Cemetery World Read Online Free Page A

for.
    He looked like a worker robot, perhaps a heavy construction robot, although what a heavy construction robot would be doing on a planet such as Alden I could not imagine. Heavy construction is just one of the many things that are not done on Alden.
    He came lurching up and stopped beside the gate. “With your permission, sir,” he said.
    “Welcome to my home,” I told him, through my teeth.
    He unlatched the gate and came through, stopping to make sure it was latched again before coming on. He came over to me and hunkered down as gently as he could and hissed a little at me as a matter of politeness. Have you ever heard a three-ton robot hiss? I tell you, it’s uncanny.
    “The birds are doing nicely,” said this hunk of metal, squatting there beside me.
    “They do very well,” I said.
    “Allow me,” said the robot, “to introduce myself.”
    “If you would please,” I said.
    “My name is Elmer,” said the robot. “I am a free machine. I was given freedom papers many centuries ago. I have been my own man ever since.”
    “Well,” I said, “congratulations. How are you making out?”
    “Very well,” said Elmer. “I just sort of wander, going here and there.”
    I nodded, believing him. You saw them now and then, these free and wandering robots who had gained, technically, the status of a human after many years of servitude.
    “I have heard,” said Elmer, “that you’re going back to Earth.”
    Not to the Earth, but back to Earth—that was the way of it. After more than ten millennia, one still went back to Earth. As if the human race had left it only yesterday.
    “You have been misinformed,” I said.
    “But you have a compositor …”
    “A basic instrument,” I told him, “that needs a million things to do the kind of job that should be done. It would be pitiful to go to Earth with such a pile of junk.”
    “Too bad,” said Elmer. “There is a glorious composition waiting on the Earth. There is only one thing, sir …”
    He stuttered to a halt, embarrassed for some reason I could not detect. I waited, not wishing to further embarrass him by saying anything.
    “What I meant to say, sir—and it may not be in my province to say anything at all—is that you must not allow yourself to be trapped by the Cemetery. The Cemetery is no part of the Earth. It is something that has been grafted on the Earth. Grafted, if I may say so, with a colossal cynicism.”
    I pricked up my ears at that. Here, I told myself with more surprise than I would admit, was someone who was in agreement with me. I took a closer look at him in the gathering dusk. He wasn’t much to look at. His body was old-fashioned, at least by Alden standards, a clumsy thing, all brawn, an unsoftened lusty body, and his head piece was one upon which no effort, had been expended to make it sympathetic. But rough and tough as he might seem, his speech was not the kind of language one would expect from a hulking, outdated labor robot.
    “I am somewhat surprised,” I told him, “and at the same time gratified, to find a robot who has an interest in the arts, especially in an art so complicated.”
    “I have tried,” said Elmer, “to make myself a whole man. Not being a man, I suppose, might explain why I tried so hard. Once I got my freedom papers and was given in the process the status of a human, I felt it incumbent on myself to try to be a human. It’s not possible, of course. There is a great deal of machine still left in me …”
    “But composition work,” I said, “and myself—how did you know I was at work on an instrument?”
    “I am a mechanic, see,” said Elmer. “I’ve been a mechanic all my life, by nature. I look at a thing and I know instinctively how it works or what is wrong with it. Tell me what kind of machine you want built and the chances are that I can build it for you. And when you come right down I to it, a compositor is about as complicated a piece of mechanism as one can happen on and, more