by Isaac Asimov
“Ambassador Burgess,” he said. “Thank you for returning my call so quickly.”
For the thousandth time, Ariel wished that Aurora had stripped her of the title. “What was it you wanted to meet about, Mr. Brixa?”
It came out more brusquely than she’d intended, but Brixa didn’t react. “I’d prefer to discuss that in confidence, Ambassador. Could we meet tomorrow?”
She made a show of consulting her schedule even though she’d already decided where she could fit him in if that’s what she chose to do. “You’re a long way from Nova City, Mr. Brixa.”
“I can fly in tonight,” he responded. “It’s important that we meet as soon as possible.”
“Very well. Between prior commitments, I have exactly thirty minutes available tomorrow.”
She waited for him to bluster. Instead he said, “Would you like to tell me which thirty?”
“Ten-thirty to eleven.”
“I’ll see you at ten-thirty, Ambassador,” Brixa said, and cut the connection.
Well, that was interesting, Ariel thought. Her initial misgivings were replaced by fresh curiosity. What did a Nucleomorph executive need from her that would spur him to fly across a significant piece of the planet, overnight, so he could occupy half an hour’s time with an out-of-favor official working in governmental reform?
“What do you think, Jennie?” Ariel said, even though Jennie was back at her apartment.
“Of his motives?”
“Why is he so eager?”
“Clearly you have something he wants, or he believes you can perform a service for him.”
There was nothing like a robot to put the obvious in sharp focus.
“Run a search on Nucleomorph, just this facility. Any criminal prosecutions pending?” It wouldn’t be the first time an industrial executive had appeared from nowhere in an attempt to cajole — or bribe — Ariel.
Once a vice-chair of a mining conglomerate had even claimed he could get her posted back to Aurora. She’d turned him down out of hand, and only afterward realized that she didn’t want to go back to Aurora anyway. Or Earth. Her diplomatic service seemed in hindsight to be a waste of time — years spent greasing the social interactions among the monied and powerful. How long had it been since she’d done any meaningful work? Once it had consumed her life.
And even that was avoiding the real truth behind her dismissal of a chance to go home. The truth was she didn’t want to return to Earth because Coren had died there.
“Ariel.” R. Jennie was waiting for her.
“Go ahead.”
As R. Jennie reported, public records related to Nucleomorph played across Ariel’s office terminal. “They have been engaged in reconstruction and expansion of the ruined cyborg-research facility near Noresk for almost four years. Only during the past year have they begun production of organisms for the ecosystem restoration. Your colleague Derec Avery has contracted for the design of a number of species derived from native fauna. At this point, he and the Nova Levis government are Nucleomorph’s only on-planet clients.” The screen changed to display public legal filings. “No evidence of statutory violations exists in the records available to you.”
Which, unless something was being aggressively concealed, was everything except classified military or research contracts. Ariel considered getting in touch with Masid Vorian to see if he could browse the records beyond her security clearance. She’d asked him for similar favors once or twice before, and he’d come through for her — but he too was stigmatized in the eyes of the colonial government because of his involvement with the Parapoyos debacle. Despite this, his spying experience made him too valuable to them to shunt him completely aside.
“Shall I consult the records further?” Jennie asked.
Ariel decided to wait on contacting Masid. The sudden surfacing of the cyborg lab had dredged up painful memories, leaving her ready to jump at shadows, that was all. A cyborg built from the son of one of the lab’s founders had killed Coren; now the corporation taking over the remains of the lab wanted to talk to her. There was no reason to assume a relationship between those two facts. Zev Brixa had in all likelihood contacted her because of her prominent yet marginal position in the government. She could speculate about his reasons all night, and it would get her nothing but insomnia.
“I’m coming home, Jennie,” she said. “I’d appreciate a drink and dinner when I get there.”
When Derec got back to his lab, Elin had gone home. She came early and left early. He instructed Miles to let him know when the compiler was running again. Since he’d have to hold off on specimen testing until he had a compiler to grow specimens in, he turned to the other project under his guidance.
Mutations in the field occurred so quickly that there was often no way to track whether a tailored organism had actually had its desired effect. Derec had lost count of the times he’d engineered a vonooman to eradicate an endemic pathogen only to find that the pathogen was transformed by evolutionary pressures by the time his remedy took the field. Things moved fast on Nova Levis — part of his job was to slow them down. So while he kept the arms factory cooking in the compiler, he also tracked rates of infection, mutation, and recovery in certain sectors of the human population. He concentrated on native-born and Terran-émigré cohorts, on the theory that Spacers’ immune-system enhancements would skew the results, and he’d found certain population clusters very useful in predicting what new pathogens would reach pandemic distribution.
Once he’d given Miles instructions, Derec settled in to comb the most recent results from his indicator populations. He received weekly reports from on-site personnel in Nova City, Noresk, and Stopol — personnel more qualified in epidemiology and population statistics than Derec was, which was lucky for the enterprise — and he tracked their reports through a database that monitored each subject’s population of invasive microbes. Preparation of his quarterly report for Senator Lamina’s ritual slaughter had put him behind schedule on generating his most recent results, and he threw himself into the task now as if fresh data would scour away the residual frustration of the meeting.
They didn’t, but when Derec had the field results processed and plotted, he at least had something else to think about. The first thing he always did with a weekly report was see who had died. No clearer indicator of progress existed than mortality rates, and Derec measured himself by the rise or fall in the number of fatalities in his sample populations. It wasn’t the most scientific way to approach the problem, but it was the approach he could live with.
And this week the number of deaths was sharply down. The problem was that the number of UDs was up. Sharply.
Unknown Disposition. This meant that the field operative hadn’t been able to locate the subject in question. Nova Levis was a raw and shifting place; it was easy to disappear here. Still, UDs typically amounted to perhaps five percent of total samples. This week the number was seventeen percent.
An anomaly, Derec thought. He brought up the rates for the previous twelve weeks, and frowned at what he saw.
Five, six, three, eight, five, six, five. Seven weeks of statistically normal UDs. Then: nine, eleven, eight, twelve, fourteen. And this week, seventeen.
His first thought was that one of his field scientists was getting sloppy. Derec broke the numbers down by location, and saw that UDs in Nova City were up 220 percent, in Stopol 240 percent, and in Noresk 330 percent. He viewed the numbers cautiously. All three were up noticeably, but Noresk far more than the other two. Address first what is knowable, he thought, and punched in the code to contact Gar Purlin, his on-site supervisor in Noresk.
Purlin answered quickly, but he didn’t look happy about it. “It’s eight-thirty, Derec,” he said. “This couldn’t wait until tomorrow?”
Eight-thirty? Derec looked across the lab. Miles stood engrossed in the compiler. “I hadn’t realized it was so late, Gar, sorry. This will only take a minute.” Purlin waited for him to go on. “UDs are up more than three hun
dred percent in Noresk over the last six weeks.
What’s going on there?”
“Not very subtle this late, are you?” Purlin said. “I’ve been working like a baley trying to track these people down, let me tell you that up front.”
“I’m not accusing you of anything, Gar. I’m just following up on the figures. There was a quarterly today, so I’m a couple of days behind on the field results.”
Mention of the meeting softened Purlin a little. Everyone involved in the project knew the battles Derec fought to keep their work funded.
Derec watched Purlin pull up his most recent records. “Right,” he said after he’d looked them over. “People are just disappearing. I hadn’t noticed there was a trend.” He shrugged. “You get caught up in each individual case. It’s easy to lose track of the group situation.”
“Any sense of where they’re going?”
Purlin ran his finger down a list just out of Derec’s view. “Nothing definite, at least not on first glance,” he said. “I only file a UD after I’ve asked family and friends if they know where a subject might have gone.” Derec nodded. If people moved out of target areas, they were either reassigned to another group or dropped from the study. In both cases, Derec received notification of the change in status. “I haven’t been able to track any of the UDs I reported this week, but people don’t always tell me when they’re going to leave.”
“Noresk isn’t that big,” Derec said. “Someone should have heard something.”
Now Purlin’s sour expression was back. “Two things, Derec. First: I’m not a detective. I’m a medical scientist. And second, we work for the government, remember? I don’t know how things are in Nova City, but in Noresk people don’t care for the Triangle.” Something caught his attention offscreen. “Wait a minute. This family here. Aja Kyl, her spouse Toomi, and their children. Vois, Lek, and Shila.” Derec found the names on his own report. “They said something about getting together with relatives in Nova City. I followed it up and, let’s see, the relatives … there’s the name. Mika Mendes. She’s on the log in Nova City. I tried to contact her and got no response before the weekly was due, so I filed them all as UD.”
“Okay,” Derec said. “I’ll get in touch with Cin and see if she’s heard anything. Thanks, Gar.”
Cin Boski was Derec’s local field worker. She probably wouldn’t be any happier to hear from him than Purlin had, especially not at almost nine o’clock. He decided to wait until morning.
Where were all of these people going, though? Most of Derec’s study population lacked the resources to relocate. He flipped through the weekly from Nova City until he found Mika Mendes.
“Derec,” Miles said. “The compiler is functional.”
“Thanks, Miles. Get it working on whatever is next.” Miles turned to the task as a skull-cracking yawn reminded Derec of the sleep he’d sacrificed over the previous week preparing his quarterly report. He was too tired to solve mysteries tonight. “Come home when you’ve got the next batch building,” he told Miles, and then he went home.
A wasted day, he thought after he’d undressed and lay drifting to sleep an hour later. More questions and no answers.
But at least I got to see Ariel.
Chapter 3
ZEV BRIXA ARRIVED at Ariel’s office at exactly ten-thirty the next morning, his appearance so punctual she assumed he’d stood out in the hall waiting for his chrono to tick over. She had an instinctive mistrust of people who choreographed their appointments, but Brixa’s demeanor put her at ease. He shook her hand with an easy, unaffected smile that deepened creases at the corners of his eyes. He didn’t seem the typical driven mid-level corporate executive.
“Ambassador Burgess,” he began, “I much appreciate your willingness to see me on such short notice.”
Ariel gestured him to a chair in the corner of her office. She sat in the facing chair rather than behind her desk. “As I said, Mr. Brixa, I’m happy to make as much time as I can,” she said.
He glanced at the wall chrono. “Down to twenty-nine minutes already. I’d better get to business.” That smile again, as if the situation suited him perfectly. “As you have doubtless already learned, my employer Nucleomorph recently completed the reconstruction and expansion of the former cyborg lab near Noresk. We’ve invested a great deal of both human and financial capital in the project, and we’ve also made considerable effort to recruit and train local employees.”
“Your Terran workforce refused to relocate?”
“Well, we’ve had to make a virtue of necessity in that regard, yes.
But it’s the right thing to do, both for the company’s long-term stability on this planet and for the locals we’ve trained. We will only make money here if we can maintain a professional pool of locals, so in this case what’s good for Nucleomorph is also good for Nova Levis.”
Such disarming openness, Ariel thought. Most men in Brixa’s position would have given her a prepared speech about their noble intentions. She found his candor a refreshing change from the unctuous platitudes she so often dealt with.
Unless that was a canned speech itself, she reminded herself.
“I take it you haven’t come here to declare your altruism, Mr. Brixa,”
she said, purposely keeping a distance between them. Good-humored visitors to her office frequently hid illegal motives behind a professional smile.
“No, I haven’t,” he said. “I did want to set you at ease regarding our intentions, though. I’m not here to ask anything that would put you in a difficult position.”
“Glad to hear it,” Ariel said. “What exactly are you here to ask?”
Brixa settled back into his chair and crossed his legs. The pause before he spoke was the first ripple Ariel had seen in his calm surface.
“We have some concerns about the reanimés,” he said at last.
“The what?” Ariel asked, thinking she’d misheard him, but even as the words left her mouth she understood. Reanimés. What the locals had called the cyborgs discarded from Kynig Parapoyos’ experiments.
Brixa watched her face, waited for her to catch up.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I realize this touches you personally, but —”
She cut him off. “You came to see me in my professional capacity, Mr. Brixa. Please leave my personal history out of this.”
If only she could do the same. Already she felt herself hardening against whatever Zev Brixa was going to ask of her, just because he’d brought memories of Coren with him into the room. She didn’t want to deal with cyborgs, even the pitiful rejects who gleaned their survival from the garbage piles of Noresk. A cyborg had killed Coren, and every time she heard the word she thought of him dying, his body broken and Ariel lightyears away.
She realized she’d been sitting silently for much too long. “What problems?” she asked.
“The same problems you might expect from any marginalized and impoverished sector of a society,” he said, relaxing as they steered away from the shoals of Ariel’s memory. “Theft, vandalism, and so on. The particular situation is exacerbated by the reanimés’ — reverence is, I think, the best word — for the lab site. They were created there, and cast out from there, and the past few years have apparently been enough for them to construct a kind of mythology of the place. Or perhaps sacred history is a better characterization. I’m unfamiliar with the processes of religion. In any case, representatives of the reanimés have approached Nucleomorph demanding that the lab be preserved in its original state because they believe some sort of messiah will appear there.”
“That’s not likely unless you’re making cyborgs again,” Ariel observed.
Brixa laughed. “No, you’re right about that. And it’s even less likely because this messiah they await is, as near as we can discern, none other than Kynig Parapoyos.”
“Didn’t the cyborgs kill Parapoyos themselves?”
“According to eyewitness accounts, during the activation of the spacecraft that com
posed the core of the old lab, a cyborg broke Parapoyos’ arms as he was about to kill a certain Masid Vorian. Then a number of other cyborgs took Parapoyos away after the first announced, ‘He is ours, now. He must answer.’”
The words gave Ariel a shiver. She could only imagine what Parapoyos had gone through before he died; the cyborg Jerem Looms, who had killed Coren, had also tortured his own father for days before murdering him and trying to take over Imbitek. And Parapoyos was, in a sense, the father of them all.
She forced herself back to the topic at hand. “So what is it you need from me?”
“Well, we’ve come up with what will seem like a fairly radical solution,” Brixa said. “It’s Nucleomorph’s position that the reanimés’
superstitious extremism stems largely from their marginalization on this planet. We believe that a vigorous effort should be made to bring them into the economic and political institutions of Nova Levis.” He paused, maybe to let Ariel appreciate Nucleomorph’s magnanimity.
Then he concluded, “In short, we believe the reanimé population should be granted citizenship.”
Ariel automatically started to remind him that robots were precluded from citizenship — then she had to remind herself that cyborgs weren’t robots. They weren’t bound by the Three Laws, they weren’t built on the principles of positronics … as far as she knew, nothing in the constitution of Nova Levis would prevent it.
But … “This is Nova Levis, Mr. Brixa. The people who founded this colony were members of the Church of Organic Sapiens. If you ask this question publicly, people are going to riot. I hope you have good security up at your plant.”
“Our security arrangements are more than sufficient. And believe me when I say that Nucleomorph has no shortage of political will.
We have made this decision, and we intend to see it through.”
“To what?”
“Ideally to a vote.”
At least he wasn’t asking her to set up a legislative end run around Nova Levis’ tattered democracy. Still, the idea shook Ariel. “I’m not sure why you’ve come to me with this,” she said.