Isaac Asimov's Aurora

by Mark W. Tiedemann

  “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 over 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.

  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 situatio
n 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 frowned 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.

  The scent—something like sharp lavender—tickled his nose as he entered the forest.

  It would have been easy for Kru to lose him in this haze. But she only glanced back a few times to see that he kept up, and made no move to run. Masid still mistrusted her, but not because she seemed unreliable or somehow a traitor to Tilla. Rather, it was her barely contained paranoia that bothered Masid. She cared for Tilla, was clearly devoted to her, and trusted nothing outside her own ability to protect Tilla. Masid had yet to get past her inability to accept anything beyond the small apartment, beyond herself and Tilla, as benevolent. She wanted Masid gone. But she would not betray him at the risk of compromising Tilla. It was a precari­ous place to put his confidence.

  Nor would she disobey Tilla’s direct orders.

  “Who’s this Rekker we’re going to see?” Masid asked.

  “You’ll find out. He probably won’t talk to you anyway.” She glanced around. “Now shut up.”

  After half an hour, the forest thinned, then they stepped into a clear­ing. Masid looked at the ground—grassless, dark, a few local mosses stretched into the area, which formed a large circle. In the center stood a round structure of old metal sheeting, plastic, and a roof of thatch made of a combination of synthetic clothes, plastic strips, and native branches and dried leaves. Off to the right he saw the scattered piles of cannibal­ized equipment, old barrels and crates, and piles of junk gradually recom­bining into indecipherable configurations.

  There seemed to be no way into the structure. Kru held a hand up to stop Masid, then approached.

  “Rekker?” she called. “Got visitors. You here?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Got visitors.”

  “You said. Who?”

  “Come out and see.”

  “Shit . . .”

  From behind the structure a tall, lanky man with long, dark hair ambled out. He wore a faded jumpsuit with the sleeves cut off and oversized boots. Masid was surprised to see a clean-shaven face.

  He stopped a few paces from Masid. “I’m Rekker,” he said. “You know Kru, I guess.”

  “Slightly.”

  “Uh-huh. That’s all anybody knows Kru.” He turned a bright grin on her. “Just kidding. Who is he?”

  “Tilla trusts him,” Kru said.

  “Ah. I won’t ask if you do.” Rekker fixed a narrow look on Masid. “And why does Tilla trust you?”

  “We work for the same people, I suppose,” Masid said.

  “Mmm. I don’t like those people.”

  “I’m not fond of most of them myself.”

  “Why work for them, then?”

  Masid shrugged. “I get to set my own hours, there’s lots of travel, and I meet many interesting people. Other than that, it’s a job. Have to do something.”

  Rekker stared at him for a long time, then chuckled. “Good bet you want data. Come inside.”

  Masid followed the tall man around to the opposite side of his abode. There, the walls failed to meet, one end missing the other by more than a meter, forming the entrance. Within, Masid found a workbench that fol­lowed the curve of the inside wall nearly halfway around the circumfer­ence. Unlike the junk and refuse piled on one side of the clearing, here everything was neat and orderly. Equipment hummed and pulsed quietly. A tidy workshop.

  The other half of the interior contained chairs, a big couch, small tables, and the bulking cube of a hygienic module. A sleeping roll lay on the plastic floor.

  “Tilla must’ve said it was okay or Kru wouldn’t’ve brought you here,” Rekker said, dropping abruptly onto the couch. He waved at a chair. “That doesn’t mean I won’t make my own judgment about whether to trust you. Where were you born?”

  “Proclas.”

  Rekker’s ample eyebrows snapped up. “Settler? And you’re working for Earth? How does that work?”

  Masid rounded on Rekker. “All this talk about whether or not I’m trustworthy, nobody’s said anything to relieve my doubts about you.”

  Rekker nodded. “Wh
at do you want to know?”

  “First, what’s a Spacer doing living the primitive life?”

  Rekker’s face froze in an unreadable mask for several seconds. Slowly, he grinned again. “That’s good. How do you know?”

  “Trade secrets. Do you want to explain yourself?”

  “Tit for tat.” He frowned. “Whatever that means. Old phrase. Anyway, I’m the one with something you need, so you satisfy my curiosity first. If I don’t like what I hear, you go back to town with nothing more than a big question mark about things nobody else on this planet gives much of a damn about.”

  Masid considered his options. “All right,” he said. “I was seconded to Terran Offworld Security after a little misunderstanding placed me in thrall to Settler Coalition Intelligence. Ended up working for the security chief on Kopernik Station, a woman named Sipha Palen.”

  “I don’t know her. Last time I had any current knowledge about Kopernik, that post was held by a man named Golvat.”

  “Palen’s predecessor. He retired.”

  “Golvan was competent and unimaginative, but he was honest. What’s Palen like?”

  “Dead.”

  Rekker scowled. “Sorry. Did you like her?”

  “More. I respected her.”

  “I see. Is your being here related to her death?”

  “Intimately.”

  “You think her killers are associated with Nova Levis?”

  “I think here is what the killers were protecting. I think the orders came from people either here or concerned with here. Nova Levis is a great big problem. I don’t think the people on the blockade have the first idea how big.”

  Rekker grinned. “Shit, you got that right! So who are you working for now?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe myself. We had an encounter with someone who probably came from Nova Levis, mainly Nova City. No other explanation, really, since he was working for people who seemed to have a vested interest in this place. A really unusual encounter, nothing I ever saw before. Kru suggested you might be able to tell me something about it.”

  Rekker glanced curiously at Kru. “She was there?”