Asimov’s Future History Volume 16

by Isaac Asimov

  “Councilor Sinter would appreciate some results,” the young man said.

  “Farad must have some concern for my health!” Vara shot back. “If I become ill or burn myself out, what will he do then? I’m all the ammunition he has in this little war of his!” Her tone surprised her. She was close to the limits of her endurance. But rather than keep the focus on Farad’s need for her, she pushed the onus onto the major. “If you’re responsible for my effectiveness being reduced... What will Councilor Sinter say then?”

  The young man considered this possibility with little apparent emotion. “You’re the one who has to answer to him. I’m just here to watch over you.”

  Vara Liso held back a sharp bolt of anger. How close they come! They don’t even know!

  “Well, take me to a place where I can rest,” she demanded sharply. “She’s not here. I don’t know where she is. I haven’t sensed her for three days!”

  “Councilor Sinter is especially concerned that you should find her. You told us she was the strongest–”

  “Other than me!” Vara shouted. “But I haven’t felt her!”

  The blond major seemed to get it through his head that she wasn’t going to work anymore today.

  “The councilor will be disappointed,” he said, then bit his lower lip again.

  Is everybody here an idiot? Vara raged inwardly, but realized anger, letting her exhaustion control her, would get her nowhere, and could even harm her chances of getting what she wanted from Sinter. “I need to be alone for a while, rest, not talk,” she said hoarsely. “We can try again tomorrow, in another Sector. I need a smaller area to work in–a few blocks at most. We need more agents and better reports.”

  “Of course,” the major said, matching her tone with a more reasonable approach of his own. “Our intelligence has been a little weak. We’ll try it again tomorrow.”

  “Thank you,” she said softly. The major walked through the empty apartment and stood by the door, holding it open for her. She was almost through the door when a sharp spike of what she could only call envy shot through her: the sudden awareness she was close to a fellow human with talents like her own. Her face went white, and she stammered, “N-n-not yet. She’s here!”

  “Where?” the major demanded, pushing her back to the window.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Vara muttered as he propelled her. They treat me like a despicable runt! But the excitement of the chase was strong. She pointed a trembling finger and wiped her lips with the back of her other hand. “Down there! She’s close!”

  The agent peered down into the crowd, following the line of the small woman’s finger. He saw a female figure, swift and almost colorless, dart through the crowds toward the entrance of a plunger.

  Immediately, he used his comm to alert other agents on the street below.

  “You’re sure?” he demanded of Vara, but she could only point and rub her lips, the sensation was so great. She had to work hard to keep from trembling. She hated this sensation–had come to know it whenever she was around the others in Wanda and Stet tin’s group, but never as strongly as this. Envy like an ache in her chest, as if this girl could steal everything in life from her and leave only empty expectations and endless disappointment!

  “Her!” she said. “Get her, please!”

  Something made Klia’s scalp feel as if it were on fire, and she cried out as she darted into the plunger cab. Two older men with heavy black-and-gray mustaches looked at her with mild concern.

  Klia could not see over their shoulders. She jumped and caught a glimpse of two square-featured men running as fast as they could toward the open plunger doors. The doors started to close; the agents shouted for it to stop, and even flashed code blinkers to take control of the mechanism.

  Klia dug into her pocket and produced a maintenance key, illegal but standard issue for couriers. The elevator doors hesitated, then stopped. She plunged her key into the control panel and shouted, “Emergency! Down now!”

  The doors resumed closing. The two men could not make it and pounded on the outside, shouting for her to stop.

  The older males gave her a wide berth. “Where would you like to get off?” she asked breathlessly, smiling.

  “The next level, please,” one of them said. “Fine.” She gave the plunger its instructions, then made the older males forget they had seen her or experienced anything out of the ordinary.

  They stepped out onto the next level, and she quickly ordered the doors to close again. With a sigh, she leaned against the dirt-smeared wall. A scratchy mechanical voice said, “Emergency instructions. Which maintenance level?”

  She reached out with all her strength and found spots of trouble for many levels above and below. Her scalp still hurt. She had to get out of range of the teams sent to find her. There was only one likely direction–down.

  “Bottom,” she answered. “Zero.”

  Four kilometers beneath all the occupied levels–

  The suburban rivers.

  18.

  TRITCH MET MORS Planch in neutral territory, far from the hold but aft of the crew quarters, in a weightless service hallway. If she had hoped to have him at a disadvantage in weightless conditions, she had hoped in vain; Planch was as much at home weightless as in standard gravitation.

  “Your corpse has some remarkable talents,” she said as Planch pushed into view around the curve of the bulkhead.

  “Your crew suffers some remarkable ethical lapses,” Planch replied.

  Tritch shrugged. “Ambition is a constant curse these days. I found Gela Andanch outside the hold, in very bad condition. He’s stable now in the infirmary.”

  Planch nodded; Lodovik had not heard the man’s name, and had just happened to run into Planch while carrying the limp body forward. Planch had taken Andanch and told Lodovik to return to the hold. Presumably, he was still there.

  “What were they looking for?”

  “Someone paid them off,” Tritch said lightly. “I presume it was someone opposed to the party or parties paying you. If they delivered Lodovik Trema, they’d each get fifty times what I pay them in a standard year. That’s a lot of money, even for Imperial corruption.”

  “What are you going to do with them?” Planch asked.

  “I presume they would have taken the ship and put us out of action, maybe killed us. Trin is in my cabin now, drinking heavily–and not Trillian, either. When she’s drunk enough, I might just toss her out of the hold over Trantor, and hope she burns up over the Palace.” Tritch’s eyelids fluttered slightly, and her lips grew tight. “She was a good first mate. My problem now is, what should I do with you?”

  “I haven’t betrayed you,” Planch said.

  “And you haven’t told me the truth. Whatever Lodovik Trema is, he isn’t human. Trin is babbling about simulacra, robots. Whoever paid her off told her she’d be looking for mechanical men. What do you know about robots?”

  “He’s not a robot,” Planch said with a shake of his head and a smile. “Nobody makes robots anymore.”

  “In our nightmares,” Tritch said. “Class B filmbooks. Tiktoks with mutated brains bent on mindless revenge. But Lodovik Trema... first councilor to the Chief Commissioner of Public Safety?”

  “It’s nonsense,” Planch said shortly, as if this entire conversation was beneath his dignity.

  “I looked it up, Mors.” Tritch’s face suddenly became sad, assuming a kind of limpness away from the draw of gravitation. “You were right. Neutrinos in sufficient numbers are deadly. And there’s no shielding against neutrino flux.”

  “He’s dying,” Planch lied. “His condition in any case has to be kept secret.”

  Tritch shook her head. “I don’t believe you. But I’m going to keep my word and drop you on Madder Loss.” She mused for a moment. “Maybe I’ll drop Trin and Andanch there with you, let you all work things out. Now go confer with your dead minister.”

  She turned and headed forward.

  “What about getting back into my cabin?�
� Planch said.

  “I’ll send food and a cot back to the hold. If I let someone who consorts with a living corpse go forward, I’d have a mutiny on my hands. We’ll be at Madder Loss in a day and a half.”

  Planch shuddered as she passed out of sight. He, too, didn’t like associating with Lodovik Trema. Tritch was perfectly correct.

  Nobody aboard the Arrow of Destiny could have survived. Nobody human.

  Lodovik stood in the hold beside his box, hands folded, waiting for Planch to return. By his actions, Lodovik had apparently brought severe harm to a human being, and yet the expected difficulties of such a situation–decrease in mental frequency, critical reexamination, and under extreme circumstances, even complete shut-down–did not affect him much, if at all. Even allowing for the extended nature of his long-term mission for Daneel–and under the provisions of the Zeroth Law–there should have been deeply uncomfortable repercussions.

  Yet there were none to speak of. Lodovik felt calm and fully functional. He did not feel contented–he had caused damage and was aware of that, quite clearly–but he experienced nothing like the near-paralyzing realization of having broken one of the Calvinian Three Laws.

  Clearly, something within him had changed. He was trying to track down what that might be when Planch returned.

  “We’re stuck back here for the duration,” Planch said matter-of-factly. “I had a very nice cabin, too. And the captain and I were...” He shook his head sadly, then his features sharpened. “Never mind. Something is very wrong with this whole scenario.”

  “What might that be?” Lodovik asked. He stretched and smiled. The human persona slid smoothly over all his other functions. “The box was cramped, but I’ve spent time in worse conditions. I emerged at the wrong moment, I suppose?”

  “No supposing about it. The man suffered a heart attack.”

  “I’m very sorry. But they were up to no good, I’m afraid.”

  “Someone else wants you, alive or dead,” Planch said. “I thought the Chief Commissioner of Public Safety was pretty much unassailable. Invincible.”

  “Nobody is invincible in this forsaken time,” Lodovik said. “I apologize for causing you difficulties.”

  Planch stared hard at Lodovik. “Up until now I’ve ignored all my misapprehensions about this mission, about you. In Imperial politics, anything can happen–individuals can be worth entire solar systems. That’s how centralized politics works.”

  “Surely you’re not a diffusionist, Mors Planch?”

  “No. There’s no money and not much life in being a traitor to Linge Chen.”

  “You mean, to the Emperor.”

  Planch did not correct himself. “My curiosity has been piqued to dangerous levels, however. Curiosity is like neutrino flux–it can penetrate anything, and in sufficient quantity, it can kill. I’m aware of that... But my curiosity about you...” He clamped his jaw shut and looked away.

  “I’m a middle-aged man with extraordinary good fortune, let’s leave it at that,” Lodovik said, making a wry face. “There are things neither you nor I can be told... and we would be best served by keeping our curiosities in check. Yes, I should be dead. I know that better than anybody. The reason I am not dead, however, has nothing to do with extraordinary superstitions about... what was it... robots? You can rest assured on that point. Mors Planch.”

  “This isn’t the first I’ve heard about robots, you know,” Planch said. “Murmurs about artificial humans sweep the worlds from time to time, like a dusty breeze. Thirty-five years ago, there was a massacre in a Seventh Octant system. Four planets were involved, quite prosperous worlds, united by a proud common culture, shaping up to be a real force in Imperial economics.”

  “I remember,” Lodovik said. “The ruler claimed he had positive proof that robots had infiltrated to the highest levels, and were fomenting rebellion. Very sad.”

  “Billions died,” Mors Planch said.

  Lodovik said, “I presume you will be paid well for your heroic rescue.”

  Planch’s face went slack. “That’s the trouble with this whole situation,” he said. “The captain and crew don’t like us. Honor is a sometimes thing with these people, and I should know... It’s the same with my people, ancestral traits as it were. They’ll take us where we want to go, but there’s always a chance they’ll talk out of turn in a spaceport somewhere... And there’s nothing I can do about that. But it’s all incredible enough, I suppose nobody will believe. I wouldn’t myself.

  “I’ve told Linge Chen you’re dead. The rescue failed.”

  Lodovik drew his head back, pressing his chin into double folds of flesh. “And we go to Madder Loss?”

  Planch nodded. A look of sadness crossed his face, but he said no more.

  19.

  LINGE CHEN WAS preparing for the informal dinner party at the Emperor’s private quarters when Kreen brought him the sealed message from Planch. In the green oceanic depths of his meditation and personal room, he put aside the straight razor and soap he was using to shave, took a deep breath as Kreen departed, and placed his thumb on the small gray parcel. The first seal, applied by the receiver and decoder, came open at this touch–confirming his unique identity through microanalysis of his skin chemistry, as well as the pattern of his thumbprint. The second seal, within the disk’s message itself, he opened through a few words spoken in his voice, known only to himself. The message flowered before him.

  Mors Planch stood within a ship, the background in soft focus for the moment, and said in low tones, “My lord Chief Commissioner Chen, I am within the Spear of Glory. The ship I have hired is the only one to have found the vessel so far, and I anticipate with some personal concern your deep disappointment at the news I bring. Your councilor is dead, along with the rest of the crew...”

  Linge Chen’s lips worked as he played back the rest of the message. Planch showed the grim details: the rows of bodies arranged within one chamber, the discovery of the body of Lodovik Trema on the bridge, curled and still. Planch confirmed Trema’s identity by placing the Commissioner’s own identifier on Trema’s bracelet.

  Linge Chen shut off the message before it could reveal the unnecessary details of what Planch would do next. The body would not be retrieved; the vessel’s discovery would be forgotten. Linge Chen did not wish to be accused of favoritism or extravagance, not at this time, when he was hoping to bring down Farad Sinter on the same charge.

  For a moment, he felt like a small boy. He had been so convinced that Lodovik Trema moved on a different and superior plane to the rest of humanity. He could never admit it to himself, much less any other, but he had trusted as well as admired Trema. His personal instincts, which had proved almost infallible, had told him that Trema would never betray him, never do anything not in Linge Chen’s best interests. He had even invited Trema to join his family on special occasions, the only councilor (or Commissioner, for that matter) he had ever invited to do so.

  Lodovik Trema had been a steady and pleasant presence on those occasions, playing solemnly and with his own kind of innocence with Linge Chen’s children, extravagantly complimenting their mothers on their cooking, which was adequate at best. And Lodovik’s advice...

  Lodovik Trema had never given Chen bad advice. They had risen together to this supreme pinnacle of responsibility over twenty-five years of, at first, inglorious and often painful service. They had weathered the end of Agis’s reign and the first years of the junta, and Lodovik had proven invaluable in designing the Commission of Public Safety to moderate and eventually replace the junta’s military rulers.

  Ten minutes passed. Kreen knocked gently on the door to the chamber. “Yes,” Chen said. “I’m almost done.”

  He picked up the razor and finished shaving his fine beard, leaving smooth, pallid skin behind. Then, as a measure of his emotion, he cut two small slices in his skin just in front of his left ear. Blood welled over the hairs and he patted it with a white towel, then dropped the towel into an incinerator, offering
his own blood to the powers that be, unspecified.

  In his youth in the Imperial Education Municipality of Runim, he had learned such rituals as part of the path to adulthood, following the Rules of Tua Chen. Tua Chen had been the most successful product of the secret plan among orthodox Ruellians to develop a select breed of Imperial administrators and bureaucrats, four thousand years before, known as the Shining Lights. In his late maturity, Tua Chen had devised two Books of Rules, based on Ruellian principles: one for the training of aristocratic administrators (and occasionally an Emperor), the other for the training of the Empire’s hundreds of billions of bureaucrats, the Greys.

  Linge Chen was reputedly a direct descendant of Tua Chen.

  The Shining Light school in its modern form was rife with superstition and almost useless, but in its heyday it had trained administrators that were sent to the far corners of the Empire. And in return, from allover the Empire, each year, millions of candidate Greys came to Trantor to receive the Tua Chen training. The best assumed positions in the planet’s infinitely layered bureaucracy, competing with the entrenched and resentful Trantor Greys; the rest, having completed their pilgrimage, returned to their homes, or took positions on frontier worlds.

  Linge Chen was the most successful of all the students to come out of the school, and he had not succeeded by being overly observant of those damnably persuasive secret rituals. But for Lodovik Trema...

  It was the very least he could do.

  “Sire...” Kreen said. With some concern, he observed his master’s small wounds, but he knew enough to say nothing.

  “I’m done. Bring me my robe for Imperial presence, and also the sash of black.”