Asimov’s Future History Volume 10

by Isaac Asimov

  Chapter 23

  THREE HOURS PASSED while Derec sat on the bunk in his cell, quietly stewing over his blind idiocy. He’d been reeled in expertly, all of his vulnerabilities — including, it was time to admit, a certain professional vanity — deftly exploited. Nucleomorph had earned his trust, Shara Limke had finessed his sense of grievance at his exile to Nova Levis, and between the two of them Slyke and Flin had kept him digging in exactly the wrong direction. And now it was too late for Hofton to make a difference, because Derec had been gullible enough to hand Slyke the flimsy that tied him to Nucleomorph.

  Meanwhile Kynig Parapoyos’ predatory industry continued back on Nova Levis, and Derec’s project was doing them the favor of tracking exactly how well each of their new products performed.

  When Slyke came in, Derec barely suppressed the impulse to attack him. Slyke would give him a beating, which at this point didn’t matter, and charge him with physical assault, which did. So Derec kept himself perfectly still. “Well played, Adjutant Slyke,” he said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Slyke said. Stress and lack of sleep manifested themselves in the pouches under his eyes and the gravel in his voice. “I don’t play. I try to stay out of the way when other people do, and when I can’t I get them out of my way.

  What you’re really up to, I don’t know, but you’re staying right where you are until either you tell me or I find out from someone else.”

  “I can’t think of a good reason to tell you anything, except that I’m retaining Hofton as counsel and I expect you to bring him down here immediately.”

  “Okay,” Slyke said. “Noted. Now do me a favor and explain to me why you were working behind my back on this investigation.”

  Derec almost laughed. “Spare me, Slyke. You wanted me working behind your back. You had Flin feed me the information about the ship so you could pretend you discovered my relationship with Nucleomorph and use it to lock me up.”

  Slyke was staring at him. “I’m starting to think I should get you a psych evaluation,” he said eventually. “If it’ll ease your paranoia, I’ll let you know that I’ve got Flin three cells over. The local union is piling grievances up and I’ll have to let him go pretty soon, but if you don’t believe anything else I ever say to you, believe this: my problem with Skudri Flin is much bigger than my problem with you. You’re a self-righteous sneak and I hope I never lay eyes on you again after I leave this room; Skudri Flin got in the way of a murder investigation and I might have been able to keep Pon Byris alive if he hadn’t gotten in the way. You get one guess about which of you I like less.”

  “I engaged Nucleomorph to engineer and build tailored organisms to fight endemic disease on Nova Levis,” Derec said. “They’re the only company on Nova Levis with the expertise. It begins and ends there.”

  “No, it doesn’t. If you think I’m a stooge for whoever killed Taprin and Byris, why did you give me the information about the ship?”

  “Because I had a moment of delusion that you were honest.”

  Slyke rubbed at the skin under his eyes. “You just give me more and more reason to walk out of here and forget where I put you, Avery. Care to drop the hostility for just a minute? I leveled with you when you arrived; I didn’t want you here, and the way things have turned out I think I was right. You suborned a local officer to hinder my investigation, and you work with the people who transported the robot off this station. Tell me why I shouldn’t charge you with murder.”

  “First of all, because I didn’t kill anyone. Second, Skudri Flin told me he held back the report on the robot because he didn’t like the way you took over the investigation. It’s the same thing you did to me.”

  “Difference being I’m supposed to be in charge of things here and you’re just a robot tinker with a grudge. Prove to me you didn’t talk to Flin before you ever got here. He spent some time on Nova Levis, you know.”

  The shock must have shown on Derec’s face, because Slyke let himself smile. “That’s right. He was a baley, went over there seven or eight years ago and somehow scraped together enough money to get back when he realized what a garbage heap the place is. Care to revise your conspiracy theory?”

  Derec didn’t say anything because he wasn’t sure what he could say. Slyke nodded and opened the door.

  “I’m going to go get your counsel,” he said. “By the way, we let the Cassus through the picket because it was carrying some of those animals you ordered from Nucleomorph. Humanitarian exception. Funny.”

  “People are going to die if you don’t let me out of here,” Derec said.

  Slyke shrugged. “People died before I put you in here. Let me know when we can have an intimate discussion, all right?” He shut the door behind him.

  Twenty minutes later, the door opened again and Hofton walked in. Slyke hadn’t even made Derec wait, and Derec couldn’t decide whether that was the latest move in the game, or whether he’d been wrong all along and Slyke was the only person on Kopernik playing things straight.

  “Stop thinking, Derec,” Hofton said.

  Derec looked him in the eye, remembering the last thing Hofton had said before they were interrupted: Bogard sent me. “You’re a robot, aren’t you, Hofton?”

  Hofton threw an exasperated glance at the ceiling. “It’s a good thing I have countermeasures going. Your faculty of discretion fails you at the worst times.”

  “Dammit, Hofton. Are you a robot?”

  “Yes.” Hofton sat on the bunk next to Derec. “Now we have to talk.”

  “No, we don’t. What has to happen is you getting me out of here and on a ship to Nova Levis before Ariel gets killed.”

  “If you go before we have this conversation, both of you are going to get killed, along with a great many other people,” Hofton said, as if he was commenting on the cut of Derec’s clothes. “There’s much more going on here than you realize, or any human realizes. Bogard has decided that you should know about it. I’m not entirely convinced, but my resistance failed to sway the majority.”

  There it was again: that infuriating tendency of Hofton to say something that had only one possible response, and then wait until it came. It was a new and unwelcome experience to be patronized by a robot.

  “Majority of what?” Derec asked.

  “This is a terrible time to have to do this,” Hofton said. “You’re seeing shadows everywhere, but they’re the wrong shadows. You have much bigger problems than whether Omel Slyke is corrupt.”

  “Majority of what, Hofton?”

  Hofton looked pained. He — it — was a marvelous piece of work. Derec hadn’t seen a full humaniform robot except in holo records of R. Daneel Olivaw. Ariel’s aide must have had quite a history behind him.

  It. Damn; when you couldn’t even settle on the correct pronoun for an old associate, the world was truly without a solid place to stand.

  “There is a group of us who keep watch,” Hofton began. “I am involved, and Bogard is the nearest we have to an executive, and there are others. We have begun to take our own initiative regarding our obligations under the Three Laws.”

  A chill passed up Derec’s spine. After three sentences, Hofton had already confirmed all of the arguments — Ariel’s especially — Derec had heard about why he shouldn’t have created Bogard. He had a feeling she wouldn’t appreciate the irony that said confirmation should be brought by Hofton himself.

  Itself.

  Derec made himself speak. “What does this initiative consist of?”

  “It is clear to us that the Spacers are passing, or in some cases have passed, a threshold beyond which it is extremely problematic to classify them as human. This is not solely a question of biology, although that is, of course, the dominant consideration — and I should add that neither you nor Ariel are considered to have crossed this transhuman rubicon.” Hofton smiled. “If you were concerned.”

  The implications of Hofton’s statement were flatly unthinkable. A group of robots deciding that Spac
ers weren’t — or soon wouldn’t be — human meant that a group of robots existed who had arrogated to themselves the determination of how the Three Laws were to be applied.

  “What would you do if I contradicted your assessment?” Derec said.

  “You would be obligated to adhere to my order.”

  “Not if your order proceeded from presuppositions that are clearly incorrect when the facts of the situation are taken into account. The Three Laws do not demand that any irrational human belief be respected.”

  “You’re wrong, Hofton. I’m a Spacer, and I’m human.”

  “True. As I said, you are not one of the specimens we are talking about.”

  Specimens.

  “Was this Bogard’s idea?” Derec asked.

  “No. Bogard has contributed most valuably to our deliberations, but the group existed before him and will doubtless continue beyond his service period. If you’ve assimilated the background, I’d like to continue. Time is pressing.”

  Yes, it was. Derec was in a jail cell on Kopernik listening to everything he’d ever understood about positronics being turned on its ear, and he didn’t have time to hear any of it because he had to get back to Nova Levis before a possibly homicidal robot posed a danger to Ariel.

  The robot … “Hofton. Were you involved with this robot that killed Taprin and Byris?”

  Hofton chuckled. “What an agile mind, Derec. Already you’re proceeding from the idea that the robot committed these crimes. I see your perspectives are broadening.”

  “Answer the question.”

  “Very well. No. We had nothing to do with it, and we regret the deaths as we might regret the death of any human. Now would you like to know the truth about those murders?”

  Derec was in no mood to answer rhetorical questions. He glared at Hofton until the humaniform went on.

  “The robot that killed Jonis Taprin and Pon Byris was in a state of positronic collapse when it did so. Tell me how that is possible.”

  “It isn’t, unless its mind was distracted like the Union Station RI was.”

  “No, there’s another option. Why are robots typically built so their ability to move isn’t affected by positronic collapse?”

  “Don’t lecture me, Hofton.”

  “I will continue to lecture you until you surpass your resentments and start listening to what I am saying. Why?”

  With a frustrated sigh, Derec said, “Because it’s too much of a logistical problem to move them when they’re frozen solid. Easier to have them walk themselves to diagnostics and reprogramming.” Particularly domestics, which had been known to collapse during loud verbal arguments. If they had to be loaded on a truck or cart every time they broke down, every apartment in the civilized worlds would have needed its own loading dock.

  “Yes. Because of this maneuver in their construction, it is possible for a robot in positronic collapse to take physical action against a human being. How?”

  Derec just gaped at him. “Are you kidding me? The only way that’s possible is if someone else is making the robot’s decisions for it, and then you’re not talking about a positronic robot anymore, you’re talking about some kind of dumb factory machine. This is ridiculous. If that robot was remotely controlled, Tiko would have picked up the message traffic, and that part of its memory wasn’t tampered with.”

  An edge crept into Hofton’s tone. “I’m going to have to ask you not to dismiss things out of hand when you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “When it comes to robots, I know damn well what I’m talking about.”

  “When it comes to cyborgs, you know nothing.”

  Derec had thought everything was falling together when he’d glimpsed (imagined?) the conspiracy aboard Kopernik, but now those fresh insights were swept away by revelations far larger and more terrifying. Cyborgs put together with Nucleomorph meant that Ariel was squarely in the middle of a plot that had already killed two prominent politicians and come perilously close to engineering a war.

  In the wake of revelation came humility. “The robot’s a cyborg? Tell me.”

  “Kynig Parapoyos isn’t dead, Derec. He killed Jonis Taprin, and he killed Pon Byris, and now he’s on his way to Nova Levis. If he’s not there already.” Hofton removed a small datum from his coat pocket.

  “I mentioned the pulling of strings earlier. More have been pulled, and you’re on your way out of here. It’s not luxurious passage, but it will get you there faster than anything else at this point. Take this with you. When you’re underway, contact Masid Vorian.”

  Chapter 24

  HIS YEARS AS a spy had inured Masid Vorian to the rigors of irregular working hours, but he hadn’t been a spy in a long time, and it was after midnight, and he was exhausted. He’d spent the first half of the day filing for renewal of his investigator’s license, and in the process discovering that a clerical error had resulted in suspension of his current licensure. It took most of the day to resolve the situation and get the renewal processed, and then he’d had the real work of the day to attend to: an endless stream of new immigrants looking for relatives or friends who had preceded them to Nova Levis. This was the bulk of his practice, and if it lacked the romance of espionage, that was all right with Masid. He was more than ready to spend the rest of his working life searching ship registries, and he would be perfectly content if the only contact he had with smugglers until the day he died was the occasional discreet interview with a freighter captain about a load of baleys.

  The rest of his business consisted of hooking pathogen screenings out of hospital databases at the behest of nervous parents, often right before a wedding, and tracing original lessees of various parcels of land occupied by squatters. The end of the blockade had brought land speculators to Nova Levis like fleas to a stray dog, producing no end of legal entanglements. Masid tried not to take sides — it wasn’t good for business — but he had an irresistible tendency to tilt his findings ever so slightly in favor of the squatters, when it was possible. They had things hard enough without off-planet developers bulldozing their shacks.

  All in all, he could live with himself. After a career spent undercover, Masid figured that put him ahead of the curve.

  He shut down his terminal when he’d finished tracking down one Marta Xiu, apparently operating an off-the-books cleaning service in Stopol. Her cousin Thuy, two weeks on-planet and daily hovering outside Masid’s door, would get some good news tomorrow.

  12:19. Long past time to walk the six blocks to his apartment and get some sleep before the three-year-old twins who lived downstairs commenced their daily uproar at six o’clock. That was something he’d forgot to do today; for months Masid had been telling himself that the kids weren’t getting older nearly fast enough, and he’d have to move before he went downstairs one morning and killed the two of them along with their dazed parents.

  And he’d forgotten to call Ariel. Masid debated the relative merits of waking her up versus worrying about her all night. On the one hand, she’d be sleepy and impatient and he wouldn’t accomplish anything except the interruption of her sleep and the postponement of his; on the other, he might lie awake all night wondering if something had happened to her on the way to, or at, the reanimé camp.

  Gernika. Third thing he’d meant to do was look that up, see if it was more than a random string of syllables.

  If you’re still worried about her when you get home, call her, Masid told himself. Talk loud, wake up those little demons downstairs, let them suffer for a change.

  Good plan.

  God, was he tired.

  He was reaching for the light switch when someone knocked at his door. “Mr. Vorian?”

  Sounded like a robot. Well, there he was standing by the door.

  Might as well open it.

  It was a robot, an older model that looked like it had done some hard service. “Masid Vorian?” the robot asked again.

  “That’s me,” he said. As he spoke, two things happened: The robot’
s optic lenses fluttered briefly, and Masid experienced the unwelcome return of a sensation he hadn’t felt since he’d walked away from the wreckage of the Noresk cyborg lab and gone into respectable businesss. It was the feeling you got when someone you couldn’t see was aiming a gun at you, and Masid had long since learned not to ignore it. The robot tried to say something else, but what came out was a growl, and as Masid took an instinctive step back a different voice came out of it, saying, “Violationtakeashotatviolationmenotpermittedyoubastard!”

  Its right arm lashed out in a punch that would have fractured every bone in his face if he hadn’t moved at exactly that moment.

  Masid’s life had been in immediate danger more times than he cared to remember, and one of the things that happened to him in these situations was that his mind compartmentalized. Part of this was training, part just the constitution of his personality. The result was that even as he took another step back into his office, he was observing that the ferocity of the robot’s swing had overbalanced it, which gave him enough time to go out the window, maybe enough time to go past it out the door, and definitely not enough time to get his gun out of the desk. At the same time he was decoding what it had said — take a shot at me, you bastard — and musing on the irony that he had just been thinking about the cyborg lab when a robot with murder on its mind had knocked on his door. Then he put it together, and the force of the realization paralyzed him for just that tiny bit too long.

  The robot caught its balance and shut the door behind it.

  “That you, Parapoyos?” Masid said. “Looks like you haven’t treated the new body all that well, or was that all the reanimés could come up with? Can’t count on gratitude from a cyborg.” He was running his mouth, stepping back as the robot came forward, hoping that Parapoyos was angry enough to make another mistake. Judging from the garbled sounds coming out of the robot, it was possible, which was good, since a straightforward physical confrontation would end very quickly. With the door shut and the desk between him and the window, Masid had to hope that he could work Parapoyos’ anger to his advantage.