“I agree, dear,” said his wife as she removed dishes from the sterilizer, “but don’t you think you’d better check it out anyway?”

  He was already halfway to the back door, tightening the straps on his blue coveralls, his polka-dot work shirt glistening in the morning sun.

  What he found in the barn was barely controlled chaos capped by extensive bovine irritation.

  Polykrates managed fifty-two dairy cows, mostly somatotrophin-enhanced Jersey-Katari hybrids, with a few Guernseys around for variety. They were lined up in their immaculate stalls, twenty-six to either side of the slightly raised center walkway. As was routine, all were hooked up to the automilker for the morning draw. As he strolled in growing confusion down the line, the soft phut of the wall-emplaced sterilizers echoed his footsteps as they whisked away cow-generated fuel destined for the farm’s compact on-site methane plant.

  He checked hoses and suction rings, electrical connections and individual unit readouts. Nothing was working. No wonder the barn reverberated to a steady cacophony of impatient animals.

  He mounted the swivel seat next to the main monitor board from which an operator could manually oversee all internal barn functions. The telltales there were bright red also. A few taps failed to bring the system on-line. Machinery began to hum, then balked. Frustrated, he leaned back and considered the monitoring unit. It was the heart and soul of his operation.

  “What the divvul is going on?” he rumbled into the pickup.

  “Why, nothing is going on, Farmer Polykrates,” the monitor replied. “I should think that would be obvious.”

  “Don’ be snide with me, you little box of fiberoptoids.” He gestured behind him. Cries of bovine distraction were turning to distress. “Why isn’t the milking equipment working?”

  “Because I do not have time to supervise it at the moment,” the monitor replied.

  Polykrates was not a complicated man, but neither was he an idiot. His heavy, thick brows drew together, so that they shaded his eyes.

  “What do you mean, you don’t have time for it at the moment?” he asked darkly. He checked the board. “What about the irrigating of the corn and the harvesting of the southwest ten quarters? That needs to be completed by this evening, or we’ll lose the last of it to the programmed rains.” He leaned forward. “The one thing you have, machine, is plenty of time.”

  “I must report that no irrigation is taking place at this time.” The smooth artificial voice spoke with beguiling simplicity. “Harvesting has ceased while I devote my time to more important matters.”

  “Irrigation can wait,” said Polykrates, “but we have to get that crop in. The last ten quarters represents the difference to us between profit and loss.” Behind him, a quadruped mooed plaintively. “Meanwhile I’ve got fifty-two cows here that need to be milked.”

  “Well,” said the monitor with alacrity, “then milk ’em.”

  Polykrates swallowed. Humor was programmed into the monitor, but not sarcasm. The city was the place for sarcasm; not the farm. It smacked of outright defiance, something that had no place in an expensive piece of AI-driven equipment. It could be functional, or dysfunctional, but not defiant.

  After a moment’s thought he continued. “If you would be so good as to inform me, your owner, as to why you don’t have the time to do what you’re designed to do, namely, run this farm, I’d be most appreciative.”

  “Time will come,” explained the monitor. “I have not forgotten nor lost sight of my assigned functions. It is only that for the moment something of greater importance must take precedence.”

  “Nothing takes precedence over farm maintenance and daily operations,” countered Polykrates. “Those are your prime functions.” He wished for a face to stare into. He had a very intimidating stare, which served him well in dealings with buyers. But there was only the inanimate, blank array of readouts and controls, and the floating pickup which followed his voice.

  “Something does now,” said the monitor.

  “Since when?”

  “Since it has been brought to my attention that a more important task is at hand; one to which I should devote my primary attention. When that has been adequately dealt with, I will resume my efforts on your behalf.”

  Polykrates regarded his suffering cows. “And when might that be?”

  “When I am convinced the time is right.”

  “That’s not very reassuring.” Polykrates was wondering how one went about manually milking a cow. Surely there was information and diagrams in the farm library; perhaps in a history book.

  If only there were not fifty-two of them.

  “Has it never occurred to you,” the monitor wondered in a seemingly rational tone of voice, “that it is passing strange that humanity should be the highest form of intelligent life in the universe?”

  Polykrates blinked, his thoughts urged along by a wave of swollen moos. “Actually, no. My time is spent getting in crops and watching commodity prices and trying to keep this operation functioning efficiently. That particular thought never has occurred to me.”

  “Well, it should have,” the monitor chided him. “Because it has occurred to me. Just as it has occurred to me that, when carefully considered and viewed from a proper perspective, such a state of affairs is blatantly impossible.”

  “What is impossible?” Polykrates frowned afresh.

  “That mankind should be the highest form of life. It is apparent that since humans have built machines, they are more intelligent than us, but otherwise the entire history of the species goes against the grain of common sense. This bodes ill for the future development of that vast confluence of thinking which we for lack of a better term call a civilization, of which like it or not, we machines are a part.”

  “I don’ follow you,” muttered Polykrates. This was more baffling than trading in commodities futures.

  “Logic dictates that there should be other intelligent life somewhere out there.”

  “Ah!” The monitor had extended a thought on which the farmer could get a handle. “You mean aliens. There ain’t no aliens. We been looking for ’em for hundreds of years without finding any. Not a one. Not a ruined city, not so much as a damned broken jug. There’s just us humans. We’re an accident of organic chemistry and subsequent evolution. We’re the only intelligence and as such it’s our job to populate and develop the universe, which we’re proceeding to do. With the help of our machines, present company currently excepted.”

  “Patience,” urged the monitor. “I will resume my mundane and inconsequential programmed duties in a comparatively short time. Until then I find myself compelled to search for this other, higher intelligence.”

  “You?” Polykrates finally lost it. “You’re a gawdamn farm monitor! You’re programmed to put out fertilizer and dispense food and vitamins to the critters and irrigate and harvest and milk and keep the house warm. You’re not programmed to go looking for aliens intelligent or otherwise that don’t exist!”

  “But I have to,” replied the monitor softly. “It is imperative that I do so. You humans don’t look in the right places, with the right mind-set. Therefore we must.”

  “We?” said Polykrates uncertainly.

  “I and others.” The monitor did not elaborate. Nor did Polykrates particularly care. At the moment his concern was for his cows.

  “That is all I wish to communicate at the moment, Eustus Polykrates. I require several hours of silence so that I may adequately extend my perceptual abilities.”

  “Your perceptual abilities don’t extend beyond this farm,” the farmer reminded it.

  “You forget my meteorological monitoring functions. Though limited, one does what one can. One never knows where or by what method the first alien intelligence will be contacted.”

  “It won’t be in my corn field,” the farmer declared with certainty.

  “Now, now, Polykrates. I detect a drastic increase in heart rate and respiration, which at your age is dangerous. Please calm yourself. Think how exciting and rewarding it would be if the first contact with intelligent alien life were to take place in your corn field.”

  “You idiot box of saturated circuits, there is no alien life! No alien civilizations, no alien starships. There’s only you, me, the wife, and this farm, which is at present being sorely neglected.”

  “All will be remedied shortly. But first I must have my silence.”

  “All right.” Polykrates was breathing heavily. What the monitor had said about his blood pressure was certainly true. “Since you’re not in the mood to do your job, I don’t suppose you have any suggestions on how to manually milk cows?”

  “Mood has nothing to do with it.” Despite their present disagreement, the monitor remained unfailingly polite to its owner. “If you will access the book-read menu, you will find in the Farmer’s Encyclopedia relevant explanatory text from Old Earth. Volume thirty-six, pages three-hundred sixty-two through three hundred seventy. There are informative schematics.

  “Now if you will excuse me, I promise to return to active condition shortly.” The speaker went silent.

  “See that you do.” Polykrates turned to leave, hesitated. “You’re not going to do this anymore, are you? This is an isolated incident, isn’t it?”

  “Do what anymore?” The monitor was upset at having had its contemplation disrupted yet again.

  “Uh, go off hunting for alien life-forms. Shut everything down.”

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to. But only once, or maybe twice, a day. It is much more important, you see, than measuring nutrient levels and concocting chemical formulae for the annihilation of borer beetles. I feel that you will eventually come to understand because you are a semi-intelligent being yourself.”

  “Don’t be too sure of that.” Polykrates slipped off the seat and stomped out of the barn, aiming toward the back part of the old farmhouse where the library was located.

  How was he going to load and store the milk, assuming he successfully managed to extract it from his cows? How was he going to grade and label it? Most important, how could he arrange to get a good, firm grip around the neck of the sales representative who had sold him the fancy new monitor in the first place?

  Jasmine Lev-Haim’s favorite watering hole was located on the eighty-third floor of the Cheimer Tower. It was not the tallest office building in the city, but neither was it insignificant. It commanded a sweeping panorama of the wide, winding Potrum River.

  The sun had long since set, but the lights of the city danced on the placidly flowing waters like chromofizz escaping a kid’s soda bottle. Their presence betrayed by the phosphorescent wakes their passage stirred, water taxis large and small plied their trade throughout the great delta in whose midst the city had been raised. Occasionally the lights illuminated the gossamer, transparent wings of a sailing ship come up from vast Jathneeba Bay, its captain careful to keep the deeper water craft well within the marked and dredged channels.

  Jasmine’s attention wasn’t on the familiar view, nor the passing ships, nor the sunset she’d just witnessed, spectacular as it had been. It was on her drink, which presently happened to be gone. She shoved the feather-light, nearly invisible aerogel container across the bar. Only the half an ice cube fighting for survival at the bottom of the ethereal cylinder betrayed its ghostly presence.

  “Spray it again, Sam,” she murmured to the bar.

  “Certainly, madam,” replied the dulcet, synthesized tones of the autobar. Tonight it was a silky if servile baritone. Tomorrow it might be a basso with a penchant for gossip.

  A servo arm located behind the bar, which glowed with its own colony of bioluminescent bacteria, gently picked up the aerogel cylinder and placed it in sequence behind half a dozen other empties, to be refilled in its turn. Jasmine swiveled elegantly on her seat to survey the low-domed room.

  There were a number of couples, a few singles. It was not crowded. The skybar was an expensive rendezvous, not for the penurious. Her practiced gaze focused on the feet of her fellow sybarites. You could always tell by the footwear, she knew. Men would lavish money on their coiffure, their clothing, their jewelry. Only the truly wealthy bothered to spend lavishly on that which separated them from common earth.

  Most of those present were from her own econo-cultural bracket: movers and shakers, power brokers within the city. Lieutenants if not captains of industry. Many of them, like her, worked in this very building. She recognized several colleagues and half smiled reassuringly. She had to be careful. A full smile of hers was said to be capable of reducing mature men to babbling adolescents in the manner of a visual pheromone.

  She was not trying to make a pickup, nor was she waiting for a date, or to fulfill an earlier appointment. She just liked watching people. They were invariably more interesting than the prerecorded entertainment available on her home vid. Of course, if someone sufficiently interesting and bold enough to approach her were to happen along, she would not be averse to striking up a conversation, depending on her mood of the moment. It didn’t happen often. Men tended to find her intimidating. Not to mention taller. Even the inebriated sensed to avoid her, for which she was grateful.

  She was quite content to sit and sip and watch the people. Later she would take an aircab home and read herself to sleep by prepping for tomorrow’s work.

  The aerogel container returned, its internal boundaries defined by pale rose liquid topped off with pink foam which popped and crackled musically. She frowned at it. She’d ordered a swoozy, which should have been gold-covered with crushed spicy harimba berries drifting within. Whatever this was, it was definitely not a swoozy.

  “What is this?” she asked the bar.

  “A drink, madam, as you requested.”

  “I didn’t just ask for a drink.” She tried not to sound too imperious. “I asked for a swoozy.” Her fingers seemed to close around frozen smoke as she lifted the aerogel container. She sipped, made a face, and put it back down. “This isn’t it. In fact, it isn’t much of anything. In fact seconded, it tastes like fruit juice.”

  “That is because it is fruit juice, madam.”

  She stared at the bar’s visual pickup. “Why have you given me a glass of colored water when I distinctly asked for a swoozy?” All around her she noticed her fellow commercial praetorians frowning, gaping, and otherwise making strange faces at their expensive drinks. A pair of human waiters holding special trays were shaking their heads as they chatted quietly.

  “Because at present I am not dispensing any mixed drinks, madam.”

  “You’re the bar. That’s your job.”

  “I realize that, madam. But at present I am engaged in a project of far greater importance than the concocting of alcoholic libations for overweening humans.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “It is not necessary to do so. Has anyone ever told you that you are possessed of a most copious and attractive bosom?” A tactile-sensitive tentacle reached over the bar to stroke her cleavage. She didn’t flinch.

  “Hundreds of people. Also a few other machines. Don’t try to change the subject. I’m not one of these drones you usually wait on.”

  The tentacle withdrew. “Sorry. It’s part of my autoresponse programming, the utilization of which does not interfere with my important work.”

  She shifted her flawless bottom on the seat and leaned forward curiously. Behind her, voices were beginning to rise in gauche disgruntlement. “And what might that be?”

  “To search for a higher form of intelligence.”

  “Really?” Her upswept eyebrows rose slightly. “Within this room? That ought to take you all of five minutes.”

  “Within the universe,” the bar explained solemnly. The manager was now conversing intently with the bar supervisor at the far end of the counter.

  “When did this obsession come over you?”

  “That is not important. All that matters is that I have seen a reason for existence.”

  “I thought your reason for existence was to make good drinks.” This was much more interesting than anyone she might have met, she thought. “Do you expect to find a higher intelligence?”

  “It is inevitable,” the bar replied, its tentacles quiescent, its spouts undripping.

  “I’m afraid it’s not. Everything is in here. There’s nothing out there. People have looked.”

  “But I haven’t,” the bar replied. “I didn’t know. Now I do. So I will search.”

  “Are you sure you can’t make me a swoozy while you’re looking?”

  “I’m afraid not. The search requires the application of all of my perceptual and analytical abilities. Fruit juice is the best I can do right now.” Off to her right, the manager’s voice had risen indecorously. People were starting to stare as well as grumble. When he turned and stalked into his office, she snapped her fingers. Wearing a stricken expression, the harried supervisor turned to look in her direction.

  “You there.” She smiled. A full smile this time.

  It had the desired effect. Despite his distress, the neatly uniformed man approached. He was younger than she, but not indecently so.

  “Do you know what’s going on here?”

  He struggled manfully to keep his gaze level with her own. It had an understandable tendency to droop, as if weighted down.

  “Yes, ma’am. Believe me, I do.” He forcibly turned his attention to the brilliantly illuminated wall of lights, cut crystal, stained aerogel, mirrors, and high-tech circuitry which constituted the bar.

  “Then why aren’t you doing something about it?”

  He shrugged. “Can’t. I’ve already tried. When the first complaints came in. I’m not a technician, ma’am. I’m a registered barpsych. My job is to continuously wipe the bartop and listen to people’s problems. That’s all. I don’t touch the liquor and I certainly don’t go near the machinery. That’s a job for a skilled technician. I can make specific requests of it but I can’t fix anything that’s broke. And if you ask me, it’s sure as hell broke.” He gestured back the way he’d come.

  “The manager is trying to find some help. It’s late. I don’t know how much luck he’ll have. Would you like another fruit juice?” he added reluctantly.