He himself had been ready to perform all his programmed functions the moment the last phase of his assembly was complete and his pathways had been initialized. But a newborn child was far from able to manage on its own. Andrew could see no effective difference between a fetus that had completed its various stages of fetal development but was still inside its mother and the same fetus, a day or two later, that had emerged. One was inside and one was outside, that was all. But they were just about equally helpless. So why not celebrate the anniversary of one's moment of conception instead of the anniversary of one's release from the womb?
The more he pondered it, though, the more he saw that there was some logic to either view. What, for example, would he select as his own birthday, assuming that robots felt any need to celebrate their birthdays? The date when the factory had begun assembling him, or the date on which his positronic brain had been installed in its case and initialization of somatic control had been keyed? Had he been "born" when the first strands of his armature were being drawn together, or when the unique set of perceptions that constituted NDR-113 had gone into operation? A mere armature wasn't him, whatever he was. His positronic brain was him Or the combination of the positronic brain properly placed within the body that had been designed to house it. So his birthday
Oh, it was all so confusing! And robots weren't supposed to be plagued by confusion. Their positronic minds were more complex than the simple digital "minds" of non-positronic computers, which operated entirely in stark binary realms, mere patterns of on or off, yes or no, positive or negative, and that complexity could sometimes lead to moments of conflicting potential. But nevertheless robots were logical creatures who were able to find their way out of such conflicts, usually, by sorting the data in a sensible way. Why, then, was he having so much trouble comprehending this business of when one's birthday ought to be?
Because birthdays are a purely human concept, he answered himself. They have no relevance to robots. And you are not a human being, so you do not need to worry about when your birthday ought or ought not to be celebrated.
At any rate, it was Miss's birthday. Sir made a point of coming home early that day, even though the Regional Legislature was embroiled in some complicated debate over interplanetary free-trade zones. The whole family dressed in holiday clothes and gathered around the great slab of polished redwood that was the dining-room table and candles were lit, and Andrew served an elaborate dinner that he and Ma'am had spent hours planning, and afterward Miss formally received and opened her presents. The receiving of presents-new possessions, given to you by others-was apparently a major part of the birthday-celebration ritual.
Andrew watched, not really understanding. He knew that humans placed high importance on the owning of things, specific objects that belonged only to them, but it was very hard to comprehend what value most of those objects had for them, or why they placed such emphasis on having them.
Little Miss, who had learned how to read only a year or two before, gave her sister a book. Not a cassette, not an infodisk, not a holocube, but an actual book, with a cover and binding and pages. Little Miss was very fond of books. So was Miss-especially books of poetry, which was a way of writing things in cryptic phrases arranged in uneven lines that Andrew found extremely mysterious.
"How marvelous!" Miss cried, when she had taken her book from its gaily covered wrapper. "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam! I've always wanted it! But how did you even know there was such a thing? Who told you about it, Amanda?"
"I read about it," said Little Miss, looking a trifle put out. "You think I don't know anything at all, just because I'm five years younger than you, but let me tell you, Melissa-"
"Girls! Girls!" Sir called warningly. "Let's have no bickering at the birthday dinner!"
The next present Miss opened was from her mother: a fine cashmere sweater, white and fluffy. Miss was so excited that she put it on over the sweater she was already wearing.
And then she opened the small package that was her father's gift, and gasped; for Sir had bought her an intricate pendant of pink ivorite, carved with marvelous scrollwork so delicately worked that even Andrew's flawless vision was hard pressed to follow all its curving and interlocking patterns. Miss looked radiantly happy. She lifted it by its fine golden chain and slipped it over her head, lowering it carefully until it lay perfectly centered on the front of her new sweater.
"Happy birthday, Melissa," Sir said. And Ma'am chimed in, and Little Miss too, and they all sang the birthday song. Then Ma'am called for another round of the song, and this time she gestured to Andrew, who joined in, singing along with them.
For a moment he wondered whether he should have given Amanda some sort of present also. No, he thought, she did not seem to have expected it from him. And why should she? He wasn't a member of the family. He was an item of household machinery. The giving of birthday presents was entirely a human thing.
It was a lovely birthday dinner. There was only one thing wrong with it, which was that Little Miss seemed bitterly envious of Miss's lovely ivorite pendant.
She tried to hide it, of course. It was her sister's birthday dinner, after all, and she didn't want to spoil it. But all during the course of the evening Little Miss kept stealing glances at the pendant that gleamed warmly in pink and gold atop Melissa's sweater, and it took no great subtlety of perception on Andrew's part to know how unhappy she was.
He wished there was something he could do to cheer her up. But this whole affair of birthdays, and presents, and sisters, and envy, and other such human concepts-they were really beyond his comprehension. He was a very capable robot of the kind that he was designed to be, but his designers had seen no need to give him the capacity to understand why one little girl would be upset about a beautiful object that had been given to another little girl who was her sister on the occasion of her birthday.