by Isaac Asimov
Mia opened the canteen and finished its contents. She waggled it.
“More, please. We can talk then.”
The empty canteen was snatched from her grasp and a new one placed before her. Her heart kicked at the suddenness of the action, and her mind grasped for something solid.
“Do you work for Parapoyos?” one of them asked.
“I already answered that. No.”
“Would you kill him if you had the opportunity?”
“I would arrest him if I could.”
“Arrest?”
“For trial.”
They seemed to consider this. Then her escort said, “He’s coming. He’ll be in Nova City in a few days.”
“Parapoyos? Kynig Parapoyos?”
“Is there another?”
Mia laughed sharply. “Well... no, I suppose not. Why is he coming here?”
“He owns this world.”
Mia took a long pull on the canteen, thinking. “Why tell me?”
“We’re trying to find a way to deal with the situation.”
“‘We?’ Who is ‘we?’”
“His products.”
Mia worked the term over, but it made no sense. Not now. She was still tired and now, rested, her fear returned. “My companion, the injured one —”
“Is being tended. We aren’t certain we can repair him. He may die.”
“Do you have a physician here?”
“No.”
“Can you get him one?”
“We could.”
Mia waited. “But?”
“We aren’t decided yet what to do with you. Until then, you’ll stay here.”
“Where is here?”
“The wilderness. It doesn’t have a name.”
“Do you have names?”
“No. Not individually. Not like you.”
“Okay. I have to ask eventually, it might as well be now. What are you?”
“Composite beings. Biocybernetic constructs.”
Mia felt chilled. “I didn’t think such a thing was possible.”
“It may not be, not practically.”
“But — do you have positronic brains?”
“Partially.”
Mia cast about for some memory, some conversation she might have had with a Spacer... yes, she had spoken with Ariel once about the possibility. Cyborgs, she had called them. What had she said? Mia could not quite remember. She did remember a talk with her fellow Special Service people concerning possible problems with robotics, and one suggestion had been the physical joining of robot and human. But they had meant an advanced form of mechanical augmentation to an essentially human core, not a blending.
“What are you all doing out here?” she asked finally.
“Surviving,” her escort said.
“I don’t follow.”
“We are failures. Rejects. Discards. We were supposed to be destroyed. Instead, we were simply dumped in the wilderness and expected to die. We may yet.”
Mia covered her dismay with another long drink.
“Damn,” she said finally.
Masid slipped into the dark apartment. He paused, listening. Something was different. Quieter, he decided. He raised an optam — set for infrared — to his eyes and surveyed the room for unusual heat signatures. Nothing but a dull glow from Tilla...
Not bright enough. He lurched across the room to the bed.
Tilla lay absolutely still in her mass of pillows and blankets. Utterly peaceful, a deep and long-earned sleep. Hand shaking, Masid touched the artery at her throat. Utterly still.
The sob surprised him. He stepped back from the bed and wiped at his eyes. Within seconds, the fit passed, and he managed himself, regaining control.
He went through his morning ritual of drawing blood and running tests on his portable analyzer. He recorded what was left of Tilla’s chemistry, then did a quick physical examination. He estimated that she had died perhaps four or five hours earlier. Her body temperature had been unstable since he had first met her, so it was difficult to be precise. Certain protein and enzyme decay factors might provide an exact time of death, but not here, not now.
Duty completed, he moved to the next, more questionable task. He set up an injection of exotic biologicals and mutable protein mimics, which he pumped into both her brain via the right eye socket and into her pancreas. He had already prepared a recording of a long series of tests that would suggest strongly that, throughout his stay with her, Masid had been using her as a living incubator to cook new anaphages and antivirals.
He policed the apartment carefully, wondering where Kru might be, then slipped out just as dawn began smearing the sky. In his own room, he transferred the final analysis into a hidden cache in his synthesizer, then stashed the disk of the faked experiments in a pouch in his pack which was hard to find but not impossible, convincingly hidden. He checked the time: twenty minutes before his meet with Filoo. He finished his final preparations, feeling bitter and oddly unclean, then headed out the door.
Tilla had known she was dying, there was no surprise. Masid had wanted one last chance to say goodbye. Instead, he took advantage of her death to enable his mission.
“After this,” he said sourly as he descended the stairs, “I may just retire.”
Filoo sat at a cramped, overladen desk, working at a keyboard and flatscreen. He looked up briefly when Masid entered, escorted by three of Filoo’s enforcers. Filoo smiled and nodded toward a couch. One of the enforcers took Masid’s pack. Masid sat down and waited.
Filoo worked in silence for another half-hour. Presently, Tosher entered the office and leaned close to speak into Filoo’s ear. Filoo listened without expression till Tosher finished. Then he nodded and Tosher left, taking the remaining pair of enforcers with him.
“I still want to know where you’re from,” Filoo said, turning off his desk unit. The flatscreen disappeared, and the keyboard was swallowed into a slot that sealed up.
Masid sighed. “I’m a deserter. Do you want rank and unit and all that boring crap, or have I already passed the audition?”
“We’re alone now. I mean alone. I don’t have monitoring in here, I don’t like it. So you can drop the tough act.”
“If you think it’s an act...” Masid shrugged.
“You’ve got carbon. But it’s cold, I’ll give you that.” Filoo paused. “I have a vacancy in my staff. I’m offering you the job.”
“What pay for what work?”
“The work varies, pay is I don’t kill you and I don’t let anyone — or anything — kill you. Safe food, safe shelter, safe sex, safe life.”
“I can do all that for myself.”
“Don’t go stupid on me now. Negotiating is one thing, ignorance is lethal. There are things loose on this planet that can take you apart molecule by molecule in less than three days. Other stuff that can keep you alive and in constant pain for years. You’ve been lucky so far — but I’ll need to run a complete analysis on you before we finalize our arrangements. I assure you, despite your magnificent and impressive efforts, something would eventually get you. Nova Levis is a great big petri dish, and everything in it is grist for the biological mill.”
“How did it get this bad? I thought this was a stable colony before the blockade.”
“So did everyone else,” Filoo said. “Management conflict. Details got overlooked. Then this damn embargo finished it. What you’ve got here basically is a broken economy and wartime conditions. That’s a sure formula for public health disaster. The real victims are never the combatants or the owners.” He shrugged again. “Not my concern. Not yours, either, you work for me.”
“What will be my concern?”
“Profit. How we make money out of this cookpot.”
“And you’ve got vaccines for it all?”
“For now, at least. Who knows what nature will conjure up tomorrow?”
“In that case, how can I refuse?”
“By dying. Fast or slow. At this point, it’s not e
ven up to you.”
Masid cleared his throat. “One last question, if you don’t mind. What good is it if we get rich and we’re stuck on a dying world?”
“Ah!” Filoo made a wide gesture. “Well, the one constant in the universe is change, eh? This won’t last forever. And when it ends, then... use your imagination.” He laughed.
“I confess I haven’t met too many criminals who take a long-term view.”
“Criminals? We’re not criminals. We’re the hope and salvation of humankind!” He laughed again, louder. “You have to have the right frame of mind for this kind of work. You’ll learn. Now, do we get those final analyses?”
Masid hesitated as long as he thought prudent, then nodded slowly. “I suppose that would be in my best interest.”
“Yes, it would. Very much so.” Filoo stood and pointed to the door through which Tosher had entered earlier. “I want this done ASAP. Everything turns out to my liking, we leave this afternoon.”
“Leave?”
“Have to take a trip to Nova City. Normally, Kar would have accompanied me, with Tosher. But...”
“No need to explain. But, what’s in Nova City?”
“Normally nothing. Supplies, which I don’t fetch myself. But this time it’s a special event.” He patted Masid companionably on the back. “The boss is coming. We’re throwing him a party.”
“The boss?”
“Kynig Parapoyos.”
Chapter 25
COREN SLIPPED HIS ID into the reader just inside the main doors, and waited for the slow intelligence to identify him. A green light winked on and he tapped in his personal access code on the keypad below. The doors slid open with welcoming speed, and he glanced at Shola.
“I guess you’re still welcome, boss,” she said quietly.
Coren made a dubious noise and stepped through.
The only lights were dim service strips along the baseboards, and occasional recessed lamps in the ceiling. The long main corridor stretched through the center of the structure for fifteen meters till it ended at a double staircase leading up left and right. Wide archways halfway along the corridor faced each other, opening onto mirrored ballrooms where once, years ago, Rega had entertained friends and clients and people he had called “resources” in grand style. There were guest rooms for one hundred on other floors, two separate kitchens, and an independent power supply —” just in case” — that, to Coren’s knowledge, had never been used.
The glory days of the estate had been over for years when Coren and Nyom Looms had met here to play. The vast house seemed like a small city then, sections of it closed off, waiting for archaeologists to open their secrets. The parts still in use, though, had been surprisingly cozy and intimate.
Coren took the right-hand stair up to the next level. At the top, several steps ahead of Shola, he took out a small handpad and thumbed it on. A delicate schematic of the house scrolled up on the compact screen; a moment later, blue dots appeared, scattered throughout — Hofton’s people. Coren pocketed the pad and wondered idly if Hofton himself had come. It would have made him feel marginally better — Hofton was the only one left at the Auroran embassy he knew and trusted.
He passed the room wherein Rega’s body had been laid out, hesitating for a few steps. Shola caught up.
“What are we looking for specifically?” she asked.
“Rega kept a personal apartment here.”
She frowned. “Inside his own home?”
“The wealthy are different, eh? But it makes sense when you think about it. Look at this place. Hardly a home in any common use of the word. It was built as much for show and business as to live in. So Rega sequestered a small area and turned it into a private apartment.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Few people did. Hence the ‘private’ part.”
Coren stopped just past the fourth door on the left. The entire corridor was decorated by large paintings set in the wall between doorways. Coren stood before one depicting a balcony open to a wide view of dawn-lit rolling hills stretching to a river. A collection of ancient, broken pillars stood at the crest of one hill. Coren ran a fingertip down the length of one of them, and the entire panel slid to one side.
Shola whistled. “I had no idea Rega was so taken with gadgets.”
“One of the sources of his understanding about the dangers of tech.” Coren shrugged. “I never completely agreed with his view, but there was a logic to it.”
Fifteen steps ended at an open door. Coren waited at the top for Shola to join him. A warmly-lit den spread before them. The fireplace was cold — Coren could only remember one time it had been lit, one night when Nyom had led him here, quite surreptitiously, another of her innumerable acts of rebellion against a father she knew loved her — but still it seemed as though the room had only recently been vacated, temporarily, until its owner returned. Thick carpet, heavy furniture, an ancient wood desk... “timelessly anachronistic,” Rega had called it, a private smile on his lips.
“Nice,” Shola said quietly.
Reverie broken, Coren crossed the room to the next door, and stepped into the starkly functional office. He sat down behind the gray desk and tapped in authorization codes. Halfway through, a tiny beep emanated from his pocket. With one hand still entering code, he took out the handpad. A red light glowed, located in the room he had just left — a transmission. Coren’s ears warmed, and he felt a sudden sadness. He changed the display to a keypad and pressed in three digits, then returned the pad to his pocket. He drew the palm stunner and kept working.
A few moments later, Shola came into the room. “Do you want me to police the rest of the house, boss?”
“Just a moment.” He completed his entry codes, then stood. He sighed. “I really had hoped,” he said, raising the stunner, “that I was wrong.”
Shola’s eyes widened the second before he shot her. She jerked backward against the doorjamb and collapsed to the floor.
Coren quickly rolled her over and bound her wrists and ankles. He placed a skin patch on her neck that secreted an anesthetic which would keep her unconscious for hours, then dragged her into the center of the room. He searched her and found the signaler she had just used to send the message Coren’s handpad had detected and warned him about.
He placed it on the desk and took out his handpad again. Jacking it into the desk terminal, he worked at its keypad until he produced the desired function on the screen. He set Shola’s device on the screen and activated the scan.
The receiver was in the opposite end of the house. Coren tapped for a comm, then fed the data into the local network. The blue dots indicating Aurorans began to move, four of them converging on the new position. Coren watched anxiously till the dots joined.
His comm beeped.
“Lanra.”
“Nothing. Receiver abandoned. Subject on the move.”
“Shit.” Coren tapped the desk keypad and brought the house security system on-line. A screen rose and filled with floor plans. Deftly, he linked his handpad to the system. The Aurorans, masked to the house system, suddenly appeared on the larger screen, the data fed from Coren’s dedicated readout. He entered instructions to scan the residence up and down the electromagnetic spectrum for anything unusual.
At the upper edge of the UV spectrum, the screen flickered. Coren backed the scale down to where the anomaly occurred. The lines of the schematic blurred briefly, then stabilized. The location icons throughout the house continued to glow blue, moving now, methodically, from room to room.
ENGAGE AUDIO appeared at the bottom of the screen.
Coren touched the key.
“Coren?”
The voice whispered eerily, paper-over-sand rough. A chill rippled along Coren’s spine and teased his scalp. He unlinked the handpad from the desk system and began tapping instructions — frequency at which the interruption occurred, his present location, the fact that Gamelin knew he was in the house.
“Jerem?” he asked after he sent th
e data.
“Thank you. I might never have known my first name without you. I doubt I’d ever have had a chance at my inheritance.”
“What chance? You murdered your sister.”
“So? I murdered a lot of people. She just happened to be there.”
“Nyom was your sister —”
“Coren, stop it. You’re making an appeal to a nature I don’t possess.” Silence stretched. Then: “Have you ever heard of epigenetic consequence, Coren?”
“No.”
“No brothers or sisters, then?”
“I’m an orphan.”
“Ah. Like me. We have something in common. How interesting. Were you raised in a crèche?”
“For a time.”
“Ever have sex with any of your creche mates?”
“No.”
“Ever want to?”
“No.” Coren glanced at the handpad. LOCATED appeared on the small screen.
“Ever wonder why?”
“Not really.”
“Fascinating, really. There’s an old theory called the Westermarck Effect, which posits that humans raised together from birth till thirty or forty months later exhibit an automatic resistance to conjugal relations. Sociobiology. There are a variety of other studies which give a similar underlying raison d’être for a number of taboos which once were thought to be evidence of the hand of a supernatural deity, a lawgiver. But it’s something more and less exotic than that. You see, the effect functions regardless of blood ties. Two children from different families altogether raised as brother and sister will exhibit the same reluctance to copulate later.”
“Do you have a point to make?”
“Yes. The same principle works in reverse. Never raised as a family, those in-built aversions never take hold. Brother and sister raised apart will have no automatic aversion. They treat each other as strangers. There is no consanguinity taboo.”
Coren waited. “And?”
“And so I felt no more guilt at killing my sister, who I never knew, than I did killing all those other people. There is no twinge of family connection to dissuade me.”
“In your case, would there be anyway?”
“A good question. I don’t have any friends I would regret killing.”