by Isaac Asimov
Chapter 15
DEREC WALKED INTO Omel Slyke’s office and said, “The robot came in the same day Taprin did, but not on Taprin’s ship. A procedure was performed on it in the repair berths, I’m guessing number A48, and one of the human parties involved spent conspicuous time in the gaming rooms. There may or may not be a conspirator in the Kopernik staff; if there is, he or she lives in Block Six, Seven, or Eight of on-station housing.”
Sometime in the middle of Derec’s speech, a professional mask slid into place over Slyke’s face. I’ve got him, Derec thought. Either I’ve told him something he didn’t know, or he’s surprised I’ve gotten this far.
“There’s more,” he said. “Whoever sabotaged Tiko’s memory meant to suggest that Shara Limke was involved.”
“Okay, Avery,” Slyke said, but Derec wasn’t done yet.
“And the message about Limke was meant for me,” he finished, and waited to see what Slyke would say.
“Most of that we already know,” Slyke said eventually. “But I’d sure be interested in hearing how you got there.”
Derec sat down and went through what he’d learned from Tiko: the raw data of memory gaps, the clear meaning of some of those gaps, the more delicate inferences he’d drawn from the saboteur’s choices. At the end, he said, “Of course, it’s possible that I’ve misinterpreted some of the data. I think it’s clear, though, that different blocks of memory were deleted for different reason. I also think it’s clear that the saboteur was working under some time pressure.”
“Do tell.” Slyke kept the mask on. “You finished showing off?”
Derec stood. “I am. You let me know if you think I can help.”
“Hold on.”
Derec waited at the door.
“Limke said you wanted to run a diagnostic on Tiko. I think we can probably let you do that.”
Like Tiko’s saboteur, Derec knew he didn’t have much time. He rushed through a confirmation of the damage he’d spotted on the backup done immediately after Taprin’s murder, and then he went on to the diagnostic proper. First he established that Tiko was communicating rationally and responding to input; finding no problems in that area, he proceeded on to a basic vetting of the RI’s central positronic matrices. All seemed to be in working order. Derec found no sign that Tiko’s functionality had been impaired by the erasure of memory.
With that out of the way, he got to the point. “Catalog all mentions of my name, beginning Taprin’s arrival and ending when I commenced this procedure.”
The truth was that Derec wasn’t interested in executing a full diagnostic. He was fairly confident that Tiko hadn’t been beguiled into participating in Taprin’s assassination, and his analysis of the data erasures made him equally confident that the saboteur had known that Derec Avery would become entangled in the case. If he could confirm that intuition, it would point toward the involvement of either Shara Limke or one of the conspirators involved in the murders of Clar Eliton and others five years ago. As yet, Derec had precious little in the way of facts to support this intuition, but it seemed true to him, and in his situation impressions were crucial. The misdirection being laid before him demanded that he work on that basis.
Tiko brought up a list of several dozen mentions of Derec’s name.
Most were in communications among TBI personnel. He ignored these and concentrated on the rest. Shara Limke had mentioned him three times, Flin once … and there was an intercepted message from Ariel.
“Play message from Ariel Burgess,” he said.
Ariel appeared in the lab. “Derec,” she said. “I’m beginning to get concerned that Nucleomorph’s motives are other than they have been represented to me. It’s been suggested that I go to the reanimé camp.
In addition, I’d very much like to know why you traveled off-planet at this particular time in the company of a Managin sympathizer like Vilios Kalienin. Your trip is being interpreted in peculiar ways here, and if I know you, you haven’t paid attention to anything that’s happened on Nova Levis since you left. Don’t be made into a puppet.
Contact me as soon as possible, and if you are unable to communicate from Kopernik, return to Nova Levis. If I could order you, I would.
Get in touch.”
With that, Derec was alone in the lab again.
PLAY AGAIN? Tiko asked.
“No.” Derec thought over what Ariel had said. She was right; he had no idea what was really happening on Nova Levis, although he’d kept closer tabs on reports than she seemed to be assuming.
He went through Limke’s messages concerning him. They were all innocuous. The only other mention of his name came in an anonymous message left on a station advertising archive. Derec opened it.
DEREC AVERY. WELCOME BACK. YOU HAVE LEARNED SOMETHING IN THE LAST FIVE YEARS. SO HAVE WE.
The message was dated three days before at 2306. The exact moment of Jonis Taprin’s death.
Someone wanted him to be involved. Why? Derec felt a sudden longing for Bogard, who would have been only too willing to speculate. On his own, Derec didn’t feel up to the task his invisible adversaries had set for him.
“Tiko,” he said. “Identify sender of this message.”
A pause. Then: SENDER’S IDENTITY OBSCURED.
“Nature of obscurity?”
OFF-STATION ORIGIN, ROUTED THROUGH A NUMBER OF NODES THAT ARE NO LONGER FUNCTIONING.
Leave it, Derec decided. His mystery correspondent would be revealed soon enough. He found the partial serial number he’d taken from the crime-scene images and fed it into his terminal. “Tiko. Search shipping manifests and records of correspondence for this number.”
WORKING … NO MANIFESTS AVAILABLE WITH THAT NUMBER. ONE PRIVATE MESSAGE.
“Display.”
The message appeared on his terminal. It was long, and dated three days before Taprin’s murder. Most of the message was personal, a windy discourse on the Terran political situation punctuated by references to what Derec assumed were contemporary entertainment and sports figures. In the middle of all this, a single sentence stood out: CY984653JM-I7 EN ROUTE. MAKE SURE IT GETS CLEANED UP BEFORE YOU PUT IT INTO SERVICE AGAIN.
“Sender, Tiko.”
SENDER OBSCURED.
“Recipient.”
OMEL SLYKE.
Derec bowed under the weight of questions. He dismissed all of the obvious ones and asked Tiko when Slyke had arrived at Kopernik.
ADJUTANT SLYKE ARRIVED TWELVE HOURS AFTER THE MURDER OF JONIS TAPRIN.
And he had this message waiting for him, Derec thought. Either Slyke was being set up, or Derec was. Or both. Or the sender had anticipated that Taprin would be on-station before he actually was.
“Tiko. Before Slyke arrived on this occasion, when was the last time he came to Kopernik?”
WORKING … SLYKE HAS TRAVELED TO KOPERNIK SEVEN TIMES IN THE LAST YEAR.
“Does the TBI maintain permanent staff on Kopernik? If so, list names and related information.”
PRIORITY COMMUNICATION.
“I’m not asking for communication records,” Derec said. “Just —”
PRIORITY COMMUNICATION. DIAGNOSTIC SESSION ENDED.
Shara Limke appeared exactly where Ariel had been a few minutes before. “Derec,” she said. “Pon Byris just got here. He’s demanding access to the investigation, and he’s demanding access to you.”
Pon Byris. The Auroran security chief had nearly jailed Ariel five years before, just to have a scapegoat in the latter stages of the Parapoyos mess. If he was on Kopernik, things were about to go from bad to worse.
“Tiko,” Derec said. “One more thing. List all incoming ships to Kopernik on the date that CY984653JM-I7 arrived. When the list is compiled, send it to this terminal.”
WORKING …
Derec left the lab and went looking for Shara Limke.
Chapter 16
ARIEL DIDN’T CALL ahead before she went to meet Masid Vorian.
She no longer trusted any communication channe
l except her own voice, and she was less and less confident in that.
Masid was in his office. He greeted her, perched himself on the corner of his desk, and waited.
Where to begin, Ariel wondered. She had far too much information and far too little context; perhaps it would be best to pick up where her last interaction with Masid had left off.
“Did Derec come to see you?” she asked.
Masid nodded. “He did. I don’t think he followed up on anything I told him, though. He was gone with Kalienin the next day. Is he back yet?”
“No. At least I haven’t heard from him. I tried to contact him at Kopernik, but the TBI is blocking all communication to and from the station.”
“No surprise there. Every time they run up against a situation they don’t understand, the first thing they do is try to shut everything down. Put it in stasis. It makes sense, but it isn’t always the best way to investigate a crime.” Masid saw the questioning look on Ariel’s face and went on. “If you hold everything in place, you never find out what people would have done. That’s obvious. But you never know what a person’s intentions are unless you see them acting. I did my share of police work, and I learned at least as much from what people did after a crime than I did from trying to reconstruct what came before.”
It struck Ariel that Basq — and Zev Brixa — might well be viewing her from exactly this perspective. It also struck her that since the moment Brixa had left her office, she’d been suffering from what she could only call paranoia.
“But you’re not here to philosophize about criminal investigations, are you?” Masid said. “Derec came to ask me whether I thought that some of his study subjects might be going to the black market for drugs. He took the possibility personally, like it meant he wasn’t working hard enough.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him that if his subjects were looking for drugs, they were looking for Filoo. As it turns out, I might have steered him in the wrong direction; since he left, I’ve been asking around, and nobody’s heard anything about Filoo since right after Parapoyos was killed. I think the reanimés probably got him, too.”
“In a way they did,” Ariel said. “I talked to him today at the reanimé camp.”
A cold light grew in Masid’s eyes. “Is that so.” He thought for a moment, utterly motionless; then he hopped off his desk and said,
“Let’s take a walk.”
They walked away from the Triangle, into the residential neighborhood that clustered between the government district and a struggling commercial section. A Terran entrepreneur with more vision than sense had bought up several blocks of Nova City, believing that adventuresome tourists would come to see the buccaneer world that had given birth to the vanished cyborg abominations. As she passed by the empty storefronts, Ariel had time to reflect that the would-be tourist impresario had been wrong about a number of things. On the other side of the tourist ghetto was another residential neighborhood, this one older and less ostentatious than the constantly redeveloping area closer to the Triangle. Masid led Ariel into an apartment building from whose roof she could have thrown a stone over the wall into New Nova. She followed him into the elevator and up to the fifth floor, and when Masid knocked on a door, Mia Daventri opened it.
“I didn’t think I’d see you again so soon,” Mia said to Ariel. She looked at Masid. “With you I don’t bother to wonder.”
They sat in plastic chairs on Mia’s small balcony, looking out over the wall into the haze over New Nova. Ariel felt lightheaded and a little nauseous, and realized that she hadn’t eaten since the morning.
“Ariel says Filoo’s alive,” Masid said.
Mia absorbed this. “You say that like you intend to do something about it.”
“Maybe I do, but probably not what you’re thinking. I don’t kill people anymore. I never liked it. I think that’s why I missed Parapoyos when I had a shot at him. If the mind isn’t settled, the hand doesn’t aim true.”
Coming from Masid Vorian, this was surprisingly metaphysical.
Ariel sensed that there was more to his statement than he was telling, and sensed, too, that to ask would mean intruding into a part of him she had no right to see.
“What I mean,” Masid said, “is that if Filoo’s alive there might be a lot of other things alive that we thought were gone.” He turned to Ariel. “Tell me — tell us — everything you’ve seen at the camp.”
Ariel went through it from beginning to end, dredging up as much detail as she could and getting slightly frustrated when she realized that her memories of that day’s visit weren’t as sharp as they should have been. She forced herself to acknowledge the fact that Burundi fever, the mnemonic plague, might be working in her brain again, and then she forced herself to dismiss the possibility. She’d survived it before; without doubt it had left lasting scars upon the regions of her brain that impressed memories into her sense of the past. There were perfectly good psychosomatic reasons for her to have the impression that she was suffering again; the continued existence of the reanimé camp had dragged out memories that she would just as soon have forgotten.
Beware defense mechanisms, she told herself. If you can’t see yourself clearly, you won’t understand anything else.
She went on: the quasi-military atmosphere, the surprising number of cyborgs and their surprising health, the fact that they had adopted a name for the settlement and seemed determined to make it a living community. The absence of visible disease. The presence of children.
“The oddest thing is this,” she said, coming to the end. “Just before I left, after I’d spoken to Filoo, I thought I recognized one of the children.”
Ariel wanted to stop there, to hesitate at the verge of the possibilities she would have to admit if she went on. Neither Masid nor Mia would let her, though. Almost in unison they said, “Who was it?”
“Vois Kyl,” Ariel said. “One of Derec’s study population.”
They were silent for a time.
“I might have been mistaken,” Ariel said. “I think I’ve contracted something, and it might have affected my perceptions.”
“Contracted something?” Mia said warily.
“Maybe.” Ariel waved a hand, trying to put them all at ease. “I’ve had mnemonic plague, and sometimes I think it’s permanently affected the way my memory works. Could be just a routine virus, and it’s taking a little time for my immune system to handle it.”
“Could be,” Masid said. “On the other hand, this is Nova Levis. You should see a physician.”
“Tomorrow morning. Right now we have to figure out what’s going on in Gernika.”
“If we’re going to talk, we should eat,” Mia said. “I’ll go get something. You two wait here.”
She went through her apartment and out the door, leaving Ariel and Masid. Ariel looked at him, tried to see through his knack for becoming nearly invisible even when he was sitting in the next chair.
She couldn’t tell what he was thinking, and wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
“I’m going to check in with the office,” she said, and went inside Mia’s apartment to find her terminal.
R. Jennie had sorted the day’s messages into two categories: routine and important. The second category held only one message, from Vilios Kalienin. So he’s back from Earth, Ariel thought, and wondered if Derec had returned as well. She considered it doubtful. Derec would have to be physically removed from Kopernik if he hadn’t yet illuminated the robot angle on Taprin’s murder.
Kalienin’s message was video only, without avatar presence.
“Ambassador Burgess,” he said. “I’m afraid I have some unfortunate news. The current vexatious political situation between Earth and the Fifty Worlds is having difficult consequences for discretionary funding to the Nova Levis government. Senator Lamina is calling emergency hearings to determine which programs will need to be suspended until the impasse over Kopernik is resolved. Your legal project is a valued part of the Triang
le’s outreach to the settler population, but the times call for austerity. Please attend the Senate hearing chamber tomorrow at 1330.” Kalienin could barely hide his contemptuous joy as he delivered his last lines. “None of the cuts are final as yet. Rest assured that you will be given ample opportunity to advocate for your work.
Until tomorrow afternoon.”
Ariel sat in front of Mia’s terminal, giving her exactly the span of time it would take for Mia to come back. That long she would wallow, and no more. When Mia returned, it would be time to get to work.
Chapter 17
DEREC FOUND SLYKE in Limke’s office. Neither of them looked happy. “Things are getting complicated for you, Adjutant,”
Derec said. “You can’t stonewall Pon Byris the way you can me.”
“Don’t make me get vulgar in a professional situation,” Slyke said.
“I don’t have time for this,” Limke said. “Between Byris, the Terran picket, the TBI, and the Managin media, I’ve got more than enough on my hands without you two carrying out personal vendettas. It ends now. Am I understood?”
Derec looked at her, unable to keep the surprise from his face.
Somehow Pon Byris’ arrival had steeled her. Either she realized she no longer had anything to lose from alienating the TBI, or she anticipated that the involvement of the Auroran security apparatus meant that the TBI’s influence would diminish.
“I’m here to solve a crime, Director,” Slyke said. Derec thought he meant it, but Slyke was difficult to read. He might have been accepting the rebuke, or offering a veiled one of his own.
“If Pon Byris wants to see me,” Derec said, “I’d like to be fully up to speed beforehand. Slyke, I can help you; in fact, I think I already have. Am I correct?”
With some difficulty, the TBI adjutant nodded.
“All right. You can help me, too. Whatever grudges the TBI and I bore for each other, they’ve got nothing to do with you, and they’ve got nothing to do with Jonis Taprin. We need to level with each other.