Governor Grieg was leading a revolution from above, and a lot of people didn’t like it. Revolutions made for complicated politics, caused fortunes to be made and lost, changed friends to enemies, enemies to friends. Shared assumptions turned into points of controversy during the night. The invaluable turned worthless, and what had been common became rare-and priceless. New ways of making a living, new ways of committing a crime, suddenly sprang up-and often it was hard to tell one from the other.
But none of that concerned Kresh. Not directly. Not tonight. What did bother him was another fact about revolutions: it was exceedingly rare for the people who began them to survive to their conclusions. Even a successful revolution often killed off its leadership.
Kresh did not even agree with most of what the Governor was trying to do. But it wasn’t his job to agree. His job was to maintain stability and public safety. Protecting the person of the Governor was part of that job. But in the capital city of Hades, Kresh had the power and capabilities, the resources, to protect the Governor effectively. Not here on the island of Purgatory. Here no one knew who was in control, who was in charge of what patch of turf at the moment.
Alvar removed his gun belt, hung it over the back of a chair, and sat down on the edge of the bed. He pulled off his boots, loosened the rather severe collar of his dress tunic, and flopped back on the bed, exhausted, glad to be alone.
Alone. Back before the Caliban crisis, it was unlikely that Kresh had ever in his life spent more than an hour at a time after him, fussing over him, attending to his every need and wish, including some wishes he had never needed to ask for-or, in fact, truly desired.
But solitude. That was something a robot could never give you, except by giving you nothing. Alone, without the slightest thought of how anyone-or anything-might react to your behavior. No need whatsoever to look over your shoulder, no sense at all of a robot worrying endlessly over your safety, no concern that some look or gesture or muttered word might be interpreted as an implied order. No moment when it was easier to cooperate with the wishes of a bothersome servant, rather than argue or negotiate past whatever imagined fear or perceived order the robot was determined to deal with. Grieg had had a point, talking to Donald about the tyranny of the servant.
Back in the old days, Kresh never could have allowed himself the luxury of collapsing in a heap at the end of a long day. The luxury of being alone, without the need to worry what anyone-flesh and blood, or metal and plastic-might think. Even in front of Donald, there had been a certain sense of reserve, of caution.
Alvar Kresh was proud of being Sheriff, and he took the office and his duties very seriously. He had definite opinions about the way a Sheriff should behave, and he was determined to live up to that standard. Part of it was an act, and he knew that. Theatrics were part of being a leader, even in front of the robots.
In the days when Donald had dressed him and undressed him, Kresh had not given the matter a conscious thought. Now he often thought about it. What was it Grieg had said? Something about modifying his own behavior to keep his robots happy. When the robots managed your every action, when they chose your clothes and your meals and your schedule for the day, and you developed the habit of accepting their choices, who was the master and who the servant?
Before Caliban’s advent had turned so much upside-down, Alvar always knew that if he had collapsed back into bed with his clothes still on and his teeth unbrushed and so on, Donald would have seen it and started to fuss. He would have cajoled him one way or the other to get up and take care of himself, get to bed properly rather than risk dozing off in his clothes without bathing first. And so Alvar had never done it, conceding the battle before it had even been fought.
So there was a certain pleasure, yes, a certain luxury, in being alone, in permitting himself a moment or two of relaxation without a robot fussing about, worrying that it might be harmful to his health if he accidentally dozed off in his clothes.
Luxury. What a strange idea that not having robots around could be considered a luxury.
Did Simcor Beddle fear that all the people who had been deprived of their robots would discover the absence of robots to be pleasant? Even if you granted the implausible assumption that Beddle was sincerely concerned with anything beside power, that was a silly idea. No one had been deprived of all their robots. Certainly twenty per household was far more than enough. Kresh only had five back home, aside from Donald. Maybe Beddle feared that people would make the simple discovery that it didn’t take fifty robots to care for one person, that most robots spent their time doing little more than getting in each other’s way, making work for themselves.
