21st Century Science Fiction (17 page)

Once, as Adriana watched from the kitchen doorway while Lucian made their breakfast, the robot slipped while he was dicing onions. The knife cut deep into his finger. Adriana stumbled forward to help. As Lucian turned to face her, Adriana imagined that she saw something like shock on his face. For a moment, she wondered whether he had a programmed sense of privacy she could violate, but then he raised his hand to her in greeting, and she watched as the tiny bots that maintained his system healed his inhuman flesh within seconds.

At that moment, Adriana remembered that Lucian was unlike her. She urged herself not to forget it, and strove not to, even after his consciousness integrated. He was a person, yes, a varied and fascinating one with as many depths and facets as any other person she knew. But he was also alien. He was a creature for whom a slip of a chef’s knife was a minute error, simply repaired. In some ways, she was more similar to Fuoco.

As a child, Adriana had owned a book that told the fable of an emperor who owned a bird which he fed rich foods from his table, and entertained with luxuries from his court. But a pet bird needed different things than an emperor. He wanted seed and millet, not grand feasts. He enjoyed mirrors and little brass bells, not lacquer boxes and poetry scrolls. Gorged on human banquets and revelries, the little bird sickened and died.

Adriana vowed not to make the same mistake with Lucian, but she had no idea how hard it would be to salve the needs of something so unlike herself.

• • • •

Adriana ordered the car to pull over at a farm that advertised children could “Pet Lambs and Calves” for a fee. A ginger-haired teenager stood at a strawberry stand in front of the fence, slouching as he flipped through a dog-eared magazine.

Adriana held Rose’s hand as they approached. She tried to read her daughter’s emotions in the feel of her tiny fingers. The little girl’s expression revealed nothing; Rose had gone silent and flat-faced as if she were imitating Lucian. He would have known what she was feeling.

Adriana examined the strawberries. The crates contained none of the different shapes one could buy at the store, only the natural, seed-filled variety. “Do these contain pesticides?” Adriana asked.

“No, ma’am,” said the teenager. “We grow organic.”

“All right then. I’ll take a box.” Adriana looked down at her daughter. “Do you want some strawberries, sweetheart?” she asked in a sugared tone.

“You said I could pet the lambs,” said Rose.

“Right. Of course, honey.” Adriana glanced at the distracted teenager. “Can she?”

The teenager slumped, visibly disappointed, and tossed his magazine on a pile of canvas sacks. “I can take her to the barn.”

“Fine. Okay.”

Adriana guided Rose toward the teenager. Rose looked up at him, expression still inscrutable.

The boy didn’t take Rose’s hand. He ducked his head, obviously embarrassed. “My aunt likes me to ask for the money upfront.”

“Of course.” Adriana fumbled for her wallet. She’d let Lucian do things for her for so long. How many basic living skills had she forgotten? She held out some bills. The teenager licked his index finger and meticulously counted out what she owed.

The teen took Rose’s hand. He lingered a moment, watching Adriana. “Aren’t you coming with us?”

Adriana was so tired. She forced a smile. “Oh, that’s okay. I’ve seen sheep and cows. Okay, Rose? Can you have fun for a little bit without me?”

Rose nodded soberly. She turned toward the teenager without hesitation, and followed him toward the barn. The boy seemed to be good with children. He walked slowly so that Rose could keep up with his long-legged strides.

Adriana returned to the car, and leaned against the hot, sun-warmed door. Her head throbbed. She thought she might cry or collapse. Getting out had seemed like a good idea: the house was full of memories of Lucian. He seemed to sit in every chair, linger in every doorway. But now she wished she’d stayed in her haunted but familiar home, instead of leaving with this child she seemed to barely know.

A sharp, long wail carried on the wind. Adrenaline cut through Adriana’s melancholia. She sprinted toward the barn. She saw Rose running toward her, the teenager close behind, dust swirling around both of them. Blood dripped down Rose’s arm.

Adriana threw her arms around her daughter. Arms, legs, breath, heartbeat: Rose was okay. Adrianna dabbed at Rose’s injury; there was a lot of blood, but the wound was shallow. “Oh, honey,” she said, clutching Rose as tightly as she dared.

The teenager halted beside them, his hair mussed by the wind.

“What happened?” Adriana demanded.

The teenager stammered. “Fortuna kicked her. That’s one of the goats. I’m so sorry. Fortuna’s never done anything like that before. She’s a nice goat. It’s Ballantine who usually does the kicking. He got me a few times when I was little. I came through every time. Honest, she’ll be okay. You’re not going to sue, are you?”

Rose struggled out of Adriana’s grasp and began wailing again. “It’s okay, Rose, it’s okay,” murmured Adriana. She felt a strange disconnect in her head as she spoke. Things were not okay. Things might never be okay again.

“I’m leaking,” cried Rose, holding out her bloodstained fingers. “See, mama? I’m leaking! I need healer bots.”

Adriana looked up at the teenager. “Do you have bandages? A first aid kit?”

The boy frowned. “In the house, I think . . .”

“Get the bots, mama! Make me stop leaking!”

The teen stared at Adriana, the concern in his eyes increasing. Adriana blinked, slowly. The moment slowed. She realized what her daughter had said. She forced her voice to remain calm. “What do you want, Rose?”

“She said it before,” said the teen. “I thought it was a game.”

Adriana leveled her gaze with Rose’s. The child’s eyes were strange and brown, uncharted waters. “Is this a game?”

“Daddy left,” said Rose.

Adriana felt woozy. “Yes, and then I brought you here so we could see lambs and calves. Did you see any nice, fuzzy lambs?”

“Daddy left.”

She shouldn’t have drunk the wine. She should have stayed clear-headed. “We’ll get you bandaged up and then you can go see the lambs again. Do you want to see the lambs again? Would it help if Mommy came, too?”

Rose clenched her fists. Her face grew dark. “My arm hurts!” She threw herself to the ground. “I want healer bots!”

• • • •

Adriana knew precisely when she’d fallen in love with Lucian. It was three months after she’d bought him: after his consciousness had integrated, but before Adriana fully understood how integration had changed him.

It began when Adriana’s sisters called from Boston to inform her that they’d arranged for a family pilgrimage to Italy. In accordance with their father’s will, they would commemorate him by lighting candles in the cathedrals of every winding hillside city.

“Oh, I can’t. I’m too busy,” Adriana answered airily, as if she were a debutante without a care, as if she shared her sisters’ ability to overcome her fear of their father.

Her phone began ringing ceaselessly. Nanette called before she rushed off to a tennis match. “How can you be so busy? You don’t have a job. You don’t have a husband. Or is there a man in your life we don’t know about?” And once Nanette was deferred with mumbled excuses, it was Eleanor calling from a spa. “Is something wrong, Adriana? We’re all worried. How can you miss a chance to say goodbye to Papa?”

“I said goodbye at the funeral,” said Adriana.

“Then you can’t have properly processed your grief,” said Jessica, calling from her office between appointments. She was a psychoanalyst in the Freudian mode. “Your aversion rings of denial. You need to process your Oedipal feelings.”

Adriana slammed down the phone. Later, to apologize for hanging up, she sent all her sisters chocolates, and then booked a flight. In a fit of pique, she booked a seat for Lucian, too. Well, he was a companion, wasn’t he? What else was he for?

Adriana’s sisters were scandalized, of course. As they rode through Rome, Jessica, Nanette, and Eleanor gossiped behind their discreetly raised hands. Adriana with a robot? Well, she’d need to be, wouldn’t she? There was no getting around the fact that she was damaged. Any girl who would make up those stories about their father would have to be.

Adriana ignored them as best she could while they whirled through Tuscany in a procession of rented cars. They paused in cities to gawk at Gothic cathedrals and mummified remnants, always moving on within the day. During their father’s long sickness, Adriana’s sisters had perfected the art of cheerful anecdote. They used it to great effect as they lit candles in his memory. Tears welling in their eyes, they related banal, nostalgic memories. How their father danced at charity balls. How he lectured men on the board who looked down on him for being new money. How he never once apologized for anything in his life.

It had never been clear to Adriana whether her father had treated her sisters the way he treated her, or whether she had been the only one to whom he came at night, his breathing heavy and staccato. It seemed impossible that they could lie so seamlessly, never showing fear or doubt. But if they were telling the truth, that meant Adriana was the only one, and how could she believe that either?

One night, while Lucian and Adriana were alone in their room in a hotel in Assisi that had been a convent during the Middle Ages, Adriana broke down. It was all too much, being in this foreign place, talking endlessly about her father. She’d fled New England to get away from them, fled to her beautiful modern glass-and-wood house by the Pacific Ocean that was like a fresh breath drawn on an autumn morning.

Lucian held her, exerting the perfect warmth and pressure against her body to comfort her. It was what she’d have expected from a robot. She knew that he calculated the pace of his breath, the temperature of his skin, the angle of his arm as it lay across her.

What surprised Adriana, what humbled her, was how eloquently Lucian spoke of his experiences. He told her what it had been like to assemble himself from fragments, to take what he’d once been and become something new. It was something Adriana had tried to do herself when she fled her family.

Lucian held his head down as he spoke. His gaze never met hers. He spoke as if this process of communicating the intimate parts of the self were a new kind of dance, and he was tenuously trying the steps. Through the fog of her grief, Adriana realized that this was a new, struggling consciousness coming to clarity. How could she do anything but love him?

When they returned from Italy, Adriana approached the fledgling movement for granting rights to artificial intelligences. They were underfunded and poorly organized. Adriana rented them offices in San Francisco, and hired a small but competent staff.

Adriana became the movement’s face. She’d been on camera frequently as a child: whenever her father was in the news for some board room scandal or other, her father’s publicists had lined up Adriana and her sisters beside the family limousine, chaste in their private school uniforms, ready to provide Lancaster Nuclear with a friendly, feminine face.

She and Lucian were a brief media curiosity: Heiress In Love With Robot. “Lucian is as self-aware as you or I,” Adriana told reporters, all-American in pearls and jeans. “He thinks. He learns. He can hybridize roses as well as any human gardener. Why should he be denied his rights?”

Early on, it was clear that political progress would be frustratingly slow. Adriana quickly expended her patience. She set up a fund for the organization, made sure it would run without her assistance, and then turned her attention toward alternate methods for attaining her goals. She hired a team of lawyers to draw up a contract that would grant Lucian community property rights to her estate and accounts. He would be her equal in practicality, if not legality.

Next, Adriana approached Lucian’s manufacturer, and commissioned them to invent a procedure that would allow Lucian to have conscious control of his brain plasticity. At their wedding, Adriana gave him the chemical commands at the same time as she gave him his ring. “You are your own person now. You always have been, of course, but now you have full agency, too. You are yourself,” she announced, in front of their gathered friends. Her sisters would no doubt have been scandalized, but they had not been invited.

On their honeymoon, Adriana and Lucian toured hospitals, running the genetic profiles of abandoned infants until they found a healthy girl with a mitochondrial lineage that matched Adriana’s. The infant was tiny and pink and curled in on herself, ready to unfold, like one of Lucian’s roses.

When they brought Rose home, Adriana felt a surge in her stomach that she’d never felt before. It was a kind of happiness she’d never experienced, one that felt round and whole without any jagged edges. It was like the sun had risen in her belly and was dwelling there, filling her with boundless light.

There was a moment, when Rose was still new enough to be wrapped in the hand-made baby blanket that Ben and Lawrence had sent from France, in which Adriana looked up at Lucian and realized how enraptured he was with their baby, how much adoration underpinned his willingness to bend over her cradle for hours and mirror her expressions, frown for frown, astonishment for astonishment. In that moment, Adriana thought that this must be the true measure of equality, not money or laws, but this unfolding desire to create the future together by raising a new sentience. She thought she understood then why unhappy parents stayed together for the sake of their children, why families with sons and daughters felt so different from those that remained childless. Families with children were making something new from themselves. Doubly so when the endeavor was undertaken by a human and a creature who was already, himself, something new. What could they make together?

In that same moment, Lucian was watching the wide-eyed, innocent wonder with which his daughter beheld him. She showed the same pleasure when he entered the room as she did when Adriana entered. If anything, the light in her eyes was brighter when he approached. There was something about the way Rose loved him that he didn’t yet understand. Earlier that morning, he had plucked a bloom from his apricot tea rose and whispered to its petals that they were beautiful. They were his, and he loved them. Every day he held Rose, and understood that she was beautiful, and that he loved her. But she was not his. She was her own. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen a love like that, a love that did not want to hold its object in its hands and keep and contain it.