Asimov’s Future History Volume 10

by Isaac Asimov

  “The colony is too young to have gotten that far from its founding ideal. At heart, your average citizen of Nova Levis is working from a Managin worldview. And even without that, at heart they’re all basically Terran — even though most of them hate Earth and everything they think it stands for. Terrans don’t like robots.”

  Ariel petered out, and Derec considered the situation. She’d danced carefully around one question, though. “How do you feel about it?”

  “Terrified. Disgusted. Outraged. But I’m a Spacer, and upbringing dies hard. Then there’s Coren.” She let that hang between them before adding, “All of those are personal feelings completely apart from, and irrelevant to, the question of what’s right.” Another pause. “If it wasn’t for Bogard, I’d be much more certain about this.”

  Bogard. Derec’s finest creation, the robot designed to have unprecedented latitude in analysis and interpretation of the Three Laws, who had saved lives, perhaps cost others, and in the end killed the cyborg Tro Aspil and disappeared. Not a day went by without Derec wondering what had become of Bogard, and wondering too if maybe he never should have taken the liberties he had with the Three Laws.

  “Bogard did raise more questions than he answered,” Derec said.

  He hoped Ariel wouldn’t dredge up their long disagreement over his testing the boundaries of the Three Laws. They had argued about it — and bitterly — and if Derec was honest with himself he had to admit that he’d been at least as dogmatic as she had. One casualty of the debate was the intimacy they had once shared.

  “I’m in a very delicate position,” Ariel said. “Zev Brixa’s ingratiating and pleasant, but the more I think about our conversation the more certain I am that Nucleomorph is going to go ahead with this no matter what I do.”

  “That makes it easy for you, doesn’t it? You can just tell him you don’t want to involve yourself, and let Brixa go to someone else.”

  She considered. “That’s where it gets difficult. In my professional capacity, it’s incumbent upon me to put aside personal reactions, and I think I can do that with respect to the fundamental question. The more important thing, though, is another question: Would this be good for Nova Levis? If it happened, would we be even more isolated?

  Ideals are only useful until they get in the way of actually helping people. And behind all that is the real question: What do we owe the reanimés, Derec? Even Jerem Looms once was human. What happened to them isn’t their fault. Once they were us. Has what they suffered made them less than human? What do we owe them?”

  She asked the question as if Derec might have a special insight.

  Bogard again. Some of life’s actions had seemingly infinite consequences.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s a question that needs some consideration.”

  Ariel smiled. “There’s an understatement. All right. If you’re not going to solve my problems, you can at least tell me yours.”

  Derec wasn’t entirely ready to leave the Nucleomorph question where it was, especially not when he was about to do so much business with them. He would be putting his project’s success in their hands; Miles and Elin couldn’t mass-produce vertebrate life. Ariel didn’t seem interested in going any further with it, though.

  “Too many of my study population are disappearing,” he said. “Over the last month I’ve lost contact with almost twenty percent of them. I started looking into it, and my field worker in Noresk gave me a name to check here — Mika Mendes. I went to see her, and she’s gone, too. There’s a squatter in her apartment. A scared squatter.”

  “Scared of what?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out. I think she knew what happened to Mendes, and to the family who came to visit her, but for some reason she didn’t want me to know.”

  “A whole family disappeared?”

  Derec had brought a copy of the Kyl file with him in the hope that Ariel would put him in touch with Masid. He passed it across the table and Ariel looked through it, lingering over the images.

  “Two of the children were too sick to travel. I wasn’t expecting them to live.”

  “Maybe they took the kids somewhere to die,” Ariel said. “Is there a religious background?”

  “There might be, but why would that make the squatter afraid to tell me what happened?” Derec started to get the feeling that Ariel might be partly right. “Maybe they did take those children somewhere, but I don’t think it was to let them die.”

  He turned the idea over in his mind, letting it develop. Before the blockade collapsed, the two most lucrative industries on Nova Levis had been infecting people with new microbes and curing them. How much of that trade still went on?

  “Ariel,” Derec said. “Masid Vorian infiltrated a drug gang to get close to Parapoyos, didn’t he?”

  “That’s not why he was here, but yes, he did.” She sipped her drink.

  “Do you think the Kyls went looking for a cure they didn’t think you could give them?”

  “If something illegal is going on, that would explain why the squatter in the Mendes apartment didn’t want to talk to me.”

  “This is Nova Levis, Derec. Something illegal is always going on.”

  This was true, but at that moment Derec had no interest at all in legal issues. If there was someone out there who could cure people he couldn’t, Derec wanted to know about it. The whole question lay well beyond the boundaries of his job description, but so did forcing his way into apartments in New Nova. He wasn’t restoring the ecology of Nova Levis for the sake of its struggling native organisms. He was trying to keep people alive.

  “Do you remember the drug trader’s name? The one Vorian was working with?”

  Ariel shook her head. “No. But you should talk to Masid. When you do, let him know that I need to ask him something, too, but Nucleomorph can wait.” She finished her drink. “I’m supposed to meet him in twenty minutes. You go ahead, and I’ll let him know to expect you instead.”

  Masid Vorian, like Ariel and Derec, had been relegated to office space outside of the Triangle. The colonial administration was rigorous to the point of fanaticism in its sidelining of people who had been working on the planet while Parapoyos still held sway. Even Derec and Ariel, who had arrived shortly after the lifting of the blockade, were considered suspicious because they’d been pursuing cyborgs at the time and were thus tied to events on Nova Levis. Senator Lamina and her colleagues were determined not to do more than tolerate anyone tainted by Nova Levis’ sordid recent past, and that toleration would evaporate as soon as Lamina thought she could fire them without offworld repercussions. Masid appeared to be anticipating this; the plaque on his door read VORIAN CONSULTANCY AND INVESTIGATION. He was already sidling into private practice.

  Derec knocked and entered to Masid coming toward the door. He was a compact, dark-haired man with the kind of nondescript face and bearing that had always been the spy’s chief asset.

  “Mr. Avery,” he said. “Ambassador Burgess informed me that she’s now scheduling my appointments.”

  Derec laughed and they shook hands. “Ariel has a way of getting what she wants.”

  “So what can I do for you?”

  They sat, Masid at his desk and Derec in a leather chair that seemed out of place in the room. He wondered where Masid had gotten it.

  “I’m working on invasive-disease eradication and ecosystem restoration,” he said. “Part of the project involves tracking certain populations to see if and how well our efforts are succeeding. Over the past few weeks, a large number of people in these populations have disappeared. Some of them were too ill to travel except in the case of a dire emergency, and it occurred to me that they might be looking for a cure that the project — that I haven’t been able to provide.”

  “You’re looking for Filoo,” Masid said.

  His certainty stopped Derec in the middle of what he’d thought would be a lengthy explanation. “Well,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s specifically him.”
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  “If it’s anyone, it’s Filoo,” Masid said. “He was running things for Parapoyos, and unless someone killed him he’s still running things.”

  “Where would he get the, ah —”

  “Product? Anyone with a sequencer and a compiler and a need for some quiet money. I don’t keep track of these things anymore, Mr.

  Avery. The man’s name was Filoo, and he was as dangerous and lacking in scruples as anyone I’ve ever met except when it came to his loyalty toward Kynig Parapoyos. We’re all lucky his ambition doesn’t match his cold-bloodedness. If, that is, he’s still alive.”

  Something changed in Masid’s face, as if in raising the possibility that this Filoo was dead he had reminded himself of other deaths. A spy with a conscience, Derec thought. Maybe that’s why he’s no longer a spy and still on Nova Levis.

  If he was no longer a spy. How could you tell?

  “Thank you, Mr. Vorian,” Derec said. “Do you want me to let you know what I find out?”

  A knowing smile quirked at the corner of Vorian’s mouth. “If you stir Filoo up, I’m guessing I’ll hear about it,” he said.

  Chapter 6

  ARIEL SPENT THE afternoon laying the groundwork for an ethics indictment against a magistrate in Stopol. When she got to the point where she could safely delegate the rest of the preparation to the district office there, she took a long walk through the city, watching the people and wondering how the brain behind each face would react to the proposition that cyborgs should be able to vote. If she became the standard-bearer for the question, she would absorb all of the superstitious fear the citizens of Nova Levis could muster. It would be the end of her political career, that much was certain; the Spacer bloc in the Senate was looking for an excuse to be rid of her.

  What a useless irony if she were to do all this in the service of a cause that repelled her.

  And how she was repelled by the idea. The night before, she’d dreamed of going to vote, and being the only human in a room full of cyborgs. All of them were Jerem Looms. Ariel hoped the dream was a symptom of her subconscious working through the problem and overcoming her emotional reaction. Zev Brixa had maneuvered her into a position that would require all of her faculties.

  She couldn’t shake the intuition that he knew more about her than he’d let on in their brief meeting. A corporation the size of Nucleomorph did nothing by accident; he might well have burrowed through any number of records of her behavior in the events following the Union Station massacre. She had certainly burned her share of bridges at that time, for what she considered unimpeachable reasons. No doubt there were profiles of her archived in a database somewhere, and no doubt they said that she pursued what she believed was right without regard for the consequences. Perhaps this was even characterized as a kind of behavioral deviancy. In any case, it was true — if Ariel did not explore the question and honestly determine its merits, she would spend years questioning her motivations. Surely Brixa had chosen her because of this quality.

  Well, she thought. Now that you’ve gone down the paranoid avenue, stop and think rationally.

  The rational assessment of the situation was frustratingly similar to her suspicious initial reaction. Brixa would know what she had done, and would know of her tense relationship with the colonial government of Nova Levis. Who better to take up an unpopular cause?

  What better test of the proposition’s prospects than to bring it to an official who had been permanently scarred by a cyborg’s actions?

  She was acting as the reagent in a kind of acid test, and Brixa was running the laboratory.

  Ariel had found her way to a park south of the Triangle. She watched children play an unfamiliar game. Something involving a yellow pennant, and two bases made of shoes, and a great deal of running and noise. What stories did their parents tell them of the reanimés that skulked at the edges of their tenuous civilization? Was Ariel going to be the one to bring their boogeymen into their waking lives?

  I have to at least ask, she thought. I won’t be able to live with myself if I don’t.

  So the gentle probing went on. Ariel went home and asked R. Jennie for an opinion.

  “I have no context for this, Ariel,” Jennie said. “The question is unprecedented.”

  “That’s why I’m asking you, Jennie. I need a philosophical reaction.”

  “Philosophy is not part of my programming.”

  “Just answer the question,” Ariel snapped. Could no being, organic or machine, give her a straight answer?

  R. Jennie took some time to compose a response. “My concept of citizenship is inextricably bound to my Three Laws programming,”

  it said. “Are cyborgs considered human?”

  No, Ariel thought. That far I will not go.

  “If not,” R. Jennie went on, “it would be impossible for me to accord a cyborg the same status as a human being.”

  Ariel forced herself to ask a question that sounded absurd even as she said it. “What if I told you cyborgs should be considered human?”

  Again, R. Jennie was silent. “I am not sure a single opinion would be definitive,” it said at last.

  Truer words were never spoken.

  It was evening. The colors of sunset spilled through the window onto Ariel’s couch. The strip of restaurants facing the Triangle would be throbbing with politicians and their aides at this time of day. Ariel got up and walked out the door to try her question on those few among them she felt she might be able to trust.

  She was lucky. When she walked into Kamil’s, Hodder Feng sat slouching over a tall glass of something amber and potent. Ariel ordered a glass of wine and carried it to his table.

  Feng looked up at her when she sat across from him. “I’m trying not to begrudge you your survival,” he said. The cadence of his speech pegged him as under the influence, if not exactly intoxicated.

  “I’m sorry, Hodder,” Ariel said. “It could have been any of us.”

  “Not you, Ambassador.” Feng tried without much success to hide his bitterness. “A title still counts for something on Nova Levis.”

  So should I shut myself down because Eza Lamina is still a little bit afraid of me? Ariel wondered.

  “Hodder,” she said. “I need to ask you something in confidence.”

  “No offers of employment, please. I am leaving this city as soon as I get drunk enough to be uncivil to someone prominent.”

  “Well, then, I’ll ask you my other question,” Ariel said, and Feng gave her a grudging smile.

  “All right.” He drank. “I’m just about ready to answer any question.”

  That’s what you think, Ariel thought. But she couldn’t resist the opening.

  “What would you do if someone suggested to you that cyborgs should be granted citizenship?” she asked, and waited for the explosion.

  “Laugh,” he said without hesitation. “I came here nineteen years ago, and I’m not a Managin anymore, but I know a dumb question when I hear one. You think anyone in the Senate would let that happen? Please, Ariel. I have liquor to distract me from my misery. I don’t need to indulge in moonbeams.”

  Especially not when yours are all blotted out by the shadow of Senator Lamina, Ariel thought. He was due a little self-pity. He’d devoted three years of his life to his project to create working relationships between the staggering Nova Levis educational system and the offplanet conglomerates that had begun to open after Liberation.

  Hodder Feng was personally responsible for much of the economic growth of the planet, and he’d never be credited for it because nobody noticed the people who actually created skilled workers. Lamina would probably redirect the pittance she’d allowed Hodder to a general entertainment fund for touring executives. In public she argued that people had to be wooed to come to Nova Levis, and that if she could do that, the jobs would follow by themselves. Hodder Feng, though, knew that one of the questions these junketing magnates always asked was If I do open up here, who’s going to work for me? You think I can get
people to come here from Earth or Aurora?

  Of course not. The successful businesses that operated on the bright side of the law drew heavily on a labor pool that Feng had created.

  Nucleomorph included.

  And that mental addendum snapped her back into focus. Ariel watched Feng drink and felt an enormous sympathy for him. She liked this man, with his workman’s clothes and thick hands. He was a baley who had tried to make a difference, tried to force his way into a political system that had followed him from Earth, and now he was middle-aged and starting over. For a moment, Ariel allowed herself to feel a kinship with him, but quickly she realized it was false.

  If the Nova Levis government defunded her, she’d land on her feet.

  She knew too many people, she’d done too many favors. The uncertainty that faced Hodder Feng was unlike anything Ariel had ever known, or ever would.

  So she ordered a drink, and then another, and she kept him company. It was the least she could do. And when she’d drunk enough to be less discreet, she asked him about cyborgs again.

  He was farther down the road to intoxication than Ariel was, but his bedrock response was largely the same as it had been when she’d first blurted out the question after walking in. “This planet is barely feeding itself, Ariel,” Hodder said. “You think anyone has the time or energy to hold a constitutional convention? I thought I was a dreamer.”

  “You’re misunderstanding me. I don’t know if it’s a good idea or not.” Ariel had already told him this twice, but this was the price of choosing a miserable idealist for a sounding board. Add drunk to the list of characteristics, and it was a wonder he heard anything she said.

  That’s why she’d chosen Hodder, though, or so Ariel told herself.

  He was a listener, quiet in meetings, deferential to people clearly competent in areas outside his own expertise. To his immense credit, he hadn’t once steered the conversation to his own misfortune. She tried again. “Hodder, what if there didn’t have to be a constitutional issue? Are cyborgs robots?”

  “You tell me.”