Asimov’s Future History Volume 16

by Isaac Asimov

  That man was never wrong, and he had not been wrong this time. Where all others might be dead, one might still be alive... And he must not be returned to Chen. He must be reported dead.

  Lodovik Trema blinked slowly, calmly, at Planch. Planch held his fingers to his lips, and whispered, “You’re still dead, sir. Don’t move or make a sound.” Then he spoke a coded phrase incorporating both numbers and words that the man of many faces had told him to use.

  Tritch watched them from across the bridge. “What did you find?” she asked.

  “The man I’m looking for,” Planch said. “He lived a little longer. He must have arranged the others, then come here to die.”

  As he brought out Lodovik, Tritch tried to back away, but could not find a grip fast enough. The body, curled and lifeless, floated ahead of Planch, under Tritch’s nose, and she nearly gagged with some reflex expectation.

  “Don’t worry,” Planch said. “This one doesn’t smell much. It’s colder on the bridge.”

  Tritch could not believe they had come all this way just to retrieve a single body. Back aboard the Flower of Evil, with Lodovik safely stowed in a box in the hold, she passed Planch a bottle of Trillian water of life, and he poured himself a glass and lifted it in cheerless toast.

  “The Chief Commissioner wanted to make sure. And now that we know he’s dead, and all the others with him, I’m to take him back to his home world and see him decently buried, with full Imperial honors.”

  “And leave all the others? That seems a little bizarre.”

  Planch shrugged. “I don’t question my orders.”

  “Which world is he from?”

  “Madder Loss,” Planch replied.

  Tritch shook her head in disbelief. “A man in such high authority, from a planet of disgraced parasites?”

  Planch inspected his glass and lifted one finger before finishing its contents. Then he poked glass and finger at Tritch. “I remind you of our contract,” he said. “The death of this man could have political repercussions.”

  “I don’t even know his name.”

  “People could guess from what little you do know, if you spread it around in the wrong places. And if you do, I’ll find out.”

  “I keep my contracts, and I keep my mouth shut.”

  “And your crew?”

  “You must have known we were trustworthy when you hired us,” Tritch said softly, dangerously.

  “Yes, well it’s even more important now.”

  Tritch stood and lifted the bottle from the table between them. She corked it firmly. “You’ve insulted me, Mors Planch.”

  “An excess of caution, no insult intended.”

  “Nevertheless, an insult. And you ask me to go to a world that no self-respecting citizen willingly visits.”

  “They’re citizens on Madder Loss, too.”

  She closed her eyes and shook her head. “How long do we stay?”

  “Not long. You drop me there and leave at your own pleasure.”

  Tritch was finding this harder and harder to believe. “I will ask no more questions,” she said, and tucked the bottle under her arm. Apparently Planch was no longer so attractive to her, and henceforth their relationship would be strictly professional.

  Planch regretted this, but only slightly.

  When he delivered Lodovik Trema to Madder Loss, he would be a very wealthy man, and he would never have to work for anyone again. He imagined buying his own luxury vessel–one that he could keep in tip-top condition, which was more than could be said for most Imperial ships.

  As for the strange and tightly disciplined man in the hold, a man who could stay enclosed in a coffin for days without complaint or need...

  The less he thought about that, the better.

  Lodovik lay in the darkness, fully alert but quiescent, having heard the coded phrase that alerted him to Daneel’s participation in his rescue. He was to cooperate fully with Mors Planch; eventually, he would be brought back to Trantor.

  What would happen to him there, Lodovik did not know. Having performed three self-checks in the coffin-shaped box, he was reasonably certain that his positronic brain had been altered in subtle ways. The results of his self-checks were contradictory, however.

  To keep himself from deteriorating through disuse, he activated his human emotional overlay and ran diagnostics on that, as well. It seemed intact; he could operate as a human in human society, and that provided some relief. However, the contact with Mors Planch on the bridge of the Spear of Glory had been too brief for him to try out these functions. Best to be kept isolated until a more thorough test could be performed.

  Above all, he must not reveal himself to be a robot. For all the robots in Daneel’s cadres, this was of paramount importance. It was essential that humans never learn the extent to which robots had infiltrated their societies.

  Lodovik put his human overlay into the background and began a complete memory check. To do so, he had to shut down his control of external motion for twenty seconds. He could still see and hear, however.

  It was at this moment that something bumped against the box. He heard fumbling outside, then the sound of metal scraping against metal. The seconds ticked by... five, seven, ten...

  The lid of the box was pried open with a metallic groan. With his head turned to one side, half facing the wall of the box, he could only gather a blurry glimpse of one face peering in, and a fleeting impression of one other. Eighteen seconds... the memory check was almost complete.

  “He certainly looks dead.” A woman’s voice.

  The memory check ended, but he decided to remain still.

  “His eyes are open.” A male voice, not that of Mors Planch.

  “Turn him over and look for identification,” the woman said.

  “Sky, no! You do it. It’s your bounty.”

  The woman hesitated. “His skin is pink.”

  “Radiation burns.”

  “No, he looks healthy.”

  “He’s dead,” the man said. “He’s been in this box for a day and a half. No air.”

  “He just doesn’t look like a corpse.” She reached in and pinched the tissue of his exposed hand. “Cool, but not cold.”

  Lodovik blanched his skin slowly, and dropped his external temperature to match the ambient. He felt inefficient and incompetent for not having done that earlier.

  “He looks pale enough to me,” the man remarked. Another hand touched his skin. “He’s cold as ice. You’re imagining things.”

  “Dead or whatever he may be, he’s worth a fortune,” the woman said.

  “I know Mors Planch by reputation, Trin,” the man said. “He won’t just hand his prize over to you.”

  Lodovik, on his conveyance into the rescue ship, had heard the name “Trin” applied to a woman he gathered was second-in-command to the captain, Tritch. This could be a very serious situation.

  “Take his picture,” Trin said. “I’ll get a message out this sleep and we’ll learn if he’s the one they want.”

  A camera was lifted over the box and silently recorded his image. Lodovik tried to model all the possible causes for this behavior, all the scenarios and their potential outcomes.

  “Besides, Tritch has given her word to Planch,” the man continued. “She’s known to be honorable.”

  “If we succeed, we’ll make ten times what Planch is paying Tritch,” Trin said tightly. “We could buy our own ship and become free traders on the periphery. Never have to deal with Imperial taxes or inspections again. Maybe even go to work in a free system.”

  “Pretty rough territories, I hear,” the man said. “Freedom is always dangerous,” Trin said. “All right. We’re here. We’ve broken the seals on the box. We’re committed. Make an incision in his scalp and let’s get what we came for.”

  The man withdrew what sounded like a scalpel from his pocket. Lodovik activated his eyes and watched them in the dim light of the hold. The man swore under his breath and brought the scalpel down.

 
Lodovik could not allow himself to be cut. He would bleed from any superficial wound, but even an untrained eye would see that he was not human if the scalpel cut deep. Lodovik quickly calculated all the pluses and minuses of any particular action he might take, and arrived at the optimal, based on what he knew.

  His arm shot up from the box. His hand wrapped around the wrist of the man with the scalpel. “Hello,” Lodovik said, and rose to a sitting position.

  The man seemed to have a fit. He jerked and shrieked and tried to pull his hand away, then shrieked again. His eyes rolled up to show nothing but white and foam appeared on his lips. For several seconds he twitched in Lodovik’s grasp, as Lodovik appraised the situation from his new perspective.

  Trin backed toward the hatchway. She looked terrified, but not as terrified as the man in his grip. Lodovik judged the man’s condition and carefully removed the scalpel from his fingers, then released him. The man clutched his shoulder and gasped, his face turning a medically questionable pale green.

  “Trin,” the man groaned, twisting toward her. Then he collapsed. Lodovik climbed from the box and bent to examine him. The woman near the hatch seemed transfixed.

  “Your friend is suffering a heart attack,” Lodovik said, glancing at her. “Do you have a doctor or medical appliances on this ship?”

  The first mate gave a small, birdlike cry and fled.

  17.

  KLIA ASGAR APPROACHED her contact in Fleshplay, a tough though popular family and labor resort on the outskirts of Dahl, near the entertainment Sector of Little Kalgan. Here, acts and rides from Little Kalgan itself were tried on very tough customers before they were exported around Trantor.

  Fleshplay was full of brilliantly illuminated signs climbing up the walls of buildings almost to the ceil of the dome, announcing new shows and performance teams, old favorites revived in the Stardust Theater, popular beverages, stimulk, even outlaw stims from offworld. Klia glanced at the pouring cascades of projected beverages with a dry and thirsty appreciation.

  She had been standing in a store alcove for twenty minutes waiting for her contact, not daring to abandon her position even for the time it might take to get a drink at a nearby street-vendor stall.

  Klia watched the crowds with more than just her eyes, and saw them in more than just surface detail. On the surface, all seemed well enough. Men, women, and children at this evening hour strolled by in what passed for leisure-time dress in Dahl, white blouses and black culottes with red stripes around the waist for the women, pink jumpsuits for prepubescent children, a more rakish cut of black worksuit for the men. A more than cursory examination showed the strain, however.

  These were the higher citizen classes in Dahl, the more fortunate day-shift and managerial workers, functionally the equivalent of the omnipresent gray-clad bureaucrats in other Sectors, yet there was a grimness in their faces when they weren’t actively responding to banter or forcing smiles. Their eyes seemed tired, a little glazed, from months of disappointment and extensive layoffs. Klia could read the colors of their internal moods as well, caught in brief flashes, since she was otherwise occupied: angry purples and bilious green murmurings hidden within the deep holes of their minds, not auras, but pits into which she could glimpse only from certain mental perspectives.

  Nothing extraordinary in all this; Klia knew what the mood of Dahl was, and tried to ignore it as often as possible. Full immersion would not just distract her, but could even infect. She had to remain isolated from the general herd to keep her edge.

  She recognized the boy as soon as he walked into view across the street. He was perhaps a year older than she, shorter and squat, with a pinched face marked by several small scars on his cheek and chin, gang marks from Billibotton’s tougher streets. She had delivered goods and information to him several times in the last year, when better courier jobs were not to be had. Now, she realized she might be seeing even more of him, and she did not like it one bit. He was tough to convince...

  Good jobs had become almost impossible to find in the past few days. Klia was known to be marked; few trusted her. Her income had plummeted almost to nothing, and worse still, she had narrowly escaped being captured by a gang of thugs whose leader she had never seen before. There were new folks in town, with new allegiances, providing new dangers.

  Klia still had confidence in her ability to worm her way out of any tight situation, but the effort was exhausting her. She longed for a quiet place with friends, but she had few friends–none willing to take her in the way things were.

  It was enough to make her rethink her whole philosophy of life.

  The pinch-faced boy caught sight of Klia when she wanted to be seen, then went through a deliberate masquerade of casually ignoring her. She did the same, but edged closer, looking around as if waiting for somebody else.

  When they were within earshot, the boy said, “We’re not interested in what you’re carrying today. Why don’t you just slink out of Dahl and plague someone else?”

  Brusqueness and even rudeness meant little, she was so used to them. “We have a contract,” Klia said casually. “I deliver, you pay. My day boss won’t take it well if you–”

  “Word here is your day boss is in the sinks,” the boy said, staring at her boldly. “And so’s every other day or night boss who used you. Even Kindril Nashak! Word is he’s been threatened with Rikerian, held with no charges! A free warning, girlie. No more!”

  The noose was closing. “What do I do with this?” Klia asked, lifting the thin box under her arm.

  “I take nothing and pay nothing, that’s the word. Now slink!”

  Klia glanced at him for less than a second. The boy shook his head as if touched by a buzzing insect, then looked right through her. He would not report having seen her.

  If everybody wanted her to vanish, and there was no longer any work or reason to stay, it really was time to vanish. The thought scared her; she had never been outside Dab! for more than a few hours. She had less than two weeks’ living in credits, a lot of those black-market exchanges good only for local merchants–who might shun her business now anyway.

  Klia walked up the street to a less prosperous neighborhood, known euphemistically as Softer Fleshplay, and ducked through a fractured plastic front into an abandoned food stall. There, among scattered old wrappers and broken sticks of furniture, she cut the security seal on her package and opened it, to see if it contained anything valuable outside Dahl.

  Papers and a bookfilm. She leafed through them and examined the seal on the bookfilm; personal stuff, in code, nothing she could decipher or sell anywhere. She had known that before she opened the package. She was handling only cut-rate deliveries anyway, often enough backup deliveries, information too tricky to risk being sent where security eyes could intercept it, yet not so tricky anyone wanted to pay large sums for better couriers...

  And once she had been the very best of couriers, one of the highest paid in Dahl, inheritor of a tradition thousands of years old, as convoluted and ornate with language and ritual as any religious commerce off Trantor. Sometimes, even official and public papers were handed to the Dahlite couriers by legitimate day bosses, just to ensure faster delivery now that other communications systems were so often stalled or subject to surveillance by the Commission.

  For her, it had all come to nothing, in just a few days!

  With a jerk, she realized she was crying, silently, but nevertheless crying.

  She wiped her face and blew her nose on a reasonably clean if dusty wrapper, dropped the package in the litter, and took to the street again.

  Once outside, she crossed the street and waited for a few minutes. Soon enough Klia saw her tail, the one she expected would be after her if the delivery failed. It was a small, thin girl only a few years younger than she, pretending to play in the streets, dressed in a scaled-down version of a black heatsink work jumper. Klia was too far away to exert any persuasion, or learn anything; but she did not need to.

  The girl darted into
the abandoned stall and emerged a few seconds later with the shredded wrappings and contents of the package.

  Klia had tailed couriers at the very beginning, sometimes cleaning up after failed deliveries. Now, it was being done to her. This was the last slap in the face, the final insult.

  The street traffic was increasing. With the darkening ceil, the lights on the marquees above the streets would become brighter and more frantic, the crowds would jam shoulder to shoulder, looking for a moment’s relief from dreary lives. For a hunted person, such a crush could be fatal. Anything could happen in a crowd, and she would be hard-pressed to persuade, hide, make the masses forget, or even just get away quickly; she might be found and killed.

  She thought of the man in dusty green. The memory of him did not make her scalp itch, but she would have to fall much lower before she gave up her independence and actually joined a movement, even if they claimed to be like her...

  Perhaps especially if they were like her! The thought of being among people who could do what she did

  Suddenly, everyone around her made her scalp itch. With a moan, she pushed through the roiling crowds, looking for the entrance to a plunger, the large, ancient elevators that worked the levels in Dahl and most of the other Sectors of Trantor.

  Vara Liso, exhausted and haggard, begged the stolid young major by her side to let her rest. “I’ve been here for hours,” she groaned. Her head ached, her clothes were drenched in sweat, her vision blurred.

  Major Namm plucked at his Imperial insignia absently, chewing on his lower lip. Vara focused on him with a hatred she had seldom felt before–but she dared not hurt him.

  “Nobody?” he asked in a gruff tone.

  “I’ve found nobody for the last three days,” she said. “You’ve scared them all away.”

  He stepped back from the edge of the balcony overlooking the crowded Trans-Dahl thoroughfare through Fleshplay. Throngs on foot passed below the balcony, while trains and robos on elevated rails and narrow slaveways rumbled a few meters above them, rattling the empty apartment. Vara had been surveying the crowds from that location for seven hours; dark was falling quickly and the bright street signs across the thoroughfare were beginning to give her a headache. She simply wanted to sleep.