by Isaac Asimov
Coren shifted uncomfortably, conscious of the pocketful of little machines he still carried since returning from Lyzig. “This looks like the plant itself was altered.”
Jay nodded vigorously. “Sometimes the job was too big and we’d be forced to adapt the plants, meet the environment halfway, so to speak.”
“And this is that kind of plant?”
“That’s my guess. Like I said, I don’t have enough data.”
“All right, where would I go to get that data?”
“Someone who manufactures biologicals, I’d say.”
Coren thought for a moment, then nodded. “Can I have a copy of this?”
Jay handed him a disk. “Already had it prepared. Do you mind if I keep working on this?”
“I thought it wasn’t your field.”
“Not now. But who knows what we’ll get into since Rega died?”
Coren pocketed the disk and stood. “Let me know if you find anything else, would you?”
“Of course.”
Jay turned back to his screens, forgetting about Coren in the time it took to become reabsorbed in his puzzle.
Coren did not return to his office. Disk in hand, he left DyNan and headed for the nearest tubeway.
To his surprise, Myler Towne’s people brought him directly into the garden where Coren had first met the new chairman of Imbitek less than three months earlier. The ugly patch of dead foliage he had seen on that initial visit was now a flourishing sprawl of green and yellow.
“Mr. Lanra,” Towne said, stepping forward to greet him. “Good to see you again, sir, and good to see you in full health. I heard about your injuries. If possible, I would like to hear about that. May I offer you a beverage?”
“Tea would be fine, thank you. Actually, I’m here for two reasons.” He held up the disk Jay had given him. “On this is a preliminary analysis of some plantlife that my people can’t fully explain. I thought perhaps, since Imbitek once worked in the field, I might impose on your good graces to help me out.”
Towne took the disk, seemed to think about it for a moment, then held it up. An attendant stepped up. “A.S.A.P.” The man bowed sharply and hurried off. “And the other?”
“I wanted to find out if that job offer still exists.”
Towne’s eyebrows raised slowly. He was a big man, broad across the shoulders and deep in the chest, and the gesture somehow made him look even larger. He backed up to his chair and sat down.
“Possibly,” he said finally. “Is our analysis of your disk a factor in your decision?”
“No, not really. Since Rega died, things are going on in DyNan that I’m not particularly happy with. I had loyalty to Rega, not his company. I’m open to an offer.”
A man with a tray bearing a pitcher and two tall glasses appeared. Coren accepted his tea.
“And your opinion of Imbitek?” Towne asked, taking his own glass.
“Mikels is going to be in prison for a long time, and everything I’ve seen since you’ve taken over suggests I would be working for an honest employer.”
“I’m flattered by your assessment. I detect a proviso, though.”
“I’m working on a last detail on behalf of Rega. I don’t know how long it might take, but any change in my status will have to wait till I finish. Could be a week, no more than a month.”
“I see. And this disk pertains to that?”
“It does.”
“Then let us see how quickly we can resolve your situation. We can discuss it further at that time. But I’m pleased, Mr. Lanra. Have you had lunch yet?”
Lunch was excellent, but Coren was more amazed at the prodigious amounts Myler Towne ate. Coren was not a small man, and he kept himself fit and active, but Towne consumed easily three times what Coren ate. Conversation ran from one topic to another with almost dizzying abruptness, and Coren could not help but feel tested.
Halfway through a long ramble about a vacation in the southern hemisphere in one of the nature preserves, a woman approached the table and whispered to Towne. He looked up.
“Indeed? Interesting.” He finished his aperitif and gestured for Coren to follow. “We have something you can take with you.”
Coren followed him down a broad, arching corridor. “That was fast.”
“Perhaps just luck,” Towne said, shrugging. “We do have an excellent staff.”
They entered a meeting room. A long table dominated, surrounded by plain chairs. A screen covered one wall, opposite a fully-equipped dispenser. One woman waited for them. She was older than anyone else Coren had seen within the walls of Imbitek, her hair white like Alda Mikels’, the former CEO. Her features were sharp and alert. She frowned at Coren as he entered the room, then gave Towne a brief nod.
“You brought this disk?” she asked.
“Yes,” Coren answered.
“Where’d you get it?”
“It’s an analysis—”
“I know what it is, young man. I want to know where the sample came from.”
“An abandoned research lab called Nova Levis.”
She seemed for a few seconds not to believe him. “I’d love to know how it got there. None of this ought to exist on Earth.”
“What is it, Dr. Savin?” Towne asked.
“It’s actually one of our products,” she said. “And it’s an interdicted organic. Not allowed on Earth because the processes by which it was originally manufactured are not allowed here anymore.” She touched a remote on the table. The wall screen lit with the same displays Coren had seen on Jay’s terminals. “Do you know what vonoomans are?”
“Yes. Tiny machines, semi-autonomous—”
“Wrong.” She shrugged. “Well, not entirely. That’s what they would be today. But it’s an incomplete definition for what are now no longer complete examples of vonoomans.” She drummed her fingers impatiently on the table, staring at the display.
Towne cleared his throat. “What have you found?”
She started, as if jarred out of a complex thought. “We hold the design rights on the vonoomans that made this grass.”
“Imbitek?” Towne asked.
“We were called Imbedded Technologies and Environmental Manipulators, Incorporated, at the time, but essentially, yes. It was fully half our sales right before the first wave of interstellar colonization began.”
“You’re talking about the Spacers?” Coren asked. “Those colonists?”
“Exactly.” She sighed, exasperated. “Let me explain some things.”
“I think you had better,” Towne said ponderously and sat down.
Dr. Savin glared at Towne. “All right,” she said, and folded her hands together at her chin. She seemed to gather herself together mentally. Then she dropped her hands.
“We had two industries back then that literally saved our civilization, if not our lives. We forget how closely what we make determines how long we’ll last. And we forget how integrally what we make is a part of who we are. That’s probably why we never think about it. It’s a tenuous relationship in many ways because it’s so easy to break a system up and destroy it. The two industries were cybernetics—robotics, mainly—and nanotech. They went hand-in-glove, couldn’t really do one without the other. Nanotech required the machine-logic we got out of cybernetics and robotics required the miniaturization and process-concept of nanotech. That was before the Riots and the Interdicts.”
“The Interdicts pertain to robots, though,” Towne observed. “There’s no mention in them of nanotech.”
“Nanotech was phased out and banned more gradually,” Dr. Savin said. “Little at a time. By the time the robots were banned, no one really remembered the plagues.”
“Plagues?” Coren prompted.
“It’s complicated. I could recommend a couple of history texts for the details, but, in essence, we used nanotech to alter ecologies. We had to feed people, and we had a lot of people to feed. Population had leveled off at ten billion, but it fluctuated, and that many mouths put a heavy bu
rden on Earth’s resources. The only reason we didn’t devolve into absolute chaos was nanotech, which initially proved to be a panacea. We still use it in the home kitchens. Vat production is a direct descendent of agricultural nanotech. Crop yields increased ten, twenty-fold over time.”
“What happened?” Towne asked.
“It got away from us. Think of a virus. It invades a cell, analyzes what that cell does, then inserts itself into the machinery of the cell to modify it and use the cell to make copies of itself, releasing those copies to infect other cells and keep the process going. I’m simplifying—or making it more complex, depending how you look at it—but that’s what our agronans did. They altered the internal machinery of a plant to change what that plant did. Initially, it turned the plant into a super-productive organism, increasing yield. Over time, we found that this put a heavy burden on the soil and there were other problems with simply adding nutrients. So we built some vonoomans that would enter the cycle at an earlier point, in the soil, and increase the efficiency of the bacteria present, increasing nutrient absorption, complimenting the augmented crop demand, and so on. We found we could modify the system from top to bottom. Eventually, we even added some into the food products themselves to increase the efficiency of digestion and cell utilization of the nutrients available.”
“You mean, you passed vonoomans into people themselves?” Coren asked.
Dr. Savin nodded. “That’s when we started running into problems. We had allergic reactions, new cancers, a variety of metabolic disorders. Nothing we couldn’t adapt for and cope with. Initially, anyway. It got worse.”
“How was the population of vonoomans controlled?” Towne asked.
“That’s where it got worse. You see, the true definition of a vonooman includes self-replication.”
“Oh, dear,” Towne said.
Coren glanced from Towne to Savin. “ ‘Oh dear’ what?”
“It was deemed cost effective,” Savin went on, “to endow these devices with the ability to manufacture themselves. A small part of the energy involved went to reproduction. The math indicated it would be a self-regulating system. They would never produce more than the necessary quantity to achieve the desired effect.”
“But?” Coren prompted.
“Remember the virus. The damn things were designed to analyze environments and adapt to them. We thought that their range was limited, so the need for closer monitoring was unnecessary. In the first assumption, we were correct. In the second . . . well, we keep learning how very little is necessary to turn a benefit into a disaster.”
Coren thought for a moment. “Is this the source of the UPD infections?”
“You know about those, do you?” Dr. Savin asked. “Untreatable Physiological Dysfunction. Yes, they are. Were. Our machines mutated. Just enough. And all hell broke loose for about forty years.”
“This isn’t widely known.”
“No, it isn’t. People don’t really want to remember, so why help them? It ended, we controlled it. Here, anyway.”
“What do you mean?” Towne asked.
“This stuff was our largest export to the new colonies. It was absolutely essential to any terraforming effort on an alien world. The Spacer colonies were just getting started when the plagues began. By the time we were able to control them, the movement had changed from one of simple colonization to a panicked flight of the frightened wealthy. The last four or five Spacer colonies were established by hygienic paranoiacs.”
“Like the Solarians,” Coren said.
“They’re still paranoid,” Dr. Savin said.
Coren looked at the display. “So what is this?”
“This is a variety of hardy grass which was used early on to supplant indigenous flora on colony worlds. Very versatile. In this form, it carried its own potential colony of agronan machines. The plant manufactured them upon taking root in new soil and the machines would begin analyzing soil and atmosphere and returning that data to the plant itself to begin modifying it. While the plant was adapting, the vonoomans were spreading in the biosphere and changing it. Over several generations, the grass would literally remake the ecology and prepare it for other, less adaptable varieties. Originally, it was a variety of palm grass, setaria palmifolia. Common name was Burundi Grass.”
“That,” Towne said, “sounds familiar. Not in this context.”
“No, not in this context,” Dr. Savin said sardonically. “Burundi’s Fever.”
“Ah,” Towne said, nodding. He pointed. “From this?”
“We think so. Frankly, given the nature of Burundi’s Fever, the records are questionable.”
“I’ve heard the name,” Coren said. “But . . .”
“The Spacers have a different name for it,” Savin said. “They call it mnemonic plague.”
Coren thanked Myler Towne—and Dr. Savin, though she did not seem to hear—and returned to his private office. All the way back he thought of Ariel. Mnemonic plague . . . she had mentioned to him once that she had suffered it, that it, in fact, linked her with Derec Avery. They had been talking about the past and about their lives and her own story ended abruptly, and she had admitted that, beyond a certain point—beyond, it turned out, her first visit to Earth—she had no real memory of her life. The plague had destroyed her access to it, blocked her off with permanent amnesia—permanent because it was not induced psychically, but synaptically.
We’re both orphans, he thought, each in our own way . . .
He avoided thinking about the larger implications of what he had learned. Too much, too fast, and far outside the scope of his immediate interests.
Still, he had to admit that it explained a lot of the history of Earther and Spacer. It explained, for instance, the initial reluctance on the part of the Spacers to agree to a new colony program, to accept the Settler worlds. Fear of infection. A fear which had subsequently proven false, but certainly based on a real threat far in the past. Spacers even lived on Earth now, few though they were, and interacted with Terrans. What kept them apart now was more attitude than pathology.
But none of this explained why that grass had been in the abandoned shell of Nova Levis Research Labs, or how it had gotten there.
He opened the door to his office and stepped inside.
Hofton was there, again, waiting. Hofton stood.
“Mr. Lanra,” he said quietly, without preamble, “I have a message from Ambassador Setaris. She is—we are—that is, Aurora—very interested in taking some action concerning Gamelin. She would like to discuss it with you in person.”
Chapter 17
MASID ALREADY KNEW a few of Filoo’s agents. In the next days after his meeting with Rekker, Masid noticed a change in their attitude when he arrived at the bazaar. Before, they watched him the way they watched all freelance merchants and dealers, warily, but with no special attention. Now they seemed to be talking about him, paying closer attention, noting who bought from him.
Masid arrived at the open market on the fourth morning to be met by three visibly armed men. He slowed to a stop a couple meters from them. He recognized one as an agent of Filoo, but not the other two. One was short and stocky with a thick growth of beard, the other taller and clean-shaven.
“‘Morning,” Masid said.
“Yes, it is,” Filoo’s man said. “Got a minute to talk some business?”
“Sure.”
“Privately.”
Masid glanced left and right. He gestured. “Café over there, nobody there yet this early.”
“We had a more private place in mind.”
“I’m sure, but I might not like what you have to say. I prefer to find my way back after a disagreement.”
The agent shook his head, about to say more, when the stocky one grunted. The agent turned the gesture into a yawn and shrugged. “No way you’ll dislike what we have to say. But why not?” He craned his neck to peer at the café. “Gorim’s. They have good coffee. Sure.”
“After you,” Masid said.
> Masid trailed after the trio, keeping five meters between them. He watched the buyers and dealers to see if anyone followed him, but it seemed everyone else was too busy to notice.
Gorim kept his place bright up front, but the tables in back fell quickly into darkness. Candles flickered on each one. Masid found his three hosts waiting around one, their faces lit grimly by the fragile tongue of flame between them.
“All right,” Masid said, turning a chair around to straddle. He rested his arms on the back. “You have a proposal.”
“We’ve been watching you,” the agent said.
Masid held up a hand. “ ‘We’? Who’s that? And what’s your name?”
“Kar,” the agent said. He jerked a thumb at the clean-shaven one. “Tosher.”
Masid looked at the stocky one. “That makes you Filoo.”
The man stared silently at Masid for a long moment, then nodded. “Kar thinks I shouldn’t do my own negotiations. We have a disagreement about that. So we play this little game, which I always said was stupid.” He glared at Kar.
“This is the first time anybody’s figured it,” Kar protested weakly.
“One time too many,” Filoo said. He shrugged. “Security. When is it too much?”
“When you no longer enjoy doing what you’re doing,” Masid said.
Filoo looked surprised, then laughed quietly. “You’ve been selling steady for weeks now. What’s your supply?”
Masid started to rise.
“Whoa, whoa—” Kar said, one hand going into his jacket.
Filoo touched Kar’s shoulder. “Patience. What’s the problem? Question too difficult?”
“Question isn’t welcome. I don’t even know you and you think you can ask me something personal like that? Stick to neutral topics on a first meet, like who my mother’s sleeping with, or who you think you owe credit to, but nothing personal.”
