Asimov’s Future History Volume 9

by Isaac Asimov

  Derec felt warm. “Certainly.”

  Derec answered the knock at his cabin door. Clar Eliton stood in the corridor, a hopeful smile teasing at his mouth. Derec suppressed the urge to close the door and go back to the book he had been trying unsuccessfully to read ever since Clin had left to go back on duty.

  “Mr. Avery,” Eliton said softly. “I’d like to talk to you. Please. May I come in?”

  Too late, Derec thought sourly and stepped aside, waving the man in. “Sure.”

  Eliton looked quickly around the cabin, as if checking for someone else. At first Derec thought Eliton knew about CPO Craym, that perhaps he could even smell the musky afterscent of their lovemaking. After a moment, though, Derec realized Eliton expected to find a robot.

  “Bogard’s in a crate,” Derec said. “We’re alone.”

  The look of relief on Eliton’s face was almost comical. It passed quickly and Eliton nodded. “I, uh . . . I suppose I have a lot of explaining to do.”

  “To me? Why?” Derec gestured for the man to sit down.

  “I ruined your . . .” He hesitated, frowning.

  “Dreams?” Derec supplied. “That’s a fair assessment.”

  “I wanted a chance to explain. To, to—”

  “To try for forgiveness? At least understanding? Why? Because you were in such a difficult position, I should feel sympathy for you?”

  “I thought perhaps I could make an apology, perhaps—”

  Derec laughed sharply. “Would you care for a drink? I would. I don’t think I could listen this completely sober.” He went to the dispenser and punched in the code for a gin and tonic. A few seconds later, the glass appeared in the hopper. He took it and sat across from Eliton. “I take it you don’t want anything liquid. Fine.” Derec took a mouthful and swallowed, clenching involuntarily at the harsh medicinal flavor. “So you want to apologize. How?”

  “I’d hoped you could tell me. It’s not unlikely we could be useful to each other in the future. But not with this . . . rift.”

  “You’re serious.”

  “Of course.”

  “You know, I had expectations that things could change on Earth. We might then have been able to bridge the rest of the gaps between Spacer and Terran. Partly, you convinced me of that.”

  “You never struck me as naïve, Mr. Avery.”

  “I’m not. Hopeful. Optimistic. Maybe it wouldn’t have worked, but now we’ll never know.” You don’t need to do this, he thought. You can tell Eliton to leave and not open these wounds. But he wanted to know.

  “The thing is,” he said, “you’d been succeeding up till that point. It was your work that got the RI installed at Union Station D.C. and secured the permits to allow positronic robots to operate on its grounds. It was your work that eased restrictions on Spacer residency and the concomitant ownership of robots outside of embassy territory by Spacers. It was your work that allowed cooperative research to begin in Terran labs on Spacer products, including positronics.”

  Eliton waved a hand impatiently. “Yes, and I was negotiating with trade unions to let up on non-positronic restrictions, and I was working on a bill that would have allowed limited positronic presence aboard Terran starships, and I had even drafted a preliminary piece of legislation that would have reopened Spacetown for Spacer settlement.”

  “I didn’t know that. Would it have passed?”

  “Maybe. Probably not. After the conference I would have lost my support in the private sectors and without that it would all have died.”

  “Private support . . . you mean corporate?”

  “I mean the support of the people who approached me to push this line in the first place. None of whom were ultimately interested in seeing any of it enacted and successfully implemented.”

  “Then . . .”

  “It was never intended to succeed, Mr. Avery.”

  “I thought I had a grasp of Terran politics. You’re the senator—were, anyway—so why—?”

  “No, you have no grasp. I’m apologizing to you because personally I agree with what you thought would happen. I think Earth is being ridiculous and stubborn. I don’t think our future is at stake, not the way you seem to think it is. But I do think we’re turning our back on a great opportunity, all because we’re terrified of robots.” He leaned forward, holding out his hand as if in offering. “But it’s not even that, really. The riots that evicted positronics would never have succeeded if the power structure hadn’t been in agreement with the rioters. And it’s the same thing here. If collectively the people who matter on Earth had wanted my programs to succeed, the people—those whom I supposedly represented—could not have stopped it.”

  “Then why?”

  “What issue brought about the conference? The proposal for the conference?”

  “The Tiberius incident. Contraband and positronic inspection of commerce.”

  “Exactly. Do you have any idea how much money was involved? Billions of credits. Positronic inspection would have hurt that flow of money. That’s what decided Earth to expel them in the first place, two hundred plus years ago. It wasn’t the jobs—labor disputes over job losses are ancient rituals, easily manipulated, just as easily solved. It wasn’t even the religious issue—that can always be turned by professional manipulators. But positronics was becoming an ethical burden to the wrong people. And it would be no different now.”

  “So you set us up to fail.”

  “Not willingly. I thought I could find a way around it.”

  “But you went along with it to keep your senate seat.”

  “As you can see,” Eliton said dryly, “that failed, too.”

  “You think you can make an apology just because it wasn’t your intention to hurt me? To hurt us?”

  After a time, Eliton shook his head. “No, probably not. But I don’t want you hating the wrong person.”

  “I don’t hate you, Senator.”

  For the briefest space, Eliton’s face showed relief. Then he frowned, suspicious.

  “That’s right,” Derec said. “I pity you. I think you’re pathetic. I think you wasted your authority.”

  “Believe it or not, Mr. Avery, I agree with you.” He shrugged. “And now my reward is to be sent as ambassador to Solaria. I’ll be about as out of the way as it is possible to be.”

  “Do you know what Solaria is like? Don’t judge it by Chassik, he’s something of an oddity among his own.”

  “I know what Solaria is like. As for Chassik . . . he should have been a Terran. He thinks like us.”

  “Not anymore,” Derec said. “He’s dead.”

  Eliton’s eyes widened in shock. “Excuse me?”

  “You didn’t know? He was recalled. His ship was attacked by pirates and destroyed.”

  The color leached instantly from Eliton’s face. The change startled Derec. Eliton got to his feet.

  “Senator—?”

  “Thank you for your time, Mr. Avery. At least you gave me a chance to . . . well . . .” He went to the cabin door. “Good-bye, Mr. Avery. I hope you do well in the future.”

  The door opened and Eliton left.

  Derec stared after him for a time, then finished his drink and returned to his book.

  The next day, shiptime, Derec met Ariel in the Grand Lounge for Transition. He searched for Eliton, but the ex-senator never appeared. He told Ariel about their conversation; she frowned disapprovingly, but said nothing.

  The roof of the room shimmered as the simulation came on, showing the passage of the liner into hyperspace. A thick sprawl of stars glowed in the projected volume above. A bell sounded, bringing everyone’s attention to bear. Then the stars vanished, displaced by a colorless moil of near-patterns, like the shiftings of iron filings in a magnetic field, layer upon layer, shifting and dancing as if searching for a shape to become.

  A few seconds into this display, everyone experienced an instant of acute displacement, as if the deck had dropped from beneath them a few millimeters, a physical lurch ov
er before it could be clearly felt.

  The diorama over them changed once more into a familiar expanse of stars. Different stars, though, the constellations conforming to altered shapes, most still familiar, but shifted by several light years.

  The actual transit through hyperspace had occupied the time of the almost imperceptible shift. The show had been designed to last much longer than the journey, to give the audience something to experience, to see.

  As Derec—and most seasoned travelers—knew, the images generated were only surmises. No one really knew what hyperspace “looked” like. The projection was a guess. An educated, well-thought-out guess, but no more.

  The canopy hidden by the projection now slid open. The projection faded out in favor of the view of real stars. Forward, near the edge of the vast window, hovered a brilliant reddish star. Tau Ceti.

  Even though he knew the star he now saw was real—real in the sense that the shutters, for a brief time, were open and the light of several days’ past now impacted his senses, so that he saw a near true star—Derec could not shrug off the feeling that, on this side of the Jump, he had left reality behind, and nothing he would find here would be authentic.

  Still, illusion or not, he reacted to the star, and to the world he knew lay in orbit around it. He knew the power of illusions—perhaps more intimately than most—and certainly appreciated the impact of symbols. There in space was one of the most potent symbols in history.

  Aurora.

  Chapter 14

  MASID WAITED THREE days for a reply. When nothing came, he decided against resending. His signal had either reached the right place and was disbelieved, or it had gone wrong. He did not wish to antagonize anyone who might have reason to come looking to kill him. He could get out of harm’s way, but Tilla was helpless.

  He could do nothing for her. The drugs he synthesized from his stock slowed the disease, but he knew fairly soon that he could not cure her. The pathogen, whatever it was, possessed remarkable adaptive powers and was mutating as he watched to counter the effectiveness of the new pharmaceuticals he gave her. He was no physician, but he understood enough to know that nothing he could do would save her. Even if he could kill the disease, Tilla required major transplant surgery to make her whole. As she now was, even without the infection, death was only a matter of time.

  He found an abandoned apartment below Tilla’s. It reeked of old urine and decay, but a thorough search turned up no corpses. Whoever had been ill here had either been taken away or had crawled off to die elsewhere. Masid moved his kit in and proceeded to debrief Tilla during those periods when she seemed lucid.

  He became convinced of the need to get to Nova City.

  “We tried,” Tilla told him, her voice raspy. “It’s isolated, in the middle of native wilderness, and thoroughly surveilled. Automated tracking blasters, force screens, booby traps.”

  “And the verge is inhabited by reanimés,” Kru said, eyes large.

  “What?”

  Tilla shook her head. “Local myth. Rumor is, Nova Levis wasn’t uninhabited when the Solarians settled it. They killed the indigenes, terraformed—badly—and set up their colony. By the time they sublet it to the Settlers, the natives had returned as walking corpses to attack anyone leaving the settlements.”

  “Not myth,” Kru said, scowling at Tilla. “Not indigenes, either. Something out of Nova City.” She fixed Masid with a serious stare. “But something.”

  “Of course,” Masid said. “So you said you tried. How close did you get?”

  “Five hundred meters,” Tilla said, and coughed weakly. “Then Kas died. We found him caught in a razorwire trap, cut to ribbons, not five meters from us. He screamed and alarms sounded. We retreated. Damn near didn’t get back to the trucks.”

  “What happened to the trucks?”

  “Stolen, sold, abandoned,” Tilla said. “Pretty much in that order. The last one we thought to cannibalize—get more credit that way, selling it off piece by piece—until we all got sick.”

  Kru squeezed Tilla’s hand. “You brought it back from the Verge around Nova City.”

  “Nonsense,” Tilla said. “Everyone here is sick. I’ve never seen such a public health disaster.” She frowned. “About the indigenes getting revenge, it’s not complete nonsense. Not large animals, though. The reanimés Kru mentions—I don’t think they’re large predators.”

  “Pathogens?” Masid said.

  “Yeah. New, something Solaria couldn’t anticipate, something the surveys never showed . . .” She shrugged.

  “Or maybe they did know and didn’t care,” Masid said. “They were originally working this place with robots.”

  Tilla drew a ragged breath. “That would be . . . murder?”

  “Negligent homicide at best.”

  Tilla smiled thinly. “Then we should arrest them.”

  “What about the pirates?” Masid asked.

  “Pirates. Nonsense. Black marketeers, grey marketeers, bootleggers, contrabandists, people taking advantage of the situation . . . there is a loose organization, as far as I can tell, based on territories. Filoo runs this one, there are a dozen others. They get their supplies out of Nova City, but the core of the organization isn’t there.”

  “Then—?”

  “Solaria. They come and go as they please, they fly in and out of the port at Nova City with impunity . . . it’s not piracy, it’s business. Maybe war, I don’t know, but the seat of any organization that might be called—” She lapsed into a brief coughing fit. Her face red, she drew several labored breaths before continuing. “Any organization that might be called a pirate organization is offplanet. The people here are just trying to get by.”

  “The governor refused on-ground inspections.”

  “I know. Foolish, maybe, but I understand it. The Settlers here came from people who wished to be completely free of what they left behind. That includes an invasive government. The governor thought he was acting in his people’s interest. He also knew he’d get blamed for harboring pirates, no matter that he had no say over what Solaria did. He was out of office a month after the blockade went into effect.”

  Masid started. “We never knew that.”

  “Would it have mattered? By then, the Tiberius had been blown into a popular cause, and shots had been fired in local space between Settler shuttles and blockade ships. It moved past the stupidity of the governor and now is simply the situation as it stands. I can tell you this: The people here, the Settlers, hate Earth, and they’re not too fond of Spacers. But Solaria’s been keeping them alive, so their feelings are mixed.”

  Masid glanced at Kru, who looked away, her face set and angry. “Nova City is the only port. How’d you get down?”

  “We landed about fifty kilometers from here.”

  “What happened to your ship?”

  “Dismantled.”

  “By you?”

  Kru grunted. “Reanimés!”

  Tilla shook her head. “We figure local scavengers found it. I don’t know how they got past the security systems, but . . .”

  “Reanimés!” Kru insisted again. “You won’t believe me, I know, but I’m telling truth.”

  “I thought,” Masid said, “they were only in the Verge around Nova City.”

  “Most of them are,” Kru said, “but they’ve got colonies all over.”

  “Must be a lot of them, then. Somebody must have seen them.”

  Kru gave him a frightened look. “People see, most of them don’t live past it.”

  Masid looked at her. “Do you know anyone who has seen and survived?”

  “You shouldn’t tease her that way,” Tilla said.

  “I’m not. You said your ship was dismantled. I’m assuming it had a standard Special Service security package? That would take a considerable level of skill to bypass. So whoever did it, they might be worth finding, or at least finding out about. Have you seen anything in the markets that looks as though it came from your ship?”

  Tilla frow
ned thoughtfully. “No, but there are several markets and other towns . . .”

  “This is the closest one to where you landed, though.”

  “It is.”

  “Then it’s reasonable to assume anything scavenged off your ship would’ve come through here first.” He looked at Kru. “Do you know anyone who can tell me more about your reanimés?”

  Kru seemed about to stand and leave.

  “Kru,” Tilla said, halting her in mid-motion. Kru looked at her. “Take him to see Rekker.”

  “Tilla!”

  “Take him.”

  On rare days the sun broke through the cloud cover, washing everything in brilliant yellow light. Masid stepped from the apartment into that light and, as on a few previous occasions, glimpsed a little of what the town ought to look like: ivory walls and marbled pavement, the edges softened in the quasi-organic style of the Homo Primus school. Masid had seen the same elements on a dozen worlds, people wanting to distance themselves from the dominating excesses of technology-saturated Earth, adopting any motif that reminded them of flesh, bone, nature. Sometimes it turned out looking primitive, like wattle over a frame, but here he saw a balance. As he reached the street just behind Kru, he thought, I could live in this . . .

  Kru moved with a guarded urgency that made her seem both helpless and unstoppable. Following a pace behind, he wondered if it also made her look caught, watched. This early in the day, though, few people were out. The market tents would be jammed, but little else was happening in the town.

  She led him toward the north quarter. Warehouses reared up, incomplete and ominously still. Beyond them, the forest rose like a cage around the community, spindly trees with enormous, clotted crowns. The light shafted through mists of thick orange pollen that drifted endlessly in the aftermath of the spring rains. From what Masid could tell, the pollen residue coated the ground in thick gooey layers until the downpours ended, then, somehow, shed moisture rapidly until only a powdery cover remained, easily disturbed by the fickle breezes. Within minutes of sunrise, the forest was filled with pollen-fog. Masid had witnessed the process during the first couple of days on the ground, just before entering the town. He had wondered briefly if it was a source for all the illness and infection, but from what he understood about protein compatabilities and what he had seen of the various diseases response to Terran-based treatments, it seemed unlikely.