TWO
Nigel explained that logic faults were common in what he called Asimov Robots. The smarter the robot, the more the logic faults... and the sooner they started showing up. The old people (Nigel called them the Makers) compensated for this by setting up a stringent quarantine system, treating mental glitches as though they were smallpox or cholera. (Jake thought this sounded like a really fine way of dealing with insanity, although he supposed that psychiatrists wouldn't care for the idea much; it would put them out of business.) Nigel believed that the trauma of having his eyes shot out had weakened his mental survival-systems somehow, and now all sorts of bad stuff was loose in his circuits, eroding his deductive and inductive reasoning capabilities, gobbling logic^systems left and right. He told Susannah he didn't hold this against her in the slightest. Susannah raised a fist to her forehead and thanked him big-big. In truth, she did not completely believe good old DNK 45932, although she was damned if she knew why. Maybe it was just a holdover from their time in Calla Bryn Sturgis, where a robot not much different from Nigel had turned out to be a nasty, grudge-holding cully indeed. And there was something else.
I spy with my little eye, Susannah thought.
"Hold out thy hands, Nigel."
When die robot did, diey all saw the wiry hairs caught in the joints of his steel fingers. There was also a drop of blood on a...
would you call it a knuckle? "What's this?" she asked, holding several of the hairs up.
"I'm sorry, mum, I cawn't-"
Couldn't see. No, of course not. Nigel had infrared, but his actual eyesight was gone, courtesy of Susannah Dean, daughter of Dan, gunslinger in the Ka-Tet of Nineteen.
"They're hairs. I also spy some blood."
"Ah, yes," Nigel said. "Rats in the kitchen, mum. I'm programmed to dispose of vermin when I detect them. There are a great many these days, I'm sorry to say; the world is moving on." And then, snapping his head violently to the left: "Un-deuxtrois!
Minnie Mouse est la mouse pour moi!n
"Um... did you kill Minnie and Mickey before or after you made the sandwiches, Nige old buddy?" Eddie asked.
"After, sai, I assure you."
"Well, I might pass, anyway," Eddie said. "I had a poorboy back in Maine, and it's sticking to my ribs like a motherfucker."
"You should say un, deux, trois," Susannah told him. The words were out before she knew she was going to say them.
"Cry pardon?" Eddie was sitting with his arm around her.
Since the four of them had gotten back together, he touched Susannah at every opportunity, as if needing to confirm the fact that she was more than just wishful thinking.
"Nothing." Later, when Nigel was either out of the room or completely broken down, she'd tell him her intuition. She thought that robots of Nigel and Andy's type, like those in the Isaac Asimov stories she'd read as a teenager, weren't supposed to lie. Perhaps Andy had either been modified or had modified himself so that wasn't a problem. With Nigel, she thought it was a problem, indeed: can ya say problem big-big. She had an idea that, unlike Andy, Nigel was essentially goodhearted, but yes-he'd either lied or gilded the truth about the rats in the larder.
Maybe about other things, as well. Ein, zwei, drei and Un, deux, trois was his method of letting off the pressure. For awhile, anyway.
It's Mordred, she thought, looking around. She took a sandwich because she had to eat-like Jake, she was ravenous-but her appetite was gone and she knew she'd take no enjoyment from what she plugged grimly down her throat. He's been at Nigel, and now he's watching us somewhere. I know it-I feel it.
And, as she took her first bite of some long-preserved, vacuum-packed mystery-meat:
A mother always knows.
THREE
None of them wanted to sleep in the Extraction Room 1 (although they would have had their pick of three hundred or more freshly made beds) nor in the deserted town outside, so Nigel took them to his quarters, pausing every now and then for a vicious head-clearing shake and to count off in either German or French. To this he began adding numbers in some other language none of them knew.
Their way led them through a kitchen-all stainless steel and smoothly humming machines, quite different from the ancient cookhouse Susannah had visited todash beneath Castle Discordia-and although they saw the moderate clutter of the meal Nigel had prepared them, there was no sign of rats, living or dead. None of them commented on this.
Susannah's sense of being observed came and went.