by Isaac Asimov
Are you telling me you don’t know any Terrans like that?”
Slyke waved the comment away. “We’re not here to discuss sociology, Avery. You going to tell me how your mysterious assassin knew that Pon Byris was going to be here?”
“That depends. Are you going to tell me whether you intentionally sabotaged your own investigation?”
A flush spread over Slyke’s face, and Derec had a momentary worry that he’d provoked the officer to violence. “You’re lucky you’re already on Nova Levis, or I’d find some way to get you shipped there,” Slyke said. “And believe me, I can do it. You sabotaged the investigation when you decided to come out of your hole and make amends for Union Station. And while you were at it, you took Shara Limke down; she might have dug her own grave when she called you, but you pushed her in when you said yes. Just so you know.”
The anger seemed to drain out of Slyke. He shook his head. “When you deal with the kind of political heat I’m getting, you can question my integrity. Now you’ve done it twice, and I’m not going to hear it a third time. Just bear in mind that you didn’t come here to solve a crime, and I didn’t come here to make myself feel better. That’s what separates you and me.”
Derec took out the flimsy he’d gotten from Skudri Flin. “Here’s the ship that took the robot off-station. If you’re trying to find out who killed Taprin and Pon Byris, you might want to take a look at it.”
“What I want to do is put you in a cell until this whole thing blows over. If I’m lucky there’ll be a war and we can trade you to Aurora for an embassy janitor. Stay out of my way.”
Walking away to the portal that led back to the main corridor, Slyke threw a parting shot over one shoulder. “And stay out of Limke’s way, too. She’s got enough to worry about without you around.”
Chapter 20
ARIEL HAD NEVER taken public transport on Nova Levis before, and even before she had reached the main station in Nova City and bought a ticket to Noresk, the experience had changed her understanding of a great many things. She had known that far too many people on Nova Levis were poor or sick or oppressed or all of those, but even when she’d traveled to Stopol or Noresk, she typically met with people who had power. They were concerned about real problems, but they didn’t experience them in the way the average citizen of Nova Levis did on a daily basis. Sharing a seat with a woman who was obviously dying of a respiratory disease — and who, in spite of her suffering, was on her way to work driving a municipal transport just like the one they were riding in — had a way of anchoring abstractions. Not to mention making Ariel feel as if she had spent her life in willful ignorance.
The transport passed the Triangle, and again she felt a flash of pure revolutionary anger. None of this would ever change as long as the people on city buses could work themselves to death while being governed by people who would live for centuries. She transferred to the Noresk transport, and lost the sick woman in the station crowd.
Ariel sat at a window as the transport left the city, enduring that peculiar stunned feeling that came when the mind tried to accommodate a fundamental shift in the way it apprehended the world. How could she have failed to understand this for so long?
The feeling endured long enough that she started to wonder if she was ill herself. Ordinary details of her fellow passengers’ faces — the curve of an eyebrow, the habitual vacant half-smile — came to seem freighted with obscure significance. She lost hours in semi-conscious free associations, a kind of spiraling fugue that broke only when the transport stopped to take on or disgorge passengers; eventually it did not stop even then. When the transport groaned to a halt in Noresk, Ariel knew it only because everyone got off. She stirred in her seat, feeling stiffness in her limbs and a powerful need to urinate.
Walking to the public facility took care of both issues, and not knowing what else to do, Ariel walked out into the noise and smoke of Noresk. She had known in an abstract way that Noresk was a troubled place, but her first few minutes there made the slice of humanity on the transport seem like a convention of Solarian magnates.
There was a dead man in the street. He was barefoot and lay with his body twisted as if he’d been roughly searched after his death — at least Ariel hoped it was after. Wine-colored blotches, scabbed from scratching, covered his face and hands and feet, and a dark yellow substance crusted in the corners of his slitted eyes. Passersby stepped around him the way they might unconsciously navigate a pothole.
This indifference staggered Ariel even more than the presence of an unattended corpse in the street outside the main transport station.
Who was this man? Where was his family? Did they survive him, or had his disease killed them as well?
Ariel realized she was standing on the sidewalk just outside one of the station’s main doors. People shouldered their way around her, too, intent or preoccupied even to tell her to move. She started walking, crossing the street and turning right at random, just to be away from the dead man who lay like one more piece of garbage in the street. Reflexively she went to her pocket for her datum to check for messages and plot her way to Gernika, then caught herself, fearing robbery; then she was ashamed of the fear. Not ashamed enough to take her datum out, though. She kept walking until she found a restaurant, and went in only after she’d seen through the window that its clientele seemed no less groomed than the average public kitchen on Earth.
With a cup of coffee and a table to herself, Ariel opened her datum and saw that Senator Lamina had already made her defunding official.
A severance package had been transferred into her account, and she had seventy-two hours to remove her equipment from the Triangle-leased office in Nova City. A letter of reference was installed in her personnel file, diplomatically characterizing her service as professional and dedicated.
So. She was no longer involved in the government of Nova Levis, and therefore no longer concerned with the question of citizenship for the reanimés. Ariel sipped at her coffee and realized with a start that if she wanted to, she could probably leave Nova Levis. She’d never get back into the diplomatic corps, but it wasn’t out of the question that she could find robotics work with one of the large contractors on the Spacer worlds.
No, Ariel thought. I am implicated in this, and would shame myself if I abandoned my work here. Being cast loose from the Triangle might turn out to be useful, once the initial shock of rejection had passed.
If she was no longer beholden to political currents, she could strike her own course across the uncharted seas on whose shores Zev Brixa had set her.
And the truth was, the question had worked its way into her conscience like a fishhook. She couldn’t leave until she had seen it through to whatever resolution awaited.
“Jennie,” she said.
Her robot’s face filled the datum’s screen. “Yes, Ariel?”
“Clean out my office. Put all of the equipment into storage. Keep all paper records from the last two weeks at the apartment and store the rest. Relinquish my door codes at the Procurement Office in the Justice Corner and get a signed receipt. And while you’re there, make sure that they forward all messages sent to my government code.”
“Shall I leave now?”
“Yes. Bill the moving costs to the Triangle.”
“Yes, Ariel.” The screen blanked.
Ariel pulled up a satellite map of the Noresk area. Pinpointing her location, she worked out the quickest way to Gernika. East out of the city, across the Bogard, and then along what appeared to be a dirt road through the forest. Twenty kilometers or so. She would walk in the front door this time, and she would stay until she had some answers.
Before leaving, she found a shoe store and bought a pair of sturdy boots. Outside the store, she left her old shoes sitting on the sidewalk.
There were any number of people in Noresk who needed them worse than she did.
Ariel fell into a reverie again while walking, lulled into a kind of somnolence by the steady pace of her footsteps a
nd the rhythm of her body moving with each step. She was sweating more than she should have been; whatever pathogen she’d picked up on her first trip up this way, it wasn’t letting go without a struggle. At one point, she stopped, worried that she was getting worse; she couldn’t keep her mind on a thought, and she had to actively remind herself where she was going. A diplomat yesterday, a vagabond today, she mused, and in her detached state of mind she was swept up by the abstract romance of her situation. She could walk. Nowhere to go, no one to answer to. She could walk until she decided to stop. If disease took her, it took her.
The appearance of the river brought Ariel most of the way back to her senses. She was a good swimmer, but the river was perhaps five hundred meters wide and she didn’t know what currents surged under the surface. Even in her current daze, she knew better than to take that kind of risk before she’d exhausted her other options.
Which were what, exactly? Walk up-or down-river until she came to a ferry? She doubted there were any this far outside Noresk. Wait for a passing boat and hope it would carry her to the other shore?
There was no reason for a boat to be plying the waters this far north unless it belonged to a survey team of some kind, and those were not numerous in this area. The area was well mapped and the biologists were concentrating on the cities until the epidemiological situation was more under control. She could go back to Noresk and rent a transport, or purchase passage from a freelance pilot, but for reasons she couldn’t articulate Ariel didn’t feel comfortable leaving that much evidence of her actions.
The rippling boom of a large cargo or transport ship startled birds from the forest all around her. Ariel looked up, found the ship, tracked it on its northern course until it slowed and dropped out of sight behind the trees. Going to Noresk. Probably a freighter from offworld, or a short-hop courier from Nova City; it was big enough to be the first, not so large that it couldn’t be the second. Birdcalls echoed through the forest, dying away to the normal background chirps and squawks, and Ariel lost patience with obstacles. The river was wide and deep, its banks easy and its course reasonably straight. She could swim it.
She stripped down to underclothes, stuffed her socks in one boot and her datum in the other, and threaded her belt through the loops above the heels of each boot. Then she refastened the belt around her waist and worked her way down the bank into the water. It was cold, and the bottom fell away steeply; after two steps she was swimming, invigorated and a little frightened by the current and the stinging chill. It had been years since Ariel had swum any distance, but she settled into an even crawl, going with the current in a downstream diagonal course that would, with any luck, put her ashore on the other side where a small tributary creek flowed into the Bogard. Her head cleared a little, and she grinned between breaths at how quickly her caution had crumbled under the force of her impatience. Then she put her face in the water and pulled hard, enjoying the physical work of it and the sensation of being buoyed up on the water’s flow.
When she scraped sand with her fingertips, Ariel stood and shook the water out of her eyes. She slicked her hair back and reached up for a hanging branch, hauling herself up from the water onto the shore. Breathing hard, she stood dripping and elated on the far side of the Bogard from human civilization, thrilling to the feeling of release that coursed through her. She swiped the water from her limbs and put her boots back on, then tested her datum to make sure that it was as waterproof as the manufacturer advertised. It was, so she verified her position. Five kilometers away; in her exhilarated state she felt like she could fly the whole way. She hooked the datum’s carrying loop through her belt and started walking.
Ariel had no doubt that the reanimés would know she was coming long before she arrived at the outskirts of Gernika, and she was correct. After half an hour of working her way out of the thick underbrush bordering the river, she moved more quickly through a dim stretch of tall trees under which nothing grew but moss. Then she found the dirt road, and half an hour after that she saw the settlement, and the arresting figure of Basq waiting for her.
“Your appearance gives me no great confidence of your political influence, Ambassador,” he said when she’d gotten close enough.
“I doubt I’m an ambassador anymore, Basq,” Ariel answered. “I haven’t come in an official capacity.”
“Then why have you come at all?”
“To bring a message.”
“From whom?”
“From me. Here it is: You’re a fool to rely on the Triangle for anything, and you’re equally foolish to rely on Zev Brixa. The only person on this planet you can rely on to give you a fair hearing is me.”
“And you come out of the woods like a shipwreck survivor. How you do inspire confidence, Miss Burgess.”
“You don’t need confidence. You need action. I’m here to decide if I’m willing to take that action for you.”
“If you’re not an ambassador anymore, and — I’m correct in inferring that you’re not affiliated with the Triangle either?” Ariel nodded impatiently. “So I thought. What exactly can I expect to gain by your decision?”
“It’s a yes-or-no question. If the decision is no, you gain nothing.
If the decision is yes, you gain someone willing to speak for you.”
Basq laughed, a sound that coming from a human being would have brought an ambulance. “Why should I concern myself with whether you will speak for us?”
“This conversation has been useless for some time now,” Ariel said.
“I came to see what really goes on here. I want the truth, and I want you to send the word that everyone should talk to me.”
The cyborg leaned to one of his bodyguards and whispered something. The bodyguard ducked into the nearest building and returned with a shirt and pants. It — he — brought them to Ariel and returned to Basq’s side.
“Go by yourself. See what you see,” Basq told her as she dressed.
“We no longer have any desire to hide.”
Chapter 21
DEREC SPENT THE next twelve hours trying to get off Kopernik, but the Terran military authorities turned him down flat. “Not to Nova Levis, that’s for sure,” said the lieutenant in charge of issuing travel permits. “If you want to go back to Aurora, I might be able to arrange that. Most of Byris’ staff are leaving tonight.”
If it had only been a question of a murder investigation, Derec might have taken the lieutenant up on his offer. He could go back to Aurora, wait until a war happened or didn’t, and then decide whether it was worth returning to Nova Levis at all. In the event that the assassin was caught and Derec’s suspicions about the crime confirmed, he might be able to shake off his pariah status and go back to positronics. His experience at Union Station would prove too valuable to ignore.
Had it come to that, though? Had it come to the point at which Derec was willing to use two murders to advance his career, the point at which he was capable of viewing the taking of life as one component of an intellectual problem?
It had not. Not when Ariel was back on Nova Levis, with Nucleomorph putting her at the center of a political firestorm with every potential to become violent. Especially not with a robot that might have killed two humans traveling on a ship registered to Nucleomorph.
Derec had to get back to Nova Levis, and he had to talk to Ariel.
He declined the lieutenant’s offer and went back to his lab. When he opened the door, Derec found Hofton sitting at his desk.
“Hello, Derec,” Ariel’s former aide said. “Pity it takes a circumstance such as this to bring us together again.”
“Hofton,” Derec said, as if by saying the man’s name he could shed his astonishment at Hofton’s presence. “I hadn’t made a list, but you’re about the last person in the galaxy I expected to see up here.”
“If you weren’t here and Pon Byris wasn’t dead, I would have been the last person in the world to come up here. But the diplomatic situation being what it is, strings were pulled.”
“Likewise. Now we should curtail our pleasantries and get to it. What do you know about what’s going on?”
Derec gave Hofton the long version, sparing no speculation and freely indulging his instincts. As he spoke, he found himself unwilling to damn Slyke; the TBI man might have been putting a lid on certain things, but an individual could only take so much pressure. And for all Derec knew, Slyke might have been happy to see Jonis Taprin and Pon Byris dead. It didn’t quite square with his naked antipathy toward robots and Spacers, but people were generally more full of contradictions than one might expect of supposedly rational beings.
“The crux of the whole thing,” Derec said, after laying out the background, “is that I can’t figure out the robot.” This admission was surprisingly difficult. Once Derec had it out in the open, he found himself questioning his motives for coming to Kopernik in the first place — which was exactly what Slyke and even Shara Limke had been doing since he’d stepped off Vilios Kalienin’s ship. Derec wasn’t overly familiar with failure, and admitting to it gnawed at him.
“No shame in that,” Hofton said. “You’re not the only one who hasn’t figured it out.”
“I’m the one who was supposed to, though. I walked away from my lab, I endangered my project and maybe the health of who knows how many people, and I might have put Ariel in danger.”
Hofton set down the glass of water he’d been sipping. “Now we get to the real crux. How do you think you’ve endangered Ariel?”
“The robot’s gone. After Pon Byris was discovered, his attaches flooded Tiko’s processing capability with diplomatic chatter. Tiko had to shut down some of its surveillance capacity to deal with the traffic, and the robot walked right off the station. After killing two people.”
