Asimov’s Future History Volume 10

by Isaac Asimov

  The ballfields were constricted between the built-up northern neighborhoods of Nova City and the wall at the western side of the North Gate. A flat expanse of green, divided into fields that were marked with white lines in various patterns. Ariel had minimal knowledge of sports, but she was taken by the sight of the children running in groups, shouting, sometimes laughing, their entire beings given over to a pointless pursuit involving rules that in some cases were centuries old. She had no memory of ever abandoning herself to anything so completely, and felt diminished.

  Mia was waiting for her on a set of bleachers set against the wall.

  She was alone. No organized matches were scheduled, so the children that played across the green sward did it without the stifling agendas of adults. Ariel sat next to Mia. They hadn’t spoken in perhaps a year, and this was no way to renew an acquaintance. After a brief glance of greeting, both turned their attention back to the ebb and flow of childhood.

  “I thought you were worried about children overhearing you,” Ariel said.

  “At school, yes. And it’s a good thing you didn’t call me at the caucus headquarters. All of those lines are recorded, and just the fact that I’d gotten a call from you would put me in a tricky situation.

  Anyway, these aren’t my students, and children typically haven’t the slightest interest in anything adults do.”

  The feeling that she’d wasted her own childhood, even though she remembered so little of it that she had no way of knowing whether it had been wasted, irritated Ariel. She was in no mood for rebukes either explicit or implied. “You’re the only person I know of who saw Gernika before Liberation.”

  “Gernika? It has a name?” Mia looked bemused. “Wonder who decided on that.”

  “The reanimés did. I was there today.”

  Mia looked at her, initial surprise giving way to a new appraisal of both Ariel and the situation. “I’m not the only one,” she said. “I know Filoo was in and out of the camp, and he didn’t travel alone.

  If you dig, you could probably find two dozen people who have been there. To Gernika.” She pronounced the name as if testing its fit with her experience. “What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve only heard it spoken. It could be spelled any number of ways, have any number of meanings.” It was something she should find out, though, Ariel decided. It probably had some specific meaning to Basq and the rest of them.

  “The word is that you’re going to push for citizenship for the reanimés,” Mia said.

  Ariel shook her head. “I’ve been asked to look into the question. Legally and politically. The legal side of it is ambiguous, the political …” She waved a hand. “No ambiguity there.”

  “Sounds like the messenger is taking some shots for the message,” Mia observed.

  “That’s the nature of my position,” Ariel said. But it wasn’t, really, not anymore. She wasn’t a diplomat anymore. She was a government official with a strictly defined set of tasks and responsibilities, drawn into a situation she had no interest in pursuing. None of which would mean anything to Mia Daventri.

  “So did you want to ask me if I thought reanimés should be citizens?” Mia asked.

  “No. If there’s one thing I have no shortage of, it’s opinions.” Ariel shifted on the bleacher bench so she was facing Mia. “What I need to know is more concrete. If you had to guess, how many reanimés would you say were there when you passed through?”

  Mia considered. “I don’t know. I was sick, and didn’t see much of what went on there.”

  Ariel tried the comparative approach. “When I was there this morning, I saw teams of workers. Individuals with clearly defined tasks going about them the same way I go about my work. And there’s some kind of political structure there. I was led immediately to a leader, complete with retinue. It all seemed vaguely military, or maybe the degree of organization just surprised me and I equated it with a military hierarchy. In any case, the place seemed healthy. As healthy as Nova City.”

  Which, both of them knew, wasn’t necessarily healthy at all.

  “That isn’t anything like I remember,” Mia said. “I remember tents, and the reanimés like these strange beings who appeared out of the forest. I was with someone else, and he died, but they healed me. They had some kind of knowledge of how the local diseases worked. You know what it reminded me of? During school, we occasionally read chronicles of Terran explorers who encounter primitive cultures.

  They’re always entranced and repelled at the same time, and I had that same feeling. The reanimés were repulsive, but at the same time I was intrigued by how they lived. Moment to moment, with no real concern for the past, and I didn’t see anyone worrying about what would happen tomorrow.” Mia straightened. “But as I said, I was sick. I nearly died. You shouldn’t trust my recollections.”

  “I’m not necessarily discounting them, either,” Ariel said, “but what I saw this morning was very different.”

  They ran out of conversation after that. Mia receded into some interior space, reliving the days of her sickness and recuperation, and doubtless after that the chaotic scene in the lab when she activated the long-dormant spacecraft that formed the center of the facility, triggering the shattering of the blockade — and seeing Kynig Parapoyos carried away to his death.

  Suddenly feeling like an intruder in this quiet green world of heedless children and haunted adults, Ariel touched Mia on the shoulder and walked back through the city, unsettled by a feeling she couldn’t identify.

  Back at her office, R. Jennie informed her that Zev Brixa had called. Ariel returned the call, even though something about her conversation with Mia had left her uncertain about how to proceed with Brixa.

  He solved the problem for her almost immediately. “I wish you hadn’t gone to Gernika today, Ariel.”

  So now it was Ariel, not Ambassador. Ariel filed that away.

  “I had reasons that I’d rather not discuss with you on this link,” she said. “And in any case, I didn’t encounter any hostility there. The reanimés were perfectly courteous.”

  “Of course they were. They’ve identified you, and they’re not stupid. You’re their hope right now.”

  This was pressure Ariel did not need, and resisted. “You asked me to look into a question, Mr. Brixa. I am looking into it. The situation goes no farther than that, and I will permit it to go no further than that.”

  She knew it was a lie, and from his expression Ariel could tell Brixa didn’t believe it anymore than she did. “And we appreciate your initiative, Ariel. You’ve taken a burden upon yourself. We recognize that. Why don’t you come see me before you go back to Gernika?”

  There it was, out in the open. Everyone had something to sell her, a perspective they wanted her to represent in the Triangle — didn’t any of them realize that the Triangle would be only too happy to brand her irrelevant and get rid of her?

  “I’ll do that, Mr. Brixa. Let me see how things are going here, and I’ll let you know when I can get away for a tour of your facility. How does that sound?”

  He smiled. It was still a fine smile, and he was still personable and engaging, but the smile no longer struck Ariel as it had on his first visit to her office. “That sounds fine, Ariel. Let me know when you can find the time.”

  Chapter 13

  THE STATION ATRIUM was quiet at this hour. An inexplicable design quirk had placed it near enough to the docking ports that people habitually avoided it because of the noise, and that habit persisted even when the blockade had reduced traffic to a trickle. Derec found Shara Limke in a couch, looking out at the lights of the Terran picket line.

  “There’s talk on Earth of replacing me,” she said as Derec sat in the adjacent couch. “The general sentiment is that I’m no longer competent to administer this station if I’m letting prominent Terran politicians be murdered. You can guess the rest.”

  Indeed Derec could. Limke would be replaced with someone more pliable, more amenable to the desires of
the Terran political structure.

  For too long, Kopernik had been an infuriating thorn in the side of the Terran-isolationist and Organic Sapiens movements, and Taprin’s assassination had given both constituencies unprecedented voice in events. Now they were poised to strike, and Shara Limke made an inviting target.

  He made a cold assessment of the situation. He would have to make what use of her he could. “Director, I need to run a full diagnostic on the station RI.”

  “On Tiko?” she said. “What for?”

  Derec explained to her what he had found while looking into the assassination of Clar Eliton. The filaments, and where they had led him.

  For a long moment, he thought she was going to refuse him. Limke looked out the window, her body’s only motion the twitching of her eyes from light to light along the picket line that was strangling her career.

  “I’ll do what I can,” Limke said at last. “But I want something in return.”

  Derec waited.

  “When the call comes,” she said, “I want you to speak for me.”

  If that’s your last resort, Derec thought, you’re in deeper trouble than I thought. Still, he agreed. He could do nothing else.

  In the morning, Derec looked over the media reports from Earth. Every story seemed like one he’d read somewhere before: disturbances in every major population center, Spacers congregating in embassies and secure corporate headquarters for fear of personal attack, robots smashed by mobs, factories using robots being struck by their human employees or just vandalized. Most of Earth’s resident Spacers were trying to get off-planet, but the bottleneck at Kopernik was making this difficult. The Terran armed forces were permitting one ship at a time to dock at Kopernik for a rigorous search before allowing the vessel to continue to one of the Fifty Worlds. For their part, Spacer governments had fleets at the ready, waiting for the slightest provocation to appear at Kopernik and demand resumption of traffic under the threat of war. The nets were full of Managin rhetoric, much of it coming from people who had never identified with the movement before.

  And in the midst of this, there was a growing amount of furious reaction to what was being reported as a drive on Nova Levis to grant cyborgs the privileges of citizenship.

  Derec switched to NL01, the one interplanetary news source based on Nova Levis. Its servers and production facilities were less than a block from his lab, and he knew several of the journalists working there. NL01’s standard loop was fifty percent local news, mostly new pathogens and legislative minutiae, and the rest was given over to the disturbances on Earth. Either they were ignoring the story, or it wasn’t happening.

  Or someone had put a lid on it.

  Derec composed a quick message to Ariel, sent it, and was informed less than a second later that all unscreened communications to and from Kopernik Station were embargoed until further notice. He snapped off a question to Omel Slyke, asking if Slyke would waive this obstacle so Derec could keep track of his work back on Nova Levis. A minute or so later, Slyke’s projected avatar appeared in Derec’s lab.

  “Why would you even ask me that?” he said. Unlike most people, Slyke made no modifications to his avatar. It looked just like he did.

  “Because I need to keep tabs on what my lab is doing,” Derec said.

  “My project there is in some danger of having its funding cut, and if I’m going to do any good back there, I need daily updates on experiments.”

  Slyke actually appeared to give the question some thought. “Can’t do it,” he said.

  “I’m amazed,” Derec said, with a touch of sarcasm.

  “Listen a minute before you start feeling persecuted. I don’t care whether you talk to your lab people on Nova Levis or not. We’d know everything you said, and unless you controlled this robot from halfway across the galaxy you don’t know anything about the investigation anyway. But it’s not up to me. The communication embargo comes from way over my head. I don’t give a damn about anything you might say. I’m a police investigator, Avery. The only context for any of my reactions to you is concern for this case. Are we clear?”

  “I appreciate your candor,” Derec said. “Who might I talk to about getting a waiver to send messages to Nova Levis?”

  “Shara Limke.”

  “I take back everything I said about candor,” Derec said.

  “It’s the truth, Avery. I didn’t say she could do anything about it; I just said she’s the one you’d have to talk to. So, you solve the murder yet?”

  “Are you telling me you’re interested in my thoughts?”

  “I’m interested in solving Jonis Taprin’s murder. You come across anything that might get me closer to that, I expect you to tell me about it. I haven’t kicked you off Kopernik, Avery. Don’t make me regret that.”

  Slyke’s avatar disappeared. Ten seconds later, it reappeared.

  “Something I forgot to tell you,” he said. “I was considering letting you have a look at the robot after all, but now it’s out of my hands. Turns out the tinhead’s been scrapped.”

  “What?” Derec shot up out of his chair. “What idiot would destroy the single real piece of evidence in this case?”

  Slyke shrugged. “Like I said before, a lot of this stuff is decided way over my head.” He hesitated just a moment too long before disappearing again, leaving Derec with the clear intuition that he was supposed to read carefully between the lines.

  But before he had a chance to, Shara Limke walked into his lab and said, “I’ve got some bad news.”

  “That’s all there seems to be around here,” Derec said.

  “The TBI refuses to grant permission for you to analyze Tiko. According to Slyke, they need all of its excess capacity for their investigative work, and they can’t afford to have it go offline for long enough to perform all the tests you’d want to do.”

  Derec was still reading between the lines. He wasn’t sure he trusted Limke at this point. She had no reason to lie to him, but what that really meant was that if such a reason existed, Derec just didn’t know what it was. Slyke had certainly handled him with a great deal more respect than during their first interactions, and Derec didn’t think the TBI adjutant was just pandering to him. Either he’d learned something that led him to believe Derec might be of assistance, or some political wind had shifted, leading Slyke to reconsider which alliances on Kopernik were useful to him.

  The only way to find out was to recognize that a game was in progress, and try to play without knowing all of the rules. Derec had yet to get anywhere by lying to people on Kopernik, so he didn’t start then. “I just talked to Slyke. He didn’t say anything about it,” he said.

  “Every morning, he conducts a briefing to update everyone involved in the investigation. I brought your request up there, and he turned it down and asked me to let you know. If it makes any difference, he didn’t seem malicious about it.”

  “It does make a difference,” Derec said. “If his reaction to me has changed in one day, maybe it’ll keep changing. But right now he’s still not letting me do anything that might tell us whether or not the robot killed Taprin.”

  He hesitated, wondering whether he should tell her that the robot had been destroyed. If she knew and wasn’t telling him, he wasn’t sure he wanted to let her know he knew; the existence of a confidence between Derec and Omel Slyke might pay dividends later. On the other hand, Slyke might have told her that he was going to inform Derec about the robot, in which case she might not think it worth bringing up.

  That didn’t make any sense, though. Why would Slyke ask Limke to tell Derec one thing, and then get in touch with him just to tell him something else that had come up at the same meeting?

  Either Slyke had told Derec about the robot without telling Limke, or he’d told Limke and given her the impression Derec wasn’t to be informed.

  “One thing I can do is get you a copy of Tiko’s most recent backup,”

  Limke said. “It dates from three hours after Taprin’s murder. Slyke a
nd his crew have already been over it, but I’m sure you’ll see something different than they did.”

  “How soon can I see it?”

  “It’ll take me five minutes to walk back to my office, and ninety seconds to clear you after that. How does that sound?”

  It sounded like Derec was finally going to do something that justified his presence on Kopernik. “I’ll be right here,” he said.

  For seventeen hours, Derec pored over the backup, interrogating a version of Tiko that no longer existed. The RI was frustrated and confused by what it had been told of the murder, but as a result of the security precautions Taprin’s staff had demanded, Tiko had no direct records of Taprin’s room or the exterior hall between checkpoints established at the two nearest hallway crossings. Derec went exhaustively over the recordings of whom had come and gone at those checkpoints during the hours immediately before and after Taprin’s murder. When he saw the Cole-Yahner domestic that had apparently killed Taprin, Derec tracked it through the rest of the station. It had come from the hotel concession, and before that …

  I DON’T KNOW, Tiko said.

  “Process again,” Derec said. He tracked the RI’s memory processing, and that’s when he knew why he’d been allowed to look at this backup.

  Sometime before this backup had automatically archived itself, it had been drastically edited. The Tiko of three hours after Jonis Taprin’s murder had no memories and no records of events in huge swaths of Kopernik Station. The blank areas of memory showed up on Derec’s tracking display as simple white noise, a sure signal that the errors had been deliberately introduced. When positronic systems broke down, the collapse happened in distinct patterns. Each error syndrome in a system as sophisticated as an RI was as individual as a fingerprint.

  Here Derec came up against simple noise.

  He regrouped. If the saboteur was clever, he or she would have erased material that had no bearing on the crime; if not so clever, the pattern of erasures would tell Derec something about what was being concealed.