has been fought to walk among the Russian dead, the tragic half of glory, seeking their loved ones who have not returned home. A beautiful mournful aria covers the scene like mist.

Slowly, only half-conscious after the blow to his heart, Taragus searched among the pieces of robots, like a child who wants to put together a puzzle, a terrible, complicated puzzle meant for children far older. Electrode bulbs, wires, batteries – did these belong to Trisdade, or to one of the other robots who had died here beside him? Labyrinthine computer boards, like aerial views of cities made of circuits in which a soul might live; he picked up one that was charred with a third of it blown away, then another one that smelled of fire with all the wires black. There was a cry light with a protruding wire lying in the dirt. 2234 – he saw the numbers on a fragment of metal and nearly choked. Trisdade’s serial number was 223438470129 HOCR //// :::. "Trisdade!" he gasped. "Is this a piece of you?"

"Alas, poor Yorick," said Lavovin. But then he felt like killing himself for saying it.

Taragus clutched the metal fragment to him, as though it were his child, his eyes, flooded with tears seemed bewildered by the way the world was different from what men hoped for.

"This is his personality box," said Litmo, bringing over a scorched metal box with wires dangling out of it and melted components inside – as much as one half of it ruined. Litmo went away leaving the captain to take it in, and in a moment returned with a blackened computer board. "This is his memory." In one more moment he had returned with a fragment that seemed like some kind of metal fondue. "This is a part of his special programming package." Horrified, but fascinated, the crew looked at the shattered remains of the captain’s dear friend, then back at him, watching his grief as though it were an animal in the zoo. The captain’s soul was as transparent as glass, and just for this one moment, they could see his heart falling off a cliff.

"Keep searching for his pieces," Taragus told them. "We will collect as much of Trisdade as we can. Then we will bring him back to Om’Ott, to see what he can do."

"Om’Ott? He cannot even pick up the mess he has left by his piano," said Lavovin. "His genius is buried underneath empty wine glasses, cigarette butts, fragments of magnificent symphonies covered with coffee stains, unsharpened pencils resting on top of blank pieces of paper, unwatered, wilted flowers. He will look at these ruins of his creation, and only say the same thing that we are saying inside, but fear to say out loud. It is hopeless, captain, hopeless! Trisdade is no more! Do not aggravate your pain by prolonging the fall! It is over!"

"It looks bad, Zan," Litmo admitted. "The damage is massive. It would be like rebuilding a theater gutted by fire from one burned chair."

"He is Trisdade," said Taragus, refusing to use the past tense. "We must try."

Beside them, they noticed a government official from Prash who had joined the hunters in the evening. He had got lost on his way out of the killing zone. Although they paid him no mind, and, in fact, detested him at this moment, his appearance there was no accident, it was one of those gifts the universe so frequently bestows after the night has won.

**********

Back on Embriss, the home planet of Om’Ott, Taragus showed the jaded programmer and pianist the wreckage of his greatest creation. "What can you do for him?" Taragus asked.

Om’Ott amusement at the naiveté of the captain turned to terrible sorrow when he came upon sincerity that did not vanish when it was laughed at. Grimly, his eyes red from some binge or from some demon which kept him awake until the sun arose, Om’Ott took the pieces of Trisdade away to the vestiges of his laboratory, and after several hours of examination returned. "Zan Taragus," he said, respectfully, and exhausted by life, "the damage is massive. Your dear robot friend is as annihilated as annihilated can be. There is the possibility of restoring his personality through the use of redundancy and the extraction of traces of his destroyed sections from intact circuits. Some of his obliterated programming might theoretically be recovered through distortion compensation analysis, applied to melted chips by means of microscopic computer extraction techniques. This could be aided by my old construction archives, if I haven’t replaced them with porn. But all this, as I said, is theoretical. If you could imagine Archimedes saying it is theoretically possible to build a rocket ship, you will see the state I am in. Anyway, isn’t it memory which makes him dear to you, captain? The memory banks are far more delicate, and in fact, I can tell you right now, if it were ever possible to bring this creation of mine back to life, he would remember nothing of you. Your friendship is over. Everything you have shared. There will be no foundation to build on. What’s it to you if he lives?"

"He has a beautiful soul," Taragus said. "You made that soul. Make it again."

"He suffered," Om’Ott protested.

"Because you did not finish him."

Om’Ott sank heavily into a chair, like a man whose legs had been sawed off. "Captain," he said. "You have forgotten. I am a worn out man who cares for nothing. I try to love my own ass, but I have even grown weary of that. I spend my days drinking and looking at naked women on the computer screen. I don’t want real women, they are too hard to love. Captain, to salvage Trisdade would be a miracle! I cannot part the seas, I can barely walk to the bathroom."

"Please!" Taragus said. "I love that robot. I love his soul! Please, Om’Ott, you are the only one in all the universe who can restore him!"

"I wish somebody loved me the way that you love him," said Om’Ott, and he suddenly burst into tears until he fought them off, because a weeping cynic is disgraceful, like a tiger eating lettuce. Coldly, he told Taragus, "Leave the robot with me. If I can find time, in between my naps, I’ll tinker with him. I’ll let you know how it goes. Don’t you have some adventure to get to, now?" And he signaled that the meeting was at an end, and headed upstairs towards the bed which he never made – why bother, if you spend most of your life in it?

**********

Although, for Taragus, the entire episode was nothing but a great tragedy, good did come out of it. The government official who had come upon Taragus mourning among the pieces of the robots which he, the government official, had helped to slay, was moved by the depth of the great space captain’s sorrow. Word of his discovery got out, artists tapped into his mind with imagery shadowing and created vivid portraits of the captain kneeling beside the body of his fallen robot friend, tears in his eyes. As a caption they wrote: We broke the heart of our greatest hero. Another caption stated: He saved two worlds. We could not even save his friend. The planet was overwhelmed with regret, deeper than that which usually followed the exposure of its savagery, and the loss of hope for itself: its hope that it might one day leave the cocoon of barbarians as a full-fledged butterfly. Into this moment of keen disappointment came a journal article written by Dazome Hara, chronicling in words that oozed with emotion the nightmarish spectacle of the venting, and then proposed cultural alternatives to eradicate the need for it. The proposals were interesting, and attracted a political following on Prash. The end result is that before the next year’s venting had arrived, Prashid society had made the decision to implement defusionary reforms to make the staging of the ceremony unnecessary, and committed itself to an experimental decade of doing without. In the central square of the capital, the statue of a giant robot was erected. Trisdade now towered above the civilization that had destroyed him.

"Surely, all this must help you to feel better," Litmo told the captain, one day, as they flew about the universe on other business.

Taragus smiled ruefully. "Trisdade’s failure was so beautiful, that it became a success. God bless him. But I miss my robot friend."

**********

Years had now passed, years filled with adventures yet to be told, vast tracts of pages between what I have just written and what I am about to write. Taragus heard that Om’Ott had finally built a new Trisdade, and decided to take the long way between planets so that he could drop by and pay him a visit.

"It won’t be the same," Litmo told him. "Trisdade won’t remember you. Knowing Om’Ott, poor Trisdade will be lucky if he can do anything more than open a door."

"It’s all right," Taragus said. "What do I have to lose? Who Trisdade was cannot be denied. He is written into the Akashic Record, he is a part of forever. Let’s meet this new Trisdade, even if he is only a name, even if he is only a shell filled with something else."

Once more they navigated through the familiar space, the black expanse that they somehow recognized, the emptiness that pulled Taragus’ heartstrings, that made him nostalgic and want to die, and to also smile sweetly remembering the islands of life he had visited in the midst of the pain. And remembering was to go there again. The vibrant lands were now phantom lands the color of ghosts, the vivid blue of the sea and the green of the land were equally gray, the joyous freshly-erupting sounds were echoes, every year another door closed on the voices, he heard those precious voices now through many closed doors, growing fainter all the time; the bottle of reminiscing now had only a few drops of wine left in it, drops of a moment that he had once poured down his throat. He was young to carry so many memories, and he was too busy to easily hold them! Sometimes, it seemed as if the most sacred of things he had done and wished to cherish were being canceled out, like ripples on the water contested by other ripples, as trivial things collided with profound things and made the surface of the water blank. He had to fight to dig pockets of reverence for the past into the selfish earth of the now, which cried like a needy child for all the attention. To make sure the child did not run out into the street, one had to dim the trees of the days when the birds used to sing. Of course, there would be new inspirations. But for one who was loyal, they could never replace one’s broken joys.

Litmo said nothing as they coasted in to the planet Embriss, established orbit, and took the shuttle back down to the planet’s surface. He felt the tremors rumbling in the captain’s soul, felt the price of his depth. Litmo would not stain the majesty of it by trying to comfort him.

"Welcome, welcome," said the service robots, reprising gestures of long ago, leading Litmo and the captain towards the great familiar mansion. "Om’Ott is expecting you," they said.

As before, the obedient robots opened the great doors, and led them into a spacious hallway.

"The music!" cried Taragus. Once more the music! "It is beautiful! More beautiful than ever! Om’Ott’s weary hands are still not ready to sleep! They are still digging gold from who he was afraid to be!"

"Enter," the robots said, swinging open the doors to the great chamber.

And there, to Taragus’ amazement, sitting at the grand piano was not Om’Ott, but Trisdade. And the music he was playing – it would make the stones weep and the waters of the sea turn to flesh so that they might hold the one they loved. It would make men weigh nothing so that horses might run faster, it would make eagles become the sky so that they might escape from their wings. It would make lions kiss their prey and need to eat nothing but air, it would make every speck of dust become a diamond and every man rich. Amazed, Taragus watched Trisdade’s delicate new fingers caress the keys, forgive them, leave them, chastise them, rage at them, demand extraordinary things from them, gather up aimless notes into buckets of magnificence, save the life of music never heard before from the catastrophe of souls that could not dive deep enough into the lake of neglect. Taragus was so moved, he was not even aware of the tears streaming down his face. A hand reached out to him, offering him a handkerchief: Om’Ott!

Taragus was amazed to see the dissolute man now calm and clear, thirty pounds less of fat, and many pounds more of thought added to his eyes. "I am not a poet. This is the art I could give him," Om’Ott told Taragus.

"It’s – it’s beautiful," the captain stammered.

"I restored his personality, captain. He has the desire that drove him in the past. But now, he also has the talent. He is a virtuoso."

"And you?" Taragus asked him. "You have changed."

"One day, looking at his wreckage, lifting up the blanket with which I had covered it and staring down into the wires and the fragments, something came over me. I wept, captain. Yes, I, who used to laugh at other people’s tears, and to count them as a sign of innocence, most hateful of all sins! Something in that poor, poor wreckage, just lying there in my dusty lab, because I could not get myself out of my chair, or rise up out of my bed. Zan, I was hit, as though by a hammer. My cynicism came back like a boomerang, it turned into sentimentality. I sat down with my old tools. I began to work. I began to fight. I took my mind out, we ran together at dawn. I built up the legs of my thoughts. I experienced suffering again. This time I did not flee from the discomfort. I faced it, I stretched myself so that it no longer hurt. Captain – this robot is more than a robot, it is something special! I realized that I loved it, too, as you did. Loved him, for he will never be an it! I struggled with the restoration, and I struggled with the music programming, but I did it, captain, I finally did it! I gave him my talent! And he gave me his desire! The desire necessary to rebuild him! His beauty, lying there shattered on the table of my retreat from life - his beauty which only I could restore - inspired my will to rise up from the grave, it gave me back all the desire which I had lost! Now each of us has both: talent and desire. We are complete! And we are holding nothing back from the universe!"

Overcome with joy, Taragus watched his old friend playing on the piano, a new medium for his great soul. Poetry and music – so different, such different terrains to walk in, like sand and snow, perhaps like water and rock! Does the poet walk and the musician swim!? Does the poet beat gold into the shape of a God, while the musician dances and bends the world to his heart? However different the form, art is the origin. Trisdade was an artist, attached to a different hand. What he did was not the same, but it was still Trisdade.

Noting the captain standing there, beside him, Trisdade slowly released the music, then stood up to greet his guest. "Hello," he said. "Pleased to meet you. My name is Tristade. And you are?"

"Taragus," replied the captain.

"Pleased to meet you, Taragus" the robot said again, extending his hand. "It’s always a pleasure to meet new people, our planet is so out of the way! What brings you to these parts, Taragus?"

Taragus, with tears in his eyes, realized that Trisdade was now no longer more his friend than the friend of any other man. Their precious moment of camaraderie, their hour of being soul mates, was at an end. But Trisdade lived, and he had all the means of happiness within him! Though Taragus grieved, he also rejoiced. In a little while he would leave, and give his friend back to the universe and to the beautiful new plans it had made for him.

The Adventures of Zan Taragus

Short Fiction Contents

Creative Safehouse Contents