FREDDA LEVING LOOKED out the window of the Winter Residence, and smiled at the miserable drenching rain outside. The weather had been downright awful for months now, allover the planet, ever since Comet Grieg had struck. But the chaotic weather would pass. Everyone from Units Dee and Dum on down was pleased with the climatic behavior of the planet. It might mean sloppy weather in many inhabited areas for now, but every projection showed that the climate would emerge from the post-impact phase in better shape than it had been before. Even Unit Dee, who had come through her First Law crisis in good shape, was very positive. Now that she knew the world was real, Dee took a slightly different attitude toward things. But the main thing was, she confirmed the long-term climate was going to get better. Much better.

It would be some time yet before the final, relatively minor reworking of the twelve craters was complete. Once the crater walls were properly breached, the craters would flood, and Twelve Crater Channel would let the waters of the Southern, Ocean in to flood the Polar Depression, and form, at long last, the Polar Sea. Or perhaps they would name it Kresh Channel, and Grieg's Sea.

Fredda smiled. Well, if they did, no one would ever be able to prove she had been the one behind the letter-writing campaign.

At least there wouldn't be a Beddle Bay, or any such, now or in the future. Beddle the man might still be alive, but Beddle the politician was dead as yesterday. The unveiling of Gildern's plot against the New Law robots had wrecked the Ironhead movement.

In another time, the plot as revealed would not have mattered so much. But the revelation had come at the very time when the New Laws, led by Caliban, had set themselves to work with a will to assist the human evacuees, to repair and refurbish and rebuild their world, all free of charge.

The New Laws had bought themselves tremendous goodwill by their generous aid to their neighbors. The monsters portrayed by the Ironheads turned out to be helpful and useful, if frequently irritating, members of society. With its straw man knocked down, the Ironhead organization was rapidly decaying back into what it had been when it had started out: a politically irrelevant gang of thugs and plug-uglies.

But the New Law robots. Fredda had finally come to the unmistakable conclusion that their creation had been a mistake. She had put together all sods of fine, noble-sounding reasons for what she had built, but the plain fact was that they did not fit into the real-life world very well. The universe had no need, and no place, for being trapped forever between slavehood and freedom.

Of course, it was far too late to undo what she had done. She had no more right to wipe them all out than Simcor Beddle. But she could at least limit the damage. She could see to it that no more New Laws were made, that the ones now in existence were not replaced as they wore out or malfunctioned.

Which brought her to the subject of the Three-Law robots. For Fredda Leving had concluded that they, too, were a mistake. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they were a mistake now. They had served humanity well, but their time had passed, or would pass soon. The good they could do human beings could no longer make up for the damage they did to the human spirit.

Ultimately, robots wanted humans to be safe. The best way to make humans safe almost always came down to keeping things the same, to making tomorrow as much like yesterday as possible. But that which did not change could not grow, and that which could not grow would inevitably weaken, decay, and die. Fredda remembered reading somewhere, in some ancient pre-spaceflight text, that slavery destroyed the lives of the slaves and the souls of the masters. With every day that passed, she found new reasons to believe the saying to be true.

The Spacers were on the way down, and would continue on the way down-led by the robots who were determined that there be no change at all, by the slave robots programmed to hem in the lives and freedom of their masters at every turn, in the name of safety.

A grim line of thought, that was.

But a misleading one as well. For the Spacers were not all of humanity. There were the Settlers as well. And there was another group as well. A group that was something in between. Something that was just coming into being, here on Inferno.

For the Settlers who had come to Inferno were not Settlers anymore. They had built homes and married locals and had children. Some of them had even hired New Law robots as servants, or even gone so far as to buy Three-Law robots.

Nor were the Settlers the only ones who had changed. The Infernals of old would never have been so bold, so daring, as to drop a comet on themselves, let alone accept personal sacrifice in exchange for a better future. The Infernals had taken chances, and taken control of their lives, in ways that no Spacers had done for endless generations. These Infernals, these Spacers, weren't Spacers anymore, either.

So, Fredda asked herself as she stared at the rain, if we aren't Spacers and Settlers, what are we?

It might have been half a second or half an hour later when she heard a sound behind herself and looked around to see Alvar there with Tonya Welton.

"There you are," said Alvar. "I was wondering if you'd want to join us for a rather dull working lunch."

Fredda smiled. "Absolutely," she said. Tonya and Alvar had been very busy in recent days. There had been a great deal of negotiating to do, and Tonya seemed to be much more willing to cooperate than she had in the past. Her attitude might have something to do with a very full data cube labeled "Government Tower Plaza Incident"-or else it might not. Tonya was no fool. She, too, could see the world had changed.

"Hello, Tonya," Fredda said.

"Hello, Fredda," Tonya said. "You looked so thoughtful just now. What were you thinking about?"

"Change," said Fredda, looking back out at the driving rain. "Change and evolution, and forgotten ancestors. I was wondering whose we will be."

Alvar cocked his head to one side and gave her a puzzled smile. "That's a very odd turn of phrase. What do you mean, exactly?"

"I was thinking about pre-spaceflight Earth," said Fredda. "All the stories we don't know about it anymore. All the kings and queens, and leaders and followers, and heroes and villains. All the groups and tribes and nations that battled with each other, mortal enemies who fought to the death."

"What about them?" Tonya asked.

"I was thinking about what must have happened to them. How did they vanish? Think of all the wars and intermarriages and migrations and alliance that must have happened before all those groups, all those old enemies and allies were gradually subsumed into one people, into the Earthers, into the ancestors of the Settlers and Spacers. We know so little about any of those old nations and peoples. And yet without them, none of us would be here. We've forgotten their names, but their blood flows in our veins."

"But why worry about ancient history?" Tonya asked.

"Why? Because I think it's starting to happen again. Spacers are on the way out. Their time, our time, is all but done. Either we die out, or we get absorbed into Settler culture. We all know that, even if we pretend as best we can. But what no one stops to realize is that once there are no Spacers, there can be no Settlers, either. Settlers have always defined themselves as not being Spacers. I found myself wondering how you Settlers will think of yourselves that way once there are no Spacers."

Fredda gestured toward Tonya and Alvar, one member of each of the two peoples. "Then I reminded myself that Spacers and Settlers are the descendants of whole races of humanity that are now forgotten. And I realized that Spacers and Settlers will, in their turn, become the forgotten but essential ancestors of descendants who will not be born for millennia. Our merged cultures will be the unseen foundation on which they build their societies."

Alvar Kresh nodded thoughtfully. "Tonya and I have been talking about a very small part of that. We've been wondering what to do about the Settlers here on-planet, how long they can stay, what their rights should be, that sort of thing. And I think, Fredda, you've just made up my mind for me. I think we're going to let them stay, all of them, for as long as they want, with exactly the same legal rights as the native Infernals."

Tonya looked at him in surprise. "That's quite an offer," she said.

"We're going to need all the help we can get, helping Inferno rebuild itself," said Alvar. "So how about it? Why not let the Settlers live up to their name and be done with it? They can settle here, on Inferno, for good."

"In the next county over?" Tonya asked suspiciously. "In our own little Settlertowns, safely out of the way?"

"No," Kresh replied. "In the same cities, the same towns and streets and houses as the rest of us. Fredda's right. The day is coming when there won't be Spacers or Settlers. Just people. So why not let it start on Inferno? Why not let us be people, together?"

He stepped forward toward his wife, and took her right hand in his left. He turned back toward Tonya, and offered his free hand to her, a handshake that reached across all the generations of their forgotten and numberless mutual ancestors. "Let us be a new people," he said. "A new people, together."

P/S: Copyright -->www_novelfreereadonline_Com

***