by Isaac Asimov
“Very well, Derec. As of now or commencing at your departure?”
“Let’s say as of now. I’ll try not to contradict her before I leave.”
At first he had trouble getting clearance to travel to Kopernik. The morning passed in interviews, pathogen screenings, and exchanges of documentation. Then early in the afternoon, just as Derec was starting to believe that the whole situation on Kopernik would have blown over by the time he could get his travel permissions in order, his terminal chirped. Before Derec accepted the call, he glanced at the incoming identification: Vilios Kalienin. He’d heard the name.
Some kind of consultant to the Terran Senate caucus on Nova Levis.
“Mr. Kalienin,” he said.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Avery,” Kalienin said. “I understand you’ve had a little trouble getting your travel arrangements finalized.”
“So it would seem.”
“Well. As it happens, I’m traveling to Kopernik in three hours, on the way to Earth for Jonis Taprin’s funeral. Will you accept my offer of passage?”
“Gladly,” Derec said, knowing there would be a cost but happy to pay it if paying meant he could get to Kopernik and be a roboticist again. Even if it was only for a few days.
Miles had already packed a case of clothing and another of instruments, so Derec had a little time to kill before he had to report to the spaceport. He indulged a hunch and read through what he could easily find about Kalienin.
By the time he was done, he had a clearer idea of why Kalienin had been so accommodating. A career political operative with Organic Sapiens sympathies would, of course, be going to Taprin’s memorial, and if he wanted to bring along a celebrated example of the damage wrought by positronic robots, he could hardly have made a better choice than Derec Avery. So Derec was to be a symbol. Very well. It had happened before, and if he could assist in casting some light on what had really happened to Jonis Taprin, so much the better.
A factory-model robot could not have killed Taprin. That much was axiomatic. Either the circumstances of the crime had been obscured or the robot in question was other than it appeared from Shara Limke’s offhand description. Derec would find out, and whatever the truth turned out to be, he would at last be able to put the ghost of Bogard to rest.
“Page me a transport and I’ll get myself to the ship, Miles,” he called, hefting his bags. “You head down to the lab and assist Elin.”
“Fortunate travels, Derec,” Miles said as he walked past Derec to the front door. Derec had programmed that exact benediction himself.
As he watched Miles walking away down the street toward the lab, Derec felt a quiet pride that he had been able to build a robot so ordinary and at the same time so unique. His experience with Bogard had taught him something after all.
The transport arrived, and he embarked on his trip to Kopernik.
Chapter 8
ARIEL WAITED TWO days for the political explosion. When it didn’t come, its absence worried her even more than anticipating it had. Kalienin couldn’t just be sitting on an indiscretion so blatant. If he hadn’t made something of it yet, he was certainly planning to. In the calm before that inevitable storm, Ariel shored up her project’s operations, making sure that in the event of her removal the work of ethics investigation would go on. She didn’t expect to survive politically, but that wouldn’t matter if she could leave behind stable oversight.
Hodder Feng had tried to console her after Kalienin had taken his smiling leave. It was a touching gesture, coming from the depths of Hodder’s loss. She admired him for it. Perhaps once she’d been politically exiled — again — she could work with him. Nova Levis was still a place where committed individuals could work immediate change.
That little nugget of optimism sustained her for those two days.
Then she grew restless, and against all her instincts she did the one thing guaranteed to provoke a reaction: She called Zev Brixa. He wasn’t available, which made Ariel happy — she had the satisfaction of trying to do the right thing, and the relief of not suffering the consequences.
Her happiness evaporated when she scanned her messages and saw that in the queue was a query from an anonymous sender under the subject heading CYBORG QUESTION. It was text-only, she saw when she opened it. WE APPLAUD YOUR WORK, ARIEL BURGESS, the message read. REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE IF YOU WOULD KNOW MORE.
“Jennie,” Ariel said. “Trace this message.”
“Working,” R. Jennie said. Ariel sat at her desk rereading the message, wondering if there was something to it she wasn’t seeing. Had Kalienin decided to prod her? If not, who else would know?
Silly question. She’d been less than discreet at Kamil’s. Anyone who wanted to listen to her could have easily enough. Kalienin was certainly capable of unethical action, but it was much more likely that someone at the restaurant had overheard her, perhaps talked to someone else, and so on. Any number of people could be aware of the situation, and any one of them might have sent her this anonymous encouragement.
“The message was routed several times, through nodes in Stopol, Nova City, and Noresk,” Jennie reported. “Its origin is effectively masked.”
Given time, Jennie might be able to discover the sender. Ariel considered it. What stopped her was the niggling question of what would happen if she replied as the message instructed. The sender wanted to talk to her, but was reluctant to disclose his or her identity.
Under the circumstances, that kind of caution was prudent. It might well be that the sender didn’t trust Ariel not to tell the wrong person about the communication itself.
She wondered if Hodder Feng had something to do with it. Knowing nothing for certain, she flitted from possibility to possibility until she grew annoyed at herself and tapped out a terse reply.
I would.
Then she shut her terminal down and went to see Vilios Kalienin.
He wasn’t at his office, and his human secretary notified Ariel that he was en route from Earth, having attended the memorial services for Jonis Taprin. Ariel had made it a point of pride to restrain her emotional reaction to Taprin’s death, but somehow this perfunctory detail rocked her. Jonis had not always been a Managin figurehead.
She chose her lovers carefully, and in Jonis Taprin she had believed — if briefly — she’d found that rarest of animals, the untainted politician.
Later events had proved her catastrophically wrong.
You’re not doing yourself any favors by staying ignorant of the situation, Ariel thought. She ran through the subetheric accounts of the assassination. What she found left her purely stupefied.
A robot had killed Taprin? Earth was in turmoil. Widespread rioting had destroyed a number of Spacer-affiliated businesses. Residential Intelligences, thousands of them, had been crudely destroyed. Taprin’s successor in office had called for the immediate expulsion of all Spacers on Earth and the shutdown of Kopernik Station; this demand was met with acclaim. The death toll was sickening, and so was the prurient relish with which the Terran media covered the events. Ariel filtered through this sensationalist garbage looking for actual details about the investigation. Few were forthcoming, and she nearly spared herself the ordeal of searching through the welter of bigoted muck — but then she saw Derec’s name.
He was on Kopernik.
Ariel returned to the reports on the murder investigation, winnow-ing them for additional information or hints. She found nothing.
Either five years had been long enough for the name of Derec Avery to completely recede from the Terran public consciousness … or the news was being withheld.
She checked the date of the one report that mentioned Derec, and on rereading it she saw that he had arrived with Vilios Kalienin.
Flabbergasted all over again, she sat back in her chair and tried to organize what she knew. It was reported that a robot had killed Taprin, and the next day Derec had gone with Kalienin to Kopernik; since then, Kalienin had gone on to Earth to whip up popular sentiment against robots
and Spacers. If Derec hadn’t gone to Earth — and she didn’t think he had, given the vendetta the Terran Bureau of Investigation still nurtured against him — he was either still on Kopernik or back in Nova City.
A brief conversation with his assistant Elin Imbrin told her not only that Derec was not there, but that she hadn’t been able to contact him since he’d left. “Communication with Kopernik is censored,” she said. “I’ve called several times, and after the first two they stopped even pretending that they’d pass the message along.”
“Did he give you any indication when he might be returning?” Ariel asked.
Anger flashed in Elin’s eyes. “No. I made it clear when he left that I thought it was detrimental to the project, and we left it at that.”
In addition to the anger, there was strain on Elin’s face. Ariel wondered how the situation with the disappearing research subjects was progressing, but she wasn’t sure how to ask without having Elin infer that Ariel was questioning her ability to run the lab in Derec’s absence. Her diplomatic skills were sadly eroded, she thought.
“If you do hear from him, I’d very much appreciate it if you told him I’d like to talk to him,” Ariel said.
“I’ll do that,” Elin said. “Now I have work to do.”
Next, Ariel called Zev Brixa again. This time he was in his office, and he looked pleased to hear from her. “Ambassador,” he said. “Glad you’re following up on this.”
The phrasing threw Ariel. “Have you heard something?”
“No, nothing like that. I’m just guessing that if you were going to make a cursory round of the Triangle and then drop the issue, it wouldn’t have taken you this long to do it.”
He was right about that. Brixa was the kind of man, Ariel thought, who would draw up a chart indexing the lapse before her response against the probability that she was doing what he wanted. The ready smile and engaging manner were all part of his calculations. Oddly, Ariel found she didn’t begrudge him this. Now that she was beginning to learn how he worked, she felt fairly confident that he could be relied on if she gave him the impression she was pursuing his request.
“Well,” she said, “I have sounded a few people out, and the question isn’t finding much sympathy.”
He didn’t seem bothered. “I expected that. New ideas frighten people, especially people who have been through what Novans have these past few years. And the offworlders — including a large number of my colleagues — are every bit as bound to the prejudices of their upbringing as Novans are to theirs.”
Ariel thought of her own gut reaction to his proposition, and knew he was, if anything, understating the case.
“Still,” Brixa went on, “nothing was ever gained by wrapping yourself in old prejudices. Nucleomorph intends to move forward with this. We’re relying on you to tell us the best way to do it.”
“Mr. Brixa. I don’t think you understand. As the political culture of Nova Levis stands, this will not work. The Triangle is not going to open its arms to a group of mutated, possibly human rejects from a notorious illicit experiment.”
“Is that how you see them?” Brixa’s eyes were crinkling, but he didn’t quite smile. “Here’s a suggestion. Why don’t you come out here and actually see the people we’re talking about?”
See them, Ariel thought. Go to Noresk and walk among the reanimés who were even less human than Jerem Looms. It was out of the question.
“Mr. Brixa —”
“I can send a transport for you tomorrow morning,” he said. “I’ll accompany you. It isn’t dangerous, Ambassador. Even the religious fanatics among the reanimés are otherworldly dreamers. Well, there are a few who take a more aggressive line, but I don’t think many of the reanimés take them seriously. At least, they won’t if — and now we’re back to our first conversation — they perceive that someone is taking steps to end their ostracism.”
Ariel considered. If she did go to the reanimé camp, she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to arrive in a Nucleomorph transport. It always paid to be careful about who you let yourself be identified with.
“I’ll consider a visit to the camp,” she said. “If I decide to go, though, I think it would be more appropriate to go on my own.”
Brixa took her meaning right away. “Very well. That might be the prudent course. At least let me know when you’re coming so we can meet again after. Will you do that?”
“I will,” Ariel said. “I’ll be in touch, Mr. Brixa.”
She avoided thinking about the problem for the rest of the day. There was more than enough day-to-day struggling against the dysfunctional Triangle patronage system to keep her busy, and periodically a numbing sense of loss at Jonis’ murder overcame all of Ariel’s best intentions to do her work. Ariel spent the afternoon updating herself on the progress of a number of ethics investigations, including a vitriolic trial in Stopol that, it appeared, might result in the conviction of a district judge on bribery and fraud charges. If successful, that verdict would be a potent symbolic victory; she felt a little tingle of optimism, and decided that was a good way to finish off the workday.
As soon as she ran through her correspondence one more time, she would go home and forbid herself to think for sixteen hours.
Ninth in her message queue came the heading CYBORG QUESTION.
She opened the message.
I WAS HOPING YOU WOULD. KEEP BRIXA AT A DISTANCE, AND DON’T WORRY ABOUT KALIENIN. MORE SOON.
A chill spread up the back of Ariel’s neck. The sender knew about both Kalienin and Brixa. The only person she’d mentioned Brixa to was Derec, and she hadn’t told anyone about her unfortunate logorrhea in front of Kalienin.
Someone was watching her.
“Jennie,” she said. “Security sweep of the office. When it’s complete, sweep the apartment as well.”
“Working.”
Ariel sat until she couldn’t keep herself still. She needed to do something, but she also needed to delay action until she had a good reason to act.
Without meaning to, she started punching in the code for Kopernik Station. As she entered the code and charged the call to the Triangle, it started to seem like a good idea.
A security officer answered the call. “Kopernik Station.”
Use the title, Ariel thought. “This is Ambassador Ariel Burgess. Connect me to Derec Avery, please.”
The officer consulted a screen at the edge of Ariel’s field of vision.
“Communication is restricted due to the criminal investigation at this time, Ambassador,” he said. “I can record a message for Mr. Avery and send it through screening.”
“This isn’t a social call, Kopernik,” Ariel said. “Mr. Avery and I have worked together for some years, and it’s entirely possible he’ll want to consult with me on this investigation.”
“That is possible, Ambassador. If you’ll record a message, we’ll get it screened and go from there.”
“Give me the name of the official in charge of this screening.”
“I can’t do that, Ambassador. There is a very sensitive situation here.”
At one time, Ariel could have made the situation a great deal more sensitive with a few well-placed calls. That time was past, though, and there was no getting it back.
Ariel took a moment to compose her thoughts. “Begin recording,” she said.
Chapter 9
THE MINUTE DEREC stepped off Kalienin’s ship onto Kopernik Station, he knew there was going to be trouble. Shara Limke was there to meet him, but so were two stone-faced operatives of the Terran Bureau of Investigation. They stayed in the background while Limke approached to shake Derec’s hand.
“Mr. Avery,” she said. “I am terribly glad to see you.”
“Thank you, Director. It looks like not everyone here shares your enthusiasm.”
Limke glanced over her shoulder. “Another time,” she said quietly.
Together they walked toward the two TBI men. “Derec Avery,” one of them said. “What a pleasure t
o have you back in our territory again.
How many people are going to drop dead around you this time?”
“Have we been introduced?” Derec said.
“Alder Stoun. Inspector. The only thing you need to remember is the third.”
“As you wish, Inspector,” Derec said. “Your colleague?”
The second man spoke. “Iker. Inspector.”
“Well, that’ll solve me the problem of having to remember your names.” Derec might have said more, even though he wasn’t normally given to hostile bantering. His experience with the TBI had taught him that they were narrow-minded and abrasive, even when they weren’t obviously corrupt.
Shara Limke, though, touched Derec on the shoulder. “Inspectors,” she said. “You wanted to meet Mr. Avery off the ship. Now you’ve met him. If you’ll excuse us, I have work for him.”
Derec followed her out of the landing lounge and down a long hall.
Teeming with questions, he said nothing, waiting for her to direct him. That was why he was here. When they got to an elevator, they dropped several levels and emerged in an atrium with a fine view of the starfield and a picket of Terran military craft. Kopernik’s docking stations were nearly full.
“The situation here is even more tenuous than I described to you before,” Limke said. “Popular opinion on Earth is running in supermajority numbers in favor of evicting Spacers from the planet and prohibiting trade relations. Taprin’s survivors in his party are leading the charge, and they have enough pull with the military to get a temporary blockade enforced. I think once things calm down, the eviction and trade prohibition will sound a little rash. The problem is, a number of anti-Spacer politicians on Earth feel the same way, so they’re starting a second effort to circumvent any inconvenient shift in the political wind. They’re trying to close my station, Mr.
Avery. The argument, if you can call it that, seems to hint at the idea that mothballing Kopernik will be a powerful statement to the Fifty Worlds. The Spacers, if they want to continue commerce with Earth, will have to construct a station of their own, and the expense of running a station will be transferred neatly from the Terran government to the Spacers.”