A World Called Solitude

CHAPTER 1
"Arthur, how many times this month have I wished I were a poet?"

The robot barely hesitated. "Seventeen, sir."

Birk Aaland nodded absently. "Make that eighteen now. This world inspires poetry--or it would if I were any good at it. And I remember so damned little of the poetry I learned in school. It only goes to show that a good technical education can still have drawbacks."

The man and the robot were standing atop a rounded hillock overlooking a broad plain. The purple-shading-into-green flatlands stretched before them until the horizon stole it from view--a horizon that was clear and sharp, free of the haze and pollution of a human-occupied world. Low scrub dominated the scene, with some prickly pseudocactus and misshapen purple trees giving counterpoint.

The hot yellow sun rose behind Birk, warming the back of his neck. It cast long shadows of the two figures on the hill, the tall, robust man and the cylindrical robot beside him. Overhead, the gray of the dawn sky was bleached to the pastel shade of day.

It was not a still life Birk observed. The creatures he thought of as birds--even though they bore their young alive and had no feathers--filled the sky. Dawn and dusk were their prime hunting hours in this part of the world, though already most of the night-flying insects they preyed on had found their havens for the day--much to Birk's relief. Smaller creatures scampered about, little blurs at the edge of his peripheral vision. The air was clean, smelling refreshingly of herbs and damp leaves.

Two kilometers away was a herd of the animals Birk had named "lopers," already awake and grazing on the vegetation. The lopers were lumbering four-legged beasts nearly as tall as a man, two and a half meters long and weighing upward of two hundred kilos. They had tawny yellow fur slumped in odd patches over their skins, and long, flat tails dragging awkwardly in the dirt behind them. Their faces were piggish, their eyes dark and stupid, But despite their ungainly appearance, Birk knew they could move swiftly when alarmed.

"I tried writing poetry when I was in college," Birk continued, his gaze never wavering from the vista before him. "I suppose everyone does. I tried to fill it with passion and imagery, expressing the innermost secrets of my soul. Only my soul didn't have any secrets; not then, anyway. So my passion came out as pretension and the imagery came out as clich's. I had a problem, too, with lapsing into doggerel at the most inopportune places."

"'Doggerel,' sir?" From Arthur's inflection, it was clear Birk had used a word beyond the robot's vocabulary.

Birk turned from the landscape to look at his partner. Arthur was a tall, silvery cylinder of metal and plastic with a variety of arms and sensors scattered over the upper half of his body. He was supported by four legs that could extend at will from a dozen centimeters to more than two meters. The legs could also be flexible or rigid, whichever was more useful at the moment.

"Yes," Birk said. "Doggerel is considered a bad sort of poetry, when your lines take on a singsong quality and content is sacrificed for meter; I can't define it any more precisely than that, I'm afraid. It's too bad I didn't save my old poem--you could have seen it in a minute."

He shook his head. "It's a shame I can't do more justice to this place. Sometimes the urge is overwhelming, it's all so beautiful. Look at the yellow and blue of those birds flying over that green patch of ground. Well, I can't do it any justice by just talking about it; let's move in closer and see if we can bag a loper for dinner." He gave a friendly pat to the spot where Arthur's shoulder would be if Arthur had shoulders.