by Isaac Asimov
“In any event, I had a son. Once. Within six months of his birth he began developing a series of illnesses. I thought, as did the first cadre of doctors who looked at him, that he suffered some immunological dysfunction, making him unusually susceptible. This proved not to be the case.
“Long ago, Earth was host to what I, through my church, call ‘abominations.’ Every era has a list of things too frightening to contemplate and too difficult to control that it labels ‘abomination’ and summarily tries to purge from its present and all future generations. Difficult as it may be to grasp this, at one time nuclear energy was such a thing. Not without reason—it took a long time to learn to use it properly and control it safely—but for a time it was scorned and almost abolished. Polymerase gene therapy was another such thing, with its promise of extended life. Go back far enough and the very thoughts people had could be abominations. Logic once threatened our humanity, evolution threatened our morality, and scientific positivism threatened our pride. Each in their turn was called an abomination and we tried to purge ourselves of the monsters before they changed us forever.
“We failed. When the life-imitating artifacts we created to save us from lives of toil became abominations, we tried once more to rid ourselves of them, and once again we failed. But this time with a difference.
“There are no robots on Earth anymore. Not the way there once were. We have machines that do work, yes, but we do not have machines that think for us, act independently on our behalf, and threaten to supplant our decision-making freedom of choice by their mock-compassionate intervention. The robot as heir to humankind no longer strides among us. We abolished it.
“But humans are not rid of them. Humans took them to space where they proliferate in such abundance that one day they will likely return. Perhaps we’ll find then that we were as foolish to fear them as we were to fear vaccinations or invasive surgery or secularism. Perhaps.
“But the man-shaped mechanism wasn’t the only manifestation of that abomination that we failed to be rid of. Along with the technology to build such a machine came ancillary technologies that gave us the basis for an economy of abundance which we did embrace without regard to the consequences. You cannot build a machine that acts like a brain unless you can build molecular components that imitate life processes. And we did indeed build such machines—tiny components, artificial germs, self-replicating and adaptive in their own clever ways. Nanotech. Go to any home kitchen and draw a meal at the common trough and you see a primitive form of it at work, breaking down one kind of molecule and turning it into another and manufacturing food. A lot of our clothing is ‘assembled’ this way, and we even have cultures that clean, though now they’re used exclusively in environments where a high order of sanitation is absolutely necessary. Once anyone could acquire a culture of these little cleansing machines to flense the dirt from their floors and walls and furniture. We built tiny machines for medical purposes, devices that could reestablish the homeostatic base of a body, ‘resetting’ it, as it were, to a condition prior to whatever disease it suffered.
“And there’s where it all began to go wrong. Sometimes they caused breakdowns rather than repairing them. The adaptive capacities of these little machines surprised us, nearly overwhelmed us. They caused plagues. We don’t talk about them much anymore, but a thousand years or more ago there were terrible diseases flourishing on the Earth, caused by nanotech cultures that had—as they used to say with characteristic understatement—‘gotten away from us.’ ”
Rega paused, his gaze seeming to look inward. He shuddered and refocussed on where he thought Coren would be, which appeared to be about ten centimeters in front of where Coren actually was.
“Humans got rid of them. It took centuries. We had to build more of the same machines to do it, to hunt down the destructive little things. For many groups, it was taking too long. The reaction on the part of others was far too violent. We had hyperdrive then, all to ourselves, and people fled. The war continued, a hysterical cycle of development and destruction, pocket revolutions, ideological battles fought with budgets as well as guns. How, we asked, do we get rid of the bad and save the good? The answer was clear, but few at first willingly embraced it. The problem was in the definitions—what is Good? In time, we realized that the good we wished to preserve was ephemeral, illusory. There was no good. There was only convenience.
“Once we understood, it took only a few centuries to win. Once we understood, there was no compromise. It all went. We got rid of all of it. Space travel as well as nanohomeopathic medicine, imitation intelligences as well as information viruses, robots as well as life extension. You can’t have any of it and be free of the bad. All of it undermined us, threatened us, made us lesser, weaker, more dependent, inhuman. A little over two hundred years ago the last positronic manufacturer on Earth closed down. Shortly after that, when the original Spacetown was shut down, the last positronic robot was destroyed. We had won.”
He smiled grimly. “So we thought. My son was the victim of a residue. An ancient parasitic infection of nanotech. We never knew where it came from—it could have been in the soil somewhere, in a carpet we bought, passed from another infant in the hospital, waiting dormant in some food—we never knew. But the little abominations set up residence in his lymphatic and limbic systems and began to alter his immune responses and change his internal structure. ‘It happens,’ the doctors told us, ‘maybe one in ten million, one in twenty million, sometimes more often, sometimes less often. Not often enough for them to get a solid criteria, sound etiology, dependable vectors . . .’ They didn’t know. It happens. It happened to Jerem. He was being killed by artificial machines that once may have been designed to do just the opposite, but by then had altered or combined with other machines like them to become pathological. They could not cure him without making it worse—in other words, without killing him faster than the disease would.
“And we could not keep him. The infectiousness of the disease was as unknown as any other factor. Every case was slightly different, unique in some property that made the entire medical process powerless. We had to surrender him to a quarantined death.
“In my desperation, I began flailing about for answers, and in so doing got myself involved in enterprises I never would have considered otherwise. One of them was Nova Levis.
“I told you that I had named the lab. I took that name from a colony my church had settled on. We wanted a place where we could build an alternatively-tooled culture without interference or temptation from this one. Like other ideas, it seemed sound at the time, but it necessitated violating one of our principle objections, which concerned space travel. Eventually, the Church of Organic Sapiens repudiated the colony. But we had this research lab, then—or I did—which was violating the rest of my principles and doing fundamental research in high level prosthetics. I wanted to cure my son. I wanted them to find a way to make him whole. I didn’t care that it cost me my credibility with myself. I wanted life for my son.
“Here is the secret of Nova Levis that you should know: It was using those children, those victims of these opportunistic technological infections, to find ways of doing it intentionally with a specific result in mind. They wanted to build hybrids. Hybrids that wouldn’t die, of course. And I was a shareholder, giving them money, along with others, to do the very thing that I believed to be the ultimate abomination, which is the complete dehumanization of Homo Sapiens. The cure for all that ailed humankind, they believed, was to cure us of being human.”
Rega’s eyes closed briefly.
“The hospice that kept my son was violated and several children stolen, my son among them. We never traced them, though I believe strongly that Nova Levis was involved. It was never proven in court. I didn’t know then why these children were taken. I have a very good idea now. Already invaded by nanotech, their bodies already adapting to the presence of these invasive machine cultures, they were ideal for further experimentation along these lines. They were physiologica
lly ideal for continued augmentation by artificial means.
“I began to suspect this a few years after the kidnappings. But I thought—naïvely, as it turns out—that it was an experiment doomed to failure. My son was going to die anyway. This merely hastened it. I didn’t want to consider that his suffering would be prolonged. It seems I was wrong about that, too.
“I never told Nyom. I never told anyone. When the investigations into the kidnappings turned up nothing more than a local ring that was selling orphans to a black market dealer who may or may not have been using them in a slave trade . . . well, I let it drop. I subsequently took control of the Church of Organic Sapiens and have ever since been waging a war against anything that smacks of this kind of subversion of the human essence. My enemies see me as a zealot and a fanatic. Maybe I am. But they never lost a son the way I did. They might feel differently about all this if they had.”
He licked his lips.
“Something terrible has been done to those children, Coren. They are being built into something horrible. I don’t know that anything can be done to change it. But perhaps our only hope is complete isolation. They’re beginning to talk that way in the Spacer worlds, though for different reasons. The factions are choosing sides on Aurora. The Solarians seem to be simply shutting everyone out. I don’t know what will happen. I don’t know that I have any thought what I would want to do, or want you to do. All I wanted with this was to explain. I just wanted you to know. Maybe understand. But at least to have an explanation.”
Chapter 8
MIA STEPPED INTO a docking bay that was still cold from its recent exposure to hard vacuum. Across the broad deck bodies lay, many contorted into crablike shapes, others torn open, missing limbs, all of them blackened and encrusted by frozen blood and viscera now thawing. Mist boiled off them. Mia felt herself wince involuntarily; soon enough the smell would be vile.
Dock crew and regular military stayed back from the biomonitor drones now floating over each corpse under direction of the Spacer recovery technicians. Mia spotted several robots standing by the locks of the salvage boats parked just within the bay doors.
“Hey.”
Ros Yalor, her partner, hurried up to her. He was a short man with a wide forehead and thick limbs.
“Where’s Reen?” she asked.
“Down at the end of the line, with the Spacer salvage commander.”
Mia started walking again. Yalor kept up with her easily.
“What is all this?” Mia asked. “I just got word to come down here, no explanation.”
“Baleys. Four drones were launched off-schedule three hours ago. Traffic control was challenged, their operator cut the link and left them to the will of gravity, and the patrol ships started taking them out. Aside from full cargoes of contraband, they were carrying . . . these . . .”
Mia cringed. She did not approve the policy that dictated anything unauthorized be shot down. It resulted in messes like this, a wasteful loss of life.
Besides, she knew of at least one team of Terran agents that had died this way. Because of that, if nothing else, she had argued to change the policy. But probably because of that, someone higher up blocked any modification.
“Did they take them all out?” she asked.
“They’re not being fully forthcoming about that. Three blew cleanly, but there’s a question about the fourth one. It may have entered the atmosphere.”
“Without traffic control, it probably burned up.”
Or maybe it got down . . .
“Point of origin?” she asked.
“Not certain yet.”
She gave Yalor a sour look and he shrugged sympathetically. But then they reached Reen and the Spacer commander.
Reen gave her a brief nod, and returned his attention to the Spacer. Mia did not recognize him. Taller than Reen, silver-white hair drawn back in an elaborate queue tied by blue, green, and gold ribbon, his face glistened with the too-smooth elegance of an older Spacer. Two small spheres hovered just above either shoulder, his remote personal aide links connecting him to his cadre of robots. Mia had seen Spacers with a dozen or more of these devices, called extensions by Spacers, but which Terrans derisively referred to as their “pals.”
“I believe,” Reen said, carefully, as if he had been trying vainly to make a point for some time, “that a scout ship ought to go down as soon as possible to locate the fourth drone.”
“If it reached the ground,” the Spacer said in reasonable tones, “it is probably in a million pieces from the impact. What do you want us to recover? DNA?”
“I want certainty, Captain Delas. If it is in a million pieces, I want verification.”
“And if it’s not?”
“Then we may have cause to step up our internal investigation. That would imply a secondary traffic control—”
“We detected no such signal during the intercession.”
“—or the presence of a pilot on the drone itself.”
Captain Delas’s mouth twitched in a sardonic smile. “Rather pathetic pilots, then. None of the other three made the least attempt to evade us.”
Reen pursed his lips and Mia recognized the frustration. “I wouldn’t be so quick to criticize other pilots, Captain. Your people missed a robot drone and let it get away. How much skill does that take?”
Now the Spacer’s face changed. Mia saw the sudden tension, the narrowing of eyes, and the set his mouth took. Great, she thought. Reen has actually succeeded in pissing off a Spacer. Such talent is wasted here . . .
“I will bring your suggestion to the attention of my superiors, Commander,” Delas said. “Excuse me.”
Before Reen could protest, the Spacer spun around and strode away, his remotes easily keeping station with him.
Reen’s lips parted in a brief rictus of frustration. A moment later, he sighed. He looked at Mia. “What do you think?”
“Sir?”
Reen pointed at the row of bodies.
“I’d like to know where the drones originated,” she said. “I understand the piloting signals weren’t traced?”
“If they were, that—gentleman—won’t tell me.” Reen shook his head. “Delas isn’t bad, just Keresian. At least they don’t mind breathing the same air as Terrans.”
“Do you think they were Spacer in origin?” Mia asked, startled at the idea.
“You give me a good reason why they won’t follow up on the one that got away.”
“We have the authority to do that on our own,” Yalor said. He gave Mia an uncertain look. “Don’t we?”
“It depends on which party took the initial action,” Reen said. “They shot up the drones, it’s therefore a Keresian operation. Earth cannot usurp their primacy without due cause. Normally, this is just a formality, and permissions are automatic, but Delas is being obdurate.” He shook his head. “Politics.”
“I suppose it would have been more convenient had we never gotten the Fifty Worlds involved,” Mia said.
“And you know as well as I that that was impossible,” Reen snapped. “Where are you with your follow-up on Ensign Corf’s arrest?”
“I’ve been running down communications trees from his comm, but so far all I have is evidence of an active social life. There are three or four names I plan to follow up personally, but at this point I have nothing solid.”
“You went through his cabin?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you found nothing unusual?”
“No, sir. He reads more than the average junior officer, but nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Books?”
“On disk, sir. Technical updates and contemporary fiction.”
“Corf was originally a tug controller,” Reen said. “An in-system traffic specialist. What kind of technical updates?”
“The bulk are applied hyperdrive texts. I checked his record, and he applied twice for drive specialist training. He apparently still maintains an interest.”
“He didn’t strike me as h
aving the aptitude for something that complex. Interesting. But nothing else?”
Mia found herself studying Reen, looking for cues. She did it automatically, the way she had been trained and had learned as a Special Service agent on Earth. Often she did it unconsciously —until something alerted her that a problem existed.
“No, sir,” she said blandly. “Nothing unusual.”
Reen frowned. “Do your follow-ups then, and come see me in six hours. I’m going to try to clear up this territorial misunderstanding.”
“Yes, sir.”
Reen gave a sharp nod and walked off.
“Did I miss something just now?” Yalor asked.
“If you did, you’re not the only one.” Mia watched Reen’s retreating form. “Are you rated on atmospheric piloting?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact.”
“Keep yourself unoccupied for the next twelve hours.”
Mia wrinkled her nose. The smell from the bodies was beginning to be manifest.
The planetary blockade ring was comprised of nearly thirty stations and over two hundred ships of various sizes. Smaller stations linked together by an array of umbilicals. Access around the entire perimeter was easier by shuttle, though traffic was kept to a minimum for security reasons.
Mia made her way through two stations before entering the precincts of the materiel and distribution port that serviced this limb of the ring. Here shipments came in from one of the huge supply stations sitting further out, along the system perimeter, which contained fewer but larger stations and nearly a thousand ships from the various polities represented in the embargo. There were six of these supply ports along the planetary ring; given the complex web of interconnections, it proved nearly impossible to police every transaction, delivery, and routing order. Early in her tour here, she suggested borrowing an RI from the Theians to oversee distribution and had nearly found herself transferred off the blockade as a result.
