"Is it any different in the corporate world?"
"Worse. You can't ever declare open war on each other. At the end of all the games, you still have to sleep with the enemy."
She smiled. "I suppose even that could have its pleasant moments."
Coren shot her a look. "I'm sorry, Ambassador, but I don't find any of this particularly amusing."
Ariel jerked as if she had been struck. "I didn't mean-"
"Someone very special to me is dead because you people are playing games. I understand them, but that doesn't make it any more acceptable. "
Ariel's expression hardened. "Don't bleed too much, Mr. Lanra. You might pass out when I need you. "
Coren looked away, reddening. He visibly controlled himself, then cleared his throat. "So what does Aurora think Solaria is doing on Nova Levis?"'
"Until this, we had no idea. Black market trade is too vague to really attack them with-to one extent or another, we all participate, or at least our citizens do." She spoke evenly, the same tone of voice as before, as if their disagreement had not occurred.
"Until now. You mean the cyborgs?"
"Settlers couldn't build them. Solaria has to be behind it. " She took a deep breath. "Which means that, if part of the research and development was done here, there had to be a Solarian contact on Earth to funnel materials and technologies and manage the program."
Coren blinked. "Gale Chassik was one of the original shareholders in Nova Levis."
"But he divested before assuming head of the Solarian mission. "
"Which would make sense…But-why?"
"That's a very good question. I-"
Coren's comm chirped. He snatched it up from the table at his right and stabbed at it. "Lanra." He listened for a time. Gradually, his face lost its composure. He looked momentarily confused, then shocked. "I'll talk to him. Where is he now? Good. No, don't tell him I'm coming. Thanks."
"What is it?"
"Come with me. We have to see someone."
"You need more-"
"Now, Ariel. Please." They took an embassy limo to the DyNan compound, where Coren easily passed them through security. He led the way to the elevator, and tapped in the destination; a minute later, they stepped into a spacious, comfortably furnished suite.
Someone was sitting in a chair, watching the subetheric. Coren held a hand up and felt Ariel bump into it.
The subetheric showed Rega Looms at a press conference. "
– decision has not been taken lightly or capriciously. For personal reasons I choose not to go into at this time, I must announce my withdrawal from this campaign. I apologize to all those who have shown me their support through the last several months. I know all our hopes have been compromised, but I trust they have not been destroyed. There are others, more qualified than myself, to step into office and carry on the work to which I have pledged myself my entire life. I do not-"
The screen went blank. The man who had been watching now stood and turned.
Coren stared. "Rega?"
Rega Looms looked at them both, his face expressionless and pale.
"What are you doing, Coren?" he asked quietly. "Why are you here?"
"Trying to find out why your daughter was murdered."
Looms shook his head. "I want you to stop. I don't want you to go any further. I want this ended. Now."
"Why?"
Looms shook his head again. "I don't choose to discuss it."
"That's not good enough, Rega."
Looms looked mildly puzzled for a moment, then scowled. "You work for me, Coren. This investigation is over."
"Why?"
"I told you-"
"Why didn't you tell me you had a son before Nyom?"
Rega Looms turned his back on Coren and faced the dead subetheric. Coren waited till it seemed Looms would say nothing more and reached down for his pack.
"I've withdrawn from the campaign," Looms said. "I was contacted by someone who threatened to release the fact you've just mentioned to the public and tie me in with people and concerns I broke from years ago. Of course, in the public's imagination, nothing is ever finished-if I had once been in league with the enemy, I must still be so. Without even a chance to explain, my ability to function would be compromised and my reputation crippled."
"Do you know who sent it?"
"No. Not specifically."
"When did this happen?"
"Yesterday afternoon. I tried to comm you, but you were unavailable. I decided late last night to withdraw rather than hurt the Church."
Coren wanted to argue with him, tell him that people would understand, that they would support him because blackmail was so odious. But he knew better. The appearance of hypocrisy and the suggestion of a lie, even one of omission, turned people crudely incapable of compassion and robbed them of the ability to think when it came to politics. Coren had worked for the government, seen too many politicians go down in a mangle of innuendo simply because their constituency thought they had been betrayed by a promise compromised. There was nothing else Looms could do.
"Why didn't you tell me?" Coren repeated.
"I didn't tell anyone. It was nobody else's business. It was my own grief, my own horror. No one else has a right to that."
"Ree Wenithal knew."
Looms turned toward him. "Wenithal? What in god's name are you doing with him?"
"He came up. There was a kidnapping case and evidently you were part of it. "
"Wenithal is a corrupt policeman who failed to follow through on that investigation. I was peripheral to his case at the time, but we had several interviews because of Jerem."
"Jerem? That was your child's name?"
Suddenly, Looms' eyes flowed with tears. His hands curled into fists and he looked toward the ceiling. "Why won't you let this end?"
Coren waited again. Looms sighed shakily and sat down on the edge of a couch. " Jerem was born with a compromised immune system. Unusual, but not unknown; standard treatments exist for it. But they didn't work. It got worse. When he was a year old, it was obvious something was killing him. Finally, he was diagnosed with a nonorganic system infection. A nanotech disease. A leftover. " He glared suddenly at Ariel. "A gift from our flirtation with technologies we should never have allowed. " The fury waned as quickly as it had emerged, and his gaze returned to the floor. "No treatment. Life support was available in certain institutions, but we had to…surrender him into their care…"
He sobbed loudly. "It was easier. They offered anonymity and promised to make him comfortable till he died. "
"Did they tell you when he died?" Coren asked.
"No. That was part of it. We had to walk away. In return, we guaranteed that it would never be made public."
"What about birth records?"
"Security locks. The system has been in place for a long time."
"Locks can be picked, Mr. Looms," Ariel said. "This one was."
"Let me guess," Coren said. "You bought shares in Nova Levis because they offered research into exactly what killed Jerem."
"Oh, much more than that. I named the place! Nova Levis. 'New Light.' Something I'd…borrowed…from the Church." Looms shook his head. "I was naive. I hadn't yet realized that the original anti-robot movement had been absolutely correct in their analysis that any concession on the issue of nonorganic life was nothing but a danger, a complete betrayal of all things human. That this idea was fundamentally destructive and could never be controlled. "
"We've proven them wrong," Ariel said.
"Have you? You're so utterly dependent on your robots that you're dying out. You don't even reproduce anymore."
"That's-"
"What? Untrue? What is the average birthrate on a Spacer world? Is it sufficient for replacement? Or are your populations dwindling?"
Ariel said nothing.
"Life is good among the Spacers," Looms went on, warming now to his own arguments. "Two, three hundred years to explore the insides of your own psyches to the exclusion
of all else, even the future. The possibilities of self-indulgence are so wonderful that you forget the most basic necessity of organic life-to breed. It's seen as an oddity, a curiosity, a peculiarity. Solarians don't even share the same households, they can't stand to be near others. They breed ex utero. Aurorans find children too undignified and simply avoid the whole embarrassing thing. But you compensate-you make life through your robots. I imagine that this goes quite a distance in fulfilling the void in your hearts by the absence of real children."
"We don't have orphanages to warehouse the unwanted and uncounted," Ariel said.
Looms stared at her.
"Why did you sell your shares?" Coren asked.
"Um…the research took a direction that repulsed me." He frowned. "They began developing symbiotic prostheses-nonorganic augmentation that combined with organic systems, became essentially one with them. I found this… unacceptable. "
That's a lie," Coren said. "You got out because Jerem died."
Looms glared at Coren. "I know my own mind. Jerem died two years before I sold my holdings."
"But it frightened you," Ariel said. "The research."
"Yes, Ms. Burgess, it did. To preserve the few, we were threatening the very definition of 'human.' "
"Isn't that a little extreme?"
"Is it? Where's the line? Do you know where it is? Would you call your positronic creations 'living; Ms. Burgess? I wouldn't. And I saw no good in blurring the distinctions further, no matter how many suffering infants it saved. "
"So you bailed out," Coren said. "Did you know there was a sister lab on a Settler colony?"
"No. But that wouldn't have changed my decision."
Coren sighed wearily. "It's too late to stop this, Rega. I have to finish. "
"Why? I left it alone for almost thirty years, why can't you drop it now?"
"I…" Coren coughed. "I loved Nyom. This is personal for me."
"You work for me."
"I quit. "
Looms' face reddened.
"This is out of your hands anyway, Mr. Looms," Ariel said. "Aurora has a joint interest in this with Terran authorities. Nova Levis is the source of a problem to which your naivety may well have given birth. "
"You can't make me responsible for any of this."
"No? Try this: If you hadn't turned your back on what you did and pretended since that it never happened, maybe what's happened now would never have gotten this far. You surrendered any chance of control over it when you surrendered your responsibility."
"I did not act alone!"
"None of us ever do. Some of us forget that, though. Then there's a mess to clean up." She stepped up to Coren. "Mr. Lanra, Aurora offers you a job working on our behalf in this matter. Along with that comes our sanction and protection."
Coren could not look away from Looms, even when he said, "I accept, Ambassador Burgess."
A day earlier, the expression of betrayal he saw on Looms' face would have broken his heart. Now it only annoyed him.
"Very well," Looms said finally. "If you insist on going ahead. Use whatever facilities DyNan has. Both of you. Any assistance my company may offer, feel free to use, Ms. Burgess."
He walked past Coren, to the door. For a moment, Coren thought he might look back. But Looms passed through, out of the suite.
"You didn't tell him that his son is still alive," Ariel said.
"I see no purpose in cruelty now." Coren looked around the office as if trying to memorize its details. "Besides, " he said at length, "is it really his son anymore?"
Twenty-Seven
The configurations in the memory buffers are nonstandard, Derec. "
Derec glanced at the console. "That's what I expected, Thales. Can you access them?"
"Yes, but I cannot guarantee any degree of coherence."
Everyone had gathered around the platform on which lay the slightly viscous mass of cyborg brain tissue and nearly fifty centimeters of what resembled spinal column. Instead of distinct vertebrae separated by disks, the spine was composed of overlapping sheathes that attached on clusters of bearing-like spheres.
Derec had found positronic nodes within the brain mass, though their links to the actual neurons of the brain were difficult to determine. Fine cables now entered the tissue, feeding back into the interface, connecting it to Thales.
Derec looked around at the others. Rana sat at the main board, monitoring the link. Palen, Harwol, Masid, and Polifos stood on the opposite side of the platform. Baxin sat nearby, with two of Harwol's agents.
Thales/Bogard stood behind them.
"Whatever you can give us, Thales," Derec said.
"Very well. I am translating through my own language processors. Stand by."
Silence stretched.
A loud hiss emerged from the speakers. Three screens flickered to life. The far left-hand screen displayed alphanumerics. Derec recognized the symbology-inferential calculus and asymptotic series, standard approaches to positronic interactions-but the groupings did not appear logical. As the symbols flowed by, he spotted an equation that startled him:
Then:
He recognized it out of combinatorial topology, but its use here baffled him. "You're copying this to Ariel, Thales?"
"Yes, Derec." Thales paused. "I am seeing invariant topologies expressed in Poincarй Sets. I surmise these are serving as anchor points between the organic neuronal structural and the positronic matrix. "
"I'm glad you have some idea what it means. "
The second screen showed abstract shapes broken at intervals by recognizable objects-faces, buildings, rooms. A catalogue of visual memory, delivered in a form Derec comprehended from ordinary positronic excavations.
The third screen seemed to be nothing more than lists. Places, names, things.
The speakers popped loudly. Then: "My owaaaaaaaaaaa!"
The hiss seemed to modulate, then fade.
In a faint voice, sexless and tired: "Make it stop."
Derec took a step toward Rana.
"It moves! That's what I like, more juice, give me some of that and that and turn it around again, stop it!"
"Thales?" Derec prompted.
"The memory is stored nonhierarchically," Thales said. "More like a human brain, although storage is discreet rather than undifferentiated. I am trying other nodes."
The speaker crackled. "Kill it! What business does it have doing like that? I came here expecting nothing! Pull that or put it away I can do better than-"
"Derec," Thales said, "I have identified a structure that seems to be a positronic external interface. "
"We can talk to it?" Rana asked, surprised.
"You can't have that, it's too complex and I'm too one thing or another! Get out of my borrowed-"
"Perhaps," Thales said. "It depends on how reliable the connections are to the rest of the brain. It is presently generating conceptual axioms similar to an organic condition known as Korsakov's Syndrome. Imposing order may not be possible."
"Let's try it," Derec said. "It is now active."
"Can you hear me?" Derec called out. Silence.
"Do you have a name?"
"Several," the speaker said. "Call me Shit For Brains, like Greeshal does when I don't answer right away, nice guy Greeshal, should see me now, what do you want?"
"I want the name you prefer. "
"Cordios."
"What are you, Cordios?"
"The answer to your problem."
"Do I have a problem?"
"A lot of problems. Main one, you're alive."
"So are you. Is that a problem, too?"
"Wrong. Wrong. Error. Sorry."
"You aren't alive?"
"Not since I was born."
"When was that?"
"Before I died."
"Cordios, do you remember becoming what you are?"
"Do you remember being born?" it asked.
"No."
"Then you must be human."
"Do you remember being
born?" Derec asked.
"Light, fade, pinpricks all through my head, I have now taken up the heat. Little nits chasing around through my spleen, see them run, see them caught and added to the dog. Everything hurts it feels right, for once I'm growing, I hear, I see, I touch when I want to…no, I don't remember being born, just being reborn. The clarity! Look-at-that! If you made this then you must be good for something. Little shits can't even reflect light, but boy do they inspire! Watch me Mommy while I kill the cat! If you don't want me to break my toys then don't give them to me, hypocrite, liar, that's human, too. Left me here and all I did was breathe. Now I don't even have to do that. Some things are worth dying for, you should see it from the other side. "
"What is this?" Harwol asked. "This doesn't make any sense."
"You want sense, tissue? Try this: evolution has infinite vectors, most of them unrecognized, a lot of them artificial. Evolution by design only happens when design evolves. Riddle, riddles, junior piddles, spank him nice and kill him twice. You're all obsolete. Look at me, I'm the new standard."
Thunder burst from the speaker then, fading quickly to a whisper, then silence.
"The interface has been deactivated, Derec," Thales said. "Why?"
"I do not know."
"You had no reason-?"
"I did not deactivate it. The subject did."
"What does that mean?" Palen asked.
"It means," Derec said, "that this thing is still self-aware. It shut down the interface."
"Is that possible, boss?" Rana asked.
"I wouldn't have thought so. But…Thales, see what you can salvage, then terminate the subject."
"I may have a problem with that, Derec."
"What's that?"
"Is it human?"
Derec considered the question. "I see. Then just terminate the excavation. I'll deal with the remains."
"Yes, Derec. "
The names still danced across the third screen, but now the other two showed nothing.
"Thales, do you have any identification on the names being displayed?"
"Yes, Derec. They are several lists combined. I have names of people currently employed in warehouses, shipping departments, and ITE offices. Dockworkers. Transportation specialists. There is a separate list of merchant ships. A considerable amount validates the information given by Yuri Pocivil. Another list of people and places which I infer from the locations are on Settler colonies. There is also a list matching files Ariel instructed me to locate regarding the kidnappings which precipitated the investigation that closed Nova Levis."
Chimera (isaac asimov's robot mystery) Page 35