by Isaac Asimov
Except for the focus on Kopernik, Derec had heard all of this before.
It sounded altogether too much like the fallout from the slaughter at Union Station. He had a number of questions, but he decided to keep things concrete. “Kopernik doesn’t make money?”
“It does, but not as much as you might expect. And even though station operations result in a profit, the station itself was built under a contract that states that the Terran government is responsible in perpetuity for maintenance. I gather the original builders demanded that concession because they thought that the government would make more in tariffs than the station would in docking fees — hence a clause to even things up. The government has sued us in every court that would hear them, but so far the agreement has held up. So Taprin’s ideological stepchildren will close us down if they can just to free up their expenditures for something else. I think you and I both know that they won’t be endowing any charitable foundations with it.”
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Derec said. “Surely the ancillary business taxes and so on more than make up for what they spend to sweep the floors.”
“Yes, they do,” Limke said with a nod. “Unfortunately, a number of the people in charge of those ancillary businesses believe that the Settler worlds are due for a spike in economic growth. They’re betting — I’m speculating here, but it’s informed speculation — that once Kopernik is shut down and the Spacers build another station, they’ll be able to purchase Kopernik and dedicate it exclusively to shipping to and from the Settler worlds.”
“What if the Spacers don’t build another station?”
“They will. They want trade with Earth; too many of them have lucrative commercial ties with the old motherworld. If the anti-Spacer gang gets its way, they’ll have made it look like they’ve humbled the Spacers and saved the Terran government a nontrivial amount of money in the bargain. Then they can redistribute the money in the form of incentives to get people in line behind running Kopernik again.”
It would only work, Derec thought, if people on Earth were both apathetic and gullible. Unfortunately, too many of them were, especially when it came to the actions of their elected representatives.
Politicians were widely assumed to be corrupt, and politicians were widely allowed to go on being corrupt as long as the average person believed that corruption was the price to pay for getting things done.
“There would be quite a bottleneck for Spacer traffic routed via Kopernik to Settler worlds,” he mused.
Limke nodded. “And that might well backfire on them. The Spacers might just make the investment to ship to Settler worlds directly.
Many of them already do, although logistical issues typically make it cheaper to go by Earth than directly from, say, Aurora to Nova Levis. A great deal of expertise in moving things from place to place has come to be concentrated here on this station. If Kopernik closes, how many of those people are going to move offworld?”
It was a good question. Derec didn’t have an answer, and he wanted some time to think about the situation. Also he was starting to get impatient to be at the work that had brought him here.
“So a robot killed Jonis Taprin,” he said.
Limke offered him a chagrined smile. “I’m sorry. You can’t possibly be as interested in the peripheral issues as I am, and you’ve come a very long way.”
She looked around the atrium as if considering her course of action.
Derec waited. Finally she said, “I never know where the TBI is listening, with one exception. I don’t think they’ve gotten into my office yet.”
Shara Limke’s office was spacious enough to seem appropriate to her title, but without ostentation. A robot stood in the corner behind her desk, and three chairs surrounded a low table on Derec’s right as they entered. “Fergus, security sweep,” Limke said.
The robot didn’t move, but perhaps thirty seconds later it said, “No surveillance detected.”
“That will have to do,” Limke said. She and Derec sat around the table, which Derec now noticed was a live display. Tapping one corner, she brought up a number of screens. Several of them showed crime-scene photographs.
Derec took some time to look over these. Jonis Taprin had died at the foot of the bed in his room. His shirtless body lay curled in a fetal position, with deep bruising visible across his back, shoulders and arms. One side of his head was distinctly flattened, and the force of the assault had burst one of his eyes from its socket. Blood stained the carpet under his face. Next to his head, dented and covered with blood, stood an aluminum briefcase. And on the bed, sitting like a man getting up in the morning with a bad headache, was a robot. A Cole-Yahner domestic, cheap and common as inkpens on twentieth century Wall Street. Its head hung straight down on its chest, and its arms dangled over the edge of the bed. Flecks and spatters of blood were visible on its arms and torso.
“I believe that answers your question, Mr. Avery,” Limke said.
“It certainly appears to,” Derec answered, eyes still on the images.
Nothing else in the room was disturbed. Taprin’s jacket, shirt, and tie lay on the bed behind the collapsed robot. A glass of water, half full, stood on the bedside table. “Appears,” he repeated under his breath.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Could someone have killed Taprin while the robot was incapacitated somehow? That would be likely to provoke positronic collapse in a standard domestic model like the Cole-Yahner. Most of them don’t have very sophisticated tools to sort out Three Law complications; it’s cheaper to build another one than improve their matrices.”
Briefly, Derec remembered some of the battles he’d fought to get funding for his early experiments on the brain that became Bogard.
“The robot would have defended Taprin,” Limke said.
“Of course, if it could have. Informed speculation again, but what if someone disabled it and then restored its function just as the murderer struck the fatal blow? The robot would have been functional at the death of another human being, but not for long enough to take action. Tricky call for the kind of basic matrix this model works with.”
“Mr. Avery,” Limke said. “You’ll forgive my candor, I hope, but that sounds a little farfetched.”
“It is,” Derec said. “But not as farfetched as a Cole-Yahner domestic killing a human being. Especially when the human being was Jonis Taprin. You’ve looked at surveillance cameras from the area?”
“There weren’t any. Taprin’s people demanded that all surveillance on his hall be suspended during his visit. They didn’t want people watching him, and they particularly didn’t want his enemies observing his security procedures. At least that was the explanation given me.”
“The TBI has interviewed Taprin’s staff?”
“Most of them were in a lounge talking to media. Those who weren’t had either gone to sleep or were otherwise accounted for.”
“Okay. What was the robot doing in Taprin’s room?”
“One of his aides in the adjoining room heard the knock and heard the robot say it was delivering room service. Taprin was heard to say that he hadn’t ordered anything, and the robot said a friend had sent him something. The aide told the TBI he assumed one of Taprin’s supporters was sending him a bottle of champagne or something of that nature.”
Someone had sent Taprin something, all right. But all of the people close to him on Kopernik were accounted for, and that meant that the solution to his murder lay in finding out where the robot had come from.
“What was the robot’s function on-station?” Derec asked.
Limke paused before answering. When she did, something had tightened in her voice. “I don’t know. The TBI team has embargoed all the records related to it.”
Typical TBI territorialism, Derec thought. “Well, that complicates things a little. I should be able to find out from the robot itself, though, as soon as I examine it.”
Limke was looking away from him, down at the images of Taprin on
her tabletop. “The robot itself is under TBI seal. They’re not letting anyone examine it. Least of all you.”
Which complicated things rather a lot.
Chapter 10
ARIEL’S TRANSPORT SKIMMED north over the waters of the River Bogard (she’d heard Derec mention his personal nomenclature once, and liked it enough to adopt it herself). She passed isolated settlements of a few homes, most of them abandoned as even the most fearless of Nova Levis’ settlers fled for the false safety of the cities. Some of them were doubtless part of Derec’s studies.
The river narrowed after the craft passed Stopol, and the terrain around it grew hilly and rugged. She wasn’t a botanist, but she could tell that the trees were different; she imagined the diseases were, too.
So much of Nova Levis had been ruined, and yet from the air it looked like any other wilderness. It might well be that nothing moved under those trees; her perfunctory attempts to keep abreast of the public-health situation had acquainted her with a number of pathogens both organic and mechanical that tore like wildfire through any organism with a central nervous system. In other places, local biodiversity exceeded climatological norms by an order of magnitude or more; species came and went in a matter of weeks. If it was possible that the forest below her was devoid of animal life, it was equally possible that a different species of insect clung to every tree. Nova Levis was an ecology so wildly out of balance that even working out the mechanics of the imbalance had thus far proved impossible. Ariel was privately amazed that Derec and his team had made as much progress as they had.
The transport held only her and a robot pilot. She’d hired it for the day out of personal funds, not wanting herself publicly traceable to the cyborg question anymore than she already was. Perhaps it was too late to worry about it, but Ariel was generally of the opinion that a little extra caution was rarely the wrong choice — which made her volubility in Kamil’s a few nights ago all the more galling.
Never mind, she told herself. Control what you can now.
She brought up a map on the transport’s instrument panel and zeroed it in on the latest satellite imaging of the old cyborg laboratory.
New construction was visible everywhere, all but obliterating the footprint of the lab. Nucleomorph had spent a lot of money there; no wonder they wanted to pacify the reanimés. Ariel spiraled the map out from the lab until she located the reanimé camp. It was larger than she’d expected, nearly a square kilometer in size with evidence of recent growth in the stacks of recently cut trees. Hardly the cluster of shacks she’d expected, but then, all of her expectations about the situation had been rudely derailed the night before when Jennie had turned up the tiny crystal wafer laid over Ariel’s kitchen window.
She’d had Jennie analyze it on the spot, and she discovered that in addition to being a recorder, the wafer contained a message.
R. Jennie played it for her, and she’d heard a gravel-toned voice that brought back all of her memories of Coren. Jerem Looms’ voice had been ruined in just this way.
“Ambassador Burgess,” the voice said. “If you have discovered this message, it is time that we stopped relying on furtive text communication. The situation requires somewhat more bandwidth. There is much about Nucleomorph, and about us, that you would do well to know. I await your visit when you have completed your initial assessment of the political climate.”
Ariel had the wafer in her pocket now, as her pilot slowed and dropped onto the surface of the river. It guided the transport to a beach on the inside of a bend in the river, stopping three or four meters from the shore.
“My apologies, Ambassador,” it said. “I am programmed not to put the craft in danger of grounding.”
Ariel popped the hatch and looked at the water. It was only knee-deep, and sandy. “No apology necessary,” she said. “I’ll dry soon enough. Remain here until I return.”
“Yes, Ambassador.”
Splashing into the water, Ariel made her way to shore. A trail led into the trees, and she followed it for less than ten minutes before realizing that someone had fallen into step behind her. She turned and stifled a cry.
A step behind her stood a cyborg, taller than Ariel by a head, with the same granular skin and misshapen head she remembered Jerem Looms having. It — he — regarded her with hooded eyes. “You are Burgess?”
“Yes.”
“Follow me.”
The cyborg set off and she followed, becoming aware as soon as they were moving that a second reanimé was behind her. The hair on the back of her neck prickled, but she forced herself not to turn around. If they were going to kill her, she would already be dead. She was here on a diplomatic mission, her first since her exile to Nova Levis.
They came out of the woods into the reanimé camp, and despite her resolve Ariel nearly fled. Everywhere she looked, cyborgs were working or talking. They built, they dug, they repaired, they ran messages between groups. She saw one reanimé, an adolescent female — if it was appropriate to note the gender of such a being — actually salute the leader of a crew pulling stumps from a cleared field. There were a great many more than she’d expected, and Ariel wondered if anyone actually knew the population of the encampment. The whine and scrape of manufacturing machinery reached her ears, and she saw smoke rising from stacks over a number of flat-roofed buildings. There was industry here, and organization.
It was less an encampment than a town.
And where were the sick and dying? The accounts Ariel had read of the reanimé camp had led her to believe that its denizens were doomed by the experimental missteps that had created them. All around her, though, were cyborgs that she could only call healthy.
She saw no deformity, no sickness at all.
Her escort touched her on the shoulder, and smiled when she flinched. “Inside,” it, or he, said, pointing to a two-story timber house on their left. Ariel nodded and went to the door.
It opened as she approached, and a cyborg stood aside to let her in. He shut the door behind her and stood at attention in the doorway.
The interior of the ground floor was one large room, furnished only with a large table and a desk. On the walls hung a number of maps.
The dozen chairs around the table were empty; the chair behind the desk held a cyborg who stood to greet her.
“Ambassador Burgess,” he said in the rasping voice of the message on the crystal wafer. “Your presence does us honor, and you as well. Welcome to Gernika. I am Basq.”
Ariel nodded. “You seem to be doing well for yourselves here, Basq.”
“Not as well as we will be,” Basq answered. He walked around the desk. “What have you brought for me?”
The question threw her. “You contacted me. I inferred from the contact that you would want to see me.”
“Beware inference,” Basq said. “There is much here that I would have you see, and your initiative speaks well of you. This meeting may be premature, though.”
“Zev Brixa gave me to understand that the circumstances were pressing.”
“You are far too canny to take Zev Brixa at his word.” Basq gazed at Ariel for a moment, as if challenging her to dispute him. Or as if he mistrusted his own compliment, and was giving her a chance to confirm it. She said nothing. He — for some reason she had no trouble thinking of the cyborg chieftain as male — smiled, and the expression did nothing to make her more comfortable. “Brixa is Nucleomorph’s man. I am not a man, and I do not belong to Nucleomorph. Both of those qualities disturb him.”
“Are you telling me that Brixa is lying to me?”
“I don’t know the details of your interaction,” Basq said. “He may well be telling the truth while disguising the reasons for offering it.”
“Don’t patronize me,” Ariel said. She took the wafer from her pocket and let Basq get a look at it before setting it on the table. “You know as much about my conversations with Brixa as I do.”
“Ah,” Basq nodded. “So this brought you here.”
“Did y
ou intend me to find it?”
“I did. I assumed that you would take more time to gauge its significance before making a two-thousand-kilometer trip. Your other duties are pressing, I understand.”
“Are there other devices in my office?”
“You found that one,” Basq said. The guard swung the door open, and he extended an arm, escorting her from his headquarters. “Come see us again when you have something concrete to offer.”
Chapter 11
THE ADJUTANT IN charge of the TBI inquiry, one Omel Slyke, was every bit as unhelpful as Derec had expected, and supercilious to boot. “I’m not going to waste any social grace on you, Avery,” he said. “If you hadn’t been en route with Kalienin by the time I knew you were coming, I’d have had your ship intercepted and turned right around to that garbage pit you came from. Stay out of my investigation.”
Derec had come to Slyke’s office expecting to be frozen out. He had nothing to gain by pleasantries, and nothing to lose by belligerence. “I’m not here to interfere with your investigation,” he said. “I trust that it will be every bit as thorough as the other TBI cases I’ve been involved with.”
Slyke’s face darkened, but he didn’t get up from behind his desk.
“Let me explain something to you. If I decide you don’t belong here anymore, you will be gone. I might be able to put you on a ship back to Nova Levis, and I might not, but I will put you on a ship to somewhere if you get in my way.”
“If I didn’t know better, Slyke, I would think that you and I weren’t both working to solve a murder.”
“I’ve seen the way you solve murders. Your solutions tend to involve more people getting killed. That’s not going to happen while I’m in charge here.”
“I’ve seen the way you solve murders, too. Your solutions tend to involve giving up when things get sensitive to the people who pay you.”