by Isaac Asimov
“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.”
“I don’t —”
Masid saw movement. At first he was not sure, but then the flickering motion multiplied, and within seconds nearly fifty people stood around the transport. Masid controlled an impulse to jump out of the vehicle and run; his fingers curled tightly around the edge of his seat.
They were damaged. Skin lesions were common, blackened patches on gray or yellow stains. Eyes ranged from nearly albino-pink to cataract-covered smoke. Bone structure varied. They were all different, though, unique in their dissimilarity, but all marred. Most wore cloaks or ponchos, a few heavy single-piece utilities, some were possibly naked, but it was difficult to tell.
“They move quickly,” Masid said.
“Very,” Shasma agreed. “And most of them are as strong as they are fast.” She sighed. “But that’s about the end of the advantages. Most of them won’t live to the age of twenty-five. Some will die in agony from extreme osteopathologies, their bones literally crushing their internal organs. One or two of them have the use of a full range of senses. Deafness is the highest handicap among them, but sight is impaired in nearly forty percent. They seem to have a heightened sense of smell overall. They’re completely sterile.”
“Where are they from?”
“The lab. But you guessed that, didn’t you?”
One of the reanimés leaned close to the canopy and peered in with sharp, green eyes. It smiled, then, showing overlapped yellow teeth. Shasma smiled back and raised a hand. The creature withdrew, and in a few minutes the gathered crowd dispersed. Shasma touched a contact on the dash.
“I bring them some treatments that help alleviate the pain, interfere with a few of the worst aspects of their self-cannibalizing biologies.”
“Do we get out?”
“No, not this trip.”
The transport shifted as something heavy was lifted from its cargo hold. Masid then saw several reanimés walking back to the village, carrying crates.
When the unloading was complete, Shasma sealed the hold and turned the transport around.
“They started showing up about twenty years ago,” she said. “Just a few. Infants, youths. Talking to them, I suspect that, before, they would have simply been killed and the bodies destroyed. I have no idea what changed. Now they’re just released to fend for themselves. A lot of them died before the survivors got together to rescue them. They have short lives a
nyway, so it’s only a reprieve, but it’s better than starving or freezing to death when you’re only three or four years old. Some of them still don’t live. The number of new appearances has gone down recently.”
“How many are there?”
“Right now, I’d guess a couple thousand.” She glanced at him. “So, what’s this about an autopsy?”
“Kopernik Station, Earth,” Masid said. “We killed... something... that a man named Avery described finally as a cyborg. A blend of organic and machine systems, with a brain that had been augmented by positronics. It was acting as an assassin. There was another one on Earth itself. At least, that’s what I heard.”
“Derec Avery. The roboticist?”
“You know him?”
“By reputation. His father had developed some regeneration methods useful in organic regrowth. Replacement technologies.” She frowned. “An assassin?”
“There were murders involved. It attempted to kill a number of people.” He waited. “The one on Earth, I heard, was part of the Hunter Group. At least tangentially. Parapoyos.”
“I find it difficult to believe any of these... people... could manage to live among humans unnoticed.”
“The warrens of Earth have their own broken-down and disfigured inhabitants. But these were not that far from human — at least in appearance.”
“Two, you said?”
“That we knew of.”
“What conclusions did you draw from this?”
“That someone — Parapoyos, probably — was attempting to build the perfect soldier. Parapoyos is an arms dealer, among other things. It might occur to him that being able to sell a manufactured army would be a good idea.”
“Based on what I’ve seen among the reanimés,” Shasma said angrily, “they’re a long way from perfection. There’s a fundamental incompatibility in the two elements. It eats itself up.”
Masid nodded. “The autopsy showed a flawed system. A lot of attention had been paid to imbalances, a lot of tweaking in, say, the nutrient absorption systems. These two were probably the best they’d been able to come up with.”
“Then —”
“Work at anything long enough and you find solutions. Maybe they can’t build one now, but that’s not to say they won’t someday. In the meantime, they’re making a few, very efficiently destructive and dangerous models —”
“You talk about them as if they’re machines!”
“I’m not sure what to call them.”
“The basic structure is still homo sapiens sapiens. Whatever else they might be now, they began as human.”
“Once human, always human?”
“How else do you make that call?”
Masid said nothing. He had listened to similar conversations for days after they had killed the cyborg on Kopernik. No one wanted to commit to a standard in the face of what one Spacer researcher had claimed was just the next natural step in evolution.
“Evolution works by genetic response to environmental change,” she had explained. “We’ve long ago seized control of the environment, so now any changes are our doing. Therefore, any evolution that occurs from now on will also be of our doing. If radical evolution is going to happen, it will be entirely at our instigation.”
“Direct meddling?” another had countered, angry. “That’s obscene.”
“Really? At what point? Cosmetic surgery has been common for thousands of years. Prosthetics, artificial organs, transplants, gene tweaking — at what point does ‘direct meddling’ become obscene?”
“At the point we make something that’s no longer human!”
And how, Masid had wondered then and wondered now, do you define “human”?
He rode back to Shasma’s clinic in silence.
Mia opened her eyes, certain she had heard a sound. There were sounds all around her — the soft whirrings and tickings of the biomonitor, the ventilator pushing air into her room, the small shiftings of her own body beneath the sheets, the building itself creaking — but this was different. This suggested something she needed to pay attention to. Lying as still as she could and controlling her breathing, she listened.
A tiny collection of imprecise noises told her someone was in the hallway outside her room, searching.
Before she decided what to do, her door opened. A face peered in at her — almost childlike, pale hair, large eyes that contained more than a little desperation. Mia puzzled at that, how she could tell, but it could be nothing else.
The woman entered the room and came up to Mia’s bedside. “Where’s Dr. Shasma?”
She smelled slightly salty and damp. A smudge of dirt traced her right jaw line. She carried a backpack in her left hand.
“I don’t know,” Mia said.
“I need to see her,” the stranger said. She snuffled, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “Where’d she go?”
“I said —”
“You don’t know, right. Why should you? You’re obviously sick.” She leaned close, eyes narrowed. “What’ve you got?” She shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I need to see Dr. Shasma.”
“I’m Mia.”
The woman — girl, really, now that Mia saw her more clearly, closer — blinked as if she had not understood.
“I’m Kru,” she said finally. “I’m from Noresk.”
Mia vaguely recalled the name — one of the smaller towns east of Nova City. She licked her lips. “I’m from —”
From where? She was about to say Earth, but stopped, wondering if that was a good idea.
Kru frowned and went to the biomonitor. “Ah. Don’t worry about it. A few days, you won’t really remember anything.”
Mia twisted her head to look up at the monitor. “What?”
“You’ve got mnemonic plague,” Kru said. “Few days, you won’t even remember I was here.”
Mia felt a jolt and started to get up.
“Hey,” Kru said, trying to push her back down. “Take it easy, it’s not fatal. I know, I’ve had it.”
“No, it’s not —” Mia placed the heel of her hand on Kru’s solar plexus and pushed up. The girl stepped back and Mia swung her legs over the edge of the bed. “Have something to do before I forget.”
“Don’t we all. Didn’t we all. What? Maybe I can help.”
“Have to —”
Have to what? Mia wondered. Report...? Yalor’s dead, I’m stuck here, I have —
How did she contract mnemonic plague? Mia stared around at the room. Did this Shasma give it to her, part of what she did in service to whoever she worked for? No, that made no sense. She had heard from somewhere — Ariel? — that a heightened paranoia was part of the illness. Certainly profound panic. She recognized panic, she knew it very well, and right now she felt it in waves, overwhelming. She tried to ride it out.
Can’t think this way, have to be clear...
Reen. No telling what he had done while she had been unconscious.
Or maybe it was from the environment.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said aloud. “Kynig Parapoyos is coming. I have to — have to do something —”
Kru stiffened, her face losing all expression. “Parapoyos?”
“Yes, I heard — someone told me — I need to —”
Damn, she could not fix on one idea.
“I want,” Kru said slowly, “to kill him.”
Mia looked at the girl. “Yes, that’s it. I have to do something about him. Maybe...” She decided. She would soon lose her sense of who she was. She would forget. She would not remember that Reen worked for Parapoyos and had killed Yalor and was now erasing her. There was too little time to do much else. “Let me help you.”
Chapter 30
access subdirectory, commlog attached hyperwave communiqué, appending material, collating
subject transmissions routed through R. I. oversight, access epsilon-nine-admin-zero-zero-chi
file open
trace completed
contact list appended
BOGARD STEPPED
FROM the niche and headed for the exit. A moment later, Denis joined him. As they went, Bogard modified his appearance further.
What do you intend?
Location determined, apprehension protocol, review
Violation
?
Protocol constitutes aggressiveness toward humans
Preemptive action, review validation, aggression within acceptable parameters
Violation
Assistance not required
A SERIES OF tunnels formed a complex network beneath the entire city, the robotic highway that connected everywhere to the service conduits of Aurora and Eos City. Bogard entered the nearest tube and quickly out-distanced Denis. He passed cadres of robots on their ways to various destinations, all moving in absolute silence, hundreds of robots of various types, antlike in their efficiency.
Bogard assumed the form of a security robot by the time he reached the ascending shaft into the police precincts. He tapped the ether of positronic communications and noted the location of Denis — far behind in the tunnels, now slowing to a standstill to await instruction — and the location of Lea Talas within the building.
Bogard requisition to Thales
Thales
Require security clearance
Assigned, proceed
Bogard stepped into the lift and rode the shaft up. He emerged into a narrow, lightless chamber. An internal display showed him the pathway through the rows of wall niches, most empty, and to the beginning of the building’s internal robot access network. Bogard received the location code and found the access. He hurried along the tube and stepped from the public access into a small, unoccupied conference room.
Bogard requesting update location Talas Lea
Thales responding, request that you stand by in niche
Bogard crossed the room and entered one of the three wall niches and waited. A few minutes later, the conference room door opened and two people entered.
One of them conformed to the profile Bogard carried of Lea Talas. She frowned at him briefly, then ignored him.
