Gazing out upon the skies of Earth again through hundreds of appraising optic threads, Erasmus was not pleased. The robot stood in a high bell tower of his villa, staring through a curving expanse of armored windowplate. The landscape of this world, with its oceans and forests and cities built upon the bones of other cities had already seen countless civilizations rise and fall. The scope of history made his own accomplishments seem small and contrived.

Therefore, he would have to try harder.

Neither Omnius nor any of his delegated architect robots understood true beauty. To Erasmus, the buildings and the layout of the rebuilt city resembled components with sharp angles, abrupt discontinuities. A city must be more than an efficient circuit diagram. Under his multiphased scrutiny, the metropolis looked like an elaborate mechanism, designed and constructed with utilitarian force. It had its own clean lines and systematic efficiency, which resulted in a completely serendipitous beauty . . . but there was no finesse whatsoever.

It was such a disappointment when the omniscient evermind refused to live up to his potential. Sometimes, gloriously unrealistic human ambitions had a certain merit.

Omnius either ignored or intentionally refuted the graceful beauty of Golden Age human architecture. But such cold and petulant superiority was not logical. Admittedly, Erasmus could see a certain beauty in streamlined machines and components— he rather liked his own burnished platinum skinfilm, the smooth grace of his mirrored face with which he formed facial expressions. But he saw no point in maintaining ugliness just to spite a perceived enemy’s concept of beauty.

How could a vast computer mind distributed across hundreds of planets exhibit even a hint of narrow-mindedness? To Erasmus, with his detached and mature understanding developed through long contemplation, Omnius’s attitude revealed a lack of comprehensive thinking.

Making the sound of an exaggerated sigh that he had copied from humans, he transmitted a thought-command that caused projection shades to drop over the windows in the bell tower. Choosing his mood, he projected artificial, pastoral views from other worlds. So soothing and peaceful.

On one wall he paused at a clothing synthesizer, selected the design he wanted, and waited while a garment was prepared for him. A traditional painter’s smock. When it was ready, he draped it over his sleek body and crossed the room to an easel where he had already set up a blank canvas, a palette of paints, and fine brushes.

At a wave of his hand, the projection shades shifted to display enlarged images of masterpiece paintings, each one highlighting a different great master. He selected “Cottages at Cordeville” by an ancient Earth artist, Vincent Van Gogh. It was bold and colorful but basically crude in its implementation, with inept lines and childish pigment applications that featured thick globs of paint and smears of color. Yet when considered as a whole, the painting itself possessed a certain raw energy, an indefinable primitive vibrancy.

After deep concentration, Erasmus thought he had a delicate understanding of Van Gogh’s technique. But the comprehension of why anyone would want to create it in the first place eluded him.

Although he had never painted before, he copied the artwork exactly. Brushstroke for brushstroke, pigment for pigment. When he was finished, Erasmus examined his masterpiece. “There, the sincerest form of flattery.”

The nearest wall-mounted screen brightened to a pale gray wash of light. Omnius had been watching, as always. Erasmus would no doubt have to justify his activities, since the evermind would never understand what the independent robot was doing.

He studied the painting again. Why was it so hard to understand creativity? Should he just change some of the components at random and call it an original work? As the robot finished his scrutiny, satisfied that he had made no mistakes, that he had not deviated from the tolerances he could see in the image of the painting, Erasmus waited for a rush of comprehension.

Slowly, he came to realize that what he had just completed was not really art, any more than a printing press created literature. He had only copied the ancient composition in every detail. He had added nothing, synthesized no newness. And he burned with the need to understand the difference.

Frustrated, Erasmus took a different tack. In an implacable voice, he summoned three servants and ordered them to carry his painting supplies out to one of the laboratory buildings. “I intend to create a new work of art, all my own. A still life, of sorts. You three will be vital parts of the process. Rejoice in your good fortune.”

In the sterile environment of the laboratory, with the cold assistance of his personal robot guards, Erasmus proceeded to vivisect the trio of victims, oblivious to their screams. “I want to get to the heart of the matter,” he quipped, “the lifeblood of it.”

With stained metal hands he studied the dripping organs, squeezed them, watched their juices flow and cellular structures collapse. He performed a cursory analysis, discovering sloppy mechanics and inefficient circulatory systems that were unnecessarily complex and prone to failure.

Then, feeling a vibrant energy, an impulsiveness, Erasmus set up a tableau to paint. A new work, completely unique! It would be his own arrangement, and he would tint the images using different filters, making a few intentional mistakes to better approximate human imperfection and uncertainty.

At last, he must be on the right track.

At his command, the sentinel robots brought in a vat filled with fresh, uncoagulated human blood. Erasmus began removing the interesting array of human organs— still warm to the touch— from his table, and instructed two cleaning drones to scrape out the insides from the donor bodies. Contemplating the arrangement and order, he dropped organ after organ into the blood and watched them bob in the liquid— eyes, livers, kidneys, hearts.

Slowly assessing each step of the process, he set up exactly what his “creative urges” told him to do. Whim upon whim. Erasmus added more ingredients to the grisly stew. Pursuant to something he had learned about the artist Van Gogh, he sliced an ear off one of the corpses and tossed it into the vat as well.

Finally, his metal hands dripping gore, he stepped back. A beautiful arrangement— one that was totally original to him. He could think of no famous human artist who had worked on such a canvas. No one else had ever done anything approaching this.

Erasmus wiped his smooth metallic hands and began to paint upon a virgin canvas. On the blank medium, he astutely drew one of the three hearts, showing in perfect detail the ventricals, auricles, and aorta. But this was not meant to be a realistic dissection image. Dissatisfied, he smeared some of the lines to add an artistic flair. True art required the right amount of uncertainty, just as gourmet cooking needed the proper spices and flavors.

This must be how creativity worked. As he painted, Erasmus tried to imagine the kinesthetic relationship between his brain and his mechanical fingers, the thought impulses that set the fingers into motion.

“Is that what the humans define as art?” Omnius said from a wallscreen.

For once, Erasmus did not debate with the evermind. Omnius was correct in his skepticism. Erasmus had not attained true creativity. Yes, he had produced an original and graphic arrangement. But in human artwork, the sum of the components added up to more than the individual items. Just ripping organs from victims, floating them in blood, and painting them brought him no closer to understanding human inspiration. Even if he manipulated the details, he remained imprecise and uninspired.

Still, this might be a step in the right direction.

Erasmus could not carry this thought to the next logical step, and he came to understand why. The process was not ratiocinative at all. Creativity and the precision of analysis were mutually exclusive.

Frustrated, the robot gripped the macabre painting in his powerful hands, broke the frame, and tore the canvas to shreds. He would have to do better than this, much better. Erasmus shifted his metallic polymer face to a stylized pensive mask. He was no closer to comprehending humans, despite a century of intensive research and musings.

Walking slowly, Erasmus went to his private sanctuary, a botanical garden where he listened to classical music piped through the cellular structures of plants. “Rhapsody in Blue,” by a composer of Old Earth.

In the contemplative garden, the troubled robot sat in the ruddy sunlight and felt warmth on his metal skin. This was another thing that humans seemed to enjoy, but he did not understand why. Even with his sensory enhancement module, it just seemed like heat.

And machines that overheated broke down.