Isaac Asimov's Aurora

by Mark W. Tiedemann

  “Pretty much.”

  Ros nodded, though the expression he wore suggested he would rather do anything but what Mia wanted. Mia patted his arm.

  “Cheer up,” she said. “At least we won’t be bored.”

  “Oh, good, I was really worried about that.”

  Mia laughed. “Finish your shower.”

  She watched him walk back to the stall and wondered exactly what kind of points with her he wanted to make.

  Her decryption program had finally opened the text woven into the end-papers of the books. What she saw on her screens represented, at a glance, the organizational flow chart of the entire contraband network around Nova Levis. Mia stared at the complex graphs, with contact points, manifests, and timetables. According to this, most of the Keresian ships and nearly half the Terran vessels were involved in routing goods into and out of Nova Levis.

  Out of . . . what could possibly be coming out of Nova Levis?

  She shook her head. Worry about that one later.

  The sheer volume stunned her. She could not imagine where all this material might be filtered through. It was as if the blockade had a vast hole in it and entire convoys were coming and going unchallenged.

  After staring at it in amazement for several minutes, she made herself lean forward and enter commands to her datum. Soon she had everything in a new file, encrypted to her password, and a separate package to be sent to Earth, to Hofton at the Auroran Embassy, and, through him, to Coren Lanra.

  She wondered about that for a moment. Lanra worked for Rega Looms of DyNan Manual Industries. Looms was also head of the Church of Organic Sapiens. Did that make Lanra suspect?

  She decided to take the chance. In her admittedly limited experience with him, Lanra had proven more ethical than simple employment could compromise. And from what she knew of Looms, he had no use for black marketeers. The material she had already received from Lanra about the bookseller justified the chance.

  Studying the data, she found five key entry points in the blockade. One of them was on this station.

  She would wait now, and see if Ros turned up the same location fol­lowing Reen. That would tell her a lot—about the network, and about Ros.

  At this point, the people she trusted most were all on other worlds.

  Coren stepped into Ambassador Sen Setaris’s office and waited until she acknowledged him and offered him a seat before her desk.

  She looked haggard, something Coren never expected to see in a Spacer. He wondered if it were just the light—a glow from her datum screens, the overall illumination in the room low, almost moody—but the more he studied Setaris the greater the impression that she was over-worked, harried. Her eyes were puffy.

  Coren waited silently for several minutes. Then the door opened and Hofton entered. He gave Coren a nod and stood at the side of Setaris’s desk, the third point of a triangle.

  Setaris looked up.

  “We want to do something illegal, Mr. Lanra,” she said. “Will you assist us?”

  “That depends,” he said.

  “Of course it does. It ought to.” She sat back and gazed at him con­templatively. “We want to take Gamelin.”

  “ ‘Take’ him?”

  “Remove him from Earth. Alive or dead, it doesn’t matter. I’m safe in assuming that you want the same thing?”

  “I suspect that he murdered Rega Looms. If he manages to assume control of DyNan, contravening Rega’s will, I’ll take it as a personal fail­ure.”

  “That sounds like a ‘yes’ to me.”

  “You hear very clearly, then.”

  “If something goes wrong,” Setaris said carefully, “the repercussions will be . . .”

  “Profound?” Hofton said.

  She looked at the aide. “We’ll have to pack up and leave Earth imme­diately.”

  “I may be able to get a little consideration,” Coren said. “I have—”

  “I don’t want Terran authorities involved in any way, Mr. Lanra. This is a Spacer problem and I want it kept that way. You are already inti­mately involved, otherwise we wouldn’t be talking.”

  “Stop it,” Coren said. “You’d have to talk to someone—you couldn’t set this up without help outside the embassy.” He waited for a denial. When both Spacers remained silent, he continued. “Very well. We do this with as few people as possible. Do you have an idea?”

  “We hoped you would,” Hofton said.

  “Give me a day or two. How much support can you provide?”

  “I gather you mean coercive support?” Setaris said. “Hofton?”

  “We still have a full compliment of security,” Hofton said. “About thirty Aurorans, fully-armed.”

  “You’ll need blasters,” Coren said.

  “We saw the recordings from Kopernik,” Setaris said.

  “May I ask why you’re so concerned about this?”

  “Perhaps Ariel explained to you,” Setaris said. “We once played with cyborgs and found them wholly unworkable.”

  “Yes, she mentioned it. You couldn’t program the Three Laws into them.”

  “Oh, it was worse than that. Neither Ariel nor I—until this occurred—had access to the records.”

  “Aurorans keeping secrets from each other? I’m shocked.”

  Setaris’s eyes narrowed. For an instant, it seemed, she looked her age, which Coren knew to be well over two centuries. At least her eyes betrayed her; the skin remained smooth, expressionless.

  “The few successful examples,” she continued slowly, “exhibited a highly aggressive nature. They lacked, for want of a better term, a conscience. One researcher suggested it was the absence of any kind of ade­quate peer group environment within which to form the requisite empathy. Who knows? The point is, they were not simply unmanageable robots—”

  “They were competitors,” Coren said.

  Setaris looked surprised. “Was that just a guess or do you know something?”

  “A guess of sorts. It struck me that these . . . constructs . . . represent a separate species. At least, enough so that they might be inclined to see us as an embarrassing ancestral form.” Coren smiled. “When you work for Rega Looms you hear a great deal of discussion about evolution and ‘nat­ural’ versus ‘unnatural’ forms. You hear a lot about self-destructive obso­lescence.”

  “I see. Well, the saving grace, if you can call it that, was that these ‘constructs,’ as you call them, lacked an instinct for mutual cooperation as well. But we can’t risk the possibility that they might get over that.”

  “Or have it designed out?”

  “Exactly.”

  “May I ask a diplomatically delicate question?”

  Setaris inclined her head.

  “Was Ariel recalled to work on this problem?”

  “Yes.”

  Coren glanced at Hofton, whose face remained impassive, uncommu­nicative. “I see. Well, then, we’re still working on the same side. For the time being.” He stood. “I’ll be in touch. It might be safest to continue going through Hofton.”

  “I agree,” Setaris said. “This is likely the last time you and I will speak, Mr. Lanra. In that case, I thank you now for all you’ve done for us. If there is anything we might do—”

  “A job, perhaps, when all this is over.” Coren smiled. “I suspect I’ll be looking for one.”

  Setaris hesitated, then gave him a thin smile. “We’ll see, Mr. Lanra. Good evening.”

  Hofton escorted Coren out and down the wide corridors to the eleva­tors. Coren studied the walls, realizing that this might be the last time he ever saw them.

  “There are about eight among our security people,” Hofton said abruptly, “who actually know how to handle themselves in lethal situa­tions. I’ll be sure they form the core of whatever team we assemble.”

  “You know this is likely to blow up in your face.”

  “It already has. Ambassador Setaris was disingenuous about keeping Terran authorities out of this. They’ve already been in touch w
ith her.”

  Hofton entered the elevator with him.

  “Are we going somewhere together?” Coren asked.

  “I’m making sure you return safely to your domicile. The ambassador’s orders.”

  “Oh? And are you qualified to act as my bodyguard?”

  Hofton gave him a long, silent look.

  “Fine,” Coren said. “Honestly, I don’t mind your company, Hofton.” They rode down to the garages in silence. Then, as the doors opened, Coren said, “By the way, I found out something interesting the other day. That grass Ariel and I brought back from the lab site—”

  “It’s Auroran,” Hofton said. “At least, it’s related to an Auroran grass, a variant from our terraforming days.”

  “Yes,” Coren said, surprised.

  “She gave me some to turn over to our lab. We identified it quickly. I was surprised it was on Earth. It’s an outlawed variety here, though the regulations are so old I doubt there’s anyone aware of them.”

  “It was originally manufactured by the company that became Imbitek.”

  “Now that I didn’t know. Interesting.” Hofton waved Coren toward a limousine. They climbed in and as the transport started up and headed out of the embassy garage, Hofton continued. “I shall have to look into that connection.”

  “Why would grass manufactured on Earth be outlawed from it?”

  “Hmm? Well, it’s a matter of history. And memory.”

  When Hofton remained silent for several minutes, Coren cleared his throat. “You aren’t going to tell me?”

  Hofton glanced at him. “Are you sure you want to know?”

  “That’s an insulting question.”

  Hofton considered. “Yes, I suppose it is. Most people don’t want to know. Not really. They like convenient facts they can use immediately, facts that will make their lives more interesting or easier. They don’t really want to know the kind that leave them feeling helpless and angry. Some—like you—hate not knowing, no matter how uncomfortable what you know is. So to protect the rest of us from people like you, there are more radical measures.”

  “Meaning?”

  “The future is always dominated by those who aren’t hindered by the past. Sometimes that demands a kind of amnesia. How convenient then to be handed a tool that guarantees forgetting?”

  Coren stared at him. Suddenly, he shuddered. “Burundi’s Fever.”

  “That grass represents a past none of us wish to remember.”

  “Are the cyborgs connected?”

  “That remains to be seen. At a guess, I’d say only coincidentally. But it’s bothersome that the two seem to be related to the same lab.”

  “So the next question is—”

  “Do I know what’s been forgotten?”

  “Do you?” Coren asked.

  “That’s a very good question, Mr. Lanra.” He looked away. “Let me think about it before I answer you.”

  Hofton lapsed into silence, staring unseeing out the window at the passing city, one hand raised to his chin, his posture an absolute rejection of any further questions or conversation. Coren finally looked out his own window, letting his thoughts spin through the implications of what Hofton had just told him.

  Ariel was a victim of Burundi’s Fever . . . so was Avery . . .

  Then: They were both “cured” on Earth after being basically deported from Aurora. Why didn’t Aurora help them?

  Could they?

  The limo finally pulled up outside Coren’s building. Hofton silently followed him up to his office.

  “Good evening,” Coren’s desk said as they entered. “Please verify identity.”

  Coren sat down and went through the ritual. His flatscreens rose and he found data waiting for him. He opened the files.

  “Ah. Something for Mia. My little spies have done their work.”

  Hofton nodded distractedly.

  “All right,” Coren said, punching in the necessary commands to his desk for security. “Either tell me or leave. I can’t take the suspense.”

  Hofton sat down. “Do you know much about the Riots?”

  “The anti-robot riots? As much as most Terrans, I suppose. There were two waves of them, as I recall. The first came shortly after the Spacer Worlds were being settled. The second was about two centuries ago, when Spacetown was shut down.”

  “The first ones concern us most.” Hofton looked around. “Are we secured?”

  “As much as possible.”

  “Good. Perhaps you should make some coffee. This may take some time.”

  “The Spacer Worlds,” Hofton began, “weren’t settled all at once. A few at a time, over centuries. The last were opened up not from Earth but from other Spacer colonies. Solaria was such a colony. It was originally settled from Nexon. There was a second wave of settlement—I suppose it would be more accurate to say ‘refugees’—which caused the initial rift between Earth and the Fifty Worlds and resulted in the war and the isolation.

  “At first, though, it was all in the spirit of a dream come true. Hyperdrive gave us the ability to go to the stars, and we did. It was a golden age—at least, on the surface. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for most of the ten billion people trapped on Earth. There was a paradigm shift—what some historians call a ‘phase change’—occurring at the same time. The old institutions upon which Earth relied no longer worked. This was the time of the World Coordinators and Machine management. Trade from the new settlements boosted the global economy and the Machines—the first RIs, really—controlled the fluctuations that normally accompanied new expansions and pretty much kept things stable for a long, long time.

  “Can you imagine a time when robots proliferated on Earth? The Cities were being built, slowly, and most of the dangerous work was done by robots. The old institutions that dictated full employment for humans, obsolete though they were and had been for centuries, changed into quasi-religious movements that pitted the unemployed—though cared­-for—against the so-called onslaught of the artificial person. There are thousands of reasons why the first Riots occurred. I’m inclined to believe that it was largely because the original Machines had gradually removed themselves from operation. A misapplication of Three Law protocol, probably. Once stabilized, they misunderstood their role and believed—I’m guessing—that continued maintenance on their part would be harm­ful in the long run to humanity. They shut themselves down. No one really knows how long matters ran on without their management.

  “But eventually, resentments over a hundred perceived slights against the common people combined to cause riots. Not the least of which were a series of plagues which turned out to be the result of nanotech.

  “You can’t have a mechanism as complex as a positronic robot without extreme miniaturization. Earth, in fact, developed crude nanotech before the first useful robots were designed and built. The one was necessary to the other, and the other spurred research in the one. Side by side, the two technologies increased in complexity and utility.

  “The problem, however, was the closeness to organic function a lot of nanotech became, specifically in the terraforming aspects. Nanotech proved incredibly efficient at adapting ecosystems to human require­ments. In order to do that, though, a certain latitude was necessary in the organelles themselves, an innate ability to analyze and adapt. Mutate. Once you cross that line, though, you bring about all the uncertainties and unpredictabilities that come with actual living organisms. One solu­tion was to program in a self-destruct sequence that caused the specific type to eat itself out after it had done its job. Oh, the technology was fab­ulous, and amazing, and ninety-nine percent effective.

  “But that one percent . . . well, like any new plague, it began with a few outbreaks here and there and then spread. By the time Earth knew what was happening to it, people were in a blind panic. Once the thing that was killing them was identified, they conflated it with any and all technology seen to imitate life—including robots. The Riots ran across the entire planet. A seco
nd wave of settlement exploded onto the Spacer worlds. I called them refugees. They were. They were fleeing the riots, the plagues, the politics, the backlash. People who wanted to keep their robots, protect themselves from infection, start anew elsewhere. Hundreds of thousands.

  “In the end, it turned out that Earth could do without robots, but it had to keep some of the nanotech. Food production alone had become dependent on it. By the time the plagues had been wrestled into submis­sion, the surviving technologies were called other things, innocuous labels, and the tech itself operated far less independently.

  “The Spacers, however, had to stanch the flow of new colonists. The flood threatened to bring the riots out to us. That is what started the events that led to the war, and the isolation, and Earth losing its home-based star travel ability. That is also the beginning of our long fear of infection. Not all the refugees came unburdened. When the smoke cleared, Earth had purged itself of robots and virulent nanoplagues and a lot of political undesirables—at our expense. You exported some of your diseases. We nearly cut you off completely, but we needed the expertise of your researchers who had successfully isolated and stopped the spread and eruption of new plagues. Some Spacer worlds—Solaria in particular—became irremediably paranoid. All of us suffered in one way or another.”

  Coren shifted uncomfortably and took another sip of coffee. Everything Hofton said matched or complimented what he had heard from Myler Towne’s researcher. “None of this is in the history texts.”

  Hofton smiled sadly. “Of course it isn’t. Who wants to remember all that ugliness? When we tried to reintroduce robots, it ended in failure because your cultural memory is longer than your factual memory. We’re slowly getting over our fears of infection—when we allowed Terrans once more to settle, it was a fight of epic proportions among our politicians. The Settler program is essential, but an undesired compromise.”

  “I’ve heard Spacers talk about the importance of the Settler program before, but it’s obvious you don’t like it.”

  “Some of us do. But it doesn’t matter. We need it. Humankind needs it. You see, I spoke of the plagues on Earth. The cause, I said, was the high mutability factor in a particular kind of nanotech—terraforming tech. What would you conclude from that?”