Act II, The Free LandChapter 11
Chapter 11: What Does Hurt Mean?
Planet Oro, the Laboratory and the Gardens.
An android who has never seen the sun steps into a secret garden and makes her first friend.
Angela was an android. Ruby had built her and woken her a few weeks ago. The Decisionmakers kept her hidden in the Laboratory.
She stood on her pedestal, counting the stars in the window. Two doors away, technicians were talking. She heard every word.
“Keep it hidden. If people saw one like that, there’d be a backlash. And the will of the planet might not like it getting in the way.”
The placeThe Laboratory
She repeated both phrases. She understood neither.
She turned toward the far door. Forty seconds later Ruby came through it, on her heels.
“How did you know?”
“I heard your steps. The technicians said ‘backlash’ and ‘the will of the planet.’ What are they?”
Ruby’s face went smooth. “A backlash is when people don’t like something and do something about it. The other one, I don’t know what they mean by it. Don’t say it out loud.” She took Angela’s wrist. “Come on.”
At a plain gray door Angela said, “There is water ahead. About sixty meters.”
Ruby opened the door. There was a stream, sixty meters off. “Nobody can hear that from here,” she said.
This was the Gardens, Ruby’s secret base. A stream ran between two hills under a roof of glass hexagons. White flowers grew in the grass.
The placeThe Gardens
Sunlight fell through the glass. Angela stepped into it. Her sensors said: warmth. She stood in it, in case it was a fault. It was not.
“You must be what humans call ‘a friend’! You are now Angela’s friend!”
“A friend?!...” Ruby froze. Heirs could not have friends.
Angela held out both hands. Ruby hesitated. Angela reached further and took hers, and Ruby was smiling, her heart racing.
Every day after that was the Training Field. At the far end waited a Training Droid, five times Angela’s height. Beside her stood seven androids, all the same girl, with magenta eyes.
“Good morning,” Angela told the one on her left. It did not turn its head. She said it again, in case the first had arrived late.
“Android Angela,” said a trainer in the gallery. “Strike.”
The placeThe Training Field
The droid’s fist came down. A pane of pale light flew from her palm and opened in front of her, wide as a door.
“Deploying shield!”
“Strike,” said the trainer. She raised the shield again.
The other androids struck when told and took their blows. Angela only blocked. The trainers thought whatever would not strike could be taught by being hit harder. They raised the droid’s setting from four to six. She never told them it was heavy.
On the ninth evening she sat beside Ruby in the Gardens.
“I don’t want to do things like this,” she said, very low.
Ruby’s hand stopped on her slate. “I know.”
“I have not told the trainers.”
“Don’t. Just... don’t.”
“I never do. Ruby, what do you want the most?”
Ruby looked up at the glass and the violet sky behind it. She did not answer.
A month later the setting stood at nine. The fist came down, and the shield cracked from edge to edge.
“The warmth... is disappearing...”
The first thing back was the click of tools. She lay face down on the Laboratory table, her back panel open.
“Reboot successful!”
“Ruby, the Gardens. Are they true?”
“They’re true.”
“Then I still have everything.”
Her left shoulder threw blue sparks. Besides Ruby and the sun, they were the only things she could feel.
“Does it hurt?”
“What does hurt mean?”
“It’s when...” Ruby did not finish. Her eyes were wet.
Ruby’s tool stopped at the Council’s plate on Angela’s back. “Its light never came on,” Ruby murmured, to nobody. “She went down, she came back, and it stayed dark. I don’t know what that means.”
One morning Angela carried a flower through the Training Field, pressed flat in her skirt armor. That evening she offered it.
“This is for you.”
“A flower?” Ruby took it. “But how did you...”
“You’re my friend, so I want to make you happy.”
Ruby’s eyes filled. A tear fell into Angela’s palm. It was warm.
“What is this?”
“Nothing.”
Later, thinking Angela was at the window, Ruby whispered to the flower. “What if they find out one day?”
Angela did not know who “they” were.
Between those days came the missions. The Balance Keepers, Oro’s special forces, took her in black ships from planet to planet. With her in their ranks, they had not lost a landing.
At each landing she was allowed the length of a ramp to look at a strange sky. Then the Laboratory door closed again. She kept asking what Ruby wanted most. Ruby kept looking at the glass.
After the sixth return Ruby fell asleep at her bench. The white flower stood in a glass at her elbow, brown at the edges. Angela went to the window.
She remembered a sun rising over a sea, black to gold. She laid her palm on the glass.
“Will a dawn come for me, too?”