Mirage (isaac asimov's robot mystery)

by Mark W. Tiedemann

  A second door was set into the wall a dozen or so meters from the visitors' entrance, one large enough for ambulances. The space hummed with a deep background noise from above. The place was unadorned-bare metal, struts and sheeting and harsh lights. Derec could not even find graffiti, as if by unspoken agreement no one intruded upon the area.

  Ariel led the way to the entrance, carrying herself with confidence, as if she did this all the time. Derec still wondered whom she had called for the authorization to get in here, but all she gave him was a secret smile as she had dug through a closet for the jacket. She stopped at the door and slid her ill into the scanner.

  "Speak your name and business, please," a tinny voice requested. Bored, monotone, human.

  "Ariel Burgess, Auroran Embassy, authorized survey of Spacer bodies."

  Derec heard the slight hesitation on the last word, but did not look at her, keeping his hands clasped behind his back and acting the part of an ambassadorial aide.

  "I have clearance for one person," the voice said. "Who is with you?"

  "My aide, Massey."

  "I repeat, I have clearance for one visitor."

  "Check embassy protocols. All embassy personnel of representative or liaison status are permitted one aide in the conduct of any official business." She sounded just as bored as the unseen caretaker, with just a hint of impatience. Derec admired the act.

  He imagined the person on the other end punching a terminal for information on the proper regulations, looking for anything that would get him dismissed or reprimanded, and probably wondering why tonight someone like Ariel Burgess had to show up to make him think about his job.

  "Acknowledged," the man finally said.

  The scanner extruded her ill and the door slid open.

  "Massey?" Derec asked sardonically.

  Ariel cocked her eyebrows at him but said nothing. She led the way into the morgue.

  The reception area was a long, cramped chamber, bracketed by the cubicle where the night attendant worked on one end, and the doorway into the morgue proper at the other. Between them were two rows of booths containing com and datum terminals. The light, though standard, seemed oddly inadequate; the upholstery was dark, dark green, the floor a dingy grey, and the walls pale green. Even here Derec caught the aseptic scent of chemicals and a metallic tang, subtler and somehow worse than typical hospital odors.

  The attendant looked up from his desk to give them a disgruntled look, then returned his attention to whatever he had been doing before Derec and Ariel had disrupted his peace of mind.

  Ariel slid into the nearest booth and Derec stood at the edge of the seat.

  "I have the batch number," she said.

  "Batch?"

  She gave him a wry look, then tapped commands into the terminal. Derec let his gaze drift over the walls and ceiling, looking for eyes or ears, realizing even as he did so that they would not likely be obvious. He glanced at the night attendant, who ignored them pointedly.

  "You don't think they're overstaffed here, do you?" he asked.

  "According to the log, there are two doctors on duty tonight and three orderlies."

  Derec leaned closer to read over her head. "As long as we're here, why don't we see…"

  "I'm checking," Ariel said. After several seconds she gave a surprised "Huh!" and sat back. "They're all in the same lab."

  Derec studied the screen. There were eight labs, each with its own storage. He read down the list Ariel had pulled up and saw all the names from the Union Station incident appended to one lab-Number Six.

  Ariel stabbed another key and a chit extruded from a slot beside the screen. "Please follow the guidon," a small voice told them from the terminal.

  The chit glowed green in her hand.

  The door into the lab area opened on their approach. A strip along the floor pulsed green, leading the way down the long, wide corridor past door after numbered door until the green chit Ariel held turned red.

  She inserted the chit into the slot next to the door, which slid aside.

  Derec could not define the smell. A hybrid of medicinal sterility and stale air, mingled perhaps with his own preconceptions of a necropolis-decay, wet stone, mustiness. But he saw nothing damp; the room was metal and plastic, and nothing here rotted.

  The room reminded him of nothing so much as a library, with neat rows of cabinets, each drawer a number matched to a manifest, the contents awaiting study. For a moment he imagined himself lying in one of these files, still and empty of life, a shape, unconnected to anything he had ever done. He shuddered.

  Another door led to the lab where the autopsies were performed. He shivered again, heavily.

  Ariel stood before a datum set at in the right-hand wall from the entrance. Derec joined her.

  "I've got the manifests," she said absently, scrolling slowly through the names. She was in the Cs.

  "Aspil, right?" Derec reminded her.

  "Um… yes." She scrolled back to the beginning of the list. "Row three, number Five D."

  Derec followed a pace behind. Ariel moved slowly now and Derec thought he understood. Reluctance, ill-ease, sadness. She had known this person, differently than the others, a few of whom she had met but none that had meant more than a brief bio on a publicity jacket and maybe a drink while talking inconsequentials. Even Aspil she had not known well, she had told him, though she knew him well enough that it made a difference. They had met at the Calvin Institute on Aurora. She had spent three days with him giving orientation on Institute policy regarding export of robots to Settler colonies. Three days-business, dinners afterward, time for personal conversations. Sufficient to make him more than just a face and a name and an assignment. A week later she was on a ship to Earth, with other things filling her attention, and she had given Tro Aspil no further thought until his name had come up on a list of the dead.

  She strolled down row three, reading numbers. The drawers were stacked six high. Somewhere around here, Derec thought, there must be a lifter platform. But "D" was at shoulder height. Ariel stared at the plain grey square, the number in black in the center.

  Derec almost reached for the button. Ariel's hand shot out and stabbed it. She stepped back as the drawer ex tended.

  The naked body lay beneath a transparent canopy. It looked artificial, skin the wrong color, eyes closed too tightly, hair too neat and stiff. A wound puckered halfway down the neck.

  "It's Tro," Ariel said, her voice small and controlled.

  "Then who took his flight back to Aurora?"

  "I don't know." She pressed the button and the drawer withdrew, back into its slot. She gazed at it thoughtfully for a few seconds, then turned away. "What other discrepancies are there?"

  She went back to the datum where the manifest remained on the screen.

  "What the…" she hissed.

  Derec looked over her shoulder.

  "Mia Daventri," he read. "But-"

  "All the bodies from Union Station are here. That's what I meant when I said they stored them all together."

  "Mia wasn't killed at Union Station."

  "She's part of the same event, it just took a few more hours to kill her." She frowned. "There are six bodies I don't recognize from the casualty lists."

  Derec skimmed the names she pointed out. Rimmer, Iklan, Cutchin, Milmor, Rotison, and Wollin. "The assassins?"

  "It doesn't say, does it?" She pulled a portable datum from her jacket and entered the names and the tracking numbers assigned by the morgue. There was no other information.

  Derec looked self-consciously back at the entrance. "Somehow I would expect guards or… something…"

  "No one comes to the morgue except those who absolutely have to. What would they be defending? Who would steal a corpse?"

  "Still…"

  Ariel nodded. "It feels wrong, though, doesn't it?"

  Derec tapped the screen on Mia Daventri's name. "It is wrong."

  Ariel touched her lips with a straight finger. "Let's take a l
ook, shall we?"

  Mia's drawer slid out, revealing a badly charred skeleton. Derec met Ariel's eyes over the top of the canopy and saw her wondering the same thing: Who?

  Eliton's drawer was in the next aisle. Derec pressed the contact, his heart racing as it emerged. Upon seeing Eliton, he felt oddly relieved.

  The features matched, but lacked the vitality Derec recalled. The shell gave no hint of the energy Eliton possessed and displayed, nothing of his passions. Three puckered mounds traced a line from his left shoulder to his sternum.

  "He looks…"

  "Yes," Ariel said. "Death takes everything." She frowned and did a slow examination down the corpse's entire length.

  "What?" Derec asked.

  "I… nothing." She closed the drawer.

  "Humadros?"

  Ariel drew a deep breath, then shook her head.

  "We should verify them all," Derec said. He raised his eyes upward slightly.

  She caught his meaning and nodded. "All right. Let's finish." Derec experienced a profound sense of relief when the limo pulled away from the morgue. He shrugged out of the too-tight jacket and pulled his own back on. Ariel gazed out her window, a frown pulling a crease into the space above her nose.

  "Something's bothering you," Derec said.

  "Brilliant. How long did it take you to deduce that?"

  "Sarcasm. I didn't think you cared anymore."

  Instead of the sharp comeback he expected, she said, "None of this is making sense. The problem is, I can't see how it's not."

  "Such as?''

  "If Tro is dead in the morgue, then who took his seat on the shuttle?"

  "Clones?"

  Ariel made a face. "Except for some very limited organ regrowth, cloning is completely illegal on Earth. They're more frightened of that than robots."

  "But we're not talking legal here, are we?"

  Ariel shrugged but did not reply.

  "Unless it's just a glitch," Derec said. "The ticket was bought, the name was never deleted, the seat stayed reserved. This has all happened fast."

  "We can check that. Car, take us to Union Station."

  "Yes, Ambassador," the car replied flatly.

  "Then," Ariel continued, "the burned corpse under Mia's name."

  "Yes… that wouldn't have been possible even if she had died. I saw the room. Everything in it was vaporized."

  "How come the whole facility didn't go up?"

  "Contained explosion, what they call a 'bubble nuke. ' Stasis fields and so forth. Very sophisticated, very expensive."

  "Parapoyos?"

  Derec shrugged. "The trouble with Kynig Parapoyos, as I understand it, is that he's everywhere. Might as well blame a devil or some other supernatural force. But, yes, something like that would be in his line. Very thorough, too. Agent Sathen told me that nothing was recoverable."

  "Sathen?"

  "Do you know him?"

  "I spoke to him yesterday. He was very uncooperative. But not willingly. It seemed to me like he'd been given orders not to talk about the situation."

  "Hmm. He seemed open to me, but I spoke to him just after it happened. Anyway, there would be no corpse, even if Mia hadn't got out."

  "So that body-" Ariel began.

  "-whoever it might be-"

  "-wasn't just placed there so that there could be a body-"

  "-it was placed to contradict the intensity of the blast-"

  "-and keep anyone from wondering about the source."

  "Exactly."

  Ariel looked at him. "And Sathen?"

  "Who could silence him?"

  "His own people."

  "Which is just what your friend Mia suspects."

  "I talked to the nurse who was on duty that night. She told me two other agents came in and Sathen got into an argument with them."

  "Did she remember their names?"

  "One of them. Cupra."

  Derec laughed sharply. "The other one is Agent Gambel. "

  "You know them?"

  "They're the pair who threw me out of Union Station. They had all the right documents. When I checked, their authority was verified. I couldn't argue."

  "But you kept the copy of the RI. "

  "What copy?"

  Ariel chuckled, shaking her head. "Derec, Derec, Derec… you are a naughty boy."

  Derec smiled. "I knew you would appreciate my finer qualities."

  "The question is, why would the same two agents show up at the medical facility Mia was in?"

  "They've taken charge of the entire investigation. My guess would be that they needed to debrief her."

  "And instead they try to kill her."

  "That's something of a leap, don't you think?"

  "Is it?" Ariel asked.

  "Well, it could have been Bok Golner."

  "Someone would have had to set it up for him."

  They rode in silence for a time. Derec watched the urbanscape pass, mulling over the conclusions hovering just out of reach. He agreed with Ariel's guess about Cupra and Gambel, but there was no more than coincidence on which to base it. Even with Mia's assertion that there had to be a Special Service component to the entire affair, Derec wanted something concrete before he embraced the belief that Earth's own security people were responsible for what amounted to the worst diplomatic catastrophe of the decade, perhaps the century.

  "Ambassador," the limo suddenly said, "this unit is being followed."

  Ariel leaned forward. "Show me."

  The screen mounted between the seats facing them winked on, displaying the rear view. The limo made a right turn and a few moments after, another transport made the same turn.

  "Identify," Ariel said.

  "No registration available," the limo said.

  "This car isn't positronic, is it?" Derec asked.

  "I wish. Car, how far to Union Station?"

  "Ten minutes at current course and speed."

  "Proceed as normal. Let me know if that vehicle begins to gain on us."

  "Yes, Ambassador."

  "When did you get a promotion?" Derec asked.

  Ariel waved dismissively. "It's programmed to respond to the primary passenger that way unless specifically told otherwise. Sometimes I really hate it here."

  "You miss your robots."

  "Damn right I do! At least you get to play with some, when you're not building killers."

  Derec's face warmed. "Excuse me?"

  Ariel scowled but would not look at him. "I beg your pardon. I didn't mean that."

  "Yes, you did. Do you want to explain it?"

  "Why should I? You know perfectly well what I mean."

  "Bogard."

  Ariel extended her hand, palm up, in a gesture that said, There, see? You knew what I meant.

  "Bogard's purpose is to protect humans," Derec said.

  "By being willing to harm other humans."

  "It's not that simple."

  "Evidently not. It failed."

  "Not with Agent Daventri."

  "Oh, it messed up the first time and now it's doing better to compensate? Why did it let Senator Eliton die? There are three holes in that man that shouldn't have been there!"

  "I don't know why Bogard failed! I can't find out till she releases it to me and I can run a proper diagnostic on it!" Derec's anger filled him suddenly. "You never have accepted the idea that robots needn't be straitjacketed by the Three Laws, that the nature of positronics can be applied to allow wider discretion-"

  He stopped, realizing that she was no longer listening. Ariel stared into the middle distance, her face expressionless but her eyes bright.

  "What?" he demanded.

  "Hmm? I-" She shook her head. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to bring this up now."

  And she looked away from him, pointedly ending the conversation. Derec knew better than to try to force her to continue. He sat and seethed until the limo arrived at Union Station.

  "So when did you get a promotion?" he asked again.

  "Two of those b
odies were Ambassador Setaris's top aides. I ended up next in line."

  "No, you don't. They could draft some junior legate."

  Ariel shrugged. "Since the situation involves a positronic unit, it made sense to have me step in as Setaris's chief aide. For the time being."

  "You're being set up to take the blame if anything goes wrong."

  "Are you surprised? Typical Auroran politics."

  She still sounded distracted. Derec was surprised to find himself worried for her, but right now it did not seem to matter to her.

  The limo stopped on the apron of the main gallery.

  "Car," Ariel said, "you will return to the embassy garage."

  "Yes, Ambassador."

  "We're finding another way back?" Derec asked as he got out.

  "We can use the Auroran embassy offices here," Ariel said.

  Derec searched the boulevard for their shadow but saw nothing unusual in the cluster of cabs and limos crowding against the apron.

  The normality of Union Station troubled him. Two days ago Derec had entered upon a scene of violence and terror; now it seemed as though nothing had happened. The gallery echoed with the sounds of foot traffic and conversation; the P. A. announced boarding for a shuttle; the floor gleamed with new polish.

  There was still a trace of the powder bums along the wall.

  Derec felt anxious all the way to the customer service desk. He realized then that he half-expected a security guard to eject him. He glanced up at the row of windows that overlooked the gallery, where he had been two days ago.

  At the desk, Derec had planned to use a self-service datum. Instead, the small consoles were all shuttered. A young man greeted them with a vague smile.

  "Can I be of service?" he asked.

  "Are the datums down?" Derec asked.

  "For a few days. We're going through a complete systems overhaul. In the meantime, I can help you."

  Ariel shrugged. "Fine. I'd like to confirm a passenger."

  The attendant nodded and glanced down at his own console, hidden from Derec and Ariel by the desk. "Do you have the flight number?"

  Ariel checked her portable datum. "Shuttle flight two-seven-K-dash-one-one-nine-A. Yesterday at four-fifteen AM?"

  "Shuttle to Kopernik Station. It launched on schedule."

  "Seat E-twenty."

  "Confirmed for a Mr. Aspil, Tro. Final destination… Aurora on the liner Corismun."