Isaac Asimov's Aurora

by Mark W. Tiedemann

  “Y-yes . . .”

  “You also recognized that I have antibodies signifying exposure to at least half a dozen different biospheres. I’m not just from one other colony.”

  “Ex-military—”

  “Would not explain it. An awkward detail. You’re right about the implant, by the way.” He leaned forward. “The Spacers you’ve turned in. Were any of them spies?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Probably not.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Because I am.” He sat back. “So, why didn’t you turn me in?”

  “It doesn’t affect my situation . . . why should I cooperate further than necessary?”

  “That’s facile. How come they trust you?”

  Shasma smiled coldly. “No secrets, remember? They know exactly what I think of them. Changes nothing. Filoo—and everyone else who works for Kynig Parapoyos—is a soulless shit who feeds on the helpless.”

  “That’s pretty much my assessment, too. So why work with them?”

  “Because, believe it or not, they aren’t the worst.” She raised a hand. “I’m not making excuses for them, just stating a fact—Filoo has a sense of discipline, he pays attention, he’s careful to do what he must to preserve his clientele. It’s a morbid and ugly way to be responsible, but it results in at least a semblance of concern. The worst are those who don’t care that what they do may kill people—or themselves. Some of them even have a sense of remorse, guilt, something of a conscience—but they’ve aban­doned all of it because they don’t want the responsibility.” She smiled again. “Give me a competent sociopath over an incompetent martyr every time. So my question is, which category do you fit?”

  “Neither. How about you?”

  “Pragmatist. I was chief physician to the governor’s civil service branch before Parapoyos turned the planet into his personal warehouse. Before that, I was with the Fifty Worlds Advisory Mission. My concern is saving lives. This is where I’m stuck, so I do what I have to in order to appease my conscience and serve my calling.”

  She rattled the speech off as though she had given it a thousand times, but still Masid thought he detected a trace of genuine passion.

  “The alternative,” he said, “would be to refuse to cooperate with Para­poyos. Then I suppose you’d lose the clinic and be barred from practicing medicine.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Not much of an alternative, is it?”

  “What would the death toll be?”

  “Thousands, hundreds of thousands. Does it matter? One would be too many.” She sighed. “What do you want, Mister . . . ?”

  “Vorian. Masid Vorian. A number of things, really. But to start, how do you reconcile handing over spies to them? Do they kill them?”

  “No, they don’t. They infect them with mnemonic plague and drop them in the countryside somewhere.”

  “Uh-huh. Like the former governor?”

  She nodded.

  “You said I’ll require a booster for your treatments to stay effective. Can’t you just cure them?”

  “Parapoyos maintains loyalty by maintaining a chronically infected population. People work for him to get relief from what would otherwise turn their lives into daily torment.”

  “I repeat: Could it all be cured?”

  “What do you think? You worked as an independent dealer in Noresk.”

  “Yes . . .”

  “And what did you see?”

  Masid thought for a moment. “Like I said before, an incredibly high mutation rate.”

  “Almost unbelievably fast,” she agreed. “Nothing like it since the retrovirus plagues a couple millennia ago. Do you think those are curable?”

  “Vaccines are possible.”

  Shasma looked impressed. “And you’ve been given a few. Not all, not the whole series. They have to leave you vulnerable to something. But the ones that will keep you from spreading the nastier infections here, in Nova City—those have been taken care of.”

  “How many do I still have?” Masid asked, pulling a chair up to desk and sitting down.

  She frowned. “None. You’re not a Spacer, but . . . how did you get here? What do think you can do?”

  “Ah, you’re curious. That’s good, I was worried that you’d become all cynic.”

  Shasma scowled.

  Masid smiled. “I’ll answer your questions if you answer mine. Fair?”

  “Why should I? For all I know, you work for Parapoyos. Why would I want the trouble?”

  “Well, Anda Wilam said you were worth trusting.”

  She stared at him blankly for several seconds. Then, quietly, she said, “You have thirty seconds to back that up with something that will con­vince me you didn’t just do a very thorough piece of research.”

  “Anda said to ask if you remember Calinas Ridge.”

  Her eyes glistened, tears threatening to spill over. She sniffed loudly once and straightened. “All right. What do you need?”

  Mia disconnected herself from the monitor and stood. She felt mildly feverish and her legs trembled. She waited, propped against the edge of the bed, till she felt confident enough to cross the small room. She stud­ied the readouts on the monitor. They made little sense; the unit was a Spacer design, and she could not be sure the numbers corresponded to Earth standards.

  Finally, she went to the bookshelf. She ran her fingers over the spines, feeling the embossing, and at random pulled a volume out. JANE EYRE, the title read, BY CHARLOTTE BRONTË. She opened the cover. The endpapers had been removed. She returned it and chose another. No endpapers. The third one—Kidnapped—still had its end papers, ornate filigrees in red and gold.

  Mia checked several more books and found that every third or fourth one lacked its endpapers.

  That’s important, she thought. She closed her eyes and concentrated through the dull headache now growing behind them. Not every book has encoding . . .

  But how to tell the difference?

  She searched the room until she found her clothes in a narrow closet. They had been cleaned, she saw. She continued digging in the closet until she realized that she wasn’t going to find her weapon or comm. She dressed, keeping watch on the door, wondering who if anyone was overseeing her monitor.

  She zipped up the tunic and opened the door.

  The hallways seemed deserted. She walked softly to the next room. Heart racing, she drew the door open a few centimeters and peered in. It was a room like the one she had just left, unoccupied. Mia continued on till she found one in use.

  The man lying in the isolation cocoon enveloping the bed looked as though he had been burned over his entire body. Blackened skin flaked off, revealing bloodied tissue beneath. Mia retreated quickly.

  She found four more patients, each in various stages of different ill­nesses. At the end of the long hallway, she found a central monitoring station, unoccupied. The screens showed the many rooms. Almost half contained patients. A few did not appear very ill, but most clearly suf­fered from infections. Mia counted thirty-five monitors. The facility was larger than she expected, certainly large enough to warrant a sizable staff. But aside from the patients on the screens, she saw no sign of doctors or nurses.

  She sat down before a blank screen and studied the system, recog­nized it as a basic datum. Within a few minutes, she had pulled up a menu, then located a map of the clinic.

  It appeared to be divided into two parts: this section—the larger part—and a smaller one on the other side of a thick wall with only one access. She traced the corridors in the larger section to an exit.

  Which way do I want to go? she wondered. She drew a deep breath and her lungs twinged. She coughed loudly, clapping a hand over her mouth, and watched down the corridor. When no one appeared, she con­tinued working on the datum.

  The barrier . . . heavy wall, one access . . .

  She typed instructions and the screen changed to show her a detail of the interior access to the smaller section of the clinic.<
br />
  Decontamination chamber . . .

  She closed down the datum and stepped into the corridor. It took a moment for her to get her bearings, then she headed for the decontami­nation area.

  When she found it, she was surprised to see it standing open and inoperative. She hesitated, wondering if she would trip any alarms, then stepped through.

  Within the chamber, she saw signs of recent repairs. Perhaps, she decided, it was off-line.

  But then wouldn’t there be guards . . . or something . . . ?

  She passed into the next section. The hospital smell seemed stronger, the walls a bit cleaner, although Mia did not remember seeing any dirt.

  Still no people.

  But she heard voices.

  Moving as quietly as she could manage—a feat she found oddly diffi­cult for some reason—she followed the sound around a corner and down a row of closed doors.

  The door at the end of the hall stood open. The voices came from within. Mia pressed against the wall and edged closer.

  “—didn’t happen all at once,” someone said. The voice was familiar, female . . . tired. Mia tried to will her pulse to quiet down so she could hear better.

  “—smuggling, nothing large at first, but there were some people here from the original Solarian colony.”

  “When it was called Cassus Thole?” another voice cut in. Male—Mia did not recognize this one.

  “That’s right. Most people have forgotten Nova Levis ever had a dif­ferent name. Keresians, mostly, from the mining company that worked the ore fields around the poles. The company never lost its lease. It was complicated. When the first Settlers arrived—they were a religious group, did you know that? The Church of Organic Sapiens . . . Anyway, they wanted to conduct agriculture almost exclusively. Well, you can’t make a settlement on a new world work with just agriculture. Too much basic ecoengineering is required. Arrangements were made with the Keresians, an outside company was brought in to handle the terraforming, and everything looked like it would settle down into just another Settler colony.”

  “But?”

  “That smuggling. The company brought in to do the terraforming was a little more involved than anyone thought. By the time anyone realized what was happening, Nova City had become a pirate port.”

  “It wasn’t that open, was it?”

  “Almost. The governor began an investigation. I lost track of what happened after that. The next thing I knew, most of the resident Spacers had left, the governor was answering charges from Earth of colluding with the pirates, and suddenly I and every other doctor on the planet was busy dealing with emergent disease strains we’d never seen before. The governor shifted from trying to deal with the smuggling problem to confronting Terran-Spacer demands to allow ground forces onto the surface. The Settlers were afraid that would lead to a permanent Terran presence, which is exactly what they didn’t want. The governor called for a meet­ing with the relevant representatives from Solaria, Keres, Aurora, and Earth to try to come to a settlement. That’s when the Tiberius was forcibly boarded. Then a pirate ship fired on a Terran patrol cruiser. All talks were suspended, Terran demands were renewed, and the governor—well, what could he do?”

  “What did he do?”

  “Nothing. He insisted on protocol. They insisted that protocol had already failed, and the blockade went up. Now Nova City is openly a pirate port.”

  “What about these epidemics?”

  “Partly understandable, but . . .”

  “But?”

  “Well, we’re under siege. Right now the only functional authority is criminal. They run things just well enough to maintain a base, protect their own, and keep the goods flowing. Which means a lot of otherwise normal services are getting ignored. Like public health. So we’ve had sys­tems break down, doctors recruited into service directly to the smugglers, and because of the disruptions in normal economic conditions, people are on the move, under stress, undernourished . . . susceptible. All the programs and routines that ordinarily maintain the health of the community are starved of resources or have been abandoned because no one quali­fied to run them is available anymore. But where some of these pathogens have come from . . . I don’t know.”

  “What about the lab?”

  Silence. Then: “What lab?”

  “Nova Levis.”

  “It’s a sealed facility. I don’t know anything about it.”

  “We were doing so well till now, Doctor.”

  “I don’t. We were never allowed access, even before all this.”

  “All right. Maybe you don’t have any certain knowledge, but I’m sure you’ve speculated.”

  “Not good science.”

  “We’re not talking science now, Doctor.”

  “I gave up on morality some time ago, Mr. Vorian. I deal in ethics, and only the immediate kind. One patient at a time.”

  “I heard Parapoyos is coming.”

  “Here?”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  “Hm. Interesting. I was beginning to think he was just a myth.”

  “Apparently not. I think he’s coming to take direct control.”

  “And what did you come here to do?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t know what I’d find when I arrived, so I couldn’t plan very well. Now that I’m here . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m thinking of killing Kynig Parapoyos.”

  Mia drew back from the door and retreated around the corner. Kynig Parapoyos . . . here?

  A wave of dizziness staggered her. She caught herself against the wall. Whatever else, she needed to get well. Her thoughts came muddy and incomplete, and anything she might decide to do she doubted she could in her condition.

  Reluctantly, she made her way back to her room. She undressed and hung up her uniform. She barely got the monitor reconnected before sleep took her.

  Dr. Shasma smiled in disbelief. “And what would that accomplish?”

  Masid shrugged. “Nothing, probably. But it would be something. Maybe without the head, the body would stumble and make a mistake.” He looked at her. “The blockade is compromised, you know. Materiél is coming through and going out as if it weren’t even there.”

  “Plugging that hole might be more profitable, but . . .”

  “But?”

  “I don’t have any patience for blockades,” Shasma said bitterly. “The only people who end up suffering are those with the least involvement.”

  Masid considered for a few moments. “I tend to agree with you.”

  “Then . . . ?”

  “My second choice is to get inside Nova Levis Laboratory and find out what’s in there.”

  “What could be in there? It has no interaction with the rest of the colony. Whatever they’re doing, it concerns matters far from Nova Levis.”

  “Exactly. And I’d like to concern the owners of those matters—very much.”

  She began to rise.

  “One more question,” Masid said, holding up a hand. “What do you know about cyborgs?”

  Later, Masid felt a twinge of guilt because of the satisfaction he expe­rienced seeing all the color drain from Shasma’s face.

  The waste from the lab emptied into the lake. A steaming marsh filled the space between Nova City’s northwestern wall and the line of tall reeds choking the shoreline. The smell hung thick in the air, like the mist, a cloying rot laced with a metallic tang.

  The lab itself was comprised of a collection of towers and squat, trun­cated cones. As Masid watched, a flyer lifted from somewhere within its confines and flew south, toward the port. He lowered his optam. The sur­face of the lab appeared smooth, unbroken. He guessed a fairly powerful forcefield kept most of the native detritus away—the walls glowed pristinely white, a sharp distinction amid the muck and ooze surrounding it.

  “So that’s where they make them,” he murmured.

  “You haven’t convinced me of that.”

  Masid looked at Shasma, standing by
the transport behind the copse of tangled growth from which he studied the lab. She had found a path through the marshlands, stable enough to support the machine, that kept them below line-of-sight.

  “You’ve been out here often,” he said. “Why?”

  By the expression on her face, Masid supposed she was trying to decide how much to tell him.

  “We should get back,” she said.

  He glanced at his watch. They had been out here for over an hour. Masid had been away from the Parapoyos compound for nearly five hours. No one had said anything about checking in, but . . .

  He slid back from the edge of the brambles and stalks.

  “If I’m wrong,” he said, brushing grime from his legs, “then what are those things you treat?”

  “Those ‘things’ are people, Mr. Vorian.”

  “Really? Do they know that?”

  She turned away and climbed back into the transport. The motors whined softly to life. Masid got in beside her.

  “Have you ever had occasion to autopsy one?” he asked.

  “Have you?” she shot back.

  “As a matter of fact, yes.”

  She blinked, clearly stunned. She drove on in silence, away from the city, along a path different from the one they had taken to get to within sight of the lab.

  “Where are we going?” Masid asked after a time.

  “To see the rest of the answer to your question.”

  The “road” was barely discernible from the surrounding terrain, but Shasma drove it confidently. Masid paid attention to anything that might be useful as a marker and said nothing.

  She drove north, then west along the lake shore. Low hills erupted from savanna, then stands of trees similar to the stunted ones Masid had seen when he had first landed, taller and clearly healthier.

  After twenty minutes, Shasma turned off the road and jostled between two copses, toward a rocky hill. On the western slope of the hill, she stopped and pointed.

  The village sprawled, dug out of the side of the hill, with leantos and oft-repaired bubble habitats augmenting the caves. Masid saw no one, just the signs of habitation. Smoke drifted from a few caves.

  “What’s this?” Masid asked.

  “The locals,” Shasma said quietly, “call them reanimés—if they talk about them at all.”