by Isaac Asimov
She passed through three inspection nodes on the way to the quarter-master’s office. Human officers ran scanners over packages, checked tracking numbers, in one instance opened a large container to physically inspect the contents. As large as the facility was, it always seemed cramped. In-transit items piled on shelves, floated in null-g fields, or waited on the decks. The blockade now contained nearly forty-five thousand people in the planetary ring alone. The last time she had checked, another seventy thousand served on the outer, system ring. For the territory they policed, it seemed a paltry force—an entire solar system!—but the material requirements of over one hundred and ten thousand human beings, sustained in space light years from their homeworlds, was an enormous logistical problem. Exacerbated by the contraband traffic, it grew to unmanageable proportions. Simply, it could not be done. The best internal security had managed to do was to slow the illicit movement of proscribed goods through the very forces that were here to prevent it in the first place.
Frustration had become a constant background emotional noise Mia was still trying to learn to live with.
She rapped on Quartermaster Teg Sturlin’s door. A few seconds later, the hatch slid open and she stepped into a space relatively uncluttered and deceptively spacious.
“Daventri,” Sturlin said with a small smile. “Please tell me you’ve come to share a glass and talk about retirement.”
Mia returned the smile. Teg Sturlin was a round-faced, small-eyed woman who seemed to make it a point never to wear a uniform properly. She was neat, almost fastidious, but a collar would always be open or a jacket missing, a belt out of one loop, cuffs rolled a few centimeters too far up the forearms. It was a pose, a conscious rejection of protocol that bordered on insolence.
Her office was also impossibly tidy for the job she held. To be sure, file disks stacked on her desk, boxes containing questionable items waited for her attention on a long countertop, three datum screens showed a changing array of tasks requiring decisions, and a jacket lay across the back of her chair. “Things” were everywhere, manifestations of her position, but none of it simply piled up. Everything looked orderly. Teg Sturlin, it said, is in control.
“The glass would be good,” Mia said. “Nonalcoholic.”
“Oh,” Sturlin groaned in mock disappointment. She went to a samovar and filled a tall, narrow glass with tea. “Duty, I suppose, prevents a proper debauch?”
“I may be very busy very soon.” She took a sip. “Mmm. What is this?”
“Black currant. Something new. I added a touch of mint to the ice cubes. Heresy, really, it ought to be hot tea.” She perched on the edge of her desk. “So this is business?”
Mia pulled one of the paper books from her valise and handed it to Sturlin. “If I had wanted this, how hard would it be to get it here?”
Sturlin’s eyes widened. “Where did you get it in the first place? Do you have any idea how costly these can be?”
“No, I don’t. That’s why I’m asking.”
Almost reverently, Sturlin opened the cover. “This is nearly three thousand years old.”
Mia started. “That?”
“Hmm? Oh, no, not the physical item.” Sturlin laughed. “No, I shouldn’t say so. This is a facsimile. I meant the novel itself. This volume . . .” She turned pages, rubbed one between thumb and middle finger, brought the book up to her nose, turned it over, peered down the spine from above. “Maybe three hundred years old. Physically, we can make one now that will survive the Omega Point. Well, not really, but you take my meaning. But it’s a minority taste, a fetish almost. I imagine for some people it actually is a fetish. Some of these ancients wrote about sex so much more richly then. I suppose it was the guilt.”
“Teg. The vector?”
“Oh, sorry. Yes, I suppose it could be gotten out here. Even likely it was from a Spacer.”
“I don’t think so. I found four of those. One of them had a book dealer imprint: Omne Mundi Complurium, Antiquities, Lyzig.”
“I know of it.” She looked up with a quick frown. “I thought the shop in Lyzig had closed down, though.”
“Maybe it was purchased a while back. What would it cost, what would it take?”
“If someone had brought this with them in their personal items, it would be in the log.” She closed the book and went around to her chair. “Have to list everything we bring and this would be just a bit too difficult to hide, considering how little personal kit we’re allowed.” She began entering commands on her desk datum. A fourth screen slid up. “I shouldn’t think there would be many people who’d be willing to give up space for something like this when you can access the contents through the public datum . . .”
“Try Ensign Corf.”
After a moment, Sturlin shook her head. “No, not him. What are the other three titles?”
Mia told her and waited, sipping her oddly-flavored tea while Sturlin conducted her search.
“Well, there are eighty-three people who brought actual bound books with them to the blockade.”
“Really. That many?”
“I’m surprised myself. Almost all of them are senior staff.”
“Anyone I should be interested in?”
“Possibly. Probably. The thing is, I don’t see those titles listed in any of their personal kits. One—Captain Gerigel of the Verbator—has a different Dickens, but . . .”
“Okay, any of them likely to buy through the black market?”
“You mean smuggle one in? Why? It would be cheaper to simply have them shipped in legitimately. Let me backtrack and see if I can find out from the bookdealer if any shipments came to us . . .”
“That’s an expensive call.”
“Yes, it is. But I can do it without attracting attention. That’s why you brought this to me, true?”
“Something along those lines.”
Sturlin grinned, nodding. “You’ll return the favor one day. When do you need to know?”
“Now.”
“Well, then.” She began entering commands again. “This may take a bit longer.” She leaned back. “I don’t see books come through undeclared very often. Rare as it is, it should be fairly easy to track.”
“Do you ever see them?”
“As contraband?” Sturlin shook her head. “I’ve seen wine, whiskey, musical instruments once or twice, every description of necessity, clothes, even aphrodisiacs from time to time, but never bound books. Even the disks, mostly they’ll be technical works, how-to texts, a few science texts.” She picked up the book Mia had brought and ran her hand over the cover. “Never this.”
“From the way you’re treating it, I might suspect you’re lying.”
Sturlin looked startled. “That’s in jest, isn’t it? I’m a quartermaster, Agent Daventri. I take that seriously.”
“I’m sorry.”
Sturlin regarded her stonily for another few seconds, then shrugged. “It must be frustrating for you. It is for me.” She sighed. “I grew up with a houseful of books like this. My parents were antiquarians. My father belonged to the Church of Organic Sapiens.”
“That must have been awkward when you joined the service.”
“You have no idea. I might as well have told them I was emigrating to Solaria. I could never see why the two worlds couldn’t coexist. But I’ve come to understand them since coming out here.”
“Really? Tell me, then. I still have a hard time reconciling having Spacer friends with being a Terran.”
“Have you been forced by circumstances to choose?”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“Assume you meet a Spacer with whom you want to form a bond. Where do you live? His world or yours? Whose friends do you give up? Believe me, you’d have to choose. The question is, which half of these choices is the more important? Which would make you less by leaving behind and which would harm you the least by keeping?”
“It wouldn’t be that either/or.”
“You think not? Well, perhaps
. Some people are strong enough or devoted enough or lucky enough not to have to give up what they don’t want. But what if what you want changes? If who you are is defined partly or largely by your wants, then are you different if they change?”
“Of course.”
“Then what you don’t want would have the same effect.”
“That follows, I guess.”
“So if you say, ‘I don’t want to live this way’ or ‘I don’t wish to live without these things,’ then you have changed who you are from when those wants didn’t matter. It becomes then a matter of who you want to be.”
Sturlin was leaning forward, her face intent. Mia could almost feel her intensity. This was a subject very close to Sturlin.
“All right,” Mia said.
“And if what you want to be is at odds with those you live with, divergent from what they want you to be, then you have to choose.”
“But the things themselves shouldn’t be in conflict.”
“Things are metaphors, Mia. They represent ideas. If you say, ‘I want to be a Terran,’ that means a certain set of ideas. One of which is that you live without robots. If you say, ‘I want to live with robots,’ then you’ve chosen something which says that you’re not Terran.”
“Then the definition of Terran is at fault.”
Sturlin smiled broadly. “And if you change that, then you change everything. You make everyone else give something up in order that you be able to give nothing up. Consequently, you lose the very thing you thought you were preserving, because it doesn’t exist anymore.”
“That’s sophistry.”
“Contradict me.” Sturlin laughed. “My parents accepted a set of limitations as part of their concept of who they were. I wanted things that didn’t fit within those boundaries. I couldn’t be like them anymore. By accepting me, they had to accept, at least in principle, that I had made choices that were somehow right. They weren’t going to do that. I didn’t want them to hate me. The best thing for us all was for me to leave all that they were behind.”
“Was that possible?”
“I’m not sure. If not, then Spacers are in some sense still Terrans. Do you know any Terran, even a liberal one, who accepts that idea?”
“No.”
Sturlin held out a hand as if to say, “So there.”
“Spacers are different,” Sturlin added then. “I’m not even sure they know how different they are . . .” She glanced at her screen. “Ah. I’m getting a reply.” She leaned toward the screen, then nodded slowly. “The books were purchased six months ago by a buyer in Petrabor. Let me see if there’s an associated tree with any of our bibliophiles . . . hmmm . . . three possibles, none of them senior staff. Corf is not one of them.”
“Since they got on the station without anyone finding them . . .”
Sturlin glanced at her, scowling. “Finding the recipient could be very difficult. There’s some possibilities. Six months ago, they were on Earth. There’s a window to look through, at least. Here are the three officers who have done business with that bookseller in the past. I’ll see if I can link the buyer in Petrabor to any of our already neutralized freelance importers.”
Mia took the slip of paper from Sturlin. In her precise hand, Sturlin had written them out. Sometimes, they both knew, writing things down gave the best security.
“Thanks. Let me know as soon as you find anything more.”
“I will.”
Mia finished her tea and set the glass by the samovar. She hesitated at the door.
“So, what have you become?” she asked.
“I don’t know yet,” Sturlin said. “I’m still choosing.”
The three names did not mean anything to Mia until she matched them against Corf’s comm logs. One came up regularly, a Lt. Illen Jons. Mia pulled up her file.
Lt. Jons was a liaison officer to the Keresian contingent. Her counterpart was a Commander Togla Ulson, aide to the Keresian fleet commander, Commodore Palis.
Mia opened several of the communications between Corf and Jons, wondering what the Terran-Keresian liaison might have to talk to essentially a glorified stores clerk.
Books. Mia found lists of titles. Jons was checking on shipments of books and Corf was assuring her that, though the shipments were late, they were indeed on their way. Further down the stack of comms were confirmations of deliveries, new requests, notes of thanks.
Mia sat back. Books . . . ?
Corf’s records showed no batch numbers, no tracking codes, nothing that would give Mia anything to trace back through legitimate channels. She requested a cross-reference by date from her own records. Her datum told her to wait, that it had to access external files.
“While you’re at it,” she muttered, tapping in new instructions, “check if anyone else made similar requests to Corf.” Almost as an afterthought, she activated one of her personal encryption routines, which she knew would slow the process considerably. But these were now command-level people, even though Jons was only a lieutenant. Mia could not know where her trace might take her, and she did not want anyone tracing back to her until she got what she wanted.
WORKING
Mia shrugged out of her jacket and went to her locker. She pulled out one of the bound volumes and settled down to wait.
She glanced at the spine: War and Peace. She grunted. What else is there? she wondered sardonically, and opened the book.
Chapter 9
DEREC ENTERED THE Wysteria’s Grand Parlor at the last minute before departure. He had intended to stay sequestered in his cabin, disinterested in the actual vista of leaving, and leery of the celebratory gathering traditional upon casting off. But he disliked self-pity more than self-abuse and, with little time to spare, found himself sprinting down the corridors.
The Grand Parlor sprawled beneath a dense canopy permeated with photoenhancers interlaced with polarized particle-deflectors to shield the guests from radiation. The enhancers adjusted the resulting filtered light to add back the parts of the color spectrum occluded by the shielding. It was an expensive and temporary vanity, used twice during a voyage like this, once at the beginning and again at the end, so everyone could view docking if they wished by the “actual” light of the new sun. Derec thought it a ridiculous idea, since even then some of that light was lost due to the filtering, so what was being watched was no more authentic—no more real—than if they all watched on screens.
Tables rimmed the roughly teardrop-shaped chamber, bearing a bewildering array of foods—Terran, Spacer, and Settler. Drifting from one part to another took him through aromatic mixtures that inspired everything from ravenous hunger to mild nausea. Clusters of passengers tended to gather around their cuisine of choice, leaving unpeopled gaps all across the deck. Derec wandered across these empty places, looking alternately at the guests and up at the view.
The view . . . Impressive, he thought grudgingly. If I were doing this willingly, I might say spectacular . . .
At one time in the distant past, Kopernik Station might have been a triple-ring configuration. But the additional components, new sections, expanded docks, warehousing environs, entire smaller stations attached, and the new construction—for purposes which Derec could only guess—obscured nearly all trace of that early design, turning it into the imitation-organic agglomerate he now saw through the Wysteria’s Grand Parlor canopy. Perhaps an archaeohistorian could see the faint shadow of the original construction through all the growth, but if he had not known in the first place, Derec could never have imagined it.
The starship moved away from Kopernik at a considerable speed, so that the station shrank visibly, giving more view of the illimitable space around it.
“How does it make you feel?”
Derec started at the familiar voice and looked around. Ariel stood beside him, staring up. She held a glass in her left hand. After a moment, her free hand found his. She laced her fingers through his and for several seconds kept a gentle pressure, palm heel to palm heel. The moment
passed, and she released his hand.
“What deck are you on?”
“Twelve, forward,” Derec said.
“One below mine. At least they didn’t put us back with the group rates.”
“They wouldn’t dare.”
Ariel smirked. “No? Setaris couldn’t wait to get me out of the embassy. If the only flight available had been as cargo . . .”
“Is Hofton with you?”
“No, unfortunately. Setaris retained him. She knows talent when she sees it.”
“Too bad. I like Hofton.”
Ariel lapsed into silence, and Derec felt a mounting frustration, unable to think of anything further to say. He wished he had thought to get a glass so he could at least have something to occupy the awkward lull.
“Shit,” Ariel whispered.
Derec followed her gaze across the Parlor. At first he saw nothing that might have caused Ariel’s reaction. He started to ask her what she had seen when a face caught his eye.
“You’re kidding,” he said.
“When I arrived at Union Station,” Ariel said, “there was a mob protesting him. I had no idea he was traveling with us.”
Former Senator Clar Eliton stood with a small group of Spacers—Keresians, by the look of their clothing, heavy in the Solarian manner—carrying on an apparently lively conversation. He laughed, gestured—it was easy, even at a distance, to understand Eliton’s political success. Derec pointedly began walking the other way.
Ariel caught up to him in moments.
“I take it you don’t wish to see him, either?” she asked.
“I can’t think why I would.”
“Oh, no reason at all to avoid him. He only lost you your company, got both of us in trouble with the TBI, nearly fomented a diplomatic break between Earth and Aurora . . . nothing to hold a grudge about.”
“He did lose his senate seat.”
“To someone who has turned out to be just as rabidly anti-Spacer as apparently he was.”
“But more honest and open about it,” Derec said sardonically.