Mansfield tilts his head, wondering. “Tell me about this Noemi Vidal. What she’s like?”
How can he describe her? Abel sits down on the richly patterned Turkish rug to consider. The only sounds are the ticking of the grandfather clock and the pop and crackle of the nearby fire, which is close enough to share its light. “She’s… brave. That’s the first thing I knew about her. She’s also resourceful, smart, but she has a terrible temper sometimes. She can be impatient, and she’ll laugh at you if she thinks you’re too proud. She always thinks I’m too proud. But after a while I didn’t mind her laughing. By then she knew what I could do and—and she respected me. Once I knew she respected me, that made it all right for her to laugh. Is that customary?”
Mansfield shrugs in the way Abel knows means continue.
So he does. “It’s important to me that Noemi be safe, even now that she’s no longer my commander and my programming doesn’t require continued loyalty. I preferred to be with her, or at least near her, to being alone. For some reason I often think about her hair, which is unremarkable by any objective standard but seems to suit her extraordinarily well. I want to know what she thinks, and to tell her everything that’s happened to me, and I—” He breaks off when Mansfield begins to chuckle. Frowning, Abel says, “I didn’t mean to be humorous.”
“I know, I know. I’m laughing because I’m delighted.” Mansfield’s hand pets Abel on the shoulder. “You’ve fallen in love, my boy. I made a mech capable of falling in love.”
Abel’s astonishment is so great it takes him nearly three-quarters of a second to restore normal conversation. “I have? This—this feeling—this is love?”
“Or something very like it.” Mansfield sits back, weary from even these small exertions, but still smiling. “A bit of a complication, but I daresay it can be worked around.”
Leaning against the sofa, Abel allows himself to consider some of his memories of Noemi in this light. Did any one event awaken this feeling? He can’t choose just one. But some of his stranger behaviors the past few days—the way he would touch Noemi’s hair, or the wrenching wrongness of seeing her so sick in the hospital—only now does he grasp the explanation.
He’s not broken at all. Instead he’s better than he’s ever been. More human.
Mansfield coughs once, then again, and suddenly it’s as if he’s overtaken. His entire body shakes with each wheeze. The Tare model hurries forward again, this time with an oxygen-enriched mask. She cups it over Mansfield’s face for the few seconds it takes him to start breathing normally again.
Finally Mansfield waves her off, leaning back on the sofa once more. “As you can see, I haven’t been enjoying myself as much as you have, my boy.”
Exciting though the past several days with Noemi have been, Abel thinks they shouldn’t outweigh the previous three decades of loneliness, during which he was not, in any sense, enjoying himself. But he understands that this is only a conversational segue, clumsy but irrelevant. “Are you well?”
“I’m old, Abel. Older than I have any right to be.” His rheumy eyes close. “But I couldn’t go, could I? Not while you were still lost out there. I’ve been holding on. Waiting, hoping. All this time, I waited for you.”
Abel takes Mansfield’s hands, a spontaneous kind of affection he’s never shown before. “I waited for you, too.”
“And now you’re home.” When Mansfield opens his eyes again, he seems to have regained his focus. “Give me your arm, Abel. Let’s go outside.”
Mansfield leans on Abel’s arm, and together they make their way outside, into the gardens Abel remembers so well. But he doesn’t remember them like this. None of the flowers are in bloom; although it’s still early in Earth’s spring, at least a few should have blossomed by now. Instead leaves droop and vines wither. Green still dominates brown, but not by much. Even the lavender is gone. Abel always loved the scent of the lavender, the way the breeze would carry it around—
“Sad, isn’t it?” Mansfield says, shaking his head. “We can’t even buy beauty any longer. Can’t even work for it. Sometimes I think Earth has no more to give.”
Touched, Abel pats Mansfield’s hand, which tightens on his arm. They share a sad smile. “Where will you go?” Abel says. “After Earth.” It seems possible—probable—that Mansfield won’t live long enough to be faced with this challenge. However, pointing out his creator’s imminent death seems unkind.
Mansfield doesn’t acknowledge his frailty either. “I expect to have plenty of options. Come on, let’s take a look at the workshop.”
Downstairs, in the basement of the geodesic dome, is Mansfield’s workshop—an old-fashioned word for a highly sophisticated laboratory, but it fits. The walls are brick, not polymer; the tables are wood, not plastic. When Abel, brand-new, first passed the initial tests of sapience, Mansfield celebrated by having the windows replaced with stained glass, so much like his treasured Tiffany lamps. The boards of the plank floor have been worn down by decades of footsteps, tracing pale, scuffed pathways between the main computer terminal and the tanks.
Many more tanks, Abel sees, than there were before.
The long tanks now stretch along the entire basement perimeter, six on each side. Within the swirling pink goo are the indistinct outlines of mechs growing toward their point of activation. Some are very nearly complete—a foot bobs against the glass, revealing five perfect toes—but others are still nebulous, hardly more than an opaque blob congealing around the artificial frame.
Mass manufacture takes place elsewhere. The workshop has always been reserved for research projects, for the mechs Mansfield considers special. Abel woke up here.
“What are you working on?” he says. “New models?”
“Potentially. People have been asking for child-size mechs. Harder to freeze the organic components short of full maturity—but maybe not impossible. At any rate, I intend to try.” Mansfield sighs. “Better to wear out than to rust out, my boy.”
“Of course, Father.” Abel has always considered that an odd phrase for humans to have come up with, but it applies very well to him.
“I had these tanks put in within weeks of losing the Daedalus.” Mansfield totters to the easy chair set up before the broadest desk. “Spent decades trying to re-create the greatest accomplishment of my career, and failed every time.”
Abel knows what Noemi would think of his next question, but he has to ask. “Are you saying that you attempted to re-create… me?”