by Isaac Asimov
“You were chosen because you have a reputation for assessing issues on their merits, without the unfortunate colonial prejudices that afflict many of your colleagues,” Brixa said. “We trust that you’ll investigate the possibilities in an unbiased manner.”
Ariel let the compliment pass. She was still trying to sort out her emotional response and differentiate it from the relevant legal and political questions.
Of course, the political question was all about emotion, wasn’t it?
And Brixa had brought this proposal to her for exactly that reason, because he figured that, if she could handle it, anyone could.
“You’ve told me a lie, Mr. Brixa,” she said.
He looked surprised. “What’s that?”
“You said you weren’t going to ask me anything that would put me in a difficult position.”
Brixa thought this over. “Well, yes. I suppose I should apologize for that little bit of rhetoric. If I’d been thinking ahead a little more, I wouldn’t have put it in exactly that way.” He stood. “I’ve used up nearly all of my thirty minutes, and I should let you get back to your work. The last thing I’d like to say is that a great deal rides on this issue. Nucleomorph is poised to do great things on Nova Levis, and it would be a shame for all of us if that work was hindered by bigotry.”
“I’ll look into it, Mr. Brixa,” Ariel said as she showed him to the door. “If there are no explicit legal barriers, I’ll sound out a few of my more discreet colleagues. Beyond that I don’t know what will happen.” And she didn’t know why she’d even promised that much.
Brixa had purely manipulated her; if she didn’t pursue his request, he’d take it to someone else; in the firestorm that followed, Ariel would be left questioning her commitment to the ideals she espoused.
Very deft, this maneuver, and somewhat lacking in empathy.
“Of course not.” Brixa shook her hand again. “Contact me anytime,”
he said, and walked away down the hall.
When he’d stepped into the elevator and gone, Ariel stood for a long moment in her office doorway, feeling terribly lonely, her mind alive with questions she very much wanted not to ask.
Chapter 4
DEREC LOCATED MIKA Mendes’ address in the part of the city unselfconsciously called New Nova, a riot of prefabricated apartment buildings and small factories just outside the southern walls of the original city. The breaking of the blockade had brought legitimate commerce to Nova Levis, and with commerce had come widespread income disparity. A lot of people were getting wealthy because Earth and the Fifty Worlds were too preoccupied with their political strife to enforce interstellar trade laws on the Settler worlds, and Nova Levis had an outlaw heritage that drew extralegal entrepreneurs out of the proverbial woodwork. In the five years since the death of Kynig Parapoyos, illegitimate enterprise had flourished.
Freebooting trade had been good to a number of the officials imported to oversee the transition of Nova Levis from diseased backwater to functioning society, but it hadn’t been as good to the people who were already there, or the baleys who showed up in greater numbers after the blockade ended. New Nova’s poverty was ample evidence of the tendency of money to flow upward.
Once, Parapoyos had kept Nova City clean and healthy with his black-market pharmaceuticals; now, with the removal of his locally benevolent despotism, people here were as vulnerable to disease as anyone else. The resources to inoculate or cure all of them no longer existed.
Derec had an intuition that if Mika Mendes hadn’t permanently fled her home, a communication from him would be more than enough to set her on her way. People in New Nova, like those in Noresk, didn’t appreciate government workers. So he mapped the address, put Miles to work on a regression analysis of the genome of a biting fly native to the marshes around Stopol, left Elin to her work on a viral antidote to a pervasive fungal infection, and went to New Nova himself.
Armed sentries no longer guarded the gates between the original settlement and New Nova, but Derek was keenly aware as he passed through the southern gate that most of the people on the outside were still barred from coming in. Money, in his experience, was a much more effective barrier than violence. Nova City was clean and orderly, its inhabitants well-dressed and healthy; New Nova looked and smelled like a Terran slum from the twenty-second century. What struck Derec as much as anything else was the absence of robots. People here did for themselves all of the things he expected Miles to take care of: they cooked their own meals, made their own repairs of vehicles and dwellings, cleaned their own messes. Or didn’t, Derec amended, stepping around a mound of what looked like construction debris liberally topped with household refuse. Rusted metal, broken glass, fly-buzzing masses of rotting food, empty aerosols. He felt like he’d stepped back in time. Once this had been the day-to-day existence of most of the human race. Now it was his work and Ariel’s to lift New Nova and places like it out of their desperation. Five years had taken Derec a long way from the frontiers of positronics.
He found the address halfway down a dead-end street of four-story apartment buildings. All were hastily constructed, cracks already showing in foundations and around doorways, and the interiors were shabby and poorly lit. Mika Mendes lived (or so he hoped) on the third floor, number 64, at the end of a long and dusty hall.
Derec knew what she looked like, and the woman who answered his knock wasn’t her. “Who are you?” she asked him, opening the door only wide enough to get a look at her unwelcome visitor.
“My name is Derec Avery,” Derec said. “I’m looking for a Mika Mendes, who I believe lives here?” He turned it into a question, hoping to get her talking.
“Not anymore, she doesn’t,” the woman said through the crack. All he could see of her was a narrowed brown eye and the dark hair that curled over her forehead.
“I’m a public health worker, ma’am,” Derec said. “Do you know where I can find her?”
“No. She’s gone, and I live here now.”
“And your name is …?”
She shut the door, and as Derec heard the scrape of the lock turning he did something that shocked him. Leading with his shoulder, he bulled into the door and forced his way into the apartment.
The woman scrambled away from him across the apartment’s living room into the kitchen, where she spilled dirty dishes onto the floor, grabbing for a knife. “Get out!” she screamed at him. “It’s my place now, and Vilger will be back any time! You don’t want to be here when he comes back!”
Knowing he’d made a mess of the situation, Derec stayed by the door, hands away from his sides. The woman found the knife and brandished it at him.
“I’m not armed, and I don’t mean you any harm,” he said.
“Out!” She stabbed the knife in his direction but didn’t come toward him.
Derec saw a terminal in the living room wall. “You’re welcome to confirm my identity,” he said, pointing at it. “I’ll stay right here.”
“I don’t want you to stay right there,” she snapped. “I want you out. Vilger’s coming right back.”
Briefly, Derec wondered what would happen if this Vilger did come back. He wouldn’t be much good to anyone in a hospital, and even though the woman in Mika Mendes’ apartment had the worn look of someone fighting a long-term illness, she looked frightened enough to come at him out of sheer adrenalin.
“I’m a public health worker,” he repeated. “Mika Mendes was part of a health study, and I’m concerned that we haven’t been able to contact her.”
“You can’t contact her because she’s gone,” the woman said. “I don’t know where, and I don’t care. Now get out.”
Her tone was getting less hostile. Derec risked another question.
“All right,” he said. “If you don’t know where she is, do you know if she had relatives visiting before she left?”
There was a pause. “Was she sick?” the woman asked. She looked around the apartment as if afraid disease might be lingering in t
he corners.
“Yes, she was. Not as bad as a lot of the people I work with, but she was sick. We were working on a cure.”
“Am I going to get it?”
You might already have it, Derec thought. Or more properly them; most of his study subjects had more than one infection. That was the last thing this woman needed to hear, though. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Part of what we’re studying is transmission vectors.”
“She’s probably dead,” the woman said.
“Did she tell you she was part of a study?”
“She didn’t have to. The woman comes to my cousin Ike, too.”
Good. She was starting to believe him. If she would just put down the knife, Derec thought he’d be able to relax. “Did you live in this building before Mika Mendes left?” he asked.
“I got every right to take the place now that she’s gone,” the woman said. “Me and Vilger were stacked like crates in the other place, and I don’t like his mother.”
“That’s fine with me,” Derec said. “I’m not here to evict you. I just need to know what happened to Mika.”
“She left last week. Her cousins showed up, and the next morning they were all gone. I waited a whole day, and when none of them came back I got Vilger to move our stuff over here. That’s fair.” The woman appeared to consider something. She put the knife back on the kitchen counter. “Can you get me in the study?”
“I can have someone come and talk to you.” Derec weighed the question, and decided he couldn’t in good faith promise her anything else. “Her name will be Cin Boski. She’ll examine you and see how you fit in with what we’re working on. I’ll need your name, though, so Cin can go over your records before the visit.”
“My name’s Lianor Phelp,” the woman said, “but you won’t find any records.”
A baley, squatting in the apartment of a woman who had in all likelihood gone off to die with her relatives. Just thinking of it made Derec tired.
“Lianor, I need you to tell me what you know about Mika Mendes,” he said. “You may be right that she’s dead, but if she’s still alive, I need to find her.”
“If you get me in your study, I’ll tell you,” Lianor said.
“I’ll have Cin come talk to you,” Derec said, and waited, hoping it would be enough.
“Vilger and I lived next door,” Lianor began after a moment. “The night before Mika left, some people came to visit her. Walls are thin here, and from what I heard I figured they were family. I tried not to listen — I’m no gossip — but they argued some, and the next morning they were all gone.”
“Did you hear what they argued about?” Derec prompted.
Something came over Lianor’s face then, the shadow of someone wanting to unburden herself of a troubling secret. But she mastered it. “I told you, I’m not a gossip,” she said. “I know they were arguing from the noise, but I didn’t listen.”
She straightened and walked to where he stood inside the door.
“They’re gone, Derec Avery. You did say that was your name, right?”
Derec nodded.
“They’re gone,” Lianor repeated, “and maybe you should go, too.
Go on back inside.”
Inside? Derec wondered. We are inside. Then, as she was shutting the door behind him, he realized she’d meant back inside the walls. Back into the safely ignorant other world inside the walls of Nova City.
Lianor Phelp’s words stayed with Derec, dogging him through his walk back along the unfamiliar streets of New Nova to the southern gate of the old city. He felt as if an invisible door was sliding down behind him, shutting out the people he was supposed to be helping.
At the lab, he watched Elin and Miles working and realized he wasn’t sure how to proceed. Indecision was strange to Derec. Normally he broke down his options and chose one with only enough hesitation to double-check his reasoning; now he couldn’t resolve whether he should try to find Mika Mendes and the Kyl family in Noresk, write them off as just another group of UDs, talk to Lianor Phelp again, or involve an investigator.
And why was he thinking that? Something about Lianor’s face, about the way a trace of fear had shown through the defensiveness and fear. Derec felt certain that she wasn’t afraid of him, or worried that the Kyls and Mendes were dead. No, she was afraid of something she knew, and the only thing Derec could think of that she might know was where the Kyls had really gone. Why wouldn’t she want him to know that?
“Derec,” Miles said. “I have completed the regression analysis.”
“And?”
“Segments of the fly’s genome match a virus that first appeared in Noresk eleven years ago.”
Of course, Derec thought. Noresk. Kynig Parapoyos had done his work much too well. The genome of a fly, two thousand kilometers from Noresk, still bore traces of his legacy. “How many generations?” he asked.
“Several hundred. I am unable to be anymore specific without losing statistical confidence.”
And each of those hundreds of mutations had left behind an unchanged part of the population that went off on another evolutionary tangent. The vast majority of those tangents came to quick dead ends, but some went on, and in the case of this fly converged with their distant relatives. People who carried certain receptors altered by another version of the virus contracted an autoimmune disease when bitten by the fly — apparently the gene sequence in the fly activated the dormant virus. It was a recombinant plague, possibly only if the virus had somehow been programmed to control its own evolution for the particular purpose of reconstituting itself in different hosts.
Derec had been working to isolate this virus and its history for three years. Now he had it, and if he could recover the programming in the initial genome he could build a phage to disrupt that programming and consign the virus to evolutionary oblivion. Isolating the trigger in the fly meant they could now see how it combined with the human-hosted material, and working backward from there Derec hoped to eliminate the entire strain.
“Okay,” he said. “Good work. Elin, you start combing the records for other matches of the trigger sequence. Miles, start putting together some new instructions for the fly.”
“I’m almost done with the next generation of the cow for Nucleomorph, Derec,” Elin said. “Shouldn’t we get that up and running?”
“This fly kills two hundred people every year in Stopol,” Derec said.
“If I can get this cow out there, it might save a lot more than that,”
Elin responded, keeping her voice even, and she was right, but at that particular moment Derec needed a certain victory.
“The sooner you get the other strings identified in this virus, the sooner your cow goes into service, Elin. I don’t want to explain ‘might’ to people dying in Stopol.”
This was unfair, and Derec knew it, and so did Elin. She turned her back on him and went to work.
Miles was already engaged in counterprogramming the fly. Derec watched them for a long moment, torn between elation at the fly breakthrough and frustration that he wasn’t better at working with Elin, with residual disquiet about Lianor Phelp behind it all. He could do something about that, but it wasn’t something he wanted to do.
How many people had died the last time Derec had stepped outside his role and investigated a crime?
On the other hand, what if he could do something to help the Kyls, and Mika Mendes?
That decided it. Leaving Elin and Miles to their work, Derec went home to call Ariel.
Chapter 5
SHE WASN’T AT her office, and it took her three hours to return the message Derec left with R. Jennie. Ariel looked preoccupied when she called, and she only snapped into focus when Derec asked her if she knew how to get in touch with Masid Vorian.
“Why —” she started to ask, and then changed her mind. “You could look him up.”
Derec waited.
“I’m at the Triangle,” Ariel said after a pause. “Why don’t we meet where we
talked yesterday?”
He left immediately. She was waiting for him when he walked into Kamil’s, in the back of the seating area where she couldn’t be seen from the street. Derec had a bad feeling even before he’d gotten a good look at her, and that first look did nothing to lessen his apprehension. There was tension in her face, and maybe even a little fear; her eyes darted around with uncharacteristic nervousness.
He sat facing her. “Are you all right?”
“Why did you ask me about Masid Vorian?”
“He has some experience with Noresk, and I know he’s in the same kind of liaison agreement as you are. I suppose he was the first person I thought of.”
“He was a spy,” Ariel said flatly. “What do you need a spy for?”
“Ariel. Why the interrogation?”
Surprised, she sat back. “I — you’re right. Yesterday and today have been unusual, and I’m edgy. Masid’s name came up in a meeting yesterday, and …” She trailed off. “There have been too many coincidences.”
Derec put his own questions on hold for the moment. “All right.
Start with the first one.”
“The first one,” she said, “is Nucleomorph.”
She recounted the details of her meeting with Zev Brixa and her preliminary research into the question of reanimé citizenship. “There’s no legal prohibition, but that’s only because it’s never been considered And as soon as the question becomes public, there’s going to be a political uproar. My guess is that the Terran members of the Senate will be against it because the cyborgs to them are too much like robots.
The Spacers will fight it because if cyborgs gain citizenship it will raise too many questions about the human-machine boundary. And the natives will fight it because most of them settled under terms of the original lease between Solaria and the Church of Organic Sapiens. They’re all Managins, or were.”
“Not all of them,” Derec said. “A lot of people have come here since that lease expired. They can’t all be anti-robot zealots. Nobody screens baleys.”