With half his mind he knew the stranger had come across the patio and was reaching out a hand for a chair to sit in, and with the other half once again he wondered about the blackened bodies lying on the riverbank on far-off Aldebaran XII and the twisted machine that was wrapped around the tree.
Three humans had died there…three humans and two androids, and androids were almost human. And humans must not die by violence unless it be by the violence of another human. Even then it was on the field of honor with all the formality and technicality of the code duello or in the less polished affairs of revenge or execution.
For human life was sacrosanct…it had to be or there'd be no human life. Man was so pitifully outnumbered.
Violence or accident?
And accident was ridiculous.
There were few accidents, almost none at all. The near-perfection of mechanical performance, the almost human intelligence and reactions of machines to any known danger, long-ago had cut the incidence of accident to an almost non-existent figure.
No machine would be crude enough to slam into a tree. A more subtle, less apparent danger, maybe. But never a tree.
So it must be violence.
And it could not be human violence, for human violence would have advertised the fact. Human violence had nothing to fear…there was no recourse to law, scarcely a moral code to which a human killer would be answerable.
Three humans dead.