She recognized this as Brixa’s typical impulse to put a polish on everything, but at the same time Ariel couldn’t find any reason to doubt his sincerity. What a marvelous skill Brixa had for making everything seem better than it was, and for finding exactly the perfect way to make even the good look better.
“Come on,” he said. “There’s much more.”
He led her out of that ward, down a long windowed hall to the wing of the complex that housed people who were sufficiently far along to breathe on their own again and begin the process of acquainting themselves with their new bodies. Compared to the first ward, this area was a riot of activity: physical therapy, speech therapy, games and contests—and so many of them were children. At least seventy percent, racing and tumbling around the slower and more cautious adults, adapting to the radical change in their physical 197
HAVE ROBOT, WILL TRAVEL
existence as they might react to the stiffness of a new pair of shoes.
Here and there metal gleamed, where a skin graft had failed or the ravages of disease had forced Brixa’s laboratory into a more aggressive use of dermal alloys. Brixa was clearly carried away by his enthusiasm for the project, explaining to her exactly what each child or adult was doing as if he was personally familiar with every case. Periodically he caught himself, saying, “Sorry. I should be letting you come to your own conclusions.”
Ariel was too overwhelmed to comment on his facile manners. All of these people, all of these children would otherwise be dead, she thought. How could any rational person object?
Even so, she did. At the core of her, a voice spoke against what she saw. This is the death of the human, it said—and though she tried to ignore it, the words had the weight of truth. Or belief, which at the moment were the same thing.
Brixa touched her on the arm. “It gets to me, too,” he said. “You may not believe that, but it’s true. I don’t have any children, so I see all of them as mine.”
“How many do you lose?” she asked, attacking him to disguise what she was feeling.
The expression on his face shocked her. For a moment she thought he might cry; then the wave of emotion dampened itself, and all that remained was a shadow of sadness.
“Too many,” Brixa said. He turned away from her and walked down the hall, leaving her no choice but to follow.
She caught up with him in a round atrium with a domed glass ceiling. It was a lab, alive with people wearing white coats or spray-on clean suits peeling away as they disintegrated in the relatively contaminated environment of the complex’s public area. So now we talk to some of those people who are getting their hands dirty, Ariel thought. Brixa confirmed her intuition by dropping his arm around the shoulders of a slight woman and steering her back toward Ariel.
“Ariel Burgess, Krista Weil,” Brixa said. “You two talk for a while; 198
HAVE ROBOT, WILL TRAVEL
I’m going to go take care of a few things.” With that, he strode rapidly away down one of the six hallways that emptied into the large lab space.
Weil sized Ariel up and said, “You must be an investor.”
“Not exactly,” Ariel said. “Not of money, in any case. All of my capital is political, and right now there’s precious little of that.”
Weil frowned. “So what is it he wants me to tell you?”
“Let’s start with what you do here.”
Weil started walking, and Ariel followed. They covered half the length of a corridor, not the one Brixa had used and not the one they’d come in. A door opened automatically and Weil walked into a starkly lit room with waist-high counters running the length of its four walls around a formidable workstation in the center of the floor.
“This is what I do,” she said.
The counters were piled and strewn with what at first glance Ariel took to be robot components; then she realized they were various implants designed for human beings. The door opened again and a tall, thin man came in. A Spacer: Ariel knew this instinctively, and when he caught sight of her, she saw the same flicker of recognition in his eyes.
“Jan, this is Ariel Burgess. Brixa said we’re supposed to show her around.”
Ariel extended her hand and Jan shook it. “Aurora?” he said.
The simplest thing was to say yes, so that’s what Ariel did. Jan nodded. “I’m from Keres, but I’ve been working on Earth for the last eleven years, until Nucleomorph opened up shop here.”
“Jan’s the one who designed the procedure on Basq,” Weil said.
She had seated herself at the workstation, and looked ready to withdraw from the conversation.
Jan didn’t let her. “I did part of it. Krista here had something to do with it too.”
Ariel was struck by their common reluctance to take full credit for what, by any standard, was a revolutionary biomedical procedure. “It 199
HAVE ROBOT, WILL TRAVEL
was impressive work,” she said. “I’d seen a few cyborgs before him, and he looks much healthier than they ever did.”
“He is,” Weil said. “Almost all of the reanimes we found when we got here have died. That lab Parapoyos was running just barely deserves the name. It was more like a group of people who called themselves scientists rolling dice with the lives of dying children.”
This was substantially what Ariel had accused Brixa of ten minutes before. She wondered if some seminar had been conducted among Nucleomorph personnel instructing them to disarm the charge by displacing it onto their predecessors. A clever move, if that was the case, since Ariel had already admitted that Nucleomorph scientists did better work than whoever had worked in the previous Noresk lab.
“You don’t just work on people who are dying, do you?” Ariel asked. She didn’t know the answer to the question, and was in fact more interested in the tenor of their responses than a factual answer.
“Mostly,” Jan said. “We get healthy ones, too, but they’re typically parents of sick children. Brixa and Basq have made it a policy that if we do a child, the parents have to agree as well. Too much potential for conflict otherwise.”
“You rarely see the opposite,” Weil put in. “Sick parents are almost never willing to do it when their kids are healthy.”
It made sense. The cyborg transformation was still so radical and so uncertain that Ariel had a difficult time imagining that anyone other than a parent with a dying child would do it. This let some of the air out of fears that cyborgs were going to take over from humans—or unaltered humans—since a procedure only undertaken by the desperate was never going to be popular. And there was no Settled world like Nova Levis. Desperation was in the very air here.
“How do you feel about what you do?”
Weil and Jan looked at each other. “Jan’s the emotional one,” Weil said. “I’m a scientist. I’m interested in what is possible. The political questions don’t mean anything to me.”
Ariel looked to Jan. “I come to this from a medical background,”
200
HAVE ROBOT, WILL TRAVEL
he said. “A good ninety-five percent of the people we work on would die otherwise. My feeling is that this procedure isn’t different in kind from the first primitive body augmentations—heart transplants, artifi-cial knees, all of that ancient fumbling. If you could resurrect an ancient and ask him or her to choose between death and the cyborg operation, I’ll wager the odds are ten to one or so in favor of the transformation.”
“Now it’s our turn,” Weil said. “What are you doing here?”
Ariel debated how to phrase her answer. “I work with the Triangle.
Brixa asked me to investigate some legal questions surrounding the new cyborgs.”
Weil wasn’t willing to let her off that easily. “What questions?”
“He’s floated the idea of enforcing their citizenship rights.”
A puzzled frown creased Jan’s forehead. “Enforcing how? He wants to make them citizens?”
“Legally, they are citizens—unless you think yo
ur procedure somehow removes their humanity.”
Weil made a warning noise, but Jan was shocked enough to ignore it. “That’s ridiculous. What we do is remake people so they’re stronger, less vulnerable and more resilient than they were before. The work on their brains is minimal, merely tweaking a few connections so they can accommodate the new pathways and neural sensitivity.
You’ve mistaken us for the butchers who experimented on terminal orphans, Ms. Burgess. Their work fundamentally changed the personalities of their subjects. Ours doesn’t. It’s as simple as that, and it’s pure unreasoning bigotry that keeps our patients living out in their shacks instead of taking their places in the flow of society.”
At last he caught himself, and looked over at Weil, angry and nervous. She wouldn’t meet his eye, and Jan looked back to Ariel.
“Would you do it?” Ariel asked him. “If you were dying?”
“You’re damned right I would. Maybe even if I wasn’t. Not now, not in five years, but the day is not far off when we will be able to do this with no more risk to the patient than might accompany a 201
HAVE ROBOT, WILL TRAVEL
genome tuneup. It’ll never be as easy as pulling a tooth, but you and I will both live to see the day when it’s an option for anyone. Even Krista will live that long.”
“I might, but I wouldn’t do it if I lived to be a million,” Weil said.
“How about you, Ms. Burgess? Are you with your fellow Spacer? He thinks he’s living in the Stone Age because there aren’t ten robots for every human around here.”
“It doesn’t seem to me that highlighting cultural differences between Terrans and Spacers is useful here,” Ariel said.
Weil grinned without humor. “You do work for the Triangle, don’t you?”
Ariel wasn’t sure how to proceed. She’d walked into the middle of tensions that were much older and much broader than anything having to do with cyborgs, and like all old arguments, once started this one offered precious little opportunity to escape gracefully. It occurred to her that Brixa had known this would happen, had chosen Krista Weil for exactly that reason; then just as quickly Ariel dismissed the suspicion. He couldn’t manage things that closely.
Yet if he hadn’t planned this, the possibility presented itself that this kind of dissension was widespread, that the cyborg question would only deepen divisions between Terran and Spacer. Given the already tender state of affairs, there was a genuine question of whether the cyborgs’ interests outweighed the imperative to keep peace between Earth and the Fifty Worlds. Ariel had never enjoyed this brand of realpolitik reasoning, but she was supposed to be thinking for other people—including Brixa, who might have been surprised to learn that perspectives other than his own were useful.
As if conjured, Brixa stepped through the door. He took in the silence between Ariel and the two scientists and said, “Well. I trust you’ve learned what you hoped to learn here, Ariel. How about you come back to the office and we’ll see if we can’t work out some plan of action?”
202
CHAPTER
30
Derec was out of his seat and waiting at the debarkation lock before the freighter had even started to equalize pressure with Nova City ambient. He threw a hurried thanks over his shoulder at the pilot, whose name he’d never learned, and bulled his way into inspection waving his government identification. That was when the first of many things went wrong.
The inspector’s lips pursed as he ran Derec’s records. “Mr. Avery,”
he said, “you appear to have a pending criminal case against you on Kopernik Station.”
“Excuse me?”
“I can’t permit re-entry into Nova Levis under these circumstances.
Will you come with me, please?”
The clerk indicated a door behind his desk. Derec didn’t move. “The charge was fraudulent to begin with, and has been dropped. That’s why they let me out. You might have heard there’s a blockade. If I was under charge, they would hardly have let me fly away.”
“I’m not here to argue, Mr. Avery. This way, please.”
“I am here to argue. Let me put this to you simply: People are going 203
HAVE ROBOT, WILL TRAVEL
to die if you hold me up here while we establish the fact that the TBI investigators on Kopernik are slow to update their records.”
Now the clerk was angry. “Mr. Avery. If you do not come with me, I will have you arrested.”
Derec’s datum chirped. He glanced at it and saw that Hofton was calling. Without asking the clerk, he answered the call. “Hofton. What a surprise.”
“Derec. May I suggest you allow me to talk to the customs clerk?
I believe things can be cleared up without much trouble.”
“Are you—” Derec clamped his mouth shut and handed the datum to the clerk. “My counsel. He’ll clarify the situation for you.”
The clerk took the datum and spoke first. “This is Nova Levis planetary customs. Your client has a pending criminal charge, and cannot under these circumstances be permitted entry.”
Derec could no longer see Hofton’s face, but the humaniform’s voice was clear enough. “Perhaps we should discuss this out of Mr.
Avery’s hearing.”
That was pure Hofton, all discretion. Once he’d gotten the clerk a slight distance away from Derec, he could proceed with his genteel arm-twisting without the risk of embarrassing the clerk. The clerk looked up to Derec and said, “If you leave this desk, you will be arrested before you can get out of the spaceport.” He took the datum through the door he’d pointed out before.
It didn’t take long. Two minutes at the most after he shut the door, the clerk opened it again. He handed Derec the datum and through a jaw trying to unclench said, “The situation is rectified. Recordkeeping errors are an obstacle to the commission of my duties.”
“I understand,” Derec said. “Policy is policy. Sorry to have made things complicated.”
Walking away into the port, he looked at the datum again, but Hofton was gone. No— gone was the wrong word. Hofton was not evident, but he hadn’t just called at that exact moment by chance.
The datum, in addition to carrying bulletproof encryption, was 204
HAVE ROBOT, WILL TRAVEL
Hofton’s way of tracking Derec. Observing him. He looked it over, admiring its construction. It looked inert, and Derec wondered how much power drain would show up on even the best monitors he could find. Quite the little spy tool.
The idea that Hofton was keeping tabs on him made Derec profoundly uncomfortable even as he was grateful for the humaniform’s assistance. After the revelations of the past couple of days, Derec’s entire sense of the relational matrix between humans and robots was shaken. The power differential he’d always understood to be in place now looked very different.
Think about it later, he told himself. Right now, worry about Ariel.
Twenty minutes later, he was lifting off from the flier yard and heeling the light craft around to the north. Once he’d passed out of Nova City’s legal jurisdiction, he relinquished control to the autopilot and called Miles.
“Work has progressed slowly in your absence,” Miles told him.
“We’ve got bigger problems, Miles,” Derec said. “The murderer of Jonis Taprin and Pon Byris is loose on Nova Levis.” He debated how much to tell the robot; even the hint that a positronic brain had been involved in the murder of a human being might be enough to set Miles teetering.
“Should I contact law enforcement?”
“No. Under no circumstances should you do that.” Derec had serious doubts that the Nova Levis Bureau of Investigation was any less territorial than its Terran counterpart; in fact, many NLBI detectives and analysts had worked for the TBI. “Understand, Miles? Do not call law enforcement.”
Miles hesitated, and Derec knew it was wrestling with the Three Law implications. “Are you telling me that you will be safer if law enforcement is not involved?”
&n
bsp; “That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”
Again, the slight hesitation. Then, Miles said, “Very well. What are my instructions?”
205
HAVE ROBOT, WILL TRAVEL
“Take the code for the datum I’m using. If anyone calls looking for me, send them here.”
“I am unable to establish that code, Derec. It is encrypted and scrambles every buffer I try to use.”
Derec grumbled curses under his breath. That was just like Hofton.
He was probably listening to this conversation and feeling superior.
When the Nucleomorph situation was resolved, Derec was going to have a talk with Hofton—and Bogard—about their organization.
“All right,” he said. “If anyone contact you looking for me, tell them I’ll be checking back with you.”
“Understood.”
Elin’s voice rang out from off the datum’s screen. “Miles, get out of the way.” She stepped into view and said, “Derec. Where are you?”
“Traveling. I’ll be back at the lab tomorrow.” Or not at all, he thought.
“Traveling,” she repeated. “Wonderful. While you were gone, we were notified that Eza Lamina wants us to appear tomorrow at a hearing. She mentioned Nucleomorph, and the implication was that we’ve been overcharging the Triangle for the services Nucleomorph provides.”
“Have we?” Derec asked. He was too tired and focused on Ariel to be tactful.
Elin froze, then just as quickly heated up. “Are you accusing me of financial improprieties?”
“No. But I haven’t been skimming money, and I’m not getting any kickbacks from Nucleomorph—” here Derec had to suppress a laugh
“—so I’m putting my mind at ease.”
“The answer is no. And when you get back, we are going to discuss my future on this project.”
“Elin, I don’t think you’re stealing. I just don’t have any energy for indirection right now. When was the last time you talked to Nucleomorph?”
“They asked for our most recent pathogen inventory the day before 206
Have Robot, Will Travel Page 21