Mike Resnick - Robots Dont Cry

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Robots Don't Cry

MikeResnick

They call usgraverobbers , but we’re not.

What we do is plunder the past and offer it to the present. We hit old worlds, deserted worlds, worlds

that nobody wants any longer, and we pick up anything we think we can sell to the vast collectibles

market. You want a seven-hundred-year-old timepiece?A thousand-year-old bed?An actual printed

book? Just put in your order, and sooner or later we’ll fill it.

Every now and then we strike it rich. Usually we make a profit. Once in a while we just break even.

There’s only been one world where we actually lost money; I still remember it–Greenwillow. Except that

it wasn’t green, and there wasn’t a willow on the whole damned planet.

There was a robot, though. We found him, me and theBaroni , in a barn, half-hidden under a pile of

ancient computer parts and self-feeders for mutated cattle.

We were picking through the stuff, wondering if there was any market for it, tossing most of it aside,

when the sun peeked in through the doorway and glinted off a prismatic eye.

"Hey, take a look at what we’ve got here," I said. "Give me a hand digging it out."

The junk had been stored a few feet above where he’d been standing and the rack broke, practically

burying him. One of his legs was bent at an impossible angle, and his expressionless face was covered

with cobwebs. TheBaroni lumbered over–when you’ve got three legs you don’t glide gracefully–and

studied the robot.

"Interesting," he said. He never used whole sentences when he could annoy me with a single word that

could mean almost anything.

"He should pay our expenses, once we fix him up and get him running," I said.

"A human configuration," noted theBaroni .

"Yeah, we still made ’emin our own image until a couple of hundred years ago."

"Impractical."

"Spare me your practicalities," I said. "Let’s dig him out."

"Why bother?"

Trust aBaroni to miss the obvious. "Because he’s got a memory cube," I answered. "Who the hell knows

what he’s seen? Maybe we’ll find out what happened here."

"Greenwillowhas been abandoned since long before you were born and I was hatched," replied the

Baroni , finally stringing some words together. "Who cares what happened?"

"I know it makes your head hurt, but try to use your brain," I said, grunting as I pulled at the robot’s

arm. It came off in my hands. "Maybe whoever he worked for hid some valuables." I dropped the arm

onto the floor. "Maybe he knows where. We don’t just have to sell junk, you know; there’s a market for

the good stuff too."

TheBaroni shrugged and began helping me uncover the robot. "I hear a lot of ifs and maybes," he

muttered.

"Fine," I said. "Just sit on what passes for your ass, and I’ll do it myself."

"And let you keep what we find without sharing it?" he demanded, suddenly throwing himself into the

task of moving the awkward feeders. After a moment he stopped and studied one. "Big cows," he noted.

"Maybe ten or twelve feet at the shoulder, judging from the size of the stalls and the height of the

feeders," I agreed. "But there weren’t enough to fill the barn. Some of those stalls were never used."

Finally we got the robot uncovered, and I checked the code on the back of his neck.

"How about that?"I said. "The son of a bitch must be five hundred years old. That makes him an antique

by anyone’s definition. I wonder what we can get forhim? "

TheBaroni peered at the code. "What does AB stand for?"

"Aldebaran.Alabama.Abrams’ Planet.Or maybe just the model number. Who the hell knows? We’ll get

him running and maybe he can tell us." I tried to set him on his feet. No luck. "Give me a hand."

"To the ship?" asked theBaroni , using sentence fragments again as he helped me stand the robot upright.

"No," I said. "We don’t need a sterile environment to work on a robot. Let’s just get him out in the

sunlight, away from all this junk, and then we’ll have a couple ofmechs check him over."

We half-carried and half-dragged him to the crumbling concrete pad beyond the barn, then laid him

down while I tightened the muscles in my neck, activating the embedded micro-chip, and directed the

signal by pointing to the ship, which was about half a mile away.

"This is me," I said as the chip carried my voice back to the ship’s computer. "Wake upMechs Three

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Mike Resnick - Robots Dont Cry

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