Asimov’s Future History Volume 10

by Isaac Asimov

  His desktop’s edge banged into the backs of his thighs. “Wish I’d hit you, you son of a bitch,” Masid said. “Then I’d get a decent night’s sleep tonight.”

  One chance, he thought. If he decides to make it quick, I’m done.

  The second voice he’d heard gradually won out over the first. “Don’t you worry about sleep, gato,” Kynig Parapoyos said.

  The robot came across the room faster than Masid had anticipated, barely giving him time to scoot back onto the desktop and get his arms out of the way as the robot’s weight came down on him and its hands closed around his head. The pressure started out at agonizing and got much worse from there. One chance, Masid thought again.

  His vision was failing him, and he could hear the bones of his skull groaning in the robot’s grip. One chance.

  His right arm fell away from the robot’s arm — where it had been, what had it been doing, Masid couldn’t remember. He was having trouble remembering. He’d wanted the arm to fall because then the hand would be somewhere else, and there was a reason for that.

  “Hurt yet, gato?” Parapoyos said.

  The question focused Masid just enough. It did hurt, yes it did, and he tried to say that, but his entire being was devoted to remembering just why he’d wanted his arm to fall down behind him. His left cheekbone broke with a sharp crack.

  Figures that would go first, Masid thought vaguely. Someone had broken it once before, he couldn’t remember when. And even though he’d never been a believer in the idea that adversity builds character, with dim shock he realized that the stab of pain from his cheekbone had brought him a moment of clarity.

  The gun, idiot.

  And then, already fading again, he managed to flip the drawer open, get the gun in his hand, lay it against the side of the robot’s head — and fire.

  He drifted awake, furious that even though he was dead the pain in his head was worse than anything he’d ever felt. A sense of motion reached him, and there were lights in his eyes, people talking. Masid wasn’t sure what they were saying, but he tried to respond anyway, complain that being dead wasn’t supposed to hurt, that was the whole point.

  “Is he talking about robots?” someone said.

  “Put him out,” came the answer.

  Hiss of a transdermal.

  He drifted awake, this time uncertain whether he was dead. His head still hurt, but there was a covering on his body and a low light coming from somewhere. Masid opened his eyes and saw familiar objects: bedside monitor, bland art on light green walls, edge of a pillow. So that’s it, he thought. A hospital. Good sign.

  Then in a blaze of adrenalin, he remembered the robot. Kynig Parapoyos was alive, had tried to kill him, and sure as Masid had a broken cheekbone would try again if Masid hadn’t killed him last night.

  Had it been last night?

  Masid fumbled along both sides of the bed until he found the call button. After a minute or so, a nurse came into his room. His eyes were figuring out how to focus at greater distances again, and he took that as a hint that maybe he could sit up.

  He could, but the change in altitude didn’t do his head much good.

  Masid screwed his eyes shut and rode out the initial wave of pain.

  “You need to lie down, Mr. Vorian,” the nurse said.

  “What I need is to know what happened to that robot,” he said.

  She looked confused. “What robot?”

  Masid sensed that he was headed down the wrong path. “I can sit up,” he said. “I promise I won’t do anything else if you go and find whatever police officer is investigating what happened to me. Okay?”

  The nurse glanced at the readouts on his monitors. “Don’t move, Mr. Vorian. There’s a detective waiting downstairs.”

  Three minutes later, the detective walked in. She was young, Terran by the look of her, and if Masid was any judge of body language she didn’t much like being involved with whatever was going on. “Mr.

  Vorian,” she said. “Detective Linsi.”

  They shook hands and Linsi pulled a chair up next to his bed. “Are you feeling up to some questions?” she asked.

  “I’ll tell you anything you want to know, as long as you tell me one thing first,” Masid said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I need you to describe what you found in my office. Other than me.” He smiled at his own weak joke, and regretted it instantly when the smile pulled at the muscles attached to his cheekbone.

  “That’s not the way things are done,” Linsi said. “You know that as well as anyone.”

  “Listen, Detective. If you’re worried about prompting me, don’t. I know exactly what happened to me, and I’m pretty sure I know why, but I’m not going to tell you either unless you tell me first what you found when you walked in my door.”

  She didn’t like it, but after a brief pause Detective Linsi nodded.

  “A building alarm went off when a window was broken at twenty-four minutes past midnight,” she said. “That’s about thirty-six hours ago, if you’re curious. They kept you out for a while to seal up the fractures in your head. Arriving on the scene, officers discovered you lying unconscious and supine on your desk, your office window broken, and a recently fired energy weapon on the floor next to your desk. Care to tell me who you shot?”

  “There was nobody else there?”

  Linsi shook her head. “A forensics sweep came up with several hundred little bits of melted plastics and metals, but your office was empty except for you.”

  So Parapoyos had gotten away. Masid had been hoping that the head shot had scrambled the robot’s physical controls enough that it wouldn’t be able to move, but now he didn’t have that hope. Where had Parapoyos gone? There weren’t many places in Nova City where a robot with its head half-melted could walk around and not attract notice. The one consolation was that Parapoyos hadn’t felt comfortable enough to stick around and finish Masid off. That meant he, or his robot body, had suffered, and it meant that he wasn’t willing to risk discovery just for the sake of squeezing Masid’s head like a grape.

  There were other implications, but he needed some time to let everything sort itself out in his head. And he had to get in touch with Ariel.

  “I’m going to tell you the absolute truth and nothing but the truth,”

  Masid said. “At twelve-nineteen on what I guess was the night before last, a robot with Kynig Parapoyos’ brain inside it knocked on my door, and when I opened it the robot tried to kill me.”

  Linsi’s lips thinned into a straight line and a muscle twitched in her jaw. “I was hoping you would cooperate, Mr. Vorian. You were nearly killed, and my guess is you know who it was that tried.”

  “Yes, I do. I just told you.”

  She stood. “Look. I know who you are, and I know that you were out at the lab when Parapoyos was killed. If you want to keep your mouth shut, I guess that’s your right, but I’m not going to waste any time on you if all it gets me is this kind of condescending crap.”

  Which was fine. Perfect, in fact. The last thing Masid wanted was police trooping around looking for Parapoyos. They might catch him, but some of them would get killed. Masid had an idea that if he could keep the game one on one, he might be able to keep the body count lower.

  “Do me a favor, Detective Linsi?” he asked. “On your way out, let the nurse know I’d like to talk to my doctor.”

  “Call the nurse yourself,” Linsi said, and walked out the door.

  Police, Masid thought. They made him glad he’d been a spy instead.

  Chapter 25

  AS IT TURNED out, Ariel spent two days in Gernika before she came to terms with the fact that she could no longer rationalize her opposition to cyborg citizenship. They weren’t robots, so that argument didn’t hold; they had been born human, and without resorting to the most tortured metaphysics, no one could suggest that the process of making them into cyborgs had stripped them of their humanity; and there was, after all, a precedent. Jerem Looms. Ariel
had grown used to the fact that her day-to-day life on Nova Levis was outrageously steeped in irony, but to have that homicidal lunatic provide a legal basis for the betterment of people like Arantxa … this was a little much.

  Before she made a public commitment, though, Ariel had to get some straight answers from Basq. She requested an appointment with him and waited an hour or so for him to clear a block of time for her.

  They met, as always, in his blockhouse headquarters. This time, Ariel walked past the sentries without waiting for his invitation, and what she saw stopped her dead in the doorway.

  Basq was painting.

  At some point in the last forty-eight hours, workers had finished one interior wall of the blockhouse, covering the stripped logs with sheetrock. Ariel wondered where they’d gotten it, and made a mental note to ask Basq about Gernika’s trade with the human settlements.

  After, that was, she figured out what exactly he was doing here.

  The cyborg leader had a bucket of black paint and a heavy brush, and he was outlining crude figures on the bare sheetrock. He didn’t acknowledge her presence for several minutes, as several humans and what looked like a horse took shape on his makeshift canvas. Basq painted without any skill Ariel could see, but with an unshakable commitment that against her will had a powerful effect on her. Of course, they would make art — but to see it happening …

  Basq dropped the brush into the bucket and stood back. “For a start,” he said, “it will do.”

  “What is it?” Ariel asked.

  Wiping his hands on his shirt, Basq grinned at her. “Surprised to see the metal abominations acting human, Ms. Burgess? No, that’s not fair. I know. But it is sometimes so fulfilling to be unfair. My apologies. The truth is that I am merely copying. What you see on this wall is a poor and ragged imitation of a painting called Gernika. Look at it for a moment and tell me what you see.”

  She did. The paint had dripped, and the figures were deranged to begin with, but the power of the composition was beyond denying, even to someone as relatively unschooled in art as Ariel. All of the people in the painting were contorted with some kind of suffering, she couldn’t tell what; and somehow the whole thing coalesced around a horse trying to rise near the center. Ariel started to speak, stopped herself because she had nothing to say. Then, after some time spent in silent absorption of the scene, she said, “It’s a war.”

  “No,” Basq said. “It’s a massacre.”

  Prophecy, she wondered? Was this what Brixa had been getting at when he mentioned religious extremists among the reanimés? How easy it would be to brainwash a population of diseased outcasts, school them in the belief that the world beyond their borders was biding its time to strike and slaughter them.

  Ariel didn’t know much about cults, but she did know that many of the more extreme ones had something in common. “Why do you make them change their names?” she asked.

  “Ah,” Basq said. “The kernel of the matter. I’m pleased we’re finally here. Shall we sit?”

  Still looking at the painting, Ariel said, “I’d rather stand.”

  “As long as we’re both comfortable. I have them change their names because when they undergo the transformation, they are renouncing what they once were. Not because I or they choose to have it that way — because you do. You consider us monsters, or in your more enlightened moments, just inscrutably different. Well, throughout history, groups of the disenfranchised have taken terms meant pejoratively and made them into empowering badges of identity. Others have practiced a brand of identity politics so consuming that they have no politics other than identity. When I saw that this settlement needed a unifying force, I turned to a group of people from Earth’s history. I adopted their name as my own, and I named this settlement after the city that was their heart.

  “Once there was a war that threatened to overflow the borders of its country and engulf all neighboring nations. The Basques fought on one side, and their opponents were the state that claimed them.

  They were unlike the rest of the people — their language was different, their genetic makeup contained markers found nowhere else among humanity, and they had been fighting for centuries to gain their independence from the succession of emperors and kings who oppressed them. When this war came, they used it for their own ends, and had the great misfortune that their opponents had an ally looking for an opportunity to make a statement about its own military strength. A deal was struck, and one afternoon the town of Gernika was erased from the face of the earth. There was no army present, no valuable industry; the only reason to strike the town was as a show of strength and a blow against the Basque people who dared claim the right to determine their own destiny.

  “It’s a simple story, and no doubt repeated throughout human history. But this is the instance of it I know, and this is the instance of it that provoked a great artist to take up his brushes.” Basq nodded at the painted wall. “As you can see, I am no great artist. What I am is a man — a cyborg — who subscribes to the old, trite notion that not to know history is to doom yourself to repeat it. So I name this town, and I name the people who live here, to remind them that until we can write ourselves into the laws of this planet we exist at the sufferance of others.”

  Ariel wasn’t sure what to say. “How — what happened to them?”

  “The same thing that happens to every other human culture. They were absorbed, by force and by the inertia of passing time. That is where we have the advantage over them. We can’t interbreed with you, so we will be a distinct population as long as we wish to. Barring, of course …” He indicated the painting.

  Still struggling to get her bearings, Ariel said, “I’m not here to save you, Basq. I’m not even convinced you’re in danger. You seem to be much better off than the majority of the humans on Nova Levis.”

  “Nova Levis is, you’ll pardon the expression, a boil on the backside of human — and perhaps posthuman — civilization. My concerns extend much farther.” Basq went to the table and sat. “It’s time to return to the question we tabled two days ago. Are you ready to support us?”

  “I don’t know that you need my support,” Ariel said truthfully. “Or that it would do you any good. There is a Terran legal precedent for granting a cyborg the legal rights of its human — unaltered — predecessor, if that’s the right word. Without question, some new language is in order, but I think the cornerstone of your goal was laid by Jerem Looms.”

  She tried to hide her distaste at pronouncing the name, but Basq didn’t miss it. “Jerem Looms was a psychopath. I doubt he’s suitable to build a legal edifice on. You understand, don’t you, that your experience with Looms makes you an ideal spokesperson? If you can see the objective merits of the question, by extension anyone else should be able to.”

  There it was, the whole truth of Ariel’s solicitation. She felt the truth of Basq’s assessment even as she instinctively resisted it. It was disgusting that losing Coren should have fit her to speak for the descendants of his murderer, and it was purely appalling that Basq was asking her to foment revolution on a planet so precariously surviving as Nova Levis. Above all else, it was unspeakable that Ariel should be so close to agreeing.

  “The courts are not the place for this. On Earth, maybe. Not here.

  On Nova Levis, the statement must be bold, and accompanied by action.” Basq’s voice was soft as a slack tide, but beneath its softness as implacable as the rising waters that come after. Ariel couldn’t find a reply.

  “What if I told you that elements within the Triangle were already planning to exterminate us?” Basq said.

  Ariel met his gaze and saw no deceit there. Nor did she see any fear; a man who had been through the cyborg transformation must have spent his share of hours accommodating the idea of death.

  “Is that true?” she asked.

  “There is talk. I don’t know how far it has gone. You are much better able to ferret out that kind of information than I am, or anyone here. Except perhaps Filoo,
and I’m not enough of an idiot to trust what he tells me.”

  Ariel thought of Arantxa again, and her boys. In the end, it came down to individuals. Legal arguments never reached down as far as a lone woman who took it upon herself to risk her children’s lives in the hope that it might save them.

  “I’ll find out what I can,” she said. Hearing the words lifted a weight from her. She was committed. Perhaps foolishly, perhaps wrongly, but committed all the same.

  “Excellent.” Basq stood. “Zev Brixa will be happy as well. He’s been here since yesterday afternoon wanting to see you, but I wouldn’t let him near you until we’d had a chance to reach an understanding.”

  He stood and waved to the guard at the door, who went out. Ariel sat, trying to come to terms with what she had done, but she hadn’t had much success by the time Brixa and his infuriating smile came in the blockhouse door.

  Chapter 26

  IT TOOK LESS than ten minutes. Derec walked out of his cell with Hofton, passed Slyke without a word, and went straight to the cargo docks, where he was slotted into an empty baley slot while the dockworkers made a great show of looking the other way.

  “Baley passage, Hofton?” Derec said.

  Hofton shrugged. “Broaden your horizons. Getting you there is more important than your comfort, and even I can’t get you through the picket unless you want to go home to Aurora.”

  Not a chance, Derec thought. He climbed into the baley slot.

  “This is just until you get in-system at Nova Levis, approximately forty-eight hours in real time. The captain will let you out then, and the first thing you will do is play the message I have left for you on the datum. Hear me?”

  Derec nodded.

  “The second thing you will do is contact Masid Vorian. Do not under any circumstances use shipboard transmission equipment. The datum is encrypted and should be safe. Do both of those things before you even take a drink of water. Once you’re up to speed, things are going to happen fast.”