Asimov’s Future History Volume 10

by Isaac Asimov

  Now, Slyke did stand. He wasn’t taller than Derec, but he was much heavier, and he carried himself like a man familiar with physical violence. “Are you accusing me of corruption?”

  “I’m telling you what my experience has been. The director of this station asked me to come because she felt I had something to contribute. If you don’t feel the same way, you have that prerogative. I hope that animosity doesn’t interfere with our common task.”

  Derec left Slyke’s office feeling that he hadn’t been forceful enough.

  The truth was, though, that he wasn’t sure how much influence Shara Limke commanded anymore. He went down to the lab she’d had set up for him and tried to put Omel Slyke out of his mind. The situation was what it was: A rabble-rousing Terran politician was dead, and the leading suspect was a Cole-Yahner domestic that had likely killed nothing larger than a symbiotic fungus in its operational life. Derec had left his work teetering on the brink of political oblivion to come here at the behest of an embattled station manager who likely didn’t have the sway to let him do the investigation any good. The investigating agency was so riddled with political interdependency as to be completely ineffective, and the interplanetary political situation was threatening to deteriorate into open conflict.

  What was there to do but throw oneself into the work available, and wait for things to turn, either for better or worse?

  Before the TBI had descended on Kopernik, station security had conducted a preliminary assessment, and station medical personnel had conducted an autopsy on Jonis Taprin. Surprising no one, the cause of death had been blunt-force trauma to large areas of the cranium, resulting in rupture of blood vessels in the brain and a partial severing of the brain stem. The murder weapon was a hard, rectangular object with slightly rounded corners and edges — in other words, an aluminum briefcase. Derec pored over the report, looking for anything unusual. When he’d spent half an hour on it, he closed the file and turned elsewhere for leads. The autopsy had been professional and complete; Taprin had died of a simple bludgeoning.

  Station security’s crime-scene report had little more to offer. Blood samples recovered from the robot’s chassis and the briefcase matched Taprin. The briefcase was his, filled with a few paper documents, several wallets of storage wafers, and a portable terminal. Taprin’s staff had confiscated all of the materials while the investigating officer was cataloging them, and it was obvious even in the dry idiom of a crime-scene report that the officer hadn’t appreciated the interruption: DECEDENT’S STAFFERS WERE INSISTENT TO THE POINT OF ABUSE, ARGUING THAT THE MATERIALS IN QUESTION WERE PRIVATE AND IRRELEVANT TO THE CRIME. THIS INVESTIGATOR DISAGREED IN THE MOST STRENUOUS POSSIBLE TERMS, BUT NO MEANS SHORT OF PHYSICAL ASSAULT EXISTED TO PRESERVE THE SCENE. Names of the staffers were appended to the report. Derec made a note to speak to each of them, but what really interested him at the moment was a discussion with the officer who had filed the report. Skudri Flin.

  Derec rummaged up the officer’s contact information from a station directory, then stopped short of placing a call. Now was a good time to gently test how much political cover Shara Limke had to offer.

  He went to her office, and found her escorting an agitated Keresian merchant out as Derec came in. “Protesting the blockade,” she explained, gesturing for Derec to enter. “Not much I can do about it, but nobody’s complaining to the TBI or the Terran armed forces.”

  As soon as the door had shut behind them, Derec said, “I’d like your permission to speak to Skudri Flin.”

  “You don’t need my permission,” Limke said, and then caught herself. “Ah. I hear you talked to Adjutant Slyke.”

  “I did. He gave me to understand that I was an unwelcome intrusion.”

  “He left me with the same impression.” Limke sat in a chair near the door and rubbed at the bridge of her nose. “I may not be able to run as much interference for you as you’re hoping.”

  “Maybe not,” Derec said. “There’s only one way to find out, though.”

  She laughed. “True. Very well, Mr. Avery. Go and speak to Skudri.

  He’ll give you an earful.”

  And he did. Derec found Flin in the station gaming room, at a table with two other men playing a game Derec didn’t recognize. It involved two pairs of dice and a number of circular tiles arranged in a symmetrical pattern on a white rectangular board with thin triangles of alternating color along its edges. Two of the men played while the third offered advice and was repeatedly told to shut up.

  Flin’s image had been attached to the report; he was the third man.

  Paunchy, hard-faced, the tipped-back seating posture of a man used to wearing a belt with lots of gear on it. Derec wandered among the various tables and consoles until the game was over, which happened when one of the players moved all of his tiles off the board. Then he approached. “Skudri Flin?”

  Flin looked up. “Wonderful,” he said. “The robot genius comes to see me. Why don’t you just sign my discharge papers?”

  “I’m not here to get you in trouble, Officer Flin,” Derec said. He filed away the information that he was already known around the station. Vilios Kalienin had apparently not shirked his advance work.

  “Director Limke asked me to assist with the investigation, and that’s what I’m doing. You could save me a lot of time with a little conversation.”

  “Do us a favor, Skud,” the losing player growled. “Talk to the genius and let us play without listening to you run your mouth.”

  “Jump,” Flin said. He got up from the table with his glass and walked across a broad floor broken by four billiard tables to the bar, pointedly not hailing the bartender. Derec ordered for both of them, surprised by how much he wanted a drink himself. Trying times.

  Flin drank, set his glass on the bar, and said, “So, get to it.” Over his shoulder, Derec could see light spilling from the closed doors of V-game booths.

  “I have only three questions for you, Officer Flin.”

  “Skud.”

  “Skud. Three questions. The first is, did Jonis Taprin’s staffers interfere with your investigation beyond removing the contents of his briefcase?”

  “No. Unless you count three idiots barging into a crime scene and manhandling the evidence. They didn’t touch anything but the case, but for all I know the lead that would crack the investigation left the room on the sole of one of their shoes. Next.”

  “Is it your impression that the robot killed Taprin?”

  Flin drank and considered. “If you forget about the Three Laws, that’s the only conclusion you’d come to. Problem is, that’s a robot.

  Even your whatsit, Bogard, couldn’t have done this. Tell you what I think, Mr. Avery. You’re wasted here. TBI won’t let you work, and even if you could, you wouldn’t find what you were looking for.”

  “Which is?”

  “Is that your third question?” Flin winked at him over the top of his glass.

  “No. The third question — and I want to make sure you know that I’m not trying to imply anything about your conduct of your duties here — is this: Did you leave anything out of your crime-scene report?”

  The glass clunked on the bar. “Now why would I do that?”

  “You wouldn’t — unless you knew the TBI was coming and you had the same opinion of them that I do.” Or unless Flin just wanted a little quiet revenge on Taprin’s staffers for their impudence.

  Flin studied him for a long moment. He had the policeman’s appraising gaze, as if everything in his field of vision was an illusion to be seen through.

  “I can go back through my records,” he said eventually. “See if there’s anything I might have overlooked. Won’t happen until tomorrow morning, though. I go on shift in three hours, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to lose sleep over anything to do with that smug bastard Taprin.”

  “Much appreciated,” Derec said.

  “Oh, I’ll get it back.” Flin drained his glass and stood. “But before I do, I’ll throw this one
in free. What you’re looking for here is your crazy tinhead Bogard. Limke knew you’d never be able to turn this job down. Talk to you tomorrow, genius.”

  Flin went back to his game, and Derec finished his drink and left.

  He went back to his lab. Annoyed by the empty positronic diagnosis assembly hanging over the gleaming ceramic table, and further nettled by the fact that everyone on Kopernik Station had well-developed opinions about his psychology, Derec decided to see just what he could get from Slyke.

  He composed a letter that went to contortionist lengths of politeness in its couching of a request that he be allowed to examine the suspect robot “purely for research purposes.” If Slyke believed that Derec was taking himself out of the investigation entirely, playing the pure-science naïf, perhaps Derec would make some progress. It wasn’t likely — Slyke hadn’t achieved his position by being gullible — but he might take the request as a promise on Derec’s part to stay out of his way. A long shot, but all of Derec’s shots looked to be long in this situation.

  He didn’t have to wait long to find out. Ninety seconds after he’d finished composing the message and sent it off, his terminal chimed with an incoming response. It was one word in length: DENIED.

  No surprise, really. Slyke had no reason to give him anything. Derec chewed over the problem a little more, and found himself wondering if that was really true. Shara Limke wasn’t gullible, either, and she couldn’t have been completely stripped of influence. Slyke couldn’t completely discount her.

  Derec leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Limke had brought him here because of his experience. What had that experience taught him that he wasn’t using now? He mused over the question for some time, losing himself in it, letting his mind wander in the hope of stumbling over something he’d forgotten. A comfortable fugue settled over him, a waking dream state that had proved fertile when the thornier problems of positronic design had thwarted him.

  Derec let it, relishing its return; there wasn’t much call for intuition in the kind of data-gathering and field management he’d been doing on Nova Levis. This was thinking, getting out of your own mind’s way and letting it tease out the clue hiding in plain sight, the clue that the regimented conscious mind would always overlook.

  The filaments.

  Derec snapped awake, realized only then that he’d fallen asleep.

  The Resident Intelligence in Washington, compromised by an invader.

  Clots of colored filaments like a tumor on its data pipelines.

  A red herring, he told himself. There’s no indication that the station RI acted improperly here. Surveillance was purposely discontinued, and there’s nothing else the RI could have been involved in. It couldn’t have forced the robot to do what it did.

  Robots also didn’t murder human beings, but apparently one had.

  This was no time to rest on assumptions.

  Derec glanced at the wall chrono. Shara Limke wouldn’t be in her office this late, but he thought he knew a place she might go.

  Chapter 12

  ARIEL ARRIVED BACK in Nova City in mid-afternoon. She’d spent all of twenty minutes in the reanimé settlement — Gernika, she reminded herself — and that time had been simultaneously informative and mystifying. There were a great deal more of the cyborgs than she had expected — than anyone would have expected, she thought, except possibly Zev Brixa. This was useful to know, but the question of how there had come to be that many perplexed her.

  The lab was long gone, and unless Nucleomorph was manufacturing cyborgs there was no way for their population to have increased.

  Be reasonable, she told herself. There’s no possible motive for Nucleomorph to manufacture cyborgs, if manufacturing was the correct characterization of the process through which they were created. The cyborgs couldn’t work, couldn’t travel since new security procedures had been put in place following the Jerem Looms/Tro Aspil debacle, couldn’t do anything but sit in their remote exile and slowly die of the lab errors that had created them. To Brixa, they were a problem to be addressed, a troublesome population to be pacified.

  It was far more likely that the existing reports about the settlement were erroneous. Hardly anyone had known about it, and to Ariel’s knowledge only Mia Daventri had been there, and that while desperately ill. A perfect situation for exaggeration.

  Ariel had the rental transport drop her off near the Triangle. She completed the transaction with the robot pilot and walked down a side street off Nova Boulevard until she came to the Bureau of Census and Population Statistics. The building directory told her that the Census Division was on the third floor.

  She made an on-the-spot appointment with an assistant director named Gil Nandoz, waited ten minutes for him to go through his ritual pretense of clearing up whatever he was working on, and was escorted into his office. Nandoz was an officious Spacer, tall and physically arrested in a distinguished middle age. Seeing him, Ariel was reminded of Hodder Feng’s belief that midlevel bureaucrats were genetically predisposed.

  “How can I assist you, Ambassador?” Nandoz asked, with a well-practiced mixture of briskness and welcome. He was already expecting to be unable to perform whatever favor she might ask. Everything about him signaled that refusing requests was his primary function.

  Ariel decided against an incremental approach. “I’m sure you’ve heard, Director Nandoz,” she said, “that a prominent corporate citizen of Nova Levis has asked me to investigate the legal questions surrounding cyborg citizenship.”

  “I hope you don’t think I’m going to get myself entangled in this,” Nandoz said.

  “I have no such expectation. I’m simply here to ask whether any census has ever been conducted on the reanimé population.”

  Nandoz stared at her as if she’d asked about a count of sand fleas. “No,” he said when he’d gotten his incredulous reaction under control.

  “Why would there have been?”

  “Any number of reasons. It might have been useful to ascertain the spread of tailored diseases among them. They do get sick, you know.”

  “I certainly hope they do,” Nandoz said. “I hope they get sick, and I hope each and every one of them dies and the flesh of them is eaten away by maggots. That’s all I have to say about those abominations, and I’ll thank you to leave my office.”

  That was instructive, Ariel thought as she left the Census building.

  She found it hard to believe that Nandoz would have reacted the same way if she’d asked how many children under ten lived in Stopol. Even innocuous statistical questions became fraught when they concerned the reanimés, and Ariel had no doubt that she herself was becoming tainted by her association with the citizenship question. If she didn’t resolve the situation quickly, she’d find herself unable to do any kind of political work.

  There was humor in her predicament if she looked at it the right way. When she’d been assigned to Nova Levis, she’d thought that her fall from prominence to pariah was complete. Then, when the hostility of the Triangle toward people they associated with the troubles before Liberation became apparent, Ariel realized that even among pariahs there were hierarchies. Now Zev Brixa had come along and made her untouchable even in the eyes of dead-end census bureaucrats. Things could always get worse.

  At least she knew for certain that a census had never been conducted. That explained the apparent discrepancy between what she’d heard about the reanimés and what she’d observed that morning.

  There were bound to be surprises when a population was so thoroughly ignored for so long.

  Her first order of business was to obtain basic data about Gernika: How many reanimés were there, how many had died in the last month, year, since Liberation. She’d have to get in touch with Derec when he returned from his doomed errand to Kopernik. He would be interested in an untainted new data set for his project, and it would certainly be useful to know what, if any, medical procedures worked on the reanimés. None of it would take a great deal of time, and it
could be done quietly.

  Ariel thought it likely that the citizenship question would resolve itself because most of the reanimés would be ticking down the last months of their crippled lives. Whether they were religious fanatics or not, they couldn’t do Nucleomorph any harm if they all died.

  She caught herself, and was appalled at the brusque turn of her thoughts. Was it so easy to consign sentient beings, who had once been human, to a miserable and diseased death?

  The question dogged her all the way back to her apartment. By the time she’d gotten home, Ariel had resolved to do two things. One, she would touch base with Brixa, just to gauge his reaction when he found out she’d been to Gernika. Ariel wondered if he knew the name. He hadn’t mentioned it to her before. Two, and perhaps more importantly, Ariel was going to talk to Mia Daventri.

  She contacted Mia first. Mia had changed her field of employment; once she’d drifted between soldier and spy, and now she was, of all things, a part-time advisor to the Terran political caucus and a part-time teacher. Nova Levis had that effect on people, Ariel mused. All of the people she knew from the Eliton-Bogard-Parapoyos imbroglio had made fundamental changes in their lives.

  Mia was just finishing up the school day. Ariel was still a little perplexed by the use of humans to teach children in academic environments. Robots were far superior in both knowledge base and their invulnerability to standard adolescent cruelty. Still, during the course of a minute’s small talk Ariel saw that Mia was pleased with what she was doing. She almost hated to drag the other woman back into the painful chaos of her arrival on Nova Levis.

  “Mia,” she said when she’d exhausted her reservoir of aimless politeness, “I have a question that might be uncomfortable to you.”

  “I can guess,” Mia said. “You want to know about the reanimés.

  Correct?”

  All Ariel could do was nod.

  “I’m not going to talk about this at the school. Can you meet me in an hour at the ballfields near the north gate?”