From: "Andy Robertson" 
Subject: Re: (urth) Heavy Hyacinth
Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2002 15:30:00 +0100

The robots in "The Dead Lady Of Clown Town".

Lady Panc Ashash, stuck in a robot body as a travel guide:

and the fighter robots sent to kill D'Joan




This is what we all remember: the first authentic picture tape of the entire
incident:

The gold and black sergeant, his milky eyes staring at the Lady Panc Ashash

The Lady herself, in the pleasant old robot body, lifting a commanding
hand.

Elaine, distraught, half-turning as though she would grab the robot by his
right arm. Her head is moving so rapidly that her black hair swings as she
turns.

Charley-is-my-darling shouting, "I love, love, love!" at a small hand-
some man with mouse-colored hair. The man is gulping and saying nothing.

All this we know.

Then comes the unbelievable, which we now believe, the event for which
the stars and worlds were unprepared.

Mutiny.

Robot mutiny.

Disobedience in open daylight.

The words are hard to hear on the tape, but we can still make them out.

The recording device on the police ornithopter had gotten a square fix on
the face of the Lady Pane Ashash. Lip-readers can see the words plainly;
non-lip-readers can hear the words the third or fourth time the tape is run
through the eyebox.

Said the Lady, "Overridden."

Said the sergeant, "No, you're a robot."

"See for yourself. Read my brain. I am a robot. I am also a woman. You
cannot disobey people. I am people. I love you. Furthermore, you are
people. You think. We love each other. Try. Try to attack."

"I cannot," said the robot sergeant, his milky eyes seeming to spin
with excitement. "You love me? You mean I'm alive? I exist?"

"With love, you do," said the Lady Pane Ashash. "Look at her," said the
Lady, pointing to Joan, "because she has brought you love."

The robot looked and disobeyed the law. His squad looked with him.

He turned back to the Lady and bowed to her: "Then you know what we
must do, if we cannot obey you and cannot disobey the others."
"Do it,"she said sadly, "but know what you are doing. You are not really
escaping two human commands. You are making achoice. You. That makes
you men."

The sergeant turned to his squad ot man-sized robots: "You hear that?

She says we are men. I believe her. Do you believe her?"

"We do," they cried almost unanimously.

This is where the picture-tape ends. but we can imagine how the scene
was concluded. Elaine had stopped short, just behind the sergeant-robot.
The other robots had come up behind her. Charley-is-my-darling had
stopped talking. Joan was in the act oflifting her hands in blessing, her
warm
brown dog eyes gone wide with pity and understanding.
People wrote down the things that we cannot see . . . .






And many more


    hartshorn



----- Original Message -----
From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" 
To: 
Sent: Monday, September 09, 2002 5:58 PM
Subject: RE: (urth) Heavy Hyacinth


> Hartshorn wrote ...
>
> > The robots in Smith's stories may be precursors of the chems
> > and of the many "moral" mechanisms in Wolfe's stories (which
> > reach as far back as the guard robots in 5HC)
>
> ...okay, I'm blanking. The only robots I remember from
> Smith are the Manshonyaggers, which I somehow can't really
> think of as "moral." What am I forgetting ...?
>
> --Blattid
>
>
> --
>
>


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