Isaac Asimov's Aurora

by Mark W. Tiedemann

  “I still want to know where you’re from,” Filoo said, turning off his desk unit. The flatscreen disappeared, and the keyboard was swallowed into a slot that sealed up.

  Masid sighed. “I’m a deserter. Do you want rank and unit and all that boring crap, or have I already passed the audition?”

  “We’re alone now. I mean alone. I don’t have monitoring in here, I don’t like it. So you can drop the tough act.”

  “If you think it’s an act . . .” Masid shrugged.

  “You’ve got carbon. But it’s cold, I’ll give you that.” Filoo paused. “I have a vacancy in my staff. I’m offering you the job.”

  “What pay for what work?”

  “The work varies, pay is I don’t kill you and I don’t let anyone—or anything—kill you. Safe food, safe shelter, safe sex, safe life.”

  “I can do all that for myself.”

  “Don’t go stupid on me now. Negotiating is one thing, ignorance is lethal. There are things loose on this planet that can take you apart mol­ecule by molecule in less than three days. Other stuff that can keep you alive and in constant pain for years. You’ve been lucky so far—but I’ll need to run a complete analysis on you before we finalize our arrange­ments. I assure you, despite your magnificent and impressive efforts, something would eventually get you. Nova Levis is a great big petri dish, and everything in it is grist for the biological mill.”

  “How did it get this bad? I thought this was a stable colony before the blockade.”

  “So did everyone else,” Filoo said. “Management conflict. Details got overlooked. Then this damn embargo finished it. What you’ve got here basically is a broken economy and wartime conditions. That’s a sure for­mula for public health disaster. The real victims are never the combatants or the owners.” He shrugged again. “Not my concern. Not yours, either, you work for me.”

  “What will be my concern?”

  “Profit. How we make money out of this cookpot.”

  “And you’ve got vaccines for it all?”

  “For now, at least. Who knows what nature will conjure up tomor­row?”

  “In that case, how can I refuse?”

  “By dying. Fast or slow. At this point, it’s not even up to you.”

  Masid cleared his throat. “One last question, if you don’t mind. What good is it if we get rich and we’re stuck on a dying world?”

  “Ah!” Filoo made a wide gesture. “Well, the one constant in the uni­verse is change, eh? This won’t last forever. And when it ends, then . . . use your imagination.” He laughed.

  “I confess I haven’t met too many criminals who take a long-term view.”

  “Criminals? We’re not criminals. We’re the hope and salvation of humankind!” He laughed again, louder. “You have to have the right frame of mind for this kind of work. You’ll learn. Now, do we get those final analyses?”

  Masid hesitated as long as he thought prudent, then nodded slowly. “I suppose that would be in my best interest.”

  “Yes, it would. Very much so.” Filoo stood and pointed to the door through which Tosher had entered earlier. “I want this done ASAP. Everything turns out to my liking, we leave this afternoon.”

  “Leave?”

  “Have to take a trip to Nova City. Normally, Kar would have accom­panied me, with Tosher. But . . .”

  “No need to explain. But, what’s in Nova City?”

  “Normally nothing. Supplies, which I don’t fetch myself. But this time it’s a special event.” He patted Masid companionably on the back. “The boss is coming. We’re throwing him a party.”

  “The boss?”

  “Kynig Parapoyos.”

  25

  Coren slipped his ID into the reader just inside the main doors, and waited for the slow intelligence to identify him. A green light winked on and he tapped in his personal access code on the keypad below. The doors slid open with welcoming speed, and he glanced at Shola.

  “I guess you’re still welcome, boss,” she said quietly.

  Coren made a dubious noise and stepped through.

  The only lights were dim service strips along the baseboards, and occa­sional recessed lamps in the ceiling. The long main corridor stretched through the center of the structure for fifteen meters till it ended at a dou­ble staircase leading up left and right. Wide archways halfway along the corridor faced each other, opening onto mirrored ballrooms where once, years ago, Rega had entertained friends and clients and people he had called “resources” in grand style. There were guest rooms for one hundred on other floors, two separate kitchens, and an independent power supply—”just in case”—that, to Coren’s knowledge, had never been used.

  The glory days of the estate had been over for years when Coren and Nyom Looms had met here to play. The vast house seemed like a small city then, sections of it closed off, waiting for archaeologists to open their secrets. The parts still in use, though, had been surprisingly cozy and intimate.

  Coren took the right-hand stair up to the next level. At the top, sev­eral steps ahead of Shola, he took out a small handpad and thumbed it on. A delicate schematic of the house scrolled up on the compact screen; a moment later, blue dots appeared, scattered throughout—Hofton’s people. Coren pocketed the pad and wondered idly if Hofton himself had come. It would have made him feel marginally better—Hofton was the only one left at the Auroran embassy he knew and trusted.

  He passed the room wherein Rega’s body had been laid out, hesitating for a few steps. Shola caught up.

  “What are we looking for specifically?” she asked.

  “Rega kept a personal apartment here.”

  She frowned. “Inside his own home?”

  “The wealthy are different, eh? But it makes sense when you think about it. Look at this place. Hardly a home in any common use of the word. It was built as much for show and business as to live in. So Rega sequestered a small area and turned it into a private apartment.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Few people did. Hence the ‘private’ part.”

  Coren stopped just past the fourth door on the left. The entire corridor was decorated by large paintings set in the wall between doorways. Coren stood before one depicting a balcony open to a wide view of dawn-lit rolling hills stretching to a river. A collection of ancient, broken pillars stood at the crest of one hill. Coren ran a fingertip down the length of one of them, and the entire panel slid to one side.

  Shola whistled. “I had no idea Rega was so taken with gadgets.”

  “One of the sources of his understanding about the dangers of tech.” Coren shrugged. “I never completely agreed with his view, but there was a logic to it.”

  Fifteen steps ended at an open door. Coren waited at the top for Shola to join him. A warmly-lit den spread before them. The fireplace was cold—Coren could only remember one time it had been lit, one night when Nyom had led him here, quite surreptitiously, another of her innumerable acts of rebellion against a father she knew loved her—but still it seemed as though the room had only recently been vacated, temporarily, until its owner returned. Thick carpet, heavy furniture, an ancient wood desk . . . “timelessly anachronistic,” Rega had called it, a private smile on his lips.

  “Nice,” Shola said quietly.

  Reverie broken, Coren crossed the room to the next door, and stepped into the starkly functional office. He sat down behind the gray desk and tapped in authorization codes. Halfway through, a tiny beep emanated from his pocket. With one hand still entering code, he took out the handpad. A red light glowed, located in the room he had just left—a transmis­sion. Coren’s ears warmed, and he felt a sudden sadness. He changed the display to a keypad and pressed in three digits, then returned the pad to his pocket. He drew the palm stunner and kept working.

  A few moments later, Shola came into the room. “Do you want me to police the rest of the house, boss?”

  “Just a moment.” He completed his entry codes, then stood. He sighed. “I really had hoped
,” he said, raising the stunner, “that I was wrong.”

  Shola’s eyes widened the second before he shot her. She jerked backward against the doorjamb and collapsed to the floor.

  Coren quickly rolled her over and bound her wrists and ankles. He placed a skin patch on her neck that secreted an anesthetic which would keep her unconscious for hours, then dragged her into the center of the room. He searched her and found the signaler she had just used to send the message Coren’s handpad had detected and warned him about.

  He placed it on the desk and took out his handpad again. Jacking it into the desk terminal, he worked at its keypad until he produced the desired function on the screen. He set Shola’s device on the screen and activated the scan.

  The receiver was in the opposite end of the house. Coren tapped for a comm, then fed the data into the local network. The blue dots indicating Aurorans began to move, four of them converging on the new position. Coren watched anxiously till the dots joined.

  His comm beeped.

  “Lanra.”

  “Nothing. Receiver abandoned. Subject on the move.”

  “Shit.” Coren tapped the desk keypad and brought the house security system on-line. A screen rose and filled with floor plans. Deftly, he linked his handpad to the system. The Aurorans, masked to the house system, suddenly appeared on the larger screen, the data fed from Coren’s dedi­cated readout. He entered instructions to scan the residence up and down the electromagnetic spectrum for anything unusual.

  At the upper edge of the UV spectrum, the screen flickered. Coren backed the scale down to where the anomaly occurred. The lines of the schematic blurred briefly, then stabilized. The location icons throughout the house continued to glow blue, moving now, methodically, from room to room.

  ENGAGE AUDIO appeared at the bottom of the screen.

  Coren touched the key.

  “Coren?”

  The voice whispered eerily, paper-over-sand rough. A chill rippled along Coren’s spine and teased his scalp. He unlinked the handpad from the desk system and began tapping instructions—frequency at which the interruption occurred, his present location, the fact that Gamelin knew he was in the house.

  “Jerem?” he asked after he sent the data.

  “Thank you. I might never have known my first name without you. I doubt I’d ever have had a chance at my inheritance.”

  “What chance? You murdered your sister.”

  “So? I murdered a lot of people. She just happened to be there.”

  “Nyom was your sister—”

  “Coren, stop it. You’re making an appeal to a nature I don’t possess.” Silence stretched. Then: “Have you ever heard of epigenetic consequence, Coren?”

  “No.”

  “No brothers or sisters, then?”

  “I’m an orphan.”

  “Ah. Like me. We have something in common. How interesting. Were you raised in a crèche?”

  “For a time.”

  “Ever have sex with any of your creche mates?”

  “No.”

  “Ever want to?”

  “No.” Coren glanced at the handpad. LOCATED appeared on the small screen.

  “Ever wonder why?”

  “Not really.”

  “Fascinating, really. There’s an old theory called the Westermarck Effect, which posits that humans raised together from birth till thirty or forty months later exhibit an automatic resistance to conjugal relations. Sociobi­ology. There are a variety of other studies which give a similar underlying raison d’être for a number of taboos which once were thought to be evi­dence of the hand of a supernatural deity, a lawgiver. But it’s something more and less exotic than that. You see, the effect functions regardless of blood ties. Two children from different families altogether raised as brother and sister will exhibit the same reluctance to copulate later.”

  “Do you have a point to make?”

  “Yes. The same principle works in reverse. Never raised as a family, those in-built aversions never take hold. Brother and sister raised apart will have no automatic aversion. They treat each other as strangers. There is no consanguinity taboo.”

  Coren waited. “And?”

  “And so I felt no more guilt at killing my sister, who I never knew, than I did killing all those other people. There is no twinge of family con­nection to dissuade me.”

  “In your case, would there be anyway?”

  “A good question. I don’t have any friends I would regret killing.”

  “Or fucking?”

  “Well, that’s not really an option in my case. But let’s talk about you. Why are you so bent on preventing me from claiming my inheritance?”

  “It’s not really yours. You murdered Rega.”

  “You can’t prove that.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “Besides, so what? He murdered me.”

  Coren frowned. “How do you figure that?”

  “Abandonment. He might as well have exposed me to the elements.”

  “Your condition was incurable.”

  “And that relieved him of his parental responsibility?”

  “He did the best—”

  “Intentions are meaningless if they fail. He failed. I died. I’m not like I was.”

  “You’re alive.”

  “Gamelin is alive. But Jerem? Interesting question. I—”

  Coren looked at the handpad. Five of the Auroran icons converged in one room. As he watched, three of them winked out, the last two fled the room.

  “How many people are here to get me, Coren?” Gamelin asked. “I kept close watch on all the law enforcement databases. I detected no move­ment of personnel or new orders or anything that might indicate a covert action. I still have a contact or two inside Special Service. How did you manage this?”

  “Skill and nastiness.”

  “Touché.”

  On the handpad, Coren witnessed a scramble as all the remaining Aurorans changed positions throughout the residence. A line of type appeared on the bottom of the screen.

  MOVE NOW.

  Coren drew a blaster, pocketed the handpad, and headed for the door.

  At the foot of the steps to the corridor, he pressed against the wall and carefully peered around the corner. The hallway was empty.

  Back the way he had come would take him to the main entryway and out. Easily anticipated, easily blocked. Besides, he would have to rely on the Aurorans to do their part. He would not know viscerally that they had succeeded, and right now, after all that had happened in the last year and a half, knowing was the only thing important anymore.

  To the left, another staircase led up to the third level—the rooftop gardens, recreation facilities, a theater. There was a landing pad up there for aircars, part of the original structure around which Rega had built the rest of the house, unused since private licenses had been abolished decades ago. Attached to the landing pad were machine shops and a supply shed for spare parts.

  Coren sprinted for the stairs.

  The landing opened out in a large circle. Elegantly arched doors rimmed the space—six of them, including the portal from the stairs. Coren opened the handpad again to check the locations of the Aurorans. Two now waited on the landing pad, near the machine shop. Another one waited in the theater, through the door to Coren’s right.

  The theater opened out at the end of a wood-paneled corridor. Twenty rows of seats curved around a shallow stage that hid the holographic pro­jectors. Coren remembered that extra platforms could be added to deepen the stage for live performances, but to his knowledge Rega had never staged one. So much of the house had been unused, wasted in both his own and Nyom’s opinion. Finally, Rega had stopped using the house at all, allowing Nyom to take it over. Her residence here had lasted under a year, before she left to run baleys.

  Coren stood at the entrance to the gently sloping arena and scanned the rows until a tiny light caught his attention. Holding the blaster up, he moved toward it.

  A lone figure hunche
d over a large pad. When the Auroran looked up, Coren recognized Hofton. Coren slid into the seat beside him.

  The pad was a larger display of what Coren had on his own pad. Hofton’s fingers blurred over the touchpad at its base.

  “Gamelin’s masking changes frequencies constantly,” Hofton said. “Very sophisticated. I’ve had him a few times, but then the signal fades.”

  “You’ve lost people already.”

  Hofton nodded grimly. “He’s faster than we anticipated. A mistake. The advantage we have is his organic aspect. A robot could operate opti­mally for days, but Gamelin’s human elements will tire.”

  “You hope.”

  Hofton’s eyebrows raised. Then he pointed at the pad. “There.”

  On the pad, a red dot faded into being. Coren looked up at the stage, half expecting to see Gamelin rise up out of the boards. But the signal was further back, behind the rear wall.

  “Odd,” Hofton said. “What’s back there? Looks like a shaft . . .” Fingers tapped, and a separate schematic opened in one corner of the screen. “That’s what I thought it looked like, but I wouldn’t have expected it in Rega Looms’ house.”

  “What is it?”

  “A robot service passage.”

  Coren studied the schematic. “Rega built over the remains of a much older structure. He retrofitted where he could.”

  “Older. Old enough to have once possessed robots as servants?”

  “Probably.” Coren puzzled at the layout. “He’s going up to the storerooms behind the machine shop.”

  “Can they be accessed from here?” Hofton asked, tapping instructions into his keypad.

  “I think so. There’s a prop room back there.”

  Hofton folded up the pad, and it disappeared into his black clothing. He bounded over the seats for the stage. Coren worked to catch up.

  “I had no idea you were so athletic,” Coren said sarcastically as he joined Hofton at the rear of the stage.

  “Your traitor,” Hofton said. “Is she secured?”

  “She’s fine. Going nowhere.”

  Coren pointed to a door just beyond the wings. He led the way and pressed the contact. It slid upward, lights coming on in the chamber beyond.