Asimov’s Future History Volume 9

by Isaac Asimov

  “You disapprove.”

  “I like Earth for a variety of reasons. One is its chaotic nature.”

  Eliton grunted. “That’s exactly what many Terrans would like to get away from.”

  She studied him speculatively. “It’s worse on Solaria. Everything is organized into individual estates, enclosed arboreta that are part of vast households. They never bothered terraforming the planet in general—none of them intended to go outside, anyway.”

  “But the records I’ve read—”

  “Oh, don’t get me wrong, there’s an open-air biosphere, but all the variety is indoors. Far more controlled than on Aurora. Sounds perfectly hideous to me.”

  “Perhaps you should consider emigration to a Settler world. Sounds like their kind of wildness is just what you’d prefer.”

  “Don’t think I haven’t considered it. When all this nonsense at the Calvin Institute is done, I may.”

  Eliton returned his attention to the viewscreen. “We’re docking.”

  Ariel looked up. The delicate-seeming webbing of the station enveloped the ship, arching around it, kilometer-long arms enfolding the liner.

  “Solaria was the same way?” Eliton asked.

  “Hmm?”

  “The biosphere . . . the same as Aurora?”

  “No, there were different flora—”

  “I meant—what’s the term they use?—morphologically naïve. Only simple organisms, nothing advanced enough to compete in any meaningful way with Terran forms.”

  “Oh, that. Yes, essentially the same.”

  Eliton frowned, shaking his head. “As I understand it, all fifty of the Spacer colonies were like that.”

  Ariel nodded, paying more attention to the view of docking. “Yes, basically.”

  “I’ve always found that peculiar.”

  Ariel looked at him. “Hmm? Why?”

  “Well, since the Settler Accords were signed and Earth began a colony program again, we’ve found a few worlds like that, but they’ve been in the minority. I always put it down to Spacers having already taken the most easily adapted real estate, but the more you look at it, the less sense it seems to make.”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “Well, it’s a question of statistics, really. What are the odds that the first fifty habitable planets you’d find would be so ideally suitable to human modification?”

  “It wasn’t the first fifty.”

  “No? According to the records, a few hundred probes went out and maybe a dozen exploration ships. First there’s the likelihood of finding planets nearby at all—which proved less remarkable than we thought at the time—but then there’s the fact that none of the habitable planets possessed complex, aggressive ecosystems. As if they were just waiting for the arrival of new colonists.”

  “A number of those worlds were completely inhospitable to humans. Without robots—”

  “Yes, I understand that, but the completely inhospitable ones were so utterly inhospitable that the cost of terraforming was prohibitive—in fact, probably impossible. What always baffled me was the lack of in-between worlds. When you look at the records, the Spacers found the worlds they settled and completely unsuitable worlds. Nothing that required the capacity for terraforming that they brought with them. I—”

  A babble of excited voices interrupted him. Eliton looked around. Three uniformed Aurorans, followed by four robots and an array of floating extensions, entered the lounge. One of the spheres broke off and did a very quick circuit of the room, coming to a halt above Eliton. The Aurorans came over to them.

  “Ambassador Eliton?” the lead uniform asked softly.

  “Yes . . .”

  “I’m Captain Rovel, Auroran security. Would you please accompany us?”

  Eliton looked apprehensive. “Why?”

  “This would be best conducted in private—”

  “I repeat the question. Why?”

  Captain Rovel looked embarrassed on Eliton’s behalf. “I have a warrant to detain you, issued by the Council of Aurora. It is a lawful warrant, requiring you to accompany us.”

  “Accompany you where?”

  “To Eos City, Ambassador. Your presence is required at a hearing—”

  “I have diplomatic status, Captain. Your warrant—”

  “We’ve checked. Your official status as ambassador does not take effect until you reach Solaria. At this point, you are a private citizen traveling on a Terran passport. We do have the authority to subpoena you.”

  Eliton stared at the Auroran, then looked at Ariel. “Did you—?”

  Ariel stood. “Well, Senator, it seems you’ll get to see Aurora after all. I hope you enjoy your stay.”

  “I can’t—I—”

  “Please,” the Captain said. “If necessary, you will be sedated. We would rather spare you that.”

  Eliton stood, glaring at Ariel, then spoke to Captain Rovel. “I have nothing to say to you or your inquest. I consider this an illegal detention.”

  “Once we arrive,” Captain Rovel said, “you may certainly file a protest.” He stepped aside. “If you would, Ambassador?”

  With a last furious look at Ariel, Eliton stepped into the midst of the robot entourage and was walked out of the lounge.

  Captain Rovel bowed politely to Ariel, who nodded in response. As he left, Ariel sat back down to finish her brandy. Her hand trembled slightly, but she could not tell if it did so from fear or shame.

  “Welcome home,” she muttered.

  Chapter 16

  COREN FOUND THE bookstore in one of the deep sublevels of Lyzig District. An office occupied a posher section, but it had proved little more than a kiosk where one could place orders. The actual store filled several converted chambers in an ancient recycling plant Coren felt certain had been dug out of the Earth’s mantle.

  A single embossed plaque identified the entrance: OMNE MUNDI COMPLURIUM, PRINTED ANTIQUITIES, LYZIG.

  A man sat behind the high counter, idly doodling, one hand propping his chin. When he looked up, Coren hesitated at the sight of an artificial eye glowing dull blue from the man’s left socket.

  “Help you, gato?”

  Coren placed a note on the desk containing the books listed in Mia’s communiqué. The man scanned it.

  “Expensive,” he said.

  “Really? How?”

  With a barely audible groan, the dealer straightened and turned to a flatscreen Coren only now noticed amid the stacks of bound books and paper surrounding it. Coren glanced across the top of the counter, which came up to his shoulders, and saw a nameplate. Black letters set in brass announced SHAL PROST, PROP.

  The doodles the man had been absently scrawling looked like complex geometric forms.

  “We sold one each of those recently,” he said. “The War and Peace went for . . . twenty-eight hundred credits . . . three thousand for Oliver Twist . . . three for Of Human Bondage . . . fifteen hundred for Les Miserables.”

  “Why the drop?”

  “Unattributed translation, retrograde facsimile. Can’t fully authenticate the text, so it doesn’t rate as much.” He looked at Coren. “Some gatos are more interested in the pedigree than the content.”

  “Sounds human enough. Who bought them?”

  Doubt flickered in Prost’s eye. “That’s confidential.”

  “Fair enough. Can you tell me this, then—does that customer buy a lot through you?”

  “Quite. We ship at least thirty volumes a year to him. Something of a completist.”

  “Anything in particular?”

  “What are you, in competition?”

  Coren was silent. Prost smiled.

  “I see,” he said. “You’re buying for someone. Maybe a newcomer to the field? Wants to know what’s going, what’s not. It’s a fickle field, I can understand someone with reputation using a shill to protect himself from ridicule.”

  “Her.”

  Prost’s relief was almost palpable. Coren placed a hand on the counter.
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  “Well,” Prost continued, glancing at the flatscreen, “I’ll warn you up front that this is not a reliable investment. Old books like this, you can get the text from any public data service, and, frankly, folks aren’t as much concerned with the tangible past as they once were.”

  “Then who buys?”

  “Believe it or not, my biggest customers are Spacers. We do a very healthy trade to the Fifty Worlds. So far, it’s either universities or private scholars, but recently we’ve started selling to private citizens.”

  Coren nodded toward the screen and tapped his list.

  “Oh, yes. Solarian. And his taste runs to Dickens primarily.”

  “How many?”

  “He’s bought them all now, I think . . .” Prost tapped the screen and read. “Except Great Expectations and Edwin Drood.”

  “I imagine Spacers would have the time to read all this,” Coren said, interjecting a note of amazement as he shook his head.

  “It’s a status thing. I sell multiple copies to the same customer of the same title. Sometimes they actually come back through, from a different source, so they’re being given away as gifts.”

  “Or sold?”

  “I doubt it. I pick them back up for less than the original fee more often than not.”

  “What would a Solarian find valuable enough to give away?”

  Prost chuckled. “Kind of a contradiction, isn’t it? Well, this one has bought fourteen editions of A Tale of Two Cities over the last three years.”

  Coren made a show of entering the title in his hand reader. “What about those?”

  “None in stock currently. My last copies have all left the planet. However, I have several others by the same authors.”

  Coren let Prost ramble on, trying to sell something. At one point Coren asked to actually see one of the books. Prost shut down his screen and sprinted away, into the caverns.

  Coren took a handful of his little vonoomans from a pocket and scattered them on the floor. One he placed on the desk. After a second, it scampered away to hide.

  Prost returned with a musty-smelling volume that crackled when he opened the pages. They dickered over a price, finally agreeing on a few hundred credits. Prost dutifully opened an account for Coren under the false name Coren gave him. Smiling, he slipped the book into a homeostatic container and sealed it.

  “I’ll let you know when these others show up,” Prost said. “And I’ll send you a list of current properties which are making the fashionable rounds.”

  “Thanks.”

  “By the way, how did you find out about us? We like to keep track of our recommendations.”

  “Commander Reen recommended you.”

  Prost nodded. “He gets a discount next time, then.”

  “He raved about you, said he had no idea how he could survive without your service.”

  “He exaggerates, I’m sure, but he has been a very good customer.”

  “Thanks again, then.”

  Coren stepped out of the ancient shop, keeping a carefully neutral face, and, tucking his new-old copy of The Light That Failed, made his way carefully back to the upper levels of Lyzig.

  He returned to DyNan headquarters after dropping the book at his private office. As he made the corner into the corridor to his corporate office, he stopped short, seeing his door open.

  Coren ducked back around the corner and waited, not breathing. He heard footsteps coming toward him. He stepped sideways into the middle of the hall and resumed his path as if he had just arrived, rounding the corner, and colliding with the person approaching.

  “Oh, excuse me—”

  “Damn! Will you—boss!”

  “Shola, I am sorry.” He held her left arm, then stepped back. “I apologize, I wasn’t paying any attention. My mind was a world away.”

  Flustered, Shola Bran laughed, and needlessly straightened her blouse. “No problem. I was looking for you, anyway.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, someone down in biologicals has been trying to find you, a Dr. Willis Jay. He’s been insistent, so I thought I’d come give you the message personally.”

  “I see. Okay, then. Thanks.”

  “Do you need me for anything, boss?”

  Coren shook his head. “I have some calls to make.”

  He walked away, resisting the urge to glance back at her to see if she watched him. He entered his office and shut the door and waited, listening.

  When he heard nothing from the other side, he went to his desk. Quickly, he brought his system up, then pulled his hand reader out. Coren entered a series of commands into both the reader and the desk, then jacked the reader into its cradle. He sat back and waited.

  Within seconds, the screen showed a schematic of his office. One by one, bright sparks appeared in various places, including one within the icon for his desk system.

  He toyed with the idea of removing the bugs at once. His skin rippled with anger at the thought of betrayal by one of his own. But immediate action would only warn Shola and, presumably, whoever she now worked for.

  Carefully, he tapped in a new series of commands. One by one, over the next several hours, the little spies would be turned and lead him back to the source.

  He closed everything down, retrieved his reader, and headed for Jay’s lab.

  “Found some interesting things about those grass samples you gave me,” Jay said the moment Coren entered his lab.

  Coren glanced around and saw that they were alone.

  “You hinted at that the last time,” Coren said.

  “I know. It took some doing to find out just why I found what I found. Kind of like reverse engineering, trying to figure out how to build something based on its final product.” He gestured Coren to follow.

  They entered another office down the hall from Jay’s. Jay waved Coren into a chair, then activated a collection of screens.

  “This grass is the product of manipulation,” Jay said without preamble. “You know much about plant biology?”

  Coren shook his head. “They grow in the open, in soil, under sunlight . . .”

  Jay shook his head, curling his lips in disgust. “Never mind. This—” he pointed to a screen on his right “—is the molecular tree of a normal blade of grass. Over here—” he gestured at a screen on his left “—is the breakdown of what you brought me.”

  Coren examined the two diagrams, both complex assemblages of branching and interconnected lines that reminded him more of circuit pathways than anything organic. He pointed at the left-hand display, which appeared to be a more complex version of what Jay had shown him before.

  “There seem to be some extra—what?—nodes?”

  “There are. A lot, if you keep staring at it. What those are, I have no idea.”

  “What do you mean, you have no idea? You managed to diagram it.”

  “What I mean is, I have no idea where they came from or exactly what they do. It’s all residual, a leftover from some process of the mechanism which is no longer in place. The other day I told you I’d found beryllium standing in where you would expect to see magnesium; and I’d also found complex silicates attached to what magnesium there was. Both magnesium and beryllium are photosensitive, both will enable photosynthesis, though the beryllium is less efficient. I couldn’t figure out what it was doing there, how it had gotten there in the first place. So I went looking for associated molecules. I found some weird carbon chains, some unexpected occurrences of iron, and silica phosphates. None of this was exactly associated with beryllium, but it was all odd, especially where I found it, which was all over the molecular tree. Then!”

  He brought up another screen. It showed a pair of molecular trees, side by side, various nodes highlighted in bright blue.

  “I went looking for absences,” Jay continued. “Things that ought to have been in the structure but weren’t. I found these missing nodes. Originally, the grass did use magnesium as a photosynthesizer, but its production and implementation of it was blocked
at some point until it was forced to use beryllium instead, which changed its growth rate among other things, but also its hardiness. The magnesium ended up being used almost exclusively as a connector for the silicates. And I found these.” He stabbed a finger at one of the nodes, lightly touching the screen, which turned the node to green. “Plant version of fat.”

  “And what would a plant do with fat?”

  “Live on it, like a battery.” Jay grinned. “This is a terraformed variety designed to thrive in harsh environments. The energy expenditure the plant must utilize to conduct photosynthesis with beryllium is higher. Normally, that would make it less hardy. But a system has been put in place to construct these nodules of matter which the plant can then use internally during bad times. This thing is a masterpiece.”

  Coren sat back and stared at Jay. “You said you couldn’t tell me anything about it.”

  “I can’t. I can tell you what it is, but I can’t tell you where it came from, how it works, or who made it. There’s another mechanism not present at all responsible for this and I don’t have it in my library. I’m betting the silicates are the residue from whatever that mechanism is. It’s also old. As far as I can tell, this variety is now self-sustaining.”

  “What?”

  Jay shook his head impatiently. “Bad term. Look, I don’t know enough about terraforming to give you all the answers. We don’t research this stuff here, Rega never allowed it. Not really my interest, either, but I can appreciate good work when I see it. My understanding is, any alien environment is going to have certain properties, if not inimical, at least unfriendly to Terran flora. A certain amount of fundamental change has to be wrought in the biosphere of any colony to make it support our plantlife.”

  “That’s important?”

  “Absolutely. We can ship a lot of food these days, but you don’t want to do that unless you want to keep the colony in debt forever. Eventually, they have to grow their own food. So in the early days—maybe the Spacers still do it—we’d seed an environment with vonoomans that would burrow in and reconstitute everything, change the ratios of nutrients in the soil, alter the nitrogen cycle or even introduce a nitrogen cycle if there wasn’t one. After a few generations, with a lot of effort, the colony would begin to support our plantlife. Once we had it established, the vonoomans were no longer necessary.”