Asimov’s Future History Volume 10

by Isaac Asimov

  “If Tiko’s surveillance was compromised, how do you know the robot has gone?”

  “I’ve got a friend on the station security force.”

  “You can trust him?”

  Derec laughed. “Hofton, right now I don’t even know if I can trust you. He gave me information he’d withheld from the TBI, and when he did it he gave me vitals on a ship that left forty minutes after Byris’ murder.”

  “One thing at a time. What had he withheld from the TBI?”

  “A copy of the robot’s memories. Badly garbled, but useful. The problem is, I’m not sure how.”

  “And how do you know he withheld it from the TBI?”

  This was the thing with moving in diplomatic circles, Derec thought wearily. They always had a better sense of possible betrayal than people whose work didn’t consist entirely of lying. It had never occurred to him that Skudri Flin might have been working an angle.

  “Because he told me,” Derec said, and shrugged. It was all he had.

  “Derec, my friend, if you keep relying on what people tell you, we’re all in for a rough ride.” Hofton smiled over the rim of his glass.

  “The world is full of people who are better liars than I am,” Derec said. “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do about it.”

  “Neither am I. Perhaps the important thing is to be aware of it. What might this station officer have to gain from misdirecting you?”

  A question with far too many possible answers, and far too few that made any sense. “You tell me, Hofton.”

  “All right. He might be working with Omel Slyke, providing what would look like a separate information conduit in the event you came up with something Slyke was looking for. He might be trying to convince you that what he had was valuable when in fact it’s irrelevant, or even fabricated. Then while you waste energy examining it, the investigation — or coverup — can proceed without your interference. Or he might be …” Hofton appeared to struggle with himself for a moment. “He might be telling the truth.”

  “Hard for you to believe?”

  “Hard for me to see what he has to gain from interfering with the investigation of a murder that at least in theory he was partially responsible for preventing.”

  It washed over Derec all at once: Hofton was leading him. The conversation was going somewhere, but at Hofton’s pace, and wouldn’t get to its destination until he had satisfied Hofton of something. Derec could either stand up and denounce the whole charade, or he could play along. The choice was clear.

  “He said he resented the way the TBI stepped on station security’s investigation. Territoriality among law enforcement people doesn’t come as a surprise. Even to someone as naïve as I apparently am.”

  Hofton made a placatory gesture, holding out one hand palm down and shaking his head. “I beg your pardon, Derec. It’s not my intention to imply that you’re being naïve. Let’s let the question of this officer rest for the moment. What was his name?”

  “Skudri Flin.”

  “Well then. We will hold Skudri Flin in abeyance. Now tell me about the ship.”

  “Flin gave me the ship. If I can’t trust him about the report, I can’t trust him about the ship either.”

  “Exactly my point. Now we’re getting somewhere.” Hofton leaned forward, and Derec experienced a moment of admiration for his perfect mastery of his own body language. “Tell me about the ship.”

  “It’s a freighter called Cassus, it’s bound for Nova Levis, and it’s registered to Nucleomorph. A representative of which just happened to contact Ariel last week asking her to look into the question of whether the surviving cyborgs from the Noresk camp should be granted citizenship. Is all this starting to sound familiar, Hofton?”

  “There is a certain resonance, yes,” Hofton said. “Do you think the robot that allegedly killed Taprin and Byris is a cyborg?”

  “No. The report I saw convinced me of that. The robot is in total positronic collapse.”

  “Was,” Hofton corrected. “At the time of the copy you saw. It did manage to get up and eliminate first Byris’ robots and then Byris himself. And someone has doctored Tiko’s memories. Do you think Omel Slyke had anything to do with that?”

  “Not unless he had someone on-station planning the whole thing. The way I understand things, either the TBI had Taprin murdered or they’re completely innocent. There isn’t much room for them simply to be bystanders.”

  “Well, if they had Taprin murdered, that would give them ample reason to sidetrack you.”

  “But it doesn’t explain why they killed Pon Byris, too. And we’re sitting here gnawing over Taprin’s corpse while a war is about to start and Ariel is back on Nova Levis working for the people who are transporting this robot. I’ve got to get back there, Hofton.”

  Hofton frowned. “Not easy.”

  “If a freighter going to Nova Levis can get through the picket, I should be able to.”

  “You forget that maybe there are people who want to keep you here.”

  That was when it all started to fall together, and Derec understood exactly why Hofton had led him on such a circuitous path. “Okay,” he said. “Hofton, what are you doing here?”

  Hofton looked enormously pleased. “Good. At last we’re all on the same page. Bogard sent me.”

  Before Derec could gather himself and answer, Omel Slyke banged open the door and arrested him.

  Chapter 22

  ARIEL STOOD IN an open area of packed earth, more or less at the center of Gernika. She had the same impression now as on her previous visit: the inhabitants were organized, they were purposeful. Gernika looked for all the world like any other colony town she’d ever seen, with the singular exception that all of its citizens were cyborgs. It was impossible to square the evidence of her senses with the testimony of people who had visited the site before. How had things changed so dramatically?

  She noticed someone standing next to her. A cyborg, of course, but from all appearances either poorly engineered or recently worked on; scabs and raw patches of skin puckered its exposed skin, and in places open lesions exposed gleaming metal. A woman, by her face, young, but it was hard to tell because of the ravages of the transformation.

  “I’ve seen you on the nets,” the woman said. “You’re Ariel Burgess.”

  “That’s right. What’s your name?”

  “Arantxa. At least, now it is. I was born Fili Greene.”

  “Does Basq make you change your names?”

  Arantxa shrugged. “It isn’t quite ‘make,’ no — he suggests it. Basq’s suggestions are hard to ignore.”

  Nodding, Ariel said, “I’d gotten that impression myself.” She waved a hand toward this strangely thriving village around them. “What’s going on here, Arantxa? Basq suggested I look around and get some impressions.”

  “What impressions do you have so far?”

  “Mostly that this doesn’t seem like the reanimé camp I’ve been hearing about since I got here.”

  Arantxa almost smiled. Ariel wished she knew more about the woman’s history, to determine whether it was her personality or the cyborg transformation that flattened her affect in this way.

  “Come with me,” Arantxa said. “I’ll give you some impressions.”

  They walked down a narrow side street to a dormitory-style building, with living quarters arranged around a central common area.

  Arantxa didn’t offer any tour guide patter, but when the two of them got to the cyborg’s front door, Ariel realized that Arantxa had been leading her the long way around, letting her observe the building without guiding her.

  “My home,” Arantxa said, and waved Ariel inside.

  The space was small and crowded, but clean; Ariel wondered in passing whether cleanliness was more than an aesthetic choice out here where the ravages of the berserk ecology were so much more intense. Two broken-down chairs and a low couch marked off the living area from a hall, at the end of which stood three open doors.

  A typical apartm
ent, with a typical holo terminal in one wall and typical curtains half-covering the windows that looked out onto the street. Arantxa took off her coat, exposing more scarring on her forearms, and hung it on a hook near the front door. Then she clapped her hands and called out, “Xavi! Navarro! Come out here!”

  Two small boys exploded from one of the hall doorways and shouldered each other out of the way to be the first into the living room, where they stood on either side of their mother looking up at Ariel with steady curiosity. Like their mother, they bore the signs of recent invasive surgery and post-operative immune reactions.

  “These are my children,” Arantxa said, resting her hands on the napes of their necks. “Before you know anything else, know that we would all three of us be dead if it were not for Basq.”

  “Tell me,” Ariel said.

  Arantxa released the boys, who jammed up next to each other at one end of the couch. She sat next to them and let Ariel settle herself in a chair. The holo came on automatically, and one of the boys leaped up to shut it off. “The voice control is broken,” Arantxa said.

  “How old are your boys?” Ariel asked.

  “I’m six,” one of them piped up. “Xavi is four.”

  Four. What Ariel had suspected suddenly became fact. Someone on Nova Levis had been manufacturing cyborgs after the destruction of the lab.

  “When did you come here?” Ariel asked Arantxa.

  “Five months ago. We lived in Nova City before that, outside the walls. My boys were sick, and my husband died of the same infection. I had it too, but not as seriously as he did; I thought things would be all right with the government programs and the doctors who came around, but Xavi started to get worse ….” Arantxa sighed. “There was a man who approached sick people. He said he had a cure. A free cure. I never really believed him, but every so often he would bring someone along who he said had been through the cure, and those people were always so strong-looking.”

  She paused as if afraid of what Ariel would think, but the doubt didn’t last long. Ariel could guess much of Arantxa’s story, and knew that to do what she had done took a kind of strength that would quickly overwhelm any qualms about the opinions of strangers.

  “About nine months ago, this man brought with him a neighbor of ours who I’d thought had died. ‘See,’ he said to me, ‘it works.’ I asked him why he hadn’t told the Triangle about it, and he got a strange smile. ‘We’re not quite ready for that,’ he said. ‘Soon enough. But you can’t wait.’ And I couldn’t; little Xavi — he was Casti then — had gotten to the point where I knew no one could save him. So I picked up as much as I could carry, and my ex-neighbor took Xavi in his arms, and we walked out with them. Now we are here.”

  And in the interim, the part you didn’t mention, Ariel thought. The part about being transformed into a cyborg.

  Of course, it had to be Nucleomorph. Nobody else on Nova Levis had the necessary expertise, and if Nucleomorph was involved, it put Zev Brixa’s interest in the cyborg population in another light altogether. She wondered how much of his story about religious extremism was true. Basq himself might well have an interesting perspective about that. Later, though. Right now, she hadn’t gotten all of Arantxa’s story.

  They all seemed so comfortable, out here in their brave new world.

  How much did they know about Nucleomorph’s plans? How much would they care? These three people had broken with the human world irrevocably; sitting with them, Ariel realized that she could return whenever she wanted. She might not have a job, but she was still human. Arantxa and her children were not.

  Or were they? This was the question Ariel had been sent to answer.

  More properly, had sent herself to answer. Zev Brixa might have started her on this path, but she was no longer asking on his behalf.

  “How many of you are there?” she asked.

  “Of us? Do you mean how many people are in Gernika, or how many of us are new? The ones who have been here all along, they call us immigrants. Basq doesn’t like it, but he doesn’t hear everything.”

  “Total,” Ariel said. “The reports we have from post-liberation suggest only a few hundred.”

  “Well, you can see for yourself that’s not true. I don’t know the exact number, but I’d guess two or three thousand,” Arantxa said.

  “Your figure might be more accurate if you’re talking just about the original reanimés, but many of them have died. Even since I’ve been here.”

  Just what Mia had reported, that the reanimés had suffered from many of the same afflictions that killed unmechanized humans on Nova Levis. Something had changed since then, though. The procedure had improved. Fewer of the newly created cyborgs were dying. What was Nucleomorph doing? What had they learned, and from whom?

  Zev Brixa had some questions to answer, that much was certain.

  And a fresh question presented itself. “Arantxa,” she said. “Do you know Toomi Kyl?”

  Arantxa nodded as if she’d expected this. “She’s not Toomi anymore, though. Now she’s Pika, and her child is Iker.”

  “Child?” The file had listed three.

  “The other two didn’t survive,” Arantxa said. “This isn’t perfect, Ms. Burgess. Not nearly. But anyone who dies trying to get here would have died anyway.”

  Tears stood in Arantxa’s eyes, utterly astonishing Ariel. Searching for some framework, some comparison, she tried to imagine Jerem Looms crying. The fact that she couldn’t told Ariel more than she could ever have learned from a year of discussions in the chambers of the Triangle.

  An hour later, she found Basq in his headquarters. This time, he didn’t get up to greet her; she’d interrupted him in the middle of some consultation with the human she’d seen on her previous visit. Filoo. “I trust your day has been informative, Ms. Burgess?” Basq said politely.

  “It certainly has. I wonder if I might have a few minutes of your time, Basq. I’ve framed some questions that would be more usefully put to you than any of your —” She caught herself before she could say subjects, which was the first word that presented itself. “Your citizens. They don’t appear very interested in discussing politics.”

  “People who are grateful for life don’t waste time with politics,”

  Basq said. “I am no longer grateful for life, so politics has come to interest me. Filoo, we’ll talk later.”

  “You want me to go ahead to Nova City?” Filoo asked as he stood.

  “Wait until you hear from me. I have a feeling that Ms. Burgess here might change our plans.” Basq indicated that Ariel should take the seat vacated by Filoo. She did, and heard the door shut behind her as Filoo left.

  “I hope you’ll be candid with me,” Ariel said. “It will be impossible for me to proceed if I can’t trust what I hear from you.”

  “I will be as candid with you as I believe you are with me,” Basq answered.

  Ariel nodded. “My first question is this, then: How long have you and Nucleomorph been working together?”

  Basq leaned back in his chair with a satisfied smile. “Trust in you is not misplaced, Ms. Burgess. You get directly to the heart of things.

  Zev Brixa and I have known each other for thirty-two years. We were at university together in Chicago District, and we were among the first personnel hired when Nucleomorph was organized out of the fragments of several other companies.” He waited for Ariel to digest this. “Now that I’ve said that, though, let me disabuse you of whatever conspiracy theories might be germinating in that excellent mind of yours. My interaction with Brixa and Nucleomorph in the present context goes back less than a year. I came to Nova Levis from Earth shortly after our purchase of the Solarian concession, assigned to catalog the remains of the former laboratory and see what might be rescued from it. As it turned out, a surprising amount of technical information survived, and the reanimés near the site were fairly cooperative in allowing me to copy it.

  “One unfortunate consequence of my investigation was illness, which will, of cours
e, not surprise you. I quickly grew sick enough that the only way to save my life was to take a chance that Nucleomorph’s expertise combined with the surviving records from the lab might be enough to give me continued, if altered, existence. I made the choice, and the necessary procedures were executed. At approximately this time, a number of the reanimés vandalized Nucleomorph’s facilities. An opportunity presented itself for me to put my unique status to good use: I became Nucleomorph’s liaison with the reanimé camp. As events dictated, my role changed, and I assumed a position of leadership. At the same time, Nucleomorph was refining the procedures they had performed on me, and they were able to operate on a number of the reanimés to correct previous mistakes. Quite a useful relationship, in the end. A number of lives were saved here, and the knowledge gained has proved indispensable to Nucleomorph’s work on your colleague Derec Avery’s health projects.”

  Basq folded his hands. “I imagine that’s more of an answer than you expected. May I ask you a question now?”

  “It would be ungrateful of me to say no, wouldn’t it?”

  “Charmingly put. If you were asked to advocate for citizenship for the members of this community, how would you respond?”

  That was the question, wasn’t it? Ariel considered, probing the issue from as many different angles as she could think of. The clearest voice in her head, oddly, was Masid’s: You can bet your uterus that Nova Levis will never vote on citizenship for cyborgs. She wondered if he was right, and wondered if that made any difference in what she should do.

  In the end, she said, “I keep thinking of the children.” It was a lie.

  When she said it, Ariel was in fact thinking of the tears in Arantxa’s eyes, the resolute sadness of this woman who had given up her humanity — and that of her children — to save the three of them. It was no basis for a legal decision, much less political suicide; but it was the only criterion that made any sense.

  She was surprised to see an expression that she could only call compassionate on Basq’s face. “I’ve asked too soon,” he said. “The question will keep a little while. Spend the night here. There’s more to see, and I have the impression you don’t have another place to go. It’s a pleasure to offer you Gernika’s hospitality.”