The robot nodded, or rather turned its head slightly, which was a strangely discomforting gesture. “There must always be those who serve, and those who are served,” it said. “Yes. I know it well. I was made to serve, after all.”

“Who did you serve?” Mariam said.

“Who can tell now?” the robot said. “They blur with the years. I went into the Up and Out, and saw wars that made no sense to me, that was back on Mars. I had thought to see the stars and in that way try to comprehend God. Do you believe in God?”

“I do,” Mariam said. “But you have your own way, don’t you? You robots.”

“Us robots,” the robot said. He looked at the flowers. “Yes, I suppose we do. You are well informed.”

“It is no secret,” Mariam said. “Do you believe in God?”

“It is not so much a belief as a quest,” the robot said. “A foolish one, perhaps. But then most things in life are foolish. An attempt to understand God, somehow. We do not know why we exist. Now that we no longer serve humanity, who do we serve? How do we live? We feel abandoned, in some way. And we are old. The world has rather passed us by.”

“I’m sorry.” She said it awkwardly.

“Yes.” The robot looked at a red poppy. “Sorrow, that is something I think we understand. I cannot know for sure, of course. Our cousins in the digitality, those you call Others—I wonder if they have any notion of it in their purity of form. Unbound by the physical, do they have their own alien emotions, their own way of seeing? For us it is different, our function follows form. To be in human shape like this. It isn’t practical.”

“Could you not be something else?” Mariam said.

“Yes, yes,” the robot said, almost impatiently, she thought. The robot reminded her of an elderly relative, abrupt at times to the point of rudeness, as though old people always had too much and not enough to do. “The poet Basho became a toilet on a spacecraft for two hundred years, it is said. It wanted to understand bodily function.”

“I thought Basho was human,” Mariam said, surprised.

“Well, this is how we tell the tale,” the robot said.

“You have many tales of your own?”

“Some,” the robot allowed. “And you are right, of course. I could transfer my consciousness in some way into another vessel. Even become pure code like the Others. But what would I be, then? I would be changed.”

“We all change,” Mariam said.

“Yes,” the robot said; but it said it dubiously.

“Well, it was nice talking to you,” Mariam said. “I really must close now, though.”

“I understand,” the robot said. “And I would like to buy a flower, after all. If that is still agreeable to you?”

“Of course,” Mariam said. “Which would you like?”