Asimov’s Future History Volume 10

by Isaac Asimov

  “They aren’t. Every one I’ve seen or heard of was born human and augmented later,” Ariel said. Strange choice of words, augmented; it glossed over the fact that the augmentation had robbed subjects like Jerem Looms and Tro Aspil of any quality that might have been called human. In making a cyborg, Kynig Parapoyos’ laboratory destroyed a human being.

  But they were not robots. What they were was the incarnation of the fear that had driven the creation of the Three Laws in the first place. The supreme technological nightmare of human civilization.

  How could any human think rationally about putting cyborgs on an equal footing with humankind?

  This was the kind of question that had interested Ariel in diplomacy to begin with, because one possible answer was that they were human.

  Terribly damaged, no doubt, but human. She asked herself again whether they could be blamed for what had been done to them.

  Orphans, doomed by incurable disease, psychologically and emotionally maimed by the process of saving them — a process itself corrupted by Parapoyos, made into an assembly line to create assassins — what rational human could blame a child? None of it was of their own making.

  Ariel realized she was speaking aloud, realized at the same time that she’d drunk more than she meant to and that a third person had joined her and Hodder Feng. She stopped talking.

  The newcomer was Vilios Kalienin. It could only have been worse if Eza Lamina herself had appeared in the midst of Ariel’s monologue.

  And Kalienin was more unfortunate in one particularly relevant regard: He was one of many Terran politicians on Nova Levis known to have anti-robot sympathies. Ariel might as well have broadcast her thoughts on subetheric.

  She shifted instinctively into a damage-control footing. “That’s one perspective, in any case. One that’s sure to be voiced loudly if this ever becomes a public debate.”

  That last was directed at Kalienin. He picked up his cue. “A fascinating case it is, Ambassador, if a little contrarian. Of course we’re all off the record here.”

  Ariel believed him not at all. He was a policy advisor to the Terran legislative contingent on Nova Levis; if he didn’t offer a verbatim account of Ariel’s words to their caucus meeting in the next twenty-four hours, she would take up religion. Part of her brain automatically delegated itself the task of countering whatever he would suggest the Terran caucus leak to their colleagues.

  “How would this happen, Ambassador?” Kalienin asked her.

  “Assuming there’s no relevant legal question, how would a proposal so radical get a fair hearing given what’s happened with the cyborgs we know about? And on Nova Levis, to boot. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you of this colony’s origin.”

  Certainly, Vilios, Ariel thought. I will by all means offer you the strategy I have neither committed to nor yet invented.

  “I have no way of knowing whether it will ever become a proposal,”

  she said. “A representative of a prominent stakeholder in the future of this planet asked me to get a sense of how the idea might be received. That’s all.”

  “You know how it would be received,” Hodder said. “People would burn the cyborg squatters out of their huts and then start smashing robots for good measure.”

  He was probably right, but having committed herself to the contrarian perspective, Ariel was determined to see it through. “This is where leadership comes in. It is one job of government to prevent people from doing what is manifestly wrong even if that’s what most of them want to do.”

  “How ironies do abound tonight,” Kalienin said. He toyed with his glass, but he had yet to taste it as far as Ariel had seen. Correct appearance was a much more important pleasure to Vilios Kalienin than the fleeting sensation of drunkenness could ever be.

  “Don’t keep us waiting, Vilios,” said Hodder.

  “Well, Jonis Taprin said something very similar about leadership when the Terran media were busy attacking him for the latest round of riots,” Kalienin said. He was enjoying himself a great deal. “That’s one irony, that Ariel Burgess and Jonis Taprin agreed on anything.”

  Ariel knew then that she was in for a storm. Kalienin certainly knew that she and Taprin had been lovers once, and that his latter-day Managin posturing had driven the final wedge between them.

  She agreed on nothing with Taprin, but Kalienin would certainly make it appear as if “her” proposal was as radical and unreasonable as the Spacers made Taprin’s anti-robot platform out to be.

  “And then there’s the fact that we’re sitting here talking about this on the night that Jonis Taprin was murdered,” Kalienin said.

  In the shocked silence that followed his words, Ariel could see the deep satisfaction he took at being the one to tell her.

  Chapter 7

  MILES WOKE DEREC out of a dream, forgotten even as Derec sat up in bed and said, “What?”

  “There is a priority communication from Kopernik Station, Derec,” Miles said. “I suggested a call during standard working hours, but the caller insisted she speak to you immediately.”

  Even though he didn’t want to know, Derec looked at the bedside chrono. It was 1:17. He’d been asleep for less than three hours. What would anyone at Kopernik Station want so urgently?

  “Tell her I’m coming,” Derec said. He went into the bathroom, splashed water on his face, and sat at his home terminal. He took the call as video, not feeling up to full holopresence with the dream he couldn’t remember still ricocheting around his brain.

  A Terran woman, red-haired and weary, appeared on his terminal screen. “Mister Avery,” she said, “I’m Shara Limke, operations director of Kopernik Station. My apologies for badgering your robot, but it is critically important that we speak.”

  “Miles will get over it, Director, and we’re speaking,” Derec said.

  “What is it you need?”

  She gave a slight smile, as if the answer to the question might surprise Derec. “I need a great many things right now, Mr. Avery. Foremost among them is to keep Kopernik operating, and that’s why I’ve contacted you.” When Derec made no answer to this, she went on. “I’ll be succinct. Jonis Taprin was murdered six hours ago.”

  Five years fell away from Derec. He was back in Washington, where Bogard had failed to keep Clar Eliton alive (except he hadn’t, which in the end had proved even worse). There was only one reason why anyone would track him down on Nova Levis, why anyone would want to drag him back into the life he’d only recently realized he didn’t miss. He felt a deep sense of mourning, of regret for choices wrongly made, even as he determined to face the consequences of his work.

  “Let me guess,” Derec said. “Do you suspect Bogard?”

  He’d asked the question as a way to get control, and it worked beautifully. Shara Limke’s eyes widened and her mouth opened, but no words came out. She closed her mouth, opened it again, and at last said, “Is that possible?”

  “It’s been five years since I saw Bogard, Director, and longer than that since I was certain what he was capable of. Do you have an image?”

  Her silence told him that the question meant something different to her than it did to him. “That’s part of what I’m calling you about.”

  “If Bogard killed Jonis Taprin, and you apprehended or destroyed it afterward, I can probably help reconstruct its motives if its positronic matrix isn’t too badly damaged. If not, I’m not sure what I have to offer you.”

  Derec felt no regret that Jonis Taprin was dead. The man had become a reactionary demagogue, and humanity was better off without him. Derec’s only sorrow — apart from a peripheral worry about how Ariel would take the news — lay in the acknowledgment that he had created a robot that could kill. That had never been his goal. His vision for Bogard encompassed a new age in the relationship between human and machine, in which the flexibility Derec built into Bogard’s interpretation of the Three Laws heralded the dawn of a time when robots would enforce what was best in human nature. Now as he confront
ed his failure, Derec recognized his ambition for the utopian dream it had been.

  “The robot we have is a standard production model,” Limke said.

  “Your Bogard was a custom design, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.” He’d built every circuit himself, had even overseen the design of Bogard’s amalloy chassis.

  “Well, Mr. Avery,” Limke said, “I have a dead politician and a robot apparently responsible, and I’m sure you’ll understand why circumstances made me think of you. I realize it’s late there, but have you seen any news reports from Terra?”

  Derec had disabled all of the default links to commercial subetheric channels in his lab. He cared little for the events of the worlds beyond Nova Levis. There were more important things to do than observe politics from lightyears away.

  “I concern myself primarily with my work here, Director,” he said.

  “Is there something you need to tell me?”

  “You have my contact information, Mr. Avery. I can’t compel you to do this, but it would be a great service if you could catch up on the news and get back in touch with me as soon as possible. I think once you’ve seen what I’m talking about, you’ll understand my imposition.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “You can get up to speed much faster from the subetheric,” Limke said. “Promise me, Mr. Avery. Will you at least get in touch with me once you’ve scanned the news?”

  That was easy enough. “Give me an hour, Director,” Derec said.

  “I’ll contact you, and then with any luck I can get back to my work here.”

  Her face was grim. “That would be lucky indeed. I look forward to your call, Mr. Avery.”

  She terminated the call. Derec stared at the blank screen until he realized he was about to fall asleep again. If Bogard wasn’t involved, he’d burned a great deal of emotional capital to no end, and all he wanted was to go to sleep and awaken to a less complicated world.

  Derec asked Miles for coffee, and when it came he opened up the datum to the flood of news and events beyond Nova Levis.

  Jonis Taprin’s death, six hours gone by, had already become a media gateway to coverage of anti-robot and anti-Spacer riots on Earth. In Jakarta, a mob had murdered eleven Solarians working for TranPos Research; in Tulsa, the building housing the positronic theory department had been burned and several of the faculty beaten with the limbs of destroyed robots. The Sapiens church was out in force, rallying Managin mobs and demanding a complete severance of Earth-Spacer relations along with a planet-wide ban on positronic technology. Derec passed all this by with a glance, and examined the archived biographies of the murdered politician.

  Taprin was forty-nine years old at the time of his death, a lifetime (if originally clandestine) member of the Church of Organic Sapiens who had left private industry to enter politics shortly after the Spacer riots twenty years before. It didn’t surprise Derec to see that Taprin had once worked for the Managin-headed DyNan Manual Industries; no tendril of superficial coincidence raised his eyebrow any longer.

  The fact that Taprin had worked with and for Rega Looms made at least as much sense as anything else. He only wondered why he hadn’t known this before. At times like this it seemed to Derec that of all the billions of humans in the colonized universe, only a few hundred exercised the power to direct the course of civilization. A string pulled seemingly at random tugged on exactly the knot you might have predicted, if you’d been through what Derec had. He hated this knowledge, hated the cynicism his experience had bred, hated Shara Limke for drawing him back into the vortex of Terran-Spacer conflict.

  Still, he read on.

  In the hours following Taprin’s murder, the Terran Bureau of Investigation had quarantined Kopernik, putting all freight traffic under embargo, preventing any travel from Earth via the station to the Spacer worlds, and sharply restricting passage of Spacer ships using Kopernik as a way station on their way to Settled worlds. Derec noted with passing interest that ships to the Settled worlds seemed to be getting through. For a change, political tension was affecting the Fifty Worlds more than the struggling colonies. He filed it away and read on.

  Mainstream political opinion on Earth, at least as represented in the channels Derec browsed, viewed Taprin’s murder as a rationale to make a final break with the Spacers and their culture of reliance on robots. Attendance at Sapiens church events was exploding as it was leaked that a robot had killed Jonis Taprin.

  Taprin had gone to Kopernik to give a speech that under other circumstances would have been recorded only for archival purposes.

  Following his standard line, he called for “a new independence” of Earth from what he termed “the debased, machine-dependent lifestyle” represented by the Spacer worlds. He called into question the Spacers’ humanity, advocated trade sanctions against any world that “toes the Spacer line of subservience to the machine,” and leavened his adversarial paranoia with a call for a new age in human culture, self-reliant and liberated from what he liked to call “this debased, inhuman passion for all that is machine instead of flesh, positronic instead of organic, circuits instead of the neurons that are humankind’s evolutionary birthright.” According to most accounts, Taprin had chosen Kopernik as the site of his speech because it was the fulcrum in Earth-Spacer commerce. By going to the jumping-off point between the cradle of humanity and the worlds on which humans had taken their first exploratory steps, Taprin focused Terran fear and fury in a way that could bear immediate and tangible economic fruit. Moment polls showed a majority of the Terran electorate at least willing to consider his position, with a sizable plurality joining him in his separationist advocacy.

  Then the murder. After presiding over a press conference that most of the Spacer services called “fawning,” Taprin had retired to his room.

  An hour later, his security personnel had found his body after his staff in an adjacent room had heard cries. A politician like Jonis Taprin drew assassination threats as part of his daily routine, but something out of the ordinary had occurred, or so Derec inferred from the sudden circumspection of the media accounts. They all mentioned a robot, but none of the reputable nets lodged a definitive claim that the robot had killed him — because of course that was impossible.

  Only Derec knew otherwise.

  He had enough background to contact Shara Limke again, but he’d promised himself an hour, and twenty minutes remained. Derec bathed, enjoying the scouring pressure of both hot water and sonic pulse, and then he dressed the way he would for a day’s work at the lab. Interstellar diplomacy might call for formal dress, but Derec was determined to keep himself as far from the codes and protocols of Earth as this sudden intrigue would permit.

  Limke answered his call with a speed that led Derec to believe that she’d shunted aside all other communication. “Mr. Avery,” she said.

  “Thank you for following up on this.”

  “I said I would, Director.” Derec debated for a moment, then dove into a conversation whose end he thought he could already see. “The symbolic importance of Kopernik is working against you right now, it seems.”

  “Full marks for understatement,” Limke said. “Not to mention humor in a situation that doesn’t necessarily call for it. Yes, we’re in trouble.

  That’s my primary reason for contacting you. The TBI is threatening to shut us down, and I have a strong intuition that they’re speaking for someone else.”

  “So this isn’t just a murder investigation. You’re asking me to involve myself in a political debacle.”

  “Yes. Will you?”

  “What do you need from me?”

  Limke sighed. “I have no way of knowing that, Mr. Avery. But what I am asking you, what I am about to ask you, is whether you will come to Kopernik. I hope you will trust me when I say that the survival of the station is at stake, and with it the future of commerce with the Fifty Worlds.”

  Derec meant to tell her that he would have to consider it, but there was no reason to lie. Politic
al firestorm apart, he could not stop himself from prying into this incident that might have so much to say about the work to which he’d devoted most of his life.

  “Give me the morning to set things up at my lab,” he said, “and then I’ll be there as soon as transport schedules permit.”

  “We’re waiting,” said Shara Limke, and again she cut the connection before Derec could. He resolved to improve his sense of when to end a conversation.

  Elin was coldly furious when Derec broke the news at the lab. Miles already knew, of course, having recorded Derec’s conversations with Shara Limke as a matter of routine. “If you leave the planet, Derec,”

  Elin said, “this program won’t be here when you get back. And you’re doing it for Jonis Taprin.” She spat his name with bewildered disgust.

  “It’s not for Taprin,” Derec said, and would have said more but she cut him off.

  “No, it’s for yourself, which is even worse. Bogard’s gone, Derec.

  You’ll never find out where he went, and you’ll never satisfy yourself that you did everything right. Going to Kopernik won’t change any of that.”

  Derec tried to apply what she’d said to his understanding of the situation. If he was completely candid with himself, he would have to admit that she was right, that he was walking out on his project at a precarious time to run an errand for a scared administrator worried about the investigation of a murder. He acknowledged that, and then stowed it away. That kind of candor was a luxury, particularly because it might be misguided. He was doing this, he was sure, because Elin was capable and it was the right thing to do.

  “You’ve got three months before the next quarterly,” he said. “The office is leased for six months, and I own the equipment. Keep Miles.

  Eza Lamina can’t touch you for another thirteen weeks. I’ll be back long before then.”

  Elin wouldn’t answer him. She stood vibrating with fury, eyes locked on his, but she wouldn’t say a word.

  Derec gave up. “Miles,” he said. “You will respond to Elin’s instructions until I return.”