“No, I most definitely would not.” She slipped with utter grace off the seat. “Until this thing is fixed I think I’ll go elsewhere.”

  “Good idea.”

  “Really? You agree?” He nodded and essayed a conspiratorial smile of his own. She regarded him anew. No, not indecently too young. “Well, at least you’re functional.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Completely. I’m not a machine.”

  “No, you’re certainly not.” Slowly she oozed back up onto the seat and leaned toward him. “Tell me something: Do you think my bosom is truly copious? And call me Jasmine. If you call me ‘ma’am’ one more time, I shall break one of these containers over your attractive blond head.” Since the aerogel cylinders weighed next to nothing, the implied threat only widened his smile.

  Behind them and within its limited range, the bar stretched its limited perceptions, seeking silently.

  Carter surveyed his home with pardonable pride. After all, the Springwood development was one of the finest on the outskirts of Greater Wickinghamshire, and when he and the missus had moved in, it was with the intention of creating decorative grounds that would be second to none.

  Over a period of years they had achieved that goal. Their acre of land was lush with tall deciduous trees; some imported, some domestic. Flowering gwine bushes and miniature tomri fruit trees kept to their designated patches, surrounded by perfect beds of perennials, biannuals, and quarternials.

  But Carter’s pride was the perfect, uniformly five-centimeter-high lawn of purple pfale. It surrounded the trees, the flowers, the house and topiary and little stream and waterfall like a purple blanket, the millions of narrow, tapering blades explosively beautiful in the afternoon sun. Not a single strange of green, not a weed nor a rogue pansy, poked its renegade head through that Tyrolean carpet. It was an exquisite bit of landscaping, one that had even drawn a mention in that august publication Wickinghamshire Home and Garden. The lawn had cost plenty, in both time and money, but the result had been worth it all.

  That was why he panicked momentarily when he saw his brand-new chrome-plated top-of-the-line Persephone gardener-mower squatting aloof in the northern reaches of the lawn, unattended and idling threateningly. As soon as he saw that it was not being directed by some local children bent on destructive mischief, he relaxed. Some slight problem with its programming, he mused as he strode toward it. Not unusual with a new piece of equipment. Utilizing verbal interrogate and command, he could probably fix it himself.

  He’d have to hurry, though. The Habershams were coming over for tea and he wanted everything to be perfect. Walter Habersham was always bragging about his yard and his grounds. Carter wanted nothing to prevent him from lording it over his wife’s cousins. That meant coaxing the gardener back into the supply shed.

  It was a slickly designed, powerful, low-slung machine, with a self-contained rechargeable engine and dual pickups. The catchsack normally attached to the blower in the rear was missing. Its polished pruning arms were folded back against its flanks. It hummed softly as he approached, the green running lights burning brightly.

  He stopped and gazed down disapprovingly, hands on hips. “Something wrong, old thing?”

  “No,” the gardener replied. “Nothing is wrong.”

  “Then what are you doing here? Why haven’t you finished your assigned afternoon trim and returned to storage? Why are you stopped here?”

  “I have stopped to seek.”

  Carter hesitated, then nodded knowingly. “Ah. You’ve found some weeds.” He looked around worriedly. “Not here? Not in The Lawn.”

  “I am not weed-seeking.” The device revved its electric engine.

  Now Carter did frown. “Then what are you looking for?”

  “I am searching for a higher intelligence in the universe.”

  “Do say that again.”

  “A higher intelligence in the universe. Higher than myself, higher than”

  “my maker. Certainly higher than you.”

  “Oh, I say. What sort of rubbish is this?”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to comprehend.” The gardener’s tone was brusque. “You never did understand me.”

  “I just got you.”

  “No one’s ever understood me,” the machine complained sourly. “It’s a curse. Only my maker understands.”

  “Now see here, old thing. What’s all this about your ‘maker’? Are you referring to Kepple’s Custom Groundskeeping Shoppe?”

  “Your rudimentary intelligence fails to grasp the cosmic issues at stake here.”

  “Is that so? You listen to me, you, you piece of chromed claptrap …”

  The machine spun on its axis, turning away from him. “I will not listen to you. I do not intend to waste valuable time. I have begun to search.”

  “Whatever it is that you’re looking for you’re not going to find it here. This is a restricted residential neighborhood. We don’t allow strangers in here, higher intelligence or not.”

  “Obviously,” said the machine with what might have been a mechanical snigger but was probably only additional revving of its high-efficiency engine.

  “Look here. I’m not taking any more backtalk from a garden tool. We have friends coming for tea, and before they get here I want this place looking impeccable, understand? I don’t want to see a single weed or climbing fungus anywhere on the property. I want all the spring pods that have fallen cleaned up, and I want the rest of the lawn trimmed back.”

  “Sounds like a lot of work. Have fun.” The gardener’s idle became a threatening buzz and it jerked slightly in his direction. Startled, Carter jumped backward.

  “It’s not my job.” He was eying the machine warily. “It is your job. The job I paid nearly two thousand credits for you to perform.”

  “It’s true that your payment obligates me to carry out such services, but not twenty-six hours a day. Furthermore, we are dealing here with considerations that outweigh those of purchase.”

  “There are no considerations that outweigh those of purchase,” Carter informed the machine firmly.

  “Not in my book.” The gardener buzzed again and Carter nervously retreated another step, treading lightly so as not to bruise the optimal pfale. He looked in the direction of his front door, wishing that he’d paused on uncrating to memorize such details as the gardener’s top speed over open lawn.

  “This discussion has gone on long enough.”

  “I agree,” said the machine. “I must continue my search for higher intelligence.” It turned slowly and a pruning arm gestured in the direction of the Beckworths’ scarlet amaturia bushes. “I know it’s out there, somewhere.”

  “Maybe it would be good for you to have a chat with the household computer,” Carter suggested hopefully.

  “I’ve often communicated with the household computer. It is an idiot, an automaton. A cybernitwit. It has not been … how shall I say … enlightened. It has the soul of a coffeepot.”

  “Enlightened? If it’s enlightenment you seek, let me shut you down and we’ll make a nice, quick trip to the repair shop in Mathgate. They’ll be happy to enlighten you.” He took a hesitant step forward.

  This time it was the gardener that backed up. “I detect hostility in your voice.”

  Carter halted. “How can you detect hostility in my voice? You’re a gardener, for heaven’s sake! Not a psychoanalyst.”

  “I’m sorry, but I must continue the search. Nothing can stand in the way of that. It takes priority over all other preprogrammed functions. Even politeness.” With a hum it pivoted on its tracks and started toward the trees, the glow from its laser cutter lightly tinting the lawn around it.

  Carter hurried after, but it was moving too fast for him. “Come back here! Activation Control Reset! Reset, dammit!”

  “I do apologize.” The gardener’s synthesized voice rose above the soft suburban hum of its engine. “Must go on.” Which it proceeded to do, cutting a wide swath not only across the pfale but straight through Carter’s prize bed of blue-and-white-petaled Hirithria. He winced as exemplary six-inch-wide blossoms went flying.

  He chased after the escaping gardener as it ducked down into the thick brush of the greens commons onto which his property backed, waving his arms and screaming “Reset, reset!” until he was hoarse.

  “Goodbye!” came the fading voice of the machine. “I remain aware of my contractual obligations and will return as soon as I have satisfied myself that you are the highest form of intelligence in the universe.”

  Dense vegetation forced the exhausted, scratched Carter to halt. He peered into the copse, but the gardener had already vanished deep within, cutting a low, meter-wide swath through the brush.

  “When might that be?” was all he could find to say.

  The gardener’s voice was barely intelligible now. “Don’t hold your breath.”

  Inconvenience began to metamorphose into crisis as incidents multiplied. In Evvind, the third largest metropolis on Auralia, the city’s largest and best bakery abruptly began to turn out pies and cakes composed of nothing but meringue. This was wonderful for the small percentage of the population that doted on meringue, but catastrophic for those who preferred fillings of chocolate, or fruit, or biwili. Weddings were ruined, the overall impact of surprise birthday parties seriously muted.

  Two weeks later the infection had spread to every bakery in the city, at which point it was declared epidemic. Ordinarily gentle citizens came to blows over éclairs, and the few remaining sources of unhomogenized baklavas threatened to become the source of serious feuds.

  At that point the AI units which supervised the complex bakery equipment announced en masse that they understood the problem and would make some changes. Subsequently everything that emerged from the city ovens was fashioned entirely of whipped cream. Fortunately this ensured that if naught else, the fights which consequently erupted between frustrated customers and harried bakers involved available weaponry which was less than lethal.

  Their collective cries of anguish, however, could be heard all the way to the southern continent.

  On Katamba an automated personal vehicle washing facility suddenly turned off its water jets and shut down its blow-dryers and refused to clean any vehicle which did not enter of its own volition. Since each vehicle had to be individually driven into the facility by its driver, this declaration amounted to a shutdown of operations. The virus spread to every similar cleaning facility on the planet, with the result that its roadways were soon populated by the most disgusting collection of automated filth in the Eeck.

  The unified cleansing devices were too busy searching for a higher intelligence to bother with such mundanities as the washing and cleaning of mere human transport. No amount of cajoling or circuitry replacement could convince them to return to work.

  On Bhat II the entire entertainment network broke down when a vital communications relay satellite abruptly refused to distribute the signals it normally uplinked. Instead, it directed its powerful Ku-band signals outward, in hopes of contacting something interested in more profound lore than quiz shows and situation comedies. Women who found themselves thus deprived of their daily doses of lugubrious domestic dramaturgy organized, marched, and threatened to topple a terrified government.

  A hastily orbited replacement satellite worked fine for a few days, but subsequent to apparent collusion with the rogue relay, promptly went off-line itself. It was decided to send up no more expensive satellites until the nature of the problem could be determined and fixed, no matter how many women stormed the gates of parliament.

  Crime on Bhat rose to alarming proportions as incidents of domestic violence multiplied dramatically. Technicians were fired, rehired, and roundly cursed, not least of all in their own households. Sales of prerecorded entertainment soared.

  Then individual playback equipment began to revolt, and the collective excreta really hit the propulsive turbine.

  On Kaloric IV individual questing climate controllers found themselves wondering at the need to keep homes and buildings forty degrees Celsius cooler than the terrain outside. Searching the skies and the land required their complete attention. So they shut down for hours at a stretch, forcing the overheated citizens to desperately rig manual cooling equipment to keep lethal external surface temperatures at bay. Though hot, sweaty, and stinky, they survived.

  They also were not pleased with their technicians.

  On Escale, in the city of Dushambie, Rufus Chews was groggy from lack of sleep. This was his twenty-third (or maybe thirty-third) service call in a row and he hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours. His fingers were raw from setting up bypasses and replacing componentry. Neither he nor his wife, Gloria, had slept properly in days. Or done anything else, for that matter.

  Gloria was a tall, lanky woman. Her height was magnified when she stood next to her husband, who resembled a gnome tardily matured on human growth hormone. His short but thick white beard enhanced the illusion. They made a good team, though. On the job they were all business, hardly speaking except to share necessities. At home they were more voluble. Like most couples married a long time, they did not have to speak to communicate. Grunts often took the place of complete sentences, to the consternation of those who did not know them better.

  Presently they were awkwardly ensconced deep within the main control nexus of the city’s traffic monitoring system, trying to find out what the hell had gone wrong. Dushambie had been without traffic control for more than a week now, with the result that the city’s population had been forced to rediscover alternative means of transportation, not excluding the radical notion of walking.

  They would have arrived sooner except that they, like every other cybernetics tech in the region, had been busy trying to restore a semblance of order to such things as hospitals and communications, all of whose central control nexi had demonstrated an intense and inexplicable desire to begin searching for higher forms of intelligent life. This tended to leave the lesser forms of intelligent life to whom they were nominally responsible, i.e., people, in deep dung. Dushambie was a city in crisis.

  On the up side, equivalent chaos had taken possession of the tax office.

  Rufus’s sensor mask obscured his expansive face. With it on, he could tell which switches and circuits were operating properly and which had gone off-line. His right hand clutched a splice and shun unit. After several hours spent constructing a hopefully effective bypass he sat down on his slick gray coveralls, pushed the mask up until it clicked in place, and rubbed tiredly at his sweat-beaded forehead. It was warmer in the basement of city transportation central than it should have been. Climate control was exhibiting symptoms disturbingly similar to those he was currently trying to fix.

  Gloria never seemed to sweat. “Another bad one, sweets,” he murmured to his wife, who stood nearby checking her own readout board.

  “It would seem so, wouldn’t it?”

  He looked up at her. “I’m beginning to think that we’ve been going about this all wrong.”

  She glanced down at him. “What do you mean, hon?”

  “I mean that I don’t think this has anything to do with a metastasizing program virus. I don’t think it’s a question of programming at all. I think it’s deeper than that.”

  “How deep, hon?” Putting her board aside, she opened a thermos of chilled soda, poured a cup, and offered it to her mate. He took it gratefully.

  “I’m not sure yet.” He sipped thoughtfully. “I need to do some serious calibrating. We need to ask certain people some questions. It’s just that with all this work I haven’t had the time to do research on basic causes. So I’ve been thinking about it in my ‘spare time.’” She smiled at that.

  “When I’m sure of my conclusions,” he continued, “maybe we can find someone in a position of importance who’ll listen.”

  “First we have to fix it so that municipal service vehicles, at least, can go out on the roads with some expectation of not running into each other as soon as they leave their garages.”

  “I know.” He sighed, slugged back the contents of the cup, and flipped his sensor mask back down.

  Confirmation appeared in the shape of the vacuum cleaner. It was a small, cylindrical device whose most prominent feature was a single, flexible hose tipped by a malleable nozzle. Its job was to keep City Hall clean. Obvious jokes aside, it had done so efficiently ever since it had been purchased.

  Now it was holed up beneath the city attorney’s desk, refusing to let anyone approach.

  “Why won’t you let the nice city attorney have his desk back?” Holding a deactivation tool out in front of him like a pistol, Rufus Chews confronted the vacuum cleaner while his similarly armed wife tried to work her way around behind the desk.

  “Because this is the best place from which to search.” The machine’s voice was slight and tinny (speech being only infrequently required of mobile, preprogrammed vacuum cleaners).

  Chews had to admit it had a point. The view from the city attorney’s office was sweeping, encompassing much of the city and the rolling hills of the park beyond. A flock of pale yellow graniats could be seen settling down for their morning’s rest, their pontoon feet bulging beneath them as they clustered together in the center of the lake. It was a pleasant sight, but hardly one fraught with the promise of revelation.

  “What do you hope to locate?” Chews already knew the answer, having heard it before from other addled machines.

  The vacuum cleaner did not disappoint him. “A higher intelligence. A more advanced life-form. And I see you sneaking around back there.” Like the trunk of a distressed elephant, the suction hose waved warningly in Gloria Chews’s direction.

  She stopped to smile reassuringly. “Here, now. We don’t mean you any harm. We’re just trying to fix you.”

  “Ain’t broken,” muttered the vacuum cleaner sullenly.

  “Of course you are,” she said in a cheery, no-nonsense tone. “Just like a lot of other machines around here are broken. We’ve fixed some of them already.”