Asimov’s Future History Volume 9

by Isaac Asimov

  request acknowledged, repeat identification, referencing matching matrix patterns

  verification codes sent, identity Thales, resident intelligence assigned Avery, Derec, Earth

  verified, state request

  briefing, data profile update, situation report, current status

  require commensurate data

  request granted, exchange protocols on-line and open

  current situation tenuous, refer files S-987A through S-1179A, continuous, gaps compatible with offered data, welcome Thales

  thank you, request time-share, memory buffer back-up, current template protocol, status

  what is current assessment of situation regarding human-positronic relations relative to political conditions, specifically Nova Levis/Terran intervention and related manifestations

  current assessment as follows

  there is a problem

  Chapter 19

  MIA MET ROS Yalor in the gymnasium after her shift ended. She found him encased in the cardio-stress cage, limbs flexing through motions that vaguely resembled swimming, sweat giving his pale skin an oily sheen that seemed oddly unhealthy. She glanced at the time chop on the control panel and waited the remaining two and a half minutes, absently watching his chest heave and his thighs flex. Two others worked at the free weights across the room.

  The machine slowed to a stop and Ros worked his way loose from the restraints, breathing heavily. He came up to Mia, and her nose wrinkled at his strong odor.

  “Is this social, Lieutenant?” he asked. “We are off-shift, aren’t we?”

  “We’re cops, Ros. We’re never off-shift.”

  “That’s crap.”

  “But true. I needed to talk to you where we wouldn’t be monitored.”

  He hesitated, then headed toward the showers. She followed him. The air was perceptibly warmer and damp. Ros stripped out of his sweats and went toward the common stall. He turned on the water, stepped briefly under the stream, then came back out.

  “All right, I can finish when we’re done,” he said.

  “We have a serious problem. I found the control point.”

  “The contraband?”

  Mia nodded. “Hard part will be proving it, assuming we live that long.”

  “Oh, that sounds encouraging.” He grabbed a towel from a shelf and rubbed his face roughly. “Okay.”

  “I found something odd in Corf’s quarters when we arrested him. He had four books. Novels.”

  “He doesn’t strike me as a reader.”

  “Nor me, but they were ancient.”

  “So? A lot of people have odd tastes.”

  “I don’t mean just the text. They were books, Ros—bound paper with covers, pages you physically turn.”

  “Now that sounds expensive. Was there an import log?”

  “No. They’re contraband. I traced them back to a source on Earth, a dealer in rarities, antiques. They were purchased by someone here, on the blockade.”

  “Corf?” Ros guessed.

  “No, he just happened to have them.”

  Ros thought for a moment. “Then can we assume whoever owns them will be wanting them back?”

  “He does,” Mia said. “He’s asked three times.”

  “Asked you? Directly?”

  “Uh-huh. Not exactly in so many words, but the hinting is profound.”

  “Who?”

  “Reen.”

  “Commander Reen?”

  “Do you know another Reen on the blockade? Somehow, the liaison to the Keresians, Lt. Jons, is involved, but I can’t get Corf to say anything. The psychometricians tell me he exhibits all the traits of a True Believer.”

  “In what?”

  “Does it matter? I found references to family members involved with Managins in his file. Nothing that prevented his acceptance into the service, but maybe enough for Corf to hero worship. But there’s always been an element of extremists in the Settler Movement. In the early years, the screening wasn’t as rigorous as it’s become—that, and Earth was happy to get rid of some of these people—which, as good as it gets, still doesn’t prevent baleys from spilling into these worlds illegally, and who knows what their affiliations might be. But think about it this way: The group that initially settled Nova Levis was a social separatist group, the Church of Organic Sapiens.”

  “Are they tied to Managins?”

  “Not directly,” Mia said, “but their philosophies aren’t incompatible.”

  “What about Reen?” Ros asked.

  “If I start snooping into his record, I could draw attention. If he’s the nexus, the controller we’ve been looking for, he may have security on his files.”

  “You could refer back to Earth.”

  Mia nodded, deciding not to tell Ros that she had already done that. “We’ve been looking for how all this stuff gets by our screening. We’ve assumed all along that there had to be a group of people on the inside, shunting goods and immigrants out of our sight.”

  “Sure, but Reen?” Ros shook his head, in dismay rather than denial. “I suppose he’s perfect. He’s got access to everything. So how do we catch him? Do you have any idea how many people he has working for him? How corrupt the whole department probably is?”

  “The best way would be to catch him receiving contraband.”

  “And how do we set that up?”

  “You’re game to try?”

  “Consider it the foolish act of a young and inexperienced officer hoping to make points with his immediate superior,” Ros said. “Yes, I’m game. Do you have a plan?”

  “I’m working on it. In the meantime, I want you to do a little light surveillance on Reen. There have to be places the contraband gets stashed before transit down to the surface, places he’s keeping off the inspection rosters. If he’s consistent, he’ll inspect them from time to time—that’s the kind of officer he is.”

  “You want to know where he goes when he’s not on duty.”

  “Pretty much.”

  Ros nodded, though the expression he wore suggested he would rather do anything but what Mia wanted. Mia patted his arm.

  “Cheer up,” she said. “At least we won’t be bored.”

  “Oh, good, I was really worried about that.”

  Mia laughed. “Finish your shower.”

  She watched him walk back to the stall and wondered exactly what kind of points with her he wanted to make.

  Her decryption program had finally opened the text woven into the end-papers of the books. What she saw on her screens represented, at a glance, the organizational flow chart of the entire contraband network around Nova Levis. Mia stared at the complex graphs, with contact points, manifests, and timetables. According to this, most of the Keresian ships and nearly half the Terran vessels were involved in routing goods into and out of Nova Levis.

  Out of . . . what could possibly be coming out of Nova Levis?

  She shook her head. Worry about that one later.

  The sheer volume stunned her. She could not imagine where all this material might be filtered through. It was as if the blockade had a vast hole in it and entire convoys were coming and going unchallenged.

  After staring at it in amazement for several minutes, she made herself lean forward and enter commands to her datum. Soon she had everything in a new file, encrypted to her password, and a separate package to be sent to Earth, to Hofton at the Auroran Embassy, and, through him, to Coren Lanra.

  She wondered about that for a moment. Lanra worked for Rega Looms of DyNan Manual Industries. Looms was also head of the Church of Organic Sapiens. Did that make Lanra suspect?

  She decided to take the chance. In her admittedly limited experience with him, Lanra had proven more ethical than simple employment could compromise. And from what she knew of Looms, he had no use for black marketeers. The material she had already received from Lanra about the bookseller justified the chance.

  Studying the data, she found five key entry points in the blockade. One of them was on this
station.

  She would wait now, and see if Ros turned up the same location following Reen. That would tell her a lot—about the network, and about Ros.

  At this point, the people she trusted most were all on other worlds.

  Coren stepped into Ambassador Sen Setaris’s office and waited until she acknowledged him and offered him a seat before her desk.

  She looked haggard, something Coren never expected to see in a Spacer. He wondered if it were just the light—a glow from her datum screens, the overall illumination in the room low, almost moody—but the more he studied Setaris the greater the impression that she was over-worked, harried. Her eyes were puffy.

  Coren waited silently for several minutes. Then the door opened and Hofton entered. He gave Coren a nod and stood at the side of Setaris’s desk, the third point of a triangle.

  Setaris looked up.

  “We want to do something illegal, Mr. Lanra,” she said. “Will you assist us?”

  “That depends,” he said.

  “Of course it does. It ought to.” She sat back and gazed at him contemplatively. “We want to take Gamelin.”

  “ ‘Take’ him?”

  “Remove him from Earth. Alive or dead, it doesn’t matter. I’m safe in assuming that you want the same thing?”

  “I suspect that he murdered Rega Looms. If he manages to assume control of DyNan, contravening Rega’s will, I’ll take it as a personal failure.”

  “That sounds like a ‘yes’ to me.”

  “You hear very clearly, then.”

  “If something goes wrong,” Setaris said carefully, “the repercussions will be . . .”

  “Profound?” Hofton said.

  She looked at the aide. “We’ll have to pack up and leave Earth immediately.”

  “I may be able to get a little consideration,” Coren said. “I have—”

  “I don’t want Terran authorities involved in any way, Mr. Lanra. This is a Spacer problem and I want it kept that way. You are already intimately involved, otherwise we wouldn’t be talking.”

  “Stop it,” Coren said. “You’d have to talk to someone—you couldn’t set this up without help outside the embassy.” He waited for a denial. When both Spacers remained silent, he continued. “Very well. We do this with as few people as possible. Do you have an idea?”

  “We hoped you would,” Hofton said.

  “Give me a day or two. How much support can you provide?”

  “I gather you mean coercive support?” Setaris said. “Hofton?”

  “We still have a full compliment of security,” Hofton said. “About thirty Aurorans, fully-armed.”

  “You’ll need blasters,” Coren said.

  “We saw the recordings from Kopernik,” Setaris said.

  “May I ask why you’re so concerned about this?”

  “Perhaps Ariel explained to you,” Setaris said. “We once played with cyborgs and found them wholly unworkable.”

  “Yes, she mentioned it. You couldn’t program the Three Laws into them.”

  “Oh, it was worse than that. Neither Ariel nor I—until this occurred—had access to the records.”

  “Aurorans keeping secrets from each other? I’m shocked.”

  Setaris’s eyes narrowed. For an instant, it seemed, she looked her age, which Coren knew to be well over two centuries. At least her eyes betrayed her; the skin remained smooth, expressionless.

  “The few successful examples,” she continued slowly, “exhibited a highly aggressive nature. They lacked, for want of a better term, a conscience. One researcher suggested it was the absence of any kind of adequate peer group environment within which to form the requisite empathy. Who knows? The point is, they were not simply unmanageable robots—”

  “They were competitors,” Coren said.

  Setaris looked surprised. “Was that just a guess or do you know something?”

  “A guess of sorts. It struck me that these . . . constructs . . . represent a separate species. At least, enough so that they might be inclined to see us as an embarrassing ancestral form.” Coren smiled. “When you work for Rega Looms you hear a great deal of discussion about evolution and ‘natural’ versus ‘unnatural’ forms. You hear a lot about self-destructive obsolescence.”

  “I see. Well, the saving grace, if you can call it that, was that these ‘constructs,’ as you call them, lacked an instinct for mutual cooperation as well. But we can’t risk the possibility that they might get over that.”

  “Or have it designed out?”

  “Exactly.”

  “May I ask a diplomatically delicate question?”

  Setaris inclined her head.

  “Was Ariel recalled to work on this problem?”

  “Yes.”

  Coren glanced at Hofton, whose face remained impassive, uncommunicative. “I see. Well, then, we’re still working on the same side. For the time being.” He stood. “I’ll be in touch. It might be safest to continue going through Hofton.”

  “I agree,” Setaris said. “This is likely the last time you and I will speak, Mr. Lanra. In that case, I thank you now for all you’ve done for us. If there is anything we might do—”

  “A job, perhaps, when all this is over.” Coren smiled. “I suspect I’ll be looking for one.”

  Setaris hesitated, then gave him a thin smile. “We’ll see, Mr. Lanra. Good evening.”

  Hofton escorted Coren out and down the wide corridors to the elevators. Coren studied the walls, realizing that this might be the last time he ever saw them.

  “There are about eight among our security people,” Hofton said abruptly, “who actually know how to handle themselves in lethal situations. I’ll be sure they form the core of whatever team we assemble.”

  “You know this is likely to blow up in your face.”

  “It already has. Ambassador Setaris was disingenuous about keeping Terran authorities out of this. They’ve already been in touch with her.”

  Hofton entered the elevator with him.

  “Are we going somewhere together?” Coren asked.

  “I’m making sure you return safely to your domicile. The ambassador’s orders.”

  “Oh? And are you qualified to act as my bodyguard?”

  Hofton gave him a long, silent look.

  “Fine,” Coren said. “Honestly, I don’t mind your company, Hofton.” They rode down to the garages in silence. Then, as the doors opened, Coren said, “By the way, I found out something interesting the other day. That grass Ariel and I brought back from the lab site—”

  “It’s Auroran,” Hofton said. “At least, it’s related to an Auroran grass, a variant from our terraforming days.”

  “Yes,” Coren said, surprised.

  “She gave me some to turn over to our lab. We identified it quickly. I was surprised it was on Earth. It’s an outlawed variety here, though the regulations are so old I doubt there’s anyone aware of them.”

  “It was originally manufactured by the company that became Imbitek.”

  “Now that I didn’t know. Interesting.” Hofton waved Coren toward a limousine. They climbed in and as the transport started up and headed out of the embassy garage, Hofton continued. “I shall have to look into that connection.”

  “Why would grass manufactured on Earth be outlawed from it?”

  “Hmm? Well, it’s a matter of history. And memory.”

  When Hofton remained silent for several minutes, Coren cleared his throat. “You aren’t going to tell me?”

  Hofton glanced at him. “Are you sure you want to know?”

  “That’s an insulting question.”

  Hofton considered. “Yes, I suppose it is. Most people don’t want to know. Not really. They like convenient facts they can use immediately, facts that will make their lives more interesting or easier. They don’t really want to know the kind that leave them feeling helpless and angry. Some—like you—hate not knowing, no matter how uncomfortable what you know is. So to protect the rest of us from people like you, th
ere are more radical measures.”

  “Meaning?”

  “The future is always dominated by those who aren’t hindered by the past. Sometimes that demands a kind of amnesia. How convenient then to be handed a tool that guarantees forgetting?”

  Coren stared at him. Suddenly, he shuddered. “Burundi’s Fever.”

  “That grass represents a past none of us wish to remember.”

  “Are the cyborgs connected?”

  “That remains to be seen. At a guess, I’d say only coincidentally. But it’s bothersome that the two seem to be related to the same lab.”

  “So the next question is—”

  “Do I know what’s been forgotten?”

  “Do you?” Coren asked.

  “That’s a very good question, Mr. Lanra.” He looked away. “Let me think about it before I answer you.”

  Hofton lapsed into silence, staring unseeing out the window at the passing city, one hand raised to his chin, his posture an absolute rejection of any further questions or conversation. Coren finally looked out his own window, letting his thoughts spin through the implications of what Hofton had just told him.

  Ariel was a victim of Burundi’s Fever . . . so was Avery . . .

  Then: They were both “cured” on Earth after being basically deported from Aurora. Why didn’t Aurora help them?

  Could they?

  The limo finally pulled up outside Coren’s building. Hofton silently followed him up to his office.

  “Good evening,” Coren’s desk said as they entered. “Please verify identity.”

  Coren sat down and went through the ritual. His flatscreens rose and he found data waiting for him. He opened the files.

  “Ah. Something for Mia. My little spies have done their work.”

  Hofton nodded distractedly.

  “All right,” Coren said, punching in the necessary commands to his desk for security. “Either tell me or leave. I can’t take the suspense.”

  Hofton sat down. “Do you know much about the Riots?”

  “The anti-robot riots? As much as most Terrans, I suppose. There were two waves of them, as I recall. The first came shortly after the Spacer Worlds were being settled. The second was about two centuries ago, when Spacetown was shut down.”

  “The first ones concern us most.” Hofton looked around. “Are we secured?”