“Perry Gibbons,” Lester said, and drew in a breath. “Perry Gibbons is the sharpest entrepreneur I’ve ever met. He can’t help but make businesses. He’s an artist who anticipates the market a year ahead of the curve. He could be a rich man a hundred times over if he chose. Commie? Page, you’re not fit to keep his books.”
The line went quiet, the eerie silence of a net-connection with no packets routing on it. “Goodbye, Lester,” Sammy said at length.
Lester wanted to apologize. He wanted not to want to apologize. He swallowed the apology and disconnected the line.
When it was time for bed, Suzanne shut her lid and put the computer down beside the sofa. She stepped carefully around the pieces of the Calvinball game that still covered the living room floor and stepped into a pair of slippers. She slid open the back door and hit the switch for the yard’s flood-light. The last thing she wanted to do was trip into the pool.
She picked her way carefully down the flagstones that led to the workshop, where the lights burned merrily in the night. There was no moon tonight, and the stars were laid out like a bag of synthetic diamonds arrayed on a piece of black velour in a street market stall.
She peered through the window before she went around to the door, the journalist in her wanting to fix an image of the moment in her mind before she moved in and disturbed it. That was the problem with being a reporter—everything changed the instant you started reporting on it. By now, there wasn’t a person alive who didn’t know what it means to be in the presence of a reporter. She was a roving Panopticon.
The scene inside the workshop was eerie. Perry and Lester stood next to each other, cheek by jowl, hunched over something on the workbench. Perry had a computer open in front of him, and he was typing, Lester holding something out of sight.
How many times had she seen this tableau? How many afternoons had she spent in the workshop in Florida, watching them hack a robot, build a sculpture, turn out the latest toy for Tjan’s amusement, Kettlewell’s enrichment? The postures were identical—though their bodies had changed, the hair thinner and grayer. Like someone had frozen one of those innocent moments in time for a decade, then retouched it with wizening makeup and hair-dye.
She must have made a noise, because Lester looked up—or maybe it was just the uncanny, semi-psychic bond between an old married couple. He grinned at her like he was ten years old and she grinned back and went around to the door.
“Hello, boys,” she said. They straightened up, both of them unconsciously cradling their low backs, and she suppressed a grin. My little boys, all grown up.
“Darling!” Lester said. “Come here, have a look!”
He put his arm over her shoulders and walked her to the bench, leaning on her a little.
It was in pieces, but she could see where it was going: a pair of familiar boxy shapes, two of Lester’s mechanical computers, their cola-can registers spilling away in a long daisy-chain of worm-gears and rotating shafts. One figure was big and round-shouldered like a vintage refrigerator. The other was cockeyed, half its gears set higher than the other half. Each had a single, stark mechanical arm extended before it, and at the end of each arm was a familiar cracked and fragrant baseball glove.
Lester put a ball into one of the gloves and Perry hammered away at the keyboard. Very, very slowly, the slope-shouldered robot drew its mechanical arm back—“We used one of the open-source prosthestic plans,” Lester whispered in the tense moment. Then it lobbed a soft underhand toss to the lopsided one.
The ball arced through the air and the other bot repositioned its arm in a series of clattering jerks. It seemed to Suzanne that the ball would miss the glove and bounce off of the robot’s carapace, and she winced. Then, at the very last second, the robot repositioned its arm with one more fast jerk, and the ball fell into the pocket.
A moment later, the lopsided bot—Perry, it was Perry, that was easy to see—tossed the ball to the round-shouldered one, who was clearly her Lester, as she’d first known him. Lester-bot caught the ball with a similar series of jerks and returned the volley.
It was magic to watch the robots play their game of catch. Suzanne was mesmerized, mouth open. Lester squeezed her shoulder with uncontained excitement.
The Lester-bot lobbed one to Perry-bot, but Perry-bot flubbed the toss. The ball made a resounding gong sound as it bounced off of Perry-bot’s carapace, and Perry-bot wobbled.
Suzanne winced, but Lester and Perry both dissolved in gales of laughter. She watched the Perry-bot try to get itself re-oriented, aligning its torso to face Lester-bot and she saw that it was funny, very funny, like a particularly great cartoon.
“They do that on purpose?”
“Not exactly—but there’s no way they’re going to be perfect, so we built in a bunch of stuff that would make it funnier when it happened. It is now officially a feature, not a bug.” Perry glowed with pride.
“Isn’t it bad for them to get beaned with a baseball?” she asked as Lester carefully handed the ball to Perry-bot, who lobbed it to Lester-bot again.
“Well, yeah. But it’s kind of an artistic statement,” Perry said, looking away from them both. “About the way that friendships always wear you down, like upper and lower molars grinding away at each other.”
Lester squeezed her again. “Over time, they’ll knock each other apart.”
Tears pricked at Suzanne’s eyes. She blinked them away. “Guys, this is great.” Her voice cracked, but she didn’t care. Lester squeezed her tighter.
“Come to bed soon, hon,” she said to Lester. “I’m going away again tomorrow afternoon—New York, a restaurant opening.”
“I’ll be right up,” Lester said, and kissed the top of her head. She’d forgotten that he was that tall. He didn’t stand all the way up.
She went to bed, but she couldn’t sleep. She crossed to the window and drew back the curtain and looked out at the backyard—the scummy swimming pool she kept forgetting to do something about, the heavy grapefruit and lemon trees, the shed. Perry stood on the shed’s stoop, looking up at the night sky. She pulled the curtains around herself an instant before he looked up at her.
Their eyes met and he nodded slowly.
“Thank you,” she mouthed silently.
He blew her a kiss, stuck out a foot, and then bowed slightly over his outstretched leg.
She let the curtain fall back into place and went back to bed. Lester climbed into bed with her a few minutes later and spooned up against her back, his face buried in her neck.
She fell asleep almost instantly.
Thanks to Andrew Leonard and Salon for publishing this when it was Themepunks.
Thanks to Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Irene Gallo, Pablo Defendini, Justin Golenbock, Liz Gorinksy, Tom Doherty and the many wonderful people at Tor for their good work putting this book into the world.
Likewise thanks to Sarah Hodgson, Alice Moss and Victoria Barnsley at HarperCollins for making this book happen in the UK.
Thanks to my agents, Russell Galen, Danny Baror and Justin Manask.
Thanks to my mother, Dr Roslyn Doctorow, who remains the sharpest proofer in the business.
Thanks to my business partners at Boing Boing, the staff of MAKE: Magazine, and to all the makers who let me hold their skateboards while they welded the killer robots.
And thanks, of course, to Alice and Poesy, who are the reason for all of it.