by Isaac Asimov
This Masid did. “Let me guess,” he said. “Terran military has enough on their plate at home that they’re willing to erase the cyborgs just so they don’t have trouble on a Settler world to worry about.”
“That’s about right, apart from their own worries that more cyborgs mean more easily camoflauged supersoldiers. That’s the problem they really don’t want, and from what I heard today, they’re more than willing to vaporize both Gernika and the Nucleomorph lab to ease their minds.”
“So is this happening, or are we still talking about backroom strategy role-playing?”
Mia shrugged. “My guess is it won’t happen right away. For one thing, the Terran military won’t want to send a ship, especially not when destroying a big parcel of Nova Levis might look to the Aurorans like a show of force, which of course would need to be answered.
That was Lamina’s take this morning, in any case. This Hofton, the Auroran, he was very smooth about it. I’m guessing he’s trying to play it both ways, seem concerned and also suss out what the Terrans are willing to do so he can report back to his people in the Auroran government. Lamina knows this, and if she doesn’t, Kalienin will remind her; in any case, Hofton didn’t endear himself to her by mentioning Ariel. Nothing will happen until — I guess I should say unless — the cyborgs do something dangerous.”
“You seem awfully sure about that, given the fact that you’ll be back here while I’m out in Noresk or somewhere worse chasing misanthropic cyborgs.”
She laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. The impact rang a razor-studded bell in Masid’s head. When it cleared, he realized that Mia had put a gun in his hand.
“Keep your sense of humor,” Mia said. “It’ll see you through just fine.”
So he was going, which had never really been in doubt.
Mia had rented him a transport, which would keep Lamina’s dogs off his trail for a few hours at least. He took a cab to the rental agency, declined their offer of a robot pilot — he’d had enough of robots for the moment, thank you — and lifted off to the north. He flew faster than was strictly legal, trusting to local authorities’ notorious disinterest in civil minutiae such as traffic statutes, and covered the distance in two hours. Thirty kilometers or so downriver from Gernika, Masid throttled down and descended to below the tree level, skipping along the surface of the river. He had no real illusions about walking into the settlement unnoticed, but at the same time he saw no reason to advertise himself. If stealth bought him enough time to spot Ariel, it would be more than worthwhile.
There were no clearings in this part of the forest large enough to land the flier in, so Masid settled it into a bend in the river where, according to his console map, the river made its closest approach to the outskirts of Gernika. Riverbottom sand crunched under the ship, but Masid deployed the landing gear anyway, figuring that the extruded feet would hold the flier in place. He left it on standby keyed to his voice, anticipating that the next time he passed this way he might be in a hurry, and with that done he popped the hatch and jumped across a meter or so of shallow water to the brushy shore. He found a trail almost immediately, and just as quickly stepped off it, moving instead parallel to it at a distance of twenty meters. Far enough that he ought to be able to see someone on the trail before they heard him, was his thinking, and fifteen minutes later he was proved right. Voices carried to him, and he saw three figures coming down the trail in his direction.
Masid stood still, the gun resting easily near his right thigh. It crossed his mind that he should perhaps just kill all three — he could have done it before they ever knew he was there — but he held himself back, waiting to get a better look.
All three were cyborgs, and recent ones. Their faces bore the telltale signs — fading scars and the granular sheen of recently reconstructed skin — and they moved uncertainly, as if still acclimating to the newness of their transformed bodies.
“We should have done this last time,” one of them said. “The meat keep leaving ships for us to steal, we should steal them.”
“Right,” another said. “Basq would have appreciated our initiative.”
Two of them laughed, and now they were close enough that Masid could see the resentment on the face of the first. Someone who had been used to making decisions, he guessed, and was now finding out that when you took the machine inside you, you were getting on your knees to Basq. Maybe not a bad trade, considering the alternative, but not easy to get used to.
The three cyborgs passed on their way to steal Masid’s ship. He took a moment to assess the situation. They were probably bringing it back to Gernika, which might work in his favor if he needed to make a quick exit. On the other hand, their presence meant he’d been spotted before he’d ever touched down. Did they know who he was?
Would they care? Would they anticipate he’d come for Ariel? Problem was, Masid couldn’t be certain that the real danger to Ariel was coming from cyborgs. For all he knew, they were protecting her.
But he didn’t think so. He thought that Ariel had become a particularly important piece in a game that neither of the players completely understood. It was up to him to make sure that she wasn’t sacrificed when she’d outlived her strategic value.
So, for the moment, Masid was going on the assumption that Ariel was in danger from everyone — including, if Mia wasn’t overreacting to what she’d heard in Lamina’s office, the Terran military. As if cyborgs and corporate soldiers of fortune weren’t enough.
Keep control over what you can, Masid thought. Ariel was last seen here, she’s probably still here, so proceed as if she is here and change the plan when circumstances demand it. Okay.
If he could no longer count on stealth, speed was the next best thing. Masid got back on the trail. He couldn’t be more than a kilometer or so from Gernika, a distance he could cover in three minutes.
As soon as he was free of the underbrush, he was running He was still running a few minutes later, when something came out of the trees and laid him flat on his back.
When he hit the ground, Masid’s first thought was that his head had broken open. Then he thought he’d been shot through the lungs.
Then his eyes started to focus again, and he realized that someone had a knee in his chest. He gasped for breath, struggling to get free of the suffocating weight, but the cyborg leaning on him pulled Masid’s gun out of his pocket and pointed it at him. Masid stopped moving while he tried to figure out whether it was better to suffocate or get a charge between the eyes.
As it turned out, he never had to make the choice.
“Ease off a little, Gorka,” someone said. Masid recognized the voice, and realized that some things were worse than having his head melted by a cyborg.
He turned his head to look at Filoo, standing a short distance away and brushing leaves from his clothes. The dealer finished primping and walked up to stand over Masid, his face lit up like he just couldn’t believe his good fortune.
“So, Masid,” Filoo grinned. “You missed Parapoyos once, he missed you once. Looks like it’s up to me to settle things.”
Chapter 29
“OKAY, YOUR FIRST choice is whether you want to see the sick people or the ones who are getting well,” Brixa said as he piloted them over the forest.
That, at least, was easy. Ariel had seen enough sick people in her few hours in Noresk to last her the rest of her life. And even as she had the thought, she admitted to herself that it had been a kind of theme-park empathy. She would never experience what they had, which made it all the more important to do what was right … whatever that was.
Despite her quiet self-criticism, she said, “Getting well.”
“All right then,” Brixa said, and shifted the aircraft’s course slightly to the north.
They landed a few minutes later just outside a fenced-off complex of low prefabricated buildings with few windows and a large number of what appeared to be guards stationed at intervals between the buildings and the fence. Brixa’s craft was co
mpact, and as Ariel climbed out of it she noticed a robot in the back, laid on the floor behind a thin partition that defined the cockpit. Part of the robot’s head was burned away, exposing the circuitry inside.
From behind her, Brixa said, “Slag. It worked in some kind of factory in Nova City, and we bought it for scrap. There aren’t enough robots on Nova Levis that we can let one go to waste.”
“You must have been in quite a hurry to fly down there yourself,”
Ariel said once they were both on the ground.
Brixa hopped down beside her. “We were. Things move fast in our business, and if I hadn’t gone down there to pick it up someone would have stolen it off the transport on the way up. It all worked out fine; I was planning to check in on you, anyway.”
Two of the guards approached the fence upon seeing them.
Recognizing Brixa, one of them took out a black wand and traced a vertical line on the fence, which parted to allow them to step through.
He was already sealing it back up when Ariel looked back. The security arrangements struck her as excessive, but she deferred the impulse to say anything. Brixa would, of course, have a pat soothing answer, and she’d have no choice but to accept it, unless she delayed her questions until she had something concrete to ask.
Perhaps a hundred meters of open ground separated the fence from the square cluster of buildings. As they walked, Ariel saw the pits of torn-out tree stumps; this land had been cleared hastily and left to grow over on its own. Was Nucleomorph worried that the cyborgs would break in, or recently transformed patients would try to escape?
This question, too, she put off, and when they walked through a Spartan lobby into the interior of the nearest building, she had more immediate concerns.
Ariel had been in hospitals before. Not so many as the average Terran, perhaps, but enough to know what to expect — and what she saw in this isolated complex out in the wilderness of Nova Levis was an intensity and sophistication that wouldn’t have seemed inadequate on Earth. Or, for that matter, Aurora. Each room was so dense with equipment that the patient was hard to pick out: chambers not unlike baley berths, with monitors crowded around and thick braids of conduit and hose leading up into the ceiling or down through the floor.
“This is the first stage after transformation,” Brixa said, even his ebullience tempered by the scene. “Full life support, and pressurized fluid environments to speed healing and bathe the patient in anti-rejection chemicals. Constant monitoring from central nodes in every building. In addition, we do a complete rebuild of each patient’s immune system to purge whatever diseases they bring with them and decrease the probability of contracting new ones. Your friend Derec’s work has been invaluable there; we are frighteningly dependent on his inventory.”
Ariel glanced at him to see if there was more in this comment than admiration. He was looking into the nearest room, swept up in the grandeur of the work he oversaw.
“Is that why you put in a bid to engineer the animals he wanted?” Ariel asked.
“Part of it. The inventory is public, but we also knew that if Nucleomorph could work with Derec, we’d find out about his progress before someone took the time to get it into the public databases. Plus, he’s very good. You must know that. And so are we. The organisms we designed for him are of premium quality.”
She recognized this as Brixa’s typical impulse to put a polish on everything, but at the same time Ariel couldn’t find any reason to doubt his sincerity. What a marvelous skill Brixa had for making everything seem better than it was, and for finding exactly the perfect way to make even the good look better.
“Come on,” he said. “There’s much more.”
He led her out of that ward, down a long windowed hall to the wing of the complex that housed people who were sufficiently far along to breathe on their own again and begin the process of acquainting themselves with their new bodies. Compared to the first ward, this area was a riot of activity: physical therapy, speech therapy, games and contests — and so many of them were children. At least seventy percent, racing and tumbling around the slower and more cautious adults, adapting to the radical change in their physical existence as they might react to the stiffness of a new pair of shoes.
Here and there metal gleamed, where a skin graft had failed or the ravages of disease had forced Brixa’s laboratory into a more aggressive use of dermal alloys. Brixa was clearly carried away by his enthusiasm for the project, explaining to her exactly what each child or adult was doing as if he was personally familiar with every case. Periodically he caught himself, saying, “Sorry. I should be letting you come to your own conclusions.”
Ariel was too overwhelmed to comment on his facile manners. All of these people, all of these children would otherwise be dead, she thought. How could any rational person object?
Even so, she did. At the core of her, a voice spoke against what she saw. This is the death of the human, it said — and though she tried to ignore it, the words had the weight of truth. Or belief, which at the moment were the same thing.
Brixa touched her on the arm. “It gets to me, too,” he said. “You may not believe that, but it’s true. I don’t have any children, so I see all of them as mine.”
“How many do you lose?” she asked, attacking him to disguise what she was feeling.
The expression on his face shocked her. For a moment she thought he might cry; then the wave of emotion dampened itself, and all that remained was a shadow of sadness.
“Too many,” Brixa said. He turned away from her and walked down the hall, leaving her no choice but to follow.
She caught up with him in a round atrium with a domed glass ceiling. It was a lab, alive with people wearing white coats or spray-on clean suits peeling away as they disintegrated in the relatively contaminated environment of the complex’s public area. So now we talk to some of those people who are getting their hands dirty, Ariel thought. Brixa confirmed her intuition by dropping his arm around the shoulders of a slight woman and steering her back toward Ariel.
“Ariel Burgess, Krista Weil,” Brixa said. “You two talk for a while; I’m going to go take care of a few things.” With that, he strode rapidly away down one of the six hallways that emptied into the large lab space.
Weil sized Ariel up and said, “You must be an investor.”
“Not exactly,” Ariel said. “Not of money, in any case. All of my capital is political, and right now there’s precious little of that.”
Weil frowned. “So what is it he wants me to tell you?”
“Let’s start with what you do here.”
Weil started walking, and Ariel followed. They covered half the length of a corridor, not the one Brixa had used and not the one they’d come in. A door opened automatically and Weil walked into a starkly lit room with waist-high counters running the length of its four walls around a formidable workstation in the center of the floor.
“This is what I do,” she said.
The counters were piled and strewn with what at first glance Ariel took to be robot components; then she realized they were various implants designed for human beings. The door opened again and a tall, thin man came in. A Spacer: Ariel knew this instinctively, and when he caught sight of her, she saw the same flicker of recognition in his eyes.
“Jan, this is Ariel Burgess. Brixa said we’re supposed to show her around.”
Ariel extended her hand and Jan shook it. “Aurora?” he said.
The simplest thing was to say yes, so that’s what Ariel did. Jan nodded. “I’m from Keres, but I’ve been working on Earth for the last eleven years, until Nucleomorph opened up shop here.”
“Jan’s the one who designed the procedure on Basq,” Weil said.
She had seated herself at the workstation, and looked ready to withdraw from the conversation.
Jan didn’t let her. “I did part of it. Krista here had something to do with it too.”
Ariel was struck by their common reluctance to take full credit for what,
by any standard, was a revolutionary biomedical procedure. “It was impressive work,” she said. “I’d seen a few cyborgs before him, and he looks much healthier than they ever did.”
“He is,” Weil said. “Almost all of the reanimés we found when we got here have died. That lab Parapoyos was running just barely deserves the name. It was more like a group of people who called themselves scientists rolling dice with the lives of dying children.”
This was substantially what Ariel had accused Brixa of ten minutes before. She wondered if some seminar had been conducted among Nucleomorph personnel instructing them to disarm the charge by displacing it onto their predecessors. A clever move, if that was the case, since Ariel had already admitted that Nucleomorph scientists did better work than whoever had worked in the previous Noresk lab.
“You don’t just work on people who are dying, do you?” Ariel asked. She didn’t know the answer to the question, and was in fact more interested in the tenor of their responses than a factual answer.
“Mostly,” Jan said. “We get healthy ones, too, but they’re typically parents of sick children. Brixa and Basq have made it a policy that if we do a child, the parents have to agree as well. Too much potential for conflict otherwise.”
“You rarely see the opposite,” Weil put in. “Sick parents are almost never willing to do it when their kids are healthy.”
It made sense. The cyborg transformation was still so radical and so uncertain that Ariel had a difficult time imagining that anyone other than a parent with a dying child would do it. This let some of the air out of fears that cyborgs were going to take over from humans — or unaltered humans — since a procedure only undertaken by the desperate was never going to be popular. And there was no Settled world like Nova Levis. Desperation was in the very air here.