Isaac Asimov's Aurora

by Mark W. Tiedemann

  “No.”

  “Then—”

  “She calls them reanimés. If they’re what I think they are, we called them cyborgs.”

  “Do you always trust this large?” Rekker asked.

  “I haven’t told you anything yet that would cost you your life.”

  “No, probably not. Just so I’m clear, was that a threat?”

  “I don’t make threats.”

  “I bet you don’t. Well.” Rekker slapped his knees loudly and laughed. “Cyborgs. You say you encountered one? I find that hard to credit.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause they don’t work right. None of ’em. Every single one has something wrong with it. And just so we’re clear, that was a confirmation. The reanimés are cyborgs. People don’t like that word, maybe it still hasn’t occurred to them yet that that’s what they’re dealing with. To most people on Nova Levis, they aren’t even real. Ghost story, something to scare their kids at night. Lurkers in the jungle, so to speak. I’ve even heard some people theorize that they’re indigenes. Whatever, they don’t come around. Humans and cyborgs don’t share a lot in common. For that matter, cyborgs are like Solarians.”

  Masid stared at the man for a long time, stunned. Finally, he shifted in his chair and leaned forward. “Who are you?”

  Rekker grinned. “Why, I’m glad you asked that, son. I’m a man with a failed mission. I’m the original Spacer legate to oversee the Settler transition.”

  Masid remembered a name from the colonial history report he had skimmed: Prent Rekari, Keresian. He had been present during the initial phase of the Church of Organic Sapiens’ settlement program, supervising the exchange of authority between the Solarian mission and the new colonial government.

  “I thought you were dead,” Masid said.

  “The report still says that?” He laughed. “Well, there you are. I’m a ghost. But believe me, I’m the genuine article.”

  “One thing about my exile,” Rekker said, working at a large, much-repaired food recycler, “is the refreshing absence of fuck-all interstellar politics. Until, that is, the blockade sealed the planet off.”

  He returned with a pair of glasses containing a milky drink. He handed one to Masid. Kru huddled on one of the oversized chairs, point­edly ignoring them, anxious to return to Tilla.

  “You’ve been here almost thirty years then,” Masid said.

  “Has it been that long? You lose track with the various circadians all competing for command of your biology. I was here . . . let me see . . . thirty-three years ago local time, when the transfer began. I had a nice office in Nova City then.”

  “What happened?”

  “I’m still trying to figure that out. It’s difficult when you only know this end of things. But basically I was kidnapped. The transition between Solarian authority to colonial control was not going to be a smooth ordeal. The Solarians are a jealous, possessive lot, I’m sure you know, but they’re also loathe to make any kind of direct contact with other organisms, including each other. That’s why they use us as their diplomatic infantry. But that also means that errors in translation—their wishes ver­sus colonial demands or even local necessity—are inevitable. Solaria wanted to maintain a presence, mainly in Nova City. That made sense, that’s where all the latest infrastructure was based anyway.”

  “But?”

  “But the Settlers wanted no robotic presence anywhere around them. Out of sight, preferably off the planet. They knew they couldn’t get that, so the negotiations were all to do with how much and where and what could be done in the case of violations.”

  Rekker took a long drink. “Now, Nova Levis—or, as it was previously known, Cassus Thole—had been primarily a mining planet. We had robot launch facilities all over the mountains, satellite mining stations scat­tered across most of the main continent, and some processing facilities. On-ground mining was simply too lucrative to pass up, a lot of the ores were so close to pure to begin with, but even so, the bulk of the profitable mining was done offworld. Tau Secordis has very rich asteroid fields, and there are a couple of big rocks that barely qualify as planets we worked, too. There shouldn’t have been a problem, just a lot of tedious clean-up. Robots can remove themselves just as efficiently as they settle in. The only real problem should have been the biomanagement plant.”

  Masid frowned.

  “Oh, yes,” Rekker laughed. “We’d stretched a couple of points to the Settler Coalition about the actual habitability of Cassus Thole. By the time the COS arrived, we’d turned vast stretches of the plains to agricul­ture. Very profitably, too, I might add. That was part of the terms of the lease. But to do that required a considerable degree of direct reforming intervention. The Solarians built a plant near the southern pole to manage the biosphere reclamation and transition.”

  “I thought the planet was human habitable when it was found.”

  Rekker laughed sharply. “No such thing, Settler, no such thing in the universe! When you people started coming out from Earth a couple cen­turies ago, you’d been sold a story about how easy it was. After all, hadn’t we Spacers simply found a whole slew of wonderfully empty planets, biologically tabula rasa, just waiting for our benevolent transplantation of native Earth flora and fauna to turn them into paradises?” He leaned forward. “We’d found hundreds of planets that were useful. That doesn’t mean they were ready for people to move in. Some of them had very aggressive biospheres, a few of which are still unsuitable for colonization. We took the ones that were easiest to terraform and started working on the rest. I’m sure we originally intended to expand into more than just fifty worlds, but . . .” He shrugged elaborately.

  “Still,” he continued after a pause, “there was a lot of credit to be made managing new worlds and when the whole Settler Program got going, we thought we had found a way to get rich and stay safe at the same time. So we . . . withheld a few details. Nothing that hasn’t worked out just fine in the long run. Two centuries now and the Settler worlds are beginning to reach a point where they can go out and settle their own dependent colonies.”

  “But they all needed work.”

  “Right. And Cassus Thole needed a lot. Remember, originally it was just going to be a mining planet. We didn’t need to be able to stroll in the woods for that.”

  “Why lease it in the first place?”

  Rekker shook his head. “I don’t know. I was never given a justification for that. I’m sure you could ask the same question about a dozen or more other worlds we’ve leased. Why? Someone thought it was a good idea. I thought it was silly at the time, but my job was to ease the transition, not question the logic.”

  “So what went wrong? I assume something went wrong.”

  “The colonists wanted the biomanagement plant shut down. It offended them. I had to go back and forth, oh, fifty times, a hundred, with counterproposals, threats, tantrums, retractions, restatements—” He gave a mock shudder. “The crap in the pasture of the universe. It wasn’t good enough that Solaria proposed to simply relocate it to the Spacer zone in Nova City. They wanted it shut down! Idiots. How do you explain to someone who refuses to understand that certain things are necessary to a continued lifestyle? That if this thing that so offends one’s sensibili­ties goes away, then they will in all likelihood die?”

  “What was so fatal?” Masid asked.

  “The nitrogen cycle in the biosphere tends to produce an excess of ammonia. One of the byproducts is a cyanotoxin, used by some of the flowering plants to fend off a form of local ungulate that would eat every pollinating grass on the surface. You see the problem. Eliminate the excess ammonia, the ungulates overbreed and eat everything. Leave it alone and maybe take care of it during food processing. But it’s not enough to simply process out the cyanides from the harvests, because during pollination the toxins become airborne. So, you have to revise the cycle.”

  “What did you do about the ungulate?”

  “Eradicated them. We have some specimens in researc
h zoos.” Rekker raised his hands. “I know, it’s terrible. But sometimes certain biologies just can’t coexist. You can have one or the other, not both.”

  “Did it occur to you that the COS might have objected if they’d known?”

  “No. They knew. Not a word was said. They wanted their lease.” Rekker shook his head. “I don’t know why we couldn’t have sold them a different planet, somewhere else. Another one of those imponder­ables. This was the planet agreed upon, it was our job to make it ready for them. They accepted most of the terms. We fixed the biosphere. Somewhere along the way, they failed to understand that a biosphere tends to revert if the revising technologies are withdrawn prematurely. The plant had to remain in place for another century at least before the cycle could be reasonably guaranteed to be permanent. They didn’t like that.”

  Rekker finished his drink. He studied the glass as if trying to decide whether to have another. He frowned finally and set it down.

  “Solaria decided to move the plant anyway. We were still in the middle of negotiations about it. Solarian authority hired an independent firm to move the facility and start it up. By the time I knew it was hap­pening, it had been shut down and a new containment building was going up in the middle of Nova City. I started digging in for some answers—I hate being kept out of the loop, especially when it’s my word that’s supposed to carry weight with the people involved. They hired a firm called The Hunter Group. I’d never heard of them, but they seemed, on the surface, to know what they were doing. But they were overbuild­ing the facility. When I asked about it, I was informed that a second lease had been granted to this company to operate a research station on Solaria’s behalf. I thought, ‘That’s strange. I thought Keres had the exclu­sive rights to negotiate for research facilities.’ Keres did. Solaria was going around us. I started complaining. I was told to finish the negotia­tions first. But that just annoyed me more.”

  “You kept asking questions.”

  “And I was kidnapped for my troubles. Taken right out of my bed in the middle of the night. Very melodramatic. They held me in the remains of the south polar station. Very cold.”

  Masid smiled wryly. “Did you find out anything about Hunter before they kidnapped you?”

  “Now here’s where you and I have to do our own negotiation. So far I haven’t told you anything that would get you killed. But from this point on we have to learn to trust on more than just the say-so of a mutual friend.” Rekker looked past Masid to Kru. “No offense intended toward Tilla, but this is where it gets serious. In fact, maybe it’s best you not listen.”

  Masid glanced back at Kru. She glowered at them both. “If you want to go back to Tilla—”

  “She told me to see you get back safe,” Kru snapped. She stood. “I’ll wait outside.”

  When she had left, Masid said, “Let me ask you a question first. Why do you trust Tilla?”

  “Well, you get tired of not trusting people. Look at poor Kru. She spends every waking moment in fear of other people. Tilla rescued her from a serious addiction and she’s been faithful ever since, especially when Tilla got too sick to be threat to her. That’s no way to be.” Rekker sighed. “But that’s only part of the answer. Kru, I suppose, showed me that Tilla’s a good person at heart. She didn’t have to do anything to help the girl. In fact, she could have used her, done half the job and made her completely dependent. But the fact is, she convinced me that she really believed in wanting to help. She and her team could have gotten out of here long before they were compromised. There was even a chance shortly after. But they had a job and they were dedicated. I’m completely awed by that kind of dedication. I used to have it myself.”

  Masid regarded the Spacer for a long moment. Then: “Hunter is a front for an arms dealer named Kynig Parapoyos. Do you know the name?”

  “No.”

  “The cyborgs I encountered—on Kopernik Station—were working for Hunter. You said they were building a research facility? What kind?”

  “Biomedical.”

  “And it’s never been shut down?”

  “No.”

  “When did the reanimés start appearing?”

  “About ten years ago. There aren’t many of them, that’s why they’re considered more myth than meat by most people.”

  “How do you know about them?”

  Rekker grinned. “Allow me to keep a few secrets. So what is it you’re here to do?”

  “If Kynig Parapoyos owns that facility, he’s building cyborgs. Maybe the ones you’ve seen don’t work very well, but the one I saw worked very well. It’s only a matter of time before their . . . creation . . . is perfected.”

  “And a source of cyborgs for an arms dealer could be a real problem. You think you can stop them?”

  “No one on the blockade knows about the relationship between Para­poyos and Nova Levis. Baleys are being smuggled in here. I’m thinking there’s a slave traffic or at least a black market biomedical resource flow operating out of Nova City. I have no idea what I can do, but I can’t do anything until I know for certain what’s going on and who’s involved.”

  “Can’t fault your logic.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You may be shy on common sense, though. I’ll tell you one thing: Even if this Kynig Parapoyos owns that facility, the research it’s doing is for Solaria.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I’ve been here long enough to recognize patterns and players.” He remained silent until Masid understood that no other answer was going to be offered.

  “What have you been doing for the last thirty years?” Masid asked.

  “Oh, that. Well, after my kidnapping, a new liaison was assigned. My captors held me for two years. When I was freed, no one would acknowl­edge my existence. To be perfectly honest, that suited me just fine. I’d been betrayed. I’d had enough. I turned my back on the whole mess and moved out into the country. Here. I thought for a couple of years that I might one day find a way to uncover what was going on and expose it. A hero’s return, maybe. But I realized after a while that, frankly, nobody would thank me. So I became a local tinkerer. I fix things for people. I’m no threat to anyone because I have no interests that conflict with anyone else’s.” He pointed a finger at Masid. “I help you, that could change.”

  “Are you going to?”

  “Depends. What do you think would be the next step?”

  “Getting inside Nova City.”

  “That’s right. You know you might never come back out?”

  “If I’m ever going to get out, it’ll be from there.”

  Rekker grinned. “Okay, you’re not stupid. Fine. You want to get inside Nova City, it’ll take time. You can’t just walk in. The perimeter is well secured. So you’re going to have to get an invitation. To do that, you’ll have to go to work for the local boss.”

  “Filoo?”

  “Have you met him?”

  “No.”

  “Good. That’ll make it easier. What I’ll do is start a useful rumor that he ought to look into you and maybe hire you. What’ve you been doing for a living since you got here?”

  “Selling pharmaceuticals.”

  “That’s just his sort of thing. He may well know who you are already, then. I can set it up so he won’t think you’re a threat. Once he hires you, it’s up to you. The bosses are the only ones who regularly go to Nova City from the outlying townships.”

  Rekker stood. “So to answer your question, what have I been doing the last thirty years? Waiting for you, it looks like.”

  “Why are you helping?”

  “I would dearly love to know who fucked me.” He waved. “Come on, you need to get Kru back to Tilla before she bursts from anxiety.”

  “I have one more question.”

  “I doubt that. What is it?”

  “How come you’re not sick? Almost everyone else here seems to be.”

  Rekker smiled sadly. “I’m a Spacer. Spacers never get sick.”

&n
bsp; 15

  MIA SNAPPED the book closed at the sound of her cabin door chime. She reached over to her desk and touched a contact. The display identified her visitor as Commander Reen.

  Mia closed the surveillance screen and slipped the book into a locking drawer at the base of her desk. She rolled her chair around to face the flatscreen on which shipping route tables waited for her attention.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Reen, Lt. Daventri. May I come in?”

  “Certainly, sir.” She touched the contact that opened her door.

  Reen stepped quickly in, hands clasped behind his back. Mia began to rise, but he lifted one hand and gave a slightly shake of his head.

  “You’re on personal time,” he said. “Formalities can wait.”

  “Then . . .” Mia bit back a demand to know why he was here, disturb­ing her “personal time,” but instead she said, “May I offer you something to drink?”

  “No, thank you. May I sit?”

  She gestured to a chair. He glanced at her flatscreen as he folded himself into the seat. “Working?”

  “Puzzles annoy me. I have a hard time relaxing when they’re unre­solved.”

  “I understand completely. I wanted to offer you an opportunity to sit in on Corf’s interrogation. Perhaps get a sense of where you might take it before we begin.”

  “I was under the impression that he already had been interrogated.”

  “Preliminaries. I’ve assigned a specialist to do a more thorough examination.” He smiled thinly. “Corf is the first one we’ve caught of any real rank or position. Granted, Stores isn’t much of a position, but it’s a perfect one for a smuggler. He has to know more than he’s given us so far.”

  “Of course, I’ll be glad to assist . . .” Mia frowned. “A specialist? What service?”

  “Independent.”

  Mia kept her expression neutral. She knew what Reen meant, and it skirted legality. She wondered if he actually possessed the authority to do this, then wondered how she might find out without letting Reen know.

  “If you think that’s necessary,” she said carefully.