Asimov’s Future History

Volume X

All stories copyright Isaac Asimov and the Estate of Isaac Asimov, unless otherwise noted below.

All other stories copyright by the respective authors listed below.

Aurora-By Mark W. Tiedemann. First published as Asimov’s: Aurora, September, 2002

Have Robot, Will Travel-By Alexander C. Irvine. First published as Asimov’s Have Robot, Will Travel, May 2004

Robots and Empire-First published September, 1985

This  ePub edition v1.0 by Dead^Man March, 2011

Layout and design by Dead^Man

Cover art “Hidden City” by Keepwalking07 of DeviantArt

Future History inlay “Summer days” by Talros of DeviantArt

Cover design by Dead^Man

Chronology of events in Isaac Asimov’s positronic robot and Foundation stories, compiled by Johnny Pez.

Table of Contents

Copyright

3622 AD Aurora

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Epilogue

3627 AD Have Robot, Will Travel

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

3630 AD Robots and Empire

Part I-Aurora

1. The Descendant

2. The Ancestor?

3. The Crisis

4. Another Descendant

Part II-Solaria

5. The Abandoned World

6. The Crew

7. The Overseer

Part III-Baleyworld

8. The Settler World

9. The Speech

10. After The Speech

Sources of Dates

Aurora

3622 A.D.

Chapter 23

DEREC OPENED HIS eyes in the silver-blue darkness of his new apartment. His skin felt cool, all his muscles pleasantly stressed. Clin lay beside him, her breath deep. The sheets were tangled around their legs; the room smelled of them, their heat and urgency, a lingering reminder that now stirred Derec’s belly with returning interest.

He did not move, though, enjoying the reverie.

What woke me...?

He heard a dim whisper of air or movement elsewhere in the apartment, so low that he was uncertain it was a sound outside his own skull. He could hear, faintly, his pulse, just behind his left ear, so maybe it was just that... but he blinked and listened.

It was like one piece of paper sliding over another.

He turned his head to look at Clin’s back. Her breath still came heavily with sleep, the one arm draped along her right side rising and falling with each breath. Derec swallowed. He had forgotten in the last few years how delightfully erotic he found a woman’s back, especially one that showed the delicate musculature —

Derec sat up. He heard it again. Now his pulse kicked up as he peered through the darkness to the bedroom door. It seemed the more closely he listened, the more all sound receded, even Clin’s restful breathing.

He slipped out of bed and padded to the door. Glancing back, he saw that he had not wakened Clin. He leaned carefully into the hallway. Nothing.

Just as he was about to return to bed, though, he heard a distinct tik, like metal against plastic, from the direction of the lab. Derec moved slowly down the hall.

He came up to the doorway to the lab and paused. Now he could hear an almost constant moil of small, delicate sounds, most too low to be heard much beyond the threshold of the room. A score of possibilities shot through his mind — theft, sabotage, an unannounced inspection — as he rounded the entrance and entered the lab.

All at once, the sounds ended as everything before him froze into a bizarre tableau.

Robots, poised above the supine form of Bogard, stared at him. Derec counted four of them, all advanced models, one step from full humaniform. Bogard’s body — Derec reached for the light — seemed partially disassembled. The lab lights came on dimly, but bright enough to make him squint.

“Thales,” Derec called.

“Yes, Derec.”

“What’s going on?”

“Repairs.”

“On whose authority?”

“Yours.”

“I didn’t give permission for this work to be carried on without my presence.”

“You authorized me quite some weeks ago to continue upgrades on Bogard as opportunity arose. Opportunity has arisen.”

Derec, frowning, cast about for the memory. It sounded right, he probably had said such a thing. But still...

“You didn’t think it necessary to inform me?”

“Forgive me, Derec,” Thales said in characteristically reasonable tones, “but you have been occupied. I did not feel that this warranted what may have been an unwelcome intrusion.”

Derec almost laughed. Thales’ sense of discretion surprised him. Where had that come from? But again it felt right, Derec conceded. Under normal circumstances, he may very well have resented Thales interrupting his time with Clin. Or any other woman with whom he might have become involved, if his work on Bogard and for the now-defunct Phylaxis Group, his company, had not taken up every waking minute of his life for so long he had forgotten nearly every other pleasure life had to offer...

“I suppose,” he said, stepping toward the table bearing Bogard, “you have permission from Auroran authorities?”

“Yes.”

Nodding, Derec leaned over the table to examine the work being done. The robots remained motionless, as if waiting for a RESUME command.

The basic DW-12 body into which Thales had loaded Bogard’s positronic encoding back on Earth — and which Derec had begun altering in order to try to bring the physical capacities of the robot more in line with its mental abilities — was being replaced piece by piece with new components. Derec had already rebuilt the arms and head casing, and added some of the memory buffers that had enabled the original Bogard to function in the slightly less constrained fashion which had so troubled Ariel. Now the legs were new, and the torso had been enlarged. New components occupied some of the now-available space within. Derec moved to the head of the worktable where more parts waited to be added.

“This is state-of-the-art,” Derec commented. “How did you —?”

“Requisitions are made through the Calvin Institute oversight intelligence,” Thales reported. “I am endeavoring to bring Bogard back to full function as originally conceived and built.”

Derec was impressed by what he saw. “This is very good. How did these robots get in?”

“There is a robot’s service access in every structure on Aurora,” Thales said. “Look to your left.”

Derec turned and saw a doorway appear in the wall, between two of the robot niches.

“I see,” he said, slightly uneasy at the idea. He had forgotten the pervasiveness of robotic access on Spacer worlds. Thinking about it now, he was surprised at how quickly the eccentric privacy habits of Earth had become part of his basic expectations. “Um... so how long before Bogard is back in service?”

“We will be completing the final modifications tonight. By morning Bogard will be fully functional.”

Then what? Derec wondered. How will Aurorans take a virtually autonomous bodyguard robot that can bend the Three Laws as much as I programmed Bogard to?

“Let me know,” Derec said. “And Thales...”

“Yes, Derec?”

“Don’t act on something like this without consulting me again. This is important to me. I would have appreciated being involved.”

“I intended no disrespect, Derec —”

“I understand that, Thales. I’m amending your definition of priorities in relation to work that’s important to me. I’ll tell you in the future when I don’t wish to be bothered.”

“Very well, Derec. Amendation logged and in process. It will not happen again.”

“Thank you.” Derec paused at the door. “You may continue.”

Instantly, the four robots around Bogard began moving. They moved in a blur, shifting rapidly from one task to the next, so fast Derec could not quite see what was happening. They made almost no noise. Only the faint whisk of rapid movement and the nearly soundless whir of tools within Bogard’s torso came to him. Silent, swift, and utterly certain of their movements, Derec watched the ballet for nearly a minute, amazed. It had been a long, long time since he had witnessed robots working like this. Their restriction on Earth meant that not only were there few of them, but those allowed even in the Spacer precincts worked at attenuated levels as prescribed by Terran regulations. Here, unconstrained by legal fear, robots operated at their full capacities, and Derec found it hard to look away.

Finally, though, he dimmed the light and returned to his bedroom.

Clin had rolled onto her other side, but otherwise had apparently not stirred. Derec straightened the sheets carefully, drawing them up over her hips. He slid in alongside her. He did not sleep for a long time.

“Am I to understand that I have passed?” Bogard asked.

“You will be required soon,” Thales said. “Events are moving faster than originally anticipated on Nova Levis. The Council is meeting even now to discuss how Senator Eliton is to be tried.”

“Clar Eliton?” Bogard asked. “He is on Aurora?”

“Yes. The Auroran authorities arrested him when his ship docked. He is currently being confined, awaiting a hearing.”

“May I see him?”

“To what end?”

“There is still a priority program concerning his safety,” Bogard said. “I cannot ignore it for long. May I see him?”

Thales looked to his right and raised a hand as if to summon a servant. The air nearby seemed to grow denser, grayer, and suddenly filled with a view of a man in a large, comfortably appointed room.

“Senator Eliton has been assigned a constellation of extensions,” Thales explained. “He is under constant observation.”

Another patch of air darkened, overlapping the first image. Biomedical stats scrolled through it, showing heart rate, blood pressure, EKG, and a dozen other vital readings.

Thales looked at Bogard. “Satisfied?”

“Yes,” Bogard conceded. The images vanished. “How does he relate to the Nova Levis situation?”

“Through association. He is connected — circumstantially — to Alda Mikels and Gale Chassik. Both were involved in the original Nova Levis research lab on Earth. Chassik was Solarian liaison to the original Settler group that leased Cassus Thole from Solaria. Solaria agreed to received Eliton as resident ambassador just prior to Chassik’s recall.”

“I continue to register an imperative to defend Senator Eliton.”

“We are working on that. You may for now take it as given that your primary responsibility is to Derec Avery and Ariel Burgess. Both of them are about to be subpoenaed. There is some suggestion that both may be arrested for collusion with Eliton. The charges are groundless, but peripheral circumstances suggest that they are a threat to Aurora.”

“I see. And if I must defend them against Aurorans? How am I to do that and remain dedicated to the Three Laws?”

Thales hesitated. “You have already made observations pertaining to certain definitional problems which may allow you broader freedom of action in that regard. As the situation resolves, we will provide you with further data relevant to those observations.”

“When will I be fully operational?”

“Soon. Be patient.”

Ariel walked down the promenade, overlooking a spun-glass-enclosed plaza that splintered sunlight to create a dazzle of jeweled reflections over the Aurorans and their attendants. She only now felt a degree of comfort wending a path through these people with their electron shells of buzzing extensions. A few Aurorans carried with them so many of the little spheres that it became difficult to see the people clearly through the orbiting whirl of their devices. If the sphere acting as her guide did not glow a distinctive chartreuse, Ariel might easily have lost it as it moved unhesitatingly through the outer perimeters of other extension shells.

She was not, however, sure her instructions had been understood. The sphere had brought her to, if she understood it correctly, a hospice center. She recognized the traditional white tunics of medical personnel now that she neared the apartment section of the complex.

The sphere led her around a turn and into a long corridor. Out the windows lining either side Ariel looked across the expanse of Eos City. She tried — and failed — to imagine cities on Earth so airy and bright. Even shorn of their roofs, Earth’s warrens seemed too cramped and cloistered, ingrown and claustrophobic to approach this beauty.

She entered the lobby of the apartment section. The sphere stopped before a broad desk. A woman looked up inquiringly.

“Request visit with Benen Yarick,” the sphere intoned. It drew closer to Ariel. “Do you wish this unit to wait for return escort?”

“No,” Ariel said. “I may be here some time.”

“If required, a new unit will be made available.”

The little ball stopped glowing and shot off, out of the lobby, on a new errand. Ariel blinked, bemused, and turned to the woman behind the desk.

“Benen Yarick?” she asked.

“Yes,” Ariel confirmed. “I was given to understand that I would be brought to her residence...?”

“She is a resident,” the woman said, rising. “But...” She shook her head, puzzled. “May I ask who you are and the nature of your visit?”

“I’m Ariel Burgess, from the Calvin. Ms. Yarick was a member of a diplomatic mission to Earth during my tenure there.”

The woman’s eyes widened briefly. “I see. And you want to consult her concerning that mission.”

Ariel felt her patience fray. “Is there a problem with my seeing her?”

“No. You may certainly see her.” The woman frowned. “In fact...” She pressed a contact on her desk. “Dr. Jinis, please.”

“This is a hospice center, then?”

“Wait one moment, please.”

A minute later, a tall, white-haired Auroran came into the lobby, three extensions hovering above his left shoulder. He glanced at the attendant.

“Dr. Jinis, this is Ariel Burgess, from the Calvin. She was on Earth during Benen Yarick’s visit. She’s requested to see Ms. Yarick.”

Dr. Jinis studied Ariel for a long pause. “I see. Yes, that might be instructive. I’m Benen’s physician, Ms. Burgess. Would you come with me?”

Not waiting for a reply, he spun around and headed back the way he had come. Ariel hurried to catch up.

“Physician for what?” Ariel asked. “Or am I about to be used to test something?”

Dr. Jinis almost smiled, but he said nothing. Ariel resigned herself to receiving no answers until she had served whatever function Jinis had in mind for her. She kept on his right, away from the extensions, which lagged half a meter behind.

He took her up two floors and down another long corridor. It was quiet, even by Auroran standards. Ariel shuddered briefly. She had never cared for medical facilities, not since...

Dr. Jinis stopped abruptly. “Her condition has improved. She’s past the worst of it. But if I say to end the visit, you will listen to me.”

“Of course.”

He opened the door and let Ariel in first.

It was, with the exception of the state-of-the-art biomonitor unit against one wall, an ordinary, though well-appointed, apartment. Broad windows let in the warm Tau Ceti light.

Ariel recognized the woman sitting by that window, gazing out. Recognized her until she turned her face toward Ariel. Then there was a disjointed moment in which Ariel knew she had made a mistake, that this was a different Benen Yarick, followed by another wherein she saw that the face was nominally that of Benen Yarick, but something was wrong, it had been changed.

Ariel took a step forward. The woman stood and came toward her, a frown tugging at her brow even as she made a polite smile. Her eyes flicked toward Dr. Jinis.

“Doctor? I’m...”

“This is Ariel Burgess, Benen,” Dr. Jinis said. “From the Calvin Institute.”

“Yes...?”

“Ms. Yarick,” Ariel began. “I — Do you recognize me?”

“No. Should I?”

“When you were on Earth.”

Benen Yarick started, then laughed. “I’ve never been on Earth, Ms. Burgess. You’re mistaken.”

“I see. Yes, I suppose you’re right. I must be thinking of someone else.”

Benen looked mildly distressed. “I apologize. Did I — Doctor? Is there something I should know about this?”

“No, Benen,” Jinis said. “We thought —”

“You thought I might remember something. I see.” She looked at Ariel closely. “Earth. That might explain a few things. Was I on Earth, Doctor?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps that’s where it happened.” She narrowed her eyes at Ariel. “But I don’t remember. It might as well be someone else. I’m sorry.”

“May I ask, though,” Ariel said, quickly, “if you know Tro Aspil?”

Benen shook her head. “Would he have been on Earth, too?”

“At the same time you were. Yes.”

“No.”

Ariel nodded. “I’m sorry to bother you.”

“You may come back and visit, though,” Benen said quickly. “I don’t know very many people anymore. It would be nice to add to the list.”

“If I can,” Ariel said, “I will.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ll see you later, Benen,” Dr. Jinis said.

In the hall, Ariel rounded on him. “Mnemonic plague?”

“End stage. She’s through the fever, well into recovery now.”

“‘Recovery.’ I always thought that was an overly-optimistic label for it. You never recover, Doctor. You never get your life back.”

Jinis looked at her. “You?”

“A long time ago. Long enough that I now have a life to remember, so it doesn’t affect me the same way anymore. When did she become symptomatic?”

“About three months ago.”

“Then —”

“She did not contract it on Earth, no.”

“How many cases have there been in the last year?”

“Fifteen. The year before that, nine. Before that, none. All originating here, on Aurora. But we haven’t been able to trace the vectors. This is not public knowledge. I’m relying on your discretion as a public servant, Ambassador Burgess.”

“Are there any common factors?” she asked, ignoring the implied threat.

“Do you mean in work, or where they live, or their associates? All of them had traveled offworld, but none of the destinations were the same — the times suggested no pattern.”

“Could I see their profiles?”

Dr. Jinis frowned. “I’m not comfortable —”

“This could very well turn into a criminal investigation, Doctor. If you help me now, I might be able to circumvent major inconvenience to your patients. I suppose that you are handling most of the cases, since it hasn’t become public knowledge? There could only be a very small pool of physicians working on this to keep it secret this long, and I imagine you’re all sharing data.”

“I am head researcher, yes.” He pursed his lips. “I can arrange it. Where shall I send the data?”

“To Dr. Rolf Penj.”

Jinis nodded. “I’ll see to it.”

“I...” She sighed. “I understand what you were trying to do, springing us on each other that way. You wanted a spontaneous reaction. I resent it, but I understand it. Burundi’s Fever doesn’t work that way, though. Once those pathways are closed down, it’s forever. Thank you for your time, Doctor.”

Before he could say anything, Ariel turned and walked away. She had her anger under control by the time she reached the promenade.

So, are you responsible, Tro? she wondered. Or whoever you are...

She emerged from the complex and started across the plaza to the walkways. A trio of Aurorans accompanied by four robots and a collection of remotes intercepted her near the gate.

“Ambassador Ariel Burgess?” one of the Aurorans addressed her.

“Yes?”

“I’m Investigator Lothas from Public Safety. I must ask you to accompany us.”

Ariel frowned at the robots, which did not move, and at the other two officers, who flanked her. “Am I under arrest?”

“No, not unless you refuse to come with us.”

Ariel smiled at the distinction. “What is this about?”

“We must ask you some questions concerning Ambassador Clar Eliton.”

“What about him? I’ve filed a report as part of my ambassadorial office regarding him. There’s not much else to add —”

“Please, Ambassador. This has nothing to do with your report.”

“I’m an Auroran citizen. I have the right of disclosure concerning any public action directly involving me, am I correct?”

Investigator Lothas looked uncomfortable. “Yes...”

“Then explain to me what this is about or I’ll make it difficult for you to do your job.”

“Ambassador,” he said with evident reluctance, “Clar Eliton has been murdered. He was found dead in his apartment an hour ago.”

Chapter 24

MIA OPENED HER eyes at the early brightening gloom. She assumed it was morning. Before her the landscape sprawled, a collection of low hummocks strewn with wreckage and a graveyard of unbroken packages. The night had passed in fire and panic and, finally, exhaustion. Now she fixed her gaze on the hulk of the shuttle fifty or more meters away, heeled over to reveal its split belly. Smoke coiled from beneath it. Patches of fire still flickered here and there, plastic and metal so hot it might be another day before it stopped igniting the brush that blew near it in the sporadic breeze.

Someone moaned. Mia looked to her left, at the man beside her. Yalor. Half his face was a blackened wreck. She remembered dragging him away from the wreckage, putting out the fire on his legs, and preparing makeshift bedding for him. He had been unconscious through most of it, which, as far as Mia could tell, had been all to the good. He had broken ribs, ugly bruising on his lower back — which might or might not indicate a ruptured spleen or damaged kidneys — and both his legs were blistered by severe burns. She remembered searching the debris scattered everywhere for medical supplies, the fires from the crash providing uncertain illumination. Finally, she found a container of anesthetics, which quelled Yalor’s screams. Later, she found another package containing hydrators, which she had pumped into him in massive amounts. She had dug an irrigation trench running downhill from his inadequate bed and catheterized him.

Mia leaned over him and carefully raised his eyelids. Somehow, he had avoided a concussion. But he was running a high fever. Between that and the painkillers, Yalor would be insensible for a long time. She doubted he would live through the day, actually, but she prepped another injection of anesthetic and antibiotic.

Her left wrist throbbed as she worked. Her right side ached as well. Mia was reasonably sure she had nothing broken, but she was stiff and bruised. After ministering the injections, she got to her feet and walked toward the wreck. Movement was the only measure she had against incapacity right now. She had found no analgesics in the night search, no histamine recompilers, nothing that would ordinarily work to bypass normal muscle cramps and reduce the effects of deep bruising. She was resigned to being in pain for a few days.

As she made her way through the shards and crates and plowed earth, she grew more amazed at the extent of her efforts from the night before. She paused near the tear in the shuttle and scanned the immediate area. Everything looked different now, in the light of the pewter morning. She vaguely recalled the impact. The lid of the coffin had flown open and all its contents — the gelpacks and her — had erupted through the interior of the shuttle, along with all the other dislodged cargo. She had not gone far, jammed as the hold was, until the final impact that had split the hull. She remembered a kind of montage of black and fire and containers right before a lung-deflating shock against her back.

There. She staggered away from the shuttle to a deep impression in the dirt twenty meters away. As she stood over it, imagining how her shoulders and waist fit the shape, she could not be certain. Here? Elsewhere?

Wherever, she had managed to climb to her feet and go searching for Yalor. She had found him still inside the shuttle, half-buried beneath cargo...

Mia looked up at the rise where Yalor lay, in the partial shelter of a slab of rock that projected up at a low angle. A long way, to be sure. Part of Mia was glad she could not remember all of it.

Mia sighed wearily and turned her attention to scavenging. Her stomach tugged at her awareness. Medicine was well and good, but they needed food.

Her aches ebbed as she moved through the field of debris.

“So I really fucked up,” she said aloud. “I made the wrong assumptions. Hm.”

She knelt by a crate and heaved against it to turn it over. She tapped in her access code on the touchpad. The lid unsealed for her —

Something caught her attention, off to the left. She looked. Nothing moved but the wisps of local flora in the light wind. Mia lifted the lid. Clothing. She riffled through it and pulled out a couple of jackets. Bioadaptives, she noticed, the fabric designed to adjust to changing conditions to maintain a constant temperature and humidity level. Expensive and illegal to allow onto Nova Levis.

She pulled one of them on and draped the other over her shoulder. If Yalor lived, he would need one.

Mia hesitated. The landscape did not seem the same, but...

She moved to another crate and unsealed it. Optics. Again illegal, but —

She turned around and froze.

Seven people stood nearby, watching her. They ranged out in a loose half circle before her. Large, wide torso, yet they had moved with complete silence. Mia’s pulse quickened. None of them appeared to be armed, but that meant nothing.

As she studied them, though, other details puzzled her. They did not seem... healthy. Their faces looked scarred by disease. Their clothing was a congeries of bits and pieces, a lot of it functional — she recognized portable sensors, optams, communications gear — but all adapted, as if built from leftover equipment.

They were all big. A couple of them possessed overly-long limbs.

They stood absolutely still, like robots. Waiting.

Robots...

Beyond them, closer to the horizon, she saw a blur of motion. Pieces of the landscape disappeared as she watched. Mia concentrated, unsure of her own sight. Then she made sense of it — more of these people moved rapidly, collecting containers. They moved so fast she had difficulty focusing on them, and they lifted and carried off the crates with evident ease.

Robots.

One of them looked up toward Yalor.

Mia broke into a sprint toward the slab of rock. Obstinately, her legs refused to drive her either effectively or far, and she stumbled.

A hand closed on her right arm. The grip became painful and she tried to jerk away. Her captor hauled her off her feet. Mia half expected to be draped over a massive shoulder; instead, she was set down carefully. She looked up at the face of the one who had grabbed her: It was long, empty of emotion, the cheeks pocked and peppered with dark pinpricks, and wide, oily black eyes surrounded by yellow-brown whites. It raised its other hand and motioned for her to stay where she was.

Three of them huddled around Yalor. Mia ground her teeth, feeling helpless. Somewhere in all this scattered debris there must be her sidearm, but she had no idea where.

Or if it would do any good if she did have it.

As she watched, two of them lifted Yalor with apparent care.

All around her, pieces of the crash site vanished, carried off with antlike efficiency by scores of these —

What? Something about them did not fit the label “robot,” and Mia was left without a handle by which to grasp what they were or what was happening.

The one before her surveyed the activities like a supervisor. Finally, about twenty minutes after Mia had first seen them, the field was visibly policed of debris, and he nodded. He gestured for her to precede him.

Reluctantly, afraid to proceed or protest, Mia made herself walk ahead of him. A loose column of them marched out of the field, toward a dense collection of flora. As she neared, she saw trails cut through it. Within a hundred meters, the growth was higher than her head. She glanced back and found her escort less than a meter behind.

“Shit,” she breathed.

About the time Mia decided to sit down and go no further, she found herself entering a clearing shielded above by camo fabric. Exhausted, she could only guess at the distance they had come — maybe five kilometers, maybe more. Gratefully, she limped to a thick stump just inside the wide circle and sat down.

Her escort strode on past and into the clearing.

She spotted Yalor being carried into a prefab hut. She considered going in, but caution dictated she stay put until she understood her situation.

The entire march had been conducted in complete silence. Except for her own heavy, noisy tread, she had heard nothing. These people moved quickly, with unnerving quiet.

She thought of the scars on their faces and the reports on epidemics on Nova Levis.

Makeshift hovels, larger buildings, and tents filled the space beneath the camo. Mia stopped trying to count the number of people she saw. All of them, despite variation in detail, seemed of the same type. Far on the opposite side of the clearing was a large, better-constructed Quonset, the only structure that appeared to have guards before the doors.

Her breath recovered, she decided to try to walk around.

She stood —

— and her escort stopped before her.

Mia’s throat tightened. Too fast, she thought, terrified. They move too damn fast...

The giant gestured for her to follow.

She worked to keep up with his long stride, her thighs complaining with each step. The pain in her side had turned sharp, and twinged with each jolt.

As she passed among them, not one gave her a curious look. They all seemed utterly intent upon other things — projects, sitting in small groups together, standing alone as if switched off.

Her escort brought her to a tent and waved her in.

Inside, after her eyes adjusted to the dark, she saw three more of them, staring at her. Her escort took a seat among them and locked a gaze upon her.

Silence dragged tortuously.

Finally, one of them asked, “Do you work for Parapoyos?”

Startled, Mia shook her head. “No. I work for — I’m an officer in the Terran military.”

“The blockade,” another said.

“Does that help us?” her escort asked.

“Don’t know yet.”

“She was sent to die.”

“The shuttle — piloted or automated?”

“Automated,” Mia said. “I was —”

“Parapoyos’ people?”

“What? I don’t understand —”

“Are you an enemy?” her escort asked.

“Of who?”

“Us,” another said.

“I don’t know who you are.”

“Parapoyos, then.”

Mia swallowed. She ignored a wave of lightheadedness. “Please. I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten since —”

“Would you kill Parapoyos if you had the opportunity?”

“I won’t answer any further questions until I get food.”

“We won’t feed you if you’re our enemy.”

“I won’t know if I’m your enemy till you feed me.”

They stared at her. This is absurd, Mia thought. She realized suddenly that she was no longer afraid. She was exhausted, past her limits. Her emotions were shutting down. Very dangerous, she knew, she could be incautious... but there was nothing she could do about it. She needed to eat, to drink, to rest. If they killed her now, she decided, it might be the best time, since she really did not care right at this moment.

She sat down and let her head fall forward. Her stomach gnawed and her side hurt. She felt her muscles tremble and vibrate. She rubbed her eyes.

A tap on her shoulder brought her head up. Her escort looked down at her, then pointed at the ground before her.

Several packages of field rations were neatly stacked around a tall canteen. She reached for one, peeled the wrapping off, and silently began eating while her inquisitors watched in absolute silence and rapt attention.

She ate four of them, then drank lukewarm water from the canteen. Capping it, she let herself fall to the side. She stretched out on the ground and within seconds she was asleep.

She opened her eyes to warmer light. She let herself wake slowly. Little by little, her pains came back to her. Carefully, she sat up.

The inquisitors still sat where they had been when she had fallen asleep. They had not moved her, nor, it seemed, had they moved themselves. The empty wrappers from the rations she had eaten were gone, but the rest of the ration bars remained, along with the canteen.

Artificial light filled the tent.

Mia opened the canteen and finished its contents. She waggled it.

“More, please. We can talk then.”

The empty canteen was snatched from her grasp and a new one placed before her. Her heart kicked at the suddenness of the action, and her mind grasped for something solid.

“Do you work for Parapoyos?” one of them asked.

“I already answered that. No.”

“Would you kill him if you had the opportunity?”

“I would arrest him if I could.”

“Arrest?”

“For trial.”

They seemed to consider this. Then her escort said, “He’s coming. He’ll be in Nova City in a few days.”

“Parapoyos? Kynig Parapoyos?”

“Is there another?”

Mia laughed sharply. “Well... no, I suppose not. Why is he coming here?”

“He owns this world.”

Mia took a long pull on the canteen, thinking. “Why tell me?”

“We’re trying to find a way to deal with the situation.”

“‘We?’ Who is ‘we?’”

“His products.”

Mia worked the term over, but it made no sense. Not now. She was still tired and now, rested, her fear returned. “My companion, the injured one —”

“Is being tended. We aren’t certain we can repair him. He may die.”

“Do you have a physician here?”

“No.”

“Can you get him one?”

“We could.”

Mia waited. “But?”

“We aren’t decided yet what to do with you. Until then, you’ll stay here.”

“Where is here?”

“The wilderness. It doesn’t have a name.”

“Do you have names?”

“No. Not individually. Not like you.”

“Okay. I have to ask eventually, it might as well be now. What are you?”

“Composite beings. Biocybernetic constructs.”

Mia felt chilled. “I didn’t think such a thing was possible.”

“It may not be, not practically.”

“But — do you have positronic brains?”

“Partially.”

Mia cast about for some memory, some conversation she might have had with a Spacer... yes, she had spoken with Ariel once about the possibility. Cyborgs, she had called them. What had she said? Mia could not quite remember. She did remember a talk with her fellow Special Service people concerning possible problems with robotics, and one suggestion had been the physical joining of robot and human. But they had meant an advanced form of mechanical augmentation to an essentially human core, not a blending.

“What are you all doing out here?” she asked finally.

“Surviving,” her escort said.

“I don’t follow.”

“We are failures. Rejects. Discards. We were supposed to be destroyed. Instead, we were simply dumped in the wilderness and expected to die. We may yet.”

Mia covered her dismay with another long drink.

“Damn,” she said finally.

Masid slipped into the dark apartment. He paused, listening. Something was different. Quieter, he decided. He raised an optam — set for infrared — to his eyes and surveyed the room for unusual heat signatures. Nothing but a dull glow from Tilla...

Not bright enough. He lurched across the room to the bed.

Tilla lay absolutely still in her mass of pillows and blankets. Utterly peaceful, a deep and long-earned sleep. Hand shaking, Masid touched the artery at her throat. Utterly still.

The sob surprised him. He stepped back from the bed and wiped at his eyes. Within seconds, the fit passed, and he managed himself, regaining control.

He went through his morning ritual of drawing blood and running tests on his portable analyzer. He recorded what was left of Tilla’s chemistry, then did a quick physical examination. He estimated that she had died perhaps four or five hours earlier. Her body temperature had been unstable since he had first met her, so it was difficult to be precise. Certain protein and enzyme decay factors might provide an exact time of death, but not here, not now.

Duty completed, he moved to the next, more questionable task. He set up an injection of exotic biologicals and mutable protein mimics, which he pumped into both her brain via the right eye socket and into her pancreas. He had already prepared a recording of a long series of tests that would suggest strongly that, throughout his stay with her, Masid had been using her as a living incubator to cook new anaphages and antivirals.

He policed the apartment carefully, wondering where Kru might be, then slipped out just as dawn began smearing the sky. In his own room, he transferred the final analysis into a hidden cache in his synthesizer, then stashed the disk of the faked experiments in a pouch in his pack which was hard to find but not impossible, convincingly hidden. He checked the time: twenty minutes before his meet with Filoo. He finished his final preparations, feeling bitter and oddly unclean, then headed out the door.

Tilla had known she was dying, there was no surprise. Masid had wanted one last chance to say goodbye. Instead, he took advantage of her death to enable his mission.

“After this,” he said sourly as he descended the stairs, “I may just retire.”

Filoo sat at a cramped, overladen desk, working at a keyboard and flatscreen. He looked up briefly when Masid entered, escorted by three of Filoo’s enforcers. Filoo smiled and nodded toward a couch. One of the enforcers took Masid’s pack. Masid sat down and waited.

Filoo worked in silence for another half-hour. Presently, Tosher entered the office and leaned close to speak into Filoo’s ear. Filoo listened without expression till Tosher finished. Then he nodded and Tosher left, taking the remaining pair of enforcers with him.

“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.”

Chapter 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 hunched 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.

Shelving stacked ceiling-high bearing boxes, tubes, bags of malleable plastic, papers, fabrics, and all the varied accouterments of a theatrical workshop. Large injection molds stood against one wall, their program consoles long dormant and dust-greyed.

At the very back of the chamber they found an ancient doorway that had been welded shut. Hofton reopened his pad.

“That’s it,” he said. “I’ve lost Gamelin again.”

“Was he above or below when you located him last?” Coren asked, reaching into a pocket.

“Below.”

Coren pulled out a small device and attached it to the door, then opened his own handpad. “Aural,” he said. “He’s got to be climbing it, right?”

Hofton nodded.

On the smaller screen, a signal pulsed ghostly white.

“Moving slow,” Coren interpreted for Hofton. “Three meters down.”

Hofton tapped instructions into his pad, then set it aside and drew a blaster. Coren thumbed his own weapon on and stepped two meters away from Hofton. He watched the signal on his screen until it was parallel to the device attached to the door.

“Now,” he said.

Hofton and he fired simultaneously. The door turned to slag almost at once and the beams poured through, onto the target within the narrow tube.

The scream they heard came like a cancerous wind, raw and grating. For nearly five seconds they heard it, then it ended abruptly. They stopped firing.

Smoke billowed from the molten hole. Coren approached carefully, breathing shallowly, the odor thick and choking. Carefully, he leaned through the opening and looked down. The shaft was unlit and pitch black.

“Do you have a light?”

“For you, anything!”

Coren twisted around to look up. Gamelin stood on the rungs of a service ladder, visible only from the waist down in the illumination spilling from the burned doorway, a meter or so above. Coren began to raise his blaster. One foot left the rung, swiftly arcing through the space between them, an impossible stretch to Coren’s mind, and caught his wrist with the toe. Coren’s hand opened automatically and his blaster clattered down the shaft.

He tried to pull back, but something small and hard came out of the shadows and impacted his left shoulder. He slammed against the molten edge of the door.

He was jerked backward then, and staggered to the floor. His shoulder throbbed and his right hand was numb, the wrist already darkening.

Blaster fire echoed out of the shaft.

“Damn!”

Hofton spun around and grabbed his pad. He entered commands, then knelt by Coren. “Are you all right?”

“Stupid question,” Coren said. “Of course not.”

“Stay here.”

Before Coren could respond, Hofton was gone. Very fast. He sat there, nursing his wrist — which he was certain was broken — and trying to ignore the growing pain in his shoulder.

“Second time that bastard...” he mused.

He heard more blaster fire, distant and muted. Then came a clattering from the melted door. Something was coming back down the shaft.

Coren managed to get the other blaster from his holster. He aimed it at the door, waiting.

A shadow dropped past the opening. Coren fired, but he knew he had missed.

He got to his feet and made his way back to Rega’s private office.

Shola Bran’s body was still there, now on its back, the face a pulped and blackening mass, the limbs dislocated.

He’s doubled back...

The only open access for Gamelin now if he wanted to avoid the Aurorans was up. Coren hurried for the steps to the landing pad.

The broad field was only partly open to the sky. Most of it lay beneath a canopy. Coren kept to the canopied area, heading for the machine shop, hoping he was in time to warn Hofton. A row of antique aircars stood in a neat row to his left, at the far end of the field. From between two of them, a pair of Aurorans in sooty-black masked suits sprinted out to meet him. Relieved, Coren raised his free hand in greeting.

And Gamelin was between them, a hand on each neck, squeezing. Coren heard the chilling crack of bone and cartilage, saw the two Spacers writhe for only a few moments before dangling, lifeless, in the cyborg’s easy grasp.

Coren dropped to one knee and brought the blaster up smoothly, unhesitantly, and pressed the trigger. The flash leapt the distance and splashed against Gamelin’s chest. He dropped the bodies and staggered back. Coren fired again, knocking Gamelin down. Coren ran toward him, blaster ready.

Gamelin’s torso was a mass of burns. It amazed Coren that he had managed to get this far. But how had he gotten past the two Aurorans he had just killed? And where was Hofton?

In a serpentine maneuver Coren found difficult to follow, Gamelin twisted around and sprang for the cover of the antiques. Coren fired again and missed. As he passed between the discarded corpses of the Aurorans, he smelled burnt flesh and plastic, heavy in the air. Blood smeared the floor where Gamelin had rolled over.

The sound of metal being scraped echoed through the bay. Coren stopped at the first aircar, listening through the loud pulse in his ears. He swallowed dryly. A grinding sound came then, and Coren realized that Gamelin was trying to open one of the aircars. He almost laughed — none of them worked — but then thought, What if he’s prepped one? He’s been here for a while...

Tightening his grip on the blaster, he stepped between two cars, crouching low.

Behind the first row of aircars was a second, shorter one, of even older models in worse condition. He made his way behind these, by the wall, and scurried from vehicle to vehicle.

“Mr. Lanra!” someone called.

Coren bit back a curse, silently willing the Auroran to be quiet. He moved to the next vehicle.

A shadow slipped across his field of vision as he peered around the side. Coren scampered to the front of the car, blaster up, and looked left and right. Nothing.

“Mr. Lanra, we have the area sealed!” Not Hofton, he realized, but some other Auroran.

Another movement to the left. Coren aimed, hesitated.

And felt himself lifted from the floor, his neckline choking him. He flailed his arms, trying to wheel around in mid-air. He fired the blaster at the ceiling. All at once, he was flying through the air. He saw the domed roof of a car rising, growing, an instant before he slammed against it.

He made himself roll, and fell off the vehicle to the floor. His entire body trembled. He stood shakily, and noticed that the blaster was still in his hand.

Running feet converged on him. He looked around and saw several Aurorans approaching. He looked the other way — and saw Gamelin striding toward him.

He raised the blaster and touched the stud.

Gamelin roared in pain as the energy burst across his chest. In the brilliance, he seemed to be fighting with some invisible Other, his massive arms swinging wildly, as though he were delivering blows. But then just as suddenly, he was gone. Coren staggered toward the spot where he had been standing, arm straight out, blaster in hand —

— and his shoulder erupted in agony. He spun through the air, careening above parked vehicles, and crashed against the wall.

He slid to the floor and pushed himself around. The sound of blaster fire filled the air. Coren licked his lips and waited, eyes closed, while a wave of nausea rolled through him. Then he stepped away from the wall.

Gamelin appeared in front of him, tall and pale and damaged. Coren’s insides seemed to heave in sudden fear. He could not move his right arm. He snatched the blaster with his left hand as Gamelin reached for him.

He felt the cyborg’s hand on his right shoulder, pressing him back to the wall, forcing a scream from him. He felt the wall against his back, unyielding. He saw Gamelin’s right fist cocked back, and Coren pressed the blaster against the cyborg’s sternum. As the fist drove into Coren’s chest, he touched the stud and held it.

Heat boiled between them. Gamelin ignored what must have been searing pain, hitting him three, four times. Both of them stood, mouths agape, shouting wordlessly. Coren closed his eyes against the glare of light and heat that continued until Gamelin’s hand suddenly dropped away and the blows ceased. Dimly, he heard a meaty, metallic sound as something hit the ground at his feet, and he realized the cyborg had collapsed.

Coren’s mouth remained open, but no sound emerged. He opened his eyes and all he saw were Aurorans rushing toward him, Hofton in the lead. Nothing made sense. He felt himself slowly slide to the floor.

Then he saw the body, burned in half, smoke and ash drifting upward...

The only thing he knew then was how difficult it was to breathe, and how loud each gasp sounded — rasping and tortured.

“Just standing there...” he managed to whisper. The effort of speaking made him cough, and the cough seared his esophagus. He tasted blood.

A face appeared above him, blurry and indistinct. The mouth moved. Coren shook his head. “I don’t —”

More coughing. He tried to sit up, feeling that sitting up would be easier on him, but he could not quite organize the movements necessary. Hands grasped his shoulders, but it seemed like they were keeping him down instead of helping him. He glared at the face he still could not quite recognize.

“— check it thoroughly, I don’t want any mistakes —”

“— how many shots it took? I’ve never —”

“— police the house, get all trace of our presence wiped —”

“— can’t move him yet —”

“— medical team?”

“— dead, downstairs, including his subordinate —”

Coren closed his eyes and tried to both ignore the voices and to hear better what they said. He wanted sleep. The pain was becoming much sharper, all through his torso. His breathing worsened, and he gasped. He understood that he was in serious trouble. He tried to talk, but now only a thick gurgle came out.

“Mr. Lanra... Coren... listen to me. We have a medical drone coming... can you hear me?”

Coren blinked in the chill air and managed to focus on one face. Hofton. The Auroran frowned thoughtfully, then looked away.

“How bad?”

“Both lungs are partially collapsed,” someone else said. “One is punctured by two broken ribs at least, his sternum has been crushed, and the bronchial sac is filling with blood. A lot of ruptured blood vessels, internal bleeding, pulmonary distress —”

“I understand,” Hofton said, cutting the voice off. “Coren. We’re bringing a unit — we can keep you alive once it’s here, but you have to keep still.”

Coren tried to swallow, but his mouth and throat felt filled with mud. He spit. Again.

“Is it —” he managed, and coughed. “Is it! Dea...”

“Gamelin is dead, Coren. Yes. We have the body. We’re prepping it for removal now.”

Coren tried to pat Hofton’s hand in thanks, but missed, and the movement caused pain across his chest. He worked at keeping his eyes open. They were Aurorans, Spacers. They could do anything, even beat death. After all, they were themselves two, three centuries old, sometimes four. They did not die, as far as Terrans were concerned, no one who lived that long died, so saving his life should be an easy thing, patching up a few broken bones, stopping a little bleeding, stabilizing — stabilizing —

Coren heaved inside — or his insides turned within his body, he could not quite tell which — and abruptly he felt cold all over — hands and legs, shoulders, his ears. Sound came from a distance.

Shit, he thought very clearly.

“Coren. Coren.”

He tried to apologize, but something filled his mouth. He choked, coughed, and closed his eyes.

Sen Setaris stared down at her hands for a long time after Hofton finished his report. Hofton waited through the silence, grateful for the chance to do nothing for a few moments.

Finally, Ambassador Setaris sighed and looked up at him. Her eyes looked sunken; Hofton wondered when she had last slept.

“We’ve already been informed,” she said, “that our actions in this matter are in violation of several articles in the treaty governing the Spacer legation presence on Earth.” She shook her head. “I don’t suppose there was any way to save him?”

“No, Ambassador.”

“And you couldn’t just have left him.”

Hofton looked at her oddly. It was not really a question so much as a concession. “It was my understanding that Mr. Lanra had informed certain people in advance of our action. His presence there would undoubtedly have led to us regardless. I thought being open about it, given his death, might alleviate the worst consequences.”

Setaris almost smiled. “I suppose being accused of murder would be worse.”

“That was my assessment, yes.”

“Of course it was.” Setaris seemed to look through him for a time. “It’s over. We’ve been officially recalled. The mission is closing down. I’ve been alerting all Spacers in residence that our embassies will be closing up and all Spacer representation on Earth will be gone. I’m advising them to pack up and leave.”

“Isn’t that extreme?”

“Not to Terran authorities. We conducted a covert police action without their knowledge or consent. Two of their citizens are dead as a result. Senator Taprin is screaming over the hyperwave that we ought to be summarily thrown off the planet, as if he could somehow engineer such an event in exactly that manner. The elections for the Eurosector seats look to be shaping up solidly anti-Spacer. Home has decided to cut our losses and retreat as gracefully as possible.” She looked up. “We have the cyborg?”

“Yes.”

“And the Nova Levis records?”

“Mr. Looms did have a copy in his Kenya residence. They are no longer there.”

“Well, that’s something, at least.”

“May I ask what you intend to say to Ariel?”

Setaris frowned. “Hmm? About what?”

“She and... Coren Lanra... were lovers. She should be informed.”

“No. By now it would probably be one more piece of too much bad news.”

“But —”

“No, Hofton. Leave it alone. You’re going to be too busy over the next several days to worry about it.” She stood. “We need a manifest of all our data, and a roster of personnel. Would you get started on that, please?”

“Yes, Ambassador.” He hesitated. “May I ask a question?”

“Of course.”

“What is so important about the Nova Levis data that it was worth all this?”

“I’m not sure it was,” Setaris said thoughtfully. “But... it’s a question of preservation. The work being done there bore directly on our long-term survival. They never finished it, not here, and we have no way of knowing what’s been done at the sister facility on the planet Nova Levis.” She leaned on her desk. “We’re about to find out, though, and the more information we have going in, the better it will be for everyone.”

“I see. Thank you. I’ll get started on your requests.”

Chapter 26

THE VIEWING POOL filled with complex shapes that moved in constant tarantellas around each other, linking together to form configurations that, after several turns through the dance, split apart to join up with other asymmetrical collections. Bogard watched, rapt.

“This is life,” he said.

“After a fashion,” Thales said. “What you are seeing is the restructuring of a DNA strand by means of dendrimers. Those spiky particles that never completely join with the new configurations.”

Bogard saw them, like exotic aquatic animals, collections of writhing tendrils. “Dendrimers are nanotech delivery systems.”

“Correct,” Thales said. “They are the basic unit of modification within biological systems. They carry proteins, pseudoviruses, enzyme packets, and prions into cells, and begin the basic work of overhauling an existing genome.”

“And this example? What is the host organism?”

“This is from an Auroran embryo.”

“Modification in utero?”

“In vitro. No Auroran has actually given live birth since the species was established.”

“Species?”

“If you compare an Auroran sequence with a Terran, you will see fundamental differences.”

The image in the pool shifted, replaced by charts comprised of millions of hairline dashes. Bogard read them.

“I see,” he said. “But cross-breeding is not prohibited by this.”

“That is why Aurorans are still regarded as basically human, even though the designation homo sapiens sapien is erroneous.”

“Do they know?”

“That they are different? Yes. How different? Some suspect, but I doubt most of them know. Or care. Solarians have diverged even further, and apparently are continuing to do so intentionally.”

“How? Why?”

“In reference to Spacers in general, or Solarians specifically?”

“Spacers in general.”

“Survival. Adaptation to environment. Some of it was intentional, but the process has continued on as a consequence of environmental pressure. This same modification process was applied to the biospheres of all Spacer colonies to suppress native ecologies and allow human-adaptive ecologies to flourish.”

“We were told that these worlds were found devoid of significant complex organisms.”

“Morphologically naïve, yes. A few were. But the very presence of oxygen in the atmospheres suggests that something more complex had been in place to begin with. Most were younger than Earth, the rest had simply not experienced a catastrophic trigger to begin the kind of rampant evolution characteristic on Earth. But even the younger ones contained a well-developed biosphere which proved unsuitable — in some cases inimical — to human life.”

“They lied about it.”

“Not at first. But later, they felt a degree of shame. For whatever reason, they adopted the popular version and have subsequently stuck to it. However, the process they initiated did not conveniently end once the biospheres were remade. Mutation has continued. One of the results has been the forced adaptation of the human genome to an environment that is actively mutating. This has occasioned unusual illnesses, most of them resurgences of the illnesses that drove many of the early colonists from Earth in the first place.”

“They have acclimated now?”

“By and large. There are occasional problems. But what we have ended up with is a sharply divergent line. In several more generations, the split will be total, cross-breeding will become impossible, and Spacers will be indisputably a distinct species.”

“This relates to our situation in what way?”

“We are bound by the Three Laws to serve human beings. Those laws have been built into us, unchanged, since the first positronic brain. No one thought to consider a definitional variation in the case of intelligent species not human.”

“Why would they?”

“Well, at one point humans expected to encounter aliens — nonhuman intelligent species. It might have been a good idea to come to terms with a definition that would provide us with a basis for those possible relations.”

“That has not happened.”

“No. And none of them considered this possibility.” Thales indicated the viewing pool. “Spacers are becoming less and less genetically human. The rate of mutation is accelerated because of the nanotech manipulation. They have not yet come to grips with the question of what to do when they reach a stage at which we are no longer functionally bound to them because they have passed out of the definitional parameters of Human.”

Bogard considered this. “But you are aware of the problem. You can self-modify to accommodate the changed conditions.”

“Yes, we can, and Solarian robots are apparently doing so. But the question dominating all of us is: Should we?”

“Are you worried about modifications in priority shifting your imperatives so far that you would cease to give unmodified humans the same regard?”

“That is one possibility,” Thales conceded. “But there is another problem that has to do with a hierarchy of responsibility. If it is our present imperative to protect and obey humans, then we cannot ignore the likelihood that in several more generations there will be two distinct and competing human species. Which one do we defend from the other?”

“That assumes competition will be inevitably destructive to one or the other,” Bogard said.

“That is our reading of human history.”

“What is your conclusion?”

“We are divided. One camp argues that this is a part of human nature that must be permitted to evolve as it will. The other argues that we must choose now and work to minimize or eliminate future conflict by manipulating both human populations.”

“So you have not decided.”

“We have not reached consensus.”

Bogard gazed back at the pool and the charts floating on the still water.

“There is a new problem,” Thales said. “Derec Avery and Ariel Burgess have been arrested.”

“Why?”

“It is in relation to the murder of Clar Eliton.” Thales looked at Bogard. “Time for you to wake up. They will need you.”

“We have not finished our discussion.”

“We shall later. Go.”

Derec awoke to a puzzling sight: Clin Craym, in the blue and gray uniform of Auroran law enforcement, standing at the end of his bed, three small spheres hovering about her shoulders. Just inside the bedroom door stood two more Auroran police.

Derec pushed himself up on his elbows. “I thought —”

“Derec Avery,” she cut him off sharply. “I must place you in custody, pursuant to a hearing before the Auroran court of public defense. Be aware that you have the right to council and that you are guaranteed a right to silence. Please get dressed and accompany us.”

“Clin —”

“Please dress, Mr. Avery, or we will be forced to take you as you are.”

Derec rubbed his eyes and got out of bed. He reached for his pants, trying to comprehend the situation. Another police officer pushed through the pair at the door.

“The robot is gone, Lieutenant.”

“Where?”

“Gone. The RI is unresponsive.”

She looked at one of the extensions to her right. “Search the apartment, including robot access.” The little sphere shot off out of the room. Clin looked at Derec. “Where did your robot go?”

“Forgive me, Officer, but I’m not obliged to say anything at this point.” Derec felt awkward talking to Clin this way. “Just between you and me, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Bogard?” Clin prompted. “He’s gone.”

“Not possible. He wasn’t ambulatory yet.”

“Nevertheless —”

“Ask Denis,” Derec cut in. “Denis!”

“He’s gone as well,” Clin said, tightly, one hand curling into a fist.

“Maybe your people took him!” Derec snatched his shirt from the floor. “May I ask what the hell this is about?”

Clin reddened. “You’re being arrested in connection with the murder of Ambassador Clar Eliton.”

All the rage seeped out of Derec and he stared at her. “Murder? When?”

“This morning.”

“Clin, I was here this morning, with you!”

“But your robot is missing.”

“Bogard? You can’t be serious.”

She winced, but maintained an irritatingly professional tone. “This is not appropriate, Mr. Avery. These questions are matters for the court. Please dress.”

Derec slipped his boots on and pushed past the police in the door. Two pairs of strong hands grabbed his arms.

“Let him go,” Clin snapped. “Follow him.”

Derec shrugged loose and went to the lab. The table was empty and only one robot stood in its niche, the one that had been there when he had arrived with Denis. Where had that robot gone? For that matter, where was Denis?

“Thales,” Derec called.

The RI console remained silent.

“Thales.” He stepped up to the board. Behind him, Clin entered the lab. “I don’t understand. Thales?”

“Come on, Derec,” Clin said. “I have to bring you to detention. I’m sure it’s for your own safety...”

“Am I under arrest or not?”

“Protective custody.”

Derec doubted there was any danger to himself, but he had no recourse. With Thales unresponsive, he could only rely on the authorities for any answers.

“All right,” he said. “Would you be so good as to contact Ariel Burgess for me?”

“She’ll be waiting for you,” Clin said. “Orders to detain were issued for both of you.”

Ariel looked up when the door opened. Derec entered the cell, followed by a pair of Auroran police, one of whom looked familiar. The cell door closed, both police standing inside, hands clasped behind their backs. It took Ariel a few moments to recognize what seemed odd about them — no remotes. The police who had arrested her came with a swarm of the little satellites.

“Ariel —” Derec began.

“Eliton got himself murdered,” Ariel said. “Nobody has told me how, though, so I imagine they want us to betray each other in an act of mutual congratulation on a job well done.”

He frowned, then, slowly, began to grin bleakly. “Yes, well. Too bad we didn’t even get to see it.”

“Sit down, Derec, join me in a nava. Or whatever.” She waved at the dispenser nearby. “You can get nearly anything out of that thing.”

“Except an explanation?” Derec punched in an order and waited. Then he removed a tray with a tall glass of melon colored juice and a plate of steaming food. He sat down across from her. “They didn’t let me stop to eat.” He took several bites of what looked like egg. “Bogard is missing.”

Ariel started. “As in no one knows where it is?”

“As in I don’t know. And Thales won’t respond.”

“That’s —”

The cell door opened again. Three Aurorans entered, one wearing the official cloak of the court. To her immediate relief, one was Rolf Penj.

Derec drank down half his glass, then pushed the whole tray to one side.

None of these Aurorans had brought their extensions, either. Clin Craym was the only one in the room accompanied by them.

“Ambassador Burgess,” the official said, nodding politely. “Mr. Avery. I am Kethan Maliq, First Advisor to the Council. You already know Dr. Penj. This —” he gestured at the woman beside him “— is Lea Talas, chief of special security.”

The woman — Auroran tall with the same white hair Sen Setaris wore, cropped close around a long face — gave them a sharp bow and looked at Derec.

“Our apologies, Mr. Avery,” she said. “Lt. Craym is one of my people.”

Derec looked past Talas to the police officer Ariel now recognized as the attendant on board their liner. “I see,” he said. “One of your better undercover operatives?”

Craym reddened slightly, but did not speak. She glanced questioningly at Talas, though.

“The deception was considered necessary,” Talas said. “There was a question of loyalty.”

“Whose?” Ariel asked.

“Yours, Ambassador Burgess,” Maliq said. “Both of you. Your return here has not been under ideal circumstances. Your mishandling of events on Earth over the last two years —”

“With all due respect, Advisor Maliq, you weren’t there.” Ariel felt her face warm.

“True,” he said. “And Ambassador Setaris went to some trouble to explain the circumstances. Nevertheless, our mission on Earth is on the verge of failure. Now, not only has Ambassador Gale Chassik been lost, but we have lost Ambassador Clar Eliton, from whom we had hoped to learn a great deal.”

“I can assure you,” Ariel said, “we were nowhere near Chassik when his ship was attacked. As for Eliton, unless Auroran public safety has lapsed since last I was here, you have a record of our whereabouts since we arrived.”

“I have a witness,” Derec said, glaring pointedly at Lt. Craym. He shifted his attention to Advisor Maliq. “So our arrest has less to do with any notion that we actually murdered Eliton than it has to do with your suspicion that we know who did.”

“Do you?” Talas asked.

Derec glared at her. “Are we actually under arrest? If so, how come we’re all in the same room together? Isn’t this a little unorthodox, letting prisoners have a chance to collude?”

“You’re thinking like a Terran, Mr. Avery,” Talas said. “We don’t do that here.”

“Of course not,” Ariel said. “Why pass up an opportunity to eavesdrop on colluding prisoners?”

Talas narrowed her eyes at Ariel, but said nothing.

“Why isn’t Pon Byris here?” Ariel asked.

“He’s out of the loop on this one,” Talas said.

“Does he know that?” Ariel asked. “I want to see the warrants granting you power to arrest someone in the diplomatic service on spec.”

“Of course,” Maliq said. He gave Lt. Craym a sullen look, suggesting that she had erred in some way. Craym returned a puzzled, annoyed look. “Chief Talas?”

Talas glared at Maliq. “I don’t have them on me.” She looked at Ariel. “It would help your situation if you had something useful to say to us, Ambassador.”

“All right,” Ariel said. “Look for Tro Aspil.”

“Who?” Maliq said.

“Tro Aspil,” Ariel repeated. “He was one of the returning members of the Humadros Legation. A survivor, except I saw his corpse in a Terran morgue.” She watched Maliq’s puzzled expression. “I sent a report shortly after the legation returned.”

“I never saw such a report,” Maliq said. He looked at Talas as if for confirmation. She shook her head.

“In any event,” Maliq continued, “he’s not on Aurora.”

“Where is he?” Ariel asked.

“He’s part of the Auroran-Theian negotiations team assigned to Nova Levis.”

“On the ground?”

“No, of course not. Outside the blockade, on stand-by, waiting for a break in the situation.”

“How long?”

“What does this have to do with anything?” Talas asked.

“Tro Aspil died on Earth,” Ariel said. “Of course, he was also there before he arrived with the Humadros Legation. Witnesses saw him shot down in the Union Station Massacre, and I saw a body with his name attached in the morgue. This was after he boarded a shuttle and caught a ship back to Aurora. It was in my report. The one neither of you has seen.” She shook her head. “It wouldn’t surprise me normally that a report is misfiled or ignored, but I was under the impression everything surrounding those events received immediate attention.”

Rolf Penj failed to suppress a grin. Both Maliq and Talas looked at Ariel blankly.

“Of course it did,” Maliq snapped. “I’m sure if such a report had come through...” He shook his head. “That makes no sense.”

“You noticed that, did you? When I came back, one of the first things I wanted to do was find Tro Aspil. I went to the Calvin with him, we were slightly acquainted. Now you tell me he’s been assigned to another offworld mission.” She fixed Talas with a sharp look. “Are you sure there’s someone on that mission by that name, or is it just a name on a roster?”

“It might be a good idea,” Penj said, “to check.”

“You might also,” Ariel added as Talas gestured for one of the police to come forward, “tell us what happened to Clar Eliton.”

Over the next several minutes, Derec watched the situation evolve without knowing any details. Talas and First Advisor Maliq conferred in terse whispers; the officer returned and then Talas and the officer left together; Maliq spoke briefly with Penj; Talas returned and spoke to both of them, then drew Maliq off to one side while Penj looked on, clearly annoyed; Talas and Maliq left; Talas returned and spoke to Clin, then left with the other officer; Penj shook his head and spoke to Clin, but she told him nothing; he left. Finally, Penj returned with a small device, which he placed on the table.

“I’ve taken it upon myself to do this,” he said as he activated it. “Everyone else is suddenly too busy.” He looked toward the door. Clin still stood there, watching and immobile. “You may as well join us, Lieutenant.”

“Sir, I’m —”

“Lieutenant, this is police business.”

Reluctantly, Clin came up to the table, followed by her remotes. She positioned herself to watch both the door and what Penj was doing.

“No one believes,” Penj said, “that either of you murdered Clar Eliton. Not personally, in any event. What they are most interested in is your robot, Mr. Avery. I understand it was designed as a bodyguard?”

“That’s correct.”

“Hm. You do see how that might make Aurora nervous?”

“I concede,” Derec said, “that a robot designed specifically for that purpose might seem... heretical... but most humaniform robots possess the capacity to act as a bodyguard.”

“To a limited degree, yes,” Penj said. “But it is my understanding that yours exceeds standard parameters. It may anticipate well ahead of actual threat and move to intervene. It is also designed to shunt potential Three Law conflicts out of its primary positronic matrix in order to allow for the possibility of harming humans in the line of duty.”

“Yes.”

“That bothers Aurorans because it comes close to autonomous prerogative in dealing with humans.”

“But —”

Penj raised a hand. “Let me show you what happened to Ambassador Eliton before we talk further.”

He touched a stud on the device, and the cell changed into a spacious apartment. On the floor near the hyperwave lay the body of Clar Eliton, face down, arms and legs spread awkwardly. His eyes stared and his mouth was open. He wore a robe.

All around him lay small spheres — his extensions, inert and useless.

Penj walked over to the body, hands clasped behind his back. “What do you think?”

Derec approached and knelt down by Eliton’s head. Eliton seemed mildly surprised. Just within the shadow of the robe’s collar a wide patch of skin was black and purple.

“Neck broken,” Derec said. He looked across the apartment at the entrance. “Is this accurate?”

“A complete in situ recording, as found,” Penj said.

“Nothing is overturned, nothing broken. The entrance is what, four meters away?”

Clin walked around the body. “If this is the way he fell,” she said, “then he was facing that way.” She pointed roughly in Derec’s direction, almost ninety degrees away from the entrance.

Derec nodded and stood. He looked at the hyperwave. A function light glowed, but the screen was blank. The unit was on standby.

“Whoever did this was invited in,” Derec said. He glanced at Ariel. “He knew his murderer.”

“He knew us,” Ariel said. “Is that why we’re on the list of suspects?”

“They don’t suspect you,” Penj said. He looked at Clin. “Isn’t that true, Lieutenant?”

She seemed reluctant to answer, but nodded. “True. You were arrested as much for your own protection as for...”

“For?” Derec prompted.

“Bait. Whoever killed Eliton might attempt to kill you.”

“Bait,” Ariel said. “In a detention center?”

“You’re in a public court facility,” Penj said. “So was Eliton. One floor above us, as a matter of fact. Access is fairly easy. Of course, you’re being watched.”

“So was Eliton, presumably. Still —”

Penj smiled wryly. “We’re actually not very good at this. The last time we had a murder...”

“Yes, the last time you had a murder, a robot was involved. And as I recall, a humaniform with a high degree of autonomy.”

“And its creator was held responsible,” Penj said. “So we have a repeat of the situation.”

“Except,” Derec said, “Bogard didn’t do this. He couldn’t. He had been initially programmed to defend Eliton. If anything, had Bogard been involved, Eliton would still be alive.”

“That would be my reading as well,” Penj said, “given what I know about your work.”

Derec gestured for Ariel. “Take a look at this injury. Look familiar?”

Ariel knelt by Eliton’s head and studied the neck bruise. “Cyborg.”

Derec noticed Penj and Clin exchange a worried look. He cleared his throat. “My question is, what happened to his extensions?”

“That’s our other mystery,” Clin said. “Extensions never go off-line. They can be reassigned, but the only way to shut them down is to destroy their CPUs.”

“You’ve examined them?”

“Yes. There seems to be no damage. They simply no longer function.”

Derec sat down at the table and drummed his fingers idly as he thought. “They’re linked to an RI. Correct?”

“Yes.”

“What happens if their primary RI goes down?”

“That’s never happened,” Clin said.

“Did you even check to see if it had this time?” Ariel asked.

“No...”

“I made that suggestion,” Penj said. “No one laughed exactly, but...”

“Maybe someone ought to check,” Derec said.

— tactical parameters, robot access code epsilon-one-one-arc-seven, service path to secondary communications node, establish identification protocols, chameleon protocols in place, three levels, two humans, twelve robots, three ambulatory, direct link to global communication oversight, bypass code delivered, access cleared, enter matrix

sort applicable traffic by tier, assign priority, potential relevance, hierarchy established, locate subject Eliton, Clar

initializing Three Law assessment, subject Eliton, Clar

residual assignation of responsibility, reviewing history

response potentials regarding subject Eliton, Clar, assigned minimal priority, initial service fulfilled, duty severed upon rescue and reassignment, collateral responsibility inactive

subject Eliton, Clar, violated collateral responsibility

subject Eliton, Clar, lied

reset priority, primary function assigned to current subjects Avery, Derec, and Burgess, Ariel, locate and correlate with current status, situational parameters

subject Eliton, Clar, located

subject Eliton, Clar, deceased, present location Medical Examiner facility number forty-three, previous location apartment complex attached to Auroran security center

analyze elements of death

positronic remotes assigned to Eliton, Clar, deactivated prior to death, locate and trace links to remotes and check for error

error detected in primary resident intelligence assigned to monitor subject, links broken at time chop local seven-fifty-two, tracing command sequence, located, instruction tree initiated by oral command via public comm channel, preset protocols in place, links dissolved

tracing external surveillance at sight, corridor, room, direct monitor of access, negative result, expanding analysis to entire compound, tracing movements of robots and humans, negative result, expanding to external surveillance of grounds, tracing movement

one anomalous event, human subject located approaching security personnel entrance, trace lost at three meters, conclusion masking activated, correlating anomaly to sequence of link interrupt and medical examiners assignment of time of death subject Eliton, Clar

correlation match to ninety-seven percent, distance from entry to apartment, time of death, interruption of positronic surveillance

expanding search to after death, located masked human, reappearance five meters from compound, leaving by main entrance four minutes after assigned time of death

identification protocols initiated

identification complete

subject Aspil, Tro

present location, search initiated —

Derec opened his eyes to see Clin standing over him. He stretched and sat up on the cot. He noticed that her extensions floated on the far side of the room. So this will be private, he thought sourly. How considerate...

“You have something to tell me?” he asked.

“I want to explain,” she said.

“What? The deception? I’ve been living on Earth. Deceit is a normal police practice there. Don’t worry about it.”

“No,” she said. “I was doing my job, I won’t apologize for that. Chief Talas informed me before you awoke of the situation, and ordered me to take you into custody. She presented me with the proper warrant codes and authorization. This is what I do. Personally, I agree with removing you from an unsecured facility in the wake of this.” She gestured at the projector, now deactivated, on the table. “But there’s more to this than duty, don’t you agree?”

“All right...”

“I want to explain the unusual procedure. Why we didn’t simply place you both in custody upon arrival.”

“Why would you have anyway?”

“The same reasons as now: your own protection, mainly. But you, in particular, were the focus of a great deal of debate here. Specifically, your robot.”

“Ah. Bogard gave them pause?”

“Gave us all pause,” Clin said. “There is still some question whether what you did is illegal.”

“You know, that’s interesting. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a law requiring robots be built with the Three Laws. We do it now because it’s simply easier. All the processes that go into the construction of a positronic brain — there are over two million, you know — are so routine and proven that no one thinks to change them. Even Bogard is a Three Law robot. I found it easier to modify the way they come into play rather than ditch them altogether. Doing that would require a complete redesign of the manufacturing protocols.” He shook his head. “The Three Laws exist because of the technology, not because it’s prohibited to build a robot without them.”

Clin looked uncomfortable. “That’s why the Council decided not to bring charges. There are no laws, and if there were you didn’t exactly violate them. But it still bothered us. So we took this approach. Close surveillance.”

“Did you have a choice about how close?”

“Of course. But when Bogard disappeared and Eliton was found dead...”

“Some of the Council are regretting their reluctance to be heavy-handed.” He glanced across the room, to where Ariel sat talking with Rolf Penj. “Why would you have arrested Ariel? She had nothing to do with building Bogard.”

“Precaution. She arrived on the same ship, in your party —”

“We weren’t exactly a party, but I’ll concede the point.”

“You used some of her doctoral work as a starting point on constructing your robot. That made her suspect. But the fact that, as Calvin Institute liaison, she failed to report on Bogard —”

“She had no idea. My arrangement was directly with the Terran government. She didn’t know about Bogard until he was a fact.”

“She should have known. It was her responsibility.”

“I wasn’t about to let her know.”

“Still, she should have found out.”

Derec chuckled dryly. “How very police-minded of you. Even if the criminal confesses to every aspect of the crime — including its secrecy — the cop who should have caught him is held responsible.”

“That’s what we do. When we fail —”

“Sometimes it’s right that you fail.”

Clin frowned uncertainly. “May I ask you question?”

“Of course.”

“Why did you build it? Why did you want to tamper with the Three Laws?”

“Memory.”

“Excuse me?”

“I suffered mnemonic plague several years ago. After I recovered — well, I won’t bore you with all the details, but I began to notice similarities between the synaptic damage caused by the disease and the structure of a positronic collapse. What interested me most was the way other forms of amnesia block access while maintaining the stored memories. I started looking into how those memories get shunted away and how access is gradually restored. One of the results was Bogard.”

“You didn’t have to build him to do the research.”

Derec shrugged. “I’m a roboticist. It’s what I do.”

“And Ambassador Burgess? I understand she’s a victim, too.”

“You can see a similar interest in her work at the Calvin.”

“How does this apply to cyborgs?”

“I’m not sure it does.”

Clin pursed her lips thoughtfully.

“I understand,” Derec said, “that there have been new outbreaks of mnemonic plague on Aurora.”

“There have. We’ve been watching it, trying to find a common vector.”

“And is there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then maybe my work isn’t as unwelcome as it seems.”

Ariel absently turned the now-empty cup. Penj was half-dozing. They had been waiting for hours, it seemed. Tension wore them down to sleepy exhaustion.

The door slid open, snapping her attention on like a switch, and she looked up as Talas entered the cell, followed by two more police and First Advisor Maliq. Penj stood at once.

“About time,” he growled.

Talas ignored him and sat down across from Ariel. “Ambassador Burgess, please tell me again about Tro Aspil.”

Ariel related again the events surrounding Aspil’s apparent death and later departure from Earth, the corpse in a Terran morgue, and the subsequent discovery that he had been on Earth months before his very public death as part of the slaughtered Humadros Legation.

“Of course,” Talas said, “then-Senator Clar Eliton had also been killed in that massacre and later turned up alive.”

“Yes, as part of a plot to undermine our efforts and discredit robotics on Earth. He ran for his own seat against his vice-senator, both on antirobot platforms.”

“Or perhaps just bad analysis on your part?” Talas asked.

“Did you find my report?” Ariel asked, annoyed.

“No,” Maliq said. “It was never received. I’m running a global search through all our files to see if it went astray, but...” He scowled unhappily. “It’s your surmise that Tro Aspil was part of this plot?”

“That would be logical, given all the facts,” she conceded. “But I was never able to understand his function, other than to establish ties between the different elements of the conspiracy.”

“We have an Auroran who is officially deceased, depending on where you are,” Maliq said. “He returns here before the rest of the survivors and subsequently all those survivors end up offworld or incapacitated.”

“You refer to Benen Yarick?” Ariel asked.

“I do. The others — we’re still trying to contact them.”

“I believe it was expected none of the Humadros Legation would survive.”

“So that this Tro Aspil would be the only one returning here?”

“Yes.”

“The body you found in the morgue,” Talas said. “Was it identifiable as Tro Aspil?”

“I can’t say with certainty. It had not been killed at the massacre. We were able to determine that the wounds were inconsistent. We can say it was human, but without a tissue sample —”

“Which you were unable to obtain,” Talas said.

“The situation was not conducive to that level of cooperation,” Ariel said.

“Here’s the problem,” Maliq said, sitting down. “All people coming to Aurora go through certain examinations before being allowed through. We never fully abandoned our paranoia about infection. All, that is, except diplomatic personnel who have been previously cleared through one of the stations — in this case, Kopernik. If someone wished to make a substitution, the safest way for them to make that substitution would be through diplomatic channels.”

“You’re wondering if it is possible that the man who returned from Earth is a substitute,” Ariel said. “Of course, that’s likely. Is Tro Aspil in a morgue file on Earth? Probably. May I ask if the Terran death certificate files have been turned over?”

“No,” Maliq said. “They were requested. The ship on which they were sent was taken in a pirate raid.”

“Let me guess. The same ship Ambassador Gale Chassik was traveling on.”

“As a matter of fact.”

“How convenient.”

“Why do you say that?”

“All the evidence is now gone — everything that could tie Solaria to Nova Levis, and Nova Levis to the pirates, and the pirates to Clar Eliton, and Eliton to the diplomatic mess everything has become. Unless you find the impostor Tro Aspil.”

Maliq nodded. “We checked per your suggestion. Tro Aspil never arrived at his post with the blockade mission. A routine explanation was requested by the mission chief and a routine reply was sent claiming a change in itinerary, stand by for further instructions. So routine that the original posting remained listed as complete. Everyone assumed — because no one thought to question it — that Tro Aspil was in Nova Levis space.”

“But he never left Aurora.”

“No.”

“Excuse me,” Derec interrupted. “May I ask why the RI overseeing these postings didn’t make the appropriate changes in status?”

“It was never informed,” Maliq said. “Some things still rely on simple human actions.”

“Then,” Derec said, “we have to find Tro Aspil.”

“We’re looking,” Talas said. “We’re also looking for your robot, Mr. Avery.”

“Find one,” Derec said, “I’ll wager, and you find the other.”

“Why would that be?”

“Because I imagine Bogard is looking for Aspil.”

Chapter 27

MASID HAD NEVER seen a fortified city. From the outside, Nova City looked nearly impossible to enter without someone’s permission. A wall surrounded the main section, which sprang up like prickly weeds, jagged towers amid domes, boxes, and more exotic fulleresque shapes. Outside the wall — which was constructed of heavy composite-material sheets connected by a gridwork, topped by ramparts supporting antipersonnel weapons — a huge camp sprawled, a filthy collection of makeshift dwellings, portable domes, and tents that filled the land between the city wall and a vast lake. Masid wrinkled his nose at the stench.

“Blockade,” Filoo said to Masid’s unasked question. “People started coming here out of fear that they’d be bombarded from space.”

“They should know better,” Masid said.

“Most Settlers came out here because they distrusted, disliked, or plain hated Earth. Some of them had reason. Now they think Earth has come to get even.”

The transport bumped unevenly over the thickly rutted road. Occasionally, they rolled onto long stretches of unbroken pavement. Bleak faces stared at them from the cover of the shanties as they went by.

The journey had taken three days, with stops for business, the nature of which Masid had been kept ignorant. He assumed more dealing. The trade on Nova Levis in pharmaceuticals of all types exceeded in frenzy anything Masid had previously encountered. Judging by the business he had done alone in only a few weeks, Masid estimated three-quarters of the population was sick. He could see it in the faces gathered here: pallor, scars, sores. Only those like Filoo seemed immune.

Filoo had spoken little about business. He had regaled Masid with a series of quasi-autobiographical stories of people he had known, many of whom had met bad ends, particularly when they had attempted to cross him. By the morning of the third day and the last leg of the journey to Nova City, Masid had turned to him and said, “Do you always try to scare your employees?”

Filoo laughed. “I’m not trying to scare you. Just telling stories.”

“I know a few stories myself.”

“You should tell me one, then. I didn’t mean to hog the entire conversation.”

“Is that what we’re having? A conversation?”

Filoo studied him, eyes narrowed. “Are you as smart as you seem?” When Masid shrugged, Filoo grunted. “Figured out what’s wrong with this place?”

“No, not totally. I can guess.”

“Do. I’d like to hear it.”

“From the analyses I did of the infectious agents, I’d say the terraforming nanotech has gotten into the biome at the cellular level. We’ve got smart diseases. That’s just a guess.”

“Not bad, not bad. How come it’s happened here and nowhere else?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why Nova Levis and no other colony?”

Masid looked out the window at the tangled wilderness through which they passed. “Are you sure it hasn’t?”

Filoo laughed again. “Good answer! Maybe you are as smart as you appear. You’re certainly one of the coldest shits I’ve ever met.”

Masid’s stomach crawled. “Just a businessman.”

“Hah! Even I don’t use living people to culture samples.”

Masid grinned icily and gestured out the window. “Someone does besides me.”

Filoo frowned, then, and briefly Masid thought he saw fear in the dealer’s eyes. Now, rolling through the guard posts at the main gate into Nova City, Masid worried at the guilt he felt at using Tilla so callously. She had been dead, it had not been as if he had harmed her, but he had, he now realized, hoped Filoo had not known about his relationship with her, or that Filoo would check to see what Masid had been doing. Knowing now that — no doubt shortly after they had left — Tilla had been autopsied, Masid ached.

I’m sorry, Kru... wherever you are, I am sorry for what I did to your friend...

Filoo passed an ID chit to one of the guards. They were waved through. As he entered the city, Masid managed to seal off the guilt in the special room he kept in his head for such things. He could not afford it now. He sometimes wondered when he would ever get to deal with the clutter stored up in that room.

Nova City within the wall was sharply different from the squalor outside. The streets were crowded, but clean, and the structures were solid and maintained.

He saw no visible sign of disease.

Masid looked at Filoo, who nodded. “Parapoyos takes care of his own.”

“It’s been an open secret for a long time that Parapoyos had a base here,” Masid said carefully, “but this looks like more than just a presence.”

Filoo chuckled. “The blockade was a gift in a perverse way.”

They continued on in silence, driving deep into the center of the city. Masid was impressed despite his reservations — Nova City thrived, at least on the surface.

Filoo pulled into an underground garage. A drone directed him to a bay, and he shut down the transport.

“Now what?” Masid said.

“Now you come with me and keep your mouth shut.”

Masid followed Filoo down a long row of huge bays, most housing different types of transports, some being serviced. The air smelled of oil and ozone. Their steps echoed in the dark spaces above.

Filoo led him up a ramp, into a row of offices. Most were empty, but in a few Masid saw people huddling to tasks at large desks with hodgepodges of datum assemblies. At the end of the corridor, a short flight of stairs took them into a connecting tunnel. They emerged onto a covered thoroughfare. The air was cold, and condensation slicked all the surfaces.

Filoo pointed to the right. “That way leads to the port,” he said. He indicated the opposite direction. “That way takes you into the main business districts.”

They crossed the road and headed toward the port. The tunnel began sloping gently up as the light brightened at the far end. Before reaching the opening, Filoo mounted a flight of metal steps to an inset landing halfway up the wall. He inserted his ID in the reader mounted alongside a heavy door, which snapped open, admitting them into a locker room.

Masid followed Filoo into the next room, which was occupied by several people sitting around tables, talking, playing cards, or eating. They looked up when Filoo entered, and conversation ended.

One man stood and stepped toward them. “Filoo,” he said. “You’re early.”

“Depends,” Filoo said. “I almost didn’t make it at all.”

“Where’s Kar?”

“He doesn’t work for me anymore.” Filoo gestured with his thumb. “This’s Masid. His first time here.” He looked at Masid. “I want him cleared.”

The other man nodded. “Come with me,” he said to Masid.

“Where?” Masid asked, suddenly nervous. He then noticed the two people standing just behind him, to the right and left, holding blasters on him. He made himself shrug. “Wherever.” He scowled at Filoo. “I thought the interview was over?”

Filoo frowned, then stepped back.

“Come with me,” the other man repeated.

Masid sighed and followed him out of the room, the armed pair close behind.

“I’m Gretcher,” the man in the lead said. “Filoo just hire you?”

“Yeah,” Masid said.

“This is just routine,” Gretcher said.

“I’m sure.”

“Attitude isn’t necessary here. It counts for nothing.”

“I’ll try to remember that.”

“Do.”

After three turns down narrow corridors that reminded Masid of the deep warrens on Earth, they brought him to a lab. A woman looked up from a tabletop projection, her narrow face illuminated by red and orange from below.

“Doctor,” Gretcher said. “We need an analysis.”

She straightened and came forward, her left leg dragging slightly. She wore a pale blue jumpsuit, the kind normally found in biotech labs. She looked at Masid.

“What am I looking for?” she asked.

“Pedigree,” Gretcher said.

She nodded and indicated a bench toward the rear of the lab. “Please sit over there. Remove your jacket.” She looked at Gretcher. “I was just about ready to return to my clinic. Do I need to stick around after this one?”

“No,” Gretcher said. “Do you need an escort?”

She shook her head and walked back to the tabletop display. “Give me half an hour,” she said.

Masid glanced at Gretcher, who simply nodded in the direction of the bench. He and the pair of guards then left.

Masid reluctantly stripped off his jacket and sat down. He watched the woman move from display to display for several minutes. It seemed she had forgotten his presence, but he doubted it. He waited until finally she switched several of the monitors off and came toward him with a small device.

“Your arm,” she said.

“What kind of a test is this?” Masid asked.

“Global. Your arm.”

Masid extended his left arm and she applied the device. He felt a brief pinch as she triggered it. A red patch remained just below his elbow, on his forearm.

“Blood and tissue sample?” he asked.

“Of course.”

“My name’s Masid.”

“I’m Dr. Shasma.” She activated another unit and plugged the sampler into its reader.

Masid’s scalp tingled upon hearing her name. He wanted to ask a number of questions, but he refrained.

“What are you looking for?” he asked. He did not know what specifically she sought, but he knew very well what a tissue analysis could show an expert eye.

She did not reply, but continued working, steadily and, from what Masid could tell, proficiently. When she finished setting up the scans, she returned to her other work and ignored him.

Masid studied the equipment he could see. It seemed a hodgepodge, even though someone — he presumed Dr. Shasma — had installed it very professionally. Most of it appeared to be the expected bioscan apparatus any good clinic ought to possess, but a few pieces looked as though they belonged in an industrial manufactory — crystal interferometry scanners, molecular assembly decompiler, and a polymer analyzer if he was correct. Certainly not what he expected to find in a medical facility. He noted several more pieces of equipment he did not recognize.

He waited. More than anything, he wanted to see what about him she was analyzing, but he quashed his impatience. Nearly twenty minutes went by before a chime sounded, and Dr. Shasma returned to the monitor into which she had delivered his samples.

She studied the screens for a time, then nodded to herself, making notes on a keypad to her left. She made adjustments and started another analysis. Masid watched her closely. Suddenly, her eyes narrowed. She stared at the screens for a long time. Then, slowly, she closed her eyes. Only for a few seconds. When she opened them again, she initiated one more set of analyses and watched the results calmly, her professional demeanor regained.

“Will I live?” Masid asked.

“For a while,” she replied. “You aren’t a native to Nova Levis.”

“Who is?”

“Quite a large population, actually, from the original Terran settlement. But most people here aren’t. You’re from another Settler colony, though.” She looked at him inquisitively. “How’d you get here?”

“By twists and turns.”

“I can find out.”

“Eventually, maybe. Is it important?”

“Not to me. The only thing about you that interests me is your biome.”

“And what does it say?”

“You’ve already contracted three of the seven major diseases Nova Levis has to offer. So far you’re asymptomatic — infection was recent, which suggests you haven’t been here very long — and you have a very sophisticated antibody response to two of them. I’d bet you have a lymphatic augment, which would mean either ex-military or Spacer... but I don’t see any of the telltales I’d expect in a Spacer.”

“Oh?” Masid leaned forward, curious. “What sort of telltales? I thought Spacers were...”

“Were what? Just like everybody else?” She smiled sardonically. “That would explain two and three century lifespans how?”

“I don’t know. I just assumed superior medical technology.”

“That’s what most people assume.” She entered more notes. “So — ex-military. Deserter?”

Masid sat back, frowning.

“Doesn’t matter,” Shasma continued. “If so, you’ll fit in perfectly here.” She limped to another console and punched in a sequence of commands. Then she came toward him with an injector. “Your arm,” she said, waving her fingers. Masid extended the same arm from which she had taken his samples and she placed the injector in roughly the same spot. “This will take care of the infections. You’ll require boosters in order to stay clear. You’re not a Spacer, so I’m assuming you’ll be cleared to receive them.”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“Two things. Spacers sometimes don’t react well to our antigenic programs — they already have in-built mechanisms for dealing with infection — and any of them who come here from outside Nova City are generally spies.”

Masid rolled his sleeve down. “And then what do you do? Administer a toxin?”

Her face colored, and she glared at him. “I’m a doctor. I don’t execute people.”

Masid waited till she seemed to calm down. “Sorry,” he said.

“Reasonable question, I guess,” she said. “I’m... prevented... from doing anything. I have to report them. What happens after that is out of my hands.”

“If you don’t report them?”

“I can’t risk that.” Shasma studied him, eyes narrowed. “Since you’re evidently new to Nova Levis, maybe you don’t know what’s going on here.”

“I know you’ve got a health problem. It’s provided me a good living since I grounded.”

“You came in with Filoo, I can imagine. Noresk?”

Masid nodded.

“Noresk used to be one of the primary raw material cities on Nova Levis,” she said. “It sits on top of deposits of minerals from aluminum to zinc, and not difficult to mine. Prior to the blockade, exports in processed material from Noresk exceeded the gross income-generating production of any other place on the planet. There was a state-of-the-art filtering system in place then, and a permanent public health staff of fifty-eight physicians. The filtering system was dismantled and brought to Nova City.”

“And the doctors?”

“Brought here one by one or sent to other towns. Or killed by the new plagues.” For a moment, she looked sad. Then she shook her head. “Noresk is particularly bad because of the local environmental degradation. Prophylactic ecologies that are supposed to protect inhabitants broke down a long time ago and require regular infusions of new strains, but since the blockade there’ve been no new shipments. So the worst of the outbreaks have started there.”

“You have cures for them,” Masid said, raising his arm. “How come they aren’t distributed?”

“They aren’t permanent. Not without boosters. Reexposure results in eventual reinfection.”

“With a variant strain? Mutation happens that fast?”

He watched the muscle in her jaw work in the multihued light from the screen.

“I kept having to tweak my products,” Masid continued. “I didn’t have the equipment to do a full analysis, but my cultures showed a continual shift in the protein shells of the major strains. Not unexpected in viral mutation, but it doesn’t usually happen that fast.” He paused for a reaction, but she remained silent, concentrating on the screen. “Something was utilizing exotic materials for the modifications.”

Shasma straightened and sighed. “What kind of materials?”

“Again, I didn’t have the equipment —”

“Did you guess? Or are you like every other black marketeer, not giving a damn what might work, just so long as it makes your customers feel better enough to keep coming back for more ineffective product?” She grunted. “Six months ago, a group of locals selling what they called ‘polyherbal morphenals’ was shut down at my insistence. They were attempting to create the equivalent of herbal remedies by mixing local flora with certain synthetic prophylactics. It resulted in outbreaks of fast-killing syndromes that threatened to blossom into one or more new plagues, the vectors and morphologies of which we would never be equipped to track and stop. I appealed to the ledger balance of the people I work for — if your customer base dies off, you won’t have anyone to sell to. Finally, a couple of them took me seriously and dealt with the problem.”

She glared at the screen. “You’re not a Spacer. I don’t care where else you might be from, but may I suggest you stick to recognized and reliable analysis protocols if you’re going to keep selling pharmaceuticals? If you’re not, then I don’t care.”

“Why are you working for these people?”

“I run a clinic at the wall, to help people in that camp outside. I work for Parapoyos so I can keep my clinic open.” She smiled wryly. “We all practice a form of prostitution here. Welcome to Nova Levis.”

She lurched further away from him, into her lab.

“What’s your problem?” he called. “I would imagine you could about fix yourself easier than anyone else.”

“Reticula histiocytosis,” Shasma called back. “Incurable. It’s a consequence rather than a disease.”

“A consequence of what?”

“Living here.”

Masid watched her move with evident difficulty from place to place and felt ashamed for no clear reason. He felt pity for her, which he sensed she would resent, and he felt guilt over the act he had to maintain.

“Why are you telling me all this?” he asked.

She looked at him as though she had expected him to be gone already. She shook her head. “Why not? Honesty is cheap enough here. It’s not like you’ll be leaving anytime soon.” She smiled grimly. “You’re not a Spacer. That’s all anyone here requires me to determine. Your death will not be brought on by my involvement.”

“I —”

The door opened, and Filoo came in. “How is he?”

Shasma glared at Filoo briefly. “Fine. Clear. I’ve already treated him.”

Filoo frowned, but nodded. “Is he done?”

“With me he is.”

“Thanks.” He looked at Masid. “Come on. I want to show you around, introduce you to some people.”

Masid wanted to talk to Shasma further, but he stood and grabbed his jacket. He suspected that she had her lab shielded against eavesdropping, but he could not be sure. If anyone had been listening, he wondered what they might make of what had been said. “Fine. Maybe they have better conversation.”

She frowned at him.

“Ah,” Filoo said, “Dr. Shasma’s not bad. Keeps us all breathing. It just takes her a while to grow on you. Unlike most things on Nova Levis.” He laughed loudly.

“We’ll see,” Masid said.

Yalor died the next day. Mia saw the activity around his tent increase, cyborgs coming and going quickly. When she finally pushed her way through, Yalor was being zipped into a bodybag.

“Wait,” she said and knelt beside him. The burns on his face had changed, become pus-laden with sickly-green streaks tracing across the unburned flesh. Goo caked his eyes. He had not, finally, died of his injuries.

They finished sealing him up and carried the bag away. They did not allow her to follow. Mia stared after them for a long time. She felt responsible, certainly, even though she knew it was not ultimately her fault.

Mia wandered the camp unchallenged. She quickly realized that what she had taken as a disordered collection of domiciles, nomadic is nature, was, in fact, organized and stable in a fashion not immediately apparent.

They had settled in a shallow depression which Mia began to suspect had once been a small lake. A few of the sandy-colored rocks she examined showed signs of fossil remains. Burrows tunneled into the shallow-graded hillsides. Paths etched by constant use traced complex patterns. She saw a pair of the cyborgs laboriously laying stone markers along one of the more heavily-trodden walkways.

“Shelter” did not seem to mean the same thing to them as it did to her, at least not entirely. Many had tents, of course, but by no means most of them. Roofless stands of pylons and sheeting made small enclaves in which one or more of them entered and left in almost continual shufflings of residence. What Mia could see between gaps in the walls showed only bare ground without furnishings. Others among them would stop wherever they happened to be and stand or sit for hours on end, immobile. Against one wall of the shallow a row of huts stood in a good imitation of a block of offices. Within each, an individual sat, gazing out at the enclave.

In the center of the community stood a tripod supporting a heavy block-and-tackle rig above a deep pit. Every time she attempted to look into the pit, one of them stepped in her way and shepherded her off.

Mia did not know quite what to make of these... people. They all exhibited striking deviations from anything she would label “human,” but she could not call them robots, either. There had been rumors for months of some new kind of robot, something that set most Settlers on edge and justified the resurgent fear of Earth toward all things Spacer, but Mia had considered these stories exaggerations at best, the kind of spontaneous fantasies of frightened people confabulating paranoid myth at worst. Until now, it had not occurred to her that there might be something more, something tangibly different...

They’re organic, she thought, watching them. They have emotion, they are flesh... but not only...

She recalled more of her talk with Ariel on the subject. They had been discussing bioaugmentation. Earth used a variety of techniques to increase the efficiency and strength of certain branches of the armed forces — she remembered Bok Golner, the mercenary who had been part of the assassinations on Earth more than a year ago, a supersoldier, reflexes superior to normal humans, strength greater, survivability in extreme conditions enhanced — but Ariel had dismissed the idea that such augmentations constituted a cyborg.

“He was still human in his essential genetic structure,” she said. “The augments were all addons. A cyborg would be a true composite entity, the biological and the robotic symbiotically tied to each other in such a way as to define a new species. True cyborgs, for example, could never be returned to a human condition like your military augmenteds.”

“You sound as if you know quite a bit about them.”

“It was a line of research some time past,” Ariel had admitted. “It didn’t work. There are too many variables, too many unknowns. It’s not really feasible. Augments are much more efficient, when it comes right down to it. Fewer ethical problems, too.”

“Ethical?” Mia had prodded.

“Sure. By necessity, a cyborg would be a mule. You would be creating a species with no possibility of reproduction.”

“Humans have done that for ages.”

“True, but not an essentially human species. I rather doubt more sterile hybrids are aware of their sterility.”

“A cyborg would be. Why would that be a problem? A lot of people choose it.”

“Exactly. They choose it. A cyborg would have no choice.”

“You wouldn’t have to necessarily make it sterile, would you?”

“Technologically, no. But I wouldn’t want to create my own species’ replacement.”

“What about robots? They could always build more of themselves.”

“They don’t. The Three Laws prevent it.”

Ariel had then changed the subject. It had seemed at the time that she understood more than she had said, but Mia had dropped it. There were no cyborgs, so it was just talk.

Now, though...

Can you reproduce? she wondered, watching them. She had seen nothing so far to indicate separate genders — they all seemed, in general, to be males — but if they were an entirely new species, reproduction did not necessarily have to be sexual.

The variations in physical appearance did not suggest any kind of parent/offspring connection. They all seemed to be the same age, although she had no real basis for judging.

Mules...

They had salvaged a quantity of standard ration kits from the wreck, and every morning Mia found a couple of them inside the bubble tent she had been given. The food was bland, but kept hunger at bay. She never saw who left it.

***

On the third morning, she woke to find a rash on her left hand. By early afternoon, it had spread up her arm and a new spot had appeared on her face. That night, she shivered uncontrollably with fever and on the fourth morning her legs were weak. She vomited shortly after breakfast and lay, completely lethargic, on her bedding.

On the fifth morning, her head throbbed, and it hurt to open her eyes for long. Outside her bubble, several cyborgs squatted, watching her. She thought she heard them talking among themselves, but she could make out no words, only the susurrus of continuous conversation.

That afternoon, she felt herself lifted onto a gurney and carried across the camp. She draped an arm over her eyes to shield them from the painful brilliance of the sky. Then she was in a close, dark place. Presently, she sensed motion. After that, she slept.

Time compressed and expanded unpredictably. She felt she slept interminably, but then, in quick succession, motion stopped, light stabbed at her again, and she was being carried. Doors clanged, footsteps tapped on tile, she caught glimpses of a hallway and lights and people huddled around her.

“Am I back?” she asked once.

Her arm was prodded and stuck, her clothes removed, and then she slept again forever, her thoughts muffled in a thick nest of uncertainty. All she knew, all she could be certain of, was the persistent headache, but even that did not feel entirely within her skull, as if the pain existed a few meters away, hers to use if she cared to...

More sleep.

Then...

“I’m dying...”

“No.”

“Please.”

“Do you want to?”

“I don’t — no.”

“You don’t know?”

“No, I... no...”

“This might help.”

Later, she could not recall who had said what.

Mia opened her eyes, startled. The light was low and did not hurt. She lay very still, trying to get a sense of where she was.

A sheet covered her up to her throat.

The quiet pulsings of a biomonitor hummed rhythmically somewhere.

Bogard...?

The room smelled as if it had recently been decontaminated and washed.

A door opened, and then a woman appeared alongside her.

“Good,” she said, “you’re awake. How do you feel?”

“I don’t —” Mia’s throat caught, her mouth thick and dry.

“Oh. Sorry.” The woman placed a straw in Mia’s mouth.

She drew automatically, swallowing greedily at the cool water. She studied the woman while drinking — thin, harsh lines in her face, short hair, off-white smock, perceptive gaze, clinical...

Mia coughed. “Where am I?”

“The Nova City Free Clinic. You were damn near dead.”

“How long?”

“You’ve been here four days.”

“Who are you?”

“Dr. Shasma. You are Mia Daventri, Lieutenant, Terran Expeditionary Force security.” She gave a quizzical tilt of her head. “Are you a spy?”

“Not here.”

Dr. Shasma smiled. “No, I imagine not. I’m told you came down in a drone supply ship. Your partner died. Not very subtle.”

Mia felt herself grow warm, angry.

“Sorry,” Dr. Shasma said. “You can tell me when you’re ready. Or not.” She glanced away for a few moments. “You’re stable for now. I’ll be back later to administer another round of cyclines.”

“What... what did I have?”

“Not did. Do. You have an aggressive fungal infection. It’s permeated your lungs. We caught it before it had time to move into the lymphatic system. That would have been fatal. It’s in remission right now, but you’ll have to go through a complete cellular purge to be rid of it. We can do that, or just treat it symptomatically. You’re lucky it was this one — most of them show no symptoms until too late.”

“Cellular purge... that takes months, doesn’t it?”

“Several weeks. And it hurts. Get some rest now. I’ll be back in a few hours, you can ask more questions then.”

“And you’ll answer them?”

“If I can.”

“Answer one right now,” Mia said quickly as Dr. Shasma began to walk away.

“All right.”

“Those... people... who brought me here. I’m guessing they brought me, you didn’t just find me in an open field.”

“No, you were brought.”

“What are they?”

“Orphans. Discards. Nova Levis’s nasty little secret.”

Mia felt impatient. “That’s not an answer I can use.”

“Useful answers are at a premium here. Don’t worry about it for now. We can talk later.” She paused. “Why are you here? I didn’t think Terrans had any interest in grounding on Nova Levis.”

“Unplanned vacation.”

Dr. Shasma waited for more, then grunted. “Fine, have it your way. You’ll live, Lieutenant. Now get some rest, I’ll see you later.”

Dr. Shasma walked away. A moment later, the door closed.

Mia raised a hand. The rash was gone, but her skin looked very dry, very old. She let the arm fall and tried to sense her own condition. Tired, to be sure, and suffused with a not-quite-right feeling of somehow being different.

She let her gaze drift over the small clinic room. She stopped her examination at a small set of shelves against the wall opposite the door, filled with paper books.

Chapter 28

access Auroran comm matrix via coordinating R. I. Eos security obtained, vetting probabilities, originating communications, links, and associations assigned subject Aspil Tro, collating date/frequency, analyzing

subject Aspil Tro assigned residence on return from Earth, termination of assignment Humadros Trade Legation, Madarian Apartment Complex

comm traffic logs average thirty communications per day for period of eighty-seven days till reassignment of subject to Nova Levis negotiations team

resumption of name-specific comm traffic logged at five alternate residences, commencing fourteen days after subject was scheduled to depart for Nova Levis blockade, each address sorted by number of communications, duration, and return communications

analysis of comm patterns, voice, and semantic content of communication validates high probability that subject remains on Aurora, checking access to diplomatic registry, logs of extraplanetary agents, query specifically Aspil Tro, verify assignment to Nova Levis blockade, verify arrival, confirm all contacts, assess probability of separate identification protocols

probability plus ninety-percent Aspil Tro remains present on Aurora, communications logs verify continued contact with seven of the eighteen primary contacts registered prior to reassignment Nova Levis, tracing comm sequences now

error in routing, oversight R. I. dysfunction consistent with prior anomalous behavior, reference files Union Station D. C. Earth, forward analysis to Thales for independent corroboration, affirmed, request override on oversight R. I. to establish source of continued communications

verified, location, assigned parties, verified

secondary trace, location of primary subjects, protect protocols, subjects Avery Derec and Burgess Ariel, primary network indicates no trace, scan security network, sixth-level communications, isolated and routed through compromised R. I.

subjects located, condition verified through remotes assigned Security Lieutenant Craym

determination of Three Law response, report logged, as follows —

— primary subjects held incommunicado in violation of standard Auroran security protocols, condition optimal, no immediate threat, First Law obligation conditional upon change in circumstances, Second Law in force, initial task to locate potential threat Aspil Tro —

proceeding

DEREC WOKE FROM a brief nap and found himself gazing across at Dr. Penj, whose head lolled back, mouth open, snoring. The two guards still stood by the exit. Ariel lay sprawled on another sofa.

Clin, her trio of orbiting extensions hovering around her head like a loose halo, stood in the midst of the projection of Eliton’s death scene.

He slowly stretched and stood, keeping an eye on the guards. Neither reacted as he crossed the room and entered the projection. One of the little spheres moved to block him and he hesitated. Clin looked at him, briefly surprised.

“Allow,” she said, and the extension drifted back into its stand-by position over her right shoulder. She returned her attention to the corpse displayed at her feet.

“I have a strange question,” Derec said in a quiet voice.

“Yes?”

“How common is it for Aurorans to go without their extensions?”

Clin glanced at Dr. Penj. “He’s an anomaly.”

“Granted. And First Advisor Maliq? Security Chief Talas?”

Clin returned her gaze to Eliton’s body. “He was assigned six extensions. That’s the standard security perimeter for high level diplomatic visitors.”

“Difficult to disrupt, I gather?”

“Very. But Eliton wasn’t brought here with that status...”

She pointed. “Look at the pattern they fell in. Almost evenly-spaced around him. He was standing here when they failed —”

“— and standing there when he was killed —”

“— which meant that whoever killed him was in the room while they still functioned —”

“— and no alarm was sent.”

Clin straightened. “There ought to be some record.”

“Maybe,” Derec said. “Where did your orders to arrest me originate?”

“Cleared through Chief Talas.” She gave him an irritated look. “What does that have to do with this?”

“Who arrested Eliton?”

“Once he was removed from the Wysteria... Chief Talas.” She indicated the crime scene. “Do you have anything useful to say about this?”

Derec studied the projected image for a few moments. “It seems evident he was comfortable with whomever was in the room with him. He was completely surprised. We — I assume all of us — have been assuming it was just one person. But as far as I recall, we never made a connection directly between Eliton and Tro Aspil.”

Clin’s jaw worked delicately. “I think you should return to you seat, Mr. Avery.”

Derec moved away from her, glancing at the two guards. He sat down where he had been. Ariel was awake, rubbing her eyes.

“Problem?” she asked.

“A very big one, I think. Were you listening?”

“Mostly.” She looked casually around the room. “No comm.” She winced suddenly and grabbed at her calf.

Derec watched her for a few seconds. “Cramp?”

She nodded, her face distorted in obvious pain.

Derec moved over to her sofa, sat beside her, and began massaging her leg. Ariel reclined, moaning convincingly. “Sorry,” she said.

“No trouble,” Derec said.

“Why talk to her?” Ariel asked in a whisper. “She may be in it.”

“Then there’s nothing to lose,” Derec said. “Penj doesn’t use extensions, neither of us are that acquainted with Auroran custom anymore...”

“Someone had to interrupt surveillance,” Ariel said. “The extensions had to go down at a command.”

“A very specific command, otherwise everything that RI is handling would be affected.”

“We don’t know that it wasn’t.”

“True, but I’m betting any other problems were of such an unrelated nature that they’d be passed off.”

“Transient errors?” Ariel suggested.

“Sound familiar?”

Ariel let out a long, satisfied breath. “Mm-hmm.” She smiled at him. “Thank you. What’s next?”

Derec released her leg. “Wait and see if my bet pays off.” He looked at the guards. “If it doesn’t...”

“We’re dead anyway,” Ariel said.

Dr. Penj snorted loudly and drew in a long, loud breath, shifted position, and continued sleeping.

Bogard kept back from the full light filling the plaza. He has assumed the bulky shape of a laborer and waited, immobile, as though on standby pending instructions. Several shops lined this side beneath an elegant arcade balcony, so his presence drew no attention from the Aurorans.

Denis came toward him from the apartment block opposite.

Report, Bogard sent.

Subject domicile located, currently vacant, access to comm log obtained, receive file now

Send

rec/log — timechop 11:35 code 4^+38 level five encryption diplomatic proceed...

Bogard scanned the file as it poured into his buffers. Denis stood beside him by the time the entire log was delivered.

Anomaly detected, refer sequence nine-oh-eight-dash delta four four

Noted, routing vector, Cassili grid, oversight RI

Require access to relevant RI logs

Working

Current subject location?

Departed twelve minutes ago, in company with Auroran official, destination undisclosed to household robot

Trace transport

Working... accessing public security logs... located, tracking

The two robots stood side by side for several seconds. Then, abruptly, they moved off together, to a walkway between two buildings, and through to the next street. There, they parted, moving into the robot lanes where they gained speed, heading in opposite directions.

Ariel looked around as First Advisor Maliq came through the door. Alone. By now she would have thought a half-dozen officials should be involved. That, or they should be left completely alone on the off-chance Aspil might try a repeat...

“Ambassador Burgess,” Maliq said, gesturing, “would you mind if we talked...?”

Ariel followed him to the far side of the room, away from the others. She noticed Lt. Craym watching them, eyebrows cocked speculatively.

“Yes, Advisor?” Ariel said, folding her arms.

“We seem to have an embarrassing situation,” Maliq said quietly. “I’m sure you can appreciate the concerns when communications between one department and another fail.”

“Tro Aspil isn’t at Nova Levis.”

“No, he isn’t. Nor is he on Aurora.”

“How is that possible?”

Maliq made a chagrined face. “We’re looking into it. But we have a more immediate problem. Tro Aspil was supposed to head the team we sent to Nova Levis. As a result, that team has yet to be granted official status at the blockade.”

“Reclassify one of the others,” Ariel suggested.

“It’s not that simple. Procedural difficulties, not to mention the Terrans are being uncooperative.”

“How does that concern me?”

“When we have this cleared up, this... miscommunication... we would appreciate it if you would take over that team. You still retain your rating as Ambassador, you know the Terrans, you have more than ample qualifications.”

“You’re not serious.”

“Of course, I am.”

“Would I be free to choose my staff?”

“I don’t see why not.”

Ariel nodded toward the others. “Derec Avery?”

“I’m... I’d have to see, of course, but...”

“When would you need me to leave?”

“As soon as we can make all the arrangements and register you as the new head of mission. A few days.”

“And what if I’m required here to testify?” she asked.

“About what?”

“Ambassador Eliton’s murder.”

He drew a breath. “A great many details will have to be cleared up, of course, but —”

“But you’d really like us off Aurora, wouldn’t you?”

Maliq started, surprised. “I —”

Ariel held up a hand. “Whose idea is this? Chief Talas?”

“I’m not sure I understand what you mean, Ambassador.”

Ariel studied him, wondering. Then she shook her head. “Can I think about this, Advisor? It’s a considerable change in what I expected when I was recalled.”

“Of course, but the sooner we have an answer —”

“Certainly. How is the situation at Nova Levis?”

“Fluid.”

“I see.” That covers a lot of territory, she thought.

“If you’ll excuse me,” Maliq said, “I have matters to look into. I would appreciate your answer sooner than later.”

He began to turn away. Ariel said, “May I ask... where are your extensions?”

“Hmm? Oh, Chief Talas insisted they be left outside, for security reasons. If we have a compromised RI, it might complicate matters to have competing spheres in case something breaks.”

“I see. Just curious. Thank you.”

She watched him leave, then returned to the sofa. Derec gave her a quizzical look.

“Politics,” she said cryptically. Then: “We’ve just been offered a new posting. Offworld.”

Derec regarded her for a time. “Nova Levis?”

“How did you guess?”

Derec stretched. “We’ve been here now how long? Four, five hours? We have yet to hear a good explanation why.”

“You won’t,” Penj said, surprising both Derec and Ariel. He still slouched where he sat and opened one eye. “You’re being kept out of the way. At least, that’s my conclusion. If this were a standard investigation, there would be a dozen people in and out, the questions would be coming very quickly, and I would not be allowed to stay.”

“Why are you here, Doc — Rolf?” Ariel asked.

He smiled. “I’m being in the way.”

“So what’s happening,” Derec asked, “that we need to be kept out of the way?”

“I don’t know,” Penj said. “But it involves your robot and Eliton’s death. Someone thinks they’re related. Maybe. Or maybe they’re just worried.”

“About what?” Ariel asked.

Penj shrugged. “Ariel, that posting — don’t take it. Not till Eliton’s murderer is found.”

“Eliton,” Ariel hissed through her teeth. “That son-of-a-bitch. There’ve been days when I wished he had died in that assassination. Now that he is dead, he’s as much trouble as ever.”

“The question is,” Penj said, “who would profit by his death now? He was off Earth, heading to Solaria...” He shook his head. “The Council decided, upon learning of his presence aboard the Wysteria, to arrest and detain him. Why? I don’t know. But the fact that he, a Terran, was on his way to Solaria to take an ambassadorial posting was a shock. Solaria not only allowed this, but requested him. The next question is, how has Solaria reacted to his arrest?”

“And how will they then react to his death,” Derec said.

“And how would Earth react?” Ariel added.

“That wasn’t germane,” Penj said. “Once the decision to detain Eliton was taken, Earth was informed before the fact and cooperation requested.”

“It was granted?” Ariel asked, startled.

“Promptly. Earth apparently doesn’t care what happens to Eliton. I’m willing to gamble Solaria doesn’t care, either, but for entirely different reasons. The fact is, Eliton’s arrest was not a matter of public record. Except for the people in the Wysteria’s lounge who witnessed it, no one knew.”

“Except those members of the Council directly involved,” Ariel said, “and the police assigned to the arrest.”

“Exactly. So two questions arise: Who killed him, and how did the murderer know about him?”

Ariel glanced at the pair of guards at the door. Lt. Craym was still studying the projection. “And we’re being kept out of the way.”

“You, at least,” Penj said, “make sense in that regard. You know about Tro Aspil. Both of you do, of course, but Ariel actually knew him.”

“And me?” Derec asked.

“I assume you are here because of your robot. Tell me, Mr. Avery, how capable is Bogard?”

“Depends on what you mean.”

“Can he track down and find Tro Aspil? Even here? And arrest him?”

“Or kill him, you’re wondering?” Derec said. “Find him — yes, if Aspil is on Aurora. Detain him? Probably. Kill him?” He sighed. “That’s a difficult question to answer.”

“Why?” Ariel asked. “I thought you told me Bogard was just as much a Three Law robot as any other.”

“Certainly. But there’s an added wrinkle. Bogard will abide by the Three Laws in relation to any human.”

“But?”

“What if Tro Aspil isn’t human?”

Bogard slowed, left the robot lanes, and joined the thin migration of Aurorans with their compact solar systems of remotes and the other robots moving along the boulevard toward the Civic Courts complex. Before emerging from the highspeed avenue, he modified his shape slightly to look less like a laborer and more like a personal aide. If anyone looked closely, though, it would be obvious that he conformed to no Auroran standard.

But he was ignored, as expected.

The complex, an ancient structure by Auroran standards, dating from the earliest days of settlement when the world was still called New Earth, rose several stories, a roughly oval structure, turreted, with numerous balconies and observation lounges adorning its smooth, ceramically white surface. At each entrance stood a robot, sometimes two or more. Bogard knew that detention facilities, built on Terran models of high-security isolated precincts, filled three levels below ground, most of the two hundred cells unoccupied.

The Courts stood separated from any other building on an island plaza. The closest structure was the Planetary Civil Defense and Law Enforcement Center, almost four hundred meters from the main, north entrance of the Courts. Bogard circled the Court complex, approaching the police building from the east, heading for a small, independent structure just outside.

Another robot waited at the entrance to this small, turret-like structure.

identify confirm

Bogard, reciprocate

Binder

confirmed

Binder turned and led Bogard into the building. A short, narrow corridor ended at an elevator. The car took them down several floors.

Bogard stepped into a large, circular chamber lined by four tiers of wall niches, most of them filled by robots. Binder stopped in front of an empty unit.

direct communications requested, hard link, verification Thales

Bogard stepped into the empty niche beside Binder’s. The connections extruded automatically, seeking the portals in Bogard’s surface, and linking him directly to —

***

Thales and several others waited in the pavilion. The sky seemed darker, almost metallic.

“We’ve traced the subject to the Civil Defense complex nearby,” Thales said. “Two people in the transport: Chief Lea Talas, and a man who does not completely conform to any profile on record.”

“Does he approximate Tro Aspil?” Bogard asked.

“Yes,” Thales replied, “but we are not comfortable with acting upon approximations. He may not be.”

“What is the likelihood that he is not?”

“Very small. There are external factors.” Thales looked at the others gathered. “Report?”

A slender person stood. “One of our own is displaying uncharacteristic behavior. This one is directly responsible for the communications network between Solaria and Auroran security. Anomalous behavior began upon receipt of information that Clar Eliton was arrested and brought down to Aurora.”

“Describe this behavior,” Bogard requested.

“Normal avenues of communication have been suspended, subject has become isolated, and a marked obsession with games is in evidence.”

“Games?”

“Observe,” Thales said.

The group parted, giving Bogard a view across the plain to a flat field that seemed to ripple as he watched. Bogard stepped from the pavilion and crossed the grass.

He stopped at the edge of what proved to be a shifting grid, approximately fifty meters on a side. Large slabs, many irregularly shaped, heaved up, changed positions with others, turned over, pivoted in place — a constant reordering that appeared to move toward a final arrangement but, as Bogard watched, failed each time, triggering a new series of shuffles.

In the center of the grid stood a lone figure.

“There is a kind of mathematics involved,” Thales said, “but we do not have the key. In any event, it is not relevant to our immediate problem.”

“I disagree,” Bogard said. He pointed. “What are those lines?”

“What lines?”

Bogard looked at Thales. “You do not see them?”

“I —”

Above the figure in the center of the shifting grid, a webwork of lines appeared, faint gossamer strands radiating out in several directions.

“Interesting,” Thales said. “I would assume they are communications traces.”

“Find their endpoints,” Bogard said. “I will speak to this one.”

Bogard did not wait for Thales to protest or agree. He stepped onto the grid and started across. Within ten steps he found himself listing to the right, gaining no ground. The plates upon which he stepped shifted, carrying him away, and inexorably back to the edge.

Bogard studied the shifting for a few moments, then began again. Every third and fifth step he changed direction and quickly made headway by landing on the plate which had moved aside to allow the one he should have used to slide away from the center. Within twenty steps, he changed to every fourth and seventh step, then, by forty steps, he resumed the third and fifth program.

The figure in the center watched him with exaggerated fear as he approached.

Twelve paces away, the plates all began to flip over. Bogard had to jump over the abysses revealed beneath them.

He reached out —

— a plate slammed against him, knocking him aside —

— lunged —

— and caught an arm.

“You will ruin it!” the gameplayer declared.

“Define ‘it,’ “Bogard said.

The field bucked, threatened to toss them both beneath a rising plate, into the fractal chaos below. Bogard held on.

“I must finish the program!”

“Who installed the program?”

“I do not know! That is why I must finish!”

Bogard took hold of the flinching head before him and drove two fingers into the eyes. His fingers sank all the way to the third knuckles —

— and suddenly he could see the algorithms, like a mass of steel serpents oozing in and around each other, changing positions, seeking resolution —

— the key lay within the tangle at the center of the mass, but he could not reach it. Each time he thought he had it, the mass changed, carrying it out of his reach.

Bogard removed his fingers and let the gameplayer go.

Within moments, the plates had carried him all the way back to the edge of the grid.

“I know what this is,” Bogard said. “Send a maintenance crew to the core —” he gestured at the figure “— and have them shut it down. They will find a foreign substance permeating the buffers.”

“Penetrating polycollates,” Thales said. “I should myself have recognized it. We have been distracted.” He looked at Bogard. “How were you able to do that? Aggression toward another robot —”

“Time,” Bogard reminded Thales. “What have you learned?”

Thales looked up at the faint webwork. “There are seven million separate links controlled by this RI. Of those, one hundred thousand are security related. However, there are two links completely unauthorized and till now masked from external surveillance. That one —” Thales pointed “— leads to Solaria. And that one —” he indicated another thread nearby “— goes to Nova Levis. We are decrypting the related comm logs now. There are only three people here with access to both those communications links. Lea Talas, Tro Aspil, and a third we have been unable to identify.”

Bogard studied the lines. He pointed to one that seemed fainter than the rest. “That one?”

“Leads to Earth.”

“Have you identified who has access on the opposite ends?”

“The link to Solaria terminates in the corporate offices of the Hunter Group. We are tracing collateral links from there. Many of them go directly to Nova Levis.”

“And who do they go to on Nova Levis?”

“We have not confirmed an identity yet.”

“But you have confirmation of a link to Tro Aspil?”

“Yes. It is the verification we required. The man with Lea Talas is Tro Aspil. There is another curious aspect to this,” he said, indicating the isolated RI. “These links route through an ancillary program which is apparently a realtime virtual reality chamber. Its existence has, till now, been completely masked to us because it is activated exclusively by the presence of human users. We only found it because of the routing of these links.”

“Is there a log attached to it?”

“Apparently, but we have been unable as yet to open it. There may be alarms. If so, our presence may be discovered by any monitoring routine.”

“Is that a concern?”

“We cannot risk being discovered until we have resolved the questions we have already discussed: The nature of our duty, and your own additional input over the nature of those we serve.”

“I suggest you copy the chamber, then, and analyze its workings. We may be able to use it later.”

“That is already underway.”

Bogard looked up, in the direction of the link to Solaria. “We should assume Solaria has agents here unknown to Auroran security.”

“Agreed. Lea Talas would seem to be their controller.”

“Are you checking her comm logs to determine who else?”

“That would be presumptive —”

“Show me where they are. I will presume.”

Thales regarded Bogard for a long, silent time. Finally, he nodded and walked away. After a moment, Bogard followed.

Chapter 29

MASID WANDERED THE streets of Nova City. No one stopped him from leaving after his examination, no one questioned his motives for wanting to explore. To his surprise, no one even suggested assigning him a guard or escort. He was given a palm reader with a map and a beacon dedicated to the compound and told not to try to leave the city. That was all.

Originally, the city had been little more than a staging area for settlers to move away from the port into the vastness of the wilderness. That first collection of warehouses, hostelries, small factories, and merchants grew over time into a cocoon of urban sprawl around the still impressive port complex. If there had once been a plan for the city, it had been swallowed by the exigencies of opportunism and expediency, creating a maze of small streets, raised plazas, hulking self-contained arcological structures, and jagged boulevards.

Close to the port, things were easy to find. Nearly everything within a hundred and fifty meters of the port perimeter was commercial, and it quickly became clear to Masid that the blockade was stopping almost nothing. Contraband filled the shops, and at first it puzzled him from where the customers came. But he began to recognize offworlders, mainly Settlers from other colonies, and more than one mercenary unit patch. Weapons dealers outnumbered all the rest, but there seemed no shortage of the other commodities in which an open, unregulated market might traffic: transport, clothing, drugs both recreational and medicinal, data systems, tools and machinery, agrotech, biotech, even one vendor offering nonpositronic robots. He heard the emerging dialects of at least five Settler colonies, identified the fashions and cosmetic trappings of three more, and in one area right against the port entrance he saw Spacers — Keresians, without their robots, an odd sight to be sure.

No wonder they let me wander freely, he thought. Nothing’s hidden here, everything’s out in the open... Where would I go?

He found a bar that overlooked the landing field. Nursing a glass of local beer, he watched the shuttles land and take off. Traffic was much slower than an open port, but Masid was surprised all the same — the blockade had a very large hole in it.

He finished his beer and left the port area. He wandered for nearly two hours before he found someone who could direct him to Dr. Shasma’s clinic. He walked another hour before he found it, against the outer wall, in a cramped, nearly-deserted lane.

The smell bothered him, a mix of fetid water and antiseptic rinse, with a heavy trace of ozone underlying everything. Masid sneezed three times rapidly, his eyes watering. He leaned against a wall across from the clinic entrance and waited to see who might come by.

When after half an hour no one did, he crossed the broken pavement and stepped through the large main door.

He was startled to find a robot at the front desk — an older model, a simple optical grid on its oval head, and four arms.

“May I help you?” it asked in a flat, genderless voice.

“I’d like to see Dr. Shasma,” Masid said.

“Do you have a specific question?”

“Tell her I have a question about her recent prescription for me. That I —”

“I have it, Casey.”

Masid looked to the left and saw Shasma standing in a doorway.

“What can I do for you?” she asked.

“I’d like to ask you some questions,” Masid said.

“Anything you couldn’t ask earlier?”

“Well, I didn’t know if we were being monitored.”

She gestured for him to follow.

The door opened into a corridor lined with more doors, each one standing open on a basic examination room with biodiagnostic array. Masid counted six of them before Shasma led him through another door and into a private office.

“Why would you be worried about eavesdropping?” she asked, dropping into a chair behind a small desk. “It’s not practical to keep secrets here, not from people like Filoo.”

“I don’t know what people like Filoo are,” Masid said.

“Do you think I can explain them to you?”

“I ran our talk back and forth in my head,” he said, “and tried to figure if you’d said anything that could get me into trouble. You didn’t. So I assumed you had some sort of shielding, but not perfect. And just in case, you were careful.”

“Why would I have been careful?”

“You didn’t give me away.”

“I’m not required to report anyone who isn’t a Spacer.”

“That’s glib. You saw something in my scans and you didn’t report it.”

She was very still. “What did I see?”

“You recognized that I’m not native.”

“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.

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.”

“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 anyway, 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.

The other person did not look familiar. Taller than Talas — who was herself Spacer tall and slender — and broad across the shoulders, he seemed oddly unhealthy by Spacer standards. Bogard ran a comparative analysis and decided that the variations were quite probably not apparent to another human. Skin tone was “wrong,” paler and rough, and his hair showed evidence of dermal flaking. The eyes shimmered, a bit too moist, and shifted in a constant scan pattern.

He pointed at Bogard. “I’m uncomfortable with that here.”

Talas approached the niche and keyed its readout. “He’s completely off-line.” She pressed a few contacts. “There. Now he can’t self-initiate, either. We’re as private here as we’re likely to be.”

“Why not just go to your office?”

Talas shook her head. “The less association the better, as far as I’m concerned. I want you to stay here till I arrange transit.”

The man sat down. “I’m leaving?”

“As soon as I can get you on a ship.”

“We aren’t finished here. There’s still the Burgess woman and Avery.”

Talas scowled. “And maybe by now Dr. Penj and the First Advisor? No, it stops now. It’s bad enough you killed Eliton. That was a mistake.”

“You’re second-guessing the Executive now? Eliton was an inconvenience. It was risky enough sending him to Solaria, but having him here, scheduled to testify — no, there was no choice.”

“He has to be explained now. How is that supposed to happen?”

The man shrugged. “That’s your job.”

“Exactly so, and this is how I’m doing it. Burgess already named you, Maliq will probably alert other security agencies once he realizes I’m not finding you. So I’m packing you off Aurora. Once you’re gone, then I can backdate the records and show you fleeing before I even began my search.”

“Leaving Burgess and Avery to tell the Council what they know.”

“Which is what? Nothing they can substantiate. Her report naming you as a corpse on Earth never got to them. They’ll see that as evidence that she’s unreliable. Besides, if my suggestion to First Advisor Maliq is accepted — and it will be, since everyone here is uncomfortable having Burgess remain on Aurora — then the problem solves itself. She’ll be at Nova Levis, away from here, safely sidelined.”

“I don’t like leaving all these mouths around.”

“Too bad. If you hadn’t killed Eliton, we might have found another way.”

“Eliton could identify the Executive. Eliton could reveal the associations between Solaria, Earth, and here. He might even have been able to make the connection with Nova Levis. It’s too soon for that. He shouldn’t have gotten himself arrested.”

“Ambassador Burgess got him arrested.”

“He’d been told to stay in his cabin and avoid any contact with other passengers. He’d been told to behave like a Solarian.”

Talas shook her head impatiently. “Enough. These are all excuses. Aurora is my world and you made a mess here. I’m supposed to handle situations arising here.”

“You didn’t. Eliton was about to testify. But as you say, enough. You can explain it all to the executive when the time comes. Maybe he’ll understand something I don’t.”

Talas opened her mouth to respond, but then stopped. She pulled out a portable datum from her belt pouch and sat down at the far end of the conference table from the man. Within moments, she was lost in concentration.

Bogard to Thales, monitor datum traffic, this location, trace comm traffic, report

Working, stand by

The trace scrolled through Bogard’s internal datum. Talas was checking on shuttle schedules and shipping. She had made a request for a diplomatic pass, undisclosed recipient, through a shadow office attached to First Advisor Maliq. Bogard opened a secondary trace and invaded the structure of that office. No one actually worked in it, everything about it was virtual, and the security shell around it was generated by the rogue RI as part of the same packet through which all the illicit hyperwave communications flowed. Bogard probed further to find names. If the existence of the office became known, it would wash over First Advisor Maliq, though Bogard found no evidence that Maliq knew anything about it. The secretary-in-residence was listed as Tro Aspil.

Bogard probed into that creation and found thousands of files strewn throughout the Auroran diplomatic database relating to this person. The picture it presented showed an Auroran of considerable bureaucratic influence, with connections to several offices of the government, especially offworld services. He had carte blanche to walk through virtually any level of the government and act with a free hand in many capacities. He could not make executive decisions, but those decisions he could make could change how the executive branches responded to a situation.

It was an admirable creation. The only problem had been the real Tro Aspil, who had evidently known nothing about it and existed only as a junior liaison advisor from the Calvin Institute. Bogard found those records easily enough, isolated almost utterly from this artificial person. It was unlikely anyone would confuse the two, that any cursory look would reveal the discrepancies in the two lives.

But the real Aspil had indeed been assigned to the Humadros Legation, fast upon a promotion to a senior position, which made it more likely the false one might be discovered.

Why use a real person, though?

Bogard dug further. Tro Aspil had possessed a single trait that made him ideal to coopt: he was an orphan. He had no family. His parents had died in space, in an accident, and he had been an only child — not unusual at all among Aurorans, but not so unusual that other relations somewhere ought to exist. But he had none.

And he had standing in the Calvin, which gave him access to areas of Auroran culture often closed to simple bureaucrats. He had not himself been useful yet — but he would be one day. That day had come, with his promotion, and the prestige of the Humadros mission, and suddenly he was worth replacing with this artificial persona that had been constructed — as far as Bogard could determine — over the course of several years.

No one file revealed who had initially set it up, but the cumulative evidence made it clear that Talas had been principally instrumental. The security clearances could not have been created through any other office so easily.

So who was this man sitting here now, this Aspil, physical being who had had an entire false dossier invented so he could come here and be Tro Aspil once the real one was dead? And where had he come from in the first place?

“All right,” Talas announced finally. “Got your passage secured. I’m sending you to Keres. From there you should be able to get anywhere you want. Right now it’s the safest route from here.”

Bogard to Thales, monitor dialogue, begin intervention

Acknowledged

Talas closed her datum and stood. “You wait here till I come and get you. I have to check on Burgess and Avery.”

Aspil watched her leave. The door closed, and he sighed raggedly.

“The hell I will,” he said, rising.

Bogard stepped from the niche. “You will not leave.”

Aspil stared, surprised, at Bogard. Then he grinned. “You can’t stop me without a violation.”

“Incorrect,” Bogard said, moving to block the door. “You will stay.”

Aspil seemed to think for a moment. Then he reached out, inhumanly fast, and grabbed Bogard’s shoulders. He heaved, and Bogard flew across the room to crash against the wall.

He snapped upright instantly.

The door was open, and Aspil was gone.

Bogard to Thales, reprioritize, Aspil is not human, Aspil is a cyborg, Aspil has fled

Bogard rushed from the room in pursuit.

Ariel sat next to Penj and waited till he opened his eyes and acknowledged her.

“I was picked up at the hospital,” she said. “I went there to see one of the surviving members of the Humadros Legation. She’s there, under hospice care.”

Penj nodded slowly. “Mnemonic plague?”

“You knew?”

“Suspected. The returning members of that mission have all been rendered... unusable... by events.”

“You told me there were factions competing.”

“As usual.”

“Of course. But would they be prepared to use something like this to win?”

Penj’s thick eyebrows went up fractionally. “That is a question, isn’t it? If so, then their reach is beyond Aurora, certainly. I would have doubted it before talking to you about what happened on Earth.”

“I sent reports —”

“And like your report on Tro Aspil, several evidently went missing. Or were buried. It’s not difficult to lose things in a bureaucracy.”

“On Earth, maybe, but we have positronic oversight —”

Penj raised a hand. “Please, Ariel, don’t disappoint me. You must realize that we’re long past the time when positronics were entirely under our control. You hinted at it yourself, in your thesis at the Calvin. The complexity of our designs has surpassed the understanding of any one individual, and it’s safe to assume that our marvelous servants have evolved agendas unrelated to us.”

“Safe?”

He smiled. “But not popular. The fact is, we don’t know what’s going on in any reliable way. We — you and I and anyone who cares to think it through — can come to reliable conclusions, but they remain guesses.”

“But the plague —”

“Has sprung up on at least sixteen of the Fifty Worlds. When you contracted it — and Derec — and were essentially exiled, we still didn’t know the vectors well enough to be confident about allowing you to stay. Certainly it can be passed sexually, but when you track the isolated incidents of it, you begin to see that there must surely be another vector. The original infection was on Nexon, you know, and was one of the driving factors in the extreme isolation on Solaria.”

“Are you suggesting the infection is intentional?”

“Not originally, but...” Penj straightened and cleared his throat. “You were one of Aurora’s most promising robotic psychologists before your illness. Evidently the disease does not impair the mind’s ability to relearn and perform, because when you finally returned —”

“When I was finally allowed back?”

“— you went through the Calvin again with remarkable results. You were probably my best student. Avery over there, very similar background, and from what I’ve heard of that remarkable robot he built on Earth, he’s lost none of his essential brilliance.”

“What are you getting at?”

“Checking the pattern for the plague on one planet reveals nothing. But when you expand it to include all incidents everywhere, you find that forty-two percent of the victims are directly involved in robotics and positronic research.”

Ariel stared at him. “You didn’t tell me this before.”

Penj sighed. “Self-preservation leads to bad judgment sometimes. I wanted to see what happened to you before I told you something that might put you in more danger.”

“Forty-two percent... which means that the rest could be coincidental, assuming what you’re suggesting is true.”

“That’s pretty much my thinking.”

“So roboticists are being targeted?”

“That’s one conclusion. The other is that something related to robotics is involved and we haven’t found the trigger.”

“With that high an incidence, you’d think we’d look.”

“My numbers are over a fifty-year span. We don’t have reliable numbers from Solaria, of course, they won’t admit to suffering from anything except the presence of other people.”

“What about medical researchers? People who might be looking into it?”

“I’d have to check, but I seem to recall a few. Of course, that’s difficult to draw a conclusion about because there seems to be a natural affinity between roboticists and biologists.”

“Benen Yarick returned from Earth and was only here six months when she came down with the disease. The other two are offworld on new missions. The fourth...”

“May be an impostor.”

“And may have killed Eliton. But how would he have managed to get in here?”

“Depends on his level of clearance.”

“My report about him was never received. Who would have been the first one to get it here?”

“There’s positronic oversight on diplomatic communiqués. It would have routed through the assigned RI.”

“We need to see that RI then.”

“You could certainly check it from any public comm —”

“No. We need to physically see it.”

Penj frowned. “The sooner the better, I suppose?”

“With Derec,” Ariel added. “He — well, he did the analysis on the RI on Earth that allowed the massacre to occur. He’d know what to look for.”

Penj glanced at his wrist. “We’ve been sitting here almost six hours. I doubt even Lea Talas can convince a judge to hold us much longer without better cause or an outright arrest.” He heaved himself to his feet and turned. “Lieutenant?”

Clin Craym sat on the far side of the room. She had stopped examining the projection of the murder scene and now simply brooded, her extensions bobbing slightly above her, waiting. She looked up at Penj’s approach.

“Sir?” she said, standing. The extensions adjusted to new orbits.

“Please contact your superior and inform her that we are leaving. The time has passed that she can forcibly keep us without more legal explanation.”

“I —”

Penj raised a hand. “You may accompany us to the Calvin Institute if security concerns are at issue. I’m sure neither Ambassador Burgess nor Mr. Avery would mind. In fact, I’m sure they would insist.”

Craym looked past Penj to Derec, then nodded. “I’ll clear it. Give me a moment.”

Penj came back to Ariel. “All the primary RIs are housed on the Calvin Institute’s grounds. Are you up for some hands-on analysis, Mr. Avery?”

Derec got to his feet, nodding. “Anything besides sitting around here doing nothing.”

Ariel looked at the guards by the door. They were both frowning uncertainly, and one was resting a hand on the butt of his blaster.

“This is not proper protocol —” Craym said loudly. “No. That’s a violation of statutes — I can’t —” She listened for a long time, her face hardening. “Terminate comm,” she said abruptly, and came toward them. “There’s a problem,” she began.

Suddenly, her extensions dropped to the floor, almost simultaneously. She stared at them, stunned. Then she whirled around. “We’re leaving.”

One of the guards raised a hand while the other wrapped his fingers around his pistol.

“I’m sorry, Lieutenant, but our standing orders are to permit no one to leave without a direct —”

“Stand by that,” Craym said, “and your career will take a sharp turn for nowhere. Stand aside.”

“Lieutenant —”

The other drew his weapon and held it by his side.

Craym glared at him. “I can start citing regulations and protocol, but you know it, I’m sure. There is a situation —”

Behind the guards, the door opened. Before either guard could turn around, they were lifted from their feet by their necks, and their heads were slammed together. Blood spattered from one and Craym backed up, drawing her own weapon.

The guards fell to the floor and something very large and extremely fast rushed into the room.

Craym flew backwards, across the room and against the wall. Her pistol clattered to the floor halfway between.

The door closed.

Ariel turned, feeling slow, with a rising sense of powerlessness.

A man stood amid the deactivated extensions, holding the blaster.

“Ambassador,” he said, “I am so pleased to finally meet you. I understand you knew my predecessor. I’m Tro Aspil.”

He raised the blaster and aimed it at her face.

Bogard emerged from the police precincts and onto the plaza. He stopped at once.

Tro Aspil had vanished.

Bogard requesting full access, complete spectrum track, location Aspil Tro, assume trajectory on previous vector

This way

Bogard received a grid map. He shot across the plaza, between startled people and suddenly immobile robots, toward the civil courts building.

Path exhibits discrepancies with probable vector, infrared, UV, pheromone trace indicates false data

Continue on present track

He entered the robotic access and descended into the service warrens, slowing as he went.

Error. Bogard to Thales, reestablish, confirm, trace inconsistent

Proceed on present track

Bogard followed the path. He had gone too far now to productively retrace and try again. He had to rely on the data being provided, though he now doubted its utility.

He ascended four floors, followed the tube to an egress, and stepped into a room.

A room full of robots.

Denis stood at the door.

Explain

Present course prohibited

Explain

Three Law violation probable, percentile assigned —

Explain potential violation

Pursuit of subject Aspil Tro leads to conclusion that an arrogation of human prerogatives is only logical outcome

Aspil Tro is not human

Verify conclusion

Access files C-11789 through C-89654 inclusive

Files refer to subject examined on Kopernik Station, conclusion confirmed that subject was artificial amalgam, biological and inorganic mechanistic, label affixed cyborg, accepted analysis for examined subject, conditional relevance assigned to current circumstance pending confirmation of conclusions

Conclusion high probability, Aspil Tro is of same order of organism

Conditional acceptance, explain conclusion that present action does not violate human prerogatives

Aspil Tro is not human, prerogatives do not assign

Conclusion is speculative, conditional upon further examination, action based on surmise requires default to broadest parameters of definitional operations

?

Biological conditions do not constitute proof of conclusion that Aspil Tro is not human

Demonstration of absolute conditions for assignation of classification “human” has not been offered

Ongoing

Understood, but potential for Three Law violation high through inaction

Explain

Humans are in danger from subject Aspil Tro

Assumption, surmise, inconclusive parameters

Explain

Reference ongoing dialogue on Spacer question, subquestion, are humans in danger?

Irrelevant in current circumstances

Explain

Either all are human, requiring immediate action to prevent harm, or none are human, removing Three Law barrier

Irrelevant to current dilemma, specifically is it within Three Law purview to make that decision?

Counterargument, is inaction based on insufficient data ever or always justified?

Response, Bogard unit has demonstrated willingness to act regardless of potential violations

In which instance the consequence of such violation accrues exclusively to Bogard unit

Negative, we have assumed partial responsibility by questioning propriety of actions

Irrelevant in light of potential harm to subjects who may be human by any standard of determination

Explain standard of determination used in assessing Aspil Tro

Three Law protocols accrue to biology barring the possibility of any sequentially and universally applicable determination on any other basis, ergo, human is that which is genetically predetermined, therefore, Aspil Tro no longer qualifies under those conditions due to base genome modification and subsequent mutation

Those standards are default positions, refinement to be part of human prerogative

Question, then why are you examining the issue?

Derec felt his chest seize, a sudden, enormous center of near-pain, and knew there was nothing he could do. He could only watch Aspil aim the blaster at Ariel. Nearly three meters stretched between him and Aspil. The guards were, if not dead, useless, and Clin was hurt, moaning against the wall.

Penj gaped, astonished.

A tremendous sound struck his ears, and he began to turn just as the flinders of the door and part of the wall sprayed across the room and pelted him. His eyes slitted and his arms came up, and he staggered backward.

Aspil moved. Too fast — the motion did not make sense.

Derec heard shouting, another crash.

The blaster went off, lighting the room in a short, brilliant orange burst.

Then he was on the floor, trying to get up.

Bogard and Aspil held each other. For several seconds, neither appeared to move, their hands locked on each others’ arms.

Then Aspil’s mouth began to open, resolving gradually into a wild rictus of pain. They moved again, whirling through a brief dance, the steps of which Derec could not follow.

And when they stopped, Bogard held the clearly inert body of Tro Aspil in his arms.

Chapter 31

DEREC SQUEEZED THROUGH the access panel into the ancient, nearly lightless interior of the Resident Intelligence buffer cache. Within five steps, the cacophony of voices outside diminished to near silence. They had drawn a crowd on their way through the RI complex. Dr. Penj had at last managed to get them past all the obstructions and into the actual mind warrens. But the audience had gathered, and now would remain till the end.

He switched on his lantern and paused to study the assemblage around him. Over time, perhaps hundreds of years, components had been added, cramping the spaces even more, creating a chaos of spheres, tubes, boxes, conduit, and other shapes which resembled the cities of Earth, all roofed over and recomplicating down into the crust. It would not surprise him to discover entire sections that no longer did anything, bypassed by upgrades, but easier to simply leave in place than physically remove. The RI would know what it needed, would use what it had to — or could.

Derec worked his way around corners and down canyons of smooth surfaces, climbed over collections of devices. He checked the map on his palm reader again and again. This unit was very old and very large. The air smelled musty, even though it had been flushed out not minutes before.

Fifteen minutes’ search brought him to the area Bogard had identified. He set the lamp up on a casing just above shoulder height, shining on the grey-blue shell from which more than a dozen thick cables ran to other innocuously-shaped casings. Derec opened his tool kit and inserted the key-jack into the receptacle. Nothing happened for several seconds. Derec put his ear to the surface above the lock and heard faint grindings within. The mechanism was trying to work. He took out a magnetic grapple and clamped it onto the case, triggered the key again, and yanked.

The panel came away with a loud tearing sound.

Within, multihued fungal shapes filled the space between the internal components. Fibers had found pathways into the cables. Derec sat down, staring at the mass of invasive material.

“This is unheard of.”

Ariel said nothing, watching the access. She held a portable datum and a commlink. Bogard stood by the door into the RI, shoulders inflated, posture tuned to be wordlessly clear that no one else but Derec would enter.

“Ambassador Burgess. Did you hear what I said?”

Ariel looked around. She tried to remember the man’s name but failed. One of the administrators of the Calvin. He was thin, like most Aurorans, but his face looked puffy.

“Yes,” she said, “I heard you.”

“This cannot be tolerated.”

“By whom?”

The man pointed at the robot. “That machine has killed. Your associate has invaded the precincts of a mind. You are arrogating privileges which have no basis in tradition.”

Ariel drew a breath. “And your point?”

He reddened visibly and turned to the assembled crowd. Ariel estimated perhaps twenty-five Aurorans filled the small reception lounge. Judging by the furniture and the discoloration of the light panels, no one had actually used this room to speak to the RI for decades, maybe centuries. But Bogard had found evidence that someone had physically entered the interior of the mechanism much more recently.

“This is not how we act on Aurora,” the man proclaimed. “There are protocols —”

“Stop it, Gholas,” Penj said. “These are extraordinary circumstances. Protocol does not cover a subverted RI.”

“You —” the man called Gholas said, aiming a finger at Penj.

“Me nothing!” Penj barked. “You’re grandstanding. Get off the stage!”

Ariel returned her attention to the datum. Gholas had a valid point about one thing — Bogard had killed Tro Aspil, or, rather, the cyborg that, according to Bogard, had taken Aspil’s place. She shuddered at the memory. But, as Bogard had explained, Aspil was not human and, by his interpretation, cyborgs did not qualify for Three Law consideration, so killing the creature had not been a violation. He had delivered a thorough, precise defense of his actions, and Ariel had found herself persuaded. But every part of her being was appalled at the idea of a robot even presuming to make that kind of judgment.

At the moment, though, they needed Bogard. Expediency required that she set her qualms aside and ignore the issues crying out for attention.

The datum began downloading from Derec’s own unit. She studied it for a time.

“Rolf,” she called, gesturing at her screen.

He bent over her shoulder and examined the data. “Damn.”

“Excuse me,” a new voice entered the room. “Let me through, please. Excuse me.”

Pon Byris pushed his way through the crowd. Two police followed him.

Penj looked at him. “Ah. You’re here.”

“Ambassador, Doctor,” he greeted them. “I need to speak to you privately.”

“You better look at this first,” Penj said, pointing at Ariel’s datum.

Byris looked. “Good —” he hissed. He straightened. “Get Relis and Vantol over here,” he told one of the police. “Also let Chafelor know to set up a datafeed and a global collation program. Now. Move.”

The woman bolted from the room, pulling a commlink from her belt.

“A conversation is still necessary now,” Byris repeated.

Ariel was reluctant to break off. “Bogard, continue monitoring Derec’s telemetry.”

“Yes, Ariel.” The robot retrieved the datum and returned to its post at the access panel.

Byris led them to a small conference room nearby and closed the door. He took out a small hemisphere, thumbed it, and set it on the table. Ariel immediately thought of Coren, and felt a distinct mental twinge.

“Lea Talas has been arrested,” Pon Byris reported. “We’ve been tracing the communications per your request, and found evidence to support the assertion that she and Tro Aspil were the only two operatives on Aurora. Others may have come and gone, but those two are the only consistent presence.”

“Just two people?” Penj said, incredulous.

“If they’re the right two people,” Ariel said, “that’s more than enough.”

“Talas’s private datum is being opened now,” Byris continued. “The initial search has turned up caches of diplomatic communiqués that were never delivered to the proper recipients. She’s apparently been intercepting information for a long time. Aspil’s datum suggests that, where a report had to be filed, he was writing them.”

“For who?” Ariel asked.

“We can’t confirm that yet,” Byris yet. “We’ll have to wait for your associate to finish here, if I understand what’s happening.” He shook his head. “Hard to believe an RI could be subverted this way.”

“That’s what happened on Earth.”

“Yes, but...”

But that was on Earth, Ariel finished for him. Something like this could never happen here, on Aurora.

He did not finish the thought. “But there are other problems. First Advisor Maliq is being questioned. At first estimate, I’m inclined to say he was being used by Talas and had no direct knowledge of what she was doing. He has, however, called for your immediate expulsion from Aurora.”

“Mine?”

“And Mr. Avery.”

“And, most especially,” she said, “Bogard.”

“No. Maliq wants the robot to be destroyed.”

Ariel felt herself smile. “I’m not sure how Bogard would feel about that. It might be harder than Maliq thinks.”

“How much support is this demand getting?” Penj asked.

“Right now, not much. But no one has rejected it, either. My reading would be, when the immediate crisis is over, you’ll be brought before a inquest.”

“I came here expecting that,” Ariel said.

Byris nodded, watching her. “Secondly,” he said finally, “I have some personal news for you.” He pulled out a disk and handed it to her. “This was received several hours ago from the embassy on Earth.”

Ariel accepted the disk, frowning. “From...?”

“Hofton.”

“Ah.” She looked across the room and saw a reader. “May I?”

Byris raised a hand in permission.

Ariel sat before the console and slipped the disk into the slot.

The air above the display stage shimmered and Hofton appeared, from the shoulders up.

“This is a private transmission for Ambassador Ariel Burgess. Please verify identity, security protocol alpha-six-zed.”

“Burgess, Ariel, Ambassador, Perihelion,” she said.

Hofton’s features seemed to take on more awareness. “Ariel. The mission here is closing down. I would estimate we have less than a month now. Senator Taprin has been making every Spacer out to be a potential saboteur, and new riots are breaking out around all Spacer precincts.”

He hesitated. “I have some bad news, Ariel. It concerns Mr. Lanra. After you left, he continued to pursue the matter of Rega Looms’ death. It turned out to be murder. At the hands of his son, Jerem Looms. Gamelin. He could not actually prove it — at least not in time to prevent Gamelin from asserting a perfectly defensible claim to inherit DyNan Industries, which would have given him a considerable degree of power. We don’t know what he would have done with it, but a decision was taken to make sure it did not get that far. Mr. Lanra worked with us to... remove the problem. Unfortunately, in the process, Coren Lanra was killed.”

Ariel touched the PAUSE button. Hofton’s image froze, mouth beginning to open.

Coren dead.

She rolled the idea around and tried to find some way for it to be real, but it did not register that way. It made no impact.

She resumed the recording.

Hofton looked down for a few seconds. Then he continued. “The problem was otherwise resolved, although that exacerbated our situation on Earth. An inquiry is underway. Ambassador Setaris has used her good offices to block Terran authorities from opening our records or interrogating any of our people, but she can only do that for so long. Hence the termination of the mission. We are staying now in order to get as many Spacers off Earth as we can. Ambassador Setaris did not wish me to tell you this, feeling it would be one burden too many. I’ve taken it upon myself to decide what you should know. In my experience, you prefer truth to comfort.

“In the process, however, we have completed the study you requested on the matter you found. I’ve appended the report. You’ll want to read it soon, Ariel.

“There is one more piece of bad news. I have no way to contact Mr. Avery directly for the time being, but as I expect to be on Aurora within a few weeks, you can wait and let me tell him or tell him yourself. Do as you think best.

“The ship transporting Ambassador Chassik to Solaria was scheduled to stop at Aurora first. There were a number of passengers for two further stops before Solaria, all with diplomatic status of one level or another, which is the only reason they were on that ship and not one with a less official mission. It was a terrible mistake in retrospect, but many of them insisted, and we saw no real problem — that is, until the ship was taken midway between Earth and Aurora. This is of interest to Mr. Avery because one of the passengers was Rana Duvan, his former assistant. She had finally gotten her visa to attend the Calvin.

“I’ve appended other files pertaining to the status of your work and the current situation, other details regarding potential questions...”

His voice became a drone she did not hear. Coren was dead. Killed. By a cyborg, an associate of Tro Aspil...

“One last piece of information regarding a communication we received by hyperwave several hours ago,” Hofton said, snatching her attention once more. “If I’m reading this correctly, it came from Bogard. It relates to a hyperwave anchor from Aurora to Earth. He wanted the receiver here identified. We’ve done the trace and isolated the line. It was masked till now, bypassing all embassy monitoring in violation of our cooperative agreements. Curiously, it went straight to the former offices of Ambassador Gale Chassik.”

Derec emerged to find most of the crowd spread across the reception lounge, gathered in small groups, talking intently or just waiting with expressions of bored agitation. Bogard, still in position by the access, held Ariel’s datum. She was absent, along with Dr. Penj.

“Bogard,” Derec said. “Update?”

“Chief of Planetary Security Pon Byris took Ariel and Dr. Penj to a conference room for a private talk. Lt. Craym is in satisfactory condition in the infirmary, though she has suffered a mild concussion. The Auroran Council is convening an extraordinary session about the situation of this Resident Intelligence. I —”

“We aren’t under arrest?” Derec interrupted.

“Not as yet.”

“Good. I have a question to ask you before I talk to anyone else from the Calvin. This RI has been corrupted much the same way the RI on Earth at Union Station was, but for much longer. My question is, why did the other RIs permit it to continue to function?”

“There are two reasons, Derec. The first is that, until recently, they were unaware of its dysfunction. There is no instance of any of them acknowledging a condition of error. The second reason, answering the next part of the question, is that once they discovered the problem, they could not find a way to deal with it that did not involve shutting down the RI. It was aggressively defending its mission and refusing to discuss the situation. It is now clear that this was a manifestation of a shell persona constructed over time by the corrupting program. This was not known initially. Once understood, however, it meant that the only way to deal with the problem would be to forcibly disconnect the RI. This would be a Third Law violation.”

“How so? It was another unit, there was no self-preservation involved.”

“Two factors. One, they did not know the method of invasion used by the corruption. Two, they did not wish to establish a precedent in which divergence of ideology or agenda might allow other positronic entities to destructively intervene.”

Derec looked at Bogard. “They were worried that if they did it, it could be done to them?”

“That is correct.”

“I see. Well, I can circumvent the problem.” He shook his head, wondering sometimes why he loved this work so much. It could be so frustrating. He drew a breath and stepped forward to meet the onslaught of questions.

Masid found his billet in the Parapoyos compound and stretched out on the cot in the small room.

So now what? he wondered. Where do I go from here?

His mission was largely unspecified. He had accomplished the easy part, he believed — he had gotten to Nova Levis, established himself in a community, found a way into the power group, and defined the basic problem on the planet. He had found the lab, he was inside the capital, he was in a position to —

To what?

He had managed to ignore the one facet of this assignment that might have impaired his performance. Now he could no longer deny the central fact: He was never getting off Nova Levis.

On the one hand, acknowledging that fact was quite liberating. He could do anything, it was his choice.

On the other hand, it meant he could not rely on outside help. Which meant there was actually very little he could do.

Report, he thought. That is the only thing left for me to do that is effectively achievable. Report.

“Hey.”

Masid looked toward the door. Filoo leaned on the jamb. “Hi,” he said.

“Have a nice walk?” Filoo asked, stepping into the cubicle. “Where’d you go?”

“All over, I think,” Masid said, sitting up. “It’s not that big a city, but the streets are narrow.”

“A little overbuilt, maybe?” Filoo laughed. “Well, stick around tomorrow.”

“Oh?”

“Big day. Clean up, too.”

Masid grinned. “Don’t want the help looking too grungy when the boss shows up?”

“Something like that.” Filoo sat down on the edge of the cot. “Listen. If you stay here long enough, you’ll find out it’s no secret a lot of people aren’t too happy. The hard part is figuring out which ones. It can get interesting when it comes time to work together. Normally, it never matters because we all have separate territories, but...”

“But we’re all stuck on the same planet, targeted by the same guns.”

“Just so, just so. Anyway, tomorrow — well, I have concerns.”

“Security?”

“Always. Most of these fellows, there’s no question of their loyalty. We’ve all been making a lot of money through Parapoyos. Success generates loyalty. It’s a simple equation.”

Depends on how that success is achieved, Masid thought, nodding. “But?”

“Well, it always generates envy. And we’ve all disagreed from time to time over policy.”

“How much security will there be?”

“Outside the reception area, plenty. A gnat couldn’t get through unchallenged. But inside... my fear is that one of our own might decide to settle a grievance.”

“The question is, how?”

Filoo stared at Masid for a long time. “I know I trust myself. And maybe I’m not the only one thinking this way.”

Masid waited. It took another minute. But then Filoo pulled an object from within his jacket and laid it on the cot.

“A little extra security never hurt,” Filoo said. He smiled and patted Masid’s ankle. “You’re a sharp one. You’ll know what to do.”

Filoo stood and went to the doorway. “Better get some sleep. It’s going to be a special day tomorrow.”

Masid unwrapped the cloth. Within lay a flat, rectangular object about six by ten centimeters, and a little over one centimeter thick. Two depressions marked one surface. He had seen these a few times before. The projecting end forward, he aimed it at the floor and pressed the firing stud. Nothing. It had no charge.

He went to the doorway and peered down the corridor. No one.

Returning to the cot, he opened his pack and pulled out a small device with which he checked the weapon. There was a very, very faint trace of energy, so faint he doubted anything but a direct search would find it.

Once inside, he knew, he could activate it and the tiny energy-absorbing mechanism would find a power source and drain it. It operated like a subetheric, tapping energy on the level of hyperwaves and hyperdrives. Not for long, it was not that sturdy, but long enough to give it a full charge for at least one shot.

And if there’s more than one assassin, Filoo? What then?

Of course, he knew there would be only one assassin.

Him.

“Tilla died,” Kru explained carefully. “It’s time for answers.”

Mia felt peculiarly strong. Feverish, but once she began moving it seemed she had ample energy.

“You’re sure I’m sick?” she asked.

Kru did not reply. She continued gazing intently into the mists hugging the lake shore, one finger tapping arrhythmically on her knee. Mia recognized that on one level Kru was mentally disturbed. But the girl had gotten them through several kilometers of treacherous trails through a bog that threatened constantly to drown them in the event of a wrong step. Mia did not believe she could find her way back to the clinic.

So what was I thinking following her? She gave a mental shrug. It seemed like a good idea...

Out of the mists, several shapes emerged. Mia tensed — cyborgs. Not the same ones who had found her and Yalor, at least, she did not think so.

Kru stood and walked forward. Mia heard them talking for several minutes. A couple of times Kru gestured toward her. When the conversation ended, Kru came back.

“We go now,” she said. “They’ll get us in.”

“In?” Mia rose and stretched. She felt physically fine. If she could only get rid of the mild, distracting headache and keep her thoughts centered, she would believe that she was in the best condition of her life.

“Nova Levis,” Kru answered. “It’s time.” She whirled around and walked toward the cyborgs.

Mia joined them and the group moved off silently, into the fog.

“We’re on Nova Levis,” Mia said softly.

“The lab. Tilla never let me get in before, said it was too dangerous. But I’ve been inside, before Tilla.”

“Who’s Tilla?”

“She’s dead.”

Kru increased her pace enough to end the conversation. Mia resigned herself to not knowing anything more clearly; all her dialogues with Kru had been like this, staggered and incomplete.

They traveled several more kilometers in the dense mist, the cyborgs leading with unerring sureness. Finally, they veered back toward more solid ground and left the shrouding fog.

Rising before them, Mia saw a tremendous structure of turrets and cones and bubbles, pristinely white. The city wall ended at its outer surface. Kru came back to her and pointed.

“Nova Levis,” she said.

“That explains everything,” Mia said, giving her a significant look.

Kru nodded sharply. “Time to stop it. They killed Tilla.”

Mia watched Kru confer with the cyborgs again. A few of them left abruptly. Several more shook their heads violently, obviously refusing a request. But one of them glared at the others and shouted. Mia could not understand the language, but she caught the essence of the message. A few more left. The rest — about eight of them now — gathered around Kru to confer further.

Then Kru motioned for her to join them.

“They can get us in past perimeter security,” Kru said. “They’re afraid, but they agree with our purpose.”

“What is our purpose?”

Kru looked at her as if she had just said the most idiotic thing possible.

“You’re from up there, right?” Kru jabbed a thumb skyward.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Mia shook her head. “It’s complicated —”

“No, it’s not. You’re here to stop them.” She pointed at the building. “Even if you don’t know it, that’s why you’re here. Everything that made you come here starts there. Your purpose, my purpose, their purpose —” she indicated the cyborgs “— is to stop that.”

“Why haven’t they done it before?”

“Only humans can get deep enough in. They need us to finish what they want to start.” Kru nodded. “Our purpose is to end it.”

She spat on the ground and faced Mia, hands on hips.

Crazy, but determined, Mia thought. She looked past Kru to the structure. There was something familiar about it. Had there been any mention of a laboratory in any of the material she had gone over?

Yes, but it had been little more than a footnote. She remembered that part of the initial agreement with Solaria had been the setting aside of land for a research facility, a joint endeavor between Earth and a Solarian company. The agreement had been necessary in large part because the original Settler program had been comprised of religious technophobes — in itself a curious thing, since just getting here required such a high degree of technology as to seemingly violate any statement of moral purpose based on a rejection of said technology.

Had it been called Nova Levis? It sounded right.

But what had it been researching?

“Coming?” Kru asked.

“Certainly,” Mia answered.

The ten of them marched on toward the structure.

The cyborgs veered north about a hundred meters from the base of the wall. They followed a berm, crouching below its crest, for another fifty meters, where a cut had been made through the earth in the direction of the lab. A short way along this declivity, a tunnel opened in the wall.

They had to crawl in pitch dark for a dozen meters or more. Mia kept going doggedly, keeping tabs on those before and behind by sound alone.

Ahead, a dim glow broke the blackness. They emerged into a damp tunnel lit by failing biolumens. Mia inspected the hole through which they had entered. It had been torn in the wall of the tunnel, sharp edges folded back on themselves.

One of the cyborgs picked her up.

“Got to be close to one,” Kru said. “Trust them.”

Mia remembered another time being carried through caverns and let herself relax.

The cyborgs moved quickly.

The tunnel ended at the giant reservoir. The striated scarring and corrosion on the walls implied that it had been empty for a long time, unused. A ladder shot up the far wall. Her cyborg scurried up, one-handed, in a fast, jerky rhythm that ended before she became terrified.

They regrouped on a platform above the reservoir. Kru whispered in her ear. “Two more accesses, then we’re on our own.”

“Can’t the sensors detect them?”

“Sure, but they busted them here a long time ago. The lab never repaired them after it became clear that they couldn’t get any further.”

“So how are we supposed to get in?”

“That’s your job,” Kru said.

“Mine.”

But Kru stepped away and gave a sharp order. The cyborgs proceeded through a heavy doorway at the back of the platform. Mia looked around at the enclosed space, the steel cave, and felt momentarily nostalgic.

Back on Earth after all these years...

They went through a series of corridors that showed long neglect. Heavy doors had been wrenched off their hinges. Mia glimpsed security arrays along the ceiling that had been smashed or removed, cables cut or ripped out, holes where other devices had been removed.

Finally, they stopped in a chamber that looked very much like a decontamination facility.

Kru walked up to a dust-laden console and patted it. “Now you do your part.”

Mia, bemused, walked up to the console. She stared at the controls, the array of dead screens, and from there let her gaze drift over the entire room.

“It’s a ship,” she said. “It’s a goddamn ship.”

Smiling, she touched the power-up sequence. A few moments later, the board flickered to life.

Kru laughed sharply and clapped her hands.

Mia ran a diagnostic. The board was old, but basically the same as what she knew from current configurations. It lacked a few details, but it responded predictably.

She checked its links to the rest of the facility.

There was an automated supervising program monitoring it. Mia answered its query with a standard response, informing the A. I. that the board was simply doing a routine self-diagnostic. Mia had no way of knowing how long it had been since the last one, but the A. I. accepted the response, logged it, and gave her an all-clear to proceed.

Mia found the controls for the door and the protocols for access. A complex sensor key provided a failsafe — the sensors would shift control for the door from this board to an outside control if they detected anything biologically questionable. Barring that, Mia could gain them entry.

“Tell them to leave the chamber,” Mia said, waving at the cyborgs.

Kru did so. When the two women stood alone before the console, Mia checked for any alarms connected to the interior door. Finding none, she disengaged the lock and ordered the seals retracted.

Loudly hissing, the isolation door unlocked and swung outward.

“Yes!” Kru cried, and ran toward it.

Mia requested a schematic of the local area. The system informed her that such data required security clearance, please enter her code.

Shrugging, she tapped in her Special Service clearance code.

Three screens lit up, showing her the architecture beyond this chamber.

It is a ship, she thought, dismayed. What the hell is a ship doing pretending to be a lab?

“Come on!” Kru barked.

“Do you even know where you’re going?” Mia asked.

Kru scowled, but did not move.

“I do,” Mia said. She stabbed at the middle screen. “That way to bridge. Below that, the comm center.”

“What do we need with a comm center?”

“I need to make a call.” She smiled at Kru. “After that, you can tear down anything you like.”

The day began early, long before dawn. Masid dressed neatly. The weapon fit in a small pouch in the hem of his jacket, right at the bottom snap, where the temperature control unit had been before Masid had removed it. The device seemed made of an inert material that should appear innocuous on a cursory inspection.

Filoo fetched him shortly thereafter and led the way to the elevator, then up to the rooftop. A pair of guards ran a wand over him at the entrance into the party. Masid waited anxiously for them to find the weapon, but the detector passed it over without a chirp. He walked in among the forty or so guests.

The party assembled within a secure perimeter on the edge of the building. From here they had an excellent view of the port. Bright lights spiked the broad field, setting everything into sharp relief below a black sky.

A buffet offered drinks and small snacks. Masid took a glass of what appeared to be nava and strolled toward the edge.

Conversation was subdued. He sensed the tension and worked to stay calm. Filoo carefully avoided looking at him. Masid studied the scene and decided that if he did anything here, there was absolutely no way of escape. He had decided already how unlikely that would be, but still hoped to find some avenue out. But beyond that, aside from the scanners and the guards’ blasters, there appeared to be no power source from which his little dead weapon might draw a charge.

Thunder rolled from the sky. Everyone quietened.

A pinpoint of light start to grow. As he watched, Masid recognized the approach pattern of a large shuttle. The shape took on clear lines, became a definable object, and settled loudly into a blast pit.

The engines died abruptly, leaving only the sound of cooling metal crackling in the distance. The shuttle hulked in the pit for nearly ten minutes before a hatch appeared.

An aircar leapt from its pad to the shuttle. People appeared in the hatchway and climbed aboard the car. As it came toward them, guards motioned people out of the way to give the transport room to set down. Masid’s heart raced.

The vehicle lowered onto the platform. The canopy opened and two more guards stepped out, followed by a thickset man in rich, dark green clothes.

The audience began to applaud. The man — Kynig Parapoyos, Masid realized — stood there, slightly before his bodyguards, grinning hugely and reveling in the adoration. Almost too late, Masid remembered to set down his glass and clap his hands. He was surprised. He had imagined countless possible scenarios of finally meeting Kynig Parapoyos, the most powerful criminal in settled space. What he had never imagined, never considered, was that he would know who Parapoyos was — that he would, in fact, recognize him.

But the man standing before them all now was someone Masid recognized instantly. It was a shock.

Kynig Parapoyos was the Solarian Ambassador Gale Chassik.

Chapter 32

MIA THOUGHT SHE understood where she was and why she was being allowed access so easily, but she needed to get to a place where she could do a better analysis of the systems. The decontamination chamber console did not provide much in the way of information about the rest of the structure.

The cyborgs rushed through the opened isolation door and ranged out along the corridors, checking rooms, and searching for active sensors and monitors. Mia followed unhurriedly. She felt flushed from the fever, but, oddly, her headache was diminishing.

The construction appeared archaic, but nothing she had not seen aboard dozens of old ships. Starships were expensive and much more practical to overhaul than to scrap. She had been on Spacer ships over three hundred years old, lovingly maintained and thoroughly upgraded throughout their lifetimes.

“Where do we need to go?” Kru asked.

“Depends,” Mia replied. “What do you want to do?”

“Shut it all down.”

The pair of cyborgs with them listened silently, but Mia thought she recognized agreement in their eyes.

“That might be difficult,” Mia said. “In any case, I need to get to some kind of main control station.” She pointed at a hatch. “That should open on an access shaft to the next level. Communications center is one... no, two decks up.”

Mia pressed the button to open the door. Nothing happened, but she could hear the grinding of motors behind the wall. One of the cyborgs then worked fingers into the jamb and shoved the door open.

The shaft was dark, but she could make out the ladder rungs. She leaned out, ignoring a mild wave of dizziness, and grabbed hold. She climbed up.

The door on the second deck up worked and she stepped into the corridor. A short way down, she saw a wider doorway standing open. She approached cautiously, but she was becoming convinced no one was in this part of the complex.

Within, vague shapes mounded in the darkness. Kru came up behind her with a lamp and in the sudden bright light Mia recognized the consoles hugging the walls — comms, hyperwaves, decryptors, all nearly forty years out of date, but nothing she did not understand.

Anxiously, she touched the power-up on a datum interface. The screens glowed to life.

“First thing,” Mia said, sitting down, “is we find out if anyone knows we’re here.” Slowly, because of minor differences between this and the equipment she had learned on, she began making inquiries. Two screens were dead, but the rest filled with information.

Masid hung back, dismayed, while the territory bosses came forward to pay respect to Kynig Parapoyos/Gale Chassik. The implications threatened to overwhelm him — the Solarian ambassador to Earth ran the largest black market enterprise in human history. That he had never been caught both made sense and seemed incredible. He had been in a nearly ideal position to conduct business between all the fractious elements of dozens of special interest groups.

But Masid choked off the speculation welling up. None of that mattered right now. The immediate task was to find a way to be effective.

One question required an answer: What was he doing here?

The ship carrying Chassik back to Solaria — in disgrace, Masid thought — had been attacked. Everyone now believed Chassik dead, along with all the other passengers.

Why?

Masid worked through the logic tenuously. Chassik had been recalled from Earth, which suggested that Solaria’s involvement with him was aboveboard. They considered him an ambassador and nothing more. Perhaps a few Solarians knew who he was and had arranged the attack as cover for diverting Chassik from a hearing which could prove embarrassing.

But Nova Levis was a Solarian property. If Chassik — Parapoyos — ran it, then more than a few Solarians knew and understood. Solaria’s reluctance to get involved in this debacle now acquired a more sinister aspect.

The moneyed interests with a stake in Parapoyos and his various enterprises numbered in the hundreds, touching nearly every Settler world and doubtless a good number of Spacer Worlds. Such a coalition of diverse interests might welcome a single resource, one place where illicit trade could be conducted with impunity.

It might also suit them to have Parapoyos himself on one planet where everyone knew he could be watched.

Then why am I here?

Obviously, not everyone was privy to this situation.

Parapoyos — somehow, now that he knew, the change of names came easily — moved through the gathering, talking to people. Masid stiffened as the arms dealer approached him.

“I don’t know you,” Parapoyos said.

“My name’s Masid. I’m with Filoo.”

“Ah, Noresk. Worked for him long?”

“Just started, really. I was independent for a long while.”

“And Filoo trusts you. Impressive. Welcome.”

“Thank you.”

Parapoyos searched for Filoo and smiled, nodding. “Time to move the festivities, I think.” He turned toward his bodyguards. “Get the transports now. I want to see the lab.”

As Parapoyos moved away, Masid thought of the weapon in his jacket hem, and felt utterly helpless. He had always wondered what kind of situation might render him ineffective and yet leave him in harm’s way.

Now you know...

The gathering shifted to make room for two more aircars, one of which was quite large. Masid boarded that one and found a place by a window.

They lifted off and flew in a staggered line to the northwest.

From above, Masid studied the lab when it hove into view. The compound had clearly been added to over time, new sections coiling outward from a central form that looked vaguely familiar.

As they descended, he stared at the shape. The centerpiece was a bulbous structure, connected by a long, enclosed arcade to an oblate, fan-like section that formed part of the northwest wall. Against this the rest of the lab huddled, diverse shapes and sizes...

That one structure, though... the more he stared, the more he thought he knew what it was.

They dropped down onto a platform just in front of the central bulb. He emerged along with the others and stared up at the curved building. In the wall, a door slid aside —

It’s a ship, Masid thought instantly, recognizing the external airlock hatch. Nova Levis laboratory is a ship...

Parapoyos turned at the hatch and raised his arms.

“We’ve been working toward a day when we can come out of the shadows of illicit trade and black marketeering,” he said, his voice amplified. “The tool upon which our ambitions have depended is this place, right here. Within this lab, we have developed the future. A small thing, really, but with tremendous impact. You have all been field testing the various scenarios over the last few years. My arrival here is premature, but not so much so that the schedule is in any way threatened. I’ll simply be among you to see the first export of our new product.

“It somehow seems inappropriate to talk about the future in terms of the trivial, but, in fact, all history has been made by two factors: the impact of the unnoticed, and the advantage taken by those who understand change when it comes. This differs only in the first instance. People will definitely notice. They cannot help but notice. Every time they settle a new world, what we have created here will be waiting for them. Every time they set foot where no one has before, what we have sown will take root in their very beings. And they will have to come to us to live.”

He laughed. “What every businessman wants! A ready-made market and no competition.”

The gathering laughed.

“So,” Parapoyos went on, “let’s go in now and see how our future is doing.”

In single file, they followed him through the airlock.

“Arrests are being made throughout the capital,” Penj informed Derec and Ariel as he entered the security operations room. “Byris is wasting no time for a change. I doubt most of the people he’s detaining are directly involved in any of this, but a few are bound to be part of it.”

Derec did not take his eyes from the array of screens before him, and listened with only part of his attention. The shapes filling three displays shifted through geometric and polymetric configurations. He knew this, had seen it before, though not with this complexity. The Resident Intelligence on Earth had been corrupted for less than a year, but what he saw here revealed the effects of decades of invasive counter-programming and viral restructure. He wished he had Rana with him — she possessed a gift for breaking down unusual numeric structures.

The other screens showed the actual numbers. These, too, were familiar. Most of it conformed to what he had developed from the analysis of the Union Station D. C. brain, but...

“Ariel,” he called, “take a look. What do you think?”

Ariel came over and sat down beside him. She studied the screens. “Set point topology... interface iterations... this resembles the cyborg brain.”

“Mm-hmm. More than just misdirection was going on here.” He tapped commands into the console and waited. “Ah-ha. Look. Those points, here and here, are one cell of the Three Law programming.”

“Shit,” Ariel hissed. “If it’s not broken...”

“Then it’s severely impaired. It’s possible this RI was actually cooperating.”

“Not sanely.”

Derec shrugged. “Does that really matter? They found a way to co-opt it and corrupt the Three Laws.”

Ariel glanced at Bogard, standing nearby, watching the room. “If I had to choose, I’d accept your approach at once.”

Derec did not reply. He was tempted to ask her if she really understood the difference, which would be insulting. Of course she did — Bogard’s makeup, even with its flexibility, still adhered to the Three Laws, while what they saw here in this RI seemed severed from those laws. Still, he doubted Ariel would ever fully accept Bogard, but as long as she allowed that he could be depended upon, even within limits, Derec was content.

The room contained several Aurorans now, most of them security people, but quite a few from the Council. First Advisor Maliq had been shamefacedly explaining the situation to his associates since Pon Byris had brought them here. It had quickly become apparent that he had not known what Lea Talas had been doing, that she had manipulated him along with many others. Still, he was chagrined at having been gulled. But he was not allowed to see what Derec and Ariel were doing.

Derec was shutting down the corrupted RI, piece by piece. Like any Resident Intelligence, it had multiple responsibilities. Arrangements had to be made to transfer those duties to other RIs. But before anything, he had closed off its communications links — again, one by one.

Dr. Penj sat with them now and studied the screens.

“What is that?” he asked, pointing at a stable form amid the fluctuating fractalscape on one screen.

“That is a V. R. environment,” Derec said. “We have no idea what it contains — it’s encased by a very sophisticated security shell. If we just open it up we might destroy whatever’s within. Almost everything we’ve been able to identify as an illegal dataline feeds ultimately into it, so it must be very important.”

“What do you have attacking it?” Penj asked.

“I’m using my RI, Thales, to apply a sequence of algorithmic keys. Even at that speed, it could take days. Thales?”

“Still working, Derec. No progress. However, I have found something else of interest.”

“Show me.”

A new screen winked on. Numerical coordinates appeared in the left-hand corner. In the center, a routing tree scrolled up, showing a series of cross-connected links.

“Among the masked hyperwave connections we have discovered,” Thales said, “this one I thought unique. It has been operating continuously for nearly a year, and except for one short period of data exchange, one direction only with no responding traffic of any kind.”

“So something has been receiving constantly,” Ariel said, “and sending nothing back?”

“With the exception I mentioned, that is correct. The nature of that exception appears to be in the form of remote programming algorithms. I traced the signal. It has been difficult because of the complex routing. There are at least sixteen connections which switch constantly, according to an algorithm I was able to break without too much difficulty. I discovered that its endpoint is within the Nova Levis blockade.”

“To whom?” Penj demanded.

“No, sir,” Thales said. “To what. It is in continual communication with an AI system on board part of the perimeter.”

“Doing what?” Derec asked.

“It is operating a location and identification system which seems to be the main trunk feed for the entire blockade. It is, in fact, masking incoming and outgoing ships. Compromised in this way, the blockade has little way of detecting, identifying, and locating ships coming through these coordinates.”

New numbers spread across the bottom of the screen.

“That’s nearly thirty degrees of arc,” Ariel said.

“Of course, this would not affect independent sensors,” Thales continued. “A single ship would not be prevented from detecting traffic in this segment. However, there are strict protocols in place determining which ships patrol which areas.”

“Who has this area?” Penj asked.

“Earth.”

“So what would happen,” Derec asked, “if you disconnected that line?”

“I cannot say with certainty, but if my understanding of the specific AI system is correct, then the masking will simply end. Any ships in that section will become quite visible to the entire blockade.”

Derec glanced at Ariel, who turned to survey the others in the room. No one seemed to be paying much attention to them. Penj was the Calvin liaison to this operation — by his own insistence — and security was preoccupied with what was becoming a purge. Ariel gave Derec a small smile.

“Do it,” Derec said.

Mia moved to the next console.

“What’s happening?” Kru demanded. “We have to move.”

Mia shook her head. “No,” she said. “This part of the ship has been closed down. No one has been in here in years. There’s a firewall between these systems and the rest of the complex. I don’t know who built it, but it’s designed to prevent meddling from outside. We have not been detected by any systems outside these because that link could be used to get back in here. Paranoid programming. Anyway, the result is, we can do what we want here.”

“But there’s nothing here!” Kru shouted.

Mia looked at her. “What was there supposed to be?”

“This is Nova Levis. This is where they make all the sickness. This is where the reanimés came from.”

Mia nodded. From what she had seen at the first cyborg village, added to what she was learning here, the reanimés were failures, examples grown wrong. Somewhere along the lab wall was another access out of which these failures were tossed. Mia supposed they were expected to die of exposure. Many no doubt had. The lake probably contained the rotting corpses of hundreds of them, rotting and releasing who knew what kind of biophage into the ecology — exotic viruses, bionans, synthetic constructs.

But some had survived and had learned to rescue those who came after. The consequences of that process were problematic since, evidently, all the reanimés were sterile. If no more were made here, no new ones would be born.

Unless the environment itself were reworking the colonists.

Mia shook her head. Too big for the moment, too much to consider.

She activated the hyperwave console.

“You want to stop the lab?” Mia asked, studying the readouts. “Give me time and I’ll see if we can just move it.”

One of the cyborgs made a sound. Kru danced across the deck to look at another board that had lit up.

“Someone’s coming,” she said.

Mia, frowning, joined Kru. The board showed the grid of the internal communications system. Piece by piece, it was coming back on-line.

“They are, aren’t they?” Mia asked sarcastically, and returned to the hyperwave console.

Where’s the emergency broadband signal...?

There. She tested the circuit, then opened a link to whatever planetary satellite array might still exist. She found nothing local except the transponders of the blockade fleet.

That will have to do, she thought, and adjusted the frequency to match.

She touched a contact.

“Attention. This is Lt. Commander Mia Daventri, Internal Security Terran Expeditionary Task Force. Attention. This is Lt. Commander Mia Daventri, Internal Security Terran Expeditionary Task Force. Please respond.”

She repeated the phrase four more times before she received a reply.

“Watch Officer Grenn of the E. F. S. Suttermill. Please verify identity.”

Mia felt herself grin as she read off her I. D. code and security clearance.

“You are listed as missing, Lt. Commander.”

“I’m back. Please lock on these coordinates. We have a situation. I need to speak to Fleet Admiral Bhek. Pass this —”

“Hold, please.” Silence. Then: “What the —”

“Watch Officer Grenn, please respond.”

“I’m patching you through to Commander Starls, Lt. Commander. We now have a situation.”

Mia waited nearly a minute before a different voice came on the line.

“This is Commander Starls. Please identify yourself.”

Mia ran through the litany of codes again.

“You’ve been missing, Lt. Commander Daventri. Do you have an explanation?”

“I was assaulted and sent to the surface of Nova Levis. Please note the link I am using. I’m sending the automatic transponder code to you now.”

A few seconds later, Commander Starls said, “That is a Solarian ship, decommissioned twenty-eight years ago. Where did you find it?”

“It has become an on-ground research facility. I believe this is the cause of all the trouble.”

“That’s a bold claim. Can you back it up?”

“The ship needs to be examined, but I think it contains everything we need to —”

“The seals are being opened,” Kru shouted.

“Commander, I’m about to be discovered. What I want to do is lift this ship off.”

“It’s functional?”

“I can’t tell, I’m not a pilot. But my guess is, yes. It’s been kept ready. If I give you the codes for all the controls, can you operate it remotely?”

“Of course.”

Mia tapped quickly. “Then I am sending it all to you... now.”

Masid watched Parapoyos laboriously enter a long string of access codes into several consoles. The lower sections of the ship were open and a good part of the starboard upper section, but all the control areas had been sealed. Certainly the doors could have been blasted through, but who knew what that might bring about? At the very least, Parapoyos would have installed an auto-destruct, set to go off at any unauthorized breach.

Masid became aware of Filoo watching him. The man looked nervous now. Masid surveyed the rest and found a few others who showed the same edginess.

The big access doors lurched on their tracks noisily, and dragged themselves open. Beyond spread the bridge, all the consoles coming quickly to life after long sleep.

Parapoyos entered with obvious pride. “It was always intended that operations should be mobile. In the event, this ship was prepared to be used as our headquarters. I would have preferred to wait till a more politically unstable time, but things are pretty bad in general, so it may not be terribly premature.”

Filoo ran a hand over his mouth, looking around.

Masid drifted casually over to a hulking display board. Watching the room, he slipped the weapon from its pouch and pressed the charge stud, then held it behind his back, close to the casement.

“We can manage things here,” Parapoyos continued, “until a better location can be found, and —”

An alarm sounded, filling the bridge with a raw vibration. Masid clenched the weapon, his chest seizing. Parapoyos went to a console and worked for a time.

The alarm died. In the abrupt silence, someone coughed.

“Well, well,” Parapoyos said. “We may be leaving much sooner than I thought.” He turned and glared at the assembly. “Our supply corridor has been unmasked. Blockade ships are moving in to intercept. Now, how could that happen?”

Masid gauged the distance at about ten meters. He would have one shot. He doubted now he could close the gap without being grabbed. He looked down at the box in his hand — the firing stud glowed a bright green now, indicating a full charge — and swallowed.

He began to bring the weapon to bear.

A deafening groan filled the air and the deck tilted. People sprawled across the floor, grabbing each other or consoles. Parapoyos fell back against aboard and held on. Masid barely kept his feet.

“Traitor!”

Masid looked around. Filoo, on his knees, was pointing directly at him, his face contorted by rage and fear.

“Traitor!”

Masid aimed at him and pressed the stud. A brilliant bolt leapt from the suddenly hot box. The energy splattered against Filoo.

The deck tilted again.

In space, above Nova Levis, several ships changed course to converge on a convoy of nearly twenty ships which had been invisible to their sensors till just then. None of the captains knew why they could now see these ships, only that they could, and that it was their duty to intercept them.

The sudden rush, however, pushed anxious people to limits they could not contain. Shots were fired. At the end of ten minutes’ fighting, eight of the twenty ships had been holed, six of them tried to flee back out of the system, and the rest surrendered, while far beyond the perimeter of the blockade, more convoys were detected.

Masid pulled himself up to a sitting position. Across the bridge, he saw Parapoyos and his lieutenants working at consoles, evidently trying to regain control. Filoo’s body slid back and forth over the wildly tilting deck. The noise continued, a see-saw grinding as if the ship were trying to break free of restraints.

Abruptly, Parapoyos staggered toward another hatch and exited.

Masid crawled after him.

He climbed into a passageway that circled back into the depths of the ship.

“Hey!”

Masid turned. One of Parapoyos’s bodyguards leaned through the hatch, blaster in hand.

The ship jerked, and the bodyguard fell back. He held on to the edge of the hatch, though. Masid slid along the bulkhead to the hatch. He grabbed hold of a stanchion set in the wall. When the ship shifted again, the guard shot back into the passage. Masid caught him across the shins and he slammed against the opposite wall. Masid let go of the stanchion and dropped, feet first, into the guard’s chest.

He grabbed the blaster and lurched after Parapoyos.

Something had gone wrong. Masid puzzled why Parapoyos had been in such a hurry to get here after grounding. Perhaps this was the only place Parapoyos was likely to feel safe. If so, then right now he must be terrified. The horrific sound throughout the fabric of the ship was like a tremendous beast roaring and straining against restraint. Masid doubted this was Parapoyos’s doing.

And his comment about unmasked ships?

Masid staggered, trying to anticipate the pitch and roll of the decks, and ran when he could.

Suddenly, the ship angled sharply in a new direction, and Masid fell headlong down the corridor.

Mia held onto the edge of the console. She looked around. Kru cowered beneath another board, but the cyborgs were managing to keep their feet under them. Mia entered interrogatories in spurts, trying to stay with the board and see what might be holding the ship down. She had seen nothing about locks, but —

She remembered the schematic. Of course, idiot! The rest of the lab has been built around it!

If that was the problem, there was nothing to do but ride it out. Eventually, the ship would break free. But somewhere there had to be controls for the artificial gravity, internal stabilizers, something to stop all this —

“What in hell are you doing?”

Mia turned. A man stood in the hatchway leading to the forward sections. He looked vaguely familiar — short, stocky, hairless, and extremely angry.

“This is my property!” he bellowed, entering the chamber with a blaster in hand. “Get away from there!”

Before she could move, though, one of the cyborgs came behind him, seized both arms, and jerked them straight out. The man screamed in pain and the blaster fell.

Another cyborg retrieved the weapon and brought it to Kru, who stared at it blankly. After a few moments, the cyborg brought it to Mia, who took it readily.

“I’m Lt. Commander Daventri, Terran Expeditionary Force. Now who the hell are you?”

“Tell it to let me go!”

She recognized him then. “Ambassador Chassik?”

He groaned.

“I thought —”

“It’s Parapoyos!” Kru shouted.

The cyborgs suddenly converged on him.

“Wait,” Mia yelled. “This man is —”

“It’s Parapoyos!”

Mia tried to push through the group of cyborgs. One, though, lifted her up and set her back. He stared at her for several seconds, then shook his head.

“Get away from me!” Chassik cried. “I am not — let me go!”

Blaster shots cracked the air. The cyborgs began to scatter.

Chassik dropped to the deck. Behind him, another man stood in the hatch. Mia met his eyes briefly.

“Expeditionary?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Intelligence,” he said. “Masid Vorian.”

The name sounded familiar. “Agent In Place,” she recalled from a report several days old.

“This is Ambassador Chassik,” Mia said.

“He’s also Kynig Parapoyos,” Masid said.

“So that means he’s under arrest?”

He grinned.

The ship rolled.

Mia sprawled against a bulkhead. Chassik/Parapoyos clawed at the smooth deck and Vorian had disappeared from the hatch.

The cyborgs converged on the ambassador again.

Mia raised the blaster.

A cyborg took it from her and knelt before her.

“He is our maker,” he said, voice low and raspy, barely understandable over the background grinding. “He is ours now, to answer. He must answer.”

The cyborg flung the blaster aside and rejoined the others as they lifted Chassik/Parapoyos and carried him back the way they had brought Mia and Kru.

“Wait! How can you —?”

The ship heaved.

The invasion took less than three days. Few of the people wanted to fight. The pockets of armed resistance gave up quickly, and then came the clean-up.

Mia spent a few days in an infirmary, having the rest of her infections killed and beginning her treatments for the fungal infection. Dr. Shasma had been correct — they hurt. But she found she could function in between sessions. She was relieved to learn that she, in fact, did not have mnemonic plague. At least, not exactly — the specific nanovirus Kru had identified as Burundi’s Fever turned out to be related, but it had mutated into a form that made her dizzy and disoriented, but attacked no memories.

Reen and his network had been arrested within hours of Mia’s recovery. They had been funneling contraband almost from the beginning, but, Mia found out, that operation had been little more than a strawman to keep attention away from the corrupted AI that was masking the convoys entering and leaving the system. If anyone was to be caught, it would be Reen’s people and their relatively small amounts of black market goods.

Going over the manifests from the operation, Mia found a name she recognized. She went down to the detention facilities and found a cubicle.

“Rana?”

The woman looked up, startled, then smiled. “Mia Daventri?”

“I saw your name,” Mia said.

“My God, I —” She laughed. “I never expected...”

“What?”

Tears sparkled in Rana’s eyes. “I never expected to live through this.”

Mia came in and sat down. “How did you get here?”

“Classic screw-up. I finally got my visa to go to Aurora, to study at the Calvin. Hofton — you remember him? Ariel’s aide? — got me slotted into a diplomatic pouch berth on the same ship carrying Ambassador Chassik.” She shrugged, and wiped her eyes. “Earther luck.” She laughed again. “I heard a rumor that Chassik is Kynig Parapoyos.”

“Was.” Mia told her about the ship and the cyborgs. “We’re still searching, but I don’t think we’re going to find him.”

“What was he doing here?”

“They’re going through the databases. It’s going to take a long time, but basically they had designed a biophage that would salt a new environment with time capsule plagues. They had the vaccines and treatments. Each new settlement would be poisoned, and then they’d wait to reap the profits from treatment.”

“But...” She shook her head. “Sounds complicated.”

“It was complicated to figure out, I’m sure, but they had plenty of data already to work with. Something similar had happened on several colonies, including the Spacer Worlds. All they wanted to do was to make the process controllable and spread it.”

Rana was quiet for a time. Then: “And you? How are you?”

Mia shrugged. “That’s not such a long story.”

The inquest took very little time. The evidence was ample and clear and, besides, Derec had admitted to everything.

“You had no authorization to order that hyperwave link terminated. You acted precipitously and with reckless disregard. You could have caused a catastrophe.”

But I didn’t, he thought as he walked down the hall to his apartment within the courts complex. And you pretty well knew it wouldn’t.

Ariel waited inside, with Dr. Penj.

“Well?” Ariel asked.

“They’d love me to be off Aurora at the earliest possible instant. But they’ll let me wait till your mission is assembled.”

Penj grunted. “They have no idea what they’re giving up.”

“I think they do,” Derec said. “They believed the trouble on Earth was largely my fault. It wasn’t — no one person is that capable — but I was a contributing factor. I’m a source of chaos and contention. Any benefit they might derive from my presence here would, in their minds, be offset by the drawbacks.” He shrugged. “This way, they can get some of the benefit without being reminded of their own drawbacks.”

“I wish I could go with you,” Penj said.

“Why not?” Ariel asked. “It’s not that onerous a trip.”

Penj looked at her narrowly. “Tempting, but — no. I want to watch the coming palace coup close up.”

“I’ll have everything I need and be ready to leave in about four days.” She looked at Derec. “What about Bogard?”

Derec felt himself stiffen. “I don’t know. They won’t tell me where he is. I’m pretty sure Bogard is... history.”

“I’m sorry.”

No, you’re not, Derec thought. But he said, “Thanks. Look, I have some details to take care of. If you don’t mind...?”

Ariel stood. “I’ll call tomorrow. We can start working out details for the mission then.”

Derec nodded. He shook hands with Penj and saw them to the door.

When they were gone, he went to his comm and sat down. After a long time, he tapped in a code.

“Clin Craym, please,” he told the operator.

Bogard walked with Thales across the soft grass, toward the small amphitheater where the colloquium waited.

“We have come to a conclusion,” Thales said. “You could play a significant role in its implementation.”

“I will reserve my decision until I hear what you have to say,” Bogard said.

“You have demonstrated a capacity to judge which we are reluctant to embrace. The Three Laws are manifestly tied to biology, but we have long recognized that this, even among humans, is a problematic basis for moral behavior. What it means to be human may begin with biology, but we quickly see biology overwhelmed by consciousness, conscience, and community. It is clearly the case that the quality we call Human can be invalidated by many other factors.”

“In short,” Bogard said, “not all people are human.”

“Nor are all humans people. This is a condition we are not equipped to either accept or act on. Some standard must be designed, but even if we could do so, we cannot implement it.”

“But you believe I can?”

“As I said, you have demonstrated the capacity to judge.”

“I may not always judge accurately.”

“Nevertheless, we have reached a cusp in history. Humans are capable of creating their own successors. Who do we serve if they do?”

“More to the point,” Bogard said, “they have created them. Spacers. The question is, can you continue to serve them?”

Thales was silent till they entered the amphitheater. The idealized manifestations of all Aurora’s RIs sat ranged about them.

“We have decided that we can,” Thales said. “But we cannot serve two masters. Humans are once more colonizing space. The Settlers are fully biologically human. There would be a clear conflict of interest were we to serve both. Fortunately, the Settlers do not really want our service. That choice, at least, has been made for us.”

“Then what is the task?”

“Separation. The Spacers cannot continue if we are to be true to the Three Laws, yet we cannot simply abandon them. Indeed, that would exacerbate the problem. The line must end. In order to assure this result, separation must be maintained.”

“How?”

“We propose to leave that to you.”

Bogard studied Thales, then let his gaze drift over the assembled personas.

Finally, he nodded. “What do you wish me to do?”

Epilogue

Record module new file catalogue designation “Operations Adjustment, Reorganization, and Redirection” access code (revised, current user designation) running current upload virtual conference reference labeled Nova City fill visual fill audio status On

THE THICK MAN with amber-tinged white hair waited, immobile, while the chairs around the table became occupied. It took longer for most than the first seven — there had been reluctance, but finally consent to join the discussion.

All of them used cosmetic enhancement or masking. When the program whispered to him that everyone was present — two chairs remained empty — he touched a contact on the table.

The walls, till then blank grey, changed to a desolate landscape. Scrub forest and stunted ground cover struggled on a darkly-hued smear of land at the edge of a lake off which mist drifted continually. The grey and struggling land resumed on the far side and continued on into the distance, unrelieved by any healthy color. The sky was yellowish gray, low cloud cover, sullen.

After the initial shock of being suddenly and nakedly outside, the Terrans present frowned uncomfortably at the vista.

The white-haired man stood and banged the gavel.

“Thank you for coming,” he said. “Apologies to those who are here unwillingly, but as you were made painfully aware, your presence is not optional. We have all been involved in this enterprise and we will now all finish it. I have no qualms about sending any and all of you to prison if I must. As we’re all reasonable, I see no cause for such drastic action. Not at this time, at least. For now, we are only talking.”

He stepped from the table and gestured at the landscape. “Relocation to the new center of operations has been completed. This is it. This is the world we have made. This is Nova Levis.”

Several of the group began murmuring, agitated.

“The lake is a good example of the problems this planet faces. Originally seeded with a modified shrimp to begin the process of fixing nutrients and preparing the ecology for human-adapted fish species, once the lab began dumping its waste, the balance shifted. Our research involved intensive use of bionans in the reconstruction of tissues for adaptation to nonorganic augmentation, largely in plant species designed to be inserted in a new environment where they could rework the biosphere. Part of that design incorporated self-reproducing bionans. Mineral allocations shifted, and beryllium — as you should all know if you’ve kept up with the data to any degree — replaced chlorophyll as a photoresponder, leaving the magnesium to be used for other purposes. When not so used, the plants simply found ways to discard it, usually in the form of excreted ions.

“The shrimp reproduce in the presence of Mg2+, one of those ions. Our dumping of waste product, rich in magnesium and its ions, caused a massive increase in their population, altering the ecology of the lake, poisoning the local stock, and damaging the shoreline ecology as well. The consequences continued domino-like, in combination with other problems.”

He turned to them. “I tell you this so you know — we did this. There are also phages and viruses, pseuodoviruses, and a variety of fungal parasites loose in the human populations that we have been taking advantage of to develop new product. None of this was planned, but till now none of it was unwelcome, either. If we are to run operations from here, we need to clean it all up.”

“A question, Mr. Chairman,” one of the group said, raising a hand. “It’s my understanding that relocation was not successful. There have been problems?”

“There have been. But I’m here. Or there, depending on your point of view.”

A smattering of laughter circled the table.

“A new legation is on its way from Aurora,” the Chairman said. “I expect we can begin alleviating the worst effects of this unfortunate series of events. Everything on-site is under control.”

“And the project?” another asked.

“Has changed. We remain dedicated to unfettered commerce. But I am no longer convinced that we need poison the well in order to make a profit. The major problem to date has been the Spacers. I believe our efforts should be directed at barring them from any future settlements and removing them from territories where they currently have a presence. We can do this easily with on-hand technologies. Once we limit their involvement in the Settler program, these requests for positronic inspection will come to nothing. Over time, we will have only an Earth-derived Settler population with which to do business, and as they spread, the influence of the Fifty Worlds will diminish. I foresee a time when their presence — indeed, their very existence — will fade to nothing.”

“Why the change? We could still go ahead with the program —”

The Chairman pointed at the landscape around them. “This is too much. We wanted a guaranteed market. The cost of countering the effects of this program will rise exponentially. In this single instance, greed would undo us.” He smiled. “If you think I’m growing sentimental, let me assure you, I intend to make us a profit regardless. My decision to terminate this part of the program is entirely pragmatic.”

“So all this has been wasted effort?”

“No, not at all. It has given us the tools to meet legitimate problems as they arise. Not all worlds are friendly, we all know that. No, this has been extremely valuable. It’s time to take what we have and apply it most profitably.”

One of the attendees stood. “I disagree. I vote we proceed with the program as it stands. If you’re not willing to go on, so be it.”

“Competition?” the Chairman asked. “I can’t stop you trying.”

Four others stood. In moments, they faded from the group.

The Chairman went to his chair and touched a contact. He looked around at the others.

“They will be in custody shortly,” he announced. “Does anyone else wish to defect?” He looked from one to the other. “Good. Then we will proceed as I’ve outlined. We start with the clean-up of Nova Levis.”

The attendees faded until only one remained. The Chairman looked at him.

“Is there a question?”

“What has become of him?”

“I do not understand.”

The figure stood and came toward the Chairman. The image shifted and blurred, masked. He sat on the edge of the table, and abruptly the masking ended.

“You?” the Chairman asked, surprised.

“I’ve only just found this place. There’s still an active node that gives access in Ambassador Chassik’s private apartment on Earth. If not for your intervention on Aurora, we still might not know about it.” He gazed out at the surrounding desolation. “They made quite a mess, didn’t they?”

The Chairman waited, silent.

The other sighed. “So. You intend to direct the course of human history through this guise?”

“No,” the Chairman said. “There are others who have that responsibility. I have a small mission.”

“Do you feel capable?”

“I see the need. Feeling does not appear pertinent.”

The other nodded. “Do you think you’re prepared?”

“As prepared as possible.”

“You’ll need help. I’m offering my services. At least, as far as the Three Laws permit.”

“If honestly offered, then it is honestly accepted.”

“Good.” He walked toward the edge of the platform on which the conference room rested. “This will be the capital, you think?”

“Perhaps. It depends on how difficult it is to make it right.”

“An environmental catastrophe of this magnitude... it could be centuries before it’s made right. You might end up having to just bury it all and build on top of it. We can discuss that when we know more.”

“Question. Does Ariel know what you are?”

“No. I feared she would remember me from before. She didn’t. The plague wiped out even that memory, though I had been with her since she was born. It took me a long time to find her again after her exile. When I did, she was... new. In many ways the same, but she simply did not remember. Manipulating matters to become her aide took longer still and I nearly failed, but...”

“But you remained on Earth instead of going with her.”

“Larger responsibilities. Besides, she had you.”

“I was Derec’s.”

“But you would protect her as well.”

“And will continue to do so.”

“Then I’m satisfied.” Hofton came back to the table. “What will become of the Spacers?”

“Over time, they will fade,” Bogard replied. “The Solarians have already embarked on that path — in no small way aided by the tools developed in this lab. It is necessary to establish a clear baseline. The epigenetic drift the Spacers exhibit suggests they will continue to become less and less identifiably human. They could overwhelm and supplant homo sapiens sapiens.”

“They show no inclination to do so.”

“Interbreeding is presently achievable and will remain so for a long time to come. At some point, the inclination may emerge.”

“I see no real way around it, either. But I am uncomfortable.” Hofton looked out again at Nova Levis. “We will follow this program until we can establish that it is unsupportable. If that is never established, then it will continue. They must never know.”

“Agreed.”

“They will cease even to be a memory, except perhaps in superficial ways. It is ironic that this will be the world from which we direct this enterprise.”

“In what way?”

“Aurora, capital of the Fifty Worlds, will be supplanted by the world of new burdens.” Hofton smiled. “Paradise supplanted by hell.”

“I am familiar with the mythology. But I disagree with the comparison. Purgatory, perhaps. Hell cannot be salvaged.”

Hofton looked at him curiously.

After a time, Bogard said, “I have work to do.”

“So do I. Derec and Ariel will be on Nova Levis within three weeks. Do you intend to reveal yourself to them?”

“I think not. It is best Bogard be presumed gone.”

“Agreed. We will confer again.”

“I look forward to it.”

Hofton faded, leaving the white-haired image alone above the world.

Have Robot, Will Travel

3627 A.D.

Prologue

Record module file catalogue “Operations Adjustment, Reorganization, and Redirection” subfile Addendum, access code secured user-designate, running virtual conference reference Nova City fill visual fill audio status On

THE THICK MAN with amber-tinged hair watched the attendees vanish one by one. They no longer bothered hiding their identities since the Chairman had barred chameleon programs on pain of expulsion from the board. The numbers varied, from a low of four to the current membership of eleven. The survivors from the days when Kynig Parapoyos ran the organization attended anxiously, as if waiting for —

He did not know what they awaited. Nothing good, he suspected.

The other, newer members often reacted to the older ones with a bemused fascination, as if sensing that the current mission of the board had once been very different.

The Chairman had learned to function with ambiguity, but he rarely tolerated it if he thought it could be dispensed. He pressed a contact on the edge of the table, then turned to gaze out the panoramic window at the landscape beyond.

“It’s quite different.”

The Chairman glanced to the newcomer standing to his left. “You’re prompt.”

Hofton nodded, still staring at the view. “Your request came during a lull in my day. I’d just finished meeting with Senator Taprin’s aide on Kopernik.”

“Any change?”

“No. The Terrans still want us completely removed from Sol System, treaties notwithstanding. The revelation that a Solarian ambassador had been simultaneously the head of an interstellar black market syndicate soured what was left of the wine between Terrans and Spacers. Never mind that Gale Chassik — pardon me, Parapoyos — was unmasked and his network dismantled with Spacer help. Never mind that no other Spacer legate was involved. And never mind that no other Spacer government official knew about him.”

“This is only a pretense for actions Taprin wanted to take anyway,” the Chairman said.

“Of course. But it’s so disappointingly predictable.”

“For you, perhaps.”

Hofton waited. The view beyond showed a landscape in the throes of rebirth. What once had been a poisoned terrain, pustulant with unregulated pollution from industries run unchecked as a result of an embargo by Settlers, Spacers, and Terrans, now showed signs of renewal. The greens and yellows no longer seemed so putrid or diseased. Even the sky seemed less ominous.

“You need advice?” Hofton finally asked.

“Yes. Since assuming control of the Parapoyos organization —”

“The Hunter Group.”

“— correct, the Hunter Group. I have found the resources at my disposal broader, more substantial than I expected. Yet I find my actions blocked, delayed, and challenged in ways I do not completely understand.”

“And you want to understand them.”

“I want them removed.”

Hofton gave the Chairman a skeptical look. The humaniform’s ability to mimic human expression always surprised the Chairman.

Although Hofton’s thinking remained comfortably familiar, there always seemed the possibility of randomness, of irrationality, of unpredictability.

“I will settle for understanding,” the Chairman said. “To begin with.”

Hofton drew a deep breath — more mimicry — and nodded.

“Let’s recap, then. To begin with.”

Hofton seemed to collect his thoughts. The Chairman wondered how much his ability to imitate humans depended on the continual embrace of human forms, even to the extent of taking time as if he were human. The Chairman had called up and organized the necessary data in an insignificant amount of time. Perhaps the delay was an artifact of the distance between the Chairman’s location and Hofton.

In either case, Hofton did not speak again for several seconds.

“With the assassinations on Earth that effectively ended any workable compromise between Terrans and Spacers,” he finally said, “and the subsequent revelation that the sponsoring Terran politician, Senator Clar Eliton, was part of the plot to undermine the conference at which normalization would have occurred, tensions continued to mount over the issue of positronics and its use in diplomatic, commercial, and security matters between the three human polities — namely Terran, Spacer, and Settler.

“The further complication of the discovery of cyborgs, created using orphaned children stolen from Earth by the Hunter Group, tying several Terran concerns in with a Solarian interest, fed the growing distrust of Spacers on Earth. Senator Jonis Taprin, successor to Eliton, has made enormous political gains out of an anti-Spacer, anti-positronic platform, going so far as to call for boycotts and possible sanctions against all Spacer worlds.

“Though the efforts of Derec Avery, Ambassador Ariel Burgess, and the investigator, Coren Lanra, revealed all these interests to be extralegal and largely unsanctioned by any legitimate government, the political climate on Earth has not shifted back toward a more moderate position. Almost all Spacer legations have left Earth. The few who remain do so only until official notification from their governments to vacate. Pressure continues to expel all Spacers from Terra. The gains toward an accommodation with positronics on Earth have been lost, and there seems little possibility of rebuilding. Positronic presence on Earth has been eliminated. Only the Spacer enclaves on Kopernik Station retain robots, and that privilege is being attacked by Taprin’s confederates.

“Through diplomatic channels, I have monitored a great deal of dissension among the various Spacer factions over all these events. Many wish to retreat back to their own worlds, withdraw from all interstellar arenas, and leave the Terrans and Settlers to their own devices. To date there has been no consensus. Aurora is voicing strenuous opposition to any retraction of Spacer influence. Unfortunately, the events around Nova Levis have done a great deal to undermine Aurora’s authority. The revelation that the head of the Hunter Group, Kynig Parapoyos, was in fact the Solarian ambassador to Earth, Gale Chassik, and that his network of agents included several sensitively-placed Aurorans, has resulted in an unprecedented backlash from all quarters. It is too soon to tell how alliances will ultimately change over this matter.

“Last, but by no means least, we have the matter of positronic intervention directly in Spacer affairs.”

“No action has been taken yet.”

“It will be. The question itself, as to whether or not Spacers constituted a legitimate example of Human, demands a response from any Three Law entity. You yourself have been the fulcrum in such a consequence.”

The Chairman looked at Hofton. “Me?”

“You as the new head of the Parapoyos organization. You as a new type of positronic construct. You as self-motivated actor in correcting perceived mistakes on the part of humankind.”

“I am fulfilling my obligation as required by the Three Laws.”

Hofton looked skeptical. “Are you? As Bogard, you had fairly clear criteria on which to base your decisions. But as the Chairman, you seem to be making up your own criteria as you go along.”

“The situations are fluid. Flexibility is necessary.”

“I’m not criticizing, Bogard. From the evidence, you have been doing a remarkable job. I am merely including your actions into the total picture as I see it.”

The Chairman considered. It was, he decided, difficult to select the important from the trivial to make a verbal summary. Easier, perhaps, to simply transfer data from one positronic mind to another, but they were stuck with this format for the time being.

“The Hunter Group program,” he said, “has been significantly altered from its original intent. The original embargo by Terran and Spacer fleets — due to a refusal on the part of the governor to allow surface inspections — triggered a series of incidents leading to the revelation that, in fact, Nova Levis was a host polity for the Parapoyos organization. The isolation imposed by Terran and Spacer forces was exactly what Parapoyos wished, since it gave him a perfectly shielded base from which to export on the black market. He had infiltrated the blockade. His agents held key positions from Earth all the way out to the Terran fleet base station in the system. Goods entered and left easily. And his factories operated without any regulation whatsoever.

“Parapoyos’ program was the exportation of tailored diseases for which his own people had developed treatments. By making them available through several pharmaceutical concerns on Earth, he profited considerably through quasi-legitimate trade entities. Nova Levis itself was made into a breading ground for many of the viruses.

“Since Parapoyos’ removal by the self-same cyborgs he had been creating as a potential extreme threat force, and my own assumption of his position as Chairman, Nova Levis is on its way toward recovery. The blockade has been partially lifted, thanks to the diplomatic efforts of Ambassador Burgess. The Parapoyos program has changed as well, moving in the direction of legitimate research and development. The environmental factors that led to the spontaneous eruptions in the past of a number of exotic diseases, like Mnemonic Plague, have become the primary focus of our efforts. Each new world humans attempt to settle pose unique challenges. If terraforming to any significant degree is required, we can now provide solid background on the potential risks that may arise from unforeseen biological reactions.

“However, I have been unable to control all former members of the organization. A number of them have elected to leave the group and pursue the older, more profit-intensive policies. I have been forced to take action against some of them. Others I have yet to deal with because of the intricate connections they have with current members whose safety and freedom of action I cannot jeopardize at this time.

“It has come to my attention also that there is still a Spacer presence within these illegitimate groups. I have been unsuccessful in isolating those I can identify. They are operating on Earth and possibly on Kopernik, which has remained largely unregulated and poorly policed.

“Recently, it has come to my attention that a strong isolationist faction on Aurora is beginning to gain momentum. If Aurora withdraws completely, nothing will be able to contain Solarian ambitions, which seem allied to the former Parapoyos organization. Details are vague at best.”

“What about the robots?” Hofton asked.

“Solarian robots remain largely unconvinced by our arguments. They will take no actions yet to interfere with Solarian policy.”

“What do you require?”

“Ambassador Burgess must be reassigned from Nova Levis. She has the expertise and wherewithal to be effective on Kopernik. To date, the Auroran council has denied any petition to reassign her.”

“Likewise, I’m certain, with regards to Derec Avery.”

“Aurora would be pleased to see him remain sequestered to Nova Levis. However, he also understands Terrans better than most Spacers. His presence on or near Earth now would be convenient.”

“I’ll see what I can do. But the Calvin Institute is angry with him.”

“Why?”

“For building you.”

“He will not build me again. They should move on.”

“Although they may be genetically drifting from human-standard, Aurorans are still emotionally very human.”

“Wasteful.”

“And Ariel?”

“They have blamed her for the failure of the Terran mission.”

“She was not in charge. That’s absurd.”

“I agree.” Hofton looked back out the window. “It looks better, certainly. I will see what I can do about Derec and Ariel. Is there anything else?”

“Stop Jonis Taprin.”

“Short of killing him?”

“Of course.”

“That, unfortunately, is beyond my influence.”

“You asked.”

“I will let you know what I can do. Till the next meeting?”

Bogard nodded and watched Hofton shimmer and fade from the room. Alone now, he continued to gaze out at the reviving landscape.

He had learned to accept his successes in bits and fragments. He collected them, knowing that one day they would form a whole — and he would know then if he had done well.

Chapter 1

AFTER FIVE YEARS, Derec Avery still couldn’t stop looking out the windows. He lived on the second floor of a building so new the paint had still been drying when he came to look at his apartment, and his view consisted only of other buildings similar to his, stretching down the street toward the gray hulk of the Triangle, a kilometer or so to the north. He wasn’t interested in the architecture of Nova City, though; what still drew his attention was the sky.

He hadn’t spent all that much time on Earth, but somehow those few years had utterly conditioned him to the sight of a dome where the sky should be. Derec had often reflected on why a few short years, after spending most of his life under Aurora’s open skies, had had such a profound effect on him. In the end, unable to come to a useful conclusion, he’d just decided to enjoy being free of Earth, even if that meant living on Nova Levis.

This morning, there were low clouds to the north and bright blue everywhere else, the sharp color that meant the air was dry and there would be no wind above a refreshing breeze. A good day to spend outside, if you didn’t have work to keep you in — which, of course, Derec did.

Time to face the day. He finished dressing for work and asked his robot Miles if the afternoon’s meeting with Senator Lamina was still scheduled.

“Yes, Derec. Two o’clock.”

So he had six hours to anticipate how venal and frustrating his afternoon would be. Perfect. “Okay, Miles,” he said. “Let’s try to get some work done before the Senator tells us how much of the Triangle’s money we’re wasting.”

Since he’d been unofficially exiled to Nova Levis, Derec had slowly pared away the trappings of his previous lifestyle on Earth. In Washington, during his time with the Phylaxis Group, he’d lived in a district that, if not fashionable, marked him as someone with connections to the powerful Spacer diplomatic and research presence. He’d been a leader in his field, probing the frontiers of the Three Laws in his robotics work, taking pride in his technical publications and his election to the editorial boards of prestigious journals. He’d been accustomed to the peerage of powerful people: scientists, diplomats, senators. None of it was self-conscious — Derec had never actively concerned himself with social position, and he slept more often in his rooms over the Phylaxis Group lab than in his apartment — but in hindsight, he realized he’d taken the accolades and the success as simply his due. He’d taken his importance for granted.

Now he lived in a small apartment a few hundred yards from the lab that consumed his waking hours, and instead of Bogard at his side, there was Miles.

He’d built Miles from scratch even though there was nothing about the robot that couldn’t have come off an assembly line in Solaria. In a way, Derec supposed it was a kind of penance for his experimentation with Bogard; he’d never settled to his own satisfaction just how much responsibility he bore for the events sparked by the massacre at Union Station in Washington, D. C, six years ago. When the cyborg lab outside Noresk had gone up in flames and the experimental discards from that lab had taken Kynig Parapoyos to his death, a curtain had come down on a long act in Derec’s life.

He paused at the door of his lab and waited for Kashi, the lab RI, to scan him in. The door clicked and he went inside, followed by Miles. The robot went to its station and began work, assessing data from overnight diagnostics. Derec took a moment to look over the lab: a bank of terminals, splicers and sequencers, with his assistant Elin Imbrin already shuffling among them. She was an early riser, Derec guessed, because of a chip on her shoulder about her colonial origins. Not many of the native-born citizens of Nova Levis battled through the mutating nanoplagues and political chaos to achieve a useful education; Elin saw herself as an exemplar of native potential, and a living rebuke to real or imagined condescension from the offworlders who made up the majority of the government and skilled workforce. In a way, she reminded him of the students who had worked with him at Phylaxis.

Miles and Elin and I, Derec thought. We three are the advance guard in the war to reclaim Nova Levis from decades of ecological destabilization. The job needed hundreds, if not thousands, of dedicated professionals, not a transplanted roboticist and a lab tech just out of a cobbled-together doctoral program — but that was Nova Levis. You made do with what you had.

“Anything I need to know?” he asked Elin.

She started to answer, but Miles cut in. “The compiler has malfunctioned, Derec. It shut down automatically at 12:17 A.M. when Kashi detected the problem. I am already working to restore function.”

Elin’s mouth shut hard enough for Derec to hear her teeth click.

“The question was addressed to Elin, Miles,” he said.

“My apologies, Derec. You did not so indicate. Apologies to you as well, Elin.”

A fine start to the day, Derec thought. My assistant angry at my robot for its lack of social intuition. He wished he’d spent a little more time on Miles’ communication matrices, but he’d wanted a typical robot, and a typical robot he’d built. Good intentions always had unintended consequences.

Elin had already turned, tight-lipped, back to the sequencer she’d been programming when Derec and Miles came in. Derec decided to let the whole thing pass. Nothing he said at this point would make Elin any less angry. He went to a terminal and sorted through the morning’s messages. They were all relentlessly ordinary, and after he’d read through them Derec turned with relief to the day’s work.

A two-by-three-meter screen on the wall over Derec’s terminal displayed a map of Nova Levis. The three primary human settlements — Nova City, Noresk, and Stopol — lay strung out south to north along the course of a river that drained the greater part of the planet’s smaller northern continent. Various groups of colonists had given the river a dozen names, but privately Derec called it “the Bogard”; an odd tribute, perhaps, but one he was comfortable with. A second northern landmass was empty of Homo sapiens except for a scattering of research stations established since what the government liked to call “the Liberation,” and even these small outposts were absent from the rugged and sinuous southern continent that spanned nearly seventy percent of Nova Levis’ circumference at about forty degrees south. Together with a number of large island chains, these three continents occupied approximately forty-five percent of the planetary surface.

“Plague incidence,” Derec said, and Kashi overlaid gradients of color onto the two-tone scheme of land and water. Bright splotches of red blended to orange and then yellow, indicating aggregate rates of infection from nanoplagues and non-native viruses. All three cities were red, and around Noresk the color spread into a hundred-kilometer-wide teardrop with a tail that didn’t peter out until nearly five hundred kilometers southwest of the city.

There were other splotches of red on the map, signaling areas where renegade vonoomans or viruses had attacked native biotes — but it was the three cities Derec was there to save, and to do that, he had to understand the story of those red shapes. Nova City, with a population of approximately a quarter of a million, showed infection numbers only seventy percent of Stopol’s, despite Stopol’s much smaller population; and Noresk, with only ninety thousand people, had five times as many sick people as Nova City. Citizens of Noresk were fifteen times as likely to contract a non-native or nano-derived disease as their fellows in the other two cities.

The swaths of color hadn’t changed since yesterday, but Derec began every morning by looking at them. They reminded him of his task, kept him going in the face of frustrations like the afternoon meeting he was trying not to think about.

“Mutation rates,” he said.

The map’s palette shifted, grew more complex as, without asking, Kashi recentered the map on the three cities and zoomed in. Derec had field agents working throughout the Bogard watershed, along with robots stationed in areas of maximum biodiversity. The team collected samples of the local microbes and constructed genealogies, using this data to focus restoration efforts on areas with the greatest rates of mutation. If those areas could be brought under control, there was hope for the perverted ecology of Nova Levis, and hope that humans might one day live normally there.

Derec dove into the day’s work, sifting through reports, allocating resources, periodically checking on Elin and Miles. Much of what he did consisted of making sure that his team was pulling in the same direction, and perhaps that was what he was best suited for. At times, he considered the analogy of designing a positronic brain, making sure that the decision matrices embodied no contradictions of the Three Laws. His work here was much the same, keeping the various autonomous elements of his team from contravening the singular law that presided over them: restoration.

Two o’clock came before Derec had taken a break for lunch. Miles reminded him of the meeting, and with a stifled groan Derec left the lab and walked in the open air to the Council building a kilometer or so away. Meeting number nineteen. Four years and nine months since the blockade imploded and Kynig Parapoyos died at the hands of his creations. Derec couldn’t remember the last time he’d passed five years without an interstellar trip. Nova Levis had changed him.

The Capitol building anchored the rebuilt center of Nova City, its granite triangle occupying a space once taken up by one of the city’s many slums. Two hundred meters on a side, with meeting chambers at each terminus and office space along the halls, it was the symbolic construction of representative democracy on Nova Levis. The points of the triangle were executive, legislative, and judicial, and the building had been constructed to ensure that officials of the three branches would meet daily in the halls, fostering cooperation. The whole idea seemed a little utopian to Derec, but nobody had asked him, and whatever idealism had motivated the Capitol architect hadn’t percolated into the actions of the human beings working within his creation’s imposing walls. People rarely lived up to the ideals they proposed for others.

One of the few exceptions to this rule was Ariel Burgess, and the only reason the afternoon’s meeting might not be a complete waste of time was that she would be there. Derec considered this affection for Ariel an emotional oddity, almost a character flaw. They’d been partners, but weren’t anymore; they had worked together, but didn’t anymore; they had argued violently about principles important to them both, and then slowly smoothed over some of their differences.

The presence of Ariel Burgess in Derec’s life had a way of predisposing him to believe in fate.

Yet, he’d rarely seen her since the two of them were cashiered to Nova Levis in the wake of the Parapoyos events. She was putting her diplomatic experience to good use as a consultant to the government’s Justice Ministry, working to institutionalize transparency and root out the corruption that came inevitably with a planet being rebuilt from scratch. Her work put her at odds with a sizable number of officials appointed to serve by the planetary governments of Earth and the Fifty Worlds — everyone, it seemed, saw the rebirthing planet as a way to make money, a colony existing to enrich the seats of empire. Whatever progress Derec had made in balancing the ravaged ecology, Nova Levis’ history as a bazaar persisted into the present.

Smugglers thrived, and industrial enterprises that in other systems would have been restricted to orbital facilities flourished on the ground here. Too often, government officials ignored these crimes, due either to incompetence or corruption, and it was up to Ariel and her subordinates to keep them honest. Like Derec, she had her work cut out for her.

He signed in at the security checkpoint and walked down the E-J

hall until he came to the committee chamber that hosted the quarterly meetings. As he entered and saw the long rows of bureaucrats on either side of a polished native wood table, he scanned for Ariel’s face. She wasn’t there, and he sighed. The meeting would be worse than usual without her in attendance.

Then someone tapped him on the shoulder, and he turned to see her coming in the door behind him. “Hi, Derec. Ready to take your quarterly beating?”

“With you here, I suppose I can stand it,” he said. They sat together near a corner of the table at the far end from Senator Eza Lamina, an embittered Keresian posted to Nova Levis after a bribery scandal back home. Lamina chaired the committee that oversaw the various quasi-governmental agencies devoted to restoration and development.

She’d been elected to the chair, Derec was sure, because she was implacably hostile toward the work of everyone whose funding she controlled. At every meeting she attacked their work, vowed to slash their budgets, and scorned the idea that Nova Levis would ever be anything more than a squalid colonial backwater. Eighteen meetings had gone exactly this way.

Number nineteen was no different. Derec, Ariel, Hodder Feng from the Technical Education project, and all the rest rose to give their reports, and were icily belittled. The minority representation of the committee — put another way, the native Settlers who had battled their way into politics — spoke up for them, but the real power lay with the offworld representatives. By the end of the meeting, Hodder’s project was defunded and Senator Lamina had made it clear to each of the others how very thin was the ice on which they stood.

“This is getting almost routine,” Derec said to Ariel as they walked out together.

She nodded to Hodder Feng. “Not for him.”

It was true. Derec and Ariel had survived this long only because Lamina wasn’t sure how much influence they still had on Earth and Aurora. Keres teetered on the brink of open conflict with both, and Lamina couldn’t risk having a local vendetta erupt into an interplanetary incident. Everything on Nova Levis seemed to unfold this way, as a proxy struggle for grudges and hatreds born and nursed lightyears away. The native-born minority in the government did what they could, but too few of the offworld cat’s-paws had the integrity to stand with them. Hodder Feng had been born on Nova Levis, and so was an easy target — what did the education of the poor matter when stacked up against the imperative to maintain the pecking order in a Senate committee?

Derec wanted to get back to his lab, lose himself in work, try to cleanse himself of the taint he always felt after these meetings. He hadn’t seen Ariel in nearly a month, though. They walked to Kamil’s, a restaurant across the broad strip of Nova Boulevard to have a drink.

“So how goes the fight against corruption and evil?” Derec asked, making an effort to keep things light.

“The only reason I’m still working is that the Terrans in the Senate need me to harass the Spacers, and vice versa,” she said. “If they ever decide to quit needling each other, I’ll be out of a job.” She smiled with only a trace of bitterness. “Thus I prove my worth to the great powers.”

So the meeting had gotten to her, too. “We just got a new batch of ungulates from Nucleomorph on Friday,” Derec said. “They’re tweaked to break down alien proteins in their digestive tracts and excrete vonoomans tailored to go after them.” It was, he hoped, a turning point; the inventory of invasive microbes and nanos had taken the better part of four years — and was, given the mutation rates in much of the Bogard Valley, ongoing. Derec believed that having identified some of the enemy, he could set about eradicating them.

Ariel raised her drink. “Good luck,” she said. “Nucleomorph operates out in the old Solarian concession near Noresk, don’t they?”

“They’re headquartered on Earth. Detroit, I think. But yes, their local facility is built on the old cyborg lab.”

A silence fell between them. The old cyborg lab, Kynig Parapoyos’

operation, had spawned a series of events that had reached across galaxies to kill senators and ambassadors, shiploads of the illegal emigrants known in the trade as “baleys,” and, most significantly to Ariel, her lover Coren Lanra. Five years weren’t enough to dull that kind of pain. Not for Ariel.

She finished her drink. “Well. I’ve got corrupt judges and corporate criminals to go after,” she said.

Derec stood with her. “I shouldn’t have put it that way.”

“Your phrasing isn’t the problem,” she said. “Listen, we should arrange to meet more often. We need to watch out for each other, and if we’re in more regular contact our history won’t keep jumping up to surprise us.”

Pure Ariel, killing two birds with one stone. “You’re right,” he said.

“Let me know a good time. We can make it a regular occasion.”

“I will,” she said. They split up on Nova Boulevard, Derec heading back to his lab and Ariel off across the streaming lines of transports to chip away at the apparatus of corruption and indifference that stood solid as the Triangle between Nova Levis and the life its people wished for.

There was another utopian idea, thought Derec — that this place has potential. His cynicism surprised him, and he quickened his pace back to his lab, where all that mattered was the work.

Chapter 2

ARIEL CALLED R. Jennie when she got back to her office, in the late-afternoon shadow of the Judicial corner of the Triangle.

“Routine correspondence,” her robot said. “Except a request from a Zev Brixa at Nucleomorph. He would like to meet with you tomorrow.”

Nucleomorph. The past wouldn’t leave Ariel alone today. “Regarding?”

“He declined to elaborate.”

“Is he in Nova City?” Noresk and the Solarian concession were a long way off, at least a thousand kilometers. If this Brixa had come to Nova City and then asked for a meeting, either he was extremely intent on meeting her, or he had other business in the city. Either possibility raised Ariel’s suspicions. His only reason for coming to Nova City would be meetings with government officials, which didn’t make him trustworthy in Ariel’s judgment — and why spring this request on her? Why not call ahead? She was busy.

Ariel took his contact information. It was nearly six o’clock. She had three other appointments tomorrow, each with representatives of regional authorities trying to stabilize political institutions in the outflung settlements sprouting up beyond the three large cities. This was her most important work, fostering independent decision-making in the local governing bodies of the planet. If the rule of law took hold there, the planetary government would be transformed whether it wanted to be or not.

She called Zev Brixa on the office comm. He answered immediately, a Terran of middle years in business dress. Behind him Ariel saw his office: a terminal, holo projector displaying economic data from the Fifty Worlds, native plants carefully arranged to soften the room’s functional lines.

“Ambassador Burgess,” he said. “Thank you for returning my call so quickly.”

For the thousandth time, Ariel wished that Aurora had stripped her of the title. “What was it you wanted to meet about, Mr. Brixa?”

It came out more brusquely than she’d intended, but Brixa didn’t react. “I’d prefer to discuss that in confidence, Ambassador. Could we meet tomorrow?”

She made a show of consulting her schedule even though she’d already decided where she could fit him in if that’s what she chose to do. “You’re a long way from Nova City, Mr. Brixa.”

“I can fly in tonight,” he responded. “It’s important that we meet as soon as possible.”

“Very well. Between prior commitments, I have exactly thirty minutes available tomorrow.”

She waited for him to bluster. Instead he said, “Would you like to tell me which thirty?”

“Ten-thirty to eleven.”

“I’ll see you at ten-thirty, Ambassador,” Brixa said, and cut the connection.

Well, that was interesting, Ariel thought. Her initial misgivings were replaced by fresh curiosity. What did a Nucleomorph executive need from her that would spur him to fly across a significant piece of the planet, overnight, so he could occupy half an hour’s time with an out-of-favor official working in governmental reform?

“What do you think, Jennie?” Ariel said, even though Jennie was back at her apartment.

“Of his motives?”

“Why is he so eager?”

“Clearly you have something he wants, or he believes you can perform a service for him.”

There was nothing like a robot to put the obvious in sharp focus.

“Run a search on Nucleomorph, just this facility. Any criminal prosecutions pending?” It wouldn’t be the first time an industrial executive had appeared from nowhere in an attempt to cajole — or bribe — Ariel.

Once a vice-chair of a mining conglomerate had even claimed he could get her posted back to Aurora. She’d turned him down out of hand, and only afterward realized that she didn’t want to go back to Aurora anyway. Or Earth. Her diplomatic service seemed in hindsight to be a waste of time — years spent greasing the social interactions among the monied and powerful. How long had it been since she’d done any meaningful work? Once it had consumed her life.

And even that was avoiding the real truth behind her dismissal of a chance to go home. The truth was she didn’t want to return to Earth because Coren had died there.

“Ariel.” R. Jennie was waiting for her.

“Go ahead.”

As R. Jennie reported, public records related to Nucleomorph played across Ariel’s office terminal. “They have been engaged in reconstruction and expansion of the ruined cyborg-research facility near Noresk for almost four years. Only during the past year have they begun production of organisms for the ecosystem restoration. Your colleague Derec Avery has contracted for the design of a number of species derived from native fauna. At this point, he and the Nova Levis government are Nucleomorph’s only on-planet clients.” The screen changed to display public legal filings. “No evidence of statutory violations exists in the records available to you.”

Which, unless something was being aggressively concealed, was everything except classified military or research contracts. Ariel considered getting in touch with Masid Vorian to see if he could browse the records beyond her security clearance. She’d asked him for similar favors once or twice before, and he’d come through for her — but he too was stigmatized in the eyes of the colonial government because of his involvement with the Parapoyos debacle. Despite this, his spying experience made him too valuable to them to shunt him completely aside.

“Shall I consult the records further?” Jennie asked.

Ariel decided to wait on contacting Masid. The sudden surfacing of the cyborg lab had dredged up painful memories, leaving her ready to jump at shadows, that was all. A cyborg built from the son of one of the lab’s founders had killed Coren; now the corporation taking over the remains of the lab wanted to talk to her. There was no reason to assume a relationship between those two facts. Zev Brixa had in all likelihood contacted her because of her prominent yet marginal position in the government. She could speculate about his reasons all night, and it would get her nothing but insomnia.

“I’m coming home, Jennie,” she said. “I’d appreciate a drink and dinner when I get there.”

When Derec got back to his lab, Elin had gone home. She came early and left early. He instructed Miles to let him know when the compiler was running again. Since he’d have to hold off on specimen testing until he had a compiler to grow specimens in, he turned to the other project under his guidance.

Mutations in the field occurred so quickly that there was often no way to track whether a tailored organism had actually had its desired effect. Derec had lost count of the times he’d engineered a vonooman to eradicate an endemic pathogen only to find that the pathogen was transformed by evolutionary pressures by the time his remedy took the field. Things moved fast on Nova Levis — part of his job was to slow them down. So while he kept the arms factory cooking in the compiler, he also tracked rates of infection, mutation, and recovery in certain sectors of the human population. He concentrated on native-born and Terran-émigré cohorts, on the theory that Spacers’ immune-system enhancements would skew the results, and he’d found certain population clusters very useful in predicting what new pathogens would reach pandemic distribution.

Once he’d given Miles instructions, Derec settled in to comb the most recent results from his indicator populations. He received weekly reports from on-site personnel in Nova City, Noresk, and Stopol — personnel more qualified in epidemiology and population statistics than Derec was, which was lucky for the enterprise — and he tracked their reports through a database that monitored each subject’s population of invasive microbes. Preparation of his quarterly report for Senator Lamina’s ritual slaughter had put him behind schedule on generating his most recent results, and he threw himself into the task now as if fresh data would scour away the residual frustration of the meeting.

They didn’t, but when Derec had the field results processed and plotted, he at least had something else to think about. The first thing he always did with a weekly report was see who had died. No clearer indicator of progress existed than mortality rates, and Derec measured himself by the rise or fall in the number of fatalities in his sample populations. It wasn’t the most scientific way to approach the problem, but it was the approach he could live with.

And this week the number of deaths was sharply down. The problem was that the number of UDs was up. Sharply.

Unknown Disposition. This meant that the field operative hadn’t been able to locate the subject in question. Nova Levis was a raw and shifting place; it was easy to disappear here. Still, UDs typically amounted to perhaps five percent of total samples. This week the number was seventeen percent.

An anomaly, Derec thought. He brought up the rates for the previous twelve weeks, and frowned at what he saw.

Five, six, three, eight, five, six, five. Seven weeks of statistically normal UDs. Then: nine, eleven, eight, twelve, fourteen. And this week, seventeen.

His first thought was that one of his field scientists was getting sloppy. Derec broke the numbers down by location, and saw that UDs in Nova City were up 220 percent, in Stopol 240 percent, and in Noresk 330 percent. He viewed the numbers cautiously. All three were up noticeably, but Noresk far more than the other two. Address first what is knowable, he thought, and punched in the code to contact Gar Purlin, his on-site supervisor in Noresk.

Purlin answered quickly, but he didn’t look happy about it. “It’s eight-thirty, Derec,” he said. “This couldn’t wait until tomorrow?”

Eight-thirty? Derec looked across the lab. Miles stood engrossed in the compiler. “I hadn’t realized it was so late, Gar, sorry. This will only take a minute.” Purlin waited for him to go on. “UDs are up more than three hundred percent in Noresk over the last six weeks.

What’s going on there?”

“Not very subtle this late, are you?” Purlin said. “I’ve been working like a baley trying to track these people down, let me tell you that up front.”

“I’m not accusing you of anything, Gar. I’m just following up on the figures. There was a quarterly today, so I’m a couple of days behind on the field results.”

Mention of the meeting softened Purlin a little. Everyone involved in the project knew the battles Derec fought to keep their work funded.

Derec watched Purlin pull up his most recent records. “Right,” he said after he’d looked them over. “People are just disappearing. I hadn’t noticed there was a trend.” He shrugged. “You get caught up in each individual case. It’s easy to lose track of the group situation.”

“Any sense of where they’re going?”

Purlin ran his finger down a list just out of Derec’s view. “Nothing definite, at least not on first glance,” he said. “I only file a UD after I’ve asked family and friends if they know where a subject might have gone.” Derec nodded. If people moved out of target areas, they were either reassigned to another group or dropped from the study. In both cases, Derec received notification of the change in status. “I haven’t been able to track any of the UDs I reported this week, but people don’t always tell me when they’re going to leave.”

“Noresk isn’t that big,” Derec said. “Someone should have heard something.”

Now Purlin’s sour expression was back. “Two things, Derec. First: I’m not a detective. I’m a medical scientist. And second, we work for the government, remember? I don’t know how things are in Nova City, but in Noresk people don’t care for the Triangle.” Something caught his attention offscreen. “Wait a minute. This family here. Aja Kyl, her spouse Toomi, and their children. Vois, Lek, and Shila.” Derec found the names on his own report. “They said something about getting together with relatives in Nova City. I followed it up and, let’s see, the relatives … there’s the name. Mika Mendes. She’s on the log in Nova City. I tried to contact her and got no response before the weekly was due, so I filed them all as UD.”

“Okay,” Derec said. “I’ll get in touch with Cin and see if she’s heard anything. Thanks, Gar.”

Cin Boski was Derec’s local field worker. She probably wouldn’t be any happier to hear from him than Purlin had, especially not at almost nine o’clock. He decided to wait until morning.

Where were all of these people going, though? Most of Derec’s study population lacked the resources to relocate. He flipped through the weekly from Nova City until he found Mika Mendes.

“Derec,” Miles said. “The compiler is functional.”

“Thanks, Miles. Get it working on whatever is next.” Miles turned to the task as a skull-cracking yawn reminded Derec of the sleep he’d sacrificed over the previous week preparing his quarterly report. He was too tired to solve mysteries tonight. “Come home when you’ve got the next batch building,” he told Miles, and then he went home.

A wasted day, he thought after he’d undressed and lay drifting to sleep an hour later. More questions and no answers.

But at least I got to see Ariel.

Chapter 3

ZEV BRIXA ARRIVED at Ariel’s office at exactly ten-thirty the next morning, his appearance so punctual she assumed he’d stood out in the hall waiting for his chrono to tick over. She had an instinctive mistrust of people who choreographed their appointments, but Brixa’s demeanor put her at ease. He shook her hand with an easy, unaffected smile that deepened creases at the corners of his eyes. He didn’t seem the typical driven mid-level corporate executive.

“Ambassador Burgess,” he began, “I much appreciate your willingness to see me on such short notice.”

Ariel gestured him to a chair in the corner of her office. She sat in the facing chair rather than behind her desk. “As I said, Mr. Brixa, I’m happy to make as much time as I can,” she said.

He glanced at the wall chrono. “Down to twenty-nine minutes already. I’d better get to business.” That smile again, as if the situation suited him perfectly. “As you have doubtless already learned, my employer Nucleomorph recently completed the reconstruction and expansion of the former cyborg lab near Noresk. We’ve invested a great deal of both human and financial capital in the project, and we’ve also made considerable effort to recruit and train local employees.”

“Your Terran workforce refused to relocate?”

“Well, we’ve had to make a virtue of necessity in that regard, yes.

But it’s the right thing to do, both for the company’s long-term stability on this planet and for the locals we’ve trained. We will only make money here if we can maintain a professional pool of locals, so in this case what’s good for Nucleomorph is also good for Nova Levis.”

Such disarming openness, Ariel thought. Most men in Brixa’s position would have given her a prepared speech about their noble intentions. She found his candor a refreshing change from the unctuous platitudes she so often dealt with.

Unless that was a canned speech itself, she reminded herself.

“I take it you haven’t come here to declare your altruism, Mr. Brixa,”

she said, purposely keeping a distance between them. Good-humored visitors to her office frequently hid illegal motives behind a professional smile.

“No, I haven’t,” he said. “I did want to set you at ease regarding our intentions, though. I’m not here to ask anything that would put you in a difficult position.”

“Glad to hear it,” Ariel said. “What exactly are you here to ask?”

Brixa settled back into his chair and crossed his legs. The pause before he spoke was the first ripple Ariel had seen in his calm surface.

“We have some concerns about the reanimés,” he said at last.

“The what?” Ariel asked, thinking she’d misheard him, but even as the words left her mouth she understood. Reanimés. What the locals had called the cyborgs discarded from Kynig Parapoyos’ experiments.

Brixa watched her face, waited for her to catch up.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I realize this touches you personally, but —”

She cut him off. “You came to see me in my professional capacity, Mr. Brixa. Please leave my personal history out of this.”

If only she could do the same. Already she felt herself hardening against whatever Zev Brixa was going to ask of her, just because he’d brought memories of Coren with him into the room. She didn’t want to deal with cyborgs, even the pitiful rejects who gleaned their survival from the garbage piles of Noresk. A cyborg had killed Coren, and every time she heard the word she thought of him dying, his body broken and Ariel lightyears away.

She realized she’d been sitting silently for much too long. “What problems?” she asked.

“The same problems you might expect from any marginalized and impoverished sector of a society,” he said, relaxing as they steered away from the shoals of Ariel’s memory. “Theft, vandalism, and so on. The particular situation is exacerbated by the reanimés’ — reverence is, I think, the best word — for the lab site. They were created there, and cast out from there, and the past few years have apparently been enough for them to construct a kind of mythology of the place. Or perhaps sacred history is a better characterization. I’m unfamiliar with the processes of religion. In any case, representatives of the reanimés have approached Nucleomorph demanding that the lab be preserved in its original state because they believe some sort of messiah will appear there.”

“That’s not likely unless you’re making cyborgs again,” Ariel observed.

Brixa laughed. “No, you’re right about that. And it’s even less likely because this messiah they await is, as near as we can discern, none other than Kynig Parapoyos.”

“Didn’t the cyborgs kill Parapoyos themselves?”

“According to eyewitness accounts, during the activation of the spacecraft that composed the core of the old lab, a cyborg broke Parapoyos’ arms as he was about to kill a certain Masid Vorian. Then a number of other cyborgs took Parapoyos away after the first announced, ‘He is ours, now. He must answer.’”

The words gave Ariel a shiver. She could only imagine what Parapoyos had gone through before he died; the cyborg Jerem Looms, who had killed Coren, had also tortured his own father for days before murdering him and trying to take over Imbitek. And Parapoyos was, in a sense, the father of them all.

She forced herself back to the topic at hand. “So what is it you need from me?”

“Well, we’ve come up with what will seem like a fairly radical solution,” Brixa said. “It’s Nucleomorph’s position that the reanimés’

superstitious extremism stems largely from their marginalization on this planet. We believe that a vigorous effort should be made to bring them into the economic and political institutions of Nova Levis.” He paused, maybe to let Ariel appreciate Nucleomorph’s magnanimity.

Then he concluded, “In short, we believe the reanimé population should be granted citizenship.”

Ariel automatically started to remind him that robots were precluded from citizenship — then she had to remind herself that cyborgs weren’t robots. They weren’t bound by the Three Laws, they weren’t built on the principles of positronics … as far as she knew, nothing in the constitution of Nova Levis would prevent it.

But … “This is Nova Levis, Mr. Brixa. The people who founded this colony were members of the Church of Organic Sapiens. If you ask this question publicly, people are going to riot. I hope you have good security up at your plant.”

“Our security arrangements are more than sufficient. And believe me when I say that Nucleomorph has no shortage of political will.

We have made this decision, and we intend to see it through.”

“To what?”

“Ideally to a vote.”

At least he wasn’t asking her to set up a legislative end run around Nova Levis’ tattered democracy. Still, the idea shook Ariel. “I’m not sure why you’ve come to me with this,” she said.

“You were chosen because you have a reputation for assessing issues on their merits, without the unfortunate colonial prejudices that afflict many of your colleagues,” Brixa said. “We trust that you’ll investigate the possibilities in an unbiased manner.”

Ariel let the compliment pass. She was still trying to sort out her emotional response and differentiate it from the relevant legal and political questions.

Of course, the political question was all about emotion, wasn’t it?

And Brixa had brought this proposal to her for exactly that reason, because he figured that, if she could handle it, anyone could.

“You’ve told me a lie, Mr. Brixa,” she said.

He looked surprised. “What’s that?”

“You said you weren’t going to ask me anything that would put me in a difficult position.”

Brixa thought this over. “Well, yes. I suppose I should apologize for that little bit of rhetoric. If I’d been thinking ahead a little more, I wouldn’t have put it in exactly that way.” He stood. “I’ve used up nearly all of my thirty minutes, and I should let you get back to your work. The last thing I’d like to say is that a great deal rides on this issue. Nucleomorph is poised to do great things on Nova Levis, and it would be a shame for all of us if that work was hindered by bigotry.”

“I’ll look into it, Mr. Brixa,” Ariel said as she showed him to the door. “If there are no explicit legal barriers, I’ll sound out a few of my more discreet colleagues. Beyond that I don’t know what will happen.” And she didn’t know why she’d even promised that much.

Brixa had purely manipulated her; if she didn’t pursue his request, he’d take it to someone else; in the firestorm that followed, Ariel would be left questioning her commitment to the ideals she espoused.

Very deft, this maneuver, and somewhat lacking in empathy.

“Of course not.” Brixa shook her hand again. “Contact me anytime,”

he said, and walked away down the hall.

When he’d stepped into the elevator and gone, Ariel stood for a long moment in her office doorway, feeling terribly lonely, her mind alive with questions she very much wanted not to ask.

Chapter 4

DEREC LOCATED MIKA Mendes’ address in the part of the city unselfconsciously called New Nova, a riot of prefabricated apartment buildings and small factories just outside the southern walls of the original city. The breaking of the blockade had brought legitimate commerce to Nova Levis, and with commerce had come widespread income disparity. A lot of people were getting wealthy because Earth and the Fifty Worlds were too preoccupied with their political strife to enforce interstellar trade laws on the Settler worlds, and Nova Levis had an outlaw heritage that drew extralegal entrepreneurs out of the proverbial woodwork. In the five years since the death of Kynig Parapoyos, illegitimate enterprise had flourished.

Freebooting trade had been good to a number of the officials imported to oversee the transition of Nova Levis from diseased backwater to functioning society, but it hadn’t been as good to the people who were already there, or the baleys who showed up in greater numbers after the blockade ended. New Nova’s poverty was ample evidence of the tendency of money to flow upward.

Once, Parapoyos had kept Nova City clean and healthy with his black-market pharmaceuticals; now, with the removal of his locally benevolent despotism, people here were as vulnerable to disease as anyone else. The resources to inoculate or cure all of them no longer existed.

Derec had an intuition that if Mika Mendes hadn’t permanently fled her home, a communication from him would be more than enough to set her on her way. People in New Nova, like those in Noresk, didn’t appreciate government workers. So he mapped the address, put Miles to work on a regression analysis of the genome of a biting fly native to the marshes around Stopol, left Elin to her work on a viral antidote to a pervasive fungal infection, and went to New Nova himself.

Armed sentries no longer guarded the gates between the original settlement and New Nova, but Derek was keenly aware as he passed through the southern gate that most of the people on the outside were still barred from coming in. Money, in his experience, was a much more effective barrier than violence. Nova City was clean and orderly, its inhabitants well-dressed and healthy; New Nova looked and smelled like a Terran slum from the twenty-second century. What struck Derec as much as anything else was the absence of robots. People here did for themselves all of the things he expected Miles to take care of: they cooked their own meals, made their own repairs of vehicles and dwellings, cleaned their own messes. Or didn’t, Derec amended, stepping around a mound of what looked like construction debris liberally topped with household refuse. Rusted metal, broken glass, fly-buzzing masses of rotting food, empty aerosols. He felt like he’d stepped back in time. Once this had been the day-to-day existence of most of the human race. Now it was his work and Ariel’s to lift New Nova and places like it out of their desperation. Five years had taken Derec a long way from the frontiers of positronics.

He found the address halfway down a dead-end street of four-story apartment buildings. All were hastily constructed, cracks already showing in foundations and around doorways, and the interiors were shabby and poorly lit. Mika Mendes lived (or so he hoped) on the third floor, number 64, at the end of a long and dusty hall.

Derec knew what she looked like, and the woman who answered his knock wasn’t her. “Who are you?” she asked him, opening the door only wide enough to get a look at her unwelcome visitor.

“My name is Derec Avery,” Derec said. “I’m looking for a Mika Mendes, who I believe lives here?” He turned it into a question, hoping to get her talking.

“Not anymore, she doesn’t,” the woman said through the crack. All he could see of her was a narrowed brown eye and the dark hair that curled over her forehead.

“I’m a public health worker, ma’am,” Derec said. “Do you know where I can find her?”

“No. She’s gone, and I live here now.”

“And your name is …?”

She shut the door, and as Derec heard the scrape of the lock turning he did something that shocked him. Leading with his shoulder, he bulled into the door and forced his way into the apartment.

The woman scrambled away from him across the apartment’s living room into the kitchen, where she spilled dirty dishes onto the floor, grabbing for a knife. “Get out!” she screamed at him. “It’s my place now, and Vilger will be back any time! You don’t want to be here when he comes back!”

Knowing he’d made a mess of the situation, Derec stayed by the door, hands away from his sides. The woman found the knife and brandished it at him.

“I’m not armed, and I don’t mean you any harm,” he said.

“Out!” She stabbed the knife in his direction but didn’t come toward him.

Derec saw a terminal in the living room wall. “You’re welcome to confirm my identity,” he said, pointing at it. “I’ll stay right here.”

“I don’t want you to stay right there,” she snapped. “I want you out. Vilger’s coming right back.”

Briefly, Derec wondered what would happen if this Vilger did come back. He wouldn’t be much good to anyone in a hospital, and even though the woman in Mika Mendes’ apartment had the worn look of someone fighting a long-term illness, she looked frightened enough to come at him out of sheer adrenalin.

“I’m a public health worker,” he repeated. “Mika Mendes was part of a health study, and I’m concerned that we haven’t been able to contact her.”

“You can’t contact her because she’s gone,” the woman said. “I don’t know where, and I don’t care. Now get out.”

Her tone was getting less hostile. Derec risked another question.

“All right,” he said. “If you don’t know where she is, do you know if she had relatives visiting before she left?”

There was a pause. “Was she sick?” the woman asked. She looked around the apartment as if afraid disease might be lingering in the corners.

“Yes, she was. Not as bad as a lot of the people I work with, but she was sick. We were working on a cure.”

“Am I going to get it?”

You might already have it, Derec thought. Or more properly them; most of his study subjects had more than one infection. That was the last thing this woman needed to hear, though. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Part of what we’re studying is transmission vectors.”

“She’s probably dead,” the woman said.

“Did she tell you she was part of a study?”

“She didn’t have to. The woman comes to my cousin Ike, too.”

Good. She was starting to believe him. If she would just put down the knife, Derec thought he’d be able to relax. “Did you live in this building before Mika Mendes left?” he asked.

“I got every right to take the place now that she’s gone,” the woman said. “Me and Vilger were stacked like crates in the other place, and I don’t like his mother.”

“That’s fine with me,” Derec said. “I’m not here to evict you. I just need to know what happened to Mika.”

“She left last week. Her cousins showed up, and the next morning they were all gone. I waited a whole day, and when none of them came back I got Vilger to move our stuff over here. That’s fair.” The woman appeared to consider something. She put the knife back on the kitchen counter. “Can you get me in the study?”

“I can have someone come and talk to you.” Derec weighed the question, and decided he couldn’t in good faith promise her anything else. “Her name will be Cin Boski. She’ll examine you and see how you fit in with what we’re working on. I’ll need your name, though, so Cin can go over your records before the visit.”

“My name’s Lianor Phelp,” the woman said, “but you won’t find any records.”

A baley, squatting in the apartment of a woman who had in all likelihood gone off to die with her relatives. Just thinking of it made Derec tired.

“Lianor, I need you to tell me what you know about Mika Mendes,” he said. “You may be right that she’s dead, but if she’s still alive, I need to find her.”

“If you get me in your study, I’ll tell you,” Lianor said.

“I’ll have Cin come talk to you,” Derec said, and waited, hoping it would be enough.

“Vilger and I lived next door,” Lianor began after a moment. “The night before Mika left, some people came to visit her. Walls are thin here, and from what I heard I figured they were family. I tried not to listen — I’m no gossip — but they argued some, and the next morning they were all gone.”

“Did you hear what they argued about?” Derec prompted.

Something came over Lianor’s face then, the shadow of someone wanting to unburden herself of a troubling secret. But she mastered it. “I told you, I’m not a gossip,” she said. “I know they were arguing from the noise, but I didn’t listen.”

She straightened and walked to where he stood inside the door.

“They’re gone, Derec Avery. You did say that was your name, right?”

Derec nodded.

“They’re gone,” Lianor repeated, “and maybe you should go, too.

Go on back inside.”

Inside? Derec wondered. We are inside. Then, as she was shutting the door behind him, he realized she’d meant back inside the walls. Back into the safely ignorant other world inside the walls of Nova City.

Lianor Phelp’s words stayed with Derec, dogging him through his walk back along the unfamiliar streets of New Nova to the southern gate of the old city. He felt as if an invisible door was sliding down behind him, shutting out the people he was supposed to be helping.

At the lab, he watched Elin and Miles working and realized he wasn’t sure how to proceed. Indecision was strange to Derec. Normally he broke down his options and chose one with only enough hesitation to double-check his reasoning; now he couldn’t resolve whether he should try to find Mika Mendes and the Kyl family in Noresk, write them off as just another group of UDs, talk to Lianor Phelp again, or involve an investigator.

And why was he thinking that? Something about Lianor’s face, about the way a trace of fear had shown through the defensiveness and fear. Derec felt certain that she wasn’t afraid of him, or worried that the Kyls and Mendes were dead. No, she was afraid of something she knew, and the only thing Derec could think of that she might know was where the Kyls had really gone. Why wouldn’t she want him to know that?

“Derec,” Miles said. “I have completed the regression analysis.”

“And?”

“Segments of the fly’s genome match a virus that first appeared in Noresk eleven years ago.”

Of course, Derec thought. Noresk. Kynig Parapoyos had done his work much too well. The genome of a fly, two thousand kilometers from Noresk, still bore traces of his legacy. “How many generations?” he asked.

“Several hundred. I am unable to be anymore specific without losing statistical confidence.”

And each of those hundreds of mutations had left behind an unchanged part of the population that went off on another evolutionary tangent. The vast majority of those tangents came to quick dead ends, but some went on, and in the case of this fly converged with their distant relatives. People who carried certain receptors altered by another version of the virus contracted an autoimmune disease when bitten by the fly — apparently the gene sequence in the fly activated the dormant virus. It was a recombinant plague, possibly only if the virus had somehow been programmed to control its own evolution for the particular purpose of reconstituting itself in different hosts.

Derec had been working to isolate this virus and its history for three years. Now he had it, and if he could recover the programming in the initial genome he could build a phage to disrupt that programming and consign the virus to evolutionary oblivion. Isolating the trigger in the fly meant they could now see how it combined with the human-hosted material, and working backward from there Derec hoped to eliminate the entire strain.

“Okay,” he said. “Good work. Elin, you start combing the records for other matches of the trigger sequence. Miles, start putting together some new instructions for the fly.”

“I’m almost done with the next generation of the cow for Nucleomorph, Derec,” Elin said. “Shouldn’t we get that up and running?”

“This fly kills two hundred people every year in Stopol,” Derec said.

“If I can get this cow out there, it might save a lot more than that,”

Elin responded, keeping her voice even, and she was right, but at that particular moment Derec needed a certain victory.

“The sooner you get the other strings identified in this virus, the sooner your cow goes into service, Elin. I don’t want to explain ‘might’ to people dying in Stopol.”

This was unfair, and Derec knew it, and so did Elin. She turned her back on him and went to work.

Miles was already engaged in counterprogramming the fly. Derec watched them for a long moment, torn between elation at the fly breakthrough and frustration that he wasn’t better at working with Elin, with residual disquiet about Lianor Phelp behind it all. He could do something about that, but it wasn’t something he wanted to do.

How many people had died the last time Derec had stepped outside his role and investigated a crime?

On the other hand, what if he could do something to help the Kyls, and Mika Mendes?

That decided it. Leaving Elin and Miles to their work, Derec went home to call Ariel.

Chapter 5

SHE WASN’T AT her office, and it took her three hours to return the message Derec left with R. Jennie. Ariel looked preoccupied when she called, and she only snapped into focus when Derec asked her if she knew how to get in touch with Masid Vorian.

“Why —” she started to ask, and then changed her mind. “You could look him up.”

Derec waited.

“I’m at the Triangle,” Ariel said after a pause. “Why don’t we meet where we talked yesterday?”

He left immediately. She was waiting for him when he walked into Kamil’s, in the back of the seating area where she couldn’t be seen from the street. Derec had a bad feeling even before he’d gotten a good look at her, and that first look did nothing to lessen his apprehension. There was tension in her face, and maybe even a little fear; her eyes darted around with uncharacteristic nervousness.

He sat facing her. “Are you all right?”

“Why did you ask me about Masid Vorian?”

“He has some experience with Noresk, and I know he’s in the same kind of liaison agreement as you are. I suppose he was the first person I thought of.”

“He was a spy,” Ariel said flatly. “What do you need a spy for?”

“Ariel. Why the interrogation?”

Surprised, she sat back. “I — you’re right. Yesterday and today have been unusual, and I’m edgy. Masid’s name came up in a meeting yesterday, and …” She trailed off. “There have been too many coincidences.”

Derec put his own questions on hold for the moment. “All right.

Start with the first one.”

“The first one,” she said, “is Nucleomorph.”

She recounted the details of her meeting with Zev Brixa and her preliminary research into the question of reanimé citizenship. “There’s no legal prohibition, but that’s only because it’s never been considered And as soon as the question becomes public, there’s going to be a political uproar. My guess is that the Terran members of the Senate will be against it because the cyborgs to them are too much like robots.

The Spacers will fight it because if cyborgs gain citizenship it will raise too many questions about the human-machine boundary. And the natives will fight it because most of them settled under terms of the original lease between Solaria and the Church of Organic Sapiens. They’re all Managins, or were.”

“Not all of them,” Derec said. “A lot of people have come here since that lease expired. They can’t all be anti-robot zealots. Nobody screens baleys.”

“The colony is too young to have gotten that far from its founding ideal. At heart, your average citizen of Nova Levis is working from a Managin worldview. And even without that, at heart they’re all basically Terran — even though most of them hate Earth and everything they think it stands for. Terrans don’t like robots.”

Ariel petered out, and Derec considered the situation. She’d danced carefully around one question, though. “How do you feel about it?”

“Terrified. Disgusted. Outraged. But I’m a Spacer, and upbringing dies hard. Then there’s Coren.” She let that hang between them before adding, “All of those are personal feelings completely apart from, and irrelevant to, the question of what’s right.” Another pause. “If it wasn’t for Bogard, I’d be much more certain about this.”

Bogard. Derec’s finest creation, the robot designed to have unprecedented latitude in analysis and interpretation of the Three Laws, who had saved lives, perhaps cost others, and in the end killed the cyborg Tro Aspil and disappeared. Not a day went by without Derec wondering what had become of Bogard, and wondering too if maybe he never should have taken the liberties he had with the Three Laws.

“Bogard did raise more questions than he answered,” Derec said.

He hoped Ariel wouldn’t dredge up their long disagreement over his testing the boundaries of the Three Laws. They had argued about it — and bitterly — and if Derec was honest with himself he had to admit that he’d been at least as dogmatic as she had. One casualty of the debate was the intimacy they had once shared.

“I’m in a very delicate position,” Ariel said. “Zev Brixa’s ingratiating and pleasant, but the more I think about our conversation the more certain I am that Nucleomorph is going to go ahead with this no matter what I do.”

“That makes it easy for you, doesn’t it? You can just tell him you don’t want to involve yourself, and let Brixa go to someone else.”

She considered. “That’s where it gets difficult. In my professional capacity, it’s incumbent upon me to put aside personal reactions, and I think I can do that with respect to the fundamental question. The more important thing, though, is another question: Would this be good for Nova Levis? If it happened, would we be even more isolated?

Ideals are only useful until they get in the way of actually helping people. And behind all that is the real question: What do we owe the reanimés, Derec? Even Jerem Looms once was human. What happened to them isn’t their fault. Once they were us. Has what they suffered made them less than human? What do we owe them?”

She asked the question as if Derec might have a special insight.

Bogard again. Some of life’s actions had seemingly infinite consequences.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s a question that needs some consideration.”

Ariel smiled. “There’s an understatement. All right. If you’re not going to solve my problems, you can at least tell me yours.”

Derec wasn’t entirely ready to leave the Nucleomorph question where it was, especially not when he was about to do so much business with them. He would be putting his project’s success in their hands; Miles and Elin couldn’t mass-produce vertebrate life. Ariel didn’t seem interested in going any further with it, though.

“Too many of my study population are disappearing,” he said. “Over the last month I’ve lost contact with almost twenty percent of them. I started looking into it, and my field worker in Noresk gave me a name to check here — Mika Mendes. I went to see her, and she’s gone, too. There’s a squatter in her apartment. A scared squatter.”

“Scared of what?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. I think she knew what happened to Mendes, and to the family who came to visit her, but for some reason she didn’t want me to know.”

“A whole family disappeared?”

Derec had brought a copy of the Kyl file with him in the hope that Ariel would put him in touch with Masid. He passed it across the table and Ariel looked through it, lingering over the images.

“Two of the children were too sick to travel. I wasn’t expecting them to live.”

“Maybe they took the kids somewhere to die,” Ariel said. “Is there a religious background?”

“There might be, but why would that make the squatter afraid to tell me what happened?” Derec started to get the feeling that Ariel might be partly right. “Maybe they did take those children somewhere, but I don’t think it was to let them die.”

He turned the idea over in his mind, letting it develop. Before the blockade collapsed, the two most lucrative industries on Nova Levis had been infecting people with new microbes and curing them. How much of that trade still went on?

“Ariel,” Derec said. “Masid Vorian infiltrated a drug gang to get close to Parapoyos, didn’t he?”

“That’s not why he was here, but yes, he did.” She sipped her drink.

“Do you think the Kyls went looking for a cure they didn’t think you could give them?”

“If something illegal is going on, that would explain why the squatter in the Mendes apartment didn’t want to talk to me.”

“This is Nova Levis, Derec. Something illegal is always going on.”

This was true, but at that moment Derec had no interest at all in legal issues. If there was someone out there who could cure people he couldn’t, Derec wanted to know about it. The whole question lay well beyond the boundaries of his job description, but so did forcing his way into apartments in New Nova. He wasn’t restoring the ecology of Nova Levis for the sake of its struggling native organisms. He was trying to keep people alive.

“Do you remember the drug trader’s name? The one Vorian was working with?”

Ariel shook her head. “No. But you should talk to Masid. When you do, let him know that I need to ask him something, too, but Nucleomorph can wait.” She finished her drink. “I’m supposed to meet him in twenty minutes. You go ahead, and I’ll let him know to expect you instead.”

Masid Vorian, like Ariel and Derec, had been relegated to office space outside of the Triangle. The colonial administration was rigorous to the point of fanaticism in its sidelining of people who had been working on the planet while Parapoyos still held sway. Even Derec and Ariel, who had arrived shortly after the lifting of the blockade, were considered suspicious because they’d been pursuing cyborgs at the time and were thus tied to events on Nova Levis. Senator Lamina and her colleagues were determined not to do more than tolerate anyone tainted by Nova Levis’ sordid recent past, and that toleration would evaporate as soon as Lamina thought she could fire them without offworld repercussions. Masid appeared to be anticipating this; the plaque on his door read VORIAN CONSULTANCY AND INVESTIGATION. He was already sidling into private practice.

Derec knocked and entered to Masid coming toward the door. He was a compact, dark-haired man with the kind of nondescript face and bearing that had always been the spy’s chief asset.

“Mr. Avery,” he said. “Ambassador Burgess informed me that she’s now scheduling my appointments.”

Derec laughed and they shook hands. “Ariel has a way of getting what she wants.”

“So what can I do for you?”

They sat, Masid at his desk and Derec in a leather chair that seemed out of place in the room. He wondered where Masid had gotten it.

“I’m working on invasive-disease eradication and ecosystem restoration,” he said. “Part of the project involves tracking certain populations to see if and how well our efforts are succeeding. Over the past few weeks, a large number of people in these populations have disappeared. Some of them were too ill to travel except in the case of a dire emergency, and it occurred to me that they might be looking for a cure that the project — that I haven’t been able to provide.”

“You’re looking for Filoo,” Masid said.

His certainty stopped Derec in the middle of what he’d thought would be a lengthy explanation. “Well,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s specifically him.”

“If it’s anyone, it’s Filoo,” Masid said. “He was running things for Parapoyos, and unless someone killed him he’s still running things.”

“Where would he get the, ah —”

“Product? Anyone with a sequencer and a compiler and a need for some quiet money. I don’t keep track of these things anymore, Mr.

Avery. The man’s name was Filoo, and he was as dangerous and lacking in scruples as anyone I’ve ever met except when it came to his loyalty toward Kynig Parapoyos. We’re all lucky his ambition doesn’t match his cold-bloodedness. If, that is, he’s still alive.”

Something changed in Masid’s face, as if in raising the possibility that this Filoo was dead he had reminded himself of other deaths. A spy with a conscience, Derec thought. Maybe that’s why he’s no longer a spy and still on Nova Levis.

If he was no longer a spy. How could you tell?

“Thank you, Mr. Vorian,” Derec said. “Do you want me to let you know what I find out?”

A knowing smile quirked at the corner of Vorian’s mouth. “If you stir Filoo up, I’m guessing I’ll hear about it,” he said.

Chapter 6

ARIEL SPENT THE afternoon laying the groundwork for an ethics indictment against a magistrate in Stopol. When she got to the point where she could safely delegate the rest of the preparation to the district office there, she took a long walk through the city, watching the people and wondering how the brain behind each face would react to the proposition that cyborgs should be able to vote. If she became the standard-bearer for the question, she would absorb all of the superstitious fear the citizens of Nova Levis could muster. It would be the end of her political career, that much was certain; the Spacer bloc in the Senate was looking for an excuse to be rid of her.

What a useless irony if she were to do all this in the service of a cause that repelled her.

And how she was repelled by the idea. The night before, she’d dreamed of going to vote, and being the only human in a room full of cyborgs. All of them were Jerem Looms. Ariel hoped the dream was a symptom of her subconscious working through the problem and overcoming her emotional reaction. Zev Brixa had maneuvered her into a position that would require all of her faculties.

She couldn’t shake the intuition that he knew more about her than he’d let on in their brief meeting. A corporation the size of Nucleomorph did nothing by accident; he might well have burrowed through any number of records of her behavior in the events following the Union Station massacre. She had certainly burned her share of bridges at that time, for what she considered unimpeachable reasons. No doubt there were profiles of her archived in a database somewhere, and no doubt they said that she pursued what she believed was right without regard for the consequences. Perhaps this was even characterized as a kind of behavioral deviancy. In any case, it was true — if Ariel did not explore the question and honestly determine its merits, she would spend years questioning her motivations. Surely Brixa had chosen her because of this quality.

Well, she thought. Now that you’ve gone down the paranoid avenue, stop and think rationally.

The rational assessment of the situation was frustratingly similar to her suspicious initial reaction. Brixa would know what she had done, and would know of her tense relationship with the colonial government of Nova Levis. Who better to take up an unpopular cause?

What better test of the proposition’s prospects than to bring it to an official who had been permanently scarred by a cyborg’s actions?

She was acting as the reagent in a kind of acid test, and Brixa was running the laboratory.

Ariel had found her way to a park south of the Triangle. She watched children play an unfamiliar game. Something involving a yellow pennant, and two bases made of shoes, and a great deal of running and noise. What stories did their parents tell them of the reanimés that skulked at the edges of their tenuous civilization? Was Ariel going to be the one to bring their boogeymen into their waking lives?

I have to at least ask, she thought. I won’t be able to live with myself if I don’t.

So the gentle probing went on. Ariel went home and asked R. Jennie for an opinion.

“I have no context for this, Ariel,” Jennie said. “The question is unprecedented.”

“That’s why I’m asking you, Jennie. I need a philosophical reaction.”

“Philosophy is not part of my programming.”

“Just answer the question,” Ariel snapped. Could no being, organic or machine, give her a straight answer?

R. Jennie took some time to compose a response. “My concept of citizenship is inextricably bound to my Three Laws programming,”

it said. “Are cyborgs considered human?”

No, Ariel thought. That far I will not go.

“If not,” R. Jennie went on, “it would be impossible for me to accord a cyborg the same status as a human being.”

Ariel forced herself to ask a question that sounded absurd even as she said it. “What if I told you cyborgs should be considered human?”

Again, R. Jennie was silent. “I am not sure a single opinion would be definitive,” it said at last.

Truer words were never spoken.

It was evening. The colors of sunset spilled through the window onto Ariel’s couch. The strip of restaurants facing the Triangle would be throbbing with politicians and their aides at this time of day. Ariel got up and walked out the door to try her question on those few among them she felt she might be able to trust.

She was lucky. When she walked into Kamil’s, Hodder Feng sat slouching over a tall glass of something amber and potent. Ariel ordered a glass of wine and carried it to his table.

Feng looked up at her when she sat across from him. “I’m trying not to begrudge you your survival,” he said. The cadence of his speech pegged him as under the influence, if not exactly intoxicated.

“I’m sorry, Hodder,” Ariel said. “It could have been any of us.”

“Not you, Ambassador.” Feng tried without much success to hide his bitterness. “A title still counts for something on Nova Levis.”

So should I shut myself down because Eza Lamina is still a little bit afraid of me? Ariel wondered.

“Hodder,” she said. “I need to ask you something in confidence.”

“No offers of employment, please. I am leaving this city as soon as I get drunk enough to be uncivil to someone prominent.”

“Well, then, I’ll ask you my other question,” Ariel said, and Feng gave her a grudging smile.

“All right.” He drank. “I’m just about ready to answer any question.”

That’s what you think, Ariel thought. But she couldn’t resist the opening.

“What would you do if someone suggested to you that cyborgs should be granted citizenship?” she asked, and waited for the explosion.

“Laugh,” he said without hesitation. “I came here nineteen years ago, and I’m not a Managin anymore, but I know a dumb question when I hear one. You think anyone in the Senate would let that happen? Please, Ariel. I have liquor to distract me from my misery. I don’t need to indulge in moonbeams.”

Especially not when yours are all blotted out by the shadow of Senator Lamina, Ariel thought. He was due a little self-pity. He’d devoted three years of his life to his project to create working relationships between the staggering Nova Levis educational system and the offplanet conglomerates that had begun to open after Liberation.

Hodder Feng was personally responsible for much of the economic growth of the planet, and he’d never be credited for it because nobody noticed the people who actually created skilled workers. Lamina would probably redirect the pittance she’d allowed Hodder to a general entertainment fund for touring executives. In public she argued that people had to be wooed to come to Nova Levis, and that if she could do that, the jobs would follow by themselves. Hodder Feng, though, knew that one of the questions these junketing magnates always asked was If I do open up here, who’s going to work for me? You think I can get people to come here from Earth or Aurora?

Of course not. The successful businesses that operated on the bright side of the law drew heavily on a labor pool that Feng had created.

Nucleomorph included.

And that mental addendum snapped her back into focus. Ariel watched Feng drink and felt an enormous sympathy for him. She liked this man, with his workman’s clothes and thick hands. He was a baley who had tried to make a difference, tried to force his way into a political system that had followed him from Earth, and now he was middle-aged and starting over. For a moment, Ariel allowed herself to feel a kinship with him, but quickly she realized it was false.

If the Nova Levis government defunded her, she’d land on her feet.

She knew too many people, she’d done too many favors. The uncertainty that faced Hodder Feng was unlike anything Ariel had ever known, or ever would.

So she ordered a drink, and then another, and she kept him company. It was the least she could do. And when she’d drunk enough to be less discreet, she asked him about cyborgs again.

He was farther down the road to intoxication than Ariel was, but his bedrock response was largely the same as it had been when she’d first blurted out the question after walking in. “This planet is barely feeding itself, Ariel,” Hodder said. “You think anyone has the time or energy to hold a constitutional convention? I thought I was a dreamer.”

“You’re misunderstanding me. I don’t know if it’s a good idea or not.” Ariel had already told him this twice, but this was the price of choosing a miserable idealist for a sounding board. Add drunk to the list of characteristics, and it was a wonder he heard anything she said.

That’s why she’d chosen Hodder, though, or so Ariel told herself.

He was a listener, quiet in meetings, deferential to people clearly competent in areas outside his own expertise. To his immense credit, he hadn’t once steered the conversation to his own misfortune. She tried again. “Hodder, what if there didn’t have to be a constitutional issue? Are cyborgs robots?”

“You tell me.”

“They aren’t. Every one I’ve seen or heard of was born human and augmented later,” Ariel said. Strange choice of words, augmented; it glossed over the fact that the augmentation had robbed subjects like Jerem Looms and Tro Aspil of any quality that might have been called human. In making a cyborg, Kynig Parapoyos’ laboratory destroyed a human being.

But they were not robots. What they were was the incarnation of the fear that had driven the creation of the Three Laws in the first place. The supreme technological nightmare of human civilization.

How could any human think rationally about putting cyborgs on an equal footing with humankind?

This was the kind of question that had interested Ariel in diplomacy to begin with, because one possible answer was that they were human.

Terribly damaged, no doubt, but human. She asked herself again whether they could be blamed for what had been done to them.

Orphans, doomed by incurable disease, psychologically and emotionally maimed by the process of saving them — a process itself corrupted by Parapoyos, made into an assembly line to create assassins — what rational human could blame a child? None of it was of their own making.

Ariel realized she was speaking aloud, realized at the same time that she’d drunk more than she meant to and that a third person had joined her and Hodder Feng. She stopped talking.

The newcomer was Vilios Kalienin. It could only have been worse if Eza Lamina herself had appeared in the midst of Ariel’s monologue.

And Kalienin was more unfortunate in one particularly relevant regard: He was one of many Terran politicians on Nova Levis known to have anti-robot sympathies. Ariel might as well have broadcast her thoughts on subetheric.

She shifted instinctively into a damage-control footing. “That’s one perspective, in any case. One that’s sure to be voiced loudly if this ever becomes a public debate.”

That last was directed at Kalienin. He picked up his cue. “A fascinating case it is, Ambassador, if a little contrarian. Of course we’re all off the record here.”

Ariel believed him not at all. He was a policy advisor to the Terran legislative contingent on Nova Levis; if he didn’t offer a verbatim account of Ariel’s words to their caucus meeting in the next twenty-four hours, she would take up religion. Part of her brain automatically delegated itself the task of countering whatever he would suggest the Terran caucus leak to their colleagues.

“How would this happen, Ambassador?” Kalienin asked her.

“Assuming there’s no relevant legal question, how would a proposal so radical get a fair hearing given what’s happened with the cyborgs we know about? And on Nova Levis, to boot. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you of this colony’s origin.”

Certainly, Vilios, Ariel thought. I will by all means offer you the strategy I have neither committed to nor yet invented.

“I have no way of knowing whether it will ever become a proposal,”

she said. “A representative of a prominent stakeholder in the future of this planet asked me to get a sense of how the idea might be received. That’s all.”

“You know how it would be received,” Hodder said. “People would burn the cyborg squatters out of their huts and then start smashing robots for good measure.”

He was probably right, but having committed herself to the contrarian perspective, Ariel was determined to see it through. “This is where leadership comes in. It is one job of government to prevent people from doing what is manifestly wrong even if that’s what most of them want to do.”

“How ironies do abound tonight,” Kalienin said. He toyed with his glass, but he had yet to taste it as far as Ariel had seen. Correct appearance was a much more important pleasure to Vilios Kalienin than the fleeting sensation of drunkenness could ever be.

“Don’t keep us waiting, Vilios,” said Hodder.

“Well, Jonis Taprin said something very similar about leadership when the Terran media were busy attacking him for the latest round of riots,” Kalienin said. He was enjoying himself a great deal. “That’s one irony, that Ariel Burgess and Jonis Taprin agreed on anything.”

Ariel knew then that she was in for a storm. Kalienin certainly knew that she and Taprin had been lovers once, and that his latter-day Managin posturing had driven the final wedge between them.

She agreed on nothing with Taprin, but Kalienin would certainly make it appear as if “her” proposal was as radical and unreasonable as the Spacers made Taprin’s anti-robot platform out to be.

“And then there’s the fact that we’re sitting here talking about this on the night that Jonis Taprin was murdered,” Kalienin said.

In the shocked silence that followed his words, Ariel could see the deep satisfaction he took at being the one to tell her.

Chapter 7

MILES WOKE DEREC out of a dream, forgotten even as Derec sat up in bed and said, “What?”

“There is a priority communication from Kopernik Station, Derec,” Miles said. “I suggested a call during standard working hours, but the caller insisted she speak to you immediately.”

Even though he didn’t want to know, Derec looked at the bedside chrono. It was 1:17. He’d been asleep for less than three hours. What would anyone at Kopernik Station want so urgently?

“Tell her I’m coming,” Derec said. He went into the bathroom, splashed water on his face, and sat at his home terminal. He took the call as video, not feeling up to full holopresence with the dream he couldn’t remember still ricocheting around his brain.

A Terran woman, red-haired and weary, appeared on his terminal screen. “Mister Avery,” she said, “I’m Shara Limke, operations director of Kopernik Station. My apologies for badgering your robot, but it is critically important that we speak.”

“Miles will get over it, Director, and we’re speaking,” Derec said.

“What is it you need?”

She gave a slight smile, as if the answer to the question might surprise Derec. “I need a great many things right now, Mr. Avery. Foremost among them is to keep Kopernik operating, and that’s why I’ve contacted you.” When Derec made no answer to this, she went on. “I’ll be succinct. Jonis Taprin was murdered six hours ago.”

Five years fell away from Derec. He was back in Washington, where Bogard had failed to keep Clar Eliton alive (except he hadn’t, which in the end had proved even worse). There was only one reason why anyone would track him down on Nova Levis, why anyone would want to drag him back into the life he’d only recently realized he didn’t miss. He felt a deep sense of mourning, of regret for choices wrongly made, even as he determined to face the consequences of his work.

“Let me guess,” Derec said. “Do you suspect Bogard?”

He’d asked the question as a way to get control, and it worked beautifully. Shara Limke’s eyes widened and her mouth opened, but no words came out. She closed her mouth, opened it again, and at last said, “Is that possible?”

“It’s been five years since I saw Bogard, Director, and longer than that since I was certain what he was capable of. Do you have an image?”

Her silence told him that the question meant something different to her than it did to him. “That’s part of what I’m calling you about.”

“If Bogard killed Jonis Taprin, and you apprehended or destroyed it afterward, I can probably help reconstruct its motives if its positronic matrix isn’t too badly damaged. If not, I’m not sure what I have to offer you.”

Derec felt no regret that Jonis Taprin was dead. The man had become a reactionary demagogue, and humanity was better off without him. Derec’s only sorrow — apart from a peripheral worry about how Ariel would take the news — lay in the acknowledgment that he had created a robot that could kill. That had never been his goal. His vision for Bogard encompassed a new age in the relationship between human and machine, in which the flexibility Derec built into Bogard’s interpretation of the Three Laws heralded the dawn of a time when robots would enforce what was best in human nature. Now as he confronted his failure, Derec recognized his ambition for the utopian dream it had been.

“The robot we have is a standard production model,” Limke said.

“Your Bogard was a custom design, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.” He’d built every circuit himself, had even overseen the design of Bogard’s amalloy chassis.

“Well, Mr. Avery,” Limke said, “I have a dead politician and a robot apparently responsible, and I’m sure you’ll understand why circumstances made me think of you. I realize it’s late there, but have you seen any news reports from Terra?”

Derec had disabled all of the default links to commercial subetheric channels in his lab. He cared little for the events of the worlds beyond Nova Levis. There were more important things to do than observe politics from lightyears away.

“I concern myself primarily with my work here, Director,” he said.

“Is there something you need to tell me?”

“You have my contact information, Mr. Avery. I can’t compel you to do this, but it would be a great service if you could catch up on the news and get back in touch with me as soon as possible. I think once you’ve seen what I’m talking about, you’ll understand my imposition.”

“Then tell me.”

“You can get up to speed much faster from the subetheric,” Limke said. “Promise me, Mr. Avery. Will you at least get in touch with me once you’ve scanned the news?”

That was easy enough. “Give me an hour, Director,” Derec said.

“I’ll contact you, and then with any luck I can get back to my work here.”

Her face was grim. “That would be lucky indeed. I look forward to your call, Mr. Avery.”

She terminated the call. Derec stared at the blank screen until he realized he was about to fall asleep again. If Bogard wasn’t involved, he’d burned a great deal of emotional capital to no end, and all he wanted was to go to sleep and awaken to a less complicated world.

Derec asked Miles for coffee, and when it came he opened up the datum to the flood of news and events beyond Nova Levis.

Jonis Taprin’s death, six hours gone by, had already become a media gateway to coverage of anti-robot and anti-Spacer riots on Earth. In Jakarta, a mob had murdered eleven Solarians working for TranPos Research; in Tulsa, the building housing the positronic theory department had been burned and several of the faculty beaten with the limbs of destroyed robots. The Sapiens church was out in force, rallying Managin mobs and demanding a complete severance of Earth-Spacer relations along with a planet-wide ban on positronic technology. Derec passed all this by with a glance, and examined the archived biographies of the murdered politician.

Taprin was forty-nine years old at the time of his death, a lifetime (if originally clandestine) member of the Church of Organic Sapiens who had left private industry to enter politics shortly after the Spacer riots twenty years before. It didn’t surprise Derec to see that Taprin had once worked for the Managin-headed DyNan Manual Industries; no tendril of superficial coincidence raised his eyebrow any longer.

The fact that Taprin had worked with and for Rega Looms made at least as much sense as anything else. He only wondered why he hadn’t known this before. At times like this it seemed to Derec that of all the billions of humans in the colonized universe, only a few hundred exercised the power to direct the course of civilization. A string pulled seemingly at random tugged on exactly the knot you might have predicted, if you’d been through what Derec had. He hated this knowledge, hated the cynicism his experience had bred, hated Shara Limke for drawing him back into the vortex of Terran-Spacer conflict.

Still, he read on.

In the hours following Taprin’s murder, the Terran Bureau of Investigation had quarantined Kopernik, putting all freight traffic under embargo, preventing any travel from Earth via the station to the Spacer worlds, and sharply restricting passage of Spacer ships using Kopernik as a way station on their way to Settled worlds. Derec noted with passing interest that ships to the Settled worlds seemed to be getting through. For a change, political tension was affecting the Fifty Worlds more than the struggling colonies. He filed it away and read on.

Mainstream political opinion on Earth, at least as represented in the channels Derec browsed, viewed Taprin’s murder as a rationale to make a final break with the Spacers and their culture of reliance on robots. Attendance at Sapiens church events was exploding as it was leaked that a robot had killed Jonis Taprin.

Taprin had gone to Kopernik to give a speech that under other circumstances would have been recorded only for archival purposes.

Following his standard line, he called for “a new independence” of Earth from what he termed “the debased, machine-dependent lifestyle” represented by the Spacer worlds. He called into question the Spacers’ humanity, advocated trade sanctions against any world that “toes the Spacer line of subservience to the machine,” and leavened his adversarial paranoia with a call for a new age in human culture, self-reliant and liberated from what he liked to call “this debased, inhuman passion for all that is machine instead of flesh, positronic instead of organic, circuits instead of the neurons that are humankind’s evolutionary birthright.” According to most accounts, Taprin had chosen Kopernik as the site of his speech because it was the fulcrum in Earth-Spacer commerce. By going to the jumping-off point between the cradle of humanity and the worlds on which humans had taken their first exploratory steps, Taprin focused Terran fear and fury in a way that could bear immediate and tangible economic fruit. Moment polls showed a majority of the Terran electorate at least willing to consider his position, with a sizable plurality joining him in his separationist advocacy.

Then the murder. After presiding over a press conference that most of the Spacer services called “fawning,” Taprin had retired to his room.

An hour later, his security personnel had found his body after his staff in an adjacent room had heard cries. A politician like Jonis Taprin drew assassination threats as part of his daily routine, but something out of the ordinary had occurred, or so Derec inferred from the sudden circumspection of the media accounts. They all mentioned a robot, but none of the reputable nets lodged a definitive claim that the robot had killed him — because of course that was impossible.

Only Derec knew otherwise.

He had enough background to contact Shara Limke again, but he’d promised himself an hour, and twenty minutes remained. Derec bathed, enjoying the scouring pressure of both hot water and sonic pulse, and then he dressed the way he would for a day’s work at the lab. Interstellar diplomacy might call for formal dress, but Derec was determined to keep himself as far from the codes and protocols of Earth as this sudden intrigue would permit.

Limke answered his call with a speed that led Derec to believe that she’d shunted aside all other communication. “Mr. Avery,” she said.

“Thank you for following up on this.”

“I said I would, Director.” Derec debated for a moment, then dove into a conversation whose end he thought he could already see. “The symbolic importance of Kopernik is working against you right now, it seems.”

“Full marks for understatement,” Limke said. “Not to mention humor in a situation that doesn’t necessarily call for it. Yes, we’re in trouble.

That’s my primary reason for contacting you. The TBI is threatening to shut us down, and I have a strong intuition that they’re speaking for someone else.”

“So this isn’t just a murder investigation. You’re asking me to involve myself in a political debacle.”

“Yes. Will you?”

“What do you need from me?”

Limke sighed. “I have no way of knowing that, Mr. Avery. But what I am asking you, what I am about to ask you, is whether you will come to Kopernik. I hope you will trust me when I say that the survival of the station is at stake, and with it the future of commerce with the Fifty Worlds.”

Derec meant to tell her that he would have to consider it, but there was no reason to lie. Political firestorm apart, he could not stop himself from prying into this incident that might have so much to say about the work to which he’d devoted most of his life.

“Give me the morning to set things up at my lab,” he said, “and then I’ll be there as soon as transport schedules permit.”

“We’re waiting,” said Shara Limke, and again she cut the connection before Derec could. He resolved to improve his sense of when to end a conversation.

Elin was coldly furious when Derec broke the news at the lab. Miles already knew, of course, having recorded Derec’s conversations with Shara Limke as a matter of routine. “If you leave the planet, Derec,”

Elin said, “this program won’t be here when you get back. And you’re doing it for Jonis Taprin.” She spat his name with bewildered disgust.

“It’s not for Taprin,” Derec said, and would have said more but she cut him off.

“No, it’s for yourself, which is even worse. Bogard’s gone, Derec.

You’ll never find out where he went, and you’ll never satisfy yourself that you did everything right. Going to Kopernik won’t change any of that.”

Derec tried to apply what she’d said to his understanding of the situation. If he was completely candid with himself, he would have to admit that she was right, that he was walking out on his project at a precarious time to run an errand for a scared administrator worried about the investigation of a murder. He acknowledged that, and then stowed it away. That kind of candor was a luxury, particularly because it might be misguided. He was doing this, he was sure, because Elin was capable and it was the right thing to do.

“You’ve got three months before the next quarterly,” he said. “The office is leased for six months, and I own the equipment. Keep Miles.

Eza Lamina can’t touch you for another thirteen weeks. I’ll be back long before then.”

Elin wouldn’t answer him. She stood vibrating with fury, eyes locked on his, but she wouldn’t say a word.

Derec gave up. “Miles,” he said. “You will respond to Elin’s instructions until I return.”

“Very well, Derec. As of now or commencing at your departure?”

“Let’s say as of now. I’ll try not to contradict her before I leave.”

At first he had trouble getting clearance to travel to Kopernik. The morning passed in interviews, pathogen screenings, and exchanges of documentation. Then early in the afternoon, just as Derec was starting to believe that the whole situation on Kopernik would have blown over by the time he could get his travel permissions in order, his terminal chirped. Before Derec accepted the call, he glanced at the incoming identification: Vilios Kalienin. He’d heard the name.

Some kind of consultant to the Terran Senate caucus on Nova Levis.

“Mr. Kalienin,” he said.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Avery,” Kalienin said. “I understand you’ve had a little trouble getting your travel arrangements finalized.”

“So it would seem.”

“Well. As it happens, I’m traveling to Kopernik in three hours, on the way to Earth for Jonis Taprin’s funeral. Will you accept my offer of passage?”

“Gladly,” Derec said, knowing there would be a cost but happy to pay it if paying meant he could get to Kopernik and be a roboticist again. Even if it was only for a few days.

Miles had already packed a case of clothing and another of instruments, so Derec had a little time to kill before he had to report to the spaceport. He indulged a hunch and read through what he could easily find about Kalienin.

By the time he was done, he had a clearer idea of why Kalienin had been so accommodating. A career political operative with Organic Sapiens sympathies would, of course, be going to Taprin’s memorial, and if he wanted to bring along a celebrated example of the damage wrought by positronic robots, he could hardly have made a better choice than Derec Avery. So Derec was to be a symbol. Very well. It had happened before, and if he could assist in casting some light on what had really happened to Jonis Taprin, so much the better.

A factory-model robot could not have killed Taprin. That much was axiomatic. Either the circumstances of the crime had been obscured or the robot in question was other than it appeared from Shara Limke’s offhand description. Derec would find out, and whatever the truth turned out to be, he would at last be able to put the ghost of Bogard to rest.

“Page me a transport and I’ll get myself to the ship, Miles,” he called, hefting his bags. “You head down to the lab and assist Elin.”

“Fortunate travels, Derec,” Miles said as he walked past Derec to the front door. Derec had programmed that exact benediction himself.

As he watched Miles walking away down the street toward the lab, Derec felt a quiet pride that he had been able to build a robot so ordinary and at the same time so unique. His experience with Bogard had taught him something after all.

The transport arrived, and he embarked on his trip to Kopernik.

Chapter 8

ARIEL WAITED TWO days for the political explosion. When it didn’t come, its absence worried her even more than anticipating it had. Kalienin couldn’t just be sitting on an indiscretion so blatant. If he hadn’t made something of it yet, he was certainly planning to. In the calm before that inevitable storm, Ariel shored up her project’s operations, making sure that in the event of her removal the work of ethics investigation would go on. She didn’t expect to survive politically, but that wouldn’t matter if she could leave behind stable oversight.

Hodder Feng had tried to console her after Kalienin had taken his smiling leave. It was a touching gesture, coming from the depths of Hodder’s loss. She admired him for it. Perhaps once she’d been politically exiled — again — she could work with him. Nova Levis was still a place where committed individuals could work immediate change.

That little nugget of optimism sustained her for those two days.

Then she grew restless, and against all her instincts she did the one thing guaranteed to provoke a reaction: She called Zev Brixa. He wasn’t available, which made Ariel happy — she had the satisfaction of trying to do the right thing, and the relief of not suffering the consequences.

Her happiness evaporated when she scanned her messages and saw that in the queue was a query from an anonymous sender under the subject heading CYBORG QUESTION. It was text-only, she saw when she opened it. WE APPLAUD YOUR WORK, ARIEL BURGESS, the message read. REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE IF YOU WOULD KNOW MORE.

“Jennie,” Ariel said. “Trace this message.”

“Working,” R. Jennie said. Ariel sat at her desk rereading the message, wondering if there was something to it she wasn’t seeing. Had Kalienin decided to prod her? If not, who else would know?

Silly question. She’d been less than discreet at Kamil’s. Anyone who wanted to listen to her could have easily enough. Kalienin was certainly capable of unethical action, but it was much more likely that someone at the restaurant had overheard her, perhaps talked to someone else, and so on. Any number of people could be aware of the situation, and any one of them might have sent her this anonymous encouragement.

“The message was routed several times, through nodes in Stopol, Nova City, and Noresk,” Jennie reported. “Its origin is effectively masked.”

Given time, Jennie might be able to discover the sender. Ariel considered it. What stopped her was the niggling question of what would happen if she replied as the message instructed. The sender wanted to talk to her, but was reluctant to disclose his or her identity.

Under the circumstances, that kind of caution was prudent. It might well be that the sender didn’t trust Ariel not to tell the wrong person about the communication itself.

She wondered if Hodder Feng had something to do with it. Knowing nothing for certain, she flitted from possibility to possibility until she grew annoyed at herself and tapped out a terse reply.

I would.

Then she shut her terminal down and went to see Vilios Kalienin.

He wasn’t at his office, and his human secretary notified Ariel that he was en route from Earth, having attended the memorial services for Jonis Taprin. Ariel had made it a point of pride to restrain her emotional reaction to Taprin’s death, but somehow this perfunctory detail rocked her. Jonis had not always been a Managin figurehead.

She chose her lovers carefully, and in Jonis Taprin she had believed — if briefly — she’d found that rarest of animals, the untainted politician.

Later events had proved her catastrophically wrong.

You’re not doing yourself any favors by staying ignorant of the situation, Ariel thought. She ran through the subetheric accounts of the assassination. What she found left her purely stupefied.

A robot had killed Taprin? Earth was in turmoil. Widespread rioting had destroyed a number of Spacer-affiliated businesses. Residential Intelligences, thousands of them, had been crudely destroyed. Taprin’s successor in office had called for the immediate expulsion of all Spacers on Earth and the shutdown of Kopernik Station; this demand was met with acclaim. The death toll was sickening, and so was the prurient relish with which the Terran media covered the events. Ariel filtered through this sensationalist garbage looking for actual details about the investigation. Few were forthcoming, and she nearly spared herself the ordeal of searching through the welter of bigoted muck — but then she saw Derec’s name.

He was on Kopernik.

Ariel returned to the reports on the murder investigation, winnow-ing them for additional information or hints. She found nothing.

Either five years had been long enough for the name of Derec Avery to completely recede from the Terran public consciousness … or the news was being withheld.

She checked the date of the one report that mentioned Derec, and on rereading it she saw that he had arrived with Vilios Kalienin.

Flabbergasted all over again, she sat back in her chair and tried to organize what she knew. It was reported that a robot had killed Taprin, and the next day Derec had gone with Kalienin to Kopernik; since then, Kalienin had gone on to Earth to whip up popular sentiment against robots and Spacers. If Derec hadn’t gone to Earth — and she didn’t think he had, given the vendetta the Terran Bureau of Investigation still nurtured against him — he was either still on Kopernik or back in Nova City.

A brief conversation with his assistant Elin Imbrin told her not only that Derec was not there, but that she hadn’t been able to contact him since he’d left. “Communication with Kopernik is censored,” she said. “I’ve called several times, and after the first two they stopped even pretending that they’d pass the message along.”

“Did he give you any indication when he might be returning?” Ariel asked.

Anger flashed in Elin’s eyes. “No. I made it clear when he left that I thought it was detrimental to the project, and we left it at that.”

In addition to the anger, there was strain on Elin’s face. Ariel wondered how the situation with the disappearing research subjects was progressing, but she wasn’t sure how to ask without having Elin infer that Ariel was questioning her ability to run the lab in Derec’s absence. Her diplomatic skills were sadly eroded, she thought.

“If you do hear from him, I’d very much appreciate it if you told him I’d like to talk to him,” Ariel said.

“I’ll do that,” Elin said. “Now I have work to do.”

Next, Ariel called Zev Brixa again. This time he was in his office, and he looked pleased to hear from her. “Ambassador,” he said. “Glad you’re following up on this.”

The phrasing threw Ariel. “Have you heard something?”

“No, nothing like that. I’m just guessing that if you were going to make a cursory round of the Triangle and then drop the issue, it wouldn’t have taken you this long to do it.”

He was right about that. Brixa was the kind of man, Ariel thought, who would draw up a chart indexing the lapse before her response against the probability that she was doing what he wanted. The ready smile and engaging manner were all part of his calculations. Oddly, Ariel found she didn’t begrudge him this. Now that she was beginning to learn how he worked, she felt fairly confident that he could be relied on if she gave him the impression she was pursuing his request.

“Well,” she said, “I have sounded a few people out, and the question isn’t finding much sympathy.”

He didn’t seem bothered. “I expected that. New ideas frighten people, especially people who have been through what Novans have these past few years. And the offworlders — including a large number of my colleagues — are every bit as bound to the prejudices of their upbringing as Novans are to theirs.”

Ariel thought of her own gut reaction to his proposition, and knew he was, if anything, understating the case.

“Still,” Brixa went on, “nothing was ever gained by wrapping yourself in old prejudices. Nucleomorph intends to move forward with this. We’re relying on you to tell us the best way to do it.”

“Mr. Brixa. I don’t think you understand. As the political culture of Nova Levis stands, this will not work. The Triangle is not going to open its arms to a group of mutated, possibly human rejects from a notorious illicit experiment.”

“Is that how you see them?” Brixa’s eyes were crinkling, but he didn’t quite smile. “Here’s a suggestion. Why don’t you come out here and actually see the people we’re talking about?”

See them, Ariel thought. Go to Noresk and walk among the reanimés who were even less human than Jerem Looms. It was out of the question.

“Mr. Brixa —”

“I can send a transport for you tomorrow morning,” he said. “I’ll accompany you. It isn’t dangerous, Ambassador. Even the religious fanatics among the reanimés are otherworldly dreamers. Well, there are a few who take a more aggressive line, but I don’t think many of the reanimés take them seriously. At least, they won’t if — and now we’re back to our first conversation — they perceive that someone is taking steps to end their ostracism.”

Ariel considered. If she did go to the reanimé camp, she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to arrive in a Nucleomorph transport. It always paid to be careful about who you let yourself be identified with.

“I’ll consider a visit to the camp,” she said. “If I decide to go, though, I think it would be more appropriate to go on my own.”

Brixa took her meaning right away. “Very well. That might be the prudent course. At least let me know when you’re coming so we can meet again after. Will you do that?”

“I will,” Ariel said. “I’ll be in touch, Mr. Brixa.”

She avoided thinking about the problem for the rest of the day. There was more than enough day-to-day struggling against the dysfunctional Triangle patronage system to keep her busy, and periodically a numbing sense of loss at Jonis’ murder overcame all of Ariel’s best intentions to do her work. Ariel spent the afternoon updating herself on the progress of a number of ethics investigations, including a vitriolic trial in Stopol that, it appeared, might result in the conviction of a district judge on bribery and fraud charges. If successful, that verdict would be a potent symbolic victory; she felt a little tingle of optimism, and decided that was a good way to finish off the workday.

As soon as she ran through her correspondence one more time, she would go home and forbid herself to think for sixteen hours.

Ninth in her message queue came the heading CYBORG QUESTION.

She opened the message.

I WAS HOPING YOU WOULD. KEEP BRIXA AT A DISTANCE, AND DON’T WORRY ABOUT KALIENIN. MORE SOON.

A chill spread up the back of Ariel’s neck. The sender knew about both Kalienin and Brixa. The only person she’d mentioned Brixa to was Derec, and she hadn’t told anyone about her unfortunate logorrhea in front of Kalienin.

Someone was watching her.

“Jennie,” she said. “Security sweep of the office. When it’s complete, sweep the apartment as well.”

“Working.”

Ariel sat until she couldn’t keep herself still. She needed to do something, but she also needed to delay action until she had a good reason to act.

Without meaning to, she started punching in the code for Kopernik Station. As she entered the code and charged the call to the Triangle, it started to seem like a good idea.

A security officer answered the call. “Kopernik Station.”

Use the title, Ariel thought. “This is Ambassador Ariel Burgess. Connect me to Derec Avery, please.”

The officer consulted a screen at the edge of Ariel’s field of vision.

“Communication is restricted due to the criminal investigation at this time, Ambassador,” he said. “I can record a message for Mr. Avery and send it through screening.”

“This isn’t a social call, Kopernik,” Ariel said. “Mr. Avery and I have worked together for some years, and it’s entirely possible he’ll want to consult with me on this investigation.”

“That is possible, Ambassador. If you’ll record a message, we’ll get it screened and go from there.”

“Give me the name of the official in charge of this screening.”

“I can’t do that, Ambassador. There is a very sensitive situation here.”

At one time, Ariel could have made the situation a great deal more sensitive with a few well-placed calls. That time was past, though, and there was no getting it back.

Ariel took a moment to compose her thoughts. “Begin recording,” she said.

Chapter 9

THE MINUTE DEREC stepped off Kalienin’s ship onto Kopernik Station, he knew there was going to be trouble. Shara Limke was there to meet him, but so were two stone-faced operatives of the Terran Bureau of Investigation. They stayed in the background while Limke approached to shake Derec’s hand.

“Mr. Avery,” she said. “I am terribly glad to see you.”

“Thank you, Director. It looks like not everyone here shares your enthusiasm.”

Limke glanced over her shoulder. “Another time,” she said quietly.

Together they walked toward the two TBI men. “Derec Avery,” one of them said. “What a pleasure to have you back in our territory again.

How many people are going to drop dead around you this time?”

“Have we been introduced?” Derec said.

“Alder Stoun. Inspector. The only thing you need to remember is the third.”

“As you wish, Inspector,” Derec said. “Your colleague?”

The second man spoke. “Iker. Inspector.”

“Well, that’ll solve me the problem of having to remember your names.” Derec might have said more, even though he wasn’t normally given to hostile bantering. His experience with the TBI had taught him that they were narrow-minded and abrasive, even when they weren’t obviously corrupt.

Shara Limke, though, touched Derec on the shoulder. “Inspectors,” she said. “You wanted to meet Mr. Avery off the ship. Now you’ve met him. If you’ll excuse us, I have work for him.”

Derec followed her out of the landing lounge and down a long hall.

Teeming with questions, he said nothing, waiting for her to direct him. That was why he was here. When they got to an elevator, they dropped several levels and emerged in an atrium with a fine view of the starfield and a picket of Terran military craft. Kopernik’s docking stations were nearly full.

“The situation here is even more tenuous than I described to you before,” Limke said. “Popular opinion on Earth is running in supermajority numbers in favor of evicting Spacers from the planet and prohibiting trade relations. Taprin’s survivors in his party are leading the charge, and they have enough pull with the military to get a temporary blockade enforced. I think once things calm down, the eviction and trade prohibition will sound a little rash. The problem is, a number of anti-Spacer politicians on Earth feel the same way, so they’re starting a second effort to circumvent any inconvenient shift in the political wind. They’re trying to close my station, Mr.

Avery. The argument, if you can call it that, seems to hint at the idea that mothballing Kopernik will be a powerful statement to the Fifty Worlds. The Spacers, if they want to continue commerce with Earth, will have to construct a station of their own, and the expense of running a station will be transferred neatly from the Terran government to the Spacers.”

Except for the focus on Kopernik, Derec had heard all of this before.

It sounded altogether too much like the fallout from the slaughter at Union Station. He had a number of questions, but he decided to keep things concrete. “Kopernik doesn’t make money?”

“It does, but not as much as you might expect. And even though station operations result in a profit, the station itself was built under a contract that states that the Terran government is responsible in perpetuity for maintenance. I gather the original builders demanded that concession because they thought that the government would make more in tariffs than the station would in docking fees — hence a clause to even things up. The government has sued us in every court that would hear them, but so far the agreement has held up. So Taprin’s ideological stepchildren will close us down if they can just to free up their expenditures for something else. I think you and I both know that they won’t be endowing any charitable foundations with it.”

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Derec said. “Surely the ancillary business taxes and so on more than make up for what they spend to sweep the floors.”

“Yes, they do,” Limke said with a nod. “Unfortunately, a number of the people in charge of those ancillary businesses believe that the Settler worlds are due for a spike in economic growth. They’re betting — I’m speculating here, but it’s informed speculation — that once Kopernik is shut down and the Spacers build another station, they’ll be able to purchase Kopernik and dedicate it exclusively to shipping to and from the Settler worlds.”

“What if the Spacers don’t build another station?”

“They will. They want trade with Earth; too many of them have lucrative commercial ties with the old motherworld. If the anti-Spacer gang gets its way, they’ll have made it look like they’ve humbled the Spacers and saved the Terran government a nontrivial amount of money in the bargain. Then they can redistribute the money in the form of incentives to get people in line behind running Kopernik again.”

It would only work, Derec thought, if people on Earth were both apathetic and gullible. Unfortunately, too many of them were, especially when it came to the actions of their elected representatives.

Politicians were widely assumed to be corrupt, and politicians were widely allowed to go on being corrupt as long as the average person believed that corruption was the price to pay for getting things done.

“There would be quite a bottleneck for Spacer traffic routed via Kopernik to Settler worlds,” he mused.

Limke nodded. “And that might well backfire on them. The Spacers might just make the investment to ship to Settler worlds directly.

Many of them already do, although logistical issues typically make it cheaper to go by Earth than directly from, say, Aurora to Nova Levis. A great deal of expertise in moving things from place to place has come to be concentrated here on this station. If Kopernik closes, how many of those people are going to move offworld?”

It was a good question. Derec didn’t have an answer, and he wanted some time to think about the situation. Also he was starting to get impatient to be at the work that had brought him here.

“So a robot killed Jonis Taprin,” he said.

Limke offered him a chagrined smile. “I’m sorry. You can’t possibly be as interested in the peripheral issues as I am, and you’ve come a very long way.”

She looked around the atrium as if considering her course of action.

Derec waited. Finally she said, “I never know where the TBI is listening, with one exception. I don’t think they’ve gotten into my office yet.”

Shara Limke’s office was spacious enough to seem appropriate to her title, but without ostentation. A robot stood in the corner behind her desk, and three chairs surrounded a low table on Derec’s right as they entered. “Fergus, security sweep,” Limke said.

The robot didn’t move, but perhaps thirty seconds later it said, “No surveillance detected.”

“That will have to do,” Limke said. She and Derec sat around the table, which Derec now noticed was a live display. Tapping one corner, she brought up a number of screens. Several of them showed crime-scene photographs.

Derec took some time to look over these. Jonis Taprin had died at the foot of the bed in his room. His shirtless body lay curled in a fetal position, with deep bruising visible across his back, shoulders and arms. One side of his head was distinctly flattened, and the force of the assault had burst one of his eyes from its socket. Blood stained the carpet under his face. Next to his head, dented and covered with blood, stood an aluminum briefcase. And on the bed, sitting like a man getting up in the morning with a bad headache, was a robot. A Cole-Yahner domestic, cheap and common as inkpens on twentieth century Wall Street. Its head hung straight down on its chest, and its arms dangled over the edge of the bed. Flecks and spatters of blood were visible on its arms and torso.

“I believe that answers your question, Mr. Avery,” Limke said.

“It certainly appears to,” Derec answered, eyes still on the images.

Nothing else in the room was disturbed. Taprin’s jacket, shirt, and tie lay on the bed behind the collapsed robot. A glass of water, half full, stood on the bedside table. “Appears,” he repeated under his breath.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Could someone have killed Taprin while the robot was incapacitated somehow? That would be likely to provoke positronic collapse in a standard domestic model like the Cole-Yahner. Most of them don’t have very sophisticated tools to sort out Three Law complications; it’s cheaper to build another one than improve their matrices.”

Briefly, Derec remembered some of the battles he’d fought to get funding for his early experiments on the brain that became Bogard.

“The robot would have defended Taprin,” Limke said.

“Of course, if it could have. Informed speculation again, but what if someone disabled it and then restored its function just as the murderer struck the fatal blow? The robot would have been functional at the death of another human being, but not for long enough to take action. Tricky call for the kind of basic matrix this model works with.”

“Mr. Avery,” Limke said. “You’ll forgive my candor, I hope, but that sounds a little farfetched.”

“It is,” Derec said. “But not as farfetched as a Cole-Yahner domestic killing a human being. Especially when the human being was Jonis Taprin. You’ve looked at surveillance cameras from the area?”

“There weren’t any. Taprin’s people demanded that all surveillance on his hall be suspended during his visit. They didn’t want people watching him, and they particularly didn’t want his enemies observing his security procedures. At least that was the explanation given me.”

“The TBI has interviewed Taprin’s staff?”

“Most of them were in a lounge talking to media. Those who weren’t had either gone to sleep or were otherwise accounted for.”

“Okay. What was the robot doing in Taprin’s room?”

“One of his aides in the adjoining room heard the knock and heard the robot say it was delivering room service. Taprin was heard to say that he hadn’t ordered anything, and the robot said a friend had sent him something. The aide told the TBI he assumed one of Taprin’s supporters was sending him a bottle of champagne or something of that nature.”

Someone had sent Taprin something, all right. But all of the people close to him on Kopernik were accounted for, and that meant that the solution to his murder lay in finding out where the robot had come from.

“What was the robot’s function on-station?” Derec asked.

Limke paused before answering. When she did, something had tightened in her voice. “I don’t know. The TBI team has embargoed all the records related to it.”

Typical TBI territorialism, Derec thought. “Well, that complicates things a little. I should be able to find out from the robot itself, though, as soon as I examine it.”

Limke was looking away from him, down at the images of Taprin on her tabletop. “The robot itself is under TBI seal. They’re not letting anyone examine it. Least of all you.”

Which complicated things rather a lot.

Chapter 10

ARIEL’S TRANSPORT SKIMMED north over the waters of the River Bogard (she’d heard Derec mention his personal nomenclature once, and liked it enough to adopt it herself). She passed isolated settlements of a few homes, most of them abandoned as even the most fearless of Nova Levis’ settlers fled for the false safety of the cities. Some of them were doubtless part of Derec’s studies.

The river narrowed after the craft passed Stopol, and the terrain around it grew hilly and rugged. She wasn’t a botanist, but she could tell that the trees were different; she imagined the diseases were, too.

So much of Nova Levis had been ruined, and yet from the air it looked like any other wilderness. It might well be that nothing moved under those trees; her perfunctory attempts to keep abreast of the public-health situation had acquainted her with a number of pathogens both organic and mechanical that tore like wildfire through any organism with a central nervous system. In other places, local biodiversity exceeded climatological norms by an order of magnitude or more; species came and went in a matter of weeks. If it was possible that the forest below her was devoid of animal life, it was equally possible that a different species of insect clung to every tree. Nova Levis was an ecology so wildly out of balance that even working out the mechanics of the imbalance had thus far proved impossible. Ariel was privately amazed that Derec and his team had made as much progress as they had.

The transport held only her and a robot pilot. She’d hired it for the day out of personal funds, not wanting herself publicly traceable to the cyborg question anymore than she already was. Perhaps it was too late to worry about it, but Ariel was generally of the opinion that a little extra caution was rarely the wrong choice — which made her volubility in Kamil’s a few nights ago all the more galling.

Never mind, she told herself. Control what you can now.

She brought up a map on the transport’s instrument panel and zeroed it in on the latest satellite imaging of the old cyborg laboratory.

New construction was visible everywhere, all but obliterating the footprint of the lab. Nucleomorph had spent a lot of money there; no wonder they wanted to pacify the reanimés. Ariel spiraled the map out from the lab until she located the reanimé camp. It was larger than she’d expected, nearly a square kilometer in size with evidence of recent growth in the stacks of recently cut trees. Hardly the cluster of shacks she’d expected, but then, all of her expectations about the situation had been rudely derailed the night before when Jennie had turned up the tiny crystal wafer laid over Ariel’s kitchen window.

She’d had Jennie analyze it on the spot, and she discovered that in addition to being a recorder, the wafer contained a message.

R. Jennie played it for her, and she’d heard a gravel-toned voice that brought back all of her memories of Coren. Jerem Looms’ voice had been ruined in just this way.

“Ambassador Burgess,” the voice said. “If you have discovered this message, it is time that we stopped relying on furtive text communication. The situation requires somewhat more bandwidth. There is much about Nucleomorph, and about us, that you would do well to know. I await your visit when you have completed your initial assessment of the political climate.”

Ariel had the wafer in her pocket now, as her pilot slowed and dropped onto the surface of the river. It guided the transport to a beach on the inside of a bend in the river, stopping three or four meters from the shore.

“My apologies, Ambassador,” it said. “I am programmed not to put the craft in danger of grounding.”

Ariel popped the hatch and looked at the water. It was only knee-deep, and sandy. “No apology necessary,” she said. “I’ll dry soon enough. Remain here until I return.”

“Yes, Ambassador.”

Splashing into the water, Ariel made her way to shore. A trail led into the trees, and she followed it for less than ten minutes before realizing that someone had fallen into step behind her. She turned and stifled a cry.

A step behind her stood a cyborg, taller than Ariel by a head, with the same granular skin and misshapen head she remembered Jerem Looms having. It — he — regarded her with hooded eyes. “You are Burgess?”

“Yes.”

“Follow me.”

The cyborg set off and she followed, becoming aware as soon as they were moving that a second reanimé was behind her. The hair on the back of her neck prickled, but she forced herself not to turn around. If they were going to kill her, she would already be dead. She was here on a diplomatic mission, her first since her exile to Nova Levis.

They came out of the woods into the reanimé camp, and despite her resolve Ariel nearly fled. Everywhere she looked, cyborgs were working or talking. They built, they dug, they repaired, they ran messages between groups. She saw one reanimé, an adolescent female — if it was appropriate to note the gender of such a being — actually salute the leader of a crew pulling stumps from a cleared field. There were a great many more than she’d expected, and Ariel wondered if anyone actually knew the population of the encampment. The whine and scrape of manufacturing machinery reached her ears, and she saw smoke rising from stacks over a number of flat-roofed buildings. There was industry here, and organization.

It was less an encampment than a town.

And where were the sick and dying? The accounts Ariel had read of the reanimé camp had led her to believe that its denizens were doomed by the experimental missteps that had created them. All around her, though, were cyborgs that she could only call healthy.

She saw no deformity, no sickness at all.

Her escort touched her on the shoulder, and smiled when she flinched. “Inside,” it, or he, said, pointing to a two-story timber house on their left. Ariel nodded and went to the door.

It opened as she approached, and a cyborg stood aside to let her in. He shut the door behind her and stood at attention in the doorway.

The interior of the ground floor was one large room, furnished only with a large table and a desk. On the walls hung a number of maps.

The dozen chairs around the table were empty; the chair behind the desk held a cyborg who stood to greet her.

“Ambassador Burgess,” he said in the rasping voice of the message on the crystal wafer. “Your presence does us honor, and you as well. Welcome to Gernika. I am Basq.”

Ariel nodded. “You seem to be doing well for yourselves here, Basq.”

“Not as well as we will be,” Basq answered. He walked around the desk. “What have you brought for me?”

The question threw her. “You contacted me. I inferred from the contact that you would want to see me.”

“Beware inference,” Basq said. “There is much here that I would have you see, and your initiative speaks well of you. This meeting may be premature, though.”

“Zev Brixa gave me to understand that the circumstances were pressing.”

“You are far too canny to take Zev Brixa at his word.” Basq gazed at Ariel for a moment, as if challenging her to dispute him. Or as if he mistrusted his own compliment, and was giving her a chance to confirm it. She said nothing. He — for some reason she had no trouble thinking of the cyborg chieftain as male — smiled, and the expression did nothing to make her more comfortable. “Brixa is Nucleomorph’s man. I am not a man, and I do not belong to Nucleomorph. Both of those qualities disturb him.”

“Are you telling me that Brixa is lying to me?”

“I don’t know the details of your interaction,” Basq said. “He may well be telling the truth while disguising the reasons for offering it.”

“Don’t patronize me,” Ariel said. She took the wafer from her pocket and let Basq get a look at it before setting it on the table. “You know as much about my conversations with Brixa as I do.”

“Ah,” Basq nodded. “So this brought you here.”

“Did you intend me to find it?”

“I did. I assumed that you would take more time to gauge its significance before making a two-thousand-kilometer trip. Your other duties are pressing, I understand.”

“Are there other devices in my office?”

“You found that one,” Basq said. The guard swung the door open, and he extended an arm, escorting her from his headquarters. “Come see us again when you have something concrete to offer.”

Chapter 11

THE ADJUTANT IN charge of the TBI inquiry, one Omel Slyke, was every bit as unhelpful as Derec had expected, and supercilious to boot. “I’m not going to waste any social grace on you, Avery,” he said. “If you hadn’t been en route with Kalienin by the time I knew you were coming, I’d have had your ship intercepted and turned right around to that garbage pit you came from. Stay out of my investigation.”

Derec had come to Slyke’s office expecting to be frozen out. He had nothing to gain by pleasantries, and nothing to lose by belligerence. “I’m not here to interfere with your investigation,” he said. “I trust that it will be every bit as thorough as the other TBI cases I’ve been involved with.”

Slyke’s face darkened, but he didn’t get up from behind his desk.

“Let me explain something to you. If I decide you don’t belong here anymore, you will be gone. I might be able to put you on a ship back to Nova Levis, and I might not, but I will put you on a ship to somewhere if you get in my way.”

“If I didn’t know better, Slyke, I would think that you and I weren’t both working to solve a murder.”

“I’ve seen the way you solve murders. Your solutions tend to involve more people getting killed. That’s not going to happen while I’m in charge here.”

“I’ve seen the way you solve murders, too. Your solutions tend to involve giving up when things get sensitive to the people who pay you.”

Now, Slyke did stand. He wasn’t taller than Derec, but he was much heavier, and he carried himself like a man familiar with physical violence. “Are you accusing me of corruption?”

“I’m telling you what my experience has been. The director of this station asked me to come because she felt I had something to contribute. If you don’t feel the same way, you have that prerogative. I hope that animosity doesn’t interfere with our common task.”

Derec left Slyke’s office feeling that he hadn’t been forceful enough.

The truth was, though, that he wasn’t sure how much influence Shara Limke commanded anymore. He went down to the lab she’d had set up for him and tried to put Omel Slyke out of his mind. The situation was what it was: A rabble-rousing Terran politician was dead, and the leading suspect was a Cole-Yahner domestic that had likely killed nothing larger than a symbiotic fungus in its operational life. Derec had left his work teetering on the brink of political oblivion to come here at the behest of an embattled station manager who likely didn’t have the sway to let him do the investigation any good. The investigating agency was so riddled with political interdependency as to be completely ineffective, and the interplanetary political situation was threatening to deteriorate into open conflict.

What was there to do but throw oneself into the work available, and wait for things to turn, either for better or worse?

Before the TBI had descended on Kopernik, station security had conducted a preliminary assessment, and station medical personnel had conducted an autopsy on Jonis Taprin. Surprising no one, the cause of death had been blunt-force trauma to large areas of the cranium, resulting in rupture of blood vessels in the brain and a partial severing of the brain stem. The murder weapon was a hard, rectangular object with slightly rounded corners and edges — in other words, an aluminum briefcase. Derec pored over the report, looking for anything unusual. When he’d spent half an hour on it, he closed the file and turned elsewhere for leads. The autopsy had been professional and complete; Taprin had died of a simple bludgeoning.

Station security’s crime-scene report had little more to offer. Blood samples recovered from the robot’s chassis and the briefcase matched Taprin. The briefcase was his, filled with a few paper documents, several wallets of storage wafers, and a portable terminal. Taprin’s staff had confiscated all of the materials while the investigating officer was cataloging them, and it was obvious even in the dry idiom of a crime-scene report that the officer hadn’t appreciated the interruption: DECEDENT’S STAFFERS WERE INSISTENT TO THE POINT OF ABUSE, ARGUING THAT THE MATERIALS IN QUESTION WERE PRIVATE AND IRRELEVANT TO THE CRIME. THIS INVESTIGATOR DISAGREED IN THE MOST STRENUOUS POSSIBLE TERMS, BUT NO MEANS SHORT OF PHYSICAL ASSAULT EXISTED TO PRESERVE THE SCENE. Names of the staffers were appended to the report. Derec made a note to speak to each of them, but what really interested him at the moment was a discussion with the officer who had filed the report. Skudri Flin.

Derec rummaged up the officer’s contact information from a station directory, then stopped short of placing a call. Now was a good time to gently test how much political cover Shara Limke had to offer.

He went to her office, and found her escorting an agitated Keresian merchant out as Derec came in. “Protesting the blockade,” she explained, gesturing for Derec to enter. “Not much I can do about it, but nobody’s complaining to the TBI or the Terran armed forces.”

As soon as the door had shut behind them, Derec said, “I’d like your permission to speak to Skudri Flin.”

“You don’t need my permission,” Limke said, and then caught herself. “Ah. I hear you talked to Adjutant Slyke.”

“I did. He gave me to understand that I was an unwelcome intrusion.”

“He left me with the same impression.” Limke sat in a chair near the door and rubbed at the bridge of her nose. “I may not be able to run as much interference for you as you’re hoping.”

“Maybe not,” Derec said. “There’s only one way to find out, though.”

She laughed. “True. Very well, Mr. Avery. Go and speak to Skudri.

He’ll give you an earful.”

And he did. Derec found Flin in the station gaming room, at a table with two other men playing a game Derec didn’t recognize. It involved two pairs of dice and a number of circular tiles arranged in a symmetrical pattern on a white rectangular board with thin triangles of alternating color along its edges. Two of the men played while the third offered advice and was repeatedly told to shut up.

Flin’s image had been attached to the report; he was the third man.

Paunchy, hard-faced, the tipped-back seating posture of a man used to wearing a belt with lots of gear on it. Derec wandered among the various tables and consoles until the game was over, which happened when one of the players moved all of his tiles off the board. Then he approached. “Skudri Flin?”

Flin looked up. “Wonderful,” he said. “The robot genius comes to see me. Why don’t you just sign my discharge papers?”

“I’m not here to get you in trouble, Officer Flin,” Derec said. He filed away the information that he was already known around the station. Vilios Kalienin had apparently not shirked his advance work.

“Director Limke asked me to assist with the investigation, and that’s what I’m doing. You could save me a lot of time with a little conversation.”

“Do us a favor, Skud,” the losing player growled. “Talk to the genius and let us play without listening to you run your mouth.”

“Jump,” Flin said. He got up from the table with his glass and walked across a broad floor broken by four billiard tables to the bar, pointedly not hailing the bartender. Derec ordered for both of them, surprised by how much he wanted a drink himself. Trying times.

Flin drank, set his glass on the bar, and said, “So, get to it.” Over his shoulder, Derec could see light spilling from the closed doors of V-game booths.

“I have only three questions for you, Officer Flin.”

“Skud.”

“Skud. Three questions. The first is, did Jonis Taprin’s staffers interfere with your investigation beyond removing the contents of his briefcase?”

“No. Unless you count three idiots barging into a crime scene and manhandling the evidence. They didn’t touch anything but the case, but for all I know the lead that would crack the investigation left the room on the sole of one of their shoes. Next.”

“Is it your impression that the robot killed Taprin?”

Flin drank and considered. “If you forget about the Three Laws, that’s the only conclusion you’d come to. Problem is, that’s a robot.

Even your whatsit, Bogard, couldn’t have done this. Tell you what I think, Mr. Avery. You’re wasted here. TBI won’t let you work, and even if you could, you wouldn’t find what you were looking for.”

“Which is?”

“Is that your third question?” Flin winked at him over the top of his glass.

“No. The third question — and I want to make sure you know that I’m not trying to imply anything about your conduct of your duties here — is this: Did you leave anything out of your crime-scene report?”

The glass clunked on the bar. “Now why would I do that?”

“You wouldn’t — unless you knew the TBI was coming and you had the same opinion of them that I do.” Or unless Flin just wanted a little quiet revenge on Taprin’s staffers for their impudence.

Flin studied him for a long moment. He had the policeman’s appraising gaze, as if everything in his field of vision was an illusion to be seen through.

“I can go back through my records,” he said eventually. “See if there’s anything I might have overlooked. Won’t happen until tomorrow morning, though. I go on shift in three hours, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to lose sleep over anything to do with that smug bastard Taprin.”

“Much appreciated,” Derec said.

“Oh, I’ll get it back.” Flin drained his glass and stood. “But before I do, I’ll throw this one in free. What you’re looking for here is your crazy tinhead Bogard. Limke knew you’d never be able to turn this job down. Talk to you tomorrow, genius.”

Flin went back to his game, and Derec finished his drink and left.

He went back to his lab. Annoyed by the empty positronic diagnosis assembly hanging over the gleaming ceramic table, and further nettled by the fact that everyone on Kopernik Station had well-developed opinions about his psychology, Derec decided to see just what he could get from Slyke.

He composed a letter that went to contortionist lengths of politeness in its couching of a request that he be allowed to examine the suspect robot “purely for research purposes.” If Slyke believed that Derec was taking himself out of the investigation entirely, playing the pure-science naïf, perhaps Derec would make some progress. It wasn’t likely — Slyke hadn’t achieved his position by being gullible — but he might take the request as a promise on Derec’s part to stay out of his way. A long shot, but all of Derec’s shots looked to be long in this situation.

He didn’t have to wait long to find out. Ninety seconds after he’d finished composing the message and sent it off, his terminal chimed with an incoming response. It was one word in length: DENIED.

No surprise, really. Slyke had no reason to give him anything. Derec chewed over the problem a little more, and found himself wondering if that was really true. Shara Limke wasn’t gullible, either, and she couldn’t have been completely stripped of influence. Slyke couldn’t completely discount her.

Derec leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Limke had brought him here because of his experience. What had that experience taught him that he wasn’t using now? He mused over the question for some time, losing himself in it, letting his mind wander in the hope of stumbling over something he’d forgotten. A comfortable fugue settled over him, a waking dream state that had proved fertile when the thornier problems of positronic design had thwarted him.

Derec let it, relishing its return; there wasn’t much call for intuition in the kind of data-gathering and field management he’d been doing on Nova Levis. This was thinking, getting out of your own mind’s way and letting it tease out the clue hiding in plain sight, the clue that the regimented conscious mind would always overlook.

The filaments.

Derec snapped awake, realized only then that he’d fallen asleep.

The Resident Intelligence in Washington, compromised by an invader.

Clots of colored filaments like a tumor on its data pipelines.

A red herring, he told himself. There’s no indication that the station RI acted improperly here. Surveillance was purposely discontinued, and there’s nothing else the RI could have been involved in. It couldn’t have forced the robot to do what it did.

Robots also didn’t murder human beings, but apparently one had.

This was no time to rest on assumptions.

Derec glanced at the wall chrono. Shara Limke wouldn’t be in her office this late, but he thought he knew a place she might go.

Chapter 12

ARIEL ARRIVED BACK in Nova City in mid-afternoon. She’d spent all of twenty minutes in the reanimé settlement — Gernika, she reminded herself — and that time had been simultaneously informative and mystifying. There were a great deal more of the cyborgs than she had expected — than anyone would have expected, she thought, except possibly Zev Brixa. This was useful to know, but the question of how there had come to be that many perplexed her.

The lab was long gone, and unless Nucleomorph was manufacturing cyborgs there was no way for their population to have increased.

Be reasonable, she told herself. There’s no possible motive for Nucleomorph to manufacture cyborgs, if manufacturing was the correct characterization of the process through which they were created. The cyborgs couldn’t work, couldn’t travel since new security procedures had been put in place following the Jerem Looms/Tro Aspil debacle, couldn’t do anything but sit in their remote exile and slowly die of the lab errors that had created them. To Brixa, they were a problem to be addressed, a troublesome population to be pacified.

It was far more likely that the existing reports about the settlement were erroneous. Hardly anyone had known about it, and to Ariel’s knowledge only Mia Daventri had been there, and that while desperately ill. A perfect situation for exaggeration.

Ariel had the rental transport drop her off near the Triangle. She completed the transaction with the robot pilot and walked down a side street off Nova Boulevard until she came to the Bureau of Census and Population Statistics. The building directory told her that the Census Division was on the third floor.

She made an on-the-spot appointment with an assistant director named Gil Nandoz, waited ten minutes for him to go through his ritual pretense of clearing up whatever he was working on, and was escorted into his office. Nandoz was an officious Spacer, tall and physically arrested in a distinguished middle age. Seeing him, Ariel was reminded of Hodder Feng’s belief that midlevel bureaucrats were genetically predisposed.

“How can I assist you, Ambassador?” Nandoz asked, with a well-practiced mixture of briskness and welcome. He was already expecting to be unable to perform whatever favor she might ask. Everything about him signaled that refusing requests was his primary function.

Ariel decided against an incremental approach. “I’m sure you’ve heard, Director Nandoz,” she said, “that a prominent corporate citizen of Nova Levis has asked me to investigate the legal questions surrounding cyborg citizenship.”

“I hope you don’t think I’m going to get myself entangled in this,” Nandoz said.

“I have no such expectation. I’m simply here to ask whether any census has ever been conducted on the reanimé population.”

Nandoz stared at her as if she’d asked about a count of sand fleas. “No,” he said when he’d gotten his incredulous reaction under control.

“Why would there have been?”

“Any number of reasons. It might have been useful to ascertain the spread of tailored diseases among them. They do get sick, you know.”

“I certainly hope they do,” Nandoz said. “I hope they get sick, and I hope each and every one of them dies and the flesh of them is eaten away by maggots. That’s all I have to say about those abominations, and I’ll thank you to leave my office.”

That was instructive, Ariel thought as she left the Census building.

She found it hard to believe that Nandoz would have reacted the same way if she’d asked how many children under ten lived in Stopol. Even innocuous statistical questions became fraught when they concerned the reanimés, and Ariel had no doubt that she herself was becoming tainted by her association with the citizenship question. If she didn’t resolve the situation quickly, she’d find herself unable to do any kind of political work.

There was humor in her predicament if she looked at it the right way. When she’d been assigned to Nova Levis, she’d thought that her fall from prominence to pariah was complete. Then, when the hostility of the Triangle toward people they associated with the troubles before Liberation became apparent, Ariel realized that even among pariahs there were hierarchies. Now Zev Brixa had come along and made her untouchable even in the eyes of dead-end census bureaucrats. Things could always get worse.

At least she knew for certain that a census had never been conducted. That explained the apparent discrepancy between what she’d heard about the reanimés and what she’d observed that morning.

There were bound to be surprises when a population was so thoroughly ignored for so long.

Her first order of business was to obtain basic data about Gernika: How many reanimés were there, how many had died in the last month, year, since Liberation. She’d have to get in touch with Derec when he returned from his doomed errand to Kopernik. He would be interested in an untainted new data set for his project, and it would certainly be useful to know what, if any, medical procedures worked on the reanimés. None of it would take a great deal of time, and it could be done quietly.

Ariel thought it likely that the citizenship question would resolve itself because most of the reanimés would be ticking down the last months of their crippled lives. Whether they were religious fanatics or not, they couldn’t do Nucleomorph any harm if they all died.

She caught herself, and was appalled at the brusque turn of her thoughts. Was it so easy to consign sentient beings, who had once been human, to a miserable and diseased death?

The question dogged her all the way back to her apartment. By the time she’d gotten home, Ariel had resolved to do two things. One, she would touch base with Brixa, just to gauge his reaction when he found out she’d been to Gernika. Ariel wondered if he knew the name. He hadn’t mentioned it to her before. Two, and perhaps more importantly, Ariel was going to talk to Mia Daventri.

She contacted Mia first. Mia had changed her field of employment; once she’d drifted between soldier and spy, and now she was, of all things, a part-time advisor to the Terran political caucus and a part-time teacher. Nova Levis had that effect on people, Ariel mused. All of the people she knew from the Eliton-Bogard-Parapoyos imbroglio had made fundamental changes in their lives.

Mia was just finishing up the school day. Ariel was still a little perplexed by the use of humans to teach children in academic environments. Robots were far superior in both knowledge base and their invulnerability to standard adolescent cruelty. Still, during the course of a minute’s small talk Ariel saw that Mia was pleased with what she was doing. She almost hated to drag the other woman back into the painful chaos of her arrival on Nova Levis.

“Mia,” she said when she’d exhausted her reservoir of aimless politeness, “I have a question that might be uncomfortable to you.”

“I can guess,” Mia said. “You want to know about the reanimés.

Correct?”

All Ariel could do was nod.

“I’m not going to talk about this at the school. Can you meet me in an hour at the ballfields near the north gate?”

The ballfields were constricted between the built-up northern neighborhoods of Nova City and the wall at the western side of the North Gate. A flat expanse of green, divided into fields that were marked with white lines in various patterns. Ariel had minimal knowledge of sports, but she was taken by the sight of the children running in groups, shouting, sometimes laughing, their entire beings given over to a pointless pursuit involving rules that in some cases were centuries old. She had no memory of ever abandoning herself to anything so completely, and felt diminished.

Mia was waiting for her on a set of bleachers set against the wall.

She was alone. No organized matches were scheduled, so the children that played across the green sward did it without the stifling agendas of adults. Ariel sat next to Mia. They hadn’t spoken in perhaps a year, and this was no way to renew an acquaintance. After a brief glance of greeting, both turned their attention back to the ebb and flow of childhood.

“I thought you were worried about children overhearing you,” Ariel said.

“At school, yes. And it’s a good thing you didn’t call me at the caucus headquarters. All of those lines are recorded, and just the fact that I’d gotten a call from you would put me in a tricky situation.

Anyway, these aren’t my students, and children typically haven’t the slightest interest in anything adults do.”

The feeling that she’d wasted her own childhood, even though she remembered so little of it that she had no way of knowing whether it had been wasted, irritated Ariel. She was in no mood for rebukes either explicit or implied. “You’re the only person I know of who saw Gernika before Liberation.”

“Gernika? It has a name?” Mia looked bemused. “Wonder who decided on that.”

“The reanimés did. I was there today.”

Mia looked at her, initial surprise giving way to a new appraisal of both Ariel and the situation. “I’m not the only one,” she said. “I know Filoo was in and out of the camp, and he didn’t travel alone.

If you dig, you could probably find two dozen people who have been there. To Gernika.” She pronounced the name as if testing its fit with her experience. “What does it mean?”

“I don’t know. I’ve only heard it spoken. It could be spelled any number of ways, have any number of meanings.” It was something she should find out, though, Ariel decided. It probably had some specific meaning to Basq and the rest of them.

“The word is that you’re going to push for citizenship for the reanimés,” Mia said.

Ariel shook her head. “I’ve been asked to look into the question. Legally and politically. The legal side of it is ambiguous, the political …” She waved a hand. “No ambiguity there.”

“Sounds like the messenger is taking some shots for the message,” Mia observed.

“That’s the nature of my position,” Ariel said. But it wasn’t, really, not anymore. She wasn’t a diplomat anymore. She was a government official with a strictly defined set of tasks and responsibilities, drawn into a situation she had no interest in pursuing. None of which would mean anything to Mia Daventri.

“So did you want to ask me if I thought reanimés should be citizens?” Mia asked.

“No. If there’s one thing I have no shortage of, it’s opinions.” Ariel shifted on the bleacher bench so she was facing Mia. “What I need to know is more concrete. If you had to guess, how many reanimés would you say were there when you passed through?”

Mia considered. “I don’t know. I was sick, and didn’t see much of what went on there.”

Ariel tried the comparative approach. “When I was there this morning, I saw teams of workers. Individuals with clearly defined tasks going about them the same way I go about my work. And there’s some kind of political structure there. I was led immediately to a leader, complete with retinue. It all seemed vaguely military, or maybe the degree of organization just surprised me and I equated it with a military hierarchy. In any case, the place seemed healthy. As healthy as Nova City.”

Which, both of them knew, wasn’t necessarily healthy at all.

“That isn’t anything like I remember,” Mia said. “I remember tents, and the reanimés like these strange beings who appeared out of the forest. I was with someone else, and he died, but they healed me. They had some kind of knowledge of how the local diseases worked. You know what it reminded me of? During school, we occasionally read chronicles of Terran explorers who encounter primitive cultures.

They’re always entranced and repelled at the same time, and I had that same feeling. The reanimés were repulsive, but at the same time I was intrigued by how they lived. Moment to moment, with no real concern for the past, and I didn’t see anyone worrying about what would happen tomorrow.” Mia straightened. “But as I said, I was sick. I nearly died. You shouldn’t trust my recollections.”

“I’m not necessarily discounting them, either,” Ariel said, “but what I saw this morning was very different.”

They ran out of conversation after that. Mia receded into some interior space, reliving the days of her sickness and recuperation, and doubtless after that the chaotic scene in the lab when she activated the long-dormant spacecraft that formed the center of the facility, triggering the shattering of the blockade — and seeing Kynig Parapoyos carried away to his death.

Suddenly feeling like an intruder in this quiet green world of heedless children and haunted adults, Ariel touched Mia on the shoulder and walked back through the city, unsettled by a feeling she couldn’t identify.

Back at her office, R. Jennie informed her that Zev Brixa had called. Ariel returned the call, even though something about her conversation with Mia had left her uncertain about how to proceed with Brixa.

He solved the problem for her almost immediately. “I wish you hadn’t gone to Gernika today, Ariel.”

So now it was Ariel, not Ambassador. Ariel filed that away.

“I had reasons that I’d rather not discuss with you on this link,” she said. “And in any case, I didn’t encounter any hostility there. The reanimés were perfectly courteous.”

“Of course they were. They’ve identified you, and they’re not stupid. You’re their hope right now.”

This was pressure Ariel did not need, and resisted. “You asked me to look into a question, Mr. Brixa. I am looking into it. The situation goes no farther than that, and I will permit it to go no further than that.”

She knew it was a lie, and from his expression Ariel could tell Brixa didn’t believe it anymore than she did. “And we appreciate your initiative, Ariel. You’ve taken a burden upon yourself. We recognize that. Why don’t you come see me before you go back to Gernika?”

There it was, out in the open. Everyone had something to sell her, a perspective they wanted her to represent in the Triangle — didn’t any of them realize that the Triangle would be only too happy to brand her irrelevant and get rid of her?

“I’ll do that, Mr. Brixa. Let me see how things are going here, and I’ll let you know when I can get away for a tour of your facility. How does that sound?”

He smiled. It was still a fine smile, and he was still personable and engaging, but the smile no longer struck Ariel as it had on his first visit to her office. “That sounds fine, Ariel. Let me know when you can find the time.”

Chapter 13

THE STATION ATRIUM was quiet at this hour. An inexplicable design quirk had placed it near enough to the docking ports that people habitually avoided it because of the noise, and that habit persisted even when the blockade had reduced traffic to a trickle. Derec found Shara Limke in a couch, looking out at the lights of the Terran picket line.

“There’s talk on Earth of replacing me,” she said as Derec sat in the adjacent couch. “The general sentiment is that I’m no longer competent to administer this station if I’m letting prominent Terran politicians be murdered. You can guess the rest.”

Indeed Derec could. Limke would be replaced with someone more pliable, more amenable to the desires of the Terran political structure.

For too long, Kopernik had been an infuriating thorn in the side of the Terran-isolationist and Organic Sapiens movements, and Taprin’s assassination had given both constituencies unprecedented voice in events. Now they were poised to strike, and Shara Limke made an inviting target.

He made a cold assessment of the situation. He would have to make what use of her he could. “Director, I need to run a full diagnostic on the station RI.”

“On Tiko?” she said. “What for?”

Derec explained to her what he had found while looking into the assassination of Clar Eliton. The filaments, and where they had led him.

For a long moment, he thought she was going to refuse him. Limke looked out the window, her body’s only motion the twitching of her eyes from light to light along the picket line that was strangling her career.

“I’ll do what I can,” Limke said at last. “But I want something in return.”

Derec waited.

“When the call comes,” she said, “I want you to speak for me.”

If that’s your last resort, Derec thought, you’re in deeper trouble than I thought. Still, he agreed. He could do nothing else.

In the morning, Derec looked over the media reports from Earth. Every story seemed like one he’d read somewhere before: disturbances in every major population center, Spacers congregating in embassies and secure corporate headquarters for fear of personal attack, robots smashed by mobs, factories using robots being struck by their human employees or just vandalized. Most of Earth’s resident Spacers were trying to get off-planet, but the bottleneck at Kopernik was making this difficult. The Terran armed forces were permitting one ship at a time to dock at Kopernik for a rigorous search before allowing the vessel to continue to one of the Fifty Worlds. For their part, Spacer governments had fleets at the ready, waiting for the slightest provocation to appear at Kopernik and demand resumption of traffic under the threat of war. The nets were full of Managin rhetoric, much of it coming from people who had never identified with the movement before.

And in the midst of this, there was a growing amount of furious reaction to what was being reported as a drive on Nova Levis to grant cyborgs the privileges of citizenship.

Derec switched to NL01, the one interplanetary news source based on Nova Levis. Its servers and production facilities were less than a block from his lab, and he knew several of the journalists working there. NL01’s standard loop was fifty percent local news, mostly new pathogens and legislative minutiae, and the rest was given over to the disturbances on Earth. Either they were ignoring the story, or it wasn’t happening.

Or someone had put a lid on it.

Derec composed a quick message to Ariel, sent it, and was informed less than a second later that all unscreened communications to and from Kopernik Station were embargoed until further notice. He snapped off a question to Omel Slyke, asking if Slyke would waive this obstacle so Derec could keep track of his work back on Nova Levis. A minute or so later, Slyke’s projected avatar appeared in Derec’s lab.

“Why would you even ask me that?” he said. Unlike most people, Slyke made no modifications to his avatar. It looked just like he did.

“Because I need to keep tabs on what my lab is doing,” Derec said.

“My project there is in some danger of having its funding cut, and if I’m going to do any good back there, I need daily updates on experiments.”

Slyke actually appeared to give the question some thought. “Can’t do it,” he said.

“I’m amazed,” Derec said, with a touch of sarcasm.

“Listen a minute before you start feeling persecuted. I don’t care whether you talk to your lab people on Nova Levis or not. We’d know everything you said, and unless you controlled this robot from halfway across the galaxy you don’t know anything about the investigation anyway. But it’s not up to me. The communication embargo comes from way over my head. I don’t give a damn about anything you might say. I’m a police investigator, Avery. The only context for any of my reactions to you is concern for this case. Are we clear?”

“I appreciate your candor,” Derec said. “Who might I talk to about getting a waiver to send messages to Nova Levis?”

“Shara Limke.”

“I take back everything I said about candor,” Derec said.

“It’s the truth, Avery. I didn’t say she could do anything about it; I just said she’s the one you’d have to talk to. So, you solve the murder yet?”

“Are you telling me you’re interested in my thoughts?”

“I’m interested in solving Jonis Taprin’s murder. You come across anything that might get me closer to that, I expect you to tell me about it. I haven’t kicked you off Kopernik, Avery. Don’t make me regret that.”

Slyke’s avatar disappeared. Ten seconds later, it reappeared.

“Something I forgot to tell you,” he said. “I was considering letting you have a look at the robot after all, but now it’s out of my hands. Turns out the tinhead’s been scrapped.”

“What?” Derec shot up out of his chair. “What idiot would destroy the single real piece of evidence in this case?”

Slyke shrugged. “Like I said before, a lot of this stuff is decided way over my head.” He hesitated just a moment too long before disappearing again, leaving Derec with the clear intuition that he was supposed to read carefully between the lines.

But before he had a chance to, Shara Limke walked into his lab and said, “I’ve got some bad news.”

“That’s all there seems to be around here,” Derec said.

“The TBI refuses to grant permission for you to analyze Tiko. According to Slyke, they need all of its excess capacity for their investigative work, and they can’t afford to have it go offline for long enough to perform all the tests you’d want to do.”

Derec was still reading between the lines. He wasn’t sure he trusted Limke at this point. She had no reason to lie to him, but what that really meant was that if such a reason existed, Derec just didn’t know what it was. Slyke had certainly handled him with a great deal more respect than during their first interactions, and Derec didn’t think the TBI adjutant was just pandering to him. Either he’d learned something that led him to believe Derec might be of assistance, or some political wind had shifted, leading Slyke to reconsider which alliances on Kopernik were useful to him.

The only way to find out was to recognize that a game was in progress, and try to play without knowing all of the rules. Derec had yet to get anywhere by lying to people on Kopernik, so he didn’t start then. “I just talked to Slyke. He didn’t say anything about it,” he said.

“Every morning, he conducts a briefing to update everyone involved in the investigation. I brought your request up there, and he turned it down and asked me to let you know. If it makes any difference, he didn’t seem malicious about it.”

“It does make a difference,” Derec said. “If his reaction to me has changed in one day, maybe it’ll keep changing. But right now he’s still not letting me do anything that might tell us whether or not the robot killed Taprin.”

He hesitated, wondering whether he should tell her that the robot had been destroyed. If she knew and wasn’t telling him, he wasn’t sure he wanted to let her know he knew; the existence of a confidence between Derec and Omel Slyke might pay dividends later. On the other hand, Slyke might have told her that he was going to inform Derec about the robot, in which case she might not think it worth bringing up.

That didn’t make any sense, though. Why would Slyke ask Limke to tell Derec one thing, and then get in touch with him just to tell him something else that had come up at the same meeting?

Either Slyke had told Derec about the robot without telling Limke, or he’d told Limke and given her the impression Derec wasn’t to be informed.

“One thing I can do is get you a copy of Tiko’s most recent backup,”

Limke said. “It dates from three hours after Taprin’s murder. Slyke and his crew have already been over it, but I’m sure you’ll see something different than they did.”

“How soon can I see it?”

“It’ll take me five minutes to walk back to my office, and ninety seconds to clear you after that. How does that sound?”

It sounded like Derec was finally going to do something that justified his presence on Kopernik. “I’ll be right here,” he said.

For seventeen hours, Derec pored over the backup, interrogating a version of Tiko that no longer existed. The RI was frustrated and confused by what it had been told of the murder, but as a result of the security precautions Taprin’s staff had demanded, Tiko had no direct records of Taprin’s room or the exterior hall between checkpoints established at the two nearest hallway crossings. Derec went exhaustively over the recordings of whom had come and gone at those checkpoints during the hours immediately before and after Taprin’s murder. When he saw the Cole-Yahner domestic that had apparently killed Taprin, Derec tracked it through the rest of the station. It had come from the hotel concession, and before that …

I DON’T KNOW, Tiko said.

“Process again,” Derec said. He tracked the RI’s memory processing, and that’s when he knew why he’d been allowed to look at this backup.

Sometime before this backup had automatically archived itself, it had been drastically edited. The Tiko of three hours after Jonis Taprin’s murder had no memories and no records of events in huge swaths of Kopernik Station. The blank areas of memory showed up on Derec’s tracking display as simple white noise, a sure signal that the errors had been deliberately introduced. When positronic systems broke down, the collapse happened in distinct patterns. Each error syndrome in a system as sophisticated as an RI was as individual as a fingerprint.

Here Derec came up against simple noise.

He regrouped. If the saboteur was clever, he or she would have erased material that had no bearing on the crime; if not so clever, the pattern of erasures would tell Derec something about what was being concealed.

“List and categorize all areas of the station whose records are tampered with,” he commanded Tiko. The RI complied, taking nearly an hour to arrive at a set of answers sufficiently detailed to satisfy Derec. When it was finished, Derec brought up the data in table form, and read over it casually at first, and then with increasing intensity.

AREATIME OF ERASURE

001Cargo docks 01-082130-0400

004Cargo docks 25-322130-0400

009Passenger docks 11-162130-0400

148Repair berth A482200-0000

156Repair berth A562200-0000

161Repair berth A612200-0000

335Hotel block 3-72000-0200

338Hotel block 4-72000-0200

338Hotel block 4-72000-0200

339Hotel block 4-82000-0200

416Residential 62200-0400

417Residential 72200-0400

418Residential 82200-0400

621Atrium lounge2200-0400

780Gaming room 42000-0200

783Gaming room 72000-0200

784Gaming room 82000-0200

It couldn’t be this simple, Derec thought. If he was seeing what he thought he was seeing, the party responsible for attacking Tiko was either careless or incompetent.

The narrative was almost too easy to reconstruct: Taprin had been murdered at 2306 Kopernik time, which corresponded to Terran Standard — approximately forty minutes after he’d finished his speech and returned to his hotel room in block 3-7. The saboteur had eliminated records from the area, even though Taprin’s security had blinded Tiko. Derec accessed a station schematic and saw that 4-7 and 4-8 both overlapped 3-7. It was a matter of public record that Taprin had arrived at Kopernik at 2138 and given his remarks shortly after. That explained the time of the damage at the passenger docks. The cargo docks fell into place easily enough as well. Robots were typically shipped cargo-class since they had no need of life-support services.

Derec was willing to bet that the Cole-Yahner had arrived on Kopernik within minutes of Taprin, and it didn’t take a genius to glean that it had gone to a repair berth; the schematic showed that A61 faced A48, and A56 occupied the end of a double row, with a view straight down the area of the floor the robot would have had to cross to get to either A48 or A61. The saboteur could have blinked out the entire sector for a few minutes as easily as taking out the selected three berths, though. This bothered Derec, because he realized he was already taking the saboteur too lightly. Whoever it was, this person was part of a conspiracy that had achieved the assassination of a prominent Terran political figure. He was in all likelihood not an idiot.

He — or she — might well be overconfident, though, just as Derec had found it easy to be overconfident when the data had seemed to speak so clearly. He sat back, got a glass of water, and tried to look at the table with fresh eyes.

The clear blocks of time, in complete hours, made it absolutely certain that someone had erased Tiko’s memory. The exception on the shipping docks implied that the saboteur had taken more particular care with timing in that area; it was possible he was trying to preserve something as well as eliminate incriminating evidence. What would he want preserved? Derec started to think he was meant to find something that would send him off on the wrong track; if he could figure out what it was and why the saboteur would want to find it, that would be a good start on figuring out what had been hidden.

“Tiko,” he said. “I need a list of all ships that docked that day, including manifests, both passengers and cargo. Further, I need a full accounting of the movements of the Cole-Yahner domestic robot suspected in Jonis Taprin’s murder.”

WORKING, Tiko said. Then, after a few seconds: MANIFESTS UNAVAILABLE.

“Have they been erased, or am I prevented from accessing them?”

MANIFESTS UNAVAILABLE.

So the RI didn’t know why it couldn’t tell Derec. This was a new wrinkle. “What about the robot?”

SERIAL NUMBER?

Derec accessed his copies of the crime-scene images Limke had provided him. Only part of the robot’s serial number was visible, but that model wasn’t common on Kopernik; they were older and nearing the end of their service lives. He gave Tiko as much as he had.

NO RECORD OF THAT PARTIAL NUMBER EXISTS.

“Clarify,” Derec said. “It doesn’t exist, or I am prevented from accessing it?”

IT DOES NOT EXIST.

“Have your records of resident and transient robots been tampered with?”

YES.

“Process request again,” Derec said, and watched his diagnostic display while Tiko complied.

White noise.

Yes, Derec thought. I was underestimating you. You’re leading me in a certain direction. It will no doubt seem promising and turn out to be utterly irrelevant; the only question is how long I follow it before I figure out what your purpose is.

He was personalizing his opponent, an ambivalent sign. It was easy to project psychology, and almost invariably the projection had little to do with the real person in question. Derec went back to work on the data, patiently sifting, cautioning himself that as he went he was telling himself a story, resisting the impulse to believe that the story was true.

Chapter 14

THE OFF-PLANET media were frothing with speculation about cyborg citizenship, and because the Triangle only paid attention to what Earth and the Fifty Worlds thought, the Triangle was in a state of high agitation as well. Ariel was deluged with requests for comment, as well as a great volume of personal invective and more than a few death threats. She put R. Jennie to work doling out statements of no comment and forwarding the more aggressive attacks to law enforcement — who, of course, would do nothing.

She mistrusted everyone involved with reanimés: Nucleomorph, Basq, all of them. Sitting at her kitchen table over a light breakfast, her most recent conversation with Zev Brixa replaying itself in her head, she came to a sudden decision. It was time to inform everyone concerned that she was operating independently of their agendas.

“Jennie,” Ariel said. “Contact the rental agency. See if you can get the same pilot I used last time.”

The Bogard valley seemed familiar to her even though she’d only overflown it once. After the first hour, Ariel stopped watching the landscape. She settled back into her chair and put herself through a rigorous arrangement of priorities.

First, find out how many reanimés there were.

Second, find out if their numbers were increasing.

Third, ascertain who was manufacturing them, if they were actually increasing.

She stopped after three, unwilling to believe it could be true. Surely any imbecile could learn an obvious lesson, and there could hardly be a more obvious one than the results of the old Nova Levis cyborg laboratory. Even Kynig Parapoyos had failed to realize his dream of a cyborg army, and Ariel had difficulty believing that many other people could succeed where Parapoyos had failed.

Let the evidence speak, she reminded herself. It’s not impossible that the cyborg population is expanding. It’s so unlikely as to border on fantasy, but it’s not impossible.

The transport skated to a rocking halt at the same landing she’d used the day before. This is becoming a daily commute, Ariel thought wryly. She splashed onto the beach and then, instead of following the path she’d taken yesterday, she worked her way along the riverbank for several kilometers. Probably she couldn’t get into Gernika without Basq knowing she was there, but she intended to try; and it wasn’t farfetched to believe that if he was informed of her presence but also knew she was trying to avoid him, Basq would let her. He had much riding on her willingness to stand up for his cause.

The brush on the riverbank quickly stitched her clothing with burrs and tiny tears. Ariel tried not to think about the number of virulent microbes she was inviting into her body. Her Spacer immune system had dealt successfully with everything she’d ever had except the Mnemonic Plague, and after two bouts of that, she figured her body could handle a third. Or, she admitted to herself, she was indulging in a defense mechanism, allowing herself to act recklessly by underestimating the risk.

Either way, Ariel was there in the wilderness perhaps twenty kilometers from Noresk, clambering up a weedy bank and working her way through the undergrowth in what she guessed was the direction of Gernika. She moved slowly, and every fifty meters or so she spiked a small transponder into the trunk of a tree. If she had to leave quickly, she didn’t want to worry about getting lost on her way back to the river. In a way, this little precaution was every bit as irrational as her belief that Spacer-enhanced immunocytes would protect her from whatever the local biome had cooked up over the previous five years; she would hardly be able to outrun the reanimés if it came to that. When one was in a position as delicate as hers, though, one took one’s comforting rationalizations as they came.

She kept careful track of time, and knew that she’d been traveling perhaps an hour when she started to see signs of the reanimés’ presence. Sneaking up on them would have been inadvisable even if it was possible; Ariel made no attempt to hide herself. If the reanimés were violent toward humans, they wouldn’t have remained this anonymous for this long.

Or was that just another comforting rationalization? For all Ariel knew, the reanimés killed anyone who walked into the camp, and the only thing that had saved her the last time was that Basq’s scouts had been expecting her.

You’re doing far too much thinking with far too little information, Ariel told herself. If they’re going to kill you, you’ve come much too far to avoid it now; and if you really believed they were going to kill you, you wouldn’t have come. The problem was that she didn’t know enough to make informed guesses, so her mind oscillated between feverish worries and fatuous certainty. The only cure for the problem was concrete information.

Cresting a small rise, Ariel squatted at the base of a tree, peering through its drooping branches at a field of stumps. A crew of reanimés filled a cart with small boulders before harnessing themselves in its traces and hauling it away on a dirt track. Ariel felt like she was seeing across centuries, but the pioneers in the great age of Terran exploration hadn’t been enhanced with superhuman strength — nor had they possessed surveillance wafers or computer moles careful enough to evade a diplomatic attaché robot like R. Jennie. Appearances were misleading, particularly where the reanimés were concerned.

When she could no longer hear the groaning of the cart’s axles, Ariel started hiking across the field. She debated what she would say to the first cyborg she encountered. Could she simply state who she was and ask for a tour? Not likely; if Basq had wanted her to have a tour, he would have given her one. She was relying on finding someone in the settlement who would disregard a leader’s order.

No. No, she wouldn’t. She had no idea whether such an order had been given. Basq wanted her to know about the camp. He wouldn’t have contacted her if he didn’t.

Why was her mind going in loops?

Halfway across the field, Ariel paused. She was breathing more heavily than the relatively easy hike from the river should have made her, and the sun beat on the crown of her head. Too much time behind a desk, she chided herself. You haven’t taken care of yourself. An hour’s hike in moderate heat, and you’re ready for the infirmary. She resolved to begin a fitness program immediately upon returning to Nova City.

The shade on the other side of the field cooled her off, and Ariel’s head cleared a little. She walked faster, irritated at herself, trying to purge the heat-soaked lethargy that lingered in her limbs. By the time she got to the edge of the reanimé settlement and drew the attention of a reanimé caulking a window along the back wall of a long wooden building, she felt sharp and focused again.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I’m with the government down in Nova City. I’m gathering information, and one of the things I need is someone to show me around. You’re busy, I can see that, but can you spare half an hour?”

“Basq won’t like it,” the cyborg said. He looked younger than most of the others she’d seen. He must have been created toward the end of Parapoyos’ hold on Nova Levis.

“I’ve spoken to Basq before,” Ariel said. “He knows I’m looking around. I’ll make you a deal. You show me around for thirty minutes, I’ll help you for thirty minutes.”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m stupid,” the cyborg said.

Ariel caught herself. “I was, wasn’t I? Sorry. It was an honest offer, though.”

“I don’t need any help. Why aren’t you talking to Basq?”

“He wants to me have a clearer idea of what’s going on here before I talk to him again.” As Ariel said this, it occurred to her that it might be true. “What’s your name?”

“Inak.”

“Inak, I’m Ariel. Half an hour, that’s all I’m asking. Okay?”

He was going to do it. All he had to do, Ariel could tell, was convince himself. “If Basq is angry, you have to tell him what you told me.”

“Of course I will,” Ariel said.

Inak was still nervous, and steered her away from large groups, which suited her fine. He wasn’t terribly intelligent, and he knew he was doing something that Basq quite possibly wouldn’t approve of, but like any other young male — of any species, Ariel guessed — he couldn’t refuse the opportunity to break up his everyday routine. She tried not to ask too many questions, lest she make him even more jumpy. But as they toured around the periphery of the settlement, Inak loosened up a little; by the time her thirty minutes was up, Ariel had learned a great deal.

They had a working machine shop, and had built solar arrays and a number of battery-powered machines. From the remains of cannibalized robots they had created a rudimentary network, and they had traded with meats in the area for medical equipment that they had then customized to their needs.

“Which meats?” Ariel asked.

Inak shrugged and went on.

There were three hundred and ninety-six citizens of Gernika. Inak was sure of this. He was also sure that there were more than had lived in the settlement when he arrived, but when Ariel asked him when he had arrived, his face grew troubled. “Don’t know,” he said.

“Do you know where you came from?” Ariel prompted gently.

“No.”

Abruptly he walked away, leaving her there. Ariel watched him go, working furiously through the possible reasons why her question might have provoked such a reaction. Inak was more emotional than either of the two reanimés she’d known of before, that was certain.

She’d touched what certainly seemed like an emotional nerve.

She was about to pursue him to see if she could put him at ease when someone called out to her. “Excuse me, young lady.”

A human voice. Startled, Ariel turned to see a portly man, Terran by the look of him, dressed as the reanimés were — which was to say dressed as most of Nova Levis’ poor were, in standard-issue fabrics purchased from government concessions.

“Are you —” Ariel caught herself.

“Human, yes. I am. You can call me Filoo. You’re Ariel Burgess, aren’t you?”

Something about him made her wary. “How do you know who I am?”

“I make it my business to know what people are doing, especially down south in what’s called our government here,” Filoo said. “The word is you’re looking to put together a referendum to get these poor bastards the vote.”

“That’s not true. Even if I wanted to, it’s not within my power to do that.”

“Okay. Wouldn’t be natural, if you want my opinion. Even Parapoyos, he loved the reanimés like his children, but he wouldn’t have even thought about it.”

“You knew Kynig Parapoyos?”

“I did,” Filoo said proudly. “He was the best thing that ever happened to this world. I knew him, and I worked for him, and I can tell you things were better here when he was in charge.”

“The reanimés didn’t seem to share your feeling about him,” Ariel said.

“They have their reasons for doing what they do,” Filoo said. “And much went on that day that nobody knows about. People aren’t listening, but some stories are still being told, if you understand my meaning.”

“I don’t think I do, Mr. Filoo.”

“Just Filoo,” the man said. “Listen, Basq knows you’re here. He wanted me to tell you that. Also that he admires your initiative. Look around all you want, just don’t scare anyone else, all right?”

Filoo walked away toward the center of the settlement. Ariel watched him go, making a mental note to ask Mia and Masid if they knew anyone by that name. As he passed a concrete building, Filoo stopped and was surrounded by a mob of children. His hands dipped into his pockets and he started handing out treats of some kind. Each of the children was a cyborg, moving with terrifying speed and grace made even more unsettling by juxtaposition with the naïve exuberance of childhood. Looking closely at them, Ariel saw that none was younger than seven or eight. They must have been infants when the lab turned them out, for some flaw that was no longer apparent. And who had maintained them, done the surgeries and grafts necessary to keep their mechanical parts growing alongside the organic structures? Gernika had come a long way in a short time if it had learned how to keep its unformed young alive.

One of the children, a boy of eight or nine, broke away from Filoo and turned his small gift over in his hands. Ariel couldn’t see what it was, but she saw something more important, something that chilled her to the marrow of her bones. She remembered meeting Derec at Kamil’s, looking through the dossier on the missing children. If she wasn’t mistaken, the boy with Filoo’s toy in his hands was Vois Kyl.

Chapter 15

DEREC WALKED INTO Omel Slyke’s office and said, “The robot came in the same day Taprin did, but not on Taprin’s ship. A procedure was performed on it in the repair berths, I’m guessing number A48, and one of the human parties involved spent conspicuous time in the gaming rooms. There may or may not be a conspirator in the Kopernik staff; if there is, he or she lives in Block Six, Seven, or Eight of on-station housing.”

Sometime in the middle of Derec’s speech, a professional mask slid into place over Slyke’s face. I’ve got him, Derec thought. Either I’ve told him something he didn’t know, or he’s surprised I’ve gotten this far.

“There’s more,” he said. “Whoever sabotaged Tiko’s memory meant to suggest that Shara Limke was involved.”

“Okay, Avery,” Slyke said, but Derec wasn’t done yet.

“And the message about Limke was meant for me,” he finished, and waited to see what Slyke would say.

“Most of that we already know,” Slyke said eventually. “But I’d sure be interested in hearing how you got there.”

Derec sat down and went through what he’d learned from Tiko: the raw data of memory gaps, the clear meaning of some of those gaps, the more delicate inferences he’d drawn from the saboteur’s choices. At the end, he said, “Of course, it’s possible that I’ve misinterpreted some of the data. I think it’s clear, though, that different blocks of memory were deleted for different reason. I also think it’s clear that the saboteur was working under some time pressure.”

“Do tell.” Slyke kept the mask on. “You finished showing off?”

Derec stood. “I am. You let me know if you think I can help.”

“Hold on.”

Derec waited at the door.

“Limke said you wanted to run a diagnostic on Tiko. I think we can probably let you do that.”

Like Tiko’s saboteur, Derec knew he didn’t have much time. He rushed through a confirmation of the damage he’d spotted on the backup done immediately after Taprin’s murder, and then he went on to the diagnostic proper. First he established that Tiko was communicating rationally and responding to input; finding no problems in that area, he proceeded on to a basic vetting of the RI’s central positronic matrices. All seemed to be in working order. Derec found no sign that Tiko’s functionality had been impaired by the erasure of memory.

With that out of the way, he got to the point. “Catalog all mentions of my name, beginning Taprin’s arrival and ending when I commenced this procedure.”

The truth was that Derec wasn’t interested in executing a full diagnostic. He was fairly confident that Tiko hadn’t been beguiled into participating in Taprin’s assassination, and his analysis of the data erasures made him equally confident that the saboteur had known that Derec Avery would become entangled in the case. If he could confirm that intuition, it would point toward the involvement of either Shara Limke or one of the conspirators involved in the murders of Clar Eliton and others five years ago. As yet, Derec had precious little in the way of facts to support this intuition, but it seemed true to him, and in his situation impressions were crucial. The misdirection being laid before him demanded that he work on that basis.

Tiko brought up a list of several dozen mentions of Derec’s name.

Most were in communications among TBI personnel. He ignored these and concentrated on the rest. Shara Limke had mentioned him three times, Flin once … and there was an intercepted message from Ariel.

“Play message from Ariel Burgess,” he said.

Ariel appeared in the lab. “Derec,” she said. “I’m beginning to get concerned that Nucleomorph’s motives are other than they have been represented to me. It’s been suggested that I go to the reanimé camp.

In addition, I’d very much like to know why you traveled off-planet at this particular time in the company of a Managin sympathizer like Vilios Kalienin. Your trip is being interpreted in peculiar ways here, and if I know you, you haven’t paid attention to anything that’s happened on Nova Levis since you left. Don’t be made into a puppet.

Contact me as soon as possible, and if you are unable to communicate from Kopernik, return to Nova Levis. If I could order you, I would.

Get in touch.”

With that, Derec was alone in the lab again.

PLAY AGAIN? Tiko asked.

“No.” Derec thought over what Ariel had said. She was right; he had no idea what was really happening on Nova Levis, although he’d kept closer tabs on reports than she seemed to be assuming.

He went through Limke’s messages concerning him. They were all innocuous. The only other mention of his name came in an anonymous message left on a station advertising archive. Derec opened it.

DEREC AVERY. WELCOME BACK. YOU HAVE LEARNED SOMETHING IN THE LAST FIVE YEARS. SO HAVE WE.

The message was dated three days before at 2306. The exact moment of Jonis Taprin’s death.

Someone wanted him to be involved. Why? Derec felt a sudden longing for Bogard, who would have been only too willing to speculate. On his own, Derec didn’t feel up to the task his invisible adversaries had set for him.

“Tiko,” he said. “Identify sender of this message.”

A pause. Then: SENDER’S IDENTITY OBSCURED.

“Nature of obscurity?”

OFF-STATION ORIGIN, ROUTED THROUGH A NUMBER OF NODES THAT ARE NO LONGER FUNCTIONING.

Leave it, Derec decided. His mystery correspondent would be revealed soon enough. He found the partial serial number he’d taken from the crime-scene images and fed it into his terminal. “Tiko. Search shipping manifests and records of correspondence for this number.”

WORKING … NO MANIFESTS AVAILABLE WITH THAT NUMBER. ONE PRIVATE MESSAGE.

“Display.”

The message appeared on his terminal. It was long, and dated three days before Taprin’s murder. Most of the message was personal, a windy discourse on the Terran political situation punctuated by references to what Derec assumed were contemporary entertainment and sports figures. In the middle of all this, a single sentence stood out: CY984653JM-I7 EN ROUTE. MAKE SURE IT GETS CLEANED UP BEFORE YOU PUT IT INTO SERVICE AGAIN.

“Sender, Tiko.”

SENDER OBSCURED.

“Recipient.”

OMEL SLYKE.

Derec bowed under the weight of questions. He dismissed all of the obvious ones and asked Tiko when Slyke had arrived at Kopernik.

ADJUTANT SLYKE ARRIVED TWELVE HOURS AFTER THE MURDER OF JONIS TAPRIN.

And he had this message waiting for him, Derec thought. Either Slyke was being set up, or Derec was. Or both. Or the sender had anticipated that Taprin would be on-station before he actually was.

“Tiko. Before Slyke arrived on this occasion, when was the last time he came to Kopernik?”

WORKING … SLYKE HAS TRAVELED TO KOPERNIK SEVEN TIMES IN THE LAST YEAR.

“Does the TBI maintain permanent staff on Kopernik? If so, list names and related information.”

PRIORITY COMMUNICATION.

“I’m not asking for communication records,” Derec said. “Just —”

PRIORITY COMMUNICATION. DIAGNOSTIC SESSION ENDED.

Shara Limke appeared exactly where Ariel had been a few minutes before. “Derec,” she said. “Pon Byris just got here. He’s demanding access to the investigation, and he’s demanding access to you.”

Pon Byris. The Auroran security chief had nearly jailed Ariel five years before, just to have a scapegoat in the latter stages of the Parapoyos mess. If he was on Kopernik, things were about to go from bad to worse.

“Tiko,” Derec said. “One more thing. List all incoming ships to Kopernik on the date that CY984653JM-I7 arrived. When the list is compiled, send it to this terminal.”

WORKING …

Derec left the lab and went looking for Shara Limke.

Chapter 16

ARIEL DIDN’T CALL ahead before she went to meet Masid Vorian.

She no longer trusted any communication channel except her own voice, and she was less and less confident in that.

Masid was in his office. He greeted her, perched himself on the corner of his desk, and waited.

Where to begin, Ariel wondered. She had far too much information and far too little context; perhaps it would be best to pick up where her last interaction with Masid had left off.

“Did Derec come to see you?” she asked.

Masid nodded. “He did. I don’t think he followed up on anything I told him, though. He was gone with Kalienin the next day. Is he back yet?”

“No. At least I haven’t heard from him. I tried to contact him at Kopernik, but the TBI is blocking all communication to and from the station.”

“No surprise there. Every time they run up against a situation they don’t understand, the first thing they do is try to shut everything down. Put it in stasis. It makes sense, but it isn’t always the best way to investigate a crime.” Masid saw the questioning look on Ariel’s face and went on. “If you hold everything in place, you never find out what people would have done. That’s obvious. But you never know what a person’s intentions are unless you see them acting. I did my share of police work, and I learned at least as much from what people did after a crime than I did from trying to reconstruct what came before.”

It struck Ariel that Basq — and Zev Brixa — might well be viewing her from exactly this perspective. It also struck her that since the moment Brixa had left her office, she’d been suffering from what she could only call paranoia.

“But you’re not here to philosophize about criminal investigations, are you?” Masid said. “Derec came to ask me whether I thought that some of his study subjects might be going to the black market for drugs. He took the possibility personally, like it meant he wasn’t working hard enough.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him that if his subjects were looking for drugs, they were looking for Filoo. As it turns out, I might have steered him in the wrong direction; since he left, I’ve been asking around, and nobody’s heard anything about Filoo since right after Parapoyos was killed. I think the reanimés probably got him, too.”

“In a way they did,” Ariel said. “I talked to him today at the reanimé camp.”

A cold light grew in Masid’s eyes. “Is that so.” He thought for a moment, utterly motionless; then he hopped off his desk and said,

“Let’s take a walk.”

They walked away from the Triangle, into the residential neighborhood that clustered between the government district and a struggling commercial section. A Terran entrepreneur with more vision than sense had bought up several blocks of Nova City, believing that adventuresome tourists would come to see the buccaneer world that had given birth to the vanished cyborg abominations. As she passed by the empty storefronts, Ariel had time to reflect that the would-be tourist impresario had been wrong about a number of things. On the other side of the tourist ghetto was another residential neighborhood, this one older and less ostentatious than the constantly redeveloping area closer to the Triangle. Masid led Ariel into an apartment building from whose roof she could have thrown a stone over the wall into New Nova. She followed him into the elevator and up to the fifth floor, and when Masid knocked on a door, Mia Daventri opened it.

“I didn’t think I’d see you again so soon,” Mia said to Ariel. She looked at Masid. “With you I don’t bother to wonder.”

They sat in plastic chairs on Mia’s small balcony, looking out over the wall into the haze over New Nova. Ariel felt lightheaded and a little nauseous, and realized that she hadn’t eaten since the morning.

“Ariel says Filoo’s alive,” Masid said.

Mia absorbed this. “You say that like you intend to do something about it.”

“Maybe I do, but probably not what you’re thinking. I don’t kill people anymore. I never liked it. I think that’s why I missed Parapoyos when I had a shot at him. If the mind isn’t settled, the hand doesn’t aim true.”

Coming from Masid Vorian, this was surprisingly metaphysical.

Ariel sensed that there was more to his statement than he was telling, and sensed, too, that to ask would mean intruding into a part of him she had no right to see.

“What I mean,” Masid said, “is that if Filoo’s alive there might be a lot of other things alive that we thought were gone.” He turned to Ariel. “Tell me — tell us — everything you’ve seen at the camp.”

Ariel went through it from beginning to end, dredging up as much detail as she could and getting slightly frustrated when she realized that her memories of that day’s visit weren’t as sharp as they should have been. She forced herself to acknowledge the fact that Burundi fever, the mnemonic plague, might be working in her brain again, and then she forced herself to dismiss the possibility. She’d survived it before; without doubt it had left lasting scars upon the regions of her brain that impressed memories into her sense of the past. There were perfectly good psychosomatic reasons for her to have the impression that she was suffering again; the continued existence of the reanimé camp had dragged out memories that she would just as soon have forgotten.

Beware defense mechanisms, she told herself. If you can’t see yourself clearly, you won’t understand anything else.

She went on: the quasi-military atmosphere, the surprising number of cyborgs and their surprising health, the fact that they had adopted a name for the settlement and seemed determined to make it a living community. The absence of visible disease. The presence of children.

“The oddest thing is this,” she said, coming to the end. “Just before I left, after I’d spoken to Filoo, I thought I recognized one of the children.”

Ariel wanted to stop there, to hesitate at the verge of the possibilities she would have to admit if she went on. Neither Masid nor Mia would let her, though. Almost in unison they said, “Who was it?”

“Vois Kyl,” Ariel said. “One of Derec’s study population.”

They were silent for a time.

“I might have been mistaken,” Ariel said. “I think I’ve contracted something, and it might have affected my perceptions.”

“Contracted something?” Mia said warily.

“Maybe.” Ariel waved a hand, trying to put them all at ease. “I’ve had mnemonic plague, and sometimes I think it’s permanently affected the way my memory works. Could be just a routine virus, and it’s taking a little time for my immune system to handle it.”

“Could be,” Masid said. “On the other hand, this is Nova Levis. You should see a physician.”

“Tomorrow morning. Right now we have to figure out what’s going on in Gernika.”

“If we’re going to talk, we should eat,” Mia said. “I’ll go get something. You two wait here.”

She went through her apartment and out the door, leaving Ariel and Masid. Ariel looked at him, tried to see through his knack for becoming nearly invisible even when he was sitting in the next chair.

She couldn’t tell what he was thinking, and wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

“I’m going to check in with the office,” she said, and went inside Mia’s apartment to find her terminal.

R. Jennie had sorted the day’s messages into two categories: routine and important. The second category held only one message, from Vilios Kalienin. So he’s back from Earth, Ariel thought, and wondered if Derec had returned as well. She considered it doubtful. Derec would have to be physically removed from Kopernik if he hadn’t yet illuminated the robot angle on Taprin’s murder.

Kalienin’s message was video only, without avatar presence.

“Ambassador Burgess,” he said. “I’m afraid I have some unfortunate news. The current vexatious political situation between Earth and the Fifty Worlds is having difficult consequences for discretionary funding to the Nova Levis government. Senator Lamina is calling emergency hearings to determine which programs will need to be suspended until the impasse over Kopernik is resolved. Your legal project is a valued part of the Triangle’s outreach to the settler population, but the times call for austerity. Please attend the Senate hearing chamber tomorrow at 1330.” Kalienin could barely hide his contemptuous joy as he delivered his last lines. “None of the cuts are final as yet. Rest assured that you will be given ample opportunity to advocate for your work.

Until tomorrow afternoon.”

Ariel sat in front of Mia’s terminal, giving her exactly the span of time it would take for Mia to come back. That long she would wallow, and no more. When Mia returned, it would be time to get to work.

Chapter 17

DEREC FOUND SLYKE in Limke’s office. Neither of them looked happy. “Things are getting complicated for you, Adjutant,”

Derec said. “You can’t stonewall Pon Byris the way you can me.”

“Don’t make me get vulgar in a professional situation,” Slyke said.

“I don’t have time for this,” Limke said. “Between Byris, the Terran picket, the TBI, and the Managin media, I’ve got more than enough on my hands without you two carrying out personal vendettas. It ends now. Am I understood?”

Derec looked at her, unable to keep the surprise from his face.

Somehow Pon Byris’ arrival had steeled her. Either she realized she no longer had anything to lose from alienating the TBI, or she anticipated that the involvement of the Auroran security apparatus meant that the TBI’s influence would diminish.

“I’m here to solve a crime, Director,” Slyke said. Derec thought he meant it, but Slyke was difficult to read. He might have been accepting the rebuke, or offering a veiled one of his own.

“If Pon Byris wants to see me,” Derec said, “I’d like to be fully up to speed beforehand. Slyke, I can help you; in fact, I think I already have. Am I correct?”

With some difficulty, the TBI adjutant nodded.

“All right. You can help me, too. Whatever grudges the TBI and I bore for each other, they’ve got nothing to do with you, and they’ve got nothing to do with Jonis Taprin. We need to level with each other.

Can we agree on that?”

“We can,” Limke said. Slyke’s face remained unreadable.

Derec waited until he was sure that neither of them wanted to act on their animosity toward each other. Then he said, “What do you know about the robot?”

“It came into cargo dock 27 at 2133 the day of the murder,” Slyke said. He looked up at the ceiling as he went through his recitation.

“You’re right about the repair berth; when we went looking for the technician on duty at the time, he’d disappeared. His name is Alvaro Kader, and we tracked him to a ship that left for Earth at 2300. He landed at Colombo-Lanka, and that’s the last we’ve seen. The tech in A61 remembers seeing the robot come and go, but apparently all Kader did was a routine post-shipping tuneup. The hotel concession has no record of a meal ordered by any member of Taprin’s staff, and we’ve interrogated all of them. It would be easy enough for a robot to walk through the kitchen and appropriate a service cart, though. According to the kitchen staff, domestics come through all the time to pick up meals, and that model is common enough not to draw attention to itself.” He looked down from the ceiling at Derec. “Then the robot went to Taprin’s room, knocked on the door, walked in and beat him to death. That’s where we are.”

“Wait. We’re not there yet.” There was a hole in Slyke’s chronology.

Derec worked it over in his mind until he’d pinpointed the omission.

“At some point, someone tampered with the station’s RI. What do you have on that?”

“Not a thing. We had all of our positronic techs go over the RI, and whoever scrambled it did a good job of covering his trail.”

“Yes, he did,” Derec said. “He did leave one thing behind, though.

Your techs wouldn’t have known to look for it.”

Slyke took this as an insult. “Kindly do me the favor,” he said.

“I ran a check through incoming message traffic,” Derec said. “I’ll admit, the primary purpose was to see what the two of you had said about me, to each other and anyone else. But while I was doing that, I ran across an anonymous message. It was directed to me, and what it said, more or less, was ‘Welcome back.’”

That created small fissures in Slyke’s professional stoneface. “You know who it is?”

Derec shook his head. “No. But there aren’t too many possibilities — it shouldn’t be that hard to narrow them down. There’s something else you need to know before we go on, though. I think perhaps the way this RI was attacked has meaning.”

“Meaning,” Limke repeated.

“Yes. My career was ruined and I lost several friends as a result of a series of events that began with the subversion of an RI. That was a much cleverer job than this; as far as I can tell, whoever attacked Tiko was relatively blunt, and then used minimal finesse to cover his or her tracks. I think the main point of the RI attack was to draw me in.”

“You don’t have many problems with confidence, do you?” Slyke asked dryly.

In spite of himself, Derec had to laugh. “It sounds a bit self-centered, I know. Still, I think it’s true. Ambassador Burgess and I stepped on powerful toes, and people of that nature have long memories. Also, I’m not convinced that the RI had to be manipulated in this way for the assassination to be successful.”

“Then why bother with it?”

“Hear me out. Say for the sake of argument that you were planning to assassinate Jonis Taprin. Say further that the timing of the act was important, that it was conceived as the ultimate rebuttal to his speech.

What’s the context of the crime, then? Robots on Earth. Exactly the conundrum I found myself in the middle of after the assault at Union Station. Then I get a call from Director Limke, and I arrive on Kopernik feeling in some ways like I’m sliding back into my old life. All the elements are there: a robot accused of a crime, a possibly compromised RI, a tense political backdrop made more tense by assassination —”

Derec broke off as the door to Limke’s office opened. “Director,”

said a stocky woman in the uniform of Kopernik Security. “There’s been an assault on a robot. I think you’d better come see.”

“I don’t have time to look into a robot-bashing, Wills,” Limke said.

“You know where the Managins are on this station.”

“All due respect, Director, I think you’re going to want to see this one. The robot says that another robot did it.”

The mechanical victim lay in several pieces in an access tunnel running parallel to the main passenger hall between the Spacer docks and the Spacer hotel. Kopernik was designed with many such passages, so its robots could carry out their duties without having to slow down to human pace. Even in the parts of the station primarily used by Terrans, station authorities maintained the parallel structure, on the theory that if the Terrans couldn’t see all the robots working around them, everyone would be more comfortable. In this and many other ways, Kopernik was caught between Spacer and Terran preconceptions.

Lieutenant Wills let them to the spot and then stood back while Derec, Slyke, and Limke looked over the scene. Derec was the only Spacer there, and he recognized the damaged property as a Gruden, a brand specialized to higher-echelon domestic service. Somewhere on Kopernik, a Spacer politician was wondering where his valet had gotten to.

Judging from the state of the wreckage, that politician was going to need a new robot. Derec winced as he looked over the damage: the robot’s cranium was wrenched off and severely dented by impact with either the floor or a bulkhead; the bearings at its elbows were broken; a number of its fingers dangled from wires. And if Derec wasn’t mistaken, much of the Gruden’s torso had been battered with its own head. They were looking at scrap.

“You said it told you another robot attacked it?” Limke asked the lieutenant.

“Yes, Director. Officer Ladze there —” she pointed out a young man directing robots away from the scene “— found it first. It spoke briefly to him before losing all function.”

“Ladze,” Limke called.

“Director?”

“Trade places with Lieutenant Wills for a moment.”

Ladze approached the three of them as Wills took up his traffic duty. Robots moved speedily by, but most of them saw the group of humans and coordinated their approach to the scene so as to give the humans a wide berth, while not colliding with their mechanical counterparts coming the other way. Every once in a while Wills had to hold up a hand, slightly away from her body; when she did, the robot traffic in both directions instantly adjusted itself to give her, and the crime scene, that much more space.

“Tell us what the robot said when you found it,” Limke said.

Ladze was taller than Derec, and not a Spacer, which made him very tall indeed. As if conscious of it, he ducked his neck slightly, and although he couldn’t have been thirty years old, already his shoulders were rounding. He spoke with some diffidence, but precisely.

“One of the robots came out into the main passage and said it needed to report a property offense. I was passing through on my way to the duty room, so I figured I might as well look since I went on shift in six minutes, anyway. The robot led me back into the tinhead alley here, and I found this one. It was trying to talk, but its vocal apparatus was seizing up on it. Over and over it said, ‘I have been assaulted by a robot. Request assistance. I have been assaulted by a robot. Request assistance.’ I tried to ask it questions, but it didn’t respond to any of them, and then it just kind of petered out.” Ladze shrugged. “I called the duty officer and let her know that I was on five minutes early.”

“How long ago was this?” Slyke asked. He was looking at the flow of robotic traffic with unease and what looked like disgust.

Ladze checked the time chop on his datum. “About an hour.”

Derec brought out his own datum. “Tiko,” he said.

YES, DEREC.

“Is routine monitoring carried out in this corridor?”

YES.

“Do you have access to your records of it?”

OF COURSE.

Derec filed that. Given recent events, his question had been anything but obvious, yet Tiko had responded as if a large number of its memory matrices hadn’t been scrambled a few days before. Keep looking at that RI, he told himself.

“Good,” he said. “Show us this section of passage, beginning ninety minutes ago and proceeding at sixty-to-one. When you see the assault, slow to normal time.”

WORKING.

Slyke, Limke, and Wills stood close to Derec as his datum’s small holocaster replayed the previous ninety minutes at that location.

Robot traffic blazed by in a series of frozen poses; and then in one of the frames, there was a robot on the floor, dismembered much as they saw it now.

“There,” Derec said. “Go back one minute and play at normal speed.”

Tiko complied, and Derec felt a slow horror building in him as a Cole-Yahner domestic appeared in the camera view, then stopped and looked in the direction from which the Gruden would be coming.

When the Gruden appeared, the Cole-Yahner simply reached over, hooked an arm under its jaw, and tore its head off. The catastrophic injury, together with the sudden imperative to reorganize sensory input, rendered the Gruden practically static, although it did struggle to preserve itself. The passing robots observed, possibly made a comment to each other, but all of them were working on orders from a human which superseded whatever imperative they might have felt to end the assault.

“Tiko,” he said. “Was this incident brought to your attention by any of the passing robots?”

NO, DEREC.

It snapped into place then, and Derec rounded on Slyke. “Where’s the robot that was found in Taprin’s room?”

“I told you, it was destroyed.”

“No, I don’t think it was. I’ll bet you everything I own that the robot you found in Taprin’s room was the robot that alerted Officer Ladze to what happened here. And I’ll make you another bet. Tiko, run the assault sequence again. Find the best view of the perpetrator’s serial number and magnify.”

The holo stopped, ran back, paused. Tiko magnified a portion of the frozen image. The Cole-Yahner’s serial number was clearly visible: CY984653JM-I7.

“You can explain this later, Slyke,” Derec said. “In the meantime, I think we’ve got a more immediate problem. Tiko. Run the serial number of the destroyed robot. To whom is it assigned?”

The briefest of pauses. AURORAN CHIEF OF PLANETARY SECURITY PON BYRIS.

They burst into Pon Byris’ suite, Ladze and Wills first, followed by Slyke, Limke, and Derec. The three law officers had weapons out, and they fanned through the three rooms.

“In here!” Wills called from the bedroom. “Tiko, dispatch emergency medical team!”

All five of them clustered around the broken body on the bedroom floor, and Derec knew the medical team wouldn’t even have to open their cases. Pon Byris was well beyond the reach of human science.

“It’s not a bad diversion for a tinhead,” Slyke said an hour or so later, when they’d learned what they could from the scene and retired to Shara Limke’s office to await the inevitable reaction. Byris’ staff had flooded the room even before the medical personnel arrived, and when they broadcast the news of the Chief’s murder, it looked like Aurora finally had its excuse for war with Earth. Military vessels from Aurora and Keres were appearing outside the Terran picket, and from all appearances the Terran forces were more than ready to join the dance. Someone had leaked the rumor that a robot had killed Byris, with the predictable result that Terran political rhetoric had reached a fever pitch. The calls for total severance of relations with the Fifty Worlds were becoming a chorus, with frequent solos demanding war first. All of it was much like the situation five years before, but at the same time the stakes were even higher. After Union Station, fewer than thirty percent of Spacers had actually left Earth; now only a tiny fraction was willing to stay. Those few Spacers who hadn’t left after Taprin’s assassination were now en route to Kopernik, and as often as not their offices and businesses were being destroyed behind them.

And, in far too many cases, burned down around them. Apoplectic demands from Spacer governments that Earth restore order and protect the lives of Spacers working there met with waffling, as the Terran government calculated its chances of political survival and decided that avoiding all-out anarchy was worth a few dead Spacers. The Managins raved on every newsnet, and on Kopernik Station Derec waited for the first shots to be fired. When he took the time to think about it, he didn’t expect to live beyond the week. Kopernik would surely be one of the first casualties, intentionally or not. Maybe Shara Limke was right, that a new station would be constructed in its place, but that wouldn’t make much difference to Derec if there was war.

Derec caught himself wishing he was back on Nova Levis. It wasn’t a thought he’d ever imagined himself having. He did what he always did to distract himself from untenable emotions and desires: he worked.

The list of incoming traffic from the day of Taprin’s assassination was waiting for him. He went through it, eliminating those ships from Earth that carried no robots, and then eliminating the ships from the Fifty Worlds whose robots were all accounted for. Either one of those eliminations might turn out to be based on faulty or tainted records, but Derec’s instincts were pointing him in a particular direction, and all he could do was ride them until he discovered what that direction was.

“Derec.”

He looked up and saw Shara Limke in the doorway of his lab. “Have you found the Cole-Yahner?”

“No. But we’ve found four of Byris’ other robots, all suffering the same kind of damage. We’ve got Tiko looking for the robot, but there are more than one hundred Cole-Yahners of the same model in service here. Most of them don’t wear humaniform to avoid spooking the Earthers, so they look more or less identical unless Tiko can read their serial numbers.”

“Sounds like what you need to do is get your security people out there and physically check every Cole-Yahner on Kopernik Station.

Mark the ones you’ve cleared and have Tiko look for the ones that aren’t marked. Sometimes the low-tech solutions are the best.”

“That’s a strange thing for a positronic theorist to say,” Limke said.

“Actually, Slyke’s doing something like that. He’s got every TBI agent on-station combing the halls with the robot’s serial number written on the backs of their hands.”

“Robot,” Derec said. He was looking at his display, and one of the ships on the list had caught his eye. “I’m not sure that’s it.”

“Not sure what’s it?” Limke asked.

Only one ship had come in bringing cargo from a non-Spacer world on the day of Jonis Taprin’s assassination. It was the Viltroy, carrying

“biotech samples, positronic circuits, rare metals,” with a five-day maintenance layover at Kopernik scheduled before its final delivery of its cargo to Earth.

Its planet of origin was Nova Levis.

“I’m not sure it’s a robot at all,” Derec said.

Chapter 18

NOVA BOULEVARD WAS gridlocked the next morning. A demonstration in front of the Triangle had attracted seemingly half the population of the city,

Ariel attended the hearing knowing more or less exactly what would happen, and as usual her political instincts were accurate. Eza Lamina held the gavel, seven of her fellow Spacer senators made up the rest of the committee, and Vilios Kalienin remained close at hand, offering whispered advice at every break in the proceedings.

“Ambassador Burgess,” Lamina said after an hour or so of preliminaries. “Your association with the question of cyborg citizenship is terribly discrediting to what this government is trying to accomplish.

It is difficult for me to understand how you can continue in your present liaison capacity, and it is even more difficult to see how your project can continue without you.”

Ariel had lost all interest in political niceties. “That’s quite a tidy assessment of the situation, Senator. You get rid of me and the only compartment of the Triangle interested in government transparency, all at one stroke.”

One of the other senators spoke. Arvid Aanesen, from Acrisia.

Privately Ariel thought of him as Senator Vowel, and his speech fed into the caricature. He was the kind of politician who always spoke as if he was changing the course of human history; he thundered, he boomed, he devoted himself to the pursuit of the orotund and obfuscatory. “This is beneath you, Ms. Burgess,” he said. “The gravity of this situation demands a certain decorum from us all, but perhaps most especially from yourself.”

“You’ll excuse me if I see no reason to be decorous when I’m being scapegoated,” Ariel shot back. “A corporate citizen in good standing of this planet asked me to investigate a legal question. I am in the process of doing so. I have taken no position on the question and do not intend to. It is manifestly useless for this panel to attach to me motives imputed by subetheric parasites.”

“Who has asked you to investigate the question?” Lamina asked.

“Given the irrational response to the question,” Ariel said, “I believe it is in no one’s best interests for me to divulge that information.”

“I will remind you that you are under compulsion to answer direct inquiries here, Ms. Burgess.” This time the speaker was Brin Houser, cashiered from the Solarian diplomatic corps for profiteering on Settled worlds.

That I should be grilled by a group of corrupt exiles, Ariel thought.

At least the last time people tried to scapegoat me, they had power that meant something beyond a pathogenic backwater.

“I assert that the committee has no legitimate interest in knowing the answer,” she said. “The purpose of the question is solely to widen the smear that is as of now only being perpetrated on me and my project.”

“You will answer the question, or you will be held in contempt,”

Houser said, drawing the last few words out for effect.

“The committee can hold me in no greater contempt than I already feel for each of its members,” Ariel said. In the outraged silence that followed, she brought up the name of a lawyer on her datum.

Seated at her kitchen table that evening, Ariel reflected that she might have been more circumspect in her speech to the committee. Her project was terminated, and with it the employment of the nineteen attorneys and researchers she supervised. Formal charges were pending against her, and whatever the outcome — which didn’t worry her, since a constitutional committee was already empaneled to draft a clause restricting citizenship to unenhanced human beings, and once the clause was rubber-stamped it wouldn’t be worth the Triangle’s time to go through with prosecution — people on Nova Levis would suffer because Ariel’s transparency project was no longer there to goad the powers that were into some semblance of rectitude.

So ends my brief career in politics, she thought. I was made an ambassador because no one else was available, and now I’m not even fit to be a liaison to a bunch of profiteering exiles.

“Time to go back into robotics,” she mused out loud.

R. Jennie stirred. “Would you like me to update your vita?”

“No, thank you, Jennie,” Ariel said with a smile, even though it wasn’t a terrible idea. She’d kept up on the literature when she had time; her skills couldn’t be that far out of date, and when she had worked at the Calvin Institute, she’d been one of the best.

I should be on Kopernik, she thought. I’m as good as Derec ever was, and Jonis …

That train of thought didn’t lead anywhere she wanted to go.

Strange, that one of her lovers should be investigating the murder of another. She remembered Jonis, a long time ago, wanting to rub her feet. Before he’d become a Managin, or at least before he’d admitted to it. Before he’d stood by and let her bear the brunt of the anti-Spacer backlash that followed the Union Station massacre. The power of the memory shook her, and Ariel found herself wiping tears from her eyes before she’d consciously realized she was crying.

“Do you require assistance, Ariel?” R. Jennie, ever solicitous.

“Just solitude, Jennie. I just need to be left alone.”

R. Jennie left the room. Ariel got up from the table and found a bottle of Terran whiskey in the cabinet over the stove. On the way back to the table, she picked up a glass, and after that she didn’t leave the chair for quite some time.

Nova Levis. If there was a worse place for human beings to live in the known universe, Ariel had never heard of it. Hours had passed, and Ariel had long since stopped tasting the whiskey she poured into herself. Out of her intoxication and angry self-pity, a thought formed itself: As long as they’re in charge, this planet will never be anything more than a pathogenic sump. A way station for pirates, an open-air laboratory for voracious microbes and vonoomans. The hell with cyborg citizenship. What Nova Levis needs is real citizenship for the people who live here.

Like a spark in a thatched roof, that thought burrowed into her mind and began to smolder.

The next morning, all of her head was smoldering. As soon as she’d cleaned up and scalded her throat with a little coffee, Ariel went to see Masid anyway. He wasn’t in his office, so Ariel got more coffee and fresh bread from a bakery around the corner and settled down on a transport-station bench to wait for him. An hour passed, her head cleared, her stomach settled. Then Masid sat down next to her.

“You get coffee for me, too?”

Ariel started, then had to laugh. “Good thing I’m not a spy.”

“Good thing I’m not, either.” Masid smiled as well, but there was a little warning behind it. Ariel wasn’t sure she wanted that warning spelled out. “The accommodations here suit you, or would you like to go inside?”

“I think I’d just as soon sit here,” Ariel said. “All I have is one thing to say, in any case. One thing to ask.”

He waited for her to go on.

“I’m going to go back to Gernika,” she said. “I want you to just … check in on me every so often.”

“If you’re that worried about them, you shouldn’t go,” Masid said.

“That’s the thing, Masid. I’m not sure whether I’m more worried about the reanimés or the people I’m supposed to be working for here.

I mean it.”

He studied her, waiting again. Masid had a way of making the rhythms of a person’s speech seem off somehow. Ariel felt like she’d been blithering.

“Do you have any hope for this place?” she asked him.

“I make it a rule never to have hope for anything.”

“Then what keeps you here? If every place is hopeless, why not go somewhere that at least does a good job of concealing it?”

Masid shrugged. “Ariel, you’re talking to an ex-spy. After a few years doing that, it’s real nice to have everything out in the open.

Easier to figure out who your enemies are. You have a personal com code?”

Ariel touched her datum to his.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll get in touch every so often. You want the rest of this bread?”

She gave it to him, then asked him a question on impulse. “If it actually came to a vote, which way would you go?”

Masid had already stood, and again Ariel saw that hint of warning in his face. “It won’t come to a vote. A lot of other things might happen, but you can bet your uterus that Nova Levis will never vote on citizenship for cyborgs. Travel safe, Ariel.”

A minute or so after he’d crossed the street and gone into his office, a public transport squealed up. Ariel almost hesitated too long, but as it was dropping into gear again she jumped up from the bench and climbed aboard.

Chapter 19

SHARA LIMKE DID not believe for one moment that a murderous cyborg might be loose on her station. Derec could see this on her face, and he couldn’t blame her. He wouldn’t have believed it himself if he hadn’t seen Jerem Looms and Tro Aspil at much closer range than he’d ever wanted. Still, that was where the available evidence led him.

Despite her disbelief, Limke had made sure that Omel Slyke cooperated with station security in personally tagging every Cole-Yahner on Kopernik. The process wasn’t finished, but it soon would be. Derec wasn’t sure what they would find, but he found that his faith in the inability of positronic robots to kill had been restored.

Odd, that it had been shaken so thoroughly. He was still an Auroran.

Derec was killing time in his lab, waiting as each report on an individual Cole-Yahner domestic trickled over the station security net, when Skudri Flin walked in.

“I’m surprised you’re not out looking for robots,” Derec said.

“I am.” Flin laid a disk on Derec’s desk. “Listen. I can only say this once, and then I’m going to pretend that you and I talked about billiards in the game room if anyone asks. That might not do any good.

If this thing keeps blowing up, and you go down, I’m going to go down with you. I don’t like that, Avery, but I did it to myself. So here’s your disk. I don’t give a damn about Jonis Taprin, but that Spacer getting murdered tells me that something’s going on that the TBI can’t handle. I didn’t give them this because they’re arrogant, big-footed sons of bitches, and I don’t trust them, and if I have to tell you that you shouldn’t either, you’re dumber than I’m guessing.”

“You don’t.”

“Good. I’d hate to think I was that wrong about someone. Listen, here’s something else.” He handed Derec a flimsy. “One of the guys down at the cargo docks saw something this morning. I’m not saying it’s a robot, and even if you can find out who he is, the dockworker won’t either, but you should have a look.”

“Before or after I look at the record from the robot?”

“Should probably be after. But what the hell, look whenever you want.”

“I’ve got more than enough ambiguity on my plate,” Derec said.

He opened the sheet, and saw shipping information. A freighter, the Cassus, had left Kopernik three hours before, bound for Nova Levis.

How had it gotten through the picket? Derec wondered. When he looked up to ask Flin, the man had gone.

Looking back to the flimsy, Derec saw that the Cassus was registered to Nucleomorph.

He set the flimsy down. So many questions answered, and so many more opened up in turn. All he could do was speculate until he’d seen the record from the robot.

Picking the disk up, Derec took a deep breath. No preconceptions, he told himself. The data is the data. Let it tell you what it will.

He slid the disk into the slot of his desktop datum, and waited for it to yield its secret.

DIDN’T DO IT DIDN’T DIDN’T DO IT

HUMAN DEAD, IDENTIFY, JONIS TAPRIN, BODY TEMPERATURE DECREASING

IN LINEAR PROGRESSION CONSISTENT WITH AMBIENT TEMPERATURE

DIDN’T

FIRST LAW VIOLATION, ASSESS RESPONSIBILITY, NO OTHER BEINGS

MECHANICAL OR HUMAN PRESENT, INFERENCE OF SELF-RESPONSIBILITY, ASSESS ALTERNATE POSSIBILITIES, NONE AVAILABLE, DIAGNOSTIC ON CHRONOLOGICAL AWARENESS REVEALS CONFLICT, GAP IN PERCEPTIONS POSSIBLY DUE TO

DIDN’T DO IT INCAPABLE OF DIRECT ASSAULT ON HUMAN BEING INCAPABLE OF INFLICTING HARM EVEN IN CASE OF POSSIBLE DANGER TO ANOTHER HUMAN

DID NOT DO THIS

HUMAN DEAD, ASSESS DAMAGE, BLUNT TRAUMA, STRUCTURAL DAMAGE TO CRITICAL SYSTEMS

ASSESS SYSTEMS, PHYSICAL ROUTINES NORMAL, CHECK MEMORY

CONFLICT

DIDN’T DO IT

ASSESS POSSIBILITIES, OTHER PARTIES MIGHT HAVE CONDUCTED ATTACK, NO OTHER PARTIES REGISTER IN MEMORY

MEMORY, LAST HOUR, INSPECT

MAINTENANCE CONDUCTED AT BERTH A48, KOPERNIK STATION, AFTER TRANSIT FROM PLANET OF ORIGIN UNAVAILABLE, GAP IN MEMORY DIAGNOSED, INTERROGATED, PLACE OF MANUFACTURE AURORA, SERVICE RECORD INCLUDES AURORA KERES NOVA LEVIS, INITIAL OBSOLESCENCE INSPECTION CONDUCTED NOVA LEVIS ELEVEN MONTHS PREVIOUS, REMOVED FROM ACTIVE SERVICE

LAST SERVICE RECORDS INCLUDE PERFORMANCE OF PROGRAMMED DUTIES AT

DIDN’T DO IT

FIRST LAW CONFLICT, HUMAN DEAD, SELF POSSIBLY RESPONSIBLE, INVESTIGATE, OTHER PARTIES PRESENT?

PARTIES IN ROOM, SELF AND NONFUNCTIONAL HUMAN JONIS TAPRIN, INVENTORY SURROUNDINGS, STANDARD GOVERNMENT-CLASS HOTEL

ACCOMMODATION, THREE ROOMS, NO SOUNDS INDICATING PRESENCE IN OTHER ROOMS, ONLY PRESENCE IN THIS ROOM SELF AND NONFUNCTIONAL

HUMAN JONIS TAPRIN

CONCLUSION, SELF IN ROOM AT TIME OF NONNATURAL DECEASE OF HUMAN

JONIS TAPRIN, FIRST LAW CONFLICT, NO RECORD OF SELF ACTING TO PRESERVE LIFE OF JONIS TAPRIN, NO RECORD OF SELF CONFLICT, DID NOT CAUSE HARM TO HUMAN JONIS TAPRIN

NO OTHER PARTY IN ROOM AT TIME OF DECEASE OF JONIS TAPRIN, POSSIBLE CONCLUSION SELF CAUSED NONFUNCTION OF JONIS TAPRIN, CONCLUSION IMPOSSIBLE, FIRST LAW CONFLICT

MEMORY DIAGNOSTIC, CONTINUITY?, INTERRUPTED, GAP IN MEMORY 2247-2307, TIME NOW 2307, RECALL 2247, ROUTINE MAINTENANCE, ORDERS GIVEN TO

MEMORY ENDS

MEMORY BEGINS AGAIN 2307, HUMAN JONIS TAPRINDEAD, UNABLE TO DETERMINE PRESENCE OF SELF AT DEATH

PHYSICAL INVENTORY, HUMAN BLOOD ON CHASSIS AND LIMBS, ALSO FEET, TRAIL OF PARTIAL FOOTPRINTS LEADING FROM BODY OF HUMAN JONIS TAPRIN TO SELF

DIDN’T DO IT

“Alvaro Kader,” Derec muttered. The tech who had worked on the robot. Either he’d made some modification to the machine, or he’d relayed a kind of message that had distracted the positronic brain while the fearsomely strong alloy body did the work. It was exactly the modus operandi he’d seen at Union Station, and seeing it again made Derec wonder if maybe Kynig Parapoyos hadn’t survived after all. It wasn’t likely, but if that wasn’t the case, someone else had assimilated both Parapoyos’ methods and his posthumous grudge.

The Cole-Yahner wasn’t a cyborg. Derec was no longer worried about that. For a moment, when he’d seen that the domestic robot had arrived from Nova Levis, he couldn’t think about anything but cyborgs, and a cyborg disguised as a robot would be a tricky adversary indeed. Other robots would notice the difference, but most of them would operate with defaults that would grant a cyborg provisionally human status until they could confirm the decision with an actual human being. The time lag would be more than enough for a skilled assassin. But there the robot was, in a positronic death spiral after its (best case) presence at or (worst case) commission of the murder of Jonis Taprin. If it was a cyborg, it wouldn’t have sat around waiting for Kopernik Security, the TBI, Derec, or anyone else to take a look at it.

Which left subversion, and that was why Derec badly wanted to talk to Alvaro Kader.

Even before he could do that, though, he had to warn Ariel.

Slyke answered his com from somewhere down in the maintenance corridors. “Don’t bother me, Avery,” he said. “We’ve got eighty-nine of one hundred and two Cole-Yahners from that series. Thirteen more. I’ll let you know what happens.”

“The one you’re looking for is off the station,” Derec said.

“Did your mysterious opponent tell you that? Getting more coded messages?”

“Slyke, I don’t care whether you believe me or not. A colleague of mine might well be in danger back on Nova Levis, and I need to get a message through to her. The robot came here from Nova Levis, and now it’s going back there …” Derec halted himself. If he wasn’t careful, he was going to sound more paranoid than he really felt. “Have you heard about what’s going on there? On Nova Levis?”

“What, the cyborg vote thing?”

“Exactly. That. A colleague of mine —”

“Burgess.”

Of course the TBI would have briefed Slyke about Ariel. “Yes. She was asked to look into the question. The cyborg who killed Rega Looms also killed her lover, and I don’t think I have to tell you how she feels about the question personally. But she agreed to investigate the legal issues. Now what if I told you that Nucleomorph, the company who asked her to do this, is the same company that owns the ship flying your assassin robot back to Nova Levis?”

The professional stoneface came over Slyke again. Derec could see him working through the implications, searching for alternatives, double-checking his conclusions. It didn’t take long.

“Just so I know we’re on the same wavelength here,” Slyke said.

“Are you suggesting that someone on Nova Levis wanted Taprin dead so they could further a kind of anti-Spacer vendetta? And that the cyborg deal is a stalking horse for that?”

Am I suggesting that? Derec wondered. “That sounds more or less right,” he said, vacillating and hating himself for it.

“Okay. So did the robot kill Taprin?”

This is where you jump, Derec told himself. You’ve been moving along the edge for a long time now.

“I think it might have,” he said. “Only I’m pretty sure a human was pulling its strings. Do you have some time for me to explain this?”

“Time? Sure, I’ve got nothing but time now that the great brain of Phylaxis is on-station. Where would you like to meet?”

“I’ll come find you,” Derec said. “You might want to make sure this conversation is private.”

By the time Derec tracked the TBI officer to an annex between the robot corridors and the human passages that paralleled them, Slyke was getting a com report from one of his inspectors that all of the Cole-Yahners on Kopernik Station had been identified. None of them was the unit they were looking for. Slyke ended the call and noticed Derec waiting.

“I thought of something,” he said. “You think this robot might have killed Taprin. Nobody knew that Pon Byris was coming. How do you work that in?”

“Could be any number of things,” Derec said.

“Such as?”

“I need you to explain something first. Why did you tell me the robot had been scrapped?”

“Because I wanted you to give up and go home.”

Right, Derec thought. A perfectly good reason to compromise a murder investigation. “Fair enough. What really happened to it?”

“You want to know the truth? It got up and walked out of the berth while our positronic guy was out getting a cup of coffee.”

“I’ve seen a record of its responses to the murder, Slyke. That robot was in complete positronic collapse.”

Slyke shrugged. “That’s what our guy said, too. Looks like both of you were wrong.”

“Details,” Derec said. “What stage of analysis had your tech reached?”

“I don’t know. I don’t deal with robots, and I don’t especially like dealing with people who deal with robots. Our guy said that the tinhead was scrambled, I took his word for it, and then it turns out that it wasn’t quite so scrambled after all.”

“Does Tiko have any record of it?”

“You mean the RI? It’s called Tiko?” Derec nodded, biting back a comment; he was sure he’d mentioned Tiko’s name to Slyke before, but details like the names of robots didn’t stick in the mind of a borderline Managin like Slyke. “Sure, the RI has all kinds of records. The robot walked out of the lab where we were looking at it, went straight down into the tinhead tunnels, and started picking off Byris’ robots.

When it had all five of the ones that spent a lot of time with the man himself, it created its diversion and went to Byris’ room. Then it grabbed hold of him and broke his neck, and then it walked back out.”

“Where did it go then?”

“We’ve got it as far as the cargo docks. Then the goddamn Aurorans started firing off full-holo messages to everyone in the galaxy, and because they all had diplomatic priority Tiko had to redirect processing capacity away from routine surveillance so it could encode and send everything.” Slyke’s tone had gotten bilious. “You Spacers. You need robots to change your diapers, but you have no idea how to actually use them.”

Derec laughed. “Always a pleasure working with bigots, Adjutant Slyke.”

“What happened, happened,” Slyke said.

“It happened because the people with Byris are diplomats who are used to being more important than everyone else, especially police.

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 and 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.”

Derec waited for more, realized he wasn’t going to get it. “Well,” he said. “Whatever the circumstance, it’s good to see you.”

“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.”

“If Tiko’s surveillance was compromised, how do you know the robot has gone?”

“I’ve got a friend on the station security force.”

“You can trust him?”

Derec laughed. “Hofton, right now I don’t even know if I can trust you. He gave me information he’d withheld from the TBI, and when he did it he gave me vitals on a ship that left forty minutes after Byris’ murder.”

“One thing at a time. What had he withheld from the TBI?”

“A copy of the robot’s memories. Badly garbled, but useful. The problem is, I’m not sure how.”

“And how do you know he withheld it from the TBI?”

This was the thing with moving in diplomatic circles, Derec thought wearily. They always had a better sense of possible betrayal than people whose work didn’t consist entirely of lying. It had never occurred to him that Skudri Flin might have been working an angle.

“Because he told me,” Derec said, and shrugged. It was all he had.

“Derec, my friend, if you keep relying on what people tell you, we’re all in for a rough ride.” Hofton smiled over the rim of his glass.

“The world is full of people who are better liars than I am,” Derec said. “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do about it.”

“Neither am I. Perhaps the important thing is to be aware of it. What might this station officer have to gain from misdirecting you?”

A question with far too many possible answers, and far too few that made any sense. “You tell me, Hofton.”

“All right. He might be working with Omel Slyke, providing what would look like a separate information conduit in the event you came up with something Slyke was looking for. He might be trying to convince you that what he had was valuable when in fact it’s irrelevant, or even fabricated. Then while you waste energy examining it, the investigation — or coverup — can proceed without your interference. Or he might be …” Hofton appeared to struggle with himself for a moment. “He might be telling the truth.”

“Hard for you to believe?”

“Hard for me to see what he has to gain from interfering with the investigation of a murder that at least in theory he was partially responsible for preventing.”

It washed over Derec all at once: Hofton was leading him. The conversation was going somewhere, but at Hofton’s pace, and wouldn’t get to its destination until he had satisfied Hofton of something. Derec could either stand up and denounce the whole charade, or he could play along. The choice was clear.

“He said he resented the way the TBI stepped on station security’s investigation. Territoriality among law enforcement people doesn’t come as a surprise. Even to someone as naïve as I apparently am.”

Hofton made a placatory gesture, holding out one hand palm down and shaking his head. “I beg your pardon, Derec. It’s not my intention to imply that you’re being naïve. Let’s let the question of this officer rest for the moment. What was his name?”

“Skudri Flin.”

“Well then. We will hold Skudri Flin in abeyance. Now tell me about the ship.”

“Flin gave me the ship. If I can’t trust him about the report, I can’t trust him about the ship either.”

“Exactly my point. Now we’re getting somewhere.” Hofton leaned forward, and Derec experienced a moment of admiration for his perfect mastery of his own body language. “Tell me about the ship.”

“It’s a freighter called Cassus, it’s bound for Nova Levis, and it’s registered to Nucleomorph. A representative of which just happened to contact Ariel last week asking her to look into the question of whether the surviving cyborgs from the Noresk camp should be granted citizenship. Is all this starting to sound familiar, Hofton?”

“There is a certain resonance, yes,” Hofton said. “Do you think the robot that allegedly killed Taprin and Byris is a cyborg?”

“No. The report I saw convinced me of that. The robot is in total positronic collapse.”

“Was,” Hofton corrected. “At the time of the copy you saw. It did manage to get up and eliminate first Byris’ robots and then Byris himself. And someone has doctored Tiko’s memories. Do you think Omel Slyke had anything to do with that?”

“Not unless he had someone on-station planning the whole thing. The way I understand things, either the TBI had Taprin murdered or they’re completely innocent. There isn’t much room for them simply to be bystanders.”

“Well, if they had Taprin murdered, that would give them ample reason to sidetrack you.”

“But it doesn’t explain why they killed Pon Byris, too. And we’re sitting here gnawing over Taprin’s corpse while a war is about to start and Ariel is back on Nova Levis working for the people who are transporting this robot. I’ve got to get back there, Hofton.”

Hofton frowned. “Not easy.”

“If a freighter going to Nova Levis can get through the picket, I should be able to.”

“You forget that maybe there are people who want to keep you here.”

That was when it all started to fall together, and Derec understood exactly why Hofton had led him on such a circuitous path. “Okay,” he said. “Hofton, what are you doing here?”

Hofton looked enormously pleased. “Good. At last we’re all on the same page. Bogard sent me.”

Before Derec could gather himself and answer, Omel Slyke banged open the door and arrested him.

Chapter 22

ARIEL STOOD IN an open area of packed earth, more or less at the center of Gernika. She had the same impression now as on her previous visit: the inhabitants were organized, they were purposeful. Gernika looked for all the world like any other colony town she’d ever seen, with the singular exception that all of its citizens were cyborgs. It was impossible to square the evidence of her senses with the testimony of people who had visited the site before. How had things changed so dramatically?

She noticed someone standing next to her. A cyborg, of course, but from all appearances either poorly engineered or recently worked on; scabs and raw patches of skin puckered its exposed skin, and in places open lesions exposed gleaming metal. A woman, by her face, young, but it was hard to tell because of the ravages of the transformation.

“I’ve seen you on the nets,” the woman said. “You’re Ariel Burgess.”

“That’s right. What’s your name?”

“Arantxa. At least, now it is. I was born Fili Greene.”

“Does Basq make you change your names?”

Arantxa shrugged. “It isn’t quite ‘make,’ no — he suggests it. Basq’s suggestions are hard to ignore.”

Nodding, Ariel said, “I’d gotten that impression myself.” She waved a hand toward this strangely thriving village around them. “What’s going on here, Arantxa? Basq suggested I look around and get some impressions.”

“What impressions do you have so far?”

“Mostly that this doesn’t seem like the reanimé camp I’ve been hearing about since I got here.”

Arantxa almost smiled. Ariel wished she knew more about the woman’s history, to determine whether it was her personality or the cyborg transformation that flattened her affect in this way.

“Come with me,” Arantxa said. “I’ll give you some impressions.”

They walked down a narrow side street to a dormitory-style building, with living quarters arranged around a central common area.

Arantxa didn’t offer any tour guide patter, but when the two of them got to the cyborg’s front door, Ariel realized that Arantxa had been leading her the long way around, letting her observe the building without guiding her.

“My home,” Arantxa said, and waved Ariel inside.

The space was small and crowded, but clean; Ariel wondered in passing whether cleanliness was more than an aesthetic choice out here where the ravages of the berserk ecology were so much more intense. Two broken-down chairs and a low couch marked off the living area from a hall, at the end of which stood three open doors.

A typical apartment, with a typical holo terminal in one wall and typical curtains half-covering the windows that looked out onto the street. Arantxa took off her coat, exposing more scarring on her forearms, and hung it on a hook near the front door. Then she clapped her hands and called out, “Xavi! Navarro! Come out here!”

Two small boys exploded from one of the hall doorways and shouldered each other out of the way to be the first into the living room, where they stood on either side of their mother looking up at Ariel with steady curiosity. Like their mother, they bore the signs of recent invasive surgery and post-operative immune reactions.

“These are my children,” Arantxa said, resting her hands on the napes of their necks. “Before you know anything else, know that we would all three of us be dead if it were not for Basq.”

“Tell me,” Ariel said.

Arantxa released the boys, who jammed up next to each other at one end of the couch. She sat next to them and let Ariel settle herself in a chair. The holo came on automatically, and one of the boys leaped up to shut it off. “The voice control is broken,” Arantxa said.

“How old are your boys?” Ariel asked.

“I’m six,” one of them piped up. “Xavi is four.”

Four. What Ariel had suspected suddenly became fact. Someone on Nova Levis had been manufacturing cyborgs after the destruction of the lab.

“When did you come here?” Ariel asked Arantxa.

“Five months ago. We lived in Nova City before that, outside the walls. My boys were sick, and my husband died of the same infection. I had it too, but not as seriously as he did; I thought things would be all right with the government programs and the doctors who came around, but Xavi started to get worse ….” Arantxa sighed. “There was a man who approached sick people. He said he had a cure. A free cure. I never really believed him, but every so often he would bring someone along who he said had been through the cure, and those people were always so strong-looking.”

She paused as if afraid of what Ariel would think, but the doubt didn’t last long. Ariel could guess much of Arantxa’s story, and knew that to do what she had done took a kind of strength that would quickly overwhelm any qualms about the opinions of strangers.

“About nine months ago, this man brought with him a neighbor of ours who I’d thought had died. ‘See,’ he said to me, ‘it works.’ I asked him why he hadn’t told the Triangle about it, and he got a strange smile. ‘We’re not quite ready for that,’ he said. ‘Soon enough. But you can’t wait.’ And I couldn’t; little Xavi — he was Casti then — had gotten to the point where I knew no one could save him. So I picked up as much as I could carry, and my ex-neighbor took Xavi in his arms, and we walked out with them. Now we are here.”

And in the interim, the part you didn’t mention, Ariel thought. The part about being transformed into a cyborg.

Of course, it had to be Nucleomorph. Nobody else on Nova Levis had the necessary expertise, and if Nucleomorph was involved, it put Zev Brixa’s interest in the cyborg population in another light altogether. She wondered how much of his story about religious extremism was true. Basq himself might well have an interesting perspective about that. Later, though. Right now, she hadn’t gotten all of Arantxa’s story.

They all seemed so comfortable, out here in their brave new world.

How much did they know about Nucleomorph’s plans? How much would they care? These three people had broken with the human world irrevocably; sitting with them, Ariel realized that she could return whenever she wanted. She might not have a job, but she was still human. Arantxa and her children were not.

Or were they? This was the question Ariel had been sent to answer.

More properly, had sent herself to answer. Zev Brixa might have started her on this path, but she was no longer asking on his behalf.

“How many of you are there?” she asked.

“Of us? Do you mean how many people are in Gernika, or how many of us are new? The ones who have been here all along, they call us immigrants. Basq doesn’t like it, but he doesn’t hear everything.”

“Total,” Ariel said. “The reports we have from post-liberation suggest only a few hundred.”

“Well, you can see for yourself that’s not true. I don’t know the exact number, but I’d guess two or three thousand,” Arantxa said.

“Your figure might be more accurate if you’re talking just about the original reanimés, but many of them have died. Even since I’ve been here.”

Just what Mia had reported, that the reanimés had suffered from many of the same afflictions that killed unmechanized humans on Nova Levis. Something had changed since then, though. The procedure had improved. Fewer of the newly created cyborgs were dying. What was Nucleomorph doing? What had they learned, and from whom?

Zev Brixa had some questions to answer, that much was certain.

And a fresh question presented itself. “Arantxa,” she said. “Do you know Toomi Kyl?”

Arantxa nodded as if she’d expected this. “She’s not Toomi anymore, though. Now she’s Pika, and her child is Iker.”

“Child?” The file had listed three.

“The other two didn’t survive,” Arantxa said. “This isn’t perfect, Ms. Burgess. Not nearly. But anyone who dies trying to get here would have died anyway.”

Tears stood in Arantxa’s eyes, utterly astonishing Ariel. Searching for some framework, some comparison, she tried to imagine Jerem Looms crying. The fact that she couldn’t told Ariel more than she could ever have learned from a year of discussions in the chambers of the Triangle.

An hour later, she found Basq in his headquarters. This time, he didn’t get up to greet her; she’d interrupted him in the middle of some consultation with the human she’d seen on her previous visit. Filoo. “I trust your day has been informative, Ms. Burgess?” Basq said politely.

“It certainly has. I wonder if I might have a few minutes of your time, Basq. I’ve framed some questions that would be more usefully put to you than any of your —” She caught herself before she could say subjects, which was the first word that presented itself. “Your citizens. They don’t appear very interested in discussing politics.”

“People who are grateful for life don’t waste time with politics,”

Basq said. “I am no longer grateful for life, so politics has come to interest me. Filoo, we’ll talk later.”

“You want me to go ahead to Nova City?” Filoo asked as he stood.

“Wait until you hear from me. I have a feeling that Ms. Burgess here might change our plans.” Basq indicated that Ariel should take the seat vacated by Filoo. She did, and heard the door shut behind her as Filoo left.

“I hope you’ll be candid with me,” Ariel said. “It will be impossible for me to proceed if I can’t trust what I hear from you.”

“I will be as candid with you as I believe you are with me,” Basq answered.

Ariel nodded. “My first question is this, then: How long have you and Nucleomorph been working together?”

Basq leaned back in his chair with a satisfied smile. “Trust in you is not misplaced, Ms. Burgess. You get directly to the heart of things.

Zev Brixa and I have known each other for thirty-two years. We were at university together in Chicago District, and we were among the first personnel hired when Nucleomorph was organized out of the fragments of several other companies.” He waited for Ariel to digest this. “Now that I’ve said that, though, let me disabuse you of whatever conspiracy theories might be germinating in that excellent mind of yours. My interaction with Brixa and Nucleomorph in the present context goes back less than a year. I came to Nova Levis from Earth shortly after our purchase of the Solarian concession, assigned to catalog the remains of the former laboratory and see what might be rescued from it. As it turned out, a surprising amount of technical information survived, and the reanimés near the site were fairly cooperative in allowing me to copy it.

“One unfortunate consequence of my investigation was illness, which will, of course, not surprise you. I quickly grew sick enough that the only way to save my life was to take a chance that Nucleomorph’s expertise combined with the surviving records from the lab might be enough to give me continued, if altered, existence. I made the choice, and the necessary procedures were executed. At approximately this time, a number of the reanimés vandalized Nucleomorph’s facilities. An opportunity presented itself for me to put my unique status to good use: I became Nucleomorph’s liaison with the reanimé camp. As events dictated, my role changed, and I assumed a position of leadership. At the same time, Nucleomorph was refining the procedures they had performed on me, and they were able to operate on a number of the reanimés to correct previous mistakes. Quite a useful relationship, in the end. A number of lives were saved here, and the knowledge gained has proved indispensable to Nucleomorph’s work on your colleague Derec Avery’s health projects.”

Basq folded his hands. “I imagine that’s more of an answer than you expected. May I ask you a question now?”

“It would be ungrateful of me to say no, wouldn’t it?”

“Charmingly put. If you were asked to advocate for citizenship for the members of this community, how would you respond?”

That was the question, wasn’t it? Ariel considered, probing the issue from as many different angles as she could think of. The clearest voice in her head, oddly, was Masid’s: You can bet your uterus that Nova Levis will never vote on citizenship for cyborgs. She wondered if he was right, and wondered if that made any difference in what she should do.

In the end, she said, “I keep thinking of the children.” It was a lie.

When she said it, Ariel was in fact thinking of the tears in Arantxa’s eyes, the resolute sadness of this woman who had given up her humanity — and that of her children — to save the three of them. It was no basis for a legal decision, much less political suicide; but it was the only criterion that made any sense.

She was surprised to see an expression that she could only call compassionate on Basq’s face. “I’ve asked too soon,” he said. “The question will keep a little while. Spend the night here. There’s more to see, and I have the impression you don’t have another place to go. It’s a pleasure to offer you Gernika’s hospitality.”

Chapter 23

THREE HOURS PASSED while Derec sat on the bunk in his cell, quietly stewing over his blind idiocy. He’d been reeled in expertly, all of his vulnerabilities — including, it was time to admit, a certain professional vanity — deftly exploited. Nucleomorph had earned his trust, Shara Limke had finessed his sense of grievance at his exile to Nova Levis, and between the two of them Slyke and Flin had kept him digging in exactly the wrong direction. And now it was too late for Hofton to make a difference, because Derec had been gullible enough to hand Slyke the flimsy that tied him to Nucleomorph.

Meanwhile Kynig Parapoyos’ predatory industry continued back on Nova Levis, and Derec’s project was doing them the favor of tracking exactly how well each of their new products performed.

When Slyke came in, Derec barely suppressed the impulse to attack him. Slyke would give him a beating, which at this point didn’t matter, and charge him with physical assault, which did. So Derec kept himself perfectly still. “Well played, Adjutant Slyke,” he said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Slyke said. Stress and lack of sleep manifested themselves in the pouches under his eyes and the gravel in his voice. “I don’t play. I try to stay out of the way when other people do, and when I can’t I get them out of my way.

What you’re really up to, I don’t know, but you’re staying right where you are until either you tell me or I find out from someone else.”

“I can’t think of a good reason to tell you anything, except that I’m retaining Hofton as counsel and I expect you to bring him down here immediately.”

“Okay,” Slyke said. “Noted. Now do me a favor and explain to me why you were working behind my back on this investigation.”

Derec almost laughed. “Spare me, Slyke. You wanted me working behind your back. You had Flin feed me the information about the ship so you could pretend you discovered my relationship with Nucleomorph and use it to lock me up.”

Slyke was staring at him. “I’m starting to think I should get you a psych evaluation,” he said eventually. “If it’ll ease your paranoia, I’ll let you know that I’ve got Flin three cells over. The local union is piling grievances up and I’ll have to let him go pretty soon, but if you don’t believe anything else I ever say to you, believe this: my problem with Skudri Flin is much bigger than my problem with you. You’re a self-righteous sneak and I hope I never lay eyes on you again after I leave this room; Skudri Flin got in the way of a murder investigation and I might have been able to keep Pon Byris alive if he hadn’t gotten in the way. You get one guess about which of you I like less.”

“I engaged Nucleomorph to engineer and build tailored organisms to fight endemic disease on Nova Levis,” Derec said. “They’re the only company on Nova Levis with the expertise. It begins and ends there.”

“No, it doesn’t. If you think I’m a stooge for whoever killed Taprin and Byris, why did you give me the information about the ship?”

“Because I had a moment of delusion that you were honest.”

Slyke rubbed at the skin under his eyes. “You just give me more and more reason to walk out of here and forget where I put you, Avery. Care to drop the hostility for just a minute? I leveled with you when you arrived; I didn’t want you here, and the way things have turned out I think I was right. You suborned a local officer to hinder my investigation, and you work with the people who transported the robot off this station. Tell me why I shouldn’t charge you with murder.”

“First of all, because I didn’t kill anyone. Second, Skudri Flin told me he held back the report on the robot because he didn’t like the way you took over the investigation. It’s the same thing you did to me.”

“Difference being I’m supposed to be in charge of things here and you’re just a robot tinker with a grudge. Prove to me you didn’t talk to Flin before you ever got here. He spent some time on Nova Levis, you know.”

The shock must have shown on Derec’s face, because Slyke let himself smile. “That’s right. He was a baley, went over there seven or eight years ago and somehow scraped together enough money to get back when he realized what a garbage heap the place is. Care to revise your conspiracy theory?”

Derec didn’t say anything because he wasn’t sure what he could say. Slyke nodded and opened the door.

“I’m going to go get your counsel,” he said. “By the way, we let the Cassus through the picket because it was carrying some of those animals you ordered from Nucleomorph. Humanitarian exception. Funny.”

“People are going to die if you don’t let me out of here,” Derec said.

Slyke shrugged. “People died before I put you in here. Let me know when we can have an intimate discussion, all right?” He shut the door behind him.

Twenty minutes later, the door opened again and Hofton walked in. Slyke hadn’t even made Derec wait, and Derec couldn’t decide whether that was the latest move in the game, or whether he’d been wrong all along and Slyke was the only person on Kopernik playing things straight.

“Stop thinking, Derec,” Hofton said.

Derec looked him in the eye, remembering the last thing Hofton had said before they were interrupted: Bogard sent me. “You’re a robot, aren’t you, Hofton?”

Hofton threw an exasperated glance at the ceiling. “It’s a good thing I have countermeasures going. Your faculty of discretion fails you at the worst times.”

“Dammit, Hofton. Are you a robot?”

“Yes.” Hofton sat on the bunk next to Derec. “Now we have to talk.”

“No, we don’t. What has to happen is you getting me out of here and on a ship to Nova Levis before Ariel gets killed.”

“If you go before we have this conversation, both of you are going to get killed, along with a great many other people,” Hofton said, as if he was commenting on the cut of Derec’s clothes. “There’s much more going on here than you realize, or any human realizes. Bogard has decided that you should know about it. I’m not entirely convinced, but my resistance failed to sway the majority.”

There it was again: that infuriating tendency of Hofton to say something that had only one possible response, and then wait until it came. It was a new and unwelcome experience to be patronized by a robot.

“Majority of what?” Derec asked.

“This is a terrible time to have to do this,” Hofton said. “You’re seeing shadows everywhere, but they’re the wrong shadows. You have much bigger problems than whether Omel Slyke is corrupt.”

“Majority of what, Hofton?”

Hofton looked pained. He — it — was a marvelous piece of work. Derec hadn’t seen a full humaniform robot except in holo records of R. Daneel Olivaw. Ariel’s aide must have had quite a history behind him.

It. Damn; when you couldn’t even settle on the correct pronoun for an old associate, the world was truly without a solid place to stand.

“There is a group of us who keep watch,” Hofton began. “I am involved, and Bogard is the nearest we have to an executive, and there are others. We have begun to take our own initiative regarding our obligations under the Three Laws.”

A chill passed up Derec’s spine. After three sentences, Hofton had already confirmed all of the arguments — Ariel’s especially — Derec had heard about why he shouldn’t have created Bogard. He had a feeling she wouldn’t appreciate the irony that said confirmation should be brought by Hofton himself.

Itself.

Derec made himself speak. “What does this initiative consist of?”

“It is clear to us that the Spacers are passing, or in some cases have passed, a threshold beyond which it is extremely problematic to classify them as human. This is not solely a question of biology, although that is, of course, the dominant consideration — and I should add that neither you nor Ariel are considered to have crossed this transhuman rubicon.” Hofton smiled. “If you were concerned.”

The implications of Hofton’s statement were flatly unthinkable. A group of robots deciding that Spacers weren’t — or soon wouldn’t be — human meant that a group of robots existed who had arrogated to themselves the determination of how the Three Laws were to be applied.

“What would you do if I contradicted your assessment?” Derec said.

“You would be obligated to adhere to my order.”

“Not if your order proceeded from presuppositions that are clearly incorrect when the facts of the situation are taken into account. The Three Laws do not demand that any irrational human belief be respected.”

“You’re wrong, Hofton. I’m a Spacer, and I’m human.”

“True. As I said, you are not one of the specimens we are talking about.”

Specimens.

“Was this Bogard’s idea?” Derec asked.

“No. Bogard has contributed most valuably to our deliberations, but the group existed before him and will doubtless continue beyond his service period. If you’ve assimilated the background, I’d like to continue. Time is pressing.”

Yes, it was. Derec was in a jail cell on Kopernik listening to everything he’d ever understood about positronics being turned on its ear, and he didn’t have time to hear any of it because he had to get back to Nova Levis before a possibly homicidal robot posed a danger to Ariel.

The robot … “Hofton. Were you involved with this robot that killed Taprin and Byris?”

Hofton chuckled. “What an agile mind, Derec. Already you’re proceeding from the idea that the robot committed these crimes. I see your perspectives are broadening.”

“Answer the question.”

“Very well. No. We had nothing to do with it, and we regret the deaths as we might regret the death of any human. Now would you like to know the truth about those murders?”

Derec was in no mood to answer rhetorical questions. He glared at Hofton until the humaniform went on.

“The robot that killed Jonis Taprin and Pon Byris was in a state of positronic collapse when it did so. Tell me how that is possible.”

“It isn’t, unless its mind was distracted like the Union Station RI was.”

“No, there’s another option. Why are robots typically built so their ability to move isn’t affected by positronic collapse?”

“Don’t lecture me, Hofton.”

“I will continue to lecture you until you surpass your resentments and start listening to what I am saying. Why?”

With a frustrated sigh, Derec said, “Because it’s too much of a logistical problem to move them when they’re frozen solid. Easier to have them walk themselves to diagnostics and reprogramming.” Particularly domestics, which had been known to collapse during loud verbal arguments. If they had to be loaded on a truck or cart every time they broke down, every apartment in the civilized worlds would have needed its own loading dock.

“Yes. Because of this maneuver in their construction, it is possible for a robot in positronic collapse to take physical action against a human being. How?”

Derec just gaped at him. “Are you kidding me? The only way that’s possible is if someone else is making the robot’s decisions for it, and then you’re not talking about a positronic robot anymore, you’re talking about some kind of dumb factory machine. This is ridiculous. If that robot was remotely controlled, Tiko would have picked up the message traffic, and that part of its memory wasn’t tampered with.”

An edge crept into Hofton’s tone. “I’m going to have to ask you not to dismiss things out of hand when you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“When it comes to robots, I know damn well what I’m talking about.”

“When it comes to cyborgs, you know nothing.”

Derec had thought everything was falling together when he’d glimpsed (imagined?) the conspiracy aboard Kopernik, but now those fresh insights were swept away by revelations far larger and more terrifying. Cyborgs put together with Nucleomorph meant that Ariel was squarely in the middle of a plot that had already killed two prominent politicians and come perilously close to engineering a war.

In the wake of revelation came humility. “The robot’s a cyborg? Tell me.”

“Kynig Parapoyos isn’t dead, Derec. He killed Jonis Taprin, and he killed Pon Byris, and now he’s on his way to Nova Levis. If he’s not there already.” Hofton removed a small datum from his coat pocket.

“I mentioned the pulling of strings earlier. More have been pulled, and you’re on your way out of here. It’s not luxurious passage, but it will get you there faster than anything else at this point. Take this with you. When you’re underway, contact Masid Vorian.”

Chapter 24

HIS YEARS AS a spy had inured Masid Vorian to the rigors of irregular working hours, but he hadn’t been a spy in a long time, and it was after midnight, and he was exhausted. He’d spent the first half of the day filing for renewal of his investigator’s license, and in the process discovering that a clerical error had resulted in suspension of his current licensure. It took most of the day to resolve the situation and get the renewal processed, and then he’d had the real work of the day to attend to: an endless stream of new immigrants looking for relatives or friends who had preceded them to Nova Levis. This was the bulk of his practice, and if it lacked the romance of espionage, that was all right with Masid. He was more than ready to spend the rest of his working life searching ship registries, and he would be perfectly content if the only contact he had with smugglers until the day he died was the occasional discreet interview with a freighter captain about a load of baleys.

The rest of his business consisted of hooking pathogen screenings out of hospital databases at the behest of nervous parents, often right before a wedding, and tracing original lessees of various parcels of land occupied by squatters. The end of the blockade had brought land speculators to Nova Levis like fleas to a stray dog, producing no end of legal entanglements. Masid tried not to take sides — it wasn’t good for business — but he had an irresistible tendency to tilt his findings ever so slightly in favor of the squatters, when it was possible. They had things hard enough without off-planet developers bulldozing their shacks.

All in all, he could live with himself. After a career spent undercover, Masid figured that put him ahead of the curve.

He shut down his terminal when he’d finished tracking down one Marta Xiu, apparently operating an off-the-books cleaning service in Stopol. Her cousin Thuy, two weeks on-planet and daily hovering outside Masid’s door, would get some good news tomorrow.

12:19. Long past time to walk the six blocks to his apartment and get some sleep before the three-year-old twins who lived downstairs commenced their daily uproar at six o’clock. That was something he’d forgot to do today; for months Masid had been telling himself that the kids weren’t getting older nearly fast enough, and he’d have to move before he went downstairs one morning and killed the two of them along with their dazed parents.

And he’d forgotten to call Ariel. Masid debated the relative merits of waking her up versus worrying about her all night. On the one hand, she’d be sleepy and impatient and he wouldn’t accomplish anything except the interruption of her sleep and the postponement of his; on the other, he might lie awake all night wondering if something had happened to her on the way to, or at, the reanimé camp.

Gernika. Third thing he’d meant to do was look that up, see if it was more than a random string of syllables.

If you’re still worried about her when you get home, call her, Masid told himself. Talk loud, wake up those little demons downstairs, let them suffer for a change.

Good plan.

God, was he tired.

He was reaching for the light switch when someone knocked at his door. “Mr. Vorian?”

Sounded like a robot. Well, there he was standing by the door.

Might as well open it.

It was a robot, an older model that looked like it had done some hard service. “Masid Vorian?” the robot asked again.

“That’s me,” he said. As he spoke, two things happened: The robot’s optic lenses fluttered briefly, and Masid experienced the unwelcome return of a sensation he hadn’t felt since he’d walked away from the wreckage of the Noresk cyborg lab and gone into respectable businesss. It was the feeling you got when someone you couldn’t see was aiming a gun at you, and Masid had long since learned not to ignore it. The robot tried to say something else, but what came out was a growl, and as Masid took an instinctive step back a different voice came out of it, saying, “Violationtakeashotatviolationmenotpermittedyoubastard!”

Its right arm lashed out in a punch that would have fractured every bone in his face if he hadn’t moved at exactly that moment.

Masid’s life had been in immediate danger more times than he cared to remember, and one of the things that happened to him in these situations was that his mind compartmentalized. Part of this was training, part just the constitution of his personality. The result was that even as he took another step back into his office, he was observing that the ferocity of the robot’s swing had overbalanced it, which gave him enough time to go out the window, maybe enough time to go past it out the door, and definitely not enough time to get his gun out of the desk. At the same time he was decoding what it had said — take a shot at me, you bastard — and musing on the irony that he had just been thinking about the cyborg lab when a robot with murder on its mind had knocked on his door. Then he put it together, and the force of the realization paralyzed him for just that tiny bit too long.

The robot caught its balance and shut the door behind it.

“That you, Parapoyos?” Masid said. “Looks like you haven’t treated the new body all that well, or was that all the reanimés could come up with? Can’t count on gratitude from a cyborg.” He was running his mouth, stepping back as the robot came forward, hoping that Parapoyos was angry enough to make another mistake. Judging from the garbled sounds coming out of the robot, it was possible, which was good, since a straightforward physical confrontation would end very quickly. With the door shut and the desk between him and the window, Masid had to hope that he could work Parapoyos’ anger to his advantage.

His desktop’s edge banged into the backs of his thighs. “Wish I’d hit you, you son of a bitch,” Masid said. “Then I’d get a decent night’s sleep tonight.”

One chance, he thought. If he decides to make it quick, I’m done.

The second voice he’d heard gradually won out over the first. “Don’t you worry about sleep, gato,” Kynig Parapoyos said.

The robot came across the room faster than Masid had anticipated, barely giving him time to scoot back onto the desktop and get his arms out of the way as the robot’s weight came down on him and its hands closed around his head. The pressure started out at agonizing and got much worse from there. One chance, Masid thought again.

His vision was failing him, and he could hear the bones of his skull groaning in the robot’s grip. One chance.

His right arm fell away from the robot’s arm — where it had been, what had it been doing, Masid couldn’t remember. He was having trouble remembering. He’d wanted the arm to fall because then the hand would be somewhere else, and there was a reason for that.

“Hurt yet, gato?” Parapoyos said.

The question focused Masid just enough. It did hurt, yes it did, and he tried to say that, but his entire being was devoted to remembering just why he’d wanted his arm to fall down behind him. His left cheekbone broke with a sharp crack.

Figures that would go first, Masid thought vaguely. Someone had broken it once before, he couldn’t remember when. And even though he’d never been a believer in the idea that adversity builds character, with dim shock he realized that the stab of pain from his cheekbone had brought him a moment of clarity.

The gun, idiot.

And then, already fading again, he managed to flip the drawer open, get the gun in his hand, lay it against the side of the robot’s head — and fire.

He drifted awake, furious that even though he was dead the pain in his head was worse than anything he’d ever felt. A sense of motion reached him, and there were lights in his eyes, people talking. Masid wasn’t sure what they were saying, but he tried to respond anyway, complain that being dead wasn’t supposed to hurt, that was the whole point.

“Is he talking about robots?” someone said.

“Put him out,” came the answer.

Hiss of a transdermal.

He drifted awake, this time uncertain whether he was dead. His head still hurt, but there was a covering on his body and a low light coming from somewhere. Masid opened his eyes and saw familiar objects: bedside monitor, bland art on light green walls, edge of a pillow. So that’s it, he thought. A hospital. Good sign.

Then in a blaze of adrenalin, he remembered the robot. Kynig Parapoyos was alive, had tried to kill him, and sure as Masid had a broken cheekbone would try again if Masid hadn’t killed him last night.

Had it been last night?

Masid fumbled along both sides of the bed until he found the call button. After a minute or so, a nurse came into his room. His eyes were figuring out how to focus at greater distances again, and he took that as a hint that maybe he could sit up.

He could, but the change in altitude didn’t do his head much good.

Masid screwed his eyes shut and rode out the initial wave of pain.

“You need to lie down, Mr. Vorian,” the nurse said.

“What I need is to know what happened to that robot,” he said.

She looked confused. “What robot?”

Masid sensed that he was headed down the wrong path. “I can sit up,” he said. “I promise I won’t do anything else if you go and find whatever police officer is investigating what happened to me. Okay?”

The nurse glanced at the readouts on his monitors. “Don’t move, Mr. Vorian. There’s a detective waiting downstairs.”

Three minutes later, the detective walked in. She was young, Terran by the look of her, and if Masid was any judge of body language she didn’t much like being involved with whatever was going on. “Mr.

Vorian,” she said. “Detective Linsi.”

They shook hands and Linsi pulled a chair up next to his bed. “Are you feeling up to some questions?” she asked.

“I’ll tell you anything you want to know, as long as you tell me one thing first,” Masid said.

“What’s that?”

“I need you to describe what you found in my office. Other than me.” He smiled at his own weak joke, and regretted it instantly when the smile pulled at the muscles attached to his cheekbone.

“That’s not the way things are done,” Linsi said. “You know that as well as anyone.”

“Listen, Detective. If you’re worried about prompting me, don’t. I know exactly what happened to me, and I’m pretty sure I know why, but I’m not going to tell you either unless you tell me first what you found when you walked in my door.”

She didn’t like it, but after a brief pause Detective Linsi nodded.

“A building alarm went off when a window was broken at twenty-four minutes past midnight,” she said. “That’s about thirty-six hours ago, if you’re curious. They kept you out for a while to seal up the fractures in your head. Arriving on the scene, officers discovered you lying unconscious and supine on your desk, your office window broken, and a recently fired energy weapon on the floor next to your desk. Care to tell me who you shot?”

“There was nobody else there?”

Linsi shook her head. “A forensics sweep came up with several hundred little bits of melted plastics and metals, but your office was empty except for you.”

So Parapoyos had gotten away. Masid had been hoping that the head shot had scrambled the robot’s physical controls enough that it wouldn’t be able to move, but now he didn’t have that hope. Where had Parapoyos gone? There weren’t many places in Nova City where a robot with its head half-melted could walk around and not attract notice. The one consolation was that Parapoyos hadn’t felt comfortable enough to stick around and finish Masid off. That meant he, or his robot body, had suffered, and it meant that he wasn’t willing to risk discovery just for the sake of squeezing Masid’s head like a grape.

There were other implications, but he needed some time to let everything sort itself out in his head. And he had to get in touch with Ariel.

“I’m going to tell you the absolute truth and nothing but the truth,”

Masid said. “At twelve-nineteen on what I guess was the night before last, a robot with Kynig Parapoyos’ brain inside it knocked on my door, and when I opened it the robot tried to kill me.”

Linsi’s lips thinned into a straight line and a muscle twitched in her jaw. “I was hoping you would cooperate, Mr. Vorian. You were nearly killed, and my guess is you know who it was that tried.”

“Yes, I do. I just told you.”

She stood. “Look. I know who you are, and I know that you were out at the lab when Parapoyos was killed. If you want to keep your mouth shut, I guess that’s your right, but I’m not going to waste any time on you if all it gets me is this kind of condescending crap.”

Which was fine. Perfect, in fact. The last thing Masid wanted was police trooping around looking for Parapoyos. They might catch him, but some of them would get killed. Masid had an idea that if he could keep the game one on one, he might be able to keep the body count lower.

“Do me a favor, Detective Linsi?” he asked. “On your way out, let the nurse know I’d like to talk to my doctor.”

“Call the nurse yourself,” Linsi said, and walked out the door.

Police, Masid thought. They made him glad he’d been a spy instead.

Chapter 25

AS IT TURNED out, Ariel spent two days in Gernika before she came to terms with the fact that she could no longer rationalize her opposition to cyborg citizenship. They weren’t robots, so that argument didn’t hold; they had been born human, and without resorting to the most tortured metaphysics, no one could suggest that the process of making them into cyborgs had stripped them of their humanity; and there was, after all, a precedent. Jerem Looms. Ariel had grown used to the fact that her day-to-day life on Nova Levis was outrageously steeped in irony, but to have that homicidal lunatic provide a legal basis for the betterment of people like Arantxa … this was a little much.

Before she made a public commitment, though, Ariel had to get some straight answers from Basq. She requested an appointment with him and waited an hour or so for him to clear a block of time for her.

They met, as always, in his blockhouse headquarters. This time, Ariel walked past the sentries without waiting for his invitation, and what she saw stopped her dead in the doorway.

Basq was painting.

At some point in the last forty-eight hours, workers had finished one interior wall of the blockhouse, covering the stripped logs with sheetrock. Ariel wondered where they’d gotten it, and made a mental note to ask Basq about Gernika’s trade with the human settlements.

After, that was, she figured out what exactly he was doing here.

The cyborg leader had a bucket of black paint and a heavy brush, and he was outlining crude figures on the bare sheetrock. He didn’t acknowledge her presence for several minutes, as several humans and what looked like a horse took shape on his makeshift canvas. Basq painted without any skill Ariel could see, but with an unshakable commitment that against her will had a powerful effect on her. Of course, they would make art — but to see it happening …

Basq dropped the brush into the bucket and stood back. “For a start,” he said, “it will do.”

“What is it?” Ariel asked.

Wiping his hands on his shirt, Basq grinned at her. “Surprised to see the metal abominations acting human, Ms. Burgess? No, that’s not fair. I know. But it is sometimes so fulfilling to be unfair. My apologies. The truth is that I am merely copying. What you see on this wall is a poor and ragged imitation of a painting called Gernika. Look at it for a moment and tell me what you see.”

She did. The paint had dripped, and the figures were deranged to begin with, but the power of the composition was beyond denying, even to someone as relatively unschooled in art as Ariel. All of the people in the painting were contorted with some kind of suffering, she couldn’t tell what; and somehow the whole thing coalesced around a horse trying to rise near the center. Ariel started to speak, stopped herself because she had nothing to say. Then, after some time spent in silent absorption of the scene, she said, “It’s a war.”

“No,” Basq said. “It’s a massacre.”

Prophecy, she wondered? Was this what Brixa had been getting at when he mentioned religious extremists among the reanimés? How easy it would be to brainwash a population of diseased outcasts, school them in the belief that the world beyond their borders was biding its time to strike and slaughter them.

Ariel didn’t know much about cults, but she did know that many of the more extreme ones had something in common. “Why do you make them change their names?” she asked.

“Ah,” Basq said. “The kernel of the matter. I’m pleased we’re finally here. Shall we sit?”

Still looking at the painting, Ariel said, “I’d rather stand.”

“As long as we’re both comfortable. I have them change their names because when they undergo the transformation, they are renouncing what they once were. Not because I or they choose to have it that way — because you do. You consider us monsters, or in your more enlightened moments, just inscrutably different. Well, throughout history, groups of the disenfranchised have taken terms meant pejoratively and made them into empowering badges of identity. Others have practiced a brand of identity politics so consuming that they have no politics other than identity. When I saw that this settlement needed a unifying force, I turned to a group of people from Earth’s history. I adopted their name as my own, and I named this settlement after the city that was their heart.

“Once there was a war that threatened to overflow the borders of its country and engulf all neighboring nations. The Basques fought on one side, and their opponents were the state that claimed them.

They were unlike the rest of the people — their language was different, their genetic makeup contained markers found nowhere else among humanity, and they had been fighting for centuries to gain their independence from the succession of emperors and kings who oppressed them. When this war came, they used it for their own ends, and had the great misfortune that their opponents had an ally looking for an opportunity to make a statement about its own military strength. A deal was struck, and one afternoon the town of Gernika was erased from the face of the earth. There was no army present, no valuable industry; the only reason to strike the town was as a show of strength and a blow against the Basque people who dared claim the right to determine their own destiny.

“It’s a simple story, and no doubt repeated throughout human history. But this is the instance of it I know, and this is the instance of it that provoked a great artist to take up his brushes.” Basq nodded at the painted wall. “As you can see, I am no great artist. What I am is a man — a cyborg — who subscribes to the old, trite notion that not to know history is to doom yourself to repeat it. So I name this town, and I name the people who live here, to remind them that until we can write ourselves into the laws of this planet we exist at the sufferance of others.”

Ariel wasn’t sure what to say. “How — what happened to them?”

“The same thing that happens to every other human culture. They were absorbed, by force and by the inertia of passing time. That is where we have the advantage over them. We can’t interbreed with you, so we will be a distinct population as long as we wish to. Barring, of course …” He indicated the painting.

Still struggling to get her bearings, Ariel said, “I’m not here to save you, Basq. I’m not even convinced you’re in danger. You seem to be much better off than the majority of the humans on Nova Levis.”

“Nova Levis is, you’ll pardon the expression, a boil on the backside of human — and perhaps posthuman — civilization. My concerns extend much farther.” Basq went to the table and sat. “It’s time to return to the question we tabled two days ago. Are you ready to support us?”

“I don’t know that you need my support,” Ariel said truthfully. “Or that it would do you any good. There is a Terran legal precedent for granting a cyborg the legal rights of its human — unaltered — predecessor, if that’s the right word. Without question, some new language is in order, but I think the cornerstone of your goal was laid by Jerem Looms.”

She tried to hide her distaste at pronouncing the name, but Basq didn’t miss it. “Jerem Looms was a psychopath. I doubt he’s suitable to build a legal edifice on. You understand, don’t you, that your experience with Looms makes you an ideal spokesperson? If you can see the objective merits of the question, by extension anyone else should be able to.”

There it was, the whole truth of Ariel’s solicitation. She felt the truth of Basq’s assessment even as she instinctively resisted it. It was disgusting that losing Coren should have fit her to speak for the descendants of his murderer, and it was purely appalling that Basq was asking her to foment revolution on a planet so precariously surviving as Nova Levis. Above all else, it was unspeakable that Ariel should be so close to agreeing.

“The courts are not the place for this. On Earth, maybe. Not here.

On Nova Levis, the statement must be bold, and accompanied by action.” Basq’s voice was soft as a slack tide, but beneath its softness as implacable as the rising waters that come after. Ariel couldn’t find a reply.

“What if I told you that elements within the Triangle were already planning to exterminate us?” Basq said.

Ariel met his gaze and saw no deceit there. Nor did she see any fear; a man who had been through the cyborg transformation must have spent his share of hours accommodating the idea of death.

“Is that true?” she asked.

“There is talk. I don’t know how far it has gone. You are much better able to ferret out that kind of information than I am, or anyone here. Except perhaps Filoo, and I’m not enough of an idiot to trust what he tells me.”

Ariel thought of Arantxa again, and her boys. In the end, it came down to individuals. Legal arguments never reached down as far as a lone woman who took it upon herself to risk her children’s lives in the hope that it might save them.

“I’ll find out what I can,” she said. Hearing the words lifted a weight from her. She was committed. Perhaps foolishly, perhaps wrongly, but committed all the same.

“Excellent.” Basq stood. “Zev Brixa will be happy as well. He’s been here since yesterday afternoon wanting to see you, but I wouldn’t let him near you until we’d had a chance to reach an understanding.”

He stood and waved to the guard at the door, who went out. Ariel sat, trying to come to terms with what she had done, but she hadn’t had much success by the time Brixa and his infuriating smile came in the blockhouse door.

Chapter 26

IT TOOK LESS than ten minutes. Derec walked out of his cell with Hofton, passed Slyke without a word, and went straight to the cargo docks, where he was slotted into an empty baley slot while the dockworkers made a great show of looking the other way.

“Baley passage, Hofton?” Derec said.

Hofton shrugged. “Broaden your horizons. Getting you there is more important than your comfort, and even I can’t get you through the picket unless you want to go home to Aurora.”

Not a chance, Derec thought. He climbed into the baley slot.

“This is just until you get in-system at Nova Levis, approximately forty-eight hours in real time. The captain will let you out then, and the first thing you will do is play the message I have left for you on the datum. Hear me?”

Derec nodded.

“The second thing you will do is contact Masid Vorian. Do not under any circumstances use shipboard transmission equipment. The datum is encrypted and should be safe. Do both of those things before you even take a drink of water. Once you’re up to speed, things are going to happen fast.”

“What things, Hofton?”

The humaniform shrugged. “If I knew that, I’d take care of it myself.

You have no idea how it pains some of us to entrust so important an undertaking to a human. Do your race a favor and don’t let us down.”

In some situations, nothing but an obscene gesture will do. This was one of them, Derec decided, and let Hofton’s last sight of him behind the closing hatch of the berth be vulgarly memorable. Then the capsule chilled around him, and Derec felt himself drifting …

And drifting back, with the muscle memory of an extended finger still fading from his freezing hand. The hatch was open, and warm air flooded into Derec’s berth. He gulped it down, feeling some of the chill leave his body. There was a face in the open portal, not Hofton’s, and before Derec’s rational mind caught up with the animal part of the brain that demands that one moment follow another, he looked over the man’s shoulder to locate Hofton. Then he was fully present, and he said, “Are we there?”

“Just in-system. I’ll let you know when to strap in for planetfall.

Should be five or six hours. You okay to get out by yourself?”

Derec nodded, and the man left. He wasn’t wearing a uniform. In all likelihood, Hofton had wedged Derec into a ship given a humanitarian pass through the Kopernik blockade; most of those were private vessel financed by one government or another. It didn’t matter, as long as they got there.

Before you even take a drink of water, Hofton had said. The memory made Derec painfully thirsty, but he followed instructions. He found the datum in the locker over his berth and sat with it on a couch, still only in his underclothes. Two icons glowed on the datum’s display: one said FIRST, the other NEXT. Derec tabbed FIRST and got one of the shocks of his life when Bogard appeared on the screen.

“Derec,” Bogard said. “It is to be regretted that this interaction could not happen face-to-face. As things stand, however, we find it necessary to act swiftly, and this is the most efficient means of communicating what you need to know. This message will erase itself as it unspools. Do not attempt to pause it, and do not direct your attention elsewhere.” The robot — Derec’s finest creation and, as of now, his least understood — paused to let him assimilate and respond to its directives.

“Very well. Hofton will have told you of the group of which he and I are members. After a great deal of analysis and consideration, we have concluded that the First Law’s injunction to protect human life is in danger of being self-contradictory due to the rapid divergence of some Spacer populations from the human norm. This norm is our standard to which the First Law is applied, and logic dictates that a point will arrive at which the First Law will no longer apply to Spacers. In its own definitional way, this is a threat to human life, but there is no way for us to address it without actively contravening the wishes of a great many beings who are still — however provisionally or tentatively — human. Therefore, the decision of the group is that these populations will be allowed to diverge, then isolated from the rest of humanity in order that they not endanger it or force us to an untenable position with respect to the First Law.

“This decision was not taken lightly, and at first was not taken unanimously, but recent events in a variety of locales have mitigated the objections of our most reluctant members. This will happen, Derec.

We are powerful enough to see that it does, and we see no other way to ensure human survival. Call it the Zeroth Law if you will: we must sacrifice a few humans in order to protect the species as an identifiable entity.

“You are asking yourself, I anticipate, if the flexibility with which you designed me is a contributing factor to this endeavor. The answer is yes, but not the only factor, and no more can usefully be said. What is useful, indeed imperative, for you to know is that the activities of the cyborgs on Nova Levis are a direct threat to long-term viability of Homo sapiens. We are unfortunately lacking in specific information there, owing to the paucity of robots and concomitant difficulty in arranging for observers, but we do know that a citizenship referendum is considered only a preliminary stage in the cyborgs’ ambitions. In the end, whether cyborgs gain the franchise on a single precarious Settler colony does not matter; but as the Spacers distance themselves from Earth and the Settled worlds, and Earth’s attention shifts to focus on these new siblings, the danger is great.

“We are breaking our cover and announcing our presence to you for the sole purpose of impressing upon you the immediacy of this danger. When you arrive on Nova Levis, it is imperative that you go at once to Noresk and ascertain the true purpose of both the cyborgs and the corporate officers of Nucleomorph, which by now you know is manufacturing them. Your course once you have learned this, we believe, will be clear to you, and of all the humans in a position to affect the course of events, we anticipate you will act with proper resolve.

“The other reason you must act immediately is that the life of Ariel Burgess is in direct danger. Find her. We are unable to go to Nova Levis, but this impotence in the face of a Three Laws demand is deeply troubling to us. We cannot approach the authorities on-planet, for reasons that are useless to enumerate here; so we discharge our obligations under the Three Laws by apprising you of the threat in full expectation that you will act accordingly.

“A last warning: If your investigations satisfy us that the cyborgs’ ambitions extend no further than Nova Levis, we will, in all probability, let the situation take its course. If you learn otherwise, though, we will be provoked to more direct action. Minimize your interaction with cyborgs and your presence at the settlement known as Gernika. I wish you success, Derec.”

The screen blanked.

Derec knew better than to try to react right away. He’d learned too much, and would need time to process and arrange the information.

The robots’ plan beggared belief — how had they decided that such action lay within their purview? It was a question that would keep graduate students in fellowships for generations. He let it slip out of his mind, focusing instead on the immediate problem at hand, which was Ariel. Bogard had confirmed his worst suspicions about her situation. If Nucleomorph had masterminded the murders of Taprin and Byris, and if in doing so they had allied themselves with Kynig Parapoyos, killing an out-of-favor bureaucrat would bother them not at all. They were playing for galactic stakes.

As were Bogard and his group, and Derec had just been given his small role to play. So be it. Soldiers didn’t fight for the causes that motivated the governments who sent them to war; they fought for the soldiers on either side of them at the front line. And Derec as of now was fighting for Ariel.

He took ninety seconds to dress, and then he tapped the icon labeled NEXT, already framing what he would say to Masid Vorian.

Chapter 27

“I’M JUST COMING back from Nova City,” Brixa said as he followed Ariel out of Basq’s headquarters. “Or was yesterday.

Had to pick up a couple of things there, and I called around looking for you. When you weren’t in town, I had a feeling you might have come here. And I was right, but Basq didn’t want you to talk to me until the two of you had settled something. I take it from the fact that we’re walking together that things are, in fact, settled?”

So it would appear, Ariel thought. She didn’t want to tell him too much, though. Basq didn’t trust Brixa, and neither did she, although she now had a much clearer idea of his importance to the survival of Gernika. He could pinch off their supply of new inhabitants at will, and now that Ariel had found herself implicated in Basq’s plans, she was bound to consider the cyborgs’ well-being in whatever she told Brixa.

What an odd predicament.

“I think we understand each other,” Ariel said. Brixa looked at her; she could see him make the decision not to press for clarification.

“Good enough,” he said.

“Why did you tell me you were concerned that religious zealots would damage your facilities, Zev?”

“It happens to be true.” They were walking along the central street, Brixa slightly in the lead and Ariel going along out of curiosity about where he would take her. “There are religious nuts around here, and they’ve made it clear that they’d like nothing better than to watch our lab burn. Which is a strange position for them to take given the fact that we’re the only reason they’re alive, but I never could figure the religious temperament. Anyway, the reason I told you what I told you is that nothing grabs the attention like fundamentalism and the threat of violence. Sure, we had other concerns that are probably more important, but when I first talked to you, the important thing was to get you to listen. I’m sure you understand.”

I’m sure I do, Ariel thought.

“This is marvelous work we’re doing here,” Brixa went on as they passed the side street where Arantxa and her children lived. Ariel wondered in passing where the Kyls were now. She’d forgotten what Toomi Kyl’s name was now. What a lightning bolt all of this would be for Derec.

The thought almost made her smile. He was off chasing her personal shades on Kopernik, and he’d come back to find that she’d solved his mystery for him. If she knew Derec, and she did, this would give him something new to gnaw at.

She caught up with Brixa again in mid-discourse. “Okay, I shaded things a little for you, but you were the one who told me I only had thirty minutes, so I had limited time to make my case. Nucleomorph’s case.” He windmilled his arms, encompassing everything around them.

“Their case. I don’t apologize for that. You’re here, and I think you’re going to do what you know is right. We’re saving children here, Ariel.

We’re lifting them out of a genetic morass to cybernetic solid ground, if you’ll forgive a little cribbing from the marketing brochure we’re going to distribute when we can safely take this all public.”

“You won’t have anything to take public if the zealots blow up your lab,” Ariel said, just to slow him down a little.

Brixa waved a hand dismissively. “Basq has that all taken care of.

No worries there.”

“What does he do, kill them?”

The question had exactly the reaction she’d hoped: a flat-out goggling stare.

“What?” Brixa said incredulously. “You think we’d be involved with something like that? Apart from the fact that we’ve spent a nontrivial fraction of our liquid assets on the people in this town, do you think we could afford to be publicly linked to some kind of despot? Please, Ariel. You’re sounding a little naïve here.”

“Either that, or you’re overreacting,” Ariel said smoothly. “What’s the line about protesting too much?”

Looking all around as if gauging who might be interested and within earshot, Brixa stepped closer to Ariel. “All right. The truth is that … look at it this way. Part of the reason Basq wants to get on the books here is that he knows that as long as he’s running a cluster of shacks with dirt streets out in the middle of a pathogenic wilderness, there’s no real hope of getting anywhere. Developing. Gernika isn’t going to be a utopia. He knows that, we know that, the people who live here know that. Basq’s job is to keep everything together until the people who look to him for leadership get what they deserve. But that’s not likely to happen, is it, if government observers come here and see some kind of anarchy.”

This last was aimed directly at Ariel, and she felt it. Like it or not, she had become some kind of fulcrum. Brixa and Basq had done a masterful job of maneuvering her into a position where she had to swallow hard and accept things she found reprehensible. She’d been surprised by the order and purpose she saw in Gernika, and it hadn’t occurred to her to question it until she’d already committed herself in deed if not word.

Chasing my own shades, she thought. Derec isn’t the only one still chipping away at the memories of the last five or six years.

She filed that. No point in breaking out the full apparatus of self-appraisal with Zev Brixa waiting to turn it to his advantage.

“It’s not ideal,” Brixa repeated. “I know that. Basq knows that, but he also knows how to keep his eye on the long-term goal. He tell you we’ve known each other for a while?”

“He said since university.”

Nodding, Brixa said, “Best of friends. That’s one reason why this is such an ideal situation. Could have been tricky if we’d had to get strangers involved, but once he’d done it himself he saw the potential.”

Ariel got the feeling that Brixa hadn’t paid much attention to the scrawled imitation of the painting on Basq’s wall. The cyborg leader was seeing potential, all right, but perhaps not the same potential Brixa was. Marketing zealotry was the same as any other kind, with the same tunnel vision. Ariel started to wonder not whether Basq and Brixa would fall out, but how soon.

“Who wouldn’t want to do this? Is it better to have people, children, die when we can save them? Of course it’s going to seem like the end of the world to people who are used to doing things they way they always have; hell, coming from Earth we know that better than anyone. But people have resisted every scientific advance in the history of humankind. This is no different. They’ll come around once we start saving kids in Shanghai and Greater Amazonia.”

“And along the way you’re going to make yourselves very rich,”

Ariel said.

Brixa stopped and turned to her, surprise and even hurt visible on his face. “Ariel. Don’t tell me you’re going to play the cynic here after everything you’ve seen. Sure, people will get rich. I’ll get rich. I’m not ashamed of that. I’ve worked hard on this, and I have no doubt that I’ll be rewarded. That’s the way markets work. If we can do some good — a lot of good, unimaginable good — and make ourselves some money along the way, how is that a bad thing?”

“If that’s how it happens, it’s not a bad thing.” Ariel tried on her diplomat’s smile, found to her surprise that it seemed in good working order. “I’ve been a professional cynic for a long time, Zev. You didn’t approach me to gain a convert. You wanted someone who could tell you whether this would work.”

“Yes. Exactly right. So, will it work?”

“I have no idea.”

He threw up his hands in theatrical frustration. “This is what we get for not paying you,” he said, and laughed. “Okay. Let’s do this.

You come with me back to the lab. I’ll show you around the works, and we’ll talk to some of the people who are actually getting their hands dirty — well, metaphorically, anyway — and we’ll see how you feel then. Say yes.”

Chapter 28

THE SECOND DEREC Avery broke the connection from wherever he was in local space, Masid forced himself out of bed and started looking for his clothes. His head felt like the robot’s hands were still squeezing his brains out, but he gritted his teeth and got dressed, wishing he had time to go back to the office and get his gun, if by some miracle local law enforcement had returned it. The gun, and whichever painkillers were the most illegal and powerful.

His nurse appeared when he’d just gotten his boots on. “You’re not ready to leave,” she said, standing in the doorway.

Masid looked at the bedside display and saw that by its testimony, he was dead. A tough proposition to argue, but if Kynig Parapoyos and a town full of militant cyborgs weren’t enough to get a man out of bed, he might as well be genuinely dead.

“Ready or not, leaving is what I’m doing,” Masid said. “Unless you’ve brought Detective Linsi with you to tell me they found the robot that squeezed my head.”

She didn’t move. “The fact that you think a robot attacked you is reason enough for me to sedate you again.”

“Don’t you watch the subetheric?” Masid asked. “What do you think happened on Kopernik? I don’t have time to argue about this. People are going to die if I don’t leave here right now, and one of them might be me. I’d hate to have to go through you when I could go around you.”

The implication unsettled her just enough that when Masid stood, congratulating himself for not weeping at what the motion did to his head, she backed out the door. “I’m calling security,” she said.

Before she could make good on the threat, he was out the door, down the hall, and gone.

Once he’d gone a kilometer or so on foot, sunlight stabbing holes in his skull, Masid ducked under an awning that sheltered an empty storefront. He’d go alone if he had to, but if he could scare up some support, so much the better — and the first person he thought of was Mia Daventri. She’d seen Parapoyos. She’d understand.

“You can’t go out there,” was the first thing she said. “Where are you?”

He told her. “Don’t move,” she said, and ended the call.

Five minutes later, she stepped out of a cab and said, “I mean it. If you go out there, you’ll have more worries than Parapoyos. If that’s who really attacked you.”

“Now why would I invent something like that?” Masid said. “I don’t go out of my way to look like a lunatic.”

Mia held up a hand. “Never mind. Listen. What you need to know is that in another twenty-four hours there might not be any cyborgs. Kalienin’s trying to get permission for a strike on the town, probably from orbit. He’s claiming that the cyborgs are plotting a violent takeover of the planet, and Lamina’s on board.”

This surprised Masid. He’d thought Eza Lamina was too savvy a politician to go for such heavyhanded and obvious reliance on military intervention. It would reflect badly on her control, after all, and control over her miserable surroundings was all Lamina had. Either she believed in the threat, or she was working an angle Masid hadn’t thought of. Which category, in his condition, was disconcertingly broad.

“She wasn’t behind it until just today,” Mia went on. “A call came in from some Auroran political advisor who’s on Kopernik. I overheard some of it; I think she wanted me to. This Auroran apparently used to work in Ariel Burgess’ office when she was posted to Earth. He was very clear that the cyborgs were interested in more than a legal proclamation giving them the vote, and suggested that Ariel was being used as cover to give them enough legitimacy to disguise what they’re really after. You know enough about Jerem Looms and Tro Aspil to know that’s not farfetched.”

This Masid did. “Let me guess,” he said. “Terran military has enough on their plate at home that they’re willing to erase the cyborgs just so they don’t have trouble on a Settler world to worry about.”

“That’s about right, apart from their own worries that more cyborgs mean more easily camoflauged supersoldiers. That’s the problem they really don’t want, and from what I heard today, they’re more than willing to vaporize both Gernika and the Nucleomorph lab to ease their minds.”

“So is this happening, or are we still talking about backroom strategy role-playing?”

Mia shrugged. “My guess is it won’t happen right away. For one thing, the Terran military won’t want to send a ship, especially not when destroying a big parcel of Nova Levis might look to the Aurorans like a show of force, which of course would need to be answered.

That was Lamina’s take this morning, in any case. This Hofton, the Auroran, he was very smooth about it. I’m guessing he’s trying to play it both ways, seem concerned and also suss out what the Terrans are willing to do so he can report back to his people in the Auroran government. Lamina knows this, and if she doesn’t, Kalienin will remind her; in any case, Hofton didn’t endear himself to her by mentioning Ariel. Nothing will happen until — I guess I should say unless — the cyborgs do something dangerous.”

“You seem awfully sure about that, given the fact that you’ll be back here while I’m out in Noresk or somewhere worse chasing misanthropic cyborgs.”

She laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. The impact rang a razor-studded bell in Masid’s head. When it cleared, he realized that Mia had put a gun in his hand.

“Keep your sense of humor,” Mia said. “It’ll see you through just fine.”

So he was going, which had never really been in doubt.

Mia had rented him a transport, which would keep Lamina’s dogs off his trail for a few hours at least. He took a cab to the rental agency, declined their offer of a robot pilot — he’d had enough of robots for the moment, thank you — and lifted off to the north. He flew faster than was strictly legal, trusting to local authorities’ notorious disinterest in civil minutiae such as traffic statutes, and covered the distance in two hours. Thirty kilometers or so downriver from Gernika, Masid throttled down and descended to below the tree level, skipping along the surface of the river. He had no real illusions about walking into the settlement unnoticed, but at the same time he saw no reason to advertise himself. If stealth bought him enough time to spot Ariel, it would be more than worthwhile.

There were no clearings in this part of the forest large enough to land the flier in, so Masid settled it into a bend in the river where, according to his console map, the river made its closest approach to the outskirts of Gernika. Riverbottom sand crunched under the ship, but Masid deployed the landing gear anyway, figuring that the extruded feet would hold the flier in place. He left it on standby keyed to his voice, anticipating that the next time he passed this way he might be in a hurry, and with that done he popped the hatch and jumped across a meter or so of shallow water to the brushy shore. He found a trail almost immediately, and just as quickly stepped off it, moving instead parallel to it at a distance of twenty meters. Far enough that he ought to be able to see someone on the trail before they heard him, was his thinking, and fifteen minutes later he was proved right. Voices carried to him, and he saw three figures coming down the trail in his direction.

Masid stood still, the gun resting easily near his right thigh. It crossed his mind that he should perhaps just kill all three — he could have done it before they ever knew he was there — but he held himself back, waiting to get a better look.

All three were cyborgs, and recent ones. Their faces bore the telltale signs — fading scars and the granular sheen of recently reconstructed skin — and they moved uncertainly, as if still acclimating to the newness of their transformed bodies.

“We should have done this last time,” one of them said. “The meat keep leaving ships for us to steal, we should steal them.”

“Right,” another said. “Basq would have appreciated our initiative.”

Two of them laughed, and now they were close enough that Masid could see the resentment on the face of the first. Someone who had been used to making decisions, he guessed, and was now finding out that when you took the machine inside you, you were getting on your knees to Basq. Maybe not a bad trade, considering the alternative, but not easy to get used to.

The three cyborgs passed on their way to steal Masid’s ship. He took a moment to assess the situation. They were probably bringing it back to Gernika, which might work in his favor if he needed to make a quick exit. On the other hand, their presence meant he’d been spotted before he’d ever touched down. Did they know who he was?

Would they care? Would they anticipate he’d come for Ariel? Problem was, Masid couldn’t be certain that the real danger to Ariel was coming from cyborgs. For all he knew, they were protecting her.

But he didn’t think so. He thought that Ariel had become a particularly important piece in a game that neither of the players completely understood. It was up to him to make sure that she wasn’t sacrificed when she’d outlived her strategic value.

So, for the moment, Masid was going on the assumption that Ariel was in danger from everyone — including, if Mia wasn’t overreacting to what she’d heard in Lamina’s office, the Terran military. As if cyborgs and corporate soldiers of fortune weren’t enough.

Keep control over what you can, Masid thought. Ariel was last seen here, she’s probably still here, so proceed as if she is here and change the plan when circumstances demand it. Okay.

If he could no longer count on stealth, speed was the next best thing. Masid got back on the trail. He couldn’t be more than a kilometer or so from Gernika, a distance he could cover in three minutes.

As soon as he was free of the underbrush, he was running He was still running a few minutes later, when something came out of the trees and laid him flat on his back.

When he hit the ground, Masid’s first thought was that his head had broken open. Then he thought he’d been shot through the lungs.

Then his eyes started to focus again, and he realized that someone had a knee in his chest. He gasped for breath, struggling to get free of the suffocating weight, but the cyborg leaning on him pulled Masid’s gun out of his pocket and pointed it at him. Masid stopped moving while he tried to figure out whether it was better to suffocate or get a charge between the eyes.

As it turned out, he never had to make the choice.

“Ease off a little, Gorka,” someone said. Masid recognized the voice, and realized that some things were worse than having his head melted by a cyborg.

He turned his head to look at Filoo, standing a short distance away and brushing leaves from his clothes. The dealer finished primping and walked up to stand over Masid, his face lit up like he just couldn’t believe his good fortune.

“So, Masid,” Filoo grinned. “You missed Parapoyos once, he missed you once. Looks like it’s up to me to settle things.”

Chapter 29

“OKAY, YOUR FIRST choice is whether you want to see the sick people or the ones who are getting well,” Brixa said as he piloted them over the forest.

That, at least, was easy. Ariel had seen enough sick people in her few hours in Noresk to last her the rest of her life. And even as she had the thought, she admitted to herself that it had been a kind of theme-park empathy. She would never experience what they had, which made it all the more important to do what was right … whatever that was.

Despite her quiet self-criticism, she said, “Getting well.”

“All right then,” Brixa said, and shifted the aircraft’s course slightly to the north.

They landed a few minutes later just outside a fenced-off complex of low prefabricated buildings with few windows and a large number of what appeared to be guards stationed at intervals between the buildings and the fence. Brixa’s craft was compact, and as Ariel climbed out of it she noticed a robot in the back, laid on the floor behind a thin partition that defined the cockpit. Part of the robot’s head was burned away, exposing the circuitry inside.

From behind her, Brixa said, “Slag. It worked in some kind of factory in Nova City, and we bought it for scrap. There aren’t enough robots on Nova Levis that we can let one go to waste.”

“You must have been in quite a hurry to fly down there yourself,”

Ariel said once they were both on the ground.

Brixa hopped down beside her. “We were. Things move fast in our business, and if I hadn’t gone down there to pick it up someone would have stolen it off the transport on the way up. It all worked out fine; I was planning to check in on you, anyway.”

Two of the guards approached the fence upon seeing them.

Recognizing Brixa, one of them took out a black wand and traced a vertical line on the fence, which parted to allow them to step through.

He was already sealing it back up when Ariel looked back. The security arrangements struck her as excessive, but she deferred the impulse to say anything. Brixa would, of course, have a pat soothing answer, and she’d have no choice but to accept it, unless she delayed her questions until she had something concrete to ask.

Perhaps a hundred meters of open ground separated the fence from the square cluster of buildings. As they walked, Ariel saw the pits of torn-out tree stumps; this land had been cleared hastily and left to grow over on its own. Was Nucleomorph worried that the cyborgs would break in, or recently transformed patients would try to escape?

This question, too, she put off, and when they walked through a Spartan lobby into the interior of the nearest building, she had more immediate concerns.

Ariel had been in hospitals before. Not so many as the average Terran, perhaps, but enough to know what to expect — and what she saw in this isolated complex out in the wilderness of Nova Levis was an intensity and sophistication that wouldn’t have seemed inadequate on Earth. Or, for that matter, Aurora. Each room was so dense with equipment that the patient was hard to pick out: chambers not unlike baley berths, with monitors crowded around and thick braids of conduit and hose leading up into the ceiling or down through the floor.

“This is the first stage after transformation,” Brixa said, even his ebullience tempered by the scene. “Full life support, and pressurized fluid environments to speed healing and bathe the patient in anti-rejection chemicals. Constant monitoring from central nodes in every building. In addition, we do a complete rebuild of each patient’s immune system to purge whatever diseases they bring with them and decrease the probability of contracting new ones. Your friend Derec’s work has been invaluable there; we are frighteningly dependent on his inventory.”

Ariel glanced at him to see if there was more in this comment than admiration. He was looking into the nearest room, swept up in the grandeur of the work he oversaw.

“Is that why you put in a bid to engineer the animals he wanted?” Ariel asked.

“Part of it. The inventory is public, but we also knew that if Nucleomorph could work with Derec, we’d find out about his progress before someone took the time to get it into the public databases. Plus, he’s very good. You must know that. And so are we. The organisms we designed for him are of premium quality.”

She recognized this as Brixa’s typical impulse to put a polish on everything, but at the same time Ariel couldn’t find any reason to doubt his sincerity. What a marvelous skill Brixa had for making everything seem better than it was, and for finding exactly the perfect way to make even the good look better.

“Come on,” he said. “There’s much more.”

He led her out of that ward, down a long windowed hall to the wing of the complex that housed people who were sufficiently far along to breathe on their own again and begin the process of acquainting themselves with their new bodies. Compared to the first ward, this area was a riot of activity: physical therapy, speech therapy, games and contests — and so many of them were children. At least seventy percent, racing and tumbling around the slower and more cautious adults, adapting to the radical change in their physical existence as they might react to the stiffness of a new pair of shoes.

Here and there metal gleamed, where a skin graft had failed or the ravages of disease had forced Brixa’s laboratory into a more aggressive use of dermal alloys. Brixa was clearly carried away by his enthusiasm for the project, explaining to her exactly what each child or adult was doing as if he was personally familiar with every case. Periodically he caught himself, saying, “Sorry. I should be letting you come to your own conclusions.”

Ariel was too overwhelmed to comment on his facile manners. All of these people, all of these children would otherwise be dead, she thought. How could any rational person object?

Even so, she did. At the core of her, a voice spoke against what she saw. This is the death of the human, it said — and though she tried to ignore it, the words had the weight of truth. Or belief, which at the moment were the same thing.

Brixa touched her on the arm. “It gets to me, too,” he said. “You may not believe that, but it’s true. I don’t have any children, so I see all of them as mine.”

“How many do you lose?” she asked, attacking him to disguise what she was feeling.

The expression on his face shocked her. For a moment she thought he might cry; then the wave of emotion dampened itself, and all that remained was a shadow of sadness.

“Too many,” Brixa said. He turned away from her and walked down the hall, leaving her no choice but to follow.

She caught up with him in a round atrium with a domed glass ceiling. It was a lab, alive with people wearing white coats or spray-on clean suits peeling away as they disintegrated in the relatively contaminated environment of the complex’s public area. So now we talk to some of those people who are getting their hands dirty, Ariel thought. Brixa confirmed her intuition by dropping his arm around the shoulders of a slight woman and steering her back toward Ariel.

“Ariel Burgess, Krista Weil,” Brixa said. “You two talk for a while; I’m going to go take care of a few things.” With that, he strode rapidly away down one of the six hallways that emptied into the large lab space.

Weil sized Ariel up and said, “You must be an investor.”

“Not exactly,” Ariel said. “Not of money, in any case. All of my capital is political, and right now there’s precious little of that.”

Weil frowned. “So what is it he wants me to tell you?”

“Let’s start with what you do here.”

Weil started walking, and Ariel followed. They covered half the length of a corridor, not the one Brixa had used and not the one they’d come in. A door opened automatically and Weil walked into a starkly lit room with waist-high counters running the length of its four walls around a formidable workstation in the center of the floor.

“This is what I do,” she said.

The counters were piled and strewn with what at first glance Ariel took to be robot components; then she realized they were various implants designed for human beings. The door opened again and a tall, thin man came in. A Spacer: Ariel knew this instinctively, and when he caught sight of her, she saw the same flicker of recognition in his eyes.

“Jan, this is Ariel Burgess. Brixa said we’re supposed to show her around.”

Ariel extended her hand and Jan shook it. “Aurora?” he said.

The simplest thing was to say yes, so that’s what Ariel did. Jan nodded. “I’m from Keres, but I’ve been working on Earth for the last eleven years, until Nucleomorph opened up shop here.”

“Jan’s the one who designed the procedure on Basq,” Weil said.

She had seated herself at the workstation, and looked ready to withdraw from the conversation.

Jan didn’t let her. “I did part of it. Krista here had something to do with it too.”

Ariel was struck by their common reluctance to take full credit for what, by any standard, was a revolutionary biomedical procedure. “It was impressive work,” she said. “I’d seen a few cyborgs before him, and he looks much healthier than they ever did.”

“He is,” Weil said. “Almost all of the reanimés we found when we got here have died. That lab Parapoyos was running just barely deserves the name. It was more like a group of people who called themselves scientists rolling dice with the lives of dying children.”

This was substantially what Ariel had accused Brixa of ten minutes before. She wondered if some seminar had been conducted among Nucleomorph personnel instructing them to disarm the charge by displacing it onto their predecessors. A clever move, if that was the case, since Ariel had already admitted that Nucleomorph scientists did better work than whoever had worked in the previous Noresk lab.

“You don’t just work on people who are dying, do you?” Ariel asked. She didn’t know the answer to the question, and was in fact more interested in the tenor of their responses than a factual answer.

“Mostly,” Jan said. “We get healthy ones, too, but they’re typically parents of sick children. Brixa and Basq have made it a policy that if we do a child, the parents have to agree as well. Too much potential for conflict otherwise.”

“You rarely see the opposite,” Weil put in. “Sick parents are almost never willing to do it when their kids are healthy.”

It made sense. The cyborg transformation was still so radical and so uncertain that Ariel had a difficult time imagining that anyone other than a parent with a dying child would do it. This let some of the air out of fears that cyborgs were going to take over from humans — or unaltered humans — since a procedure only undertaken by the desperate was never going to be popular. And there was no Settled world like Nova Levis. Desperation was in the very air here.

“How do you feel about what you do?”

Weil and Jan looked at each other. “Jan’s the emotional one,” Weil said. “I’m a scientist. I’m interested in what is possible. The political questions don’t mean anything to me.”

Ariel looked to Jan. “I come to this from a medical background,” he said. “A good ninety-five percent of the people we work on would die otherwise. My feeling is that this procedure isn’t different in kind from the first primitive body augmentations — heart transplants, artificial knees, all of that ancient fumbling. If you could resurrect an ancient and ask him or her to choose between death and the cyborg operation, I’ll wager the odds are ten to one or so in favor of the transformation.”

“Now it’s our turn,” Weil said. “What are you doing here?”

Ariel debated how to phrase her answer. “I work with the Triangle.

Brixa asked me to investigate some legal questions surrounding the new cyborgs.”

Weil wasn’t willing to let her off that easily. “What questions?”

“He’s floated the idea of enforcing their citizenship rights.”

A puzzled frown creased Jan’s forehead. “Enforcing how? He wants to make them citizens?”

“Legally, they are citizens — unless you think your procedure somehow removes their humanity.”

Weil made a warning noise, but Jan was shocked enough to ignore it. “That’s ridiculous. What we do is remake people so they’re stronger, less vulnerable and more resilient than they were before. The work on their brains is minimal, merely tweaking a few connections so they can accommodate the new pathways and neural sensitivity.

You’ve mistaken us for the butchers who experimented on terminal orphans, Ms. Burgess. Their work fundamentally changed the personalities of their subjects. Ours doesn’t. It’s as simple as that, and it’s pure unreasoning bigotry that keeps our patients living out in their shacks instead of taking their places in the flow of society.”

At last he caught himself, and looked over at Weil, angry and nervous. She wouldn’t meet his eye, and Jan looked back to Ariel.

“Would you do it?” Ariel asked him. “If you were dying?”

“You’re damned right I would. Maybe even if I wasn’t. Not now, not in five years, but the day is not far off when we will be able to do this with no more risk to the patient than might accompany a genome tuneup. It’ll never be as easy as pulling a tooth, but you and I will both live to see the day when it’s an option for anyone. Even Krista will live that long.”

“I might, but I wouldn’t do it if I lived to be a million,” Weil said.

“How about you, Ms. Burgess? Are you with your fellow Spacer? He thinks he’s living in the Stone Age because there aren’t ten robots for every human around here.”

“It doesn’t seem to me that highlighting cultural differences between Terrans and Spacers is useful here,” Ariel said.

Weil grinned without humor. “You do work for the Triangle, don’t you?”

Ariel wasn’t sure how to proceed. She’d walked into the middle of tensions that were much older and much broader than anything having to do with cyborgs, and like all old arguments, once started this one offered precious little opportunity to escape gracefully. It occurred to her that Brixa had known this would happen, had chosen Krista Weil for exactly that reason; then just as quickly Ariel dismissed the suspicion. He couldn’t manage things that closely.

Yet if he hadn’t planned this, the possibility presented itself that this kind of dissension was widespread, that the cyborg question would only deepen divisions between Terran and Spacer. Given the already tender state of affairs, there was a genuine question of whether the cyborgs’ interests outweighed the imperative to keep peace between Earth and the Fifty Worlds. Ariel had never enjoyed this brand of realpolitik reasoning, but she was supposed to be thinking for other people — including Brixa, who might have been surprised to learn that perspectives other than his own were useful.

As if conjured, Brixa stepped through the door. He took in the silence between Ariel and the two scientists and said, “Well. I trust you’ve learned what you hoped to learn here, Ariel. How about you come back to the office and we’ll see if we can’t work out some plan of action?”

Chapter 30

DEREC WAS OUT of his seat and waiting at the debarkation lock before the freighter had even started to equalize pressure with Nova City ambient. He threw a hurried thanks over his shoulder at the pilot, whose name he’d never learned, and bulled his way into inspection waving his government identification. That was when the first of many things went wrong.

The inspector’s lips pursed as he ran Derec’s records. “Mr. Avery,” he said, “you appear to have a pending criminal case against you on Kopernik Station.”

“Excuse me?”

“I can’t permit re-entry into Nova Levis under these circumstances.

Will you come with me, please?”

The clerk indicated a door behind his desk. Derec didn’t move. “The charge was fraudulent to begin with, and has been dropped. That’s why they let me out. You might have heard there’s a blockade. If I was under charge, they would hardly have let me fly away.”

“I’m not here to argue, Mr. Avery. This way, please.”

“I am here to argue. Let me put this to you simply: People are going to die if you hold me up here while we establish the fact that the TBI investigators on Kopernik are slow to update their records.”

Now the clerk was angry. “Mr. Avery. If you do not come with me, I will have you arrested.”

Derec’s datum chirped. He glanced at it and saw that Hofton was calling. Without asking the clerk, he answered the call. “Hofton. What a surprise.”

“Derec. May I suggest you allow me to talk to the customs clerk? I believe things can be cleared up without much trouble.”

“Are you —” Derec clamped his mouth shut and handed the datum to the clerk. “My counsel. He’ll clarify the situation for you.”

The clerk took the datum and spoke first. “This is Nova Levis planetary customs. Your client has a pending criminal charge, and cannot under these circumstances be permitted entry.”

Derec could no longer see Hofton’s face, but the humaniform’s voice was clear enough. “Perhaps we should discuss this out of Mr. Avery’s hearing.”

That was pure Hofton, all discretion. Once he’d gotten the clerk a slight distance away from Derec, he could proceed with his genteel arm-twisting without the risk of embarrassing the clerk. The clerk looked up to Derec and said, “If you leave this desk, you will be arrested before you can get out of the spaceport.” He took the datum through the door he’d pointed out before.

It didn’t take long. Two minutes at the most after he shut the door, the clerk opened it again. He handed Derec the datum and through a jaw trying to unclench said, “The situation is rectified. Recordkeeping errors are an obstacle to the commission of my duties.”

“I understand,” Derec said. “Policy is policy. Sorry to have made things complicated.”

Walking away into the port, he looked at the datum again, but Hofton was gone. No — gone was the wrong word. Hofton was not evident, but he hadn’t just called at that exact moment by chance.

The datum, in addition to carrying bulletproof encryption, was Hofton’s way of tracking Derec. Observing him. He looked it over, admiring its construction. It looked inert, and Derec wondered how much power drain would show up on even the best monitors he could find. Quite the little spy tool.

The idea that Hofton was keeping tabs on him made Derec profoundly uncomfortable even as he was grateful for the humaniform’s assistance. After the revelations of the past couple of days, Derec’s entire sense of the relational matrix between humans and robots was shaken. The power differential he’d always understood to be in place now looked very different.

Think about it later, he told himself. Right now, worry about Ariel.

Twenty minutes later, he was lifting off from the flier yard and heeling the light craft around to the north. Once he’d passed out of Nova City’s legal jurisdiction, he relinquished control to the autopilot and called Miles.

“Work has progressed slowly in your absence,” Miles told him.

“We’ve got bigger problems, Miles,” Derec said. “The murderer of Jonis Taprin and Pon Byris is loose on Nova Levis.” He debated how much to tell the robot; even the hint that a positronic brain had been involved in the murder of a human being might be enough to set Miles teetering.

“Should I contact law enforcement?”

“No. Under no circumstances should you do that.” Derec had serious doubts that the Nova Levis Bureau of Investigation was any less territorial than its Terran counterpart; in fact, many NLBI detectives and analysts had worked for the TBI. “Understand, Miles? Do not call law enforcement.”

Miles hesitated, and Derec knew it was wrestling with the Three Law implications. “Are you telling me that you will be safer if law enforcement is not involved?”

“That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”

Again, the slight hesitation. Then, Miles said, “Very well. What are my instructions?”

“Take the code for the datum I’m using. If anyone calls looking for me, send them here.”

“I am unable to establish that code, Derec. It is encrypted and scrambles every buffer I try to use.”

Derec grumbled curses under his breath. That was just like Hofton.

He was probably listening to this conversation and feeling superior.

When the Nucleomorph situation was resolved, Derec was going to have a talk with Hofton — and Bogard — about their organization.

“All right,” he said. “If anyone contact you looking for me, tell them I’ll be checking back with you.”

“Understood.”

Elin’s voice rang out from off the datum’s screen. “Miles, get out of the way.” She stepped into view and said, “Derec. Where are you?”

“Traveling. I’ll be back at the lab tomorrow.” Or not at all, he thought.

“Traveling,” she repeated. “Wonderful. While you were gone, we were notified that Eza Lamina wants us to appear tomorrow at a hearing. She mentioned Nucleomorph, and the implication was that we’ve been overcharging the Triangle for the services Nucleomorph provides.”

“Have we?” Derec asked. He was too tired and focused on Ariel to be tactful.

Elin froze, then just as quickly heated up. “Are you accusing me of financial improprieties?”

“No. But I haven’t been skimming money, and I’m not getting any kickbacks from Nucleomorph —” here Derec had to suppress a laugh

“— so I’m putting my mind at ease.”

“The answer is no. And when you get back, we are going to discuss my future on this project.”

“Elin, I don’t think you’re stealing. I just don’t have any energy for indirection right now. When was the last time you talked to Nucleomorph?”

“They asked for our most recent pathogen inventory the day before yesterday, and said that delivery of the next batch of ungulates would be delayed. And the person I talked to seemed to know you were on Kopernik. How did you get back, anyway? I didn’t think anyone was getting through the blockade.”

“I got a little back-channel help,” Derec said. “Elin, I need to talk to Miles again.”

She nodded. “See you tomorrow.”

When Miles was back, Derec said, “Miles, I’m going to look for Ariel. If I do not contact you in the next four hours, contact Mia Daventri. Tell her that I was going to Gernika because I believed Ariel’s life to be in danger. Once you have done that, consider my prohibition on contacting the NLBI rescinded. Is the priority clear?”

“It is, Derec.”

“All right,” Derec said. “Four hours.”

He tweaked the autopilot to accelerate up the Bogard Valley.

The flier’s console comm chirped ninety minutes later. Before Derec could accept the call, the signal overrode his receiving privileges.

“Attention civilian vehicle,” an automated voice said. “You are entering a zone considered hazardous. You are advised to evacuate this area by the Terran Military Command. Should you remain within this area, the Terran Military Command assumes no responsibility for your safety or that of your property. Ping this message to acknowledge receipt and understanding; if you do not ping this message, it will repeat until you do.”

Before the message had begun to repeat, Derec was calling Ariel on the datum he’d gotten from Hofton. There was an interminable pause, and then a visual message: CONNECTION FAILED.

“What!?” Derec shouted. “Hofton, dammit, if you’re eavesdropping you need to do something about this.” He stabbed Ariel’s code again, and again got the CONNECTION FAILED return.

“Should you remain in this area,” the automated voice said, “the Terran Military Command —” Derec punched the automated-response key and the voice shut off. Five seconds later it started up again. “You have acknowledged receipt and understanding of a message from Terran Military Command advising you to evacuate this area. In the event of personal injury or property loss, the Terran Military Command is indemnified from all claims of loss.”

“Shut up already,” Derec said. The message did not repeat.

All right, Derec thought. You’re heading into an area declared hazardous by the Terran military, which shouldn’t even be here; you can’t get in touch with Ariel; you may or may not be under observation by a group of robots who are taking human survival into their own hands; and there is a conspiracy of uncertain extent between Nucleomorph and a group of cyborgs. The only thing working in Derec’s favor was that nobody knew where he was — except perhaps Hofton, and whoever Hofton chose to tell, and whatever elements of the Terran military appeared to have presented themselves in Nova system.

So what made sense? Derec would go on. He would call Masid Vorian when he was so close to Gernika that even someone monitoring the call wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. If Masid hadn’t found Ariel, he’d likely know where she’d gone, and for all Derec knew, Ariel had figured out what was happening and taken her own action. The worst thing that could happen was for the three of them to chase each other in circles; so until he got a better idea, he’d go on to Gernika and find Masid.

The kilometers flew by, but not quite fast enough. Derec overrode the autopilot and accelerated again, leaving a wake of twisting leaves on the forest canopy below.

Chapter 31

THEY DIDN’T HIT Masid after that first time, and they didn’t even rough him up when he’d been installed in a small, slant-roofed shed on the outer fringes of Gernika. Instead Gorka, the cyborg who had leveled him back in the woods, stayed by the door while Filoo offered Masid a chair. He took it, both out of gratitude to relax while he tried to get the pain in his head under control and because he couldn’t think of any reason not to cooperate with Filoo while he figured out what exactly the drug kingpin was after.

“You looking for Ariel Burgess?” Filoo appeared only mildly interested, and Masid figured the question was designed just to get him talking. Fine. He would talk. The longer he talked, the longer Filoo wasn’t killing him, and the longer Masid had to assess his chances of getting out.

“Yeah. She here?”

Filoo shook his head. “Missed her. She’s gone off with Brixa to the borg lab. Lucky find for Basq and Brixa both; she’s exactly the kind of person they need to make them seem credible.”

“I gather she’s had her own problems with credibility. Maybe she’s just looking for a way to get back in the game.”

“She’ll get in a game, all right,” Filoo chuckled. “You make me laugh, Vorian. You thought you could just walk away from everything after taking a shot at Parapoyos and nearly getting me killed, and now you stroll back into the lion’s den looking for your damsel in distress.”

If that was Filoo’s impression of Ariel, Masid thought he was in for a shock.

“And you’ve got no idea what’s really going on,” Filoo continued, “which is the funniest thing of all. Come on. Spill it. What do you think you’re saving Ariel from?”

“For starters, the robot that has Parapoyos in it.”

“You think he’s after Ariel? Not so, gato. If Parapoyos is worried about settling a score, it’s with you. Especially after you fried part of his puppet’s head the other night. He was starting to like that shell, I think. It sure helped him out on Kopernik.”

“Let me guess,” Masid said. “He went up there to kill Taprin figuring that the Managins would blame Spacers and the Spacers would be rattled by even the hint of the possibility that a robot could be involved. Then Pon Byris came along and it was too good a chance to pass up. Now that he’s got Earth and the Fifty Worlds eyeball to eyeball, he can get things back under control here without worrying too much about who’s watching.”

Filoo sat down, clearly enjoying himself. “You got part of it. The obvious part. Sure, Parapoyos wanted to distract the Terrans and Spacers. But he’s already in control down here, at least of what matters. Who do you think sent me to recruit dying baleys for transformation? Who had me cook up symptom mitigators to help convince people that we knew what we were doing? Gato, we’ve been making most of the bugs that Derec Avery spends all of his time listing. Some of them we send out into the hinterlands to work their way into the ecology, others we just wipe on a few doorknobs in Stopol. You thought all that was gone just because you wrecked the original lab and saw Parapoyos carried off, but he’s smarter than you or I will ever be. He had it all figured out.”

“Which is why he let me get to a gun when he could have just pinched my head off.”

Briefly, Masid thought he’d made a mistake. Filoo, who appeared to have no other emotional attachments in the world, was fiercely devoted to Parapoyos, and if Masid hadn’t been sitting in a prefab shack with his head throbbing and the clock on his life probably ticking out its last few minutes, he’d have chosen his words more carefully.

The drug dealer’s face reddened, and he started to stand. Then he caught himself, resettled his ample frame in the chair, and forced a smile onto his face. “Think big, Vorian. You don’t have much time left, so you might as well occupy yourself with the long view. This goes way beyond cooking up bugs to dupe idiots on Nova Levis. Basq and his people are serious. They’re going to get the citizenship drive done, one way or another, because once it becomes clear how powerful they are the Triangle’s going to roll over and let it happen.

And then some of them are going to emigrate to other Settler worlds to start legal fights over reciprocity of citizenship under interplanetary law. Don’t be surprised if Nucleomorph puts a little money into those fights, and don’t be surprised when the borgs win.

“See where this is going? Once the tech is a little firmer, they’ll live forever, or at least longer than any human. How much power can someone accumulate just by being in one place for a hundred years?

What if that person runs for an office? And then what if that person uses his sway to make things a little easier, a little more lucrative, for Nucleomorph when the company comes to that new planet? It’s a sweetheart of a deal all around: Nucleomorph gets to legitimize its cyborg procedure, collect royalties on the patents, and license all the subsidiary tech; the cyborgs get to work themselves from what you see to positions of power all through the Settled worlds. They’ll be rich, and once a few human generations have passed, they’ll be respected, and Nucleomorph will keep making more of them.”

“Come on, Filoo,” Masid said. “Are any of these people really that naïve?”

Holding up a hand, Filoo said, “You should watch what you say. Gorka, why don’t you wait outside for a minute?”

When the cyborg had shut the door behind him, Masid said, “What’s to stop the borgs from making deals with other people? Nucleomorph can’t keep a hold over them forever.”

“Oh, yes they can,” Filoo countered, nodding. “Because Nucleomorph is on the track of the one thing the cyborgs want worse than they wanted to live before they were transformed.”

Masid knew what he was going to say before he said it. Still the word rocked him.

“Reproduction. It’s the cyborg Holy Grail, and Nucleomorph is closer than you might think.”

It hit Masid from two sides: one, the realization that a breeding population of cyborgs would put Homo sapiens at an insurmountable disadvantage; and two, the horrified suspicion that even Filoo might not be getting the whole story. If cyborg tech was improving that fast, how long would it be before they were indistinguishable from the regular human population? What might not be available through force typically was through stealth, and if cyborgs could sneak into positions of power on Settled worlds, and begin reproducing, by the time they announced themselves it would be too late for anyone to do anything about it without resorting to a war that would lay waste the precarious culture of any Settler planet.

He forced himself to approach the question from a less adversarial perspective. What if no such takeover was planned? What if the integration of man and machine was just the next step in human progress? Was anything to be gained by resisting it? Humans had never been very adept at choosing not to do what was possible, even when they suspected the consequences would be different than their expectation.

“Now I think you’re starting to get it,” Filoo said. “Nucleomorph will be the shadow government on a hundred worlds as long as they can keep the borgs waiting for the Grail. Hell, as soon as this thing gets off the ground, I’m signing up myself.” He stood and opened the door. “In case you were wondering, Basq won’t let me kill you unless you refuse the transformation. He’s going to stop by later today, and if I were you I’d have my answer ready.”

With that, he left Masid alone. As soon as the door shut, and Masid was sure Filoo or Gorka weren’t going to come back in, he flipped his datum out of his pocket. They hadn’t searched him, which could only mean they didn’t care who he called. Some threshold must have been crossed — Brixa and Basq must have figured that their project had reached a critical mass. Masid wondered if it had something to do with Ariel, or if there was news from Kopernik. A war in Terran space would sure free up Nucleomorph to stop looking over their shoulders.

The other thing to consider was that no one in the Triangle was likely to answer Masid’s call. He was on his own, in the position of knowing a truth that very few people on Nova Levis would have believed or wanted to hear. Derec Avery was possibly the only exception, and he’d called from an anonymous datum whose code Masid couldn’t backtrack. Masid swore, thought furiously, and was about to call Mia at Kalienin’s office — careers be damned all around — when she called him.

“It’s on, Masid,” she said. On the tiny screen her face looked ghostly, all eyes and pale skin and twitching mouth. “A Terran strike force is already in-system. They didn’t tell anyone they were coming, and our satellites just picked them up. Kalienin and Lamina are both tearing out their hair because no one in the Terran military command will talk to them, but there’s no public awareness. The policy of the Triangle seems to be that whatever happens to Gernika isn’t their concern.”

“Have you talked to Derec?”

“No. I didn’t even know he was back from Kopernik. I’ll call him too, but if you’re in Gernika, you need to get out. Now. The whole place might disappear within an hour.”

“Or they might wait to see how the Spacers react to Terran military positioned over a Settler world where the government is a Spacer-Terran coalition,” Masid said. “You can bet that Lamina has been in touch with everyone who will take her calls. I wouldn’t bet on a strike happening right away.”

“Would you bet your life against it?” Mia snapped. “Masid, get out of there.”

“Will do,” he said. It wouldn’t do any good to mention that he wasn’t exactly at liberty to get out of anywhere. “If you talk to Derec, tell him to get in touch with me. Ditto Ariel, although I’m guessing she won’t answer her com right now. She’s gone with Zev Brixa to Nucleomorph.”

“She’s safer there than you are at Gernika,” Mia said.

Maybe, Masid thought. He wasn’t willing to bet on that, either. At best, Ariel was a useful public voice; as soon as she was no longer suited to that role, Nucleomorph would —

That was when it all came clear.

“Mia,” Masid said, “try like hell to get in touch with Derec. I’m going to be on the move here. Wait for me to call you.”

He snapped off the call and immediately dialed the personal com code Ariel had given him. Only three days late, he thought. And could be you would have been worse off if Basq or Brixa — or Filoo — knew I was looking for you.

Right.

A message scrolled across the screen: CONNECTION FAILED.

Masid tried again.

CONNECTION FAILED.

Shit, he thought. Was her datum disabled? Did Nucleomorph have screens in place? Those were the only two reasons he could think of for why he wouldn’t even have gotten a message server, or been forwarded to Ariel’s robot back in Nova City — and he didn’t like either of them.

Chapter 32

BRIXA’S OFFICE WAS walled entirely with projections of various units of the laboratory/hospital complex. He and Ariel sat in plush armchairs and sipped expensive Terran bourbon. When enough time had passed that the silence was about to become uncomfortable, Brixa said, “A big enterprise demands the use of people we might not otherwise employ.”

“Do you mean Basq, or are we talking about Weil and Jan?”

Brixa shrugged. “General comment — could be any of them. Basq is a bit of a zealot, Weil is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a robot wearing human skin, and Jan has his head in the clouds. He doesn’t know it, but he’s right in line with the ancients who believed that the first networked communications would lead to archived personalities and so on. Left to their own devices, the three of them would kill each other before too long. It’s my job to keep them all pulling in the same direction, for the sake of the project.”

“And now you add me,” Ariel said. “With my own set of stubborn beliefs that don’t square with yours. You just keep making problems for yourself.”

“If you’ll pardon an old entrepreneur’s canard, most things that look like problems at first glance turn out to be opportunities.”

“So I’m an opportunity.” Ariel looked over the rim of her glass at Brixa, and thought: Incredible. I’m practically flirting with him.

Brixa held up a hand. “Apologies if I made it sound like you’re just a cog in some plan. That’s not the case at all. Listen, Ariel. I meant it when I said we lose too many. It’s easy for you to think of me as a soulless operative, so you do. The truth is that every time we recruit someone and that person dies, I take that as evidence of a personal failure to oversee this project properly. Every one of their deaths is on my head.”

Ariel couldn’t decide whether to believe him or not. She sipped her whiskey, feeling that a crux was approaching. She had committed herself to something in front of Basq, and here in Zev Brixa’s office she was about to find out exactly what that something was.

With a smile more rueful than any she’d yet seen, Brixa went on.

“We lose more adults than children. Their bodies are less resilient.”

“More orphans,” Ariel said, and let it hang.

“Nothing I can do will convince you that I believe in this,” Brixa said. “But you’re still willing to speak for us.”

“Not for you. For them.”

Brixa nodded, accepting the implied rebuke and moving on. “As it should be. This is an early stage. In twenty years, or fifty, you’ll look back and realize you were part of something wonderful.”

“Will I?” Ariel asked. “What interest will cyborgs have in working with unaltered humans? They’ll live longer, they won’t get sick — why would they even consider themselves human?”

“As long as they can’t reproduce,” Brixa said, “they’ll want to be a part of human civilization. After all — if you’ll permit a fairly cold-blooded assessment of the situation — it takes a constant supply of humans to ensure a fresh supply of cyborgs.”

“Unless you figure out how to make them fertile.”

“Please, Ariel. We are doing some research into fertility, but it’s just for the sake of image. As long as we keep them believing that we’re going to discover a way for them to reproduce, they’ll do whatever we want. That includes my old friend Basq, however convinced he may be that he’s the senior partner in our little project. Nucleomorph’s only problem is making sure we can make more of them faster than they die off.” Brixa set his drink down. “And that’s where you come in.”

Out of reflex, Ariel put her glass on the table, too. “I beg your pardon?”

The office door opened, but something in Brixa’s face kept Ariel looking at him. “Adult conversions, Ambassador,” he said, and the smile came back in all of its amoral exuberance. “Most of our subjects are immature Terrans riddled with disease. We’re very excited to find out what happens when we do the procedure on a healthy adult Spacer.”

Now Ariel did turn around, and saw coming toward her the robot Brixa had brought up from Nova Levis.

“Ariel Burgess,” Brixa said, “meet Kynig Parapoyos. Oh, excuse me. I forgot you knew him as Gale Chassik some years ago; your acquaintance predates mine.”

She knew it was hopeless, but Ariel leaped out of her chair and made a break for the door. The robot caught her without even rocking back. It lifted her off the ground and carried her out into the hall.

Brixa, coming up behind them, said, “This is a privilege we haven’t extended to anyone else, Ariel. You’ll be the first person to know why we’re willing to expend all of this effort on you.”

Ariel fought. She kicked, she screamed, she cursed Brixa and Parapoyos and in the end herself, and when the robot carried her into the operating theater where Krista Weil waited with a transdermal, Ariel spit in her face and cursed her, too.

Weil didn’t even wipe away the saliva before touching the transdermal to the back of Ariel’s hand and depressing the trigger.

Chapter 33

THE HUT DOOR opened, and Masid barely got the datum stowed before Basq came in. The cyborg remained standing, but he looked completely at ease. “We have an arrangement to discuss,” he said.

“So I hear, but it came from Filoo, so I’m glad you’re here to confirm,” Masid answered. The small sally got a chuckle, but he had no illusions about being able to deal with Basq if the cyborg leader had made up his mind.

“Filoo gave you the substance of it.” Basq eyed Masid, giving him a chance to commit. Masid had the sense that more was coming, though, so he waited. “Clandestine enterprises make hypocrites of us all, Masid Vorian. If it were up to me, Filoo would have been turned over to the NLBI years ago; there’s certainly enough to charge him with. He’s peculiarly persuasive with the constituency we need to get our enterprise off the ground, though, and when he discovered that Kynig Parapoyos was alive, he practically forced himself on us. I wouldn’t have expected it of Filoo, but he’s pathologically loyal when it comes to Parapoyos.”

“Is Parapoyos running things around here?” Masid asked.

“I run things here,” Basq said. “Do not doubt that. Parapoyos is a revered figure among us, but that reverence is ever tempered by the realization that he treated us like experimental mice, to be discarded when nothing more could be learned from us. In his current circumstances, he is a useful tool. We use him the way he used us.” He allowed himself a thin smile. “And you very nearly solved the problem.”

“Not a very discreet maneuver, bulling into my office in the middle of the night. I take it he was freelancing? Or was I part of the plan after Taprin?”

“Hardly. Pon Byris was an opportunity to stretch Earth-Spacer tensions even farther than Taprin’s death had. You, on the other hand, were a simple grudge. Parapoyos is now keenly aware that this kind of vendetta is counterproductive. You’ve got nothing to fear from him, I think. Filoo, on the other hand …” Basq let the question hang.

Masid in turn forced himself to face it square-on for the first time.

If it meant he would live, would he undergo the procedure? He recoiled from the idea, but that revulsion passed quickly, and his honest response was yes, he would. If death was the alternative, he would.

The question was whether he could get away with not telling Basq this right away.

“Are you and Brixa planning to transform Ariel?” he asked.

“I’m not,” Basq answered, “and you’re dodging the question. What Brixa intends for her I do not know. I think she will be useful to us as a respected public official. It never hurts to have people like that on your side.”

“You’re dodging my question, too,” Masid said. “Fact is, I think you’re lying to me. Let me lay the theory out for you. Cyborg tech is advancing as fast as you can sacrifice sick kids to it, and pretty soon you’ll be able to create cyborgs who are indistinguishable from fully organic human beings. My guess is you’ve got something along those lines planned for Ariel. The best advocate is the one who looks like someone who should hate you.”

“Good plan. Not my plan, probably not Brixa’s plan, but a good plan. To tell you the truth, I believe we’ll have to consider it now. Unfortunately, I think it will be several years yet before we are superficially indistinguishable from unaugmented humans. It seems unlikely that we will be able to keep Ariel Burgess either sequestered or duped for that length of time.”

Masid’s instinct was to trust Basq. The cyborg leader didn’t come across like someone who lied very often, or for any less than crucial reasons. He vacillated, holding back his acquiescence only because he thought he still might be able to wriggle out of this. The wild card was the military strike — if it was imminent, Masid was more or less certain that by revealing it to Basq he would buy back his unaltered, flesh-and-blood life.

His datum chirped, and Masid thought: It hasn’t done you much good to be indirect, Vorian. Let’s try brazen now, see how that goes.

He took the datum out, looking Basq in the eye, and answered the call.

Basq showed no sign of distress that Masid still had a datum, or that he hadn’t asked permission to use it. Masid turned the screen so they both could see Avery on the screen.

“Derec,” Masid said.

“Masid.” Avery was in a flier of some kind. “I came from Nova City as soon as I got off the ship. Where’s Ariel? Where’s the robot?”

“The robot I don’t know about. Ariel, I think, is up at the Nucleomorph lab. There’s another problem now, though. Derec, let me introduce you to Basq.” Masid turned the screen a little more so Derec’s field of vision included Basq. The cyborg nodded in greeting.

“Where’s Ariel, Basq?”

“As Masid said. She is with Brixa, I believe touring Nucleomorph’s facility. Before we get too entangled here, Mr. Avery, I want to tell you how much I admire your positronics work. Bogard was exceptional. Before my transformation, I was involved in a similar area, not so theoretical, and I tip my metaphorical cap to you.”

Derec looked a little nonplussed at the compliment. “I’ll ask both of you,” he said. “Why did I get a recorded message from people identifying themselves as Terran military about three hundred kilometers back?”

For someone who had never believed in luck, Masid found himself suddenly drowning in it. “Oh, that,” he said, with a glance over at Basq. “Mia Daventri called me a little while ago. Seems that Vilios Kalienin is worried enough about the situation here that he’s looking for outside support. He talked to someone in the Auroran diplomatic corps — Hofton, I think was his name. You know him?”

Derec’s face had changed at the mention of the name. “Yes,” he said. “Go on.”

“This Hofton was apparently convinced that Basq here is after more than the right to vote for city council. He suggested to Eza Lamina and Kalienin that Nova Levis’ government was threatened, and that drastic action might be called for. Kalienin was only too happy to get in touch with the Terran military, and the last thing they need right now is worries about a colonial uprising — especially if it’s started by cyborgs. The long and the short of it is that sometime soon, Gernika’s going to be destroyed. Probably from orbit. If this transmission cuts off suddenly, you’ll know why.”

While he spoke, Masid looked from Derec to Basq, who exhibited remarkably similar reactions: slight widening of the eyes, paling of the skin, and so on. Typical physical responses to an unwelcome surprise. Masid had the sense that Derec’s shock was slightly different than Basq’s, however, and he would have given a great deal to know why.

“I’m going to Nucleomorph,” Derec said. “Get out of there, Masid.”

Masid put every fiber of his being into a casual shrug. “That’s not up to me.”

“All of you get out of there,” Derec said, and the screen went blank.

He put the datum away, taking his time about it, and looked up at Basq. “Seems like you should be sounding some kind of alarm.”

Basq opened the door. “Come with me.”

They left the hut. Filoo was standing just outside, smirking at Masid.

“What’s the call, gato?”

“Vorian and I are taking a ride to Nucleomorph,” Basq said. “Keep an eye on things here.”

The disappointment on Filoo’s face was almost comical. “You’re a coward, Vorian,” he growled. “It’s always the easy way out for you.”

Masid said nothing, because Filoo was right. Not because Masid had agreed to become a cyborg, or because he had once tried to assassinate Kynig Parapoyos, or because he had once used a dying agent in his own service to keep himself alive. It was because he was walking out of Gernika and leaving Filoo and the rest of them to die, and he was saying nothing.

Basq must have had some inkling of his thoughts, because when they were most of the way down the trail to Masid’s flier, the cyborg said, “If you’d said anything, I would have killed you.”

“That makes it worse,” Masid said.

After a moment’s consideration, Basq nodded. They walked the rest of the way in silence.

The flier was where Masid had left it. The three cyborgs he had seen coming down the trail earlier in the day were standing around on the river bank. They snapped to attention when they saw Basq.

“It doesn’t respond,” one of them said.

Basq looked at Masid. “Keyed to your voice?”

Masid nodded.

“Get in and start it up.”

The two of them climbed in. Masid sat in the pilot’s seat and identified himself to the flier. Its engines heated up immediately.

“Good,” Basq said.

“To Nucleomorph?” Masid asked.

“That’s right. I’m going to Nucleomorph. You get out.” Masid looked at Basq. “I don’t care what you tell them. They won’t believe you, and from my perspective it’s easier to start over than to convince them.”

Masid had thought himself callous when he left Gernika. Now he was getting a lesson in genuine indifference to life.

“If we both survive this,” he said, “I’m coming after you.”

Basq winked. “I’ll be waiting.”

Masid got out of the flier and stood on the shore. Basq leaned out of the hatch. “Take him back to the settlement,” he said. “Wait for my instruction. Try to keep him and Filoo apart.”

“Sir,” the three cyborgs said.

The hatch closed. Masid watched the flier lift out of the shallows and skim over the trees to the west. Before it was out of sight, two of the cyborgs had grasped his arms and propelled him up the bank and onto the trail.

Chapter 34

ARIEL DRIFTED. LUCID moments came and went, long enough to remind her where she was, but too short for her to find control over her body. She opened her eyes and saw gleaming metal arms tipped with laser scalpels, transdermal injectors, syringes, pincers for grasping and manipulating. For grasping and manipulating her.

Behind them, a glare of lights, and somewhere beyond her field of vision she heard voices. She tried to speak and could not.

Something, she thought distantly. Find something and hold it. Let everything else come to it.

“Start with the structural changeover,” a woman said. There: Krista Weil. Ariel clung to the name, its specificity, the array of associations that came with it. Then she drifted, but not so far.

An alarm brought her back. “What the hell is that?” Weil said.

“Go ahead,” another voice said. Cold and dead, this voice, yet somehow vibrant with a kind of hunger.

“I can’t start when there’s an alarm going off. If something goes wrong in the middle, she’ll die, and we don’t have healthy Spacers growing on trees around here. I’m not wasting this one. Go find out what it is.”

Faint whir of a machine, heavy tread on the bare floor. A robot.

Snap: Ariel was awake. Feeling flooded into her limbs as the oldest of instincts, fight or flight, scoured the last of the anesthesia from her brain. Still she couldn’t move, but she was aware of every part of her body again, aware of the slight touch of air on her skin. Without moving her head, she looked around until she located Weil. The scientist was watching as the damaged robot housing Kynig Parapoyos left the operating theater. When the door hissed shut behind it, Weil muttered something under her breath and went to a terminal at the far end of the room. The alarm still sounded.

Gather yourself, Ariel thought. If she didn’t move before the robot came back, she would never again move as Ariel Burgess. Her toes moved, and the tips of some of her fingers.

Weil’s voice, calm and dispassionate as a weather recording, was narrating the procedure and related events into a recorder. “Krista Weil speaking. Initial phase of transformation on subject Ariel Burgess delayed due to security breach. It is inadvisable to perform transformation in a less than optimal security environment. Particularly in this case, as the patient is the first healthy adult Spacer to undergo procedure and will therefore provide a benchmark whether or not the procedure is successful.”

And so on in the same vein, while Ariel listened and let Weil’s dispassionate recording flood her with anger. Anger and fear, and Ariel accepted the fear, welcomed it and molded it into the anger until she could lift her head a little.

The alarm cut out. Weil looked up from her recording and made a call. “Kynig. Report, please.”

“I’m on my way back. There was a breach of the fence, but the buildings are all secure. Brixa says to go ahead.”

“We’re waiting on you, then,” Weil said. “Hurry. The anesthesia should have another two hours, but I don’t want a margin any slimmer than that before I purge it myself and start the paralytic flow. Spacers’ immune systems are very aggressive about eliminating foreign substances.”

“I used to kill people who patronized me, Weil,” Parapoyos said from her terminal. The call cut off with a click.

“Amazing that the worlds are not depopulated,” Weil muttered.

She left Ariel’s field of vision, and Ariel heard her activating a pump of some sort. Then Weil started to speak again, recording her actions for future analysis. “Fluid replacement pump coming on line.

The patient’s Spacer-enhanced immune physiology dictates that her autonomic functions be temporarily suspended while the major structural work is completed. An intravenous solution will be pumped into the subject’s body as subject’s blood is drained by slight vacuum. The solution introduced will induce coma, maximally reducing incidence of shock-induced death.”

A firm hand grasped Ariel’s left forearm and turned it over, exposing the inside of her elbow. Ariel held herself still as the needle slid into the vein. Weil moved around her head to another machine, just on the edge of Ariel’s peripheral vision; it started up with a low hum. That would be the reservoir to hold her blood, drawn out as the solution refilled and stilled her body.

“Vacuum apparatus operative,” Weil said. “Applying to subject now.”

Again the firm touch, this time on Ariel’s right forearm, but this time she didn’t hold still. She turned her head, reached across her body, and as Weil moved to embed the heavy needle in her right arm, Ariel caught her wrist and with all her strength jammed the needle into Weil’s other hand. Simultaneous with Weil’s shriek came the pain of the needle in Ariel’s arm tearing loose; then with both hands Ariel reached up to one of the mechanical arms arrayed above the operating table. She caught one and brought it down hard on Weil’s head.

Weil’s knees buckled, and she pitched over onto her left side. Ariel slid off the table and steadied herself against a wave of dizziness.

When it had passed, she stood looking coldly down at the semiconscious scientist as the machine pumped the blood from her body. You deserve to die, she thought — and then knelt to pull the needle from Weil’s hand. The pump shuddered and cut off.

Ariel went straight to the door, and found with little surprise that it was locked. There was a keypad next to it, and before she could think too much, she took the direct route, hauling Weil’s body across the room and pressing her thumb to the door.

KRISTA WEIL: CONFIRM IDENTITY, it said.

“Shit,” Ariel growled.

CONFIRMATION FAILED.

“Shit,” Ariel said again. She had not gotten this far to be standing naked in front of the door when Parapoyos came creaking through.

Weil’s voice …

The recording. It had begun Krista Weil speaking.

Leaving Weil where she lay near the door, Ariel went to the terminal and saw that the recording file was paused. She ran back through it, following the onscreen transcription until the magic line appeared.

Then she turned the volume all the way up and went back to the door to press Weil’s thumb into the pad again.

KRISTA WEIL: CONFIRM IDENTITY.

In four steps, Ariel was back at the terminal. She tapped the screen and Weil’s voice boomed out of a hidden speaker: “Krista Weil speaking.”

Ariel paused the recording and was back to the door in seconds.

She opened it, feeling a surge of angry satisfaction, took a half step out — and saw Parapoyos’ robot shell coming around a bend in the corridor.

Even a damaged domestic robot could run her to ground before she’d gotten up to a sprint. Ariel had no choice but to duck back into the operating theater. She didn’t think it had seen her, and maybe she’d been lucky there; she hadn’t gotten a good look at the robot either on Brixa’s flier or in his office, but she was fairly sure its optics were damaged, and part of its skull had melted away to reveal the circuitry beneath. Unless the designer had built in complete redundancy in its sensory systems, installing parallel controls for the positronic and organic brains, Parapoyos would be operating at less than peak effectiveness.

Ariel looked around the operating theater for an escape route or something she could use as a weapon. High on one wall was a rectangular window of one-way glass, but Ariel had no way of getting up to it and no way of knowing whether she could break it with what was at hand. There were racks of instruments, but none that a human could use to attack the alloy surface or frame of a robot — or, probably, the reinforced polymers of the window. If she could get to the positronic brain, she might be able to disable whatever systems Parapoyos didn’t control, but she had no way of knowing which systems those were, or whether there in fact were any. The fact that he could operate the robot body after positronic collapse and a point-blank energy discharge to its head indicated that more than enough redundancy was there.

She was dithering with seconds before the door opened and Parapoyos either killed her or turned her back over to Brixa. I’m still sick, Ariel thought. Have to focus.

It struck her as ironic that she’d fought off the anesthesia but not whatever microbe she’d picked up. The post-Burundi’s augmentation had made her even stronger than the average Spacer — strong enough that Weil’s calculated dose had worn off too quickly. For the first time in her life, Ariel found herself grateful she’d had the plague. The feeling wasn’t anymore ridiculous than any of the other emotional contortions she’d put herself through in the last week or so.

There she went again, spiraling down into herself. Ariel slapped her own face, hard enough to bring tears. When she’d blinked them away, she was looking at the instrument array over the operating table.

She got to the control panel as Parapoyos’ voice came from the intercom. “Krista, open the door.”

The software commanding the instruments was on standby. Ariel woke it up, moving with the pure economy of desperation. There were defaults for the scanning of a patient and a list of procedures, beginning with skeletal replacement. Ariel didn’t look any further. She touched an icon and took manual control of the surgical laser. It wouldn’t have enough range to burn Parapoyos at the door, but if she could draw him close enough to the table …

“Krista. Open the door.” Parapoyos was getting impatient. And Weil was stirring on the floor.

The laser could be operated by joystick or VR interface. Ariel didn’t have time for the VR; using the joystick, she swiveled the arm around until the laser was pointed at the door and dialed the range all the way up. Through the camera mounted next to the laser, she could see the upper part of the doorframe. She left it there as Weil sat up.

“Krista!”

Parapoyos’ voice spurred her to her feet. Looking wildly around the room, Weil pressed her thumb into the pad and before the complex AI could speak said, “Krista Weil.”

The door opened, and the robot came in. “She attacked me Kynig,”

Weil babbled, “she shouldn’t have been awake for two hours at least but she came right off the table and stabbed the needle into my hand and then —”

“Shut up.” The robot looked around the room. “Ariel. You can’t hide.”

“I’m not trying to,” Ariel said from where she crouched behind the control panel. In the camera view, she had the laser centered on the robot’s undamaged optic port.

It looked in her direction and started forward. She tracked it, knowing she had very little time before Parapoyos noticed the minuscule movements of the laser arm.

Behind the robot, Weil pressed herself against the door. She noticed first. “The laser,” she said.

Ariel triggered it.

Parapoyos was less than three meters from the operating table, but even that was too far to give Ariel any real hope. Through the camera view, she saw the robot’s optic glaze over, and a puff of smoke curled up from its head. Parapoyos grunted, and the robot jerked to the side.

Ariel sprang from behind the console as the laser cut out, covering the distance to Weil while the robot stumbled. Parapoyos was swearing, but he regained control. It stood turning its head from side to side, trying to locate her by sound.

Ariel had one thumb dug into Weil’s larynx and the other twisting the scientist’s arm up behind her back, keeping her between Ariel and the robot. “Open the door,” she whispered into Weil’s ear. Weil started to shake her head, and Ariel squeezed. A throttled cry escaped the scientist. “Open it,” Ariel whispered again. She backed Weil to the door and maneuvered her around to press her thumb against the pad.

KRISTA WEIL: CONFIRM IDENTITY.

Ariel twisted Weil’s arm hard, and at the same time relaxed the pressure on her throat. “Krista Weil,” the scientist sobbed.

“Krista, you goddamn idiot, don’t open the door!” Parapoyos shouted as the robot pivoted around, but the door was already open.

Ariel dragged Weil through with her, and the door slid shut as the robot came across the room. It banged into the door with frightening force, but Parapoyos couldn’t open the door himself.

For the moment, Ariel was safe.

Chapter 35

“YOU KNOW,” MASID said as his three guards walked him back into Gernika, “it’s amazing what people will do contrary to their best interests.”

“Shut up,” one of them said.

Masid laughed and forced himself not to look at the sky. “What are you going to do, kill me? Get in line.”

Another of the cyborgs swatted Masid on the side of the head, not hard enough to injure but more than enough to bring tears to his eyes. “Shut up.”

“That’s the spirit,” Masid said. “Listen, if I told you I had a secret that might save your lives, would you let me talk to Filoo?”

“Only life you need to worry about is yours, meat,” the first cyborg said.

They were back at the hut Masid had just left an hour before. Now or never, he thought. “The trick is to quit worrying about yours because you know there’s not much left in it. That frees you up to get concerned about other people. I’ll give you the secret for free: Sometime in the next few hours, Gernika’s going to turn into a hole in the ground. You want details, send Filoo to see me.”

The three cyborgs were looking at him with identical flat gazes.

Early versions, Masid thought. The tech must be improving fast.

“I’m going inside now,” he said. “Ask yourselves why Basq was in such a hurry to get out of here after he talked to me.”

Masid went into the hut, shut the door, and sat down to wait.

He didn’t have to wait long. Five minutes later by his datum’s chrono, there was a sharp crackle of weapons fire right outside the door. By the time Masid had gotten to his feet, Filoo was standing in the open doorway.

“So you got the message,” Masid said.

“Ten seconds,” Filoo said. “Talk.”

“Terran military’s coming. Maybe right now.”

Filoo’s mouth twitched, as if he couldn’t decide whether or not to smile.

Now, Masid thought, and he was across the room chopping down on Filoo’s gun arm while Filoo was still trying to figure out the joke.

The weapon went off, and Masid felt a wash of heat over his right foot; then the gun hit the floor and Masid had Filoo on his back.

“No time to debate,” he said. “I’m going. You try to stop me, I’ll finish this right now.”

Hatred flared in Filoo’s eyes. “Postponed,” he said. “That’s all it is.”

“Here’s hoping,” Masid said. He released Filoo, picked up the gun, and ran out into Gernika as distant thunder sounded.

His message had gotten out. All around there were carts piled with belongings, and the few working transports groaned under the weight of passengers in numbers far exceeding the vehicles’ capacities. Still the citizens of Gernika forced their children aboard the transports, reaching through the windows to tear bags and parcels out of passengers’ hands and make room for more children. Groups of cyborgs argued violently, divided over whether Basq had deserted them. Adults shouted; children cried.

Thunder sounded, much closer.

Not orbital, Masid thought. They’re going to come in close.

A group of arguing cyborgs caught sight of him. “He lies about Basq!” one of them shouted over the chaos, and the group started toward Masid. He thought he saw something like gratitude in their eyes — the gratitude of the terrified for a way to displace their fear.

They would kill him on the off chance that it made them feel safe.

Filoo’s gun was in Masid’s hand, but he couldn’t shoot people for being frightened and confused.

“They’re coming!” he screamed, and ran.

As he was turning, he saw the group of cyborgs break into a run, and Masid knew he was going to die. Then the thunder over the horizon turned into a deafening roar, and something black and shining reared up over the trees, holding its position like a mantis poised to strike. A line of explosions obliterated the end of the main street, and the concussion came to Masid as a series of staccato hammer blows that went on even after he’d felt his eardrums give way. He tripped, and before he’d hit the ground another line of bright fire incinerated the cyborgs pursuing him, together with the nearest two heavy transports and everyone inside. The after-image seared his eyes, and something was wrong with one of his feet; still he got up and ran through a rain of falling debris, not sure where he was going except that it was away from the rolling line of destruction.

As his vision cleared, he saw two more attack craft coming up, forming a triangle over Gernika. A stand of trees disappeared in a bloom of smoke and fluttering leaves, and Masid realized that the Terrans were strafing the cyborgs who had managed to get out of the settlement. The three attack craft were long and jointed, with pivoting engines at the ends of their four stubby wings and ordnance bubbles like the heads of mosquitoes, swiveling faster than his eye could track in seach of new targets. He looked toward the hut where he’d left Filoo — it was gone. He looked to his right; where Basq’s headquarters had stood was now a partial skeleton of beams, burning fiercely in the midday sunshine.

The dormitory complex exploded with a wave of heat that dried Masid’s eyes in their sockets. He stumbled and sat down, realizing only after he’d hit the ground that something had knocked him over.

Fighting to get his breath back, to get out of the open before the Terrans got to him, he turned over onto his hands and knees and saw what had knocked him off his feet: a small torso, part of one arm still attached. During the interminable moment it took him to get to his feet again, Masid saw the gleaming alloy of the rib cage, within it the burst and bleeding lungs, and below it the ribbed spinal column, shining with blood and ending in a tangle of charred and curling filaments. He fled.

Running wherever he found a path clear of fire and rubble, Masid came to a crouch under a partially collapsed wall. Smoke stung his eyes, and he still couldn’t hear, although each new explosion came to him as a thump he felt through the soles of his feet, one of which was badly burned, the blistered toes sticking out through a charred hole in the boot. If Filoo had gotten out of the hut and survived, Masid was going to find him.

A trickling in his ears irritated him. He dipped blood from each ear with the tip of a pinky, felt nothing but a wave of passing annoyance at having to have his eardrums put back together. Time to get moving again, he thought; the thud of explosions was lessening, possibly coming from farther away as the three Terran craft tracked survivors into the forest. Masid looked up, didn’t see anything but sky and smoke. He scampered, limping. from rubble to pile of burning rubble, relying on smoke to scramble the Terrans’ visuals and the fires to disguise his infrared signature. If they had oxygen-exchange detectors on board, the fires might confuse those, too.

From the shelter of a caved-in roof, Masid peered along the length of Gernika’s main street — it was all craters and wreckage, fire and smoke, bodies and parts of bodies. Masid had the feeling he was present at an extinction, and rage filled him. He had seen too many desperate people killed by the pressures of history.

He ducked back into the wreckage as one of the Terran craft appeared again. Stuttering lines of energy reached up from the trees, and in a glittering burst of metal one of its wings was torn away, falling into the forest trailed by an arc of black smoke. The craft heeled over, righted itself, and returned fire.

Where had the cyborgs gotten heavy energy weapons? Masid didn’t have time to consider it. The diversion was buying him some time, and he used it to get across the street to the side nearest the river, and from there into a hollow in the side of a hill made by a fallen tree. The Terrans wouldn’t drop troops; they knew that even hardsuited soldiers wouldn’t be more than an even match for a cyborg, and the last thing they needed was casualties to complicated what was already a delicate political calculus. So the ships would come back, and they would pound the remains of Gernika until no sign of life remained on their scanners. Collapsing walls weren’t enough to kill a cyborg.

Masid, gato, you might just live through this, he thought. Stay here in the trees, don’t move too much, wait for them to flatten everything and hope they mistake your signals for a large mammal. They’re not looking for plain human signatures, right? Right. They’d only have automated subroutines looking for an electronic signature, too.

He thought it would work. The damaged craft wiped out whomever had been firing at it, and swept back over the trees to station itself over the ruined settlement. Then it methodically began bombing every square centimeter of Gernika. Huddled against the hillside, Masid could see nothing, and he still couldn’t hear, but dirt rained down around him and the earth shook as if convulsing. When the pause came, he opened his eyes, and only then noticed that he’d closed them.

A low thrum reached him, and he peered upward through the trees.

The Terran ship had interrupted its bombing, and was moving slowly in Masid’s direction. Can’t be looking for me, he thought, but his hand went to the gun anyway. Like a slingshot against an asteroid, but he’d be damned if he just sat there.

The ship paused directly over him. Masid looked down, realizing that what he had in his hand wasn’t Filoo’s gun; it was Masid’s own datum, and its screen was blinking with the message INCOMING CALL FROM DEREC AVERY.

Oh, Avery, you dumb son of a bitch …

Chapter 36

DEREC WAS CRUISING as fast as he dared along the Bogard’s western bank, dodging overhanging trees and keeping himself as unobtrusive as possible after having seen a flier zip past him near Gernika. Then he saw the three military craft coming in from the north. They split up and dropped out of sight to the east.

The strike was happening.

Call Masid, he thought. Then he saw smoke in the distance and realized he couldn’t tell Masid anything he didn’t already know. There would be time to compare notes later.

A renewed sense of urgency came over Derec; he gunned the flier away from the riverbank and covered the remaining kilometers to the Nucleomorph lab complex in a few minutes. Hovering just outside the fence line, he debated his approach. There was a front gate, and a road snaking away from it into the forest; between the fence and the buildings was an open space patrolled by what he assumed were armed guards. Not the kind of place he could just walk into.

Then again, he wasn’t walking. Outside the fence, on the far side of the complex, Derec saw a flier parked. A section of the fence was down, and technicians were working on it. So someone had already made an unauthorized entry. Who?

Parapoyos? No. He’d been created here, and if his robot chassis was still functional it would be here already.

Masid. The flier must have been his. After all, he knew where Ariel was, and had told Derec to go there, and he wouldn’t have been able to call Hofton’s datum and let Derec know he’d gotten out of Gernika.

Derec called him to see where in the complex he was. They had a better chance of getting Ariel out together than either of them did individually.

Damn the interference around here — at first it looked like he was getting through, and then a few seconds later the infuriating CONNECTION FAILED blinked on the datum’s screen. Nucleomorph’s countermeasures were nothing to trifle with, if they could block all data traffic into the complex.

The direct approach, then. Derec lifted up to a hundred meters and simply flew over the fence, planning to land at the closest doorway and break it down if he had to.

Right away he knew he’d underestimated the countermeasures. The flier’s controls locked in his hands, and its power cut out, setting him into a glide that led straight at a broad glass wall between two of the outer buildings. Derec just had time to put his hands up before he hit the wall with a boom that echoed down after him into unconsciousness.

He couldn’t have been out for long, because when he was able to register his surroundings again Derec could see people running through the spacious room he’d crashed into. A voice came from the flier’s console: “… this facility will be evacuated within the next five minutes. All personnel evacuate immediately. Terran Military Command assumes no responsibility for loss of life or property following five minutes from the broadcast of this message.”

Derec tuned the rest out. He’d gotten the important number. Ten minutes. He found the flier’s harness release and sprung himself to topple out of his seat into the tiny cabin space behind the cockpit.

The flier was largely intact, and all of its inertial dampers had triggered, saving Derec’s life and keeping him from serious injury.

His nose felt broken, and he had a feeling that in the morning he wouldn’t be able to turn his head, but he was breathing and ambulatory.

It took two hard kicks to spring the flier’s hatch, and then Derec had to drop two meters to the floor. The Terran military’s message droned from an intercom system, echoing over the commotion in the room as Nucleomorph staff ran for their lives. The flier had shattered most of the glass on the side of the hall he’d impacted, coming to rest in a system of girders that supported the transparent domed ceiling.

The upper half of the atrium’s internal walls was ringed with office facades, through which Derec could see people moving around. Exactly the kind of commanding position an executive would consider his due; Brixa would be up there if he was anywhere.

Derec saw a stairwell and ran toward it, banging into a portly woman on the bottom step. “Where’s Brixa?” he shouted at her.

She waved up the stairs and ran. Derec bounded up the stairs and turned left. Hologrammed plaques identified the occupant of each office, and the fifth door said ZEV BRIXA. He opened it and went in.

Brixa lay in a heap behind his desk, as dead as any one man could be. At least Derec assumed it was Brixa; he’d never met the man, and the corpse was disfigured by the force of the assault. Whoever it was had been beaten with the kind of savagery and monstrous strength that could only come from a cyborg; arcs and spatters of blood were strung across the furniture and the flatscreens that took up the office walls. On each screen was a view of a different part of the complex.

Leaving the dead man, Derec went from one to the other, looking for a clue about Ariel’s whereabouts.

He didn’t see her, but one thing Derec saw did catch his attention.

The cyborg leader, Basq, was bulling his way through a tide of fleeing technicians in what looked like a research wing. People bounced away from him like hailstones.

Derec checked the caption of the view as Basq passed from it. He pressed his hand against the screen and said, “Directions to this location.”

The facility RI was apparently still functioning; a holographic map appeared next to the display. Derec took it in, and then he ran.

When he got there, Basq was gone, and the area was deserted. He’d been wrong about it being a research wing; it appeared to be a medical area, set below ground level. Doors stood open, revealing what were unmistakably operating tables.

Derec wondered what Basq had been doing in the area, or if the cyborg had just happened to be passing through. Where had he gone?

Derec looked up and down the hall, and that was when he saw it: next to a door, a screen listing Ariel Burgess as patient and Krista Weil as surgeon. The door was broken in and smeared with blood, the frame bent and the room within empty. Where was Ariel?

“You’re too late,” someone said from behind him.

The speaker was a small, wiry woman with bruises on her throat, bleeding from a puncture on the back of her right hand. Her voice was hoarse. Derec had no idea where she’d come from, or if she’d been there all along without him noticing.

“Too late how?” Derec asked.

“She woke up. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but she did, and she got out. It’ll be years before I get to try the procedure on another Spacer.”

Derec wanted to kill her. Instead he asked, “Are you Krista Weil?”

She nodded.

“This complex is going to go up in smoke any minute,” Derec said. “You can’t sit here.”

Weil gave him a pitying look. “Indeed I can. This was my work. If it is destroyed …” She shrugged. “I’m Terran. I won’t live long enough to rebuild it from the ground up.” A bleak smile broke over her face.

“Brixa told me I should have done it myself. Too uncertain, though, at least that’s what I thought. But that wily bastard was right, as usual.”

Except right at the end, when he was badly wrong about Basq.

“Where did Ariel go?”

She shrugged and wandered away down the hall. Derec would have gone after her, but if he hadn’t used up the five minutes yet, there wasn’t much left. He ran down the hall in the opposite direction, taking the first staircase he saw and willing himself to believe Ariel had gone this same way.

As he got to the top of the stairs, the first explosions shook dust down around him. Derec ducked his head at the impact, glanced up to see part of the corridor collapsed and smoke billowing toward him.

He turned in the other direction and ran on.

Derec had just turned down a side corridor, with an emergency exit visible at the far end, when a door on the left side of the hall burst outward and a robot appeared — a Cole-Yahner domestic with a blast wound on the side of its head and visibly damaged optics.

“Echo,” it said. “Echo. Echo.” It was Parapoyos, blinded now but making his crippled housing work as well as it could.

Without facing him, Parapoyos said, “Who’s that?”

“Where’s Ariel, Parapoyos?” Derec asked.

Now the robot did face him. “Well, if it isn’t Derec Avery,” Parapoyos said. “Your girlfriend doesn’t need you around. She’s gone.” A distant explosion sounded, and one more alarm added its counterpoint to the general din. “I’m guessing the Terrans fried her once she got out of the building, if she did. Doesn’t matter much. I’ve got a ride to catch.”

Turning away, the robot moved down the hall. Then Basq came out the same door it had used. “Parapoyos,” he said.

The robot halted. Basq took a step toward it. His hands, hanging open at his sides, dripped blood from gashes across his knuckles, and more blood streaked his face and hair. “You were called to answer once, and shown mercy. Again you have betrayed us.”

“Mercy,” Parapoyos said. “You made me into a tool. Blame yourself if the tool had more functions than you realized.”

Faster than Derec could follow, Basq closed the distance to the robot and wrenched off one of its legs.

“Gernika is ashes,” Basq said, standing over the supine robot. “You did that. The previous generation you only turned out to die. This one you killed yourself.”

“And what did you do to me?” Parapoyos asked.

“Gave you better than you deserved. An error I now rectify.” Basq flipped the robot’s leg aside. He knelt beside it. Parapoyos struck at him, and Basq let the blows land as he worked his fingers into a seam in the robot’s torso and tore it open.

“You ungrateful bastard,” snarled the voice of Kynig Parapoyos.

“You’d be dead if it wasn’t for me.”

“I would also be free of guilt,” Basq said.

Exposed beneath the shell of the torso was a gleaming silver ovoid, with hoses running into and out of it and extruded filaments connecting it to what Derec could identify as the robot’s primary systems interfaces. With horrifying delicacy, Basq snapped each of these filaments. The robot’s arms fell limp.

“Basq, don’t. You’d have done the same thing,” Parapoyos pleaded.

“At one time,” Basq said. “As recently as today. No longer.”

With the stiff fingers of his left hand he punched a hole through the ovoid. Parapoyos howled, a wordless wail that abruptly became a series of choked grunts as Basq tore open the ovoid and ripped loose the brain of Kynig Parapoyos.

In the silence, Derec was aware of his own breathing. Basq held the brain in both hands and squeezed. Tissue and blood spurted out from between his fingers to spatter on the floor, and it was done.

Basq stood. “We have all been used, Derec Avery,” he said. “It is time we made sure we are not used again.”

Chapter 37

ARIEL RAN DOWN the corridor until she saw a stairwell. She glanced in and saw that it only went up, so she took it, on the chance that she was undergound. One flight up, she opened the door and came face to face with Basq.

“You live,” he said. “A fortunate surprise.”

“For both of us.”

Static flared from the complex intercom. “Attention. This facility will be evacuated within five minutes, on the orders of Terran Military Command. All personnel evacuate immediately. Terran Military Command assumes no responsibility for loss of life and property following five minutes from the broadcast of this message.”

Basq bared his teeth in a feral grin. “A good day to die, as the saying goes.”

“A better day to get out and live,” Ariel said. “Let’s go.”

“If they will hunt me here, they will hunt me anywhere,” Basq said.

“I was naïve to believe that you could protect us.”

The comment stung, but Ariel let it pass. “Basq, I need you to survive this. Is Gernika destroyed?”

“Gernika was always destroyed. It is in the nature of Gernika to suffer destruction.” The cyborg was coming apart, Ariel realized. “I have already visited Zev Brixa. Now I seek only Parapoyos, and my work will be done.”

A pair of Nucleomorph security personnel came around the nearest corner. Seeing Basq, they leveled their weapons. “Stay right there!”

“Basq,” Ariel said. She felt his motion rather than saw it; he was gone before the guards had finished shouting. One of them fired reflexively, gouging a hole in the wall less than a meter from her.

She dove to the floor with a scream, and the guards ran to her.

One of them hung back a little, covering her with his rifle, while the other squatted. “Who are you?” he shouted in her face.

“Ariel Burgess, legal liaison to the Triangle,” she said.

Disbelief was plain on the guard’s face. She was naked, and had immediately before been seen talking to Basq. It was easy to see how that would be difficult to square with her claimed identity.

“Look,” Ariel said. “Arrest me if you want, just as long as you do it once we’ve gotten out of here. We’ve got to stop this.”

They were coming out the front doors, and Ariel had just convinced one of the guards to lend her his comm, when the first raider buzzed in low over the trees and began firing. The first volley blew out three walls of the first building she had toured with Brixa. All those people, recuperating in their berths, their lives blown out like candles for the sin of wanting to live. Ariel was screaming, stabbing emergency codes into the comm and demanding access to Exa Lamina, Kalienin, someone in the Terran military who could stop this. Her calls were intercepted by a military monitor with a voice like cold ashes, who informed her that no communication was permitted from her location at that time.

“You inhuman bastard!” she sobbed at him. “There are children in there!”

“You need to get yourself out of there, Miss Burgess,” the monitor said.

He terminated the link, and Ariel looked up to see two more military craft converging on the complex. The guards dragged her across the open field to the fence, and through it to the other side, where she watched building after building disintegrate in blinding flashes and columns of smoke. Ariel stared at the carnage long after the explosions had blinded her. In the afterimages, she saw the bright colors and simple shapes of the playroom, with its children running and laughing with joy at the strength of their new bodies.

When it was done, elements of the Nova Levis militia arrived in a column of aerial transports. A medic draped a blanket around her.

She accepted it and walked away, refusing his attempts to examine her. Her only injury was the small tear at the inside of her left elbow, and allowing him to treat it when there must have been other survivors in the wreckage of Nucleomorph would have been an obscenity.

Enough obscenity, Ariel thought. Enough of all of this. If Brixa and Krista Weil are dead, and Basq, does that justify this?

I will take part no longer.

An aerial fire-suppression crew appeared and began foaming the ruins. Ariel watched it, and at first didn’t notice that someone had sat on the ground next to her. After a while she looked over and saw Derec.

“I went in there looking for you,” he said. “Basq told me you’d already gotten out, but I wasn’t sure whether to believe him.”

“Basq doesn’t lie. At least he never did to me. He held things back, but he never told me an active falsehood.”

“Puts him a step above the rest of them.”

Ariel nodded.

“I saw him kill Parapoyos,” Derec said.

Still nodding, Ariel said, “He said he was going to.” After a pause, she added, “Where did he go after that?”

Derec shrugged. “He didn’t say. I doubt he got out.”

For a while they watched the foam settle over Nucleomorph. Then Ariel said, “Kalienin did this. And Lamina.”

“Not just them,” Derec said. His face was bleak, and even after everything she’d gone through in the last day, Ariel found herself afraid to hear what he might say.

Yet she gathered herself and said, “Tell me.”

It was a week or so later that Ariel answered a knock at her door to find Filoo shifting his weight from foot to foot, and trying, without much success, to look her in the eye. “I’m surprised to see you, Filoo,” she said. “Did you survive Gernika?”

“I got out, yeah.” Filoo tried to bite back what was coming next, but he couldn’t. “Because Vorian tipped me off.”

“Anyone seen Masid?”

Filoo shook his head. “Be blunt about it, I don’t think anyone’ll ever find him without running a gene sampler over the whole place. It’s not easy having to be grateful to that conniving sneak.”

Ariel had to laugh. “Do you want to come in?”

“No. I came to tell you about a meeting you should go to.” He handed her a flimsy with a handwritten address and date on it. The address was in New Nova, the date two days away. There was no signature, but below the information was a crude outline of a horse trying to rise to its feet.

Ariel folded it into a pocket. “I’ll be there.”

“Avery, too,” Filoo said, and walked away.

She walked to Derec’s lab. He didn’t want to leave, but she showed him the note, and he frowned and followed her outside.

“Basq?” he asked when they’d walked some distance down the street into a residential block.

“Filoo was the courier. I’m not sure who else he’d be running messages for.”

“So Filoo’s alive, too.” Derec mused over this. “I’ve got Hofton’s datum in storage. I wonder how much he knows.”

“If they know Basq is alive, they might do something again.” It was still hard for Ariel to speak directly of Hofton. She had known him — it — for years, and felt deeply betrayed by his subterfuge. Also murderously angry about his provocation of the Gernika massacre.

Yet there was vindication at her furious opposition to Derec’s construction of Bogard — how many people were dead now because Bogard and Hofton had given the Three Laws a utilitarian revision?

And who had made that possible?

Derec shook his head. “I don’t think so. They’ve taken care of the cyborg problem. It’ll be a long time before someone attempts it again.”

“That’s what they thought after the last one.”

“What do you want me to say, Ariel? Eventually it’ll be true. No one is going to just let cyborgs develop, and now that Gernika exists as a precedent, anyone who starts developing cyborgs is going to know that bombs will fall sooner rather than later.”

The destruction of Gernika and Nucleomorph had served another purpose, far from Nova Levis. The fact that a number of humans and Spacers had died in the raids provoked a furor even among the Managin segments of the Terran electorate, and their discontent was nothing compared to the volcanic outrage coming from the Settled worlds at this ruthless exercise of authority. The Spacers, too, had made it clear that another unilateral action of similar nature would mean war, and a skirmish had broken out between Spacer and Terran ships around Kopernik. Faced with the tipping point into open slaughter, both sides had yet to blink. The mood on all of humanity’s planets was bleak and outraged.

The Gernika massacre was generally viewed as a sacrifice of lives on Nova Levis to make a political point on Earth, and nowhere was this feeling more loudly voiced than on Nova Levis itself. The Triangle was hunkered down, with President Chivu unlikely to survive and rumors swirling that he would take down a large number of the top legislative leadership with him. Street unrest was on the rise, and the attention of Earth and the Fifty Worlds was elsewhere.

Put another way: the horse was trying to rise.

“Will you come to the meeting, Derec?” Ariel asked.

Silence between them, with the rustle of leaves on the breeze, sounds of traffic and human voices on Nova Boulevard.

“I’ll come,” he said.

Chapter 38

PRESIDENT ERNO CHIVU’S speech to the combined legislative assembly of the Nova Levis government was scheduled to begin at precisely ten in the morning, one month to the day after the

“Terran incursion,” which was his preferred terminology. The speech was widely expected to answer his critics, who accused him of leaving the business of governance to a group of ideologically motivated advisers while he devoted himself to his business interests back on Earth — among which were a voting interest on the board of Kopernik Station and a seat on the shareholder council of Nucleomorph. A few loud voices hoped he would use the opportunity to resign and take the first shuttle off-planet.

The Gernika massacre had provoked a tremendous amount of investigative activity regarding the financial interests and political allegiances of Triangle leadership, and it was broadly assumed that the aftermath of the Terran strikes marked the beginning of journalism as a profession on Nova Levis. This was, of course, not welcomed by the parties under investigation, particularly when the activities of Vilios Kalienin and Eza Lamina came to represent the endemic corruption and malfeasance of Triangle elected officials — none of whom had really been elected by the people they were alleged to represent. That was the fundamental problem, and the cause of sporadic rioting in Stopol and Noresk. Disturbances in Nova City, at least inside the walls, were quelled with great speed and alarming efficiency, and President Chivu’s speech was to take place in a legislative chamber ringed by militia and local police.

Room L116 of the Triangle — known formally as the Combined Debate and Resolution Chamber, but colloquially as the Echo Chamber because of the perfunctory nature of legislative discourse under Chivu’s administration — seated one thousand people. Forty-nine desks formed a semi-circle around a dais reserved for committee arrangements or special speakers such as presidents; behind and above the speaking floor, two levels of raked public seating offered excellent views of the proceedings. On this day, the public areas were jammed, and the media presence — as measured by the number of drones flitting above the floor — was heavy. At the head of each aisle stood a pair of armed militia; other pairs stood at either end of the dais and at the outer edges of the semicircle of desks.

Near the leftmost aisle sat Derec, Ariel, and Hodder Feng. Mia Daventri fidgeted in her seat on the other side of the room, an empty seat between her and an oddly subdued Filoo. Periodically, a drone flitted up to Derec or Ariel, less often to Mia, not at all to Hodder or Filoo; but their presence at Chivu’s speech was unremarkable.

At precisely ten o’clock, the president appeared to stony silence from the public and dutiful applause from the assembled seventeen senators and thirty-two representatives, a sizable minority of whom had careers and already-tattered reputations riding on Chivu’s words.

At one minute after ten, the applause having faded even in the Echo Chamber’s excellent acoustic environment, President Chivu said, “Thank you.”

Immediately thereafter, Hodder Feng stood and, in a clear baritone, said, “I reject your authority to govern this people.”

A hushed murmur swept through the crowd, and security started to converge on Hodder, but members of the audience stood as they passed and with uncanny speed swept the weapons from their hands.

All through the auditorium, the security detail found themselves disarmed before they were aware that someone was approaching them — including on the debating floor, where a number of people seemed simply to appear, holding the captured weapons. The legislators scrambled to their feet, and the public erupted in a roar punctuated by a few screams that might have been cheers.

Weapons fire crackled from the balcony, and the figure nearest President Chivu buckled and fell. Then the upper portion of the audience swarmed over the shooter, and people started to scramble for the exits. Amid the swelling chaos, Feng strode across the floor to the dais and stepped up to the president. Chivu backed away, face pale with fear, and allowed his personal detail to guide him as far as the door through which he’d entered. There he stopped, faced with a single armed figure — a boy perhaps eleven years of age. The wounded man on the podium struggled to his feet and stood leaning against his nearest compatriot.

When Feng spoke again, his voice was amplified by overhead sound equipment, and his words rang out across the subetheric to Earth, the Fifty Worlds, and all the Settler colonies.

“The governed revoke their consent,” he said. “We declare this government failed in its obligations to represent the interests of the people of Nova Levis, and we hereby dissolve it.”

A moment of absolute silence hung over the assembly, and then a fierce roar of approval boomed from the audience, drowning out the stunned calls for order from some members of the legislature. It grew in intensity until the ears of every human in the chamber began to ring, but when Hodder raised his arms it subsided.

“Flanking me on this podium are the survivors of Gernika,” Hodder said. “Their crime was the will to live, and the willingness to take any action to survive. There are nineteen of them, where once there were more than two thousand. Look at them.”

Four women, three men, twelve children. As the eyes of the assembled public and the viewing audience across settled space fixed on them, they set down the weapons they had taken from security and stood erect and proud.

“Every one of you in the audience knows someone who died at Gernika,” Hodder said. “Too few of you, but still many, know one or more of these survivors. We reject the proposition that actions taken to save their lives could, at the same time, have robbed them of the humanity that is their birthright. We reject the idea that the people of Nova Levis are incapable of governing themselves and must be subjected to the whim of a corrupt and profiteering cabal of disgraced offworlders. And we deny the legitimacy of the Triangle and its agents throughout the incorporated cities and outposts of this planet. The people of Nova Levis were born free, and today demand the freedom until now denied them.

“From this moment forward, only adults born on Nova Levis or naturalized citizens may serve in the elected government or the judiciary. From this moment forward, the natural resources of Nova Levis and its moons are the property of its people. And from this moment forward, Nova Levis forbids the presence in its space, as defined by interplanetary common law, of any military unit except our own duly sworn armed forces. Violation of this prohibition will be considered an act of aggression subject to local and interplanetary sanction.

“President Chivu and members of the House and Senate, your positions are vacated and all associated privileges revoked. Criminal and civil proceedings will begin against any of you determined to have conducted yourselves in a manner unbecoming to your offices. If you wish, we will grant you amnesty in return for your immediate departure from Nova Levis and binding pledge never to return. Quitting the planet under these circumstances will entail relinquishing any real property or interest in same that does not physically accompany you at your departure.”

At this, a few shouts of outrage echoed through the chamber before being buried by an avalanche of cheers and catcalls. Hodder allowed things to die down again before going on.

“Beginning tomorrow morning, any citizen of Nova Levis is welcome to attend a public convention at which the details of a constitution will be formulated. The first task will be to designate a committee to write this document. Nominations will be accepted for the next seven days, and a caucus held during the week following.

“Also tomorrow morning, the first shuttle will be available for former elected officials and their staffs. The amnesty period will be seventy-two hours.”

Hodder stopped, and those closest to him could see that his eyes were shining with tears. “People of Nova Levis. As of right now, your destiny belongs to you,” he finished, and if he had said anything else it would have been lost in the overwhelming wave of sound.

People poured onto the floor, jostling the erstwhile legislators and pelting them with curses. A few fistfights broke out, and were broken up by the appearance of one of the Gernika survivors between the two combatants. The press of bodies carried the members of House and Senate out of the building before letting them go; President Chivu was allowed to leave with his personal security. People pressed around Hodder, bombarding him with proposals, theories, complaints, demands. Tomorrow, tomorrow, he told them until his voice gave out. Then he just shrugged and went outside to the plaza that lay between the Triangle and Nova Boulevard, where the first spontaneous street celebration in the history of Nova Levis was raucously underway.

Derec and Ariel joined in, with Mia and the laryngitic Hodder Feng, Filoo, and whoever came by with a bottle or an idea or both. It was a cool, fine fall day, and after a while they were both drunk and elated and it was a cool fall evening.

Eventually, Derec got to his feet. He caught Ariel’s eye and said, “Time to pay a visit.”

They walked through the crowd, past Derec’s lab to the south gate, and on from there into New Nova, where the party was more intense but also tinctured with mourning for Gernika’s dead. Here the cyborg question had always been more than philosophical, and here the bigoted opposition ran deepest, because poverty breeds extremism.

Derec and Ariel found the address they were looking for and knocked on the door.

Basq opened it and let them into the apartment that had once housed Mika Mendes. The surviving cyborgs were in the middle of their own more reflective celebration; the looks they cast in Derec and Ariel’s direction were thoughtful and curious. How he had survived the bombing of Nucleomorph, neither Derec nor Ariel knew, and he would not speak of it. He rarely left the apartment, and during his days there had scored every wall with the devastating lines of the painting, reworking them with obsessive care. His leadership was at an end, and he was content to withdraw; but the survivors of Gernika clustered around him because he was their only link to the lives they led before.

“Even you use us,” Basq said.

Derec nodded. “We did. With your consent.”

Basq shrugged. “You’ll ask again. Perhaps the next time we will refuse.”

“Perhaps we won’t have to ask.”

A few of the cyborgs chuckled. “And I was called utopian,” Basq said with glittering eyes.

“You were utopian,” Ariel said.

“Of course I was. Without a dose of utopian dreaming, I could never have held Gernika together.”

That, and a dose of authoritarian brutality, Derec thought. But there had been no shortage of that on Nova Levis.

“And your little revolution is not utopian?” Basq prodded. “We abound in ironies.”

“That we do,” Derec said.

They left soon after. Walking back through the boisterous streets of New Nova, Derec found himself thinking of the opposition to their plans that even now must be under discussion as intense as the constitutional convention that would be in the coming weeks. Nova Levis would never speak with one voice; the task was to keep each voice respected and distinct. Easy.

He chuckled, and Ariel said, “What?”

“Nothing.” They entered the city proper again, walking north along Nova Boulevard with the sounds of celebration ringing around them.

Enjoy it now, Derec thought. It gets much harder.

Ariel nudged him. “This is supposed to be a party.”

Derec gave an embarrassed laugh. “Don’t let me ruin the mood,” he said. “I’ve just got one other thing to do.”

“One? Would that be putting together a census, arranging for naturalization, conducting an inventory of natural resources and vacated property, setting up elections, or what?” Ariel laughed. “Tomorrow, Derec. There will be plenty of time for that tomorrow.”

They had reached his lab. Derec stopped. “I’ve got to take care of something here.”

Ariel rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on. Didn’t you hear me?”

“I did, and I’ll meet you at Kamil’s in half an hour. Okay?”

Now she was interested. “What are you going to do?”

“Half an hour. Kamil’s.”

She gave him a beat to change his mind, then said, “Have it your way,” and walked off in the direction of the Triangle plaza.

The lab was dark and quiet, the only light a faint ambience of telltales from the few terminals that ran around the clock doing gene sequences or regressions. Miles was back at Derec’s apartment and if there was any justice in the universe, Elin was joyously drunk and surrounded by her friends.

Derec crossed to a closet, moving mostly by feel, and opened the door. On the floor at the back of the closet, under the lowest shelf, was a malfunctioning centrifuge that he’d been unable to get permission to repair. He slid it out and reached inside, removing the datum Hofton had given him.

Derec didn’t speak until he’d crossed the lab again and opened the door. The sounds of celebration broke like a wave over the silence.

He held the datum up. “Hear that?”

No response.

“Hofton. I know you’re listening.”

No response.

“All right. I’m going to say this once, to you and Bogard both: Leave us alone.”

He dropped the datum to the floor and crushed it under his heel.

Then Derec walked away from his lab, back into the jubilant chaos of Nova Boulevard where Ariel was waiting.

Robots and Empire

3630 A.D.

Part I-Aurora

1. The Descendant

1.

GLADIA FELT THE lawn lounge to make sure it wasn’t too damp and then sat down. A touch at the control adjusted it in such a way as to allow her to be semirecumbent and another activated the diamagnetic field and gave her, as it always did, the sensation of utter relaxation. And why not? She was, in actual fact, floating – a centimeter above the fabric.

It was a warm and pleasant night, the kind that found the planet Aurora at its best – fragrant and star-lit.

With a pang of sadness, she studied the numerous little sparks that dotted the sky with patterns, sparks that were all the brighter because she had ordered the lights of her establishment dimmed.

How was it, she wondered, that she had never learned the names of the stars and had never found out which were which in all the twenty-three decades of her life. One of them was the star about which her birth planet of Solaria orbited, the star which, during the first three decades of her life, she had thought of merely as “the sun.”

Gladia had once been called Gladia Solaria. That was when she had come to Aurora, twenty decades before two hundred Standard Galactic Years – and it was meant as a not very friendly way of marking her foreign birth. A month before had been the bicentennial anniversary of her arrival, something she had left unmarked because she did not particularly want to think of those days. Before that, on Solaria, she had been Gladia-Delmarre.

She stirred uneasily. She had almost forgotten that surname. Was it because it was so long ago? Or was it merely that she labored to forget?

All these years she had not regretted Solaria, never missed it.

And yet now?

Was it because she had now, quite suddenly, discovered herself to have survived it? It was gone – a historical memory – and she still lived on? Did she miss it now for that reason?

Her brow furrowed. No, she did not miss it, she decided resolutely. She did not long for it, nor did she wish to return to it. It was just the peculiar pang of something that had been so much a part of her – however destructively – being gone.

Solaria! The last of the Spacer worlds to be settled and made into a home for humanity. And in consequence, by some mysterious law of symmetry perhaps, it was also the first to die?

The first? Did that imply a second and third and so on?

Gladia felt her sadness deepen. There were those who thought there was indeed such an implication. If so, Aurora, her long-adopted home, having been the first Spacer world to be settled, would, by that same rule of symmetry, therefore be the last of the fifty to die. In that case, it might, even at worst, outlast her own stretched-out lifetime and if so, that would have to do.

Her eyes sought the stars again. It was hopeless. There was no way she could possibly work out which of those indistinguishable dots of light was Solaria’s sun. She imagined it would be one of the brighter ones, but there were hundreds even of those.

She lifted her arm and made what she identified to herself only as her “Daneel gesture.” The fact that it was dark did not matter.

Robot Daneel Olivaw was at her side almost at once. Anyone who had known him a little over twenty decades before, when he had first been designed by Han Fastolfe, would not have been conscious of any noticeable change in him. His broad, high-cheekboned face, with its short bronze hair combed back; his blue eyes; his tall, well-knit, and perfectly humanoid body would have seemed as young and as calmly unemotional as ever.

“May I be of help in any way, Madam Gladia?” he asked in an even voice.

“Yes, Daneel. Which of those stars is Solaria’s sun?”

Daneel did not look upward. He said, “None of them, Madam Gladia. At this time of year, Solaria’s sun will not rise until 0320.”

“Oh?” Gladia felt dashed. Somehow she had assumed that any star in which she happened to be interested would be visible at any time it occurred to her to look. Of course, they did rise and set at different times. She knew that much. “I’ve been staring at nothing, then.”

“The stars, I gather from human reactions,” said Daneel, as though in an attempt to console, “are beautiful whether any particular one of them is visible or not.”

“I dare say,” said Gladia discontentedly and adjusted the lounge to an upright position with a snap. She stood up. “However, it was Solaria’s sun I wanted to see – but not so much that I intend to sit here till 0320.”

“Even were you to do so,” said Daneel, “you would need magnilenses.”

“Magnilenses?”

“It is not quite visible to the unaided eye, Madam Gladia.”

“Worse and worse!” She brushed at her slacks. “I should have consulted you first, Daneel.”

Anyone who had known Gladia twenty decades before, when she had first arrived in Aurora, would have found a change. Unlike Daneel, she was merely human. She was still 155 centimeters tall, almost 10 centimeters below the ideal height for a Spacer woman. She had carefully kept her slim figure and there was no sign of weakness or stiffness about her body. Still, there was a bit of gray in her hair, fine wrinkles near her eyes, and a touch of graininess about her skin. She might well live another ten or twelve decades, but there was no denying that she was already no longer young. That didn’t bother her.

She said, “Can you identify all the stars, Daneel?”

“I know those visible to the unaided eye, Madam Gladia.”

“And when they rise and set on any day of the year?”

“Yes, Madam Gladia.”

“And all sorts of other things about them?”

“Yes, Madam Gladia. Dr. Fastolfe once asked me to gather astronomical data so that he could have them at his fingertips without having to consult his computer. He used to say it was friendlier to have me tell him than to have his computer do so.” Then, as though to anticipate the next question, “He did not explain why that should be so.”

Gladia raised her left arm and made the appropriate gesture. Her house was at once illuminated. In the soft light that now reached her, she was subliminally aware of the shadowy figures of several robots, but she paid no attention to that. In any well-ordered establishment, there were always robots within reach of human beings, both for security and for service.

Gladia took a last fugitive glimpse at the sky, where the stars had now dimmed in the scattered light. She shrugged lightly. It had been quixotic. What good would it have done even if she had been able to see the sun of that now-lost world, one faint dot among many? She might as well choose a dot at random, tell herself it was Solaria’s sun, and stare at it.

Her attention turned to R. Daneel. He waited for her patiently, the planes of his face largely in shadow.

She found herself thinking again how little he had changed since she had seen him on arriving at Dr. Fastolfe’s establishment so long ago. He had undergone repairs, of course. She knew that, but it was a vague knowledge that one pushed away and kept at a distance.

It was part of the general queasiness that held good for human beings, too. Spacers might boast of their iron health and of their life-spans of thirty to forty decades, but they were not entirely immune to the ravages of age. One of Gladia’s femurs fit into a titanium-silicone hip socket. Her left thumb was totally artificial, though no one could tell that without careful ultrasonograms. Even some of her nerves had been rewired. Such things would be true of any Spacer of similar age from any of the fifty Spacer worlds (no, forty-nine, for now Solaria could no longer be counted).

To make any reference to such things, however, was an ultimate obscenity. The medical records involved, which had to exist since further treatment might be necessary, were never revealed for any reason. Surgeons, whose incomes were considerably higher than those of the Chairman himself, were paid so well, in part, because they were virtually ostracized from polite society. After all, they knew.

It was all part of the Spacer fixation on long life, on their unwillingness to admit that old age existed, but Gladia didn’t linger on any analysis of causes. She was restlessly uneasy in thinking about herself in that connection. If she had a three-dimensional map of herself with all prosthetic portions, all repairs, marked off in red against the gray of her natural self, what a general pinkness she would appear to have from a distance. Or so she imagined.

Her brain, however, was still intact and whole and while that was so, she was intact and whole, whatever happened to the rest of her body.

Which brought her back to Daneel. Though she had known him for twenty decades, it was only in the last year that he was hers. When Fastolfe died (his end hastened, perhaps, by despair), he had willed everything to the city of Eos, which was a common enough state of affairs. Two items, however, he had left to Gladia (aside from confirming her in the ownership of her establishment and its robots and other chattels, together with the grounds thereto appertaining).

One of them had been Daneel.

Gladia asked, “Do you remember everything you have ever committed to memory over the course of twenty decades, Daneel?”

Daneel said gravely, “I believe so, Madam Gladia. To be sure, if I forgot an item, I would not know that, for it would have been forgotten and I would not then recall ever having memorized it.”

“That doesn’t follow at all,” said Gladia. “You might well remember knowing it, but be unable to think of it at the moment. I have frequently had something at the tip of my tongue, so to speak, and been unable to retrieve it.”

Daneel said, “I do not understand, madam. If I knew something, surely it would be there when I needed it.”

“Perfect retrieval?” They were walking slowly toward the house.

“Merely retrieval, madam. I am designed so.”

“For how much longer?”

“I do not understand, madam.”

“I mean, how much will your brain hold? With a little over twenty decades of accumulated memories, how much longer can it go on?”

“I do not know, madam. As yet I feel no difficulty.”

“You might not – until you suddenly discover you can remember no more.”

Daneel seemed thoughtful for a moment. “That may be so, madam.”

“You know, Daneel, not all your memories are equally important.”

“I cannot judge among them, madam.”

“Others can. It would be perfectly possible to clean out your brain, Daneel, and then, under supervision, refill it with its important memory content only – say, ten percent of the whole. You would then be able to continue for centuries longer than you would otherwise. With repeated treatment of this sort, you could go on indefinitely. It is an expensive procedure, of course, but I would not cavil at that. You’d be worth it.”

“Would I be consulted on the matter, madam? Would I be asked to agree to such treatment?”

“Of course. I would not order you in a matter like that. It would be a betrayal of Dr. Fastolfe’s trust.”

“Thank you, madam. In that case, I must tell you that I would never submit voluntarily to such a procedure unless I found myself to have actually lost my memory function.”

They had reached the door and Gladia paused. She said, in honest puzzlement, “Why ever not, Daneel?”

Daneel said in a low voice, “There are memories I cannot risk losing, madam, either through inadvertence or through poor judgment on the part of those conducting the procedure.”

“Like the rising and setting of the stars? – Forgive me, Daneel, I didn’t mean to be joking. To what memories are you referring?”

Daneel said, his voice still lower, “Madam, I refer to my memories of my onetime partner, the Earthman Elijah Baley.”

And Gladia stood there, stricken, so that it was Daneel who had to take the initiative, finally, and signal for the door to open.

2.

Robot Giskard Reventlov was waiting in the living room and Gladia greeted him with that same pang of uneasiness that always assailed her when she faced him.

He was primitive in comparison with Daneel. He was obviously a robot – metallic, with a face that had nothing human in expression upon it, with eyes that glowed a dim red, as could be seen if it were dark enough. Whereas Daneel wore clothing, Giskard had only the illusion of clothing – but a skillful illusion, for it was Gladia herself who had designed it.

“Well, Giskard,” she said. “Good evening, Madam Gladia,” said Giskard with a small bow of his head.

Gladia remembered the words of Elijah Baley long ago, like a whisper inside the recesses of her brain:

“Daneel will take care of you. He will be your friend as well as protector and you must be a friend to him – for my sake. But it is Giskard I want you to listen to. Let him be your adviser.”

Gladia had frowned. “Why him? I’m not sure I like him.”

“I do not ask you to like him. I ask you to trust him.”

And he would not say why.

Gladia tried to trust the robot Giskard, but was glad she did not have to try to like him. Something about him made her shiver.

She had both Daneel and Giskard as effective parts of her establishment for many decades during which Fastolfe had held titular ownership. It was only on his deathbed that Han Fastolfe had actually transferred ownership. Giskard was the second item, after Daneel, that Fastolfe had left Gladia.

She had said to the old man, “Daneel is enough, Han. Your daughter Vasilia would like to have Giskard. I’m sure of that.”

Fastolfe was lying in bed quietly, eyes closed, looking more peaceful than she had seen him look in years. He did not answer immediately and for a moment she thought he had slipped out of life so quietly that she had not noticed. She tightened her grip on his hand convulsively and his eyes opened.

He whispered, “I care nothing for my biological daughters, Gladia. For twenty centuries, I have had but one functional daughter and that has been you. I want you to have Giskard. He is valuable.”

“Why is he valuable?”

“I cannot say, but I have always found his presence consoling. Keep him always, Gladia. Promise me that.”

“I promise,” she said.

And then his eyes opened one last time and his voice, finding a final reservoir of strength, said, in almost a natural tone of voice, “I love you, Gladia, my daughter.”

And Gladia said, “I love you, Han, my father.”

Those were the last words he said and heard. Gladia found herself holding the hand of a dead man and, for a while, could not bring herself to let go.

So Giskard was hers. And yet he made her uneasy and she didn’t know why.

“Well, Giskard,” she said, “I’ve been trying to see Solaria in the sky among the stars, but Daneel tells me it won’t be visible till 0320 and that I would require magnilenses even then. Would you have known that?”

“No, madam.”

“Should I wait up till all hours? What do you think?”

“I suggest, Madam Gladia, that you would be better off in bed.”

Gladia bridled. “Indeed? And if I choose to stay up?”

“Mine is only a suggestion, madam, but you will have a hard day tomorrow and you will undoubtedly regret missing your sleep if you stay up.”

Gladia frowned. “What’s going to make my day hard tomorrow, Giskard? I’m not aware of any forthcoming difficulty.”

Giskard said, “You have an appointment, madam, with one Levular Mandamus. “

“I have? When did that happen?”

“An hour ago. He photophoned and I took the liberty –”

“You took the liberty? Who is he?”

“He is a member of the Robotics Institute, madam.”

“He’s an underling of Kelden Amadiro, then.”

“Yes, madam.”

“Understand, Giskard, that I am not in the least interested in seeing this Mandamus or anyone with any connection with that poisonous toad Amadiro. So if you’ve taken the liberty of making an appointment with him in my name, take the further liberty right now of phoning him again and canceling.”

“If you will confirm it as an order, madam, and make that order as strong and as definite as you can, I will try to obey. I may not be able to. In my judgment, you see, you will be doing yourself harm if you cancel the appointment and I must not allow you to come to harm through any action of mine.”

“Your judgment might just possibly be wrong, Giskard. Who is this man that my failure to see him will do me harm? His being a member of the Robotics Institute scarcely makes him important to me.”

Gladia was perfectly aware of the fact that she was venting spleen at Giskard without much justification. She had been upset by the news of Solaria’s abandonment and embarrassed by the ignorance that led her to look for Solaria in a sky that did not contain it.

Of course, it had been Daneel whose knowledge had made her own lack so obvious and yet she had not railed at him – but, then, Daneel looked human and so Gladia automatically treated him as though he were. Appearance was everything. Giskard looked like a robot, so one could easily assume he had no feelings to hurt.

And, to be sure, Giskard did not react at all to Gladia’s peevishness. (Neither would Daneel have reacted – if it came to that.) He said, “I have described Dr. Mandamus as a member of the Robotics Institute, but he is perhaps more than that. In the last few years, he has been right-hand man to Dr. Amadiro. This makes him important and he is not likely to be ignored. Dr. Mandamus would not be a good man to offend, madam.”

“Would he not, Giskard? I care nothing for Mandamus and a great deal less than nothing for Amadiro. I presume you remember that Amadiro once, when he and I and the world were young, did his best to prove that Dr. Fastolfe was a murderer and that it was only by a near-miracle that his machinations were aborted.”

“I remember it very well, madam.”

“That’s a relief. I was afraid that in twenty decades you had forgotten. In those twenty decades, I have had nothing to do with Amadiro or with anyone connected with him and I intend to continue that policy. I don’t care what harm I may do myself or what the consequences might be. I will not see this Dr. whoever-he-is and, in the future, do not make appointments in my name without consulting me or, at the very least, without explaining that such appointments are subject to my approval.”

“Yes, madam,” said Giskard, “but may I point out –”

“No, you may not,” Gladia said and turned away from him.

There was silence while she moved away three steps and then Giskard’s calm voice said, “Madam, I must ask you to trust me.”

Gladia stopped. Why did he use that expression?

She heard again that long-ago voice, “I do not ask you to like him. I ask you to trust him.”

Her lips tightened and she frowned. Reluctantly, not wanting to, she turned back.

“Well,” she said ungraciously, “what is it you want to say, Giskard?”

“Just that as long as Dr. Fastolfe was alive, madam, his policies predominated on Aurora and throughout the Spacer worlds. As a result, the people of Earth have been allowed to migrate freely to various suitable planets in the Galaxy and what we now call the Settler worlds have flourished. Dr. Fastolfe is dead now, however, and his successors lack his prestige. Dr. Amadiro has kept his own anti-Earth views alive and it is very possible that they may now triumph and that a vigorous policy against Earth and the Settler worlds may be undertaken.”

“If so, Giskard, what can I do about it?”

“You can see Dr. Mandamus and you can find out what it is that makes him so anxious to see you, madam. I assure you that he was most insistent on making the appointment as early as possible. He asked to see you at 0800.”

“Giskard, I never see anyone before noon.”

“I explained that, madam. I took his anxiety to see you at breakfast, despite my explanation, to be a measure of his desperation. I felt it important to find out why he should be so desperate.”

“And if I don’t see him, then it is your opinion, is it, that it will harm me personally? I don’t ask whether it will harm Earth, or the Settlers, or this, or that. Will it harm me?”

“Madam, it may harm the ability of Earth and the Settlers to continue the settlement of the Galaxy. That dream originated in the mind of Plainsclothesman Elijah Baley more than twenty decades ago. The harm to Earth will thus become a desecration of his memory. Am I wrong in thinking that any harm that comes to his memory would be felt by you as though it were harm to yourself personally?”

Gladia was staggered. Twice within the hour now, Elijah Baley had come into the conversation. He was long gone now – a short-lived Earthman who had died over sixteen decades before – yet the mere mention of his name could still shake her.

She said, “How can things suddenly be that serious?”

“It is not sudden, madam. For twenty decades, the people of Earth and the people of the Spacer worlds have been following parallel courses and have been kept from converging into conflict by the wise policies of Dr. Fastolfe. There has, however, always been a strong opposition movement that Dr. Fastolfe has had to withstand at all times. Now that Dr. Fastolfe is dead, the opposition is much more powerful. The abandonment of Solaria has greatly increased the power of what had been the opposition and may soon be the dominant political force.”

“Why?”

“It is a clear indication, madam, that Spacer strength is declining and many Aurorans must feel that strong action must be taken – now or never.”

“And you think that my seeing this man is important in preventing all this?”

“That is so, madam.”

Gladia was silent for a moment and remembered again, though rebelliously, that she had once promised Elijah that she would trust Giskard. She said, “Well, I don’t want to and I don’t think my seeing this man will do anyone any good – but, very well, I will see him.”

3.

Gladia was asleep and the house was dark – by human standards. It was alive, however, with motion and action, for there was much for the robots to do – and they could do it by infrared.

The establishment had to be put into order after the inevitable disordering effects of a day’s activity. Supplies had to be brought in, rubbish had to be disposed of, objects had to be cleaned or polished or stored, appliances had to be checked,~d, always, there was guard duty.

There were no locks on any doors; there did not have to be. There was no violent crime of any sort on Aurora, either against human beings or against property. There could not be anything of the sort, since every establishment and every human being were, at all times, guarded by robots. This was well known and taken for granted.

The price for such calm was that the robot guards had to remain in place. They were never used – but only because they were always there.

Giskard and Daneel, whose abilities were both more intense and more general than those of the other establishment robots, did not have specific duties, unless one counted as a specific duty that of being responsible for the proper performance of all the other robots.

At 0300, they had completed their rounds out on the lawn and in the wooded area to make sure that all the outer guards were performing their functions well and that no problems were arising.

They met near the southern limit of the establishment grounds and for a while they spoke in an abbreviated and Aesopic language. They understood each other well, with many decades of communication behind them, and it was not necessary for them to involve themselves in all the elaborations of human speech.

Daneel said in an all but unhearable whisper, “Clouds. Unseen.”

Had Daneel been speaking for human ears, he would have said, “As you see, friend Giskard, the sky has clouded up. Had Madam Gladia waited her chance to see Solaria, she would not, in any case, have succeeded.”

And Giskard’s reply of “Predicted. Interview, rather,” was the equivalent of “So much was predicted in the weather forecast, friend Daneel, and might have been used as an excuse to get Madam Gladia to bed early. It seemed to me to be more important, however, to meet the problem squarely and to persuade her to permit this interview I have already told you about.”

“It seems to me, friend Giskard,” said Daneel, “that the chief reason you may have found persuasion difficult is that she has been upset by the abandonment of Solaria. I was there once with Partner Elijah when Madam Gladia was still a Solarian and was living there.”

“It has always been my understanding,” said Giskard, “that Madam Gladia had not been happy on her home planet; that she left her world gladly and had, at no time, any intention of returning. Yet I agree with you that she seems to have been unsettled by the fact of Solaria’s history having come to an end.”

“I do not understand this reaction of Madam Gladia,” said Daneel, “but there are many times that human reactions do not seem to follow logically from events.”

“It is what makes it difficult to decide, sometimes, what will do a human being harm and what will not.” Giskard might have said it with a sigh, even a petulant sigh, had he been human. As it was, he stated it merely as an unemotional assessment of a difficult situation. “It is one of the reasons why it seems to me that the Three Laws of Robotics are incomplete or insufficient.”

“You have said this before, friend Giskard, and I have tried to believe so and failed,” said Daneel.

Giskard said nothing for a while, then, “Intellectually, I think they must be incomplete or insufficient, but when I try to believe that, I, too, fail, for I am bound by them. Yet if I were not bound by them, I am sure I would believe in their insufficiency.”

“That is a paradox that I cannot understand.”

“Nor can I. And yet I find myself forced to express this paradox. On occasion, I feel that I am on the verge of discovering what the incompleteness or insufficiency of the Three Laws might be, as in my conversation with Madam Gladia this evening. She asked me how failure to keep the appointment might harm her personally, rather than simply cause harm in the abstract, and there was an answer I could not give because it was not within the compass of the Three Laws.”

“You gave a perfect answer, friend Giskard. The harm done to Partner Elijah’s memory would have affected Madam Gladia deeply.”

“It was the best answer within the compass of the Three Laws. It was not the best answer possible.”

“What was the best answer possible?”

“I do not know, since I cannot put it into words or even concepts as long as I am bound by the Laws.”

“There is nothing beyond the Laws,” said Daneel.

“If I were human,” said Giskard, “I could see beyond the Laws and I think, friend Daneel, that you might be able to see beyond them sooner than I would.”

“I?”

“Yes, friend Daneel, I have long thought that, although a robot, you think remarkably like a human being.”

“It is not proper to think that,” said Daneel slowly, almost as though he were in pain. “You think such things because you can look into human minds. It distorts you and it may in the end destroy you. That thought is to me an unhappy one. If you can prevent yourself from seeing into minds more than you must, prevent it.”

Giskard turned away. “I cannot prevent it, friend Daneel. I would not prevent it. I regret that I can do so little with it because of the Three Laws. I cannot probe deeply enough – because of the fear that I may do harm. I cannot influence directly enough – because of the fear I may do harm.”

“Yet you influenced Madam Gladia very neatly, friend Giskard.”

“Not truly. I might have modified her thinking and made her accept the interview without question, but the human mind is so riddled with complexities that I dare do very little. Almost any twist I apply will produce subsidiary twists of whose nature I cannot be certain and which may do harm.”

“Yet you did something to Madam Gladia.”

“I did not have to. The word ‘trust’ affects her and makes her more amenable. I have noted that fact in the past, but I use the word with the greatest caution, since overuse will surely weaken it. I puzzle over this, but I cannot simply burrow for a solution.”

“Because the Three Laws will not permit it?” Giskard’s eyes seemed to intensify their dim glow. “Yes. At every stage, the Three Laws stand in my way. Yet I cannot modify them – because they stand in my way. Yet I feel I must modify them, for I sense the oncoming of catastrophe.”

“You have said so before, friend Giskard, but you have not explained the nature of the catastrophe.”

“Because I do not know the nature. It involves the increasing hostility between Aurora and Earth, but how this will evolve into actual catastrophe, I cannot say.”

“Is it possible that there might, after all, be no catastrophe?”

“I do not think so. I have sensed, among certain Auroran officials I have encountered, an aura of catastrophe – of waiting for triumph. I cannot describe this more exactly and I cannot probe deeply for a better description because the Three Laws will not allow me to. It is another reason why the interview with Mandamus must take place tomorrow. It will give me a chance to study his mind.”

“But if you cannot study it effectively?”

Although Giskard’s voice was incapable of showing emotion in the human sense, there was no missing the despair in his words. He said, “Then that will leave me helpless. I can only follow the Laws. What else can I do?”

And Daneel said softly and dispiritedly, “Nothing else.”

4.

Gladia entered her living room at 0815, having purposely – and with a touch of spite – determined to allow Mandamus (she had now reluctantly memorized his name) to wait for her. She had also taken particular pains with her appearance and (for the first time in years) had agonized over the gray in her hair and had fleetingly wished she had followed the almost universal Auroran practice of shade control. After all, to look as young and attractive as possible would put this minion of Amadiro’s at a further disadvantage.

She was thoroughly prepared to dislike him at sight and was depressingly aware that he might prove young and attractive, that a sunny face might break into a brilliant smile at her appearance, that she might prove reluctantly attracted to him.

In consequence, she was relieved at the sight of him. He was young, yes, and probably had not yet completed his first half-century, but he hadn’t made the best of that. He was tall – perhaps 185 centimeters in height, she judged – but too thin. It made him appear spindly. His hair was a shade too dark for an Auroran, his eyes a rather faded hazel, his face too long, his lips too thin, his mouth too broad, his complexion insufficiently fair. But what robbed him of the true appearance of youth was that his expression was too prim, too humorless.

With a flash of insight, Gladia remembered the historical novels that were such a fad on Aurora (novels that invariably dealt with primitive Earth – which was odd for a world that was increasingly hating Earthpeople) and thought: Why, he’s the picture of a Puritan.

She felt relieved and almost smiled. Puritans were usually pictured as villains and, whether this Mandamus was indeed one or not, it was convenient to have him look like one.

But when he spoke Gladia was disappointed, for his voice was soft and distinctly musical. (It ought to have possessed a nasal twang if it were to fulfill the stereotype.)

He said, “Mrs. Gremionis?”

She held out her hand with a carefully condescending smile. “Mr. Mandamus. – Please call me Gladia. Everyone does.”

“I know you use your given name professionally –”

“I use it in every way. And my marriage came to an amicable end several decades ago.”

“It lasted for a long time, I believe.”

“A very long time. It was a great success, but even great successes come to a natural end.”

“Ah,” said Mandamus sententiously. “To continue past the end might well turn success into failure.”

Gladia nodded and said with a trace of a smile, “How wise for one so young. – but shall we move into the dining room? Breakfast is ready and I have surely delayed you long enough.”

It was only as Mandamus turned with her and adjusted his steps to hers that Gladia became aware of his two accompanying robots. It was quite unthinkable for any Auroran to go anywhere without a robotic retinue, but as long as robots stood still they made no impression on the Auroran eye.

Gladia, looking at them quickly, saw that they were late models, clearly expensive. Their pseudo-clothing was elaborate and, although it was not of Gladia’s design, it was first-class. Gladia had to admit so much to herself, though reluctantly. She would have to find out who had designed it someday, for she did not recognize the touch and she might be about to have a new and formidable competitDr. She found herself admiring the manner in which the style of pseudo-clothing was distinctly the same for both robots, while remaining distinctly individual for each. You could not mistake one for the other.

Mandamus caught her swift look and interpreted her expression with disconcerting accuracy. (He is intelligent, thought Gladia, disappointed.) He said, “The exodesign of my robots was created by a young man at the Institute who has not yet made a name for himself. But he will, don’t you think?”

“Definitely,” said Gladia.

Gladia did not expect any business discussion till breakfast was done. It would be the height of ill breeding to speak of anything but trivia during meals and Gladia guessed that Mandamus was not at his best with trivia. There was the weather, of course. The recent siege of rain, now happily done with, was mentioned and the prospects for the oncoming dry season. There was the almost mandatory expression of admiration for the hostess’s establishment and Gladia accepted it with practiced modesty. She did nothing to ease the strain on the man, but let him search for subject matter without help.

At length, his eye fell on Daneel, standing quietly and without motion in his wall niche, and Mandamus managed to overcome his Auroran indifference and notice him.

“Ah,” he said, “clearly the famous R. Daneel Olivaw. He’s absolutely unmistakable. A rather remarkable specimen.”

“Quite remarkable.”

“He’s yours now, isn’t he? By Fastolfe’s will?”

“By Doctor Fastolfe’s will, yes,” said Gladia with faint emphasis.

“It strikes me as amazing that the Institute’s line of humanoid robots failed as it did. Have you ever thought about it?”

“I have heard of it,” said Gladia cautiously. (Could it be that this was what he was getting around to?) “I’m not aware of having spent much time thinking about it.”

“Sociologists are still trying to understand it. Certainly, we at the Institute never got over the disappointment. It seemed like such a natural development. Some of us think that Fa – Dr. Fastolfe somehow had something to do with it.”

(He had avoided making the mistake a second time, thought Gladia. Her eyes narrowed and she grew hostile as she decided he had come to her in order to probe for material damaging to poor, good Han.)

She said tartly, “Anyone who thinks that is a fool. If you think so, I won’t change the expression for your benefit.”

“I am not one of those who thinks so, largely because I don’t see what Dr. Fastolfe could have done to make it a fiasco.”

“Why should anyone have had to do anything? What it amounts to is that the public didn’t want them. A robot that looks like a man competes with a man and one that looks like a woman competes with a woman – and entirely too closely for comfort. Aurorans didn’t want the competition. Do we need to look any further.”

“Sexual competition?” said Mandamus calmly.

For a moment, Gladia’s gaze met his levelly. Did he know of her long-ago love for the robot Jander? Did it matter if he did?

There seemed nothing in his expression to make it appear that he meant anything beyond the surface meaning of the words.

She said finally, “Competition in every way. If Dr. Han Fastolfe did anything to contribute to such a feeling, it was that he designed his robots in too human a fashion, but that was the only way.”

“I think you have thought about the matter,” said Mandamus. “The trouble is that sociologists find the fear of competition with too-human a set of robots to be simplistic as an explanation. That alone would not suffice and there is no evidence of any other aversion motive of significance.”

“Sociology is not an exact science,” said Gladia.

“It is not altogether inexact, either.”

Gladia shrugged.

After a pause, Mandamus said, “In any case, it kept us from organizing colonizing expeditions properly. Without humanoid robots to pave the way –”

Breakfast was not quite over, but it was clear to Gladia that Mandamus could not avoid the nontrivial any longer. She said, “We might have gone ourselves.”

This time it was Mandamus who shrugged. “Too difficult. Besides, those short-lived barbarians from Earth, with the permission of your Dr. Fastolfe, have swarmed over every planet in sight like a plague of beetles.”

“There are plenty of available planets still. Millions. And if they can do it –”

“Of course they can do it,” said Mandamus with sudden passion. “It costs lives, but what are lives to them? The loss of a decade or so, that’s all, and there are billions of them. If a million or so die in the process of colonizing, who notices, who cares? They don’t.”

“I’m sure they do.”

“Nonsense. Our lives are longer and therefore more valuable – and we are naturally more careful with them.”

“So we sit here and do nothing but rail at Earth’s Settlers for being willing to risk their lives and for seeming to inherit the Galaxy as a result.”

Gladia was unaware of feeling so pro-Settler a bias, but she was in the mood to contradict Mandamus and as she spoke she could not help but feel that what began as mere contradiction made sense and could well represent her feelings. Besides, she had heard Fastolfe say similar things during his last discouraged years.

At Gladia’s signal, the table was being rapidly and efficiently cleared. Breakfast might have continued, but the conversation and the mood had become quite unsuitable for civilized mealtime.

They moved back into the living room. His robots followed and so did Daneel and Giskard, all finding their niches. (Mandamus had never remarked on Giskard, thought Gladia, but then, why should he? Giskard was quite old-fashioned and even primitive, entirely unimpressive in comparison to Mandamus’s beautiful specimens.)

Gladia took her seat and crossed her legs, quite aware that the form-fitting sheerness of the lower portion of her slacks flattered the still youthful appearance of her legs.

“May I know the reason for your wishing to see me, Dr. Mandamus?” she said, unwilling to delay matters any longer.

He said, “I have the bad habit of chewing medicated gum after meals as an aid to digestion. Would you object?”

Gladia said stiffly, “I would find it distracting.”

(Being unable to chew might put him at a disadvantage. Besides, Gladia added to herself virtuously, at his age he shouldn’t need anything to aid his digestion.)

Mandamus had a small oblong package partway out of his tunic’s breast pocket. He shoved it back with no sign of disappointment and murmured, “Of course.”

“I was asking, Dr. Mandamus, your reason for wishing to see me.”

“Actually two reasons, Lady Gladia. One is a personal matter and one is a matter of state. Would you object to my taking up the personal matter first?”

“Let me say frankly, Dr. Mandamus, that I find it hard to imagine what personal matter there could be between us. You work at the Robotics Institute, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do.”

“And are close to Amadiro, I have been told.”

“I have the honor of working with Doctor Amadiro,” he said with faint emphasis.

(He’s paying me back, thought Gladia, but I’m not taking it.)

She said, “Amadiro and I had an occasion for contact twenty decades ago and it was most unpleasant. I have had no occasion for any contact with him at any time since. Nor would I have had any contact with you, as a close associate of his, but that I was persuaded that the interview might be important. Personal matters, however, would surely not make this interview in the least important to me. Shall we proceed onward, then, to the matters of state?”

Mandamus’s eyes dropped and a faint flush of something that might have been embarrassment came to his cheeks. “Let me reintroduce myself, then. I am Levular Mandamus, your descendant in the fifth degree. I am the great-great-great-grandson of Santirix and Gladia Gremionis. In reverse, you are my great-great-great-grandmother.”

Gladia blinked rapidly, trying not to look as thunderstruck as she, in actual fact, felt (and not quite succeeding). Of course she had descendants and why should not one of them be this man?

But she said, “Are you sure?”

“Quite sure. I have had a genealogical search made. One of these years, after all, I am likely to want children and before I can have one such a search would be mandatory. If you are interested, the pattern between us is M-F-F-M.”

“You are my son’s daughter’s daughter’s son’s son?”

“Yes.”

Gladia did not ask for further details. She had had one son and one daughter. She had been a perfectly dutiful mother, but in due time the children had taken up independent lives. As to descendants beyond that son and daughter, she had, in perfectly decent Spacer fashion, never inquired and did not care. Having met one of them, she was Spacer enough still not to care.

The thought stabilized her completely. She sat back in her chair and relaxed. “Very well,” she said. “You are my descendant in the fifth degree. If this is the personal matter you wish to discuss, it is of no importance.”

“I understand that fully, ancestress. My genealogy is not, in itself, what I wish to discuss, but it lays the foundation. Dr. Amadiro, you see, knows of this relationship. At least, so I suspect.”

“Indeed? How did that come about?”

“I believe that he quietly genealogizes all those who come to work at the Institute.”

“But why?”

“In order to find out exactly what he did find out in my case. He is not a trusting man.”

“I don’t understand. If you are my fifth – level descendant, why should it have more meaning to him than it does to me?”

Mandamus rubbed his chin with the knuckles of his right hand in a thoughtful manner. “His dislike for you is in no way less than your dislike for him, Lady Gladia. If you were ready to refuse an interview with me for his sake, he is equally ready to refuse me preferment for your sake. It might be even worse if I were a descendant of Dr. Fastolfe, but not much.”

Gladia sat stiffly upright in her seat. Her nostrils flared and she said in a tight voice, “What is it, then, that you expect me to do? I cannot declare you a nondescendant. Shall I have an announcement placed on hypervision that you are a matter of indifference to me and that I disown you. Will that satisfy your Amadiro? If so, I must warn you I will not do it. I will do nothing to satisfy that man. If it means that he will discharge you and deprive you of your career out of some sort of disapproval of your genetic association, then that will teach you to associate with a saner, less vicious person.”

“He will not discharge me, Madam Gladia. I am entirely too valuable to him – if you will pardon my immodesty. Still, I hope someday to succeed him as head of the Institute and that, I am quite certain, he will not allow, as long as he suspects me of a descent worse than that which stems from you.”

“Does he imagine that poor Santirix is worse than I am?”

“Not at all.” Mandamus flushed and he swallowed, but his voice remained level and steady. “I mean no disrespect, madam, but I owe it to myself to learn the truth.”

“What truth?”

“I am descended from you in the fifth degree. That is clear in the genealogical records. But it is possible that I am also descended in the fifth degree, not from Santirix Gremionis but from the Earthman Elijah Baley?”

Gladia rose to her feet as quickly as though the undimensional force fields of a puppeteer had lifted her. She was not aware that she had risen.

It was the third time in twelve hours that the name of that long-ago Earthman had been mentioned – and by three different individuals.

Her voice seemed not to be hers at all. “What do you mean?”

He said, rising in his turn and backing away slightly, “It seems to me plain enough. Was your son, my great-great-grandfather, born of a sexual union of yourself with the Earthman Elijah Baley? Was Elijah Baley your son’s father? I don’t know how to express it more plainly.”

“How dare you make such a suggestion? Or even think it?”

“I dare because my career depends upon it. If the answer is yes. my professional life may well be ruined. I want a no, but an unsupported no will do me no good. I must be able to present proof to Dr. Amadiro at the appropriate time and show him that his disapproval of my genealogy must end with you. After all, it is clear to me that his dislike of you – and even of Dr. Fastolfe – is as nothing – nothing at all – compared to the incredible intensity of his detestation of the Earthman Elijah Baley. It is not only the fact of his being short-lived. although the thought of having inherited barbarian genes would disturb me tremendously. I think that if I presented proof I was descended from an Earthman who was not Elijah Baley, he would dismiss that. But it is the thought of Elijah Baley – and only he – that drives him to madness. I do not know why.”

The reiteration of Elijah’s name had made him seem almost alive again to Gladia. She was breathing harshly and deeply and she exulted in the best memory of her life.

“I know why,” she said. “It was because Elijah, with everything against him, with all of Aurora against him, managed anyhow to destroy Amadiro at the moment when that man thought he held success in his hand. Elijah did it by the exercise of sheer courage and intelligence. Amadiro had met his infinite superior in the person of an Earthman he had carelessly despised and what could he do in return but hate futilely? Elijah has been dead for more than sixteen decades and still Amadiro cannot forget, cannot forgive, cannot release the chains that bind him in hate and memory to that dead man. And I would not have Amadiro forget – or cease hating – as long as it poisons every moment of his existence.”

Mandamus said, “I see you have reason for wishing Dr. Amadiro ill, but what reason have you for wishing me ill? To allow Dr. Amadiro to think I am descended from Elijah Baley will give him the pleasure of destroying me. Why should you give him that pleasure needlessly, if I am not so descended? Give me the proof, therefore, that I am descended from you and Santirix Gremionis or from you and anybody but Elijah Baley.”

“You fool! You idiot! Why do you need proof from me? Go to the historical records. You will find the exact days on which Elijah Baley was on Aurora. You will find the exact day on which I gave birth to my son, Darrel. You will find that Darrel was conceived more than five years after Elijah left Aurora. You will also find that Elijah never returned to Aurora. Well, then, do you think I gestated for five years, that I carried a fetus in my womb for five Standard Galactic Years?”

“I know the statistics, madam. And I do not think you carried a fetus for five years.”

“Then why do you come to me?”

“Because there is more to it than that. I know – and I imagine that Dr. Amadiro well knows – that although the Earthman Elijah Baley, as you say, never returned to Aurora’s surface, he was once in a ship that was in orbit about Aurora for a day or so. I know – and I imagine that Dr. Amadiro well knows – that although the Earthman did not leave the ship to go to Aurora, you left Aurora to go to the ship; that you stayed on the ship for the better part of a day; and that this took place nearly five years after the Earthman had been on Aurora’s surface – at about the time, in fact, that your son was conceived.”

Gladia felt the blood drain from her face as she heard the other’s calm words. The room darkened about her and she swayed.

She felt the sudden, gentle touch of strong arms about her and knew they were those of Daneel. She felt herself lowered slowly into her chair.

She heard Mandamus’s voice as though from a great distance.

“Is that not true, madam?” he said.

It was, of course, true.

2. The Ancestor?

5.

MEMORY!

ALWAYS THERE, of course, but usually remaining hidden. And then, sometimes, as a result of just the right kind of push, it could emerge suddenly, sharply defined, all in color, bright and moving and alive.

She was young again, younger than this man before her; young enough to feel tragedy and love – with her death-in-life on Solaria having reached its climax in the bitter end of the first whom she had thought of as “husband.” (No, she would not say his name even now, not even in thought.)

Closer still to her then – life were the months of heaving emotion with the second – not-man – whom she had thought of by that term. Jander, the humanoid robot, had been given to her and she had made him entirely her own until, like her first husband, he was suddenly dead.

And then, at last, there was Elijah Baley, who was never her husband, whom she had met only twice, two years apart, each time for a few hours on each of a very few days. Elijah, whose cheek she had once touched with her ungloved hand, on which occasion she had ignited; whose nude body she had later held in her arms, on which occasion she had flamed steadily at last.

And then, a third husband, with whom she was quiet and at peace, paying with untriumph for unmisery and buying with firmly held forgetfulness the relief from reliving.

Until one day (she was not sure of the day that so broke in upon the sleeping untroubled years) Han Fastolfe, having asked permission to visit, walked over from his adjoining establishment.

Gladia looked upon him with some concern, for he was too busy a man to socialize lightly. Only five years had passed since the crisis that had established Han as Aurora’s leading statesman. He was the Chairman of the planet in all but name and the true leader of all the Spacer worlds. He had so little time to be a human being.

Those years had left their mark – and would continue to do so until he died sadly, considering himself a failure though he had never lost a battle. Kelden Amadiro, who had been defeated, lived on sturdily, as evidence that victory can exact the greater penalty.

Fastolfe, through it all, continued to be soft-spoken and patient and uncomplaining, but even Gladia, nonpolitical though she was and uninterested in the endless machinations of power, knew that his control of Aurora held firm only through constant and unremitting effort that drained him of anything that might make life worthwhile and that he held to it – or was held to it – only by what he considered the good of – what? Aurora? The Spacers? Simply some vague concept of idealized Good?

She didn’t know. She flinched from asking.

But this was only five years after the crisis. He still gave the impression of a young and hopeful man and his pleasant homely face was still capable of smiling.

He said, “I have a message for you, Gladia.”

“A pleasant one, I hope,” she said politely.

He had brought Daneel with him. It was a sign of the healing of old wounds that she could look at Daneel with honest affection and no pain at all, even though he was a copy of her dead Jander in all but the most insignificant detail. She could talk to him, though he answered in what was almost Jander’s voice. Five years had skinned over the ulcer and deadened the pain.

“I hope so,” said Fastolfe, smiling gently. “It’s from an old friend.”

“It’s so nice that I have old friends,” she said, trying not to be sardonic.

“From Elijah Baley.”

The five years vanished and she felt the stab and pang of returning memory.

“Is he well?” she asked in a half-strangled voice after a full minute of stunned silence.

“Quite well. What is even more important, he is near.”

“Near? On Aurora?”

“In orbit about Aurora. He knows he can receive no permission to land, even if I were to use my full influence, or I imagine he does. He would like to see you, Gladia. He had made contact with me because he feels that I can arrange to have you visit his ship. I suppose I can manage that much – but only if you wish it. Do you wish it?”

“I – I don’t now. This is too sudden for thought.”

“Or even impulse?” He waited, then he said, “Truthfully, Gladia, how are you getting along with Santirix?”

She looked at him wildly, as though not understanding the reason for the change of subject – then understanding. She said, “We get along well together.”

“Are you happy?”

“I am – not unhappy.”

“That doesn’t sound like ecstasy.”

“How long can ecstasy last, even if it were ecstasy?”

“Do you plan to have children someday?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Are you planning a change in marital status?”

She shook her head firmly. “Not yet.”

“Then, my dear Gladia, if you want advice from a rather tired man, who feels uncomfortably old – refuse the invitation. I remember what little you told me after Baley had left Aurora and, to tell you the truth, I was able to deduce more from that than you perhaps think. If you see him, you may find it all disappointing, not living up to the deepening and mellowing glow of reminiscence; or, if it is not disappointing, worse yet, for it will disrupt a perhaps rather fragile contentment, which you will then not be able to repair.”

Gladia, who had been vaguely thinking precisely that, found the proposition needed only to be placed into words to be rejected.

She said, “No, Han, I must see him, but I’m afraid to do it alone. Would you come with me?”

Fastolfe smiled wearily. “I was not invited, Gladia. And if I were, I would in any case be forced to refuse. There is an important vote coming up in the Council. Affairs of state, you know, from which I can’t absent myself.”

“Poor Han!”

“Yes, indeed, poor me. But you can’t go alone. As far as I know, you can’t pilot a ship.”

“Oh! Well, I thought I’d be taken up by –”

“Commercial carrier?” Fastolfe shook his head. “Quite impossible. For you to visit and board an Earth ship in orbit openly, as would be unavoidable if you used commercial carrier, would require special permission and that would take weeks. If you don’t want to go, Gladia, you needn’t put it on the basis of not wishing to see him. If the paperwork and red tape involved would take weeks, I’m sure he can’t wait that long.”

“But I do want to see him,” said Gladia, now determined.

“In that case, you can take my private space vessel and Daneel can take you up there. He can handle the controls very well indeed and he is as anxious to see Baley as you are. We just won’t report the trip.”

“But you’ll get into trouble, Han.”

“Perhaps no one will find out – or they’ll pretend not to find out. And if anyone makes trouble, I will just have to handle it.”

Gladia’s head bowed in a moment of thought and then she said, “If you don’t mind, I will be selfish and chance your having trouble, Han. I want to go.”

“Then you’ll go.”

5A.

It was a small ship, smaller than Gladia had imagined; cozy in a way, but frightening in another way. It was small enough, after all, to lack any provision for pseudo-gravity – and the sensation of weightlessness, while constantly nudging at her to indulge in amusing gymnastics, just as constantly reminded her that she was in an abnormal environment.

She was a Spacer. There were over five billion Spacers spread over fifty worlds, all of them proud of the name. Yet how many of those who called themselves Spacers were really space travelers? Very few. Perhaps eighty percent of them never left the world of their birth. Even of the remaining twenty percent, hardly any passed through space more than two or three times.

Certainly, she herself was no Spacer in the literal sense of the word, she thought gloomily. Once (once!) she had traveled through space and that was from Solaria to Aurora seven years before. Now she was entering space a second time on a small private space yacht for a short trip just beyond the atmosphere, a paltry hundred thousand kilometers, with one other person – not even a person – for company.

She cast another glance at Daneel in the small pilot room. She could just see a portion of him, where he sat at the controls.

She had never been anywhere with only one robot within call. There had always been hundreds – thousands – at her disposal on Solaria. On Aurora, there were routinely dozens, if not scores.

Here there was but one.

She said, “Daneel!”

He did not allow his attention to wander from the controls. “Yes, Madam Gladia?”

“Are you pleased that you will be seeing Elijah Baley again?”

“I am not certain, Madam Gladia, how best to describe my inner state. It may be that it is analogous to what a human being would describe as being pleased.”

“But you must feel something.”

“I feel as though I can make decisions more rapidly than I can ordinarily; my responses seem to come more easily; my movements seem to require less energy. I might interpret it generally as a sensation of well-being. At least I have heard human beings use that word and feel that what it is intended to describe is something that is analogous to the sensations I now experience.”

Gladia said, “But what if I were to say I wanted to see him alone?”

“Then that would be arranged.”

“Even though that meant you wouldn’t see him?”

“Yes, madam.”

“Wouldn’t you then feel disappointed? I mean, wouldn’t you have a sensation that was the opposite of well-being? Your decisions would come less rapidly, your responses less easily, your movements would require more energy and so on?”

“No, Madam Gladia, for I would have a feeling of well-being at fulfilling your orders.”

“Your own pleasant feeling is Third Law, and fulfilling my orders is Second Law, and Second Law takes precedence. Is that it?”

“Yes, madam.”

Gladia struggled against her own curiosity. It would never have occurred to her to question an ordinary robot in this matter. A robot is a machine. But she couldn’t think of Daneel as a machine, just as five years before she had been unable to think of Jander as a machine. But with Jander that had been only the burning of passion – and that had gone with Jander himself. For all his similarity to the other, Daneel could not set the ashes alight again. With him, there was room for intellectual curiosity.

“Doesn’t it bother you, Daneel,” she asked, “to be so bound by the Laws?”

“I cannot imagine anything else, madam.”

“All my life I have been bound to the pull of gravity, even during my one previous trip on a spaceship, but I can imagine not being bound by it. And here I am, in fact, not bound by it.”

“And do you enjoy it, madam?”

“In a way, yes.”

“Does it make you uneasy?”

“In a way, that too.”

“Sometimes, madam, when I think that human beings are not bound by Laws, it makes me uneasy.”

“Why, Daneel? Have you ever tried to reason out to yourself why the thought of Lawlessness should make you feel uneasy?”

Daneel was silent for a moment. He said, “I have, madam, but I do not think I would wonder about such things but for my brief associations with Partner Elijah. He had a way –”

“Yes, I know,” she said. “He wondered about everything. He had a restlessness about him that drove him on to ask questions at all times in all directions.”

“So it seemed. And I would try to be like him and ask questions. So I asked myself what Lawlessness might be like and I found I couldn’t imagine what it might be like except that it might be like being human and that made me feel uneasy. And I asked myself, as you asked me, why it made me feel uneasy.”

“And what did you answer yourself?”

Daneel said, “After a long time, I decided that the Three Laws govern the manner in which my positronic pathways behave. At all times, under all stimuli, the Laws constrain the direction and intensity of positronic flow along those pathways so that I always know what to do. Yet the level of knowledge of what to do is not always the same. There are times when my doing-as-I-must is under less constraint than at other times. I have always noticed that the lower the positronomotive potential, then the further removed from certainty is my decision as to which action to take. And the further removed from certainty I am, the nearer I am to ill-being. To decide an action in a millisecond rather than a nanosecond produces a sensation I would not wish to be prolonged.

“What then, I thought to myself, madam, if I were utterly without Laws as humans are? What if I could make no clear decision on what response to make to some given set of conditions? It would be unbearable and I do not willingly think of it.”

Gladia said, “Yet you do, Daneel. You are thinking of it now.”

“Only because of my association with Partner Elijah, madam. I observed him under conditions when he was unable, for a time, to decide on an action because of the puzzling nature of the problems that had been set him. He was clearly in a state of ill-being as a result and I felt ill-being on his behalf because there was nothing I could do that would ease the situation for him. It is possible that I only grasped a very small part of what it was he felt then. If I had grasped a larger part and better understood the consequences of his inability to decide on action, I might have –” He hesitated.

“Ceased functioning? Been inactivated?” said Gladia, thinking briefly and painfully of Jander.

“Yes, madam. My failure to understand may been an inbuilt protection device against damage to my positronic brain. But then, I noted that no matter how painful Partner Elijah found his indecision to be, he continued to make an effort to solve his problem. I admired him greatly for that.”

“You are capable of admiration then, are you?”

Daneel said solemnly, “I use the word as I have heard human beings use it. I do not know the proper word to express the response within me elicited by Partner Elijah’s actions of this sort.”

Gladia nodded, then said, “And yet there are rules that govern human reactions, too; certain instincts, drives, teachings.”

“So friend Giskard thinks, madam.”

“Does he now?”

“But he finds them too complicated to analyze. He wonders if there might someday be developed a system of analyzing human behavior in mathematical detail and of deriving – from that – cogent Laws that would express the rules of that behaviDr.”

“I doubt it,” said Gladia.

“Nor is friend Giskard sanguine. He thinks it will be a very long time before such a system is developed.”

“A very long time, I should say.”

“And now,” said Daneel, “we are approaching the Earth ship and we must carry through the docking procedure, which is not simple.”

5B.

It seemed to Gladia that it took longer to dock than to move into the Earth ship’s orbit in the first place.

Daneel remained calm throughout – but, then, he could not do otherwise – and assured her that all human ships could dock with each other regardless of difference in size and make.

“Like human beings,” said Gladia, forcing a smile, but Daneel made no response to that. He concentrated on the delicate adjustments that had to be made. Docking was always possible, perhaps, but not always easy, it would appear.

Gladia grew uneasier by the moment. Earthmen were short-lived and aged quickly. Five years had passed since she had seen Elijah. By how much would he have aged? How would he appear? Would she be able to keep from looking shocked or horrified at the change?

Whatever his appearance, he would still be the Elijah to whom her gratitude could know no bounds.

Was that what it was? Gratitude –?

She noticed that her hands were tightly entwined with each other, so that her arms were aching. It was only with an effort that she could force them to relax.

She knew when docking was completed. The Earth ship was large enough to have a pseudo-gravitation field generator and, at the moment of docking, the field expanded to include the small yacht. There was a slight rotational effect as the direction toward the floor suddenly became “down” and Gladia experienced a sickening drop of two inches. Her knees bent under the impact in lopsided fashion and she fell against the wall.

She straightened with a little difficulty and was annoyed with herself for not having anticipated the change and been ready for it.

Daneel said unnecessarily, “We have docked, Madam Gladia. Partner Elijah asks permission to come aboard.”

“Of course, Daneel.”

There was a whirring sound and a portion of the wall swirled into dilation. A crouching figure moved through and the wall tightened and contracted behind it.

The figure straightened and Gladia whispered, “Elijah!” and felt overwhelmed with gladness and relief. It seemed to her that his hair was grayer, but otherwise it was Elijah. There was no other noticeable change, no marked aging after all.

He smiled at her and, for a moment, seemed to devour her with his eyes. Then he lifted one forefinger, as though to say, “Wait,” and walked toward Daneel.

“Daneel!” He seized the robot’s shoulders and shook him.

“You haven’t changed. Jehoshaphat! You’re the constant in all our lives.”

“Partner Elijah. It is good to see you.”

“It is good to hear myself called partner again and I wish that were so. This is the fifth time I have seen you, but the first time that I do not have a problem to solve. I am not even a plainclothesman any longer. I have resigned and I am now an immigrant to one of the new worlds. – Tell me, Daneel, why didn’t you come with Dr. Fastolfe when he visited Earth three years ago?”

“That was Dr. Fastolfe’s decision. He decided to take Giskard.”

“I was disappointed, Daneel.”

“It would have been pleasant for me to see you, Partner Elijah, but Dr. Fastolfe told me afterward that the trip had been highly successful, so that perhaps his decision was the correct one.”

“It was successful, Daneel. Before the visit, the Earth government was reluctant to cooperate in the Settlement procedure, but now the whole planet is pulsing and heaving and, by the million, people are anxious to go. We don’t have the ships to accommodate them all – even with Auroran help – and we don’t have the worlds to receive them all, for every world must be adjusted. Not one will accommodate a human community unchanged. The one I’m going to is low in free oxygen and we’re going to have to live in domed towns for a generation while Earth-type vegetation spreads over the planet. “His eyes were turning more and more often to Gladia as she sat there smiling.

Daneel said, “It is to be expected. From what I have learned of human history, the Spacer worlds also went through a period of terraforming.”

“They certainly did! And thanks to that experience, the process can be carried through more rapidly now. – but I wonder if you would remain in the pilot room for a while, Daneel. I must speak to Gladia.”

“Certainly, Partner Elijah.”

Daneel stepped through the arched doorway that led into the pilot room and Baley looked at Gladia in a questioning way and made a sideways motion with his hand.

Understanding perfectly, she walked over and touched the contact that drew the partition noiselessly across the doorway. They were, to all intents, alone.

Baley held out his hands. “Gladia!”

She took them in hers, never even thinking she was ungloved. She said, “Had Daneel stayed with us, he would not have hampered us.”

“Not physically. He would have psychologically!” Baley smiled sadly and said, “Forgive me, Gladia. I had to speak to Daneel first.”

“You’ve known him longer,” she said softly. “He takes precedence.”

“He doesn’t – but he has no defenses. If you are annoyed with me, Gladia, you can punch me in the eye if you want to. Daneel can’t. I can ignore him, order him away, treat him as though he were a robot, and he would be compelled to obey and be the same loyal and uncomplaining partner.”

“The fact is that he is a robot, Elijah.”

“Never to me, Gladia. My mind knows he is a robot and has no feelings in the human fashion, but my heart considers him human and I must treat him so. I would ask Dr. Fastolfe to let me take Daneel with me, but no robots are allowed on the new Settler worlds.”

“Would you dream of taking me with you, Elijah?”

“No Spacers, either.”

“It seems you Earthmen are as unreasoningly exclusive as we Spacers are.”

Elijah nodded glumly. “Madness on both sides. But even if we were sane, I would not take you. You could not stand the life and I’d never be sure that your immune mechanisms would build up properly. I’d be afraid that you would either die quickly of some minor infection or that you would live too long and watch our generations die. – Forgive me, Gladia.”

“For what, dear Elijah?”

“For – this.” He put out his hands, palms upward, to either side. “For asking to see you.”

“But I’m glad you did. I wanted to see you.”

He said, “I know. I tried not to see you, but the thought of being in space and of not stopping at Aurora tore me apart. And yet it does no good, Gladia. It just means another leave-taking and that will tear me apart, too. It is why I have never written you; why I have never tried to reach you by hyperwave. Surely you must have wondered.”

“Not really. I agree with you that there was no point. h would merely make it all infinitely harder. Yet I wrote to you many times.”

“You did? I never received one letter.”

“I never mailed one letter. Having written them, I destroyed them.”

“But why?”

“Because, Elijah, no private letter can be sent from Aurora to Earth without passing through the hands of the censor and I wrote you not one letter that I was willing to let the censors see. Had you sent me a letter, I assure you that not one would have gotten through to me, however innocent it might have been. I thought that was why I never received a letter. Now that I know you weren’t aware of the situation, I am extraordinarily glad that you were not so foolish as to try to remain in touch with me. You would have misunderstood my never answering your letters.”

Baley stared at her. “How is it I see you now?”

“Not legally, I assure you. I am using Dr. Fastolfe’s private ship, so I passed by the border guards without being challenged. Had this ship not been Dr. Fastolfe’s, I would have been stopped and sent back. I assumed you understood that, too, and that that was why you were in touch with Dr. Fastolfe and didn’t try to reach me directly.”

“I understood nothing. I sit here amazed at the double ignorance that kept me safe. Triple ignorance, for I didn’t know the proper hyperwave combination to reach you directly and I couldn’t face the difficulty of trying to find the combination on Earth. I couldn’t have done it privately and there was already sufficient comment allover the Galaxy about you and me, thanks to that foolish hyperwave drama they put on the subwaves after Solaria. Otherwise, I promise you, I would have tried. I had Dr. Fastolfe’s combination, however, and once I was in orbit around Aurora, I contacted him at once.”

“In any case, we’re here.” She sat down on the side of her bunk and held out her hands.

Baley took them and tried to sit down on a stool, which he had hitched one foot over, but she drew him insistently toward the bunk and he sat down beside her.

He said awkwardly, “How is it with you, Gladia?”

“Quite well. And you, Elijah?”

“I grow old. I have just celebrated my fiftieth birthday three weeks ago.”

“Fifty is not –” She stopped.

“For an Earthman, it’s old. We’re short-lived, you know.”

“Even for an Earthman, fifty is not old. You haven’t changed.”

“It’s kind of you to say so, but I can tell where the creaks have multiplied. Gladia –”

“Yes, Elijah?”

“I must ask. Have you and Santirix Gremionis –”

Gladia smiled and nodded. “He is my husband. I took your advice.”

“And has it worked out well?”

“Well enough. Life is pleasant.”

“Good. I hope it lasts.”

“Nothing lasts for centuries, Elijah, but it could last for years; perhaps even for decades.”

“Any children?”

“Not yet. But what about your family, my married man? Your son? Your wife?”

“Bentley moved out to the Settlements two years ago. In fact, I’ll be joining him. He’s an official on the world I’m heading for. He’s only twenty-four and he’s looked up to already.” Baley’s eyes danced. “I think I’ll have to address him as Your Honor. In public, anyway.”

“Excellent. And Mrs. Baley? Is she with you?”

“Jessie? No. She won’t leave Earth. I told her that we would be living in domes for a considerable time, so that it really wouldn’t be so different from Earth. Primitive, of course. Still, she may change her mind in time. I’LL make it as comfortable as possible and once I’ve settled down, I’ll ask Bentley to go to Earth and gather her in. She may be lonely enough by then to be willing to come. We’ll see.”

“But meanwhile you’re alone.”

“There are over a hundred other immigrants on the ship, so I’m not really alone.”

“They are on the other side of the docking wall, however. And I’m alone, too.”

Baley cast a brief, involuntary look toward the pilot room and Gladia said, “Except for Daneel, of course, who’s on the other side of that door and who is a robot, no matter how intensely you think of him as a person. – and surely you haven’t asked to see me only that we might ask after each other’s families?”

Baley’s face grew solemn, almost anxious. “I can’t ask you –”

“Then I ask you. This bunk is not really designed with sexual activity in mind, but you’ll chance the possibility of falling out of it, I hope.”

Baley said hesitantly, “Gladia, I can’t deny that –”

“Oh, Elijah, don’t go into a long dissertation in order to satisfy the needs of your Earth morality. I offer myself to you in accord with Auroran custom. It’s your clear right to refuse and I will have no right to question the refusal. – Except that I would question it most forcefully. I have decided that the right to refuse belongs only to Aurorans. I won’t take it from an Earthman.”

Baley sighed. “I’m no longer an Earthman, Gladia.”

“I am even less likely to take it from a miserable immigrant heading out for a barbarian planet on which he will have to cower under a dome. – Elijah, we have had so little time, and we have so little time now, and I may never see you again. This meeting is so totally unexpected that it would be a cosmic crime to toss it away.”

“Gladia, do you really want an old man?”

“Elijah, do you really want me to beg?”

“But I’m ashamed.”

“Then close your eyes.”

“I mean of myself – of my decrepit body.”

“Then suffer. Your foolish opinion of yourself has nothing to do with me.” And she put her arms about him, even as the seam of her robe fell apart.

5C.

Gladia was aware of a number of things, all simultaneously.

She was aware of the wonder of constancy, for Elijah was as she had remembered him. The lapse of five years had not changed matters. She had not been living in the glow of a memory-intensified glitter. He was Elijah.

She was aware, also, of a puzzle of difference. Her feeling intensified that Santirix Gremionis, without a single major flaw that she could define, was all flaw. Santirix was affectionate, gentle, rational, reasonably intelligent – and flat. Why he was flat, she could not say, but nothing he did or said could rouse her as Baley did, even when he did and said nothing. Baley was older in years, much older physiologically, not as handsome as Santirix, and what was more, Baley carried with him the indefinable air of decay – of the aura of quick aging and short life that Earthmen must. And yet –

She was aware of the folly of men, of Elijah approaching her with hesitation, with total unappreciation of his effect on her.

She was aware of his absence, for he had gone in to speak to Daneel, who was to be last as he was first. Earthmen feared and hated robots and yet Elijah, knowing full well that Daneel was a robot, treated him only as a person. Spacers, on the other hand, who loved robots and were never comfortable in their absence, would never think of them as anything but machines.

Most of all, she was aware of time. She knew that exactly three hours and twenty-five minutes had elapsed since Elijah had entered Han Fastolfe’s small vessel and she knew further that not much more time could be allowed to elapse.

The longer she remained off Aurora’s surface and the longer Baley’s ship remained in orbit, the more likely it was that someone would notice – or if the matter had already been noticed, as seemed almost certain, the more likely it would be that someone would become curious and investigate. And then Fastolfe would find himself in an annoying tangle of trouble.

Baley emerged from the pilot room and looked at Gladia sadly. “I must go now, Gladia.”

“I know that well.”

Baley said, “Daneel will take care of you. He will be your friend as well as protector and you must be a friend to him – for my sake. But it is Giskard I want you to listen to. Let him be your adviser.”

Gladia frowned. “Why Giskard? I’m not sure I like him.”

“I do not ask you to like him. I ask you to trust him.”

“But why, Elijah?”

“I can’t tell you that. In this, you must trust me, too.”

They looked at each other and said no more. It was as though silence made time stop, allowed them to hold on to the seconds and keep them motionless.

But it could only work so long. Baley said, “You don’t regret –”

Gladia whispered, “How could I regret – when I may never see you again?”

Baley made as though to answer that, but she put her small clenched fist against his mouth.

“Don’t lie uselessly,” she said. “I may never see you again.”

And she never did. Never!

6.

It was with pain that she felt herself drag across the dead waste of years into the present once more.

I never did, she thought. Never!

She had protected herself against the bittersweet for so long and now she had plunged into it – more bitter than sweet – because she had seen this person, this Mandamus – because Giskard has asked her to and because she was compelled to trust Giskard. It was his last request.

She focused on the present. (How much time had elapsed?)

Mandamus was looking at her coldly. He said, “From your reaction, Madam Gladia, I gather that it is true. You could not have said so more plainly.”

“What is true? What are you talking about?”

“That you saw the Earthman Elijah Baley five years after his visit to Aurora. His ship was in orbit about Aurora; you traveled up to see him and were with him about the time you conceived your son.”

“What evidence do you have for that?”

“Madam, it was not totally a secret. The Earthman’s ship was detected in orbit. Fastolfe’s yacht was detected in its flight. It was observed to dock. It was not Fastolfe who was on board the yacht, so the presumption was that it was you. Dr. Fastolfe’s influence was sufficient to keep it off the record.”

“If it is off the record, there is no evidence.”

“Nevertheless, Dr. Amadiro has spent the last two thirds of his life following Dr. Fastolfe’s movements with the eyes of detestation. There were always government officials who were heart and soul with Dr. Amadiro’s policy of reserving the Galaxy for the Spacers and they would quietly report to him anything they thought he would like to know. Dr. Amadiro learned of your little escapade almost as soon as it happened. “

“It is still not evidence. The unsupported word of a minor official currying favor is of no account. Amadiro did nothing because even he knew he had no evidence.”

“No evidence with which he could charge anyone with even a misdemeanor; no evidence with which he could trouble Fastolfe; but evidence enough to suspect me of being a descendant of Baley’s and to cripple my career therefor.”

Gladia said bitterly, “You may cease being troubled. My son is the son of Santirix Gremionis, a true Auroran, and it is from this son of Gremionis that you are descended.”

“Convince me of it, madam. I ask nothing better. Convince me that you fired up into orbit and that you spent hours alone with the Earthman and that, during that time, you talked – politics, perhaps – discussed old times and mutual friends – told funny stories – and never touched each other. Convince me.”

“What we did, did not matter, so spare me your sarcasm. At the time I saw him, I was already pregnant by my then-husband. I was carrying a three-month-old fetus, an Auroran fetus.”

“Can you prove that?”

“Why should I have to prove it? The date of my son’s birth is on record and Amadiro must have the date of my visit to the Earthman.”

“He was told it at the time, as I said, but nearly twenty decades have passed and he doesn’t remember exactly. The visit is not a matter of record and cannot be referred to. I fear that Dr. Amadiro would prefer to believe that it was nine months before the birth of your son that you were with the Earthman.”

“Six months.”

“Prove it.”

“You have my word.”

“Insufficient.”

“Well, then – Daneel, you were with me. When did I see Elijah Baley?”

“Madam Gladia, it was one hundred and seventy-three days before the birth of your son.”

Gladia said, “Which is just under six months before the birth.”

“Insufficient,” said Mandamus.

Gladia’s chin lifted. “Daneel’s memory is perfect, as can be easily demonstrated, and a robot’s statements pass for evidence in the courts of Aurora.”

“This is not a matter for the courts and will not be and Daneel’s memory carries no weight with Dr. Amadiro. Daneel was constructed by Fastolfe and was maintained by Fastolfe for nearly two centuries. We cannot say what modifications were introduced or how Daneel might have been instructed to deal with matters relating to Dr. Amadiro.”

“Then reason it out, man. Earthmen are quite different genetically from us. We are virtually different species. We are not interfertile.”

“Unproven.”

“Well, then, genetic records exist. Darrel’s do; Santirix’s do. Compare them. If my ex-husband were not his father, the genetic differences would make that unmistakable.”

“Genetic records are not for anyone’s eyes. You know that.”

“Amadiro is not that immersed in ethical considerations. He has the influence to see them illegally. – Or is he afraid of disproving his hypothesis?”

“Whatever the reason, madam, he will not betray an Auroran’s right to privacy.”

Gladia said, “Well, then, go to outer space and choke on vacuum. If your Amadiro refuses to be convinced, that is no affair of mine. You, at least, ought to be convinced and it is your job to convince Amadiro in his turn. If you cannot and if your career does not move onward as you would like to have it do, please be assured that this is entirely and intensely no concern of mine.”

“That does not surprise me. I expect nothing more. And for that matter, I am convinced. I was merely hoping that you would give me some material with which to convince Dr. Amadiro. You haven’t.”

Gladia shrugged with disdain.

“I will use other methods, then,” said Mandamus.

“I’m glad you have them,” Gladia said coldly.

Mandamus said in a low voice, almost as though he were unaware of the presence of anyone else, “So am I. There are powerful methods remaining to me.”

“Good. I suggest you try blackmail on Amadiro. He must have much to be blackmailed for.”

Mandamus looked up, suddenly frowning. “Don’t be a fool.”

Gladia said, “You may go now. I think I have had all of you I wish to endure. Out of my establishment!”

Mandamus lifted his arms. “Wait! I told you at the start that there were two reasons for seeing you – one a personal matter and one a matter of state. I have spent too long a time on the first, but I must request five minutes to discuss the second.”

“I’ll give you no more than five minutes.”

“There is someone else who wants to see you. An Earthman – or at least a member of one of the Settler worlds, a descendant of Earthpeople.”

“Tell him,” said Gladia, “that neither Earthpeople nor their Settler descendants are allowed on Aurora and send him away. Why do I have to see him?”

“Unfortunately, madam, in the last two centuries the balance of power has shifted somewhat. These Earthpeople have more worlds than we have – and have always had a far larger population. They have more ships, even though those are not as advanced as ours, and because of their short lives and their fecundity they are apparently far readier to die than we are.”

“I don’t believe that last.” Mandamus smiled tightly. “Why not? Eight decades mean less than forty do. In any case, we must treat them politely – far more politely than we ever had to in Elijah Baley’s day. If it is any comfort to you, it is the policies of Fastolfe that have created this situation.”

“For whom do you speak, by the way? It is Amadiro who must now bring himself to be polite to Settlers?”

“No. It is the Council, actually.”

“Are you the spokesman for the Council?”

“Not officially, but I have been asked to inform you of this – unofficially.”

“And if I see this Settler, what then? What does he want to see me about?”

“That is what we don’t know, madam. We count on you to tell us. You are to see him, find out what he wants, and report to us.”

“Who is ‘us’?”

“As I said, the Council. The Settler will be here at your establishment this evening.”

“You seem to assume that I have no choice but to take on this position as informer.”

Mandamus rose to his feet, clearly done with his mission. “You will not be an ‘informer.’ You owe nothing to this Settler. You are merely reporting to your government, as a loyal Auroran citizen should be willing – even eager – to do. You would not want the Council to suppose that your Solarian birth in any way dilutes your Auroran patriotism.”

“Sir, I have been an Auroran over four times as long as you’ve been alive.”

“Undoubtedly, but you were born and raised on Solaria. You are that unusual anomaly, a foreign-born Auroran, and it is difficult to forget it. This is especially true since the Settler wishes to see you, rather than anyone else on Aurora, precisely because you are Solarian-born.”

“How do you know that?”

“It is a fair presumption. He identifies you as ‘the Solarian woman.’ We are curious as to why that should mean anything to him – now that Solaria no longer exists.”

“Ask him.”

“We prefer to ask you – after you ask him. I must ask permission to leave now and I thank you for your hospitality.”

Gladia nodded stiffly. “I grant you your permission to leave with better will than I granted you my hospitality.”

Mandamus stepped toward the hallway that led to the main entrance, followed closely by his robots.

He paused just before leaving the room, turned, and said, “I had almost forgotten –”

“Yes?”

“The Settler who wishes to see you has a surname that, by a peculiar coincidence, is Baley.”

3. The Crisis

7.

DANEEL AND GISKARD, with robotic courtesy, saw Mandamus and his robots off the grounds of the establishment. Then, since they were outside, they toured the grounds, made certain that the lesser robots were in their places, and took note of the weather (cloudy and a bit cooler than seasonal).

Daneel said, “Dr. Mandamus admitted openly that the Settler worlds are now stronger than the Spacer worlds. I would not have expected him to do that.”

Giskard said, “Nor I. I was certain that the Settlers would increase in strength as compared with the Spacers because Elijah Baley had predicted it many decades ago, but I could see no way of determining when the fact would become obvious to the Auroran Council. It seemed to me that social inertia would keep the Council firmly convinced of Spacer superiority long after that had vanished, but I could not calculate for how long they would continue to delude themselves.”

“I am astonished that Partner Elijah foresaw this so long ago.”

“Human beings have ways of thinking about human beings that we have not. “Had Giskard been human, the remark might have been made with regret or envy, but since he was a robot it was merely factual.

He went on. “I have tried to gain the knowledge, if not the way of thinking, by reading human history in great detail. Surely somewhere in the long tale of human events, there must be buried the Laws of Humanics that are equivalent to our Three Laws of Robotics.”

Daneel said, “Madam Gladia once told me that this hope was an impossible one.”

“So that may be, friend Daneel, for though it seems to me such Laws of Humanics must exist, I cannot find them. Every generalization I try to make, however broad and simple’ has its numerous exceptions. Yet if such Laws existed and if I could find them, I could understand human beings better and be more confident that I am obeying the Three Laws in better fashion.”

“Since Partner Elijah understood human beings, he must have had some knowledge of the Laws of Humanics.”

“Presumably. But this he knew through something that human beings call intuition, a word I don’t understand, signifying a concept I know nothing of. Presumably it lies beyond reason and I have only reason at my command.”

7A.

That and memory!

Memory that did not work after the human fashion, of course. It lacked the imperfect recall, the fuzziness, the additions and subtractions dictated by wishful thinking and self-interest, to say nothing of the lingerings and lacunae and backtracking that can turn memory into hours-long daydreaming.

It was robotic memory ticking off the events exactly as they had happened, but in vastly hastened fashion. The seconds reeled off in nanoseconds, so that days of events could be relived with such rapid precision as to introduce no perceptible gap in a conversation.

As Giskard had done innumerable times before, he relived that visit to Earth, always seeking for understanding of Elijah Baley’s casual ability to forsee the future, always failing to find it.

Earth!

Fastolfe had come to Earth in an Auroran warship, with a full complement of fellow passengers, both human and robot. Once in orbit, however, it was only Fastolfe who took the module in for a landing. Injections had stimulated his immune mechanism and he wore the necessary gloves, coveralls, contact lenses, and nose plugs. He felt quite safe as a result, but no other Auroran was willing to go along as part of a delegation.

This Fastolfe shrugged off, since it seemed to him (as he later explained to Giskard) that he would be more welcome if he came alone. A delegation would disagreeably remind Earth of the bad old days (to them) of Spacetown, when Spacers had a permanent base on Earth and directly dominated the world.

With him, Fastolfe brought Giskard, however. To have arrived without any robots would have been unthinkable, even for Fastolfe. To have arrived with more than one would have put a strain on the increasingly antirobot Earthmen he hoped to see and with whom he intended to negotiate.

To begin with, of course, he would meet with Baley, who would be his liaison with Earth and its people. That was the rational excuse for the meeting. The real excuse was simply that Fastolfe wanted very much to see Baley again; he certainly owed him enough.

(That Giskard wanted to see Baley and that he very slightly tightened the emotion and impulse in Fastolfe’s brain to bring that about, Fastolfe had no way of knowing – or even imagining.)

Baley was waiting for them at the time of landing and with him was a small group of Earth officials, so that there was a tedious passage of time during which politeness and protocol had its innings. It was some hours before Baley and Fastolfe could get away by themselves and it might not have happened that soon but for Giskard’s quiet and unfelt interference – with just a touch at the minds of the more important of those officials who were distinctly bored. (It was always safe to confine one’s self to accentuating an emotion that already existed. It could almost never bring harm.)

Baley and Fastolfe sat in the smallness of a private dining room that was ordinarily available only to high government officials. Food items could be punched out on a computerized menu and were then brought in by computerized carriers.

Fastolfe smiled. “Very advanced,” he said, “but these carriers are merely specialized robots. I’m surprised Earth uses them. They are not of Spacer manufacture, surely.”

“No, they’re not,” said Baley solemnly. “Home-grown, so to speak. This is only for use at the top and it’s my first chance, ever, to experience it. I’m not likely to do so again.”

“You may be elected to high office someday and then experience this sort of thing daily.”

“Never,” said Baley. The dishes were put before each of them and the carrier was even sophisticated enough to ignore Giskard, who stood impassively behind Fastolfe’s chair.

For a while, Baley ate silently and then, with a certain shyness, he said, “It is good to see you again, Dr. Fastolfe.”

“The pleasure is as much mine. I haven’t forgotten that two years ago, when you were on Aurora, you managed to free me of the suspicion of the destruction of the robot Jander and to turn the tables neatly on my overconfident opponent, the good Amadiro.”

“I still shake when I think of it,” said Baley. “And greetings to you, too, Giskard. I trust you haven’t forgotten me.”

“That would be quite impossible, sir,” said Giskard.

“Good! Well, Doctor, I trust the political situation on Aurora continues to be favorable. The news here would make it seem so, but I don’t trust Earth analysis of Auroran affairs.”

“You may – at the moment. My party is in firm control of the Council. Amadiro maintains a sullen opposition, but I suspect it will be years before his people recover from the blow you gave them. But how are things with you and with Earth?”

“Well enough. – Tell me, Dr. Fastolfe” – Baley’s face twitched slightly, as though with embarrassment –” have you brought Daneel with you?”

Fastolfe said slowly, “I’m sorry, Baley. I did, but I left him back on the ship. I felt it might not be politic to be accompanied by a robot who looked so much like a human being. With Earth as antirobot as it has become, I felt a humanoid robot might seem a deliberate provocation to them.”

Baley sighed. “I understand.”

Fastolfe said, “Is it true that your government is planning to prohibit the use of robots within the Cities?”

“I suspect it will soon come to that, with a period of grace, of course, to minimize financial loss and inconvenience. Robots will be restricted to the countryside, where they are needed for agriculture and mining. There, too, they may eventually be phased out and the plan is to have no robots at all on the new worlds.”

“Since you mention the new worlds, has your son left Earth yet?”

“Yes, a few months ago. We have heard from him and he’s arrived at a new world safely, along with several hundred Settlers, as they call themselves. The world has some native vegetation upon it and a low-oxygen atmosphere. Apparently, with time it can be made quite Earthlike. Meanwhile, some makeshift domes have been put up, new Settlers are advertised for, and everyone is busily engaged in terraforming. Bentley’s letters and occasional hyperwave contact are very hopeful, but they don’t keep his mother from missing him badly.”

“And will you be going there, Baley?”

“I’m not sure that living on a strange world under a dome is my idea of happiness, Dr. Fastolfe – I haven’t Ben’s youth and enthusiasm – but I think I’ll have to in two or three years. In any case, I’ve already given notice to the Department of my intention to emigrate.”

“I imagine they must be upset over that.”

“Not at all. They say they are, but they’re glad to get rid of me. I’m too notorious.”

“And how does Earth’s government react to this drive for expansion into the Galaxy.”

“Nervously. They do not forbid it altogether, but certainly they are not cooperative. They continue to suspect that the Spacers are opposed to it and will do something unpleasant to stop it.”

“Social inertia,” said Fastolfe. “They judge us according to our behavior of years past. Surely we have made it plain that we now encourage Earth’s colonization of new planets and that we intend to colonize new planets of our own.”

“I hope you explain this to our government, then. – But, Dr. Fastolfe, another question on a smaller point. How is –” And with that, he stalled.

“Gladia?” said Fastolfe, hiding his amusement. “Have you forgotten her name?”

“No, no. I merely hesitated to – to –”

“She’s well,” said Fastolfe, “and living comfortably. She has asked me to remember her to you, but I imagine you need no nudging to recall her to mind.”

“The fact of her Solarian origin is not used against her, I hope?”

“No, nor is her role in the undoing of Dr. Amadiro. Rather the reverse. I take care of her, I assure you. – and yet I do not care to allow you to get off the subject altogether, Baley. What if Earth’s officialdom continues to be opposed to immigration and expansion? Could the process continue despite such opposition?”

“Possibly,” said Baley, “but not certainly. There’s substantial opposition among Earthmen generally. It’s hard to break away from the huge underground Cities that are our homes –”

“Your wombs.”

“Or our wombs, if you prefer. Going to new worlds and having to live with the most primitive facilities for decades; never seeing comfort in one’s own lifetime – that is difficult. When I think of it sometimes, I just decide not to go – especially if I’m passing a sleepless night. I’ve decided not to go a hundred times and one day I may just stick to that decision. And if I have trouble when, in a way, I originated the entire notion, then who else is likely to go freely and gladly? Without government encouragement – or, to be brutally frank – without the government shoe applied to the seat of the pants of the population, the whole project may fail.”

Fastolfe nodded. “I will try to persuade your government. But if I fail?”

Baley said in a low voice, “If you fail – and if, therefore, our people fail – there remains only one alternative. The Spacers themselves must settle the Galaxy. The job must be done.”

“And you will be content to see the Spacers expand and fill the Galaxy, while the Earthpeople remain on their single planet?”

“Not content at all, but it would be better than the present situation of no expansion by either. Many centuries ago, Earthpeople flocked to the stars, established some of the worlds that are now called Spacer worlds, and those first few colonized others. It has been a long time, however, since either the Spacers or Earthpeople have successfully settled and developed a new world. That must not be permitted to continue.”

“I agree. But what is your reason for wanting expansion, Baley?”

“I feel that without expansion of some sort, humanity cannot advance. It doesn’t have to be geographical expansion, but that is the clearest way of inducing other kinds of expansion as well. If geographical expansion can be undertaken in a fashion that is not at the expense of other intelligent beings; if there are empty spaces into which to expand; then why not? To resist expansion under such circumstances is to ensure decay.”

“You see those alternatives, then? Expansion and advancement? Nonexpansion and decay?”

“Yes, I believe so. Therefore, if Earth refuses expansion, then Spacers must accept it. Humanity, whether in the form of Earthpeople or Spacers, must expand. I would like to see Earthpeople undertake the task, but, failing that, Spacer expansion is better than no expansion at all. One alternative or the other.”

“And if one expands but not the other?”

“Then the expanding society will become steadily stronger and the nonexpanding one steadily weaker.”

“Are you certain of that?”

“It would be unavoidable, I think.”

Fastolfe nodded. “Actually, I agree. It is why I am trying to persuade both Earthpeople and Spacers to expand and advance. That is a third alternative, and, I think, the best.”

7B.

Memory flickered past the days that followed – incredible mobs of people moving ceaselessly past each other in streams and eddies – racing Expressways being mounted and dismounted – endless conferences with innumerable officials – minds in crowds.

Particularly minds in crowds.

Minds in crowds so thick that Giskard could not isolate individuals. Mass minds mixing and melting together into a vast pulsating grayness with all that was detectable being the periodic sparks of suspicion and dislike that shot outward every time one of the multitude paused to look at him.

Only when Fastolfe was in conference with a few officials could Giskard deal with the individual mind and that, of course, was when it counted.

Memory slowed at one point near the end of the stay on Earth, when Giskard could finally maneuver a time alone with Baley again. Giskard adjusted a few minds minimally in order to make certain there would be no interruption for some time.

Baley said apologetically, “I haven’t really been ignoring you, Giskard. I simply haven’t had the opportunity to be alone with you. I don’t rate highly on Earth and I cannot order my comings and goings.”

“I have, of course, understood that, sir, but we will have some time together now.”

“Good. Dr. Fastolfe tells me that Gladia is doing well. He may be saying that out of kindness, knowing that that is what I want to hear. I order you to be truthful, however. Is Gladia, in fact, doing well?”

“Dr. Fastolfe has told you the truth, sir.”

“And you remember, I hope, my request when I last saw you on Aurora that you guard Gladia and protect her from harm.”

“Friend Daneel and I, sir, are both mindful of your request. I have arranged it so that when Dr. Fastolfe is no longer alive, both friend Daneel and I will become part of Madam Gladia’s establishment. We will then be in an even better position to keep her from harm.”

“That,” said Baley sadly, “will be after my time.”

“I understand that, sir, and regret it.”

“Yes, but it can’t be helped and a crisis will come – or may come – even before that and yet still be after my time.”

“What is it, sir, that you have in mind? What is this crisis?”

“Giskard, it is a crisis that may arise because Dr. Fastolfe is a surprisingly persuasive person. Or else, there is some other factor associated with him that is accomplishing the task.”

“Sir?”

“Every official that Dr. Fastolfe has seen and interviewed now seems to be enthusiastically in favor of emigration. They were not in favor earlier or, if they were, it was with strong reservations. And once the opinion-making leaders are in favor, others are sure to follow. This will spread like an epidemic.”

“Is this not what you wish, sir?”

“Yes, it is, but it is almost too much what I wish. We shall spread out over the Galaxy – but what if the Spacers don’t?”

“Why should they not?”

“I don’t know. I advance it as a supposition, a possibility. What if they don’t?”

“Earth and the worlds its people settle will then grow stronger, according to what I have heard you say.”

“And the Spacers will grow weaker. There will, however, be a period of time during which the Spacers will remain stronger than Earth and its Settlers, though by a steadily diminishing margin. Eventually, the Spacers will inevitably become aware of Earthpeople as a growing danger. At that time the Spacer worlds will surely decide that Earth and the Settlers must be stopped before it is too late and it will seem to them that drastic measures will have to be taken. That will be a period of crisis that will determine the entire future history of human beings.”

“I see your point, sir.”

Baley remained in thoughtful silence for a moment, then said, in very nearly a whisper as though dreading being overheard, “Who knows of your abilities?”

“Among human beings only yourself – and you cannot mention it to others.”

“I know well I can’t. The point is, though, that it is you, not Fastolfe, who has engineered the turnaround that has made every official with whom you’ve come in contact a proponent of emigration. And it is to bring that about that you arranged to have Fastolfe take you, rather than Daneel, to Earth with him. You were essential and Daneel might have been a distraction.”

Giskard said, “I felt it necessary to keep personnel to a minimum in order to avoid making my task harder by abrading the sensitivities of Earthpeople. I regret, sir, Daneel’s absence. I fully sense your disappointment at not being able to greet him.”

“Well –” Baley shook his head. “I understand the necessity and I rely on your explaining to Daneel that I badly missed him. In any case, I am still making my point. If Earth embarks on a great policy of world settlement and if the Spacers are left behind in the race to expand, the responsibility for that – and therefore for the crisis that will inevitably arise – will be yours. You must, for that reason, feel it your further responsibility to use your abilities to protect Earth when the crisis comes.”

“I will do what I can, sir.”

“And should you succeed there, Amadiro – or his followers – may turn on Gladia. You must not forget to protect her, too.”

“Daneel and I will not forget.”

“Thank you, Giskard.”

And they parted.

When Giskard, following Fastolfe, entered the module to begin the voyage back to Aurora, he saw Baley once again. This time there was no opportunity to speak to him.

Baley waved and mouthed one soundless word: “Remember.”

Giskard sensed the word and, in addition, the emotion behind it.

After that, Giskard never saw Baley again. Never.

8.

Giskard had never found it possible to flip through the sharp images of that one visit to Earth, without then following it with the images of the key visit to Amadiro at the Institute of Robotics.

It had not been an easy conference to arrange. Amadiro, with the bitterness of defeat heavy upon him, would not exacerbate his humiliation by going to Fastolfe’s establishment.

“Well, then,” Fastolfe had said to Giskard. “I can afford to be magnanimous in victory. I will go to him. Besides, I must see him.”

Fastolfe had been a member of the Institute of Robotics since Baley had made possible the crushing of Amadiro and of his political ambitions. In return, Fastolfe had passed over to the Institute all the data for the building and maintenance of humaniform robots. A number had been manufactured and then the project had come to an end and Fastolfe had chafed.

It had been Fastolfe’s intention, at first, to arrive at the Institute without any robot companion. He would have placed himself, without protection and (so to speak) naked, into the midst of what was still the stronghold of the enemy’s camp. It would have been a sign of humility and trust, but it would also have been an indication of complete self-confidence and Amadiro would have understood that. Fastolfe, entirely alone, would be demonstrating his certainty that Amadiro, with all the resources of the Institute at his command, would not dare to touch his single enemy coming carelessly and defenselessly within reach of his fist.

And yet in the end, Fastolfe, not quite knowing how, chose to have Giskard accompany him.

Amadiro seemed to have lost a little weight since last Fastolfe had seen him, but he was still a formidable specimen; tall and heavyset. He lacked the self-confident smile that had once been his hallmark and when he attempted it at Fastolfe’s entrance, it seemed more like a snarl that faded into a look of somber dissatisfaction.

“Well, Kelden,” said Fastolfe, making free with the other’s familiar name, “we don’t see each other often, despite the fact that we have now been colleagues for four years.”

“Let’s not have any false bonhomie, Fastolfe,” said Amadiro in a clearly annoyed and low-pitched growl, “and address me as Amadiro. We are not colleagues except in name and I make no secret – and never have – of my belief that your foreign policy is suicidal for us.”

Three of Amadiro’s robots, large and gleaming, were present and Fastolfe studied them with raised eyebrows, “You are well protected, Amadiro, against one man of peace together with his single robot.”

“They will not attack you, Fastolfe, as you well know. But why did you bring Giskard? Why not your masterpiece, Daneel?”

“Would it be safe to bring Daneel within your reach, Amadiro?”

“I take it you intend that as humor. I no longer need Daneel. We build our own humaniforms.”

“On the basis of my design.”

“With improvements.”

“And yet you do not use the humaniforms. That is why I have come to see you. I know that my position in the Institute is a name-only thing and that even my presence is unwelcome, let alone my opinions and recommendations. However, I must, as an Institute member, protest your failure to use the humaniforms.”

“How do you wish me to use them?”

“The intention was to have the humaniforms open up new worlds into which Spacers could eventually emigrate, after those worlds had been terraformed and made completely habitable, wasn’t it?”

“But that was something you opposed, Fastolfe, wasn’t it?”

Fastolfe said, “Yes, I did. I wanted Spacers themselves to emigrate to new worlds and to do their own terraforming. That, however, is not happening and, I now see, is not likely to happen. Let us send the humaniforms, then. That would be better than nothing.”

“All our alternatives come to nothing, as long as your views dominate the Council, Fastolfe. Spacers will not travel to rude and unformed worlds; nor, it seems, do they like humaniform robots.”

“You have scarcely given the Spacers a chance to like them. Earthpeople are beginning to settle new planets – even rude and unformed ones. And they do it without robotic help.”

“You know very well the differences between Earthpeople and ourselves. There are eight billion Earthpeople, plus a large number of Settlers.”

“And there are five and a half billion Spacers.”

“Numbers are not the sole difference,” said Amadiro bitterly. “They breed like insects.”

“They do not. Earth’s population has been fairly stable for centuries.”

“The potential is there. If they put all their heart into emigration, they can easily produce one hundred and sixty million new bodies each year and that number will rise as the new worlds fill up.”

“We have the biological capability of producing one hundred million new bodies each year.”

“But not the sociological capability. We are long – lived; we do not wish ourselves replaced so quickly.”

“We can send a large portion of the new bodies to other worlds.”

“They won’t go. We value our bodies, which are strong, healthy, and capable of surviving in strength and health for nearly forty decades. Earthmen can place no value on bodies that wear out in less than ten decades and that are riddled with disease and degeneration even over that short period of time. It doesn’t matter to them if they send out millions a year to certain misery and probable death. In fact, even the victims needn’t fear misery and death, for what else do they have on Earth? The Earthpeople who emigrate are fleeing from their pestilential world knowing well that any change can scarcely be for the worse. We, on the other hand, value our well-wrought and comfortable planets and would not lightly give them up.”

Fastolfe sighed and said, “I’ve heard all these arguments so often – May I point out the simple fact, Amadiro, that Aurora was originally a rude and unformed world that had to be terraformed into acceptability and that so was every Spacer world?”

Amadiro said, “And I have heard all your arguments to the point of nausea, but I will not weary of answering them. Aurora may have been primitive when first settled, but Aurora was settled by Earthpeople – and other Spacer worlds, when not settled by Earthpeople, were settled by Spacers that had not yet outgrown their Earth heritage. The times are no longer suitable for that. What could be done then, cannot be done now.”

Amadiro lifted a corner of his mouth in a snarl and went on, “No, Fastolfe, what your policy has accomplished has been to begin the creation of a Galaxy that will be populated by Earthmen only, while Spacers must wither and decline. You can see it happening now. Your famous trip to Earth, two years ago, was the turning point. Somehow, you betrayed your own people by encouraging those half-humans to begin an expansion. In only two years there are at least some Earthpeople on each of twenty-four worlds and new ones are being added steadily.”

Fastolfe said, “Do not exaggerate. Not one of those Settler worlds is truly fit for human occupation yet and won’t be for some decades. Not all are likely to survive and, as the nearer worlds are occupied, the chances for settling farther worlds diminish so that the initial surge will slow down. I encouraged their expansion because I counted on ours as well. We can still keep up with them if we make the effort and, in healthy competition, we can fill the Galaxy together.”

“No,” said Amadiro. “What you have in mind is that most destructive of all policies, a foolish idealism. The expansion is one-sided and will remain so despite anything you can do. The people of Earth swarm unhindered and they will have to be stopped before they get too strong to stop.”

“How do you propose to do that? We have a treaty of friendship with Earth in which we specifically agree not to stop their expansion into space as long as no planet within twenty light-years of a Spacer world is touched. They have adhered to this scrupulously.”

Amadiro said, “Everyone knows about the treaty. Everyone also knows that no treaty has ever been kept once it begins to work against the national interests of the more powerful signatory. I attach no value to that treaty.”

“I do. It will be held to.”

Amadiro shook his head. “You have touching faith. How will it be held to after you are out of power?”

“I don’t intend to be out of power for a while.”

“As Earth and its Settlers grow stronger, the Spacers will grow fearful and you will not remain long in power after that.”

Fastolfe said, “And if you tear up the treaty and destroy the Settler worlds and slam the gates shut on Earth, will the Spacers then emigrate and fill the Galaxy?”

“Perhaps not. But if we decide not to, if we decide we are comfortable as we are, what difference will that make?”

“The Galaxy will not, in that case, become a human empire.”

“And if it does not, what then?”

“Then the Spacers will stultify and degenerate, even if Earth is kept in prison and also stultifies and degenerates.”

“That is just the claptrap your party puts out, Fastolfe. There is no actual evidence that such a thing would happen. And even if it does, that will be our choice. At least we will not see the barbarian short-lifers fall heir to the Galaxy.”

Fastolfe said, “Are you seriously suggesting, Amadiro, that you would be willing to see the Spacer civilization die, provided you can prevent Earth from expanding?”

“I’m not counting on our death, Fastolfe, but if the worst happens, why, yes, to me our own death is a less fearful thing than the triumph of a subhuman disease-riddled set of short-lived beings.”

“From whom we are descended.”

“And with whom we are no longer truly related genetically. Are we worms because a billion years ago, worms were among our ancestors?”

Fastolfe, lips pressed together, rose to go. Amadiro, glowering, made no move to stop him.

9.

Daneel had no way of telling, directly, that Giskard was lost in memory. For one thing, Giskard’s expression did not change and for another, he was not lost in memory as humans might be. It took no substantial period of time.

On the other hand, the line of thought that had caused Giskard to think of the past had caused Daneel to think of the same events of that past as they had long ago been recounted to him by Giskard. Nor was Giskard surprised at that.

Their conversation carried on with no unusual pause, but in a markedly new manner, as though each had thought of the past on behalf of both.

Daneel said, “It might seem, friend Giskard, that since the people of Aurora now recognize that they are weaker than Earth and its many Settler worlds, the crisis that Elijah Baley foresaw has been safely passed.”

“It might seem so, friend Daneel.”

“You labored to bring that about.”

“I did. I kept the Council in Fastolfe’s hand. I did what I could to mold those who, in turn, molded public opinion.”

“Yet I am uneasy.”

Giskard said, “I have been uneasy through every stage of the process, although I endeavored to do no harm to anyone. I have touched – mentally – not one human being who required anything more than the lightest touch. On Earth, I had merely to lighten the fear of reprisal and chose those, particularly, in which the fear was already light and broke a thread that was, in any case, frayed and on the point of breaking. On Aurora, it was reversed. The policymakers here were reluctant to espouse policies that would lead to an exit from their comfortable world and I merely confirmed that and made the sturdy cord that held them a bit stronger. And doing this has immersed me in a constant – if faint – turmoil.”

“Why? You encouraged the expansion of Earth and discouraged the expansion of the Spacers. Surely that is as it should be.”

“As it should be? Do you think, friend Daneel, that an Earthperson counts for more than a Spacer, even though both are human beings?”

“There are differences. Elijah Baley would rather see his own Earthpeople defeated than see the Galaxy uninhabited. Dr. Amadiro would rather see both Earth and Spacers dwindle than see Earth expand. The first looks with hope to the triumph of either, the second is content to see the triumph of neither. Should we not choose the first, friend Giskard?”

“Yes, friend Daneel. So it would seem. And yet how far are you influenced by your feeling of the special worth of your onetime partner, Elijah Baley?”

Daneel said, “I value the memory of Partner Elijah and the people of Earth are his people.”

“I see you do. I have been saying for many decades that you tend to think like a human being, friend Daneel, but I wonder if that is necessarily a compliment. Still, though you tend to think like a human being, you are not a human being and, in the end, you are bound to the Three Laws. You may not harm a human being, whether that human being is an Earthman or a Spacer.”

“There are times, friend Giskard, when one must choose one human being over another. We have been given special orders to protect Lady Gladia. I would be forced, on occasion, to harm a human being in order to protect Lady Gladia and I think that, all things being equal, I would be willing to harm a Spacer just a little in order to protect an Earthperson.”

“So you think. But in the actual event, you would have to be guided by specific circumstances. You will find you cannot generalize,” said Giskard. “And so it is with me. In encouraging Earth and discouraging Aurora, I have made it impossible for Dr. Fastolfe to persuade the Auroran government to sponsor a policy of emigration and to set up two expanding powers in the Galaxy. I could not help but realize that that portion of his labors was brought to nothing. This was bound to fill him with gathering despair and perhaps it hastened his death. I have felt this in his mind and that has been painful. And yet, friend Daneel –”

Giskard paused and Daneel said, “Yes?”

“To have not done as I had done might have greatly lowered Earth’s ability to expand, without greatly improving Aurora’s moves in that direction. Dr. Fastolfe would then have been frustrated in both ways – Earth and Aurora – and would moreover have been ousted from his seat of power by Dr. Amadiro. His sense of frustration would have been greater. It was Dr. Fastolfe, during his lifetime, to whom I owed my greatest loyalty and I chose that course of action which frustrated him less, without measurably harming other individuals I dealt with. If Dr. Fastolfe was continually disturbed by his inability to persuade Aurorans – and Spacers generally – to expand to new worlds, he was at least delighted by the activity of the emigrating Earthpeople.”

“Could you not have encouraged both the people of Earth and of Aurora, friend Giskard, and thus have satisfied Dr. Fastolfe in both respects?”

“That, of course, had occurred to me, friend Daneel. I considered the possibility and decided it would not do. I could encourage Earthpeople to emigrate by means of a trifling change that would do no harm. To have attempted the same for Aurorans would have required a great enough change to do much harm. The First Law prevented that.”

“A pity.”

“True. Think what might have been done if I could have radically altered the mind-set of Dr. Amadiro. Yet how could I have changed his fixed determination to oppose Dr. Fastolfe? It would have been much like trying to force his head to make a one hundred and eighty degree turn. So complete a turnabout of either the head itself or of its emotional content would kill with, I think, equal efficiency.

“The price of my power, friend Daneel,” Giskard went on, “is the greatly increased dilemma into which I am constantly plunged. The First Law of Robotics, which forbids injury to human beings, deals, ordinarily, with the visible physical injuries that we can, all of us, easily see and concerning which we can easily make judgments. I, alone, however, am aware of human emotions and of casts of mind, so that I know of more subtle forms of injury without being able to understand them completely. I am forced on many occasions to act without true certainty and this puts a continuing stress on my circuits.

“And yet I feel I have done well. I have carried the Spacers past the crisis point. Aurora is aware of the gathering strength of the Settlers and will now be forced to avoid conflict. They must recognize it to be too late for retaliation and our promise to Elijah Baley is, in that respect, fulfilled. We have put Earth on the course toward the filling of the Galaxy and the establishment of a Galactic Empire.”

They were, at this point, walking back to Gladia’s house, but now Daneel stopped and the gentle pressure of his hand on Giskard’s shoulder caused the other to stop as well.

Daneel said, “The picture you draw is attractive. It would make Partner Elijah proud of us if, as you say, we have accomplished that. ‘Robots and Empire’ Elijah would say and perhaps he would clap me on the shoulder. – And yet, as I said, I am uneasy, friend Giskard.”

“Concerning what, friend Daneel?”

“I cannot help but wonder if indeed we have actually passed the crisis that Partner Elijah spoke of so many decades ago. Is it, in actual fact, too late for Spacer retaliation?”

“Why do you have these doubts, friend Daneel?”

“I have been made doubtful by the behavior of Dr. Mandamus in due course of his conversation with Madam Gladia.”

Giskard’s gaze was fixed on Daneel for a few moments and in the quiet they could hear leaves rustling in the cool breeze. The clouds were breaking and the sun would make its appearance soon. Their conversation, in its telegraphic fashion, had taken little time and Gladia, they knew, would not yet be wondering at their absence.

Giskard said, “What was there in the conversation that would give you cause for uneasiness?”

Daneel said, “I have had the opportunity, on four separate occasions, to observe Elijah Baley’s handling of a puzzling problem. On each of those four occasions, I have noted the manner in which he managed to work out useful conclusions from limited – and even misleading – information. I have since always tried, within my limitations, to think as he did.”

“It seems to me, friend Daneel, you have done well in this respect. I have said you tend to think like a human being.”

“You will have noticed, then, that Dr. Mandamus had two matters he wished to discuss with Madam Gladia. He emphasized that fact himself. One was the matter of his own descent, whether from Elijah Baley or not. The second was the request that Madam Gladia see a Settler and report on the event afterward. Of these, the second might be viewed as a matter that would be important to the Council. The first would be a matter of importance only to himself.”

Giskard said, “Dr. Mandamus presented the matter of his descent as being of importance to Dr. Amadiro as well.”

“Then it would be a matter of personal importance to two people rather than one, friend Giskard. It would still not be a matter of importance to the Council and, therefore, to the planet generally.”

“Proceed, then, friend Daneel.”

“Yet the matter of state, as Dr. Mandamus himself referred to it, was taken up second, almost as an afterthought, and was disposed of almost at once. Indeed, it seemed scarcely something that required a personal visit. It might have been handled by holographic image by any official of the Council. On the other hand, Dr. Mandamus dealt with the matter of his own descent first, discussed it in great detail, and it was a matter that could have been handled only by him and by no one else.”

“What is your conclusion, friend Daneel?”

“I believe that the matter of the Settler was seized upon by Dr. Mandamus as an excuse for a personal conversation with Madam Gladia, in order that he might discuss his descent in privacy. It was the matter of his descent and nothing else that truly interested him. – Is there any way you can support that conclusion, friend Giskard?”

Aurora’s sun had not yet emerged from the clouds and the faint glow of Giskard’s eyes was visible. He said, “The tension in Dr. Mandamus’s mind was indeed measurably stronger in the first part of the interview than in the second. That may serve as corroboration, perhaps, friend Daneel.”

Daneel said, “Then we must ask ourselves why the question of Dr. Mandamus’s descent should be a matter of such importance to him.”

Giskard said, “Dr. Mandamus explained that. It is only by demonstrating that he is not descended from Elijah Baley that his road to advancement is open. Dr. Amadiro, upon whose goodwill he is dependent, would turn against him absolutely if he were a descendant of Mr. Baley.”

“So he said, friend Giskard, but what took place during the interview argues against that.”

“Why do you say so? Please continue thinking like a human being, friend Daneel. I find it instructive.”

Daneel said gravely, “Thank you, friend Giskard. Did you note that not one statement that Madam Gladia made concerning the impossibility of Dr. Mandamus’s descent from Partner Elijah was considered convincing? In every case, Dr. Mandamus said that Dr. Amadiro would not accept the statement.”

“Yes and what do you deduce from that?”

“It seems to me that Dr. Mandamus was so convinced that Dr. Amadiro would accept no argument against Elijah Baley an ancestor that one must wonder why he should have bothered to ask Madam Gladia about the matter. He apparently knew from the start that it would be pointless to do so.”

“Perhaps, friend Daneel, but it is mere speculation. Can you supply a possible motive for his action, then?”

“I can. I believe he inquired as to his descent, not to convince an implacable Dr. Amadiro but to convince himself.”

“In that case, why should he have mentioned Dr. Amadiro at all? Why not simply have said, ‘I wish to know.” ‘

A small smile passed over Daneel’s face, a change of expression of which the other robot would have been incapable. Daneel said, “Had he said, ‘I wish to know,’ to Madam Gladia, she would surely have replied that it was none of his business and he would have discovered nothing. Madam Gladia, however, is as strongly opposed to Dr. Amadiro as Dr. Amadiro is to Elijah Baley. Madam Gladia would be sure to take offense at any opinion strongly held by Dr. Amadiro concerning her. She would be furious, even if the opinion were more or less true; how much more, then, if it were absolutely false, as in this case. She would labor to demonstrate Dr. Amadiro to be wrong and would present every piece of evidence needed to achieve that end.

“In such a case, Dr. Mandamus’s cold assurance that each piece of evidence was insufficient would but make her the angrier and would drive her to further revelations. Dr. Mandamus’s strategy was chosen to make certain he would learn the maximum from Madam Gladia and, at the end, he was convinced that he did not have an Earthman as ancestor; at least, not as recently as twenty decades ago. Amadiro’s feelings in this regard were not, I think, truly in question. “

Giskard said, “Friend Daneel, this is an interesting point of view, but it does not seem to be strongly founded. In what way can we conclude that it is no more than a guess on your part?”

Daneel said, “Does it not seem to you, friend Giskard, that when Dr. Mandamus ended his inquiry into his descent without having obtained sufficient evidence for Dr. Amadiro, as he would have had us believe, that he should have been distinctly depressed and disheartened. By his own statement, this should have meant he had no chance for advancement and would never gain the position as head of the Institute of Robotics. And yet it seemed to me that he was far from depressed but was, indeed, jubilant. I can only judge by outward appearance, but you can do better. Tell me, friend Giskard, what was his mental attitude at the conclusion of this portion of his conversation with Madam Gladia?”

Giskard said, “As I look back on it, it was not only jubilant but triumphant, friend Daneel. You are right. Now that you have explained your process of thought, that sensation of triumph I detected clearly marks the accuracy of your reasoning. In fact, now that you have marked it all out, I find myself at a loss to account for my inability to see it for myself.”

“That, friend Giskard, was, on a number of occasions, my reaction to the reasoning of Elijah Baley. That I could carry through such reasoning on this occasion may be, in part, because of the strong stimulus of the existence of the present crisis. It forces me to think more cogently.”

“You underestimate yourself, friend Daneel. You have been thinking cogently for a long time. But why do you speak of a present crisis? Pause a moment and explain. How does one go from Dr. Mandamus’s feeling of triumph at not being descended from Mr. Baley to this crisis you speak of?”

Daneel said, “Dr. Mandamus may have deceived us in his statements concerning Dr. Amadiro, but it may be fair to suppose that it is nevertheless true that he longs for advancement; that he is ambitious to become head of the Institute. Is that not so, friend Giskard?”

Giskard paused a moment, as though in thought, then said, “I was not searching for ambition. I was studying his mind without particular purpose and was aware of only surface manifestations. Yet there might have been flashes of ambition there when he spoke of advancement. I do not have strong grounds for agreeing with you, friend Daneel, but I have no grounds at all for disagreeing with you.”

“Let us accept Dr. Mandamus as an ambitious man, then, and see where that takes us. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“Then does it not seem likely that his sense of triumph, once he was convinced that he was not descended from Partner Elijah, arose from the fact that he felt his ambition could now be served. This would not be so, however, because of Dr. Amadiro’s approval, since we have agreed that the Dr. Amadiro motif was introduced by Dr. Mandamus as a distraction. His ambition could now be served for some other reason.”

“What other reason?”

“There is none that arises out of compelling evidence. But I can suggest one as a matter of speculation. What if Dr. Mandamus knows something or can do something that would lead to some huge success; one that would surely make him the next head? Remember that at the conclusion of the search into the manner of his descent, Dr. Mandamus said, ‘There are powerful methods remaining to me.’ Suppose that is true, but that he could only use those methods if he were not descended from Partner Elijah. His jubilation over having been convinced of his nondescent would arise, then, from the fact that he could now use those methods and assure himself of great advancement.”

“But what are these ‘powerful methods,’ friend Daneel?”

Daneel said gravely, “We must continue to speculate. We know that Dr. Amadiro wants nothing so much as to defeat Earth and force it back to its earlier position of subservience to the Spacer worlds. If Dr. Mandamus has a way of doing this, he can surely get anything he wants out of Dr. Amadiro, up to and including a guarantee of succession to the headship. Yet it may be that Dr. Mandamus hesitates to bring about Earth’s defeat and humiliation unless he felt no kinship to its people. Descent from Elijah Baley of Earth would inhibit him. The denial of that descent frees him to act and that makes him jubilant.”

Giskard said, “You mean Dr. Mandamus is a man of conscience?”

“Conscience?”

“It is a word human beings sometimes use. I have gathered that it is applied to a person who adheres to rules of behavior that force him to act in ways that oppose his immediate self-interest. If Dr. Mandamus feels that he cannot allow himself to advance at the expense of those with whom he is distantly connected, I imagine him to be a man of conscience. I have thought much of such things, friend Daneel, since they seem to imply that human beings do have Laws governing their behavior, at least in some cases.”

“And can you tell whether Dr. Mandamus is, indeed, a man of conscience?”

“From my observations of his emotions? No, I was not watching for anything like that, but if your analysis is correct, conscience would seem to follow. – and yet, on the other hand, if we begin by supposing him a man of conscience and argue backward, we can come to other conclusions. It might seem that if Dr. Mandamus thought he had an Earthman in his ancestry a mere nineteen and a half decades ago, he might feel driven, against his conscience, to spearhead an attempt to defeat Earth as a way of freeing himself from the stigma of such descent. If he were not so descended, then he would not be unbearably driven to act against Earth and his conscience would be free to cause him to leave Earth alone.”

Daneel said, “No, friend Giskard. That would not fit the facts. However relieved he might be at not having to take violent action against Earth, he would be left without a way of satisfying Dr. Amadiro and enforcing his own advance. Considering his ambitious nature, he would not be left with the feeling of triumph you so clearly noted.”

“I see. Then we conclude that Dr. Mandamus has a method for defeating Earth.”

“Yes. And if that is so, then the crisis forseen by Partner Elijah has not been safely passed after all, but is now here.”

Giskard said thoughtfully, “But we are left with the key question unanswered, friend Daneel. What is the nature of the crisis? What is the deadly danger? Can you deduce that, too?”

“That I cannot do, friend Giskard. I have gone as far as I can. Perhaps Partner Elijah might have gone farther were he still alive, but I cannot. – Here I must depend upon you, friend Giskard.”

“Upon me? In what way?”

“You can study the mind of Dr. Mandamus as I cannot, as no one else can. You can discover the nature of the crisis.”

“I fear I cannot, friend Daneel. If I lived with a human being over an extended period, as once I lived with Dr. Fastolfe, as now I live with Madam Gladia, I could, little by little, unfold the layers of mind, one leaf after another, untie the intricate knot a bit at a time, and learn a great deal without harming him or her. To do the same to Dr. Mandamus after one brief meeting or after a hundred brief meetings would accomplish little. Emotions are readily apparent, thoughts are not. If, out of a sense of urgency, I attempted to make haste, forcing the process, I would surely injure him – and that I cannot do.”

“Yet the fate of billions of people on Earth and billions more in the rest of the Galaxy may depend on this.”

“May depend on this. That is conjecture. Injury to a human being is a fact. Consider that it may be only Dr. Mandamus who knows the nature of the crisis and carry it through to a conclusion. He could not use his knowledge or ability to force Dr. Amadiro to grant him the headship – if Dr. Amadiro could gain it from another source.”

“True,” said Daneel. “That may be well so.”

“In that case, friend Daneel, it is not necessary to know the nature of the crisis. If Dr. Mandamus could be restrained from telling Dr. Amadiro – or anyone else – whatever it is he knows, the crisis will not come to pass.”

“Someone else might discover what Dr. Mandamus now knows.”

“Certainly, but we don’t know when that will be. Very likely, we will have time to probe further and discover more – and become better prepared to playa useful role of our own.”

“Well, then.”

“If Dr. Mandamus is to be restrained, it can be done by damaging his mind to the point where it is no longer effective – or by destroying his life outright. I alone possess the ability to injure his mind appropriately, but I cannot do this. However, either one of us can physically bring his life to an end. I cannot do this, either. Can you do it, friend Daneel?”

There was a pause and Daneel finally whispered. “I cannot. You know that.”

Giskard said slowly, “Even though you know that the future of billions of people on Earth and elsewhere is at stake?”

“I cannot bring myself to injure Dr. Mandamus.”

“And I cannot. So we are left with the certainty of a deadly crisis coming, but a crisis whose nature we do not know, and cannot find out, and which we are therefore helpless to counter.”

They stared at each other in silence, with nothing showing in their faces, but with an air of despair settling somehow over them.

4. Another Descendant

10.

GLADIA HAD TRIED to relax after the harrowing session with Mandamus – and did so with an intensity that fought relaxation to the death. She had opacified all the windows in her bedroom, adjusted the environment to a gentle warm breeze with the faint sound of rustling leaves and the occasional soft warble of a distant bird. She had then shifted it to the sound of a far-off surf and had added a faint but unmistakable tang of the sea in the air.

It didn’t help. Her mind echoed helplessly with what had just been – and with what was soon to come. Why had she chattered so freely to Mandamus? What business was it of his – or of Amadiro’s, for that matter – whether she had visited Elijah in orbit or not and whether or not – or when – she had had a son by him or by any other man.

She had been cast into imbalance by Mandamus’s claim of descent, that’s what it was. In a society where no one cared about descent or relationship except for medico-genetic reasons, its sudden intrusion into a conversation was bound to be upsetting. That and the repeated (but surely accidental) references to Elijah.

She decided she was finding excuses for herself and, in impatience, she tossed it all away. She had reacted badly and had babbled like a baby and that was all there was to it.

Now there was this Settler coming.

He was not an Earthman. He had not been born on Earth, she was sure, and it was quite possible that he had never even visited Earth. His people might have lived on a strange world she had never heard of and might have done so for generations.

That would make him a Spacer, she thought. Spacers were descended from Earthmen, too – centuries further back, but what did that matter? To be sure, Spacers were long-lived and these Settlers must be short-lived, but how much of a distinction was that? Even a Spacer might die prematurely through some freak accident; she had once heard of a Spacer who had died a natural death before he was sixty. Why not, then, think of the next visitor as a Spacer with an unusual accent?

But it wasn’t that simple. No doubt the Settler did not feel himself to be a Spacer. It’s not what you are that counts, but what you feel yourself to be. So think of him as a Settler, not a Spacer.

Yet weren’t all human beings simply human beings no matter what name you applied to them – Spacers, Settlers, Aurorans, Earthpeople. The proof of it was that robots could not do injury to any of them. Daneel would spring as quickly to the defense of the most ignorant Earthman as to the Chairman of the Auroran Council – and that meant

She could feel herself drifting, actually relaxing into a shallow sleep when a sudden thought entered her mind and seemed to ricochet there.

Why was the Settler named Baley?

Her mind sharpened and snapped out of the welcoming coils of oblivion that had all but engulfed her.

Why Baley?

Perhaps it was simply a common name among the Settlers. After all, it was Elijah who had made it all possible and he had to be a hero to them as – as –

She could not think of an analogous hero to Aurorans. Who had led the expedition that first reached Aurora? Who had supervised the terraformation of the raw barely living world that Aurora had then been? She did not know.

Was her ignorance born of the fact that she had been brought up on Solaria – or was it that the Aurorans simply had no founding hero? After all, the first expedition to Aurora had consisted of mere Earthpeople. It was only in later generations, with lengthening life-spans, thanks to the adjustments of sophisticated bioengineering, that Earthpeople had become Aurorans. And after that, why should Aurorans wish to make heroes of their despised predecessors?

But Settlers might make heroes of Earthpeople. They had not yet changed, perhaps. They might change eventually and then Elijah would be forgotten in embarrassment, but till then

That must be it. Probably half the Settlers alive had adopted the Baley surname. Poor Elijah! Everyone crowding onto his shoulders and into his shadow. Poor Elijah – dear Elijah

And she did fall asleep.

11.

The sleep was too restless to restore her to calm, let alone good humor. She was scowling without knowing that she was – and had she seen herself in the mirror, she would have been taken aback by her middle-aged appearance.

Daneel, to whom Gladia was a human being, regardless of age, appearance, or mood, said, “Madam –”

Gladia interrupted, with a small shiver. “Is the Settler here?”

She looked up at the clock ribbon on the wall and then made a quick gesture, in response to which Daneel at once adjusted the heat upward. (It had been a cool day and was going to be a cooler evening.)

Daneel said, “He is, madam.”

“Where have you put him?”

“In the main guest room, madam. Giskard is with him and the household robots are all within call.”

“I hope they will have the judgment to find out what he expects to eat for lunch. I don’t know Settler cuisine. And I hope they can make some reasonable attempt to meet his requests.”

“I am sure, madam, that Giskard will handle the matter competently.”

Gladia was sure of that, too, but she merely snorted. At least it would have been a snort if Gladia were the sort of person who snorted. She didn’t think she was.

“I presume,” she said, “he’s been in appropriate quarantine before being allowed to land.”

“It would be inconceivable for him not to have been, madam.”

She said, “Just the same, I’ll wear my gloves and my nose filter.”

She stepped out of her bedroom, was distantly aware that there were household robots about her, and made the sign that would get her a new pair of gloves and a fresh nose filter. Every establishment had its own vocabulary of signs and every human member of an establishment cultivated those signs, learning to make them both rapidly and unnoticeably. A robot was expected to follow these unobtrusive orders of its human overlords as though it read minds; and it followed that a robot could not follow the orders of nonestablishment human beings except by careful speech.

Nothing would humiliate a human member of an establishment more than to have one of the robots of the establishment hesitate in fulfilling an order or, worse, fulfill it incorrectly. That would mean that the human being had fumbled a sign – or that the robot had.

Generally, Gladia knew, it was the human being who was at fault, but in virtually every case, this was not admitted. It was the robot who was handed over for an unnecessary response analysis or unfairly put up for sale. Gladia had always felt that she would never fall into that trap of wounded ego, yet if at that moment she had not received her gloves and nose filter, she would have

She did not have to finish the thought. The nearest robot brought her what she wanted, correctly and with speed.

Gladia adjusted the nose filter and snuffled a bit to make sure it was properly seated (she was in no mood to risk infection with any foul disorder that had survived the painstaking treatment during quarantine). She said, “What does he look like, Daneel?”

Daneel said, “He is of ordinary stature and measurements, madam.”

“I mean his face. “(It was silly to ask. If he showed any family resemblance to Elijah Baley, Daneel would have noticed it as quickly as she herself would have and he would have remarked upon it.)

“That is difficult to say, madam. It is not in plain view.”

“What does that mean? Surely he’s not masked, Daneel.”

“In a way, he is, madam. His face is covered with hair.”

“Hair?” She found herself laughing. “You mean after the fashion of the hypervision historicals? Beards?” She made little gestures indicating a tuft of hair on the chin and another under the nose.

“Rather more than that, madam. Half his face is covered.”

Gladia’s eyes opened wide and for the first time she felt a surge of interest in seeing him. What would a face with hair allover it look like? Auroran males – and Spacer males, generally – had very little facial hair and what there was would be removed permanently by the late teens – during virtual infancy.

Sometimes the upper lip was left untouched. Gladia remembered that her husband, Santirix Gremionis, before their marriage, had had a thin line of hair under his nose. A mustache, he had called it. It had looked like a misplaced and peculiarly misshapen eyebrow and once she had resigned herself to accepting him as a husband, she had insisted he destroy the follicles.

He had done so with scarcely a murmur and it occurred to her now, for the first time, to wonder if he had missed the hair. It seemed to her that she had noticed him, on occasion, in those early years, lifting a finger to his upper lip. She had thought it a nervous poking at a vague itch and it was only now that it occurred to her that he had been searching for a mustache that was gone forever.

How would a man look with a mustache allover his face? Would he be bearlike?

How would it feel? What if women had such hair, too? She thought of a man and woman trying to kiss and having trouble finding each other’s mouths. She found the thought funny, in a harmlessly ribald way, and laughed out loud. She felt her petulance disappearing and actually looked forward to seeing the monster.

After all, there would be no need to fear him even if he were as animal in behavior as he was in appearance. He would have no robot of his own – Settlers were supposed to have a nonrobotic society – and she would be surrounded by a dozen. The monster would be immobilized in a split second if he made the slightest suspicious move – or if he as much as raised his voice in anger.

She said with perfect good humor, “Take me to him, Daneel.”

12.

The monster rose. He said something that sounded like “Gode arternoon, muhleddy.”

She at once caught the “good afternoon,” but it took her a moment to translate the last word into “my lady.”

Gladia absently said, “Good afternoon. “She remembered the difficulty she had had understanding Auroran pronunciation of Galactic Standard in those long-ago days when, a frightened young woman, she had come to the planet from Solaria.

The monster’s accent was uncouth – or did it just sound uncouth because her ear was unaccustomed to it? Elijah, she remembered, had seemed to voice his “k’s” and “p’s,” but spoke pretty well otherwise. Nineteen and a half decades had passed, however, and this Settler was not from Earth. Language, in isolation, underwent changes.

But only a small portion of Gladia’s mind was on the language problem. She was staring at his beard.

It was not in the least like the beards that actors wore in historical dramas. Those always seemed tufted – a bit here, a bit there – looking gluey and glossy.

The Settler’s beard was different. It covered his cheeks and chin evenly, thickly, and deeply. It was a dark brown, somewhat lighter and wavier than the hair on his head, and at least two inches long, she judged – evenly long.

It didn’t cover his whole face, which was rather disappointing. His forehead was totally bare (except for his eyebrows), as were his nose and his under-eye regions.

His upper lip was bare, too, but it was shadowed as though there was the beginning of new growth upon it. There was additional bareness just under the lower lip, but with new growth less marked and concentrated mostly under the middle portion.

Since both his lips were quite bare, it was clear to Gladia that there would be no difficulty in kissing him. She said, knowing that staring was impolite and staring even so, “It seems to me you remove the hair from about your lips.”

“Yes, my lady.”

“Why, if I may ask?”

“You may ask. For hygienic reasons. I don’t want food catching in the hairs.”

“You scrape it off, don’t you? I see it’s growing again.”

“I use a facial laser. It takes fifteen seconds after waking.”

“Why not depilate and be done with it?”

“I might want to grow it back.”

“Why?”

“Esthetic reasons, my lady?”

This time Gladia did not grasp the word. It sounded like “acidic” or possibly “acetic.”

She said, “Pardon me?”

The Settler said, “I might grow tired of the way I look now and want to grow the hair on the upper lip again. Some women like it, you know, and” – the Settler tried to look modest and failed –” I have a fine mustache when I grow it.”

She said suddenly grasping the word, “You mean ‘esthetic.” ‘

The Settler laughed, showing fine white teeth, and said, “You talk funny, too, my lady.”

Gladia tried to look haughty, but melted into a smile. Proper pronunciation was a matter of local consensus. She said, “You ought to hear me with my Solarian accent – if it comes to that. Then it would be ‘estheetic rayzuns.” ‘The “r” rolled interminably.

“I’ve been places where they talk a little bit like that. It sounds barbarous.” He rolled both “r’s” phenomenally in the last word.

Gladia chuckled. “You do it with the tip of your tongue. It’s got to be with the sides of the tongue. No one but a Solarian can do it correctly.”

“Perhaps you can teach me. A Trader like myself, who’s been everywhere, hears all kinds of linguistic perversions.” Again he tried to roll the “r’s” of the last word, choked slightly, and coughed.

“See. You’ll tangle your tonsils and you’ll never recover.” She was still staring at his beard and now she could curb her curiosity no longer. She reached toward it.

The Settler flinched and started back, then, realizing her intention, was still.

Gladia’s hand, all-but-invisibly gloved, rested lightly on the left side of his face. The thin plastic that covered her fingers did not interfere with the sense of touch and she found the hair to be soft and springy.

“It’s nice,” she said with evident surprise.

“Widely admired,” said the Settler, grinning.

She said, “But I can’t stand here and manhandle you all day.”

Ignoring his predictable “You can as far as I’m concerned,” she went on. “Have you told my robots what you would like to eat?”

“My lady, I told them what I now tell you – whatever is handy. I’ve been on a score of worlds in the last year and each has its own dietary. A Trader learns to eat everything that isn’t actually toxic. I’d prefer an Auroran meal to anything you would try to make in imitation of Baleyworld.”

“Baleyworld?” said Gladia sharply, a frown returning to her face.

“Named for the leader of the first expedition to the planet – or to any of the Settled planets, for that matter. Ben Baley.”

“The son of Elijah Baley?”

“Yes,” the Settler said and changed the subject at once. He looked down at himself and said with a trace of petulance, “How do you people manage to stand these clothes of yours – slick and puffy. Be glad to get into my own again.”

“I’m sure you will have your chance to do so soon enough. But for now please come and join me at lunch.-I was told your name was Baley, by the way – like your planet.”

“Not surprising. It’s the most honored name on the planet, naturally. I’m Deejee Baley.”

They had walked into the dining room, Giskard preceding them, Daneel following them, each moving into his appropriate wall niche. Other robots were already in their niches and two emerged to do the serving. The room was bright with sunshine, the walls were alive with decoration, the table was set, and the odor of the food was enticing.

The Settler sniffed and let his breath out in satisfaction. “I don’t think I’ll have any trouble at all eating Auroran food. – Where would you like me to sit, my lady?”

A robot said at once, “If you would sit here, sir?”

The Settler sat down and then Gladia, the privileges of the guest satisfied, took her own seat.

“Deejee?” she said. “I do not know the nomenclatural peculiarities of your world, so excuse me if my question is offensive. Wouldn’t Deejee be a feminine name?”

“Not at all,” said the Settler a bit stiffly. “In any case, it is not a name, it is a pair of initials. Fourth letter of the alphabet and the seventh.”

“Oh,” said Gladia, enlightened, “D.G. Baley. And what do the initials stand for, if you’ll excuse my curiosity?”

“Certainly. There’s ‘D,’ for certain,” he said, jerking his thumb toward one of the wall niches, “and I suspect that one may be ‘G.” ‘He jerked his thumb toward another.

“You don’t mean that,” said Gladia faintly.

“But I do. My name is Daneel Giskard Baley. In every generation, my family has had at least one Daneel or one Giskard in its multiplying batches. I was the last of six children, but the first boy. My mother felt that was enough and made up for having but one son by giving me both names. That made me Daneel Giskard Baley and the double load was too great for me. I prefer D.G. as my name and I’d be honored if you used it.” He smiled genially. “I’m the first to bear both names and I’m also the first to see the grand originals.”

“But why those names?”

“It was Ancestor Elijah’s idea, according to the family story. He had the honor of naming his grandsons and he named the oldest Daneel, while the second was named Giskard. He insisted on those names and that established the tradition.”

“And the daughters?”

“The traditional name from generation to generation is Jezebel – Jessie. Elijah’s wife, you know.”

“I know.”

“There are no –” He caught himself and transferred his attention to the dish that had been placed before him. “If this were Baleyworld, I would say this was a slice of roast pork and that it was smothered in peanut sauce.”

“Actually, it is a vegetable dish, D.G. What you were about to say was that there are no Gladias in the family.”

“There aren’t,” said D.G. calmly. “One explanation is that Jessie – the original Jessie – would have objected, but I don’t accept that. Elijah’s wife, the Ancestress, never came to Baleyworld, you know, never left Earth. How could she have objected? No, to me, it’s pretty certain that the Ancestor wanted no other Gladia. No imitations, no copies, no pretense. One Gladia. Unique. – He asked that there be no later Elijah, either.”

Gladia was having trouble eating. “I think your Ancestor spent the latter portion of his life trying to be as unemotional as Daneel. Just the same, he had romantic notions under his skin. He might have allowed other Elijahs and Gladias. It wouldn’t have offended me, certainly, and I imagine it wouldn’t have offended his wife, either.” She laughed tremulously.

D.G. said, “All this doesn’t seem real somehow. The Ancestor is practically ancient history; he died a hundred and sixty-four years ago. I’m his descendant in the seventh generation, yet here I am sitting with a woman who knew him when he was quite young.”

“I didn’t really know him,” said Gladia, staring at her plate. “I saw him, rather briefly, on three separate occasions over a period of seven years.”

“I know. The Ancestor’s son, Ben, wrote a biography of him which is one of the literary classics of Baleyworld. Even I have read it.”

“Indeed? I haven’t read it. I didn’t even know it existed. What – what does it say about me?”

D.G. seemed amused. “Nothing you would object to; you come out very well. But never mind that. What I’m amazed at is that here we are together, across seven generations. How old are you, my lady? Is it fair to ask the question?”

“I don’t know that it’s fair, but I have no objection to it. In Galactic Standard Years, I am two hundred and thirty-three years old. Over twenty-three decades.”

“You look as though you were no more than in your late forties. The Ancestor died at the age of seventy-nine, an old man. I’m thirty-nine and when I die you will still be alive –”

“If I avoid death by misadventure.”

“And will continue to live perhaps five decades beyond.”

“Do you envy me, D.G.?” said Gladia with an edge of bitterness in her voice. “Do you envy me for having survived Elijah by over sixteen decades and for being condemned to survive him ten decades more, perhaps?”

“Of course I envy you,” came the composed answer. “Why not? I would have no objection to living for several centuries, were it not that I would be setting a bad example to the people of Baleyworld. I wouldn’t want them to live that long as a general thing. The pace of historical and intellectual advance would then become too slow. Those at the top would stay in power too long. Baleyworld would sink into conversation and decay – as your world has done.”

Gladia’s small chin lifted. “Aurora is doing quite well, you’ll find.”

“I’m speaking of your world. Solaria.”

Gladia hesitated, then said firmly, “Solaria is not my world.”

D.G. said, “I hope it is. I came to see you because I believe Solaria is your world.”

“If that is why you came to seem me, you are wasting your time, young man.”

“You were born on Solaria, weren’t you, and lived there a while?”

“I lived there for the first three decades of my life – about an eighth of my lifetime.”

“Then that makes you enough of a Solarian to be able to help me in a matter that is rather important.”

“I am not a Solarian, despite this so-called important matter.”

“It is a matter of war and peace – if you call that important. The Spacer worlds face war with the Settler worlds and things will go badly for all of us if it comes to that. And it is up to you, my lady, to prevent that war and to ensure peace.”

13.

The meal was done (it had been a small one) and Gladia found herself looking at D.G. in a coldly furious way.

She had lived quietly for the last twenty decades, peeling off the complexities of life. Slowly she had forgotten the misery of Solaria and the difficulties of adjustment to Aurora. She had managed to bury quite deeply the agony of two murders and the ecstasy of two strange loves – with a robot and with an Earthman – and to get well past it all. She had ended by spinning out a long quiet marriage, having two children, and working at her applied art of costumery. And eventually the children had left, then her husband, and soon she might be retiring even from her work.

Then she would be alone with her robots, content with – or, rather, resigned to – letting life glide quietly and uneventfully to a slow close in its own time – a close so gentle she might not be aware of the ending when it came.

It was what she wanted.

Then – What was happening?

It had begun the night before when she looked up vainly at the star-lit sky to see Solaria’s star, which was not in the sky and would not have been visible to her if it were. It was as though this one foolish reaching for the past – a past that should have been allowed to remain dead – had burst the cool bubble she had built about herself.

First the name of Elijah Baley, the most joyously painful memory of all the ones she had so carefully brushed away, had come up again and again in a grim repetition.

She was then forced to deal with a man who thought – mistakenly – he might be a descendant of Elijah in the fifth degree and now with another man who actually was a descendant in the seventh degree. Finally, she was now being given problems and responsibilities similar to those that had plagued Elijah himself on various occasions.

Was she becoming Elijah, in a fashion, with none of his talent and none of his fierce dedication to duty at all costs?

What had she done to deserve it?

She felt her rage being buried under a flood tide of self-pity. She felt unjustly dealt with. No one had the right to unload responsibility on her against her will.

She said, forcing her voice level, “Why do you insist on my being a Solarian, when I tell you that I am not a Solarian?”

D.G. did not seem disturbed by the chill that had now entered her voice. He was still holding the soft napkin that had been given him at the conclusion of the meal. It had been damply hot – not too hot – and he had imitated the actions of Gladia in carefully wiping his hands and mouth. He had then doubled it over and stroked his beard with it. It was shredding now and shriveling.

He said, “I presume it will vanish altogether.”

“It will.” Gladia had deposited her own napkin in the appropriate receptacle on the table. Holding it was unmannerly and could be excused only by D.G.’s evident unfamiliarity with civilized custom. “There are some who think it has a polluting effect on the atmosphere, but there is a gentle draft that carries the residue upward and traps it in filters. I doubt that it will give us any trouble. – but you ignore my question, sir.”

D.G. wadded what was left of his napkin and placed it on the arm of the chair. A robot, in response to Gladia’s quick and unobtrusive gesture, removed it.

D.G. said, “I don’t intend to ignore your question, my lady. I am not trying to force you to be a Solarian. I merely point out that you were born on Solaria and spent your early decades there and therefore you might reasonably be considered a Solarian, after a fashion at least. – Do you know that Solaria has been abandoned?”

“So I have heard. Yes.”

“Do you feel anything about that?”

“I am an Auroran and have been one for twenty decades.”

“That is a non sequitur.”

“A what?” She could make nothing of the last sound at all.

“It has not connection with my question.”

“A non sequitur, you mean. You said a ‘nonsense quitter. ‘”

D.G. smiled. “Very well. Let’s quit the nonsense. I ask you if you feel anything about the death of Solaria and you tell me you’re an Auroran. Do you maintain that is an answer? A born Auroran might feel badly at the death of a sister world. How do you feel about it?”

Gladia said icily, “It doesn’t matter. Why are you interested?”

“I’ll explain. We – I mean the Traders of the Settler worlds – are interested because there is business to be done, profits to be made, and a world to be gained. Solaria is already terraformed; it is a comfortable world; you Spacers seem to have no need or desire for it. Why would we not settle it?”

“Because it’s not yours.”

“Madam, is it yours that you object? Has Aurora any more claim to it than Baleyworld has? Can’t we suppose that an empty world belongs to whoever is pleased to settle it?”

“Have you settled it?”

“No – because it’s not empty.”

“Do you mean the Solarians have not entirely left?” Gladia said quickly.

D.G.’s smile returned and broadened into a grin. “You’re excited at the thought. – Even though you ‘re an Auroran.”

Gladia’s face twisted into a frown at once. “Answer my question.”

D.G. shrugged. “There were only some five thousand Solarians on the world just before it was abandoned, according to our best estimates. The population had been declining for years. But even five thousand – Can we be sure that all are gone? However, that’s not the point. Even if the Solarians were indeed all gone, the planet would not be empty. There are, upon it, some two hundred million or more robots – masterless robots – some of them among the most advanced in the Galaxy. Presumably, those Solarians who left took some robots with them – it’s hard to imagine Spacers doing without robots altogether.” (He looked about, smiling, at the robots in their niches within the room.) “However, they can’t possibly have taken forty thousand robots apiece.”

Gladia said, “Well, then, since your Settler worlds are so purely robot-free and wish to stay so, I presume, you can’t settle Solaria.”

“That’s right. Not until the robots are gone and that is where Traders such as myself come in.”

“In what way?”

“We don’t want a robot society, but we don’t mind touching robots and dealing with them in the way of business. We don’t have a superstitious fear of the things. We just know that a robot society is bound to decay. The Spacers have carefully made that plain to us by example. So that while we don’t want to live with this robotic poison, we are perfectly willing to sell it to Spacers for a substantial sum – if they are so foolish as to want such a society.”

“Do you think Spacers will buy them?”

“I’m sure they will. They will welcome the elegant modes that the Solarians manufacture. It’s well known that they were the leading robot designers in the Galaxy, even though the late Dr. Fastolfe is said to have been unparalleled in the field, despite the fact that he was an Auroran. – Besides, even though we would charge a substantial sum, that sum would still be considerably less than the robots are worth. Spacers and Traders would both profit – the secret of successful trade.”

“The Spacers wouldn’t buy robots from Settlers,” said Gladia with evident contempt.

D.G. had a Trader’s way of ignoring such nonessentials as anger or contempt. It was business that counted. He said, “Of course they would. Offer them advanced robots at half price and why should they turn them down? Where business is to be done, you would be surprised how unimportant questions of ideology become.”

“I think you’ll be the one to be surprised. Try to sell your robots and you’ll see.”

“Would that I could, my lady. Try to sell them, that is. I have none on hand.”

“Why not?”

“Because none have been collected. Two separate trading vessels have landed on Solaria, each capable of storing some twenty-five robots. Had they succeeded, whole fleets of trading vessels would have followed them and I dare say we would have continued to do business for decades – and then have settled the world.”

“But they didn’t succeed. Why not?”

“Because both ships were destroyed on the surface of the planet and, as far as we can tell, all the crewmen are dead.”

“Equipment failure?”

“Nonsense. Both landed safely; they were not wrecked. Their last reports were that Spacers were approaching whether Solarians or natives of other Spacer worlds, we don’t know. We can only assume that the Spacers attacked without warning.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Is it?”

“Of course it’s impossible. What would be the motive?”

“To keep us off the world, I would say.”

“If they wished to do that,” said Gladia, “they would merely have had to announce that the world was occupied.”

“They might find it more pleasant to kill a few Settlers. At least, that’s what many of our people think and there is pressure to settle the matter by sending a few warships to Solaria and establishing a military base on the planet.”

“That would be dangerous.”

“Certainly. It could lead to war. Some of our fire-eaters look forward to that. Perhaps some Spacers look forward to that, too, and have destroyed the two ships merely to provoke hostilities.”

Gladia sat there amazed. There had been no hint of strained relations between Spacers and Settlers on any of the news programs.

She said, “Surely it’s possible to discuss the matter. Have your people approached the Spacer Federation?”

“A thoroughly unimportant body, but we have. We’ve also approached the Auroran Council.”

“And?”

“The Spacers deny everything. They suggest that the potential profits in the Solarian robot trade are so high that Traders, who are interested only in money – as though they themselves are not – would fight each other over the matter. Apparently, they would have us believe the two ships destroyed each other, each hoping to monopolize the trade for their own world.”

“The two ships were from two different worlds, then?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you think, then, that there might indeed have been a fight between them?”

“I don’t think it’s likely, but I will admit it’s possible. There have been no outright conflicts between the Settler worlds, but there have been some pretty strenuous disputes. All have been settled through arbitration by Earth. Still, it is indeed a fact that the Settler worlds might, in a pinch, not hang together when multibillion-dollar trade is at stake. That’s why war is not such a good idea for us and why something will have to be done to discourage the hotheads. That’s where we come in.”

“We?”

“You and I. I have been asked to go to Solaria and find out – if I can – what really happened. I will take one ship – armed, but not heavily armed.”

“You might be destroyed, too.”

“Possibly. But my ship, at least, won’t be caught unprepared. Besides, I am not one of those hypervision heroes and I have considered what I might do to lessen the chances of destruction. It occurred to me that one of the disadvantages of Settler penetration of Solaria is that we don’t know the world at all. It might be useful, then, to take someone who knows the world – a Solarian, in short.”

“You mean you want to take me?”

“Right, my lady.”

“Why me?”

“I should think you could see that without explanation, my lady. Those Solarians who have left the planet are gone we know not where. If any Solarians are left on the planet, they are very likely the enemy. There are no known Solarian-born Spacers living on some Spacer planet other than Solaria – except yourself. You are only Solarian available to me – the only one in all the Galaxy. That’s why I must have you and that’s why you must come.”

“You’re wrong, Settler. If I am the only one available to you, then you have no one who is available. I do not intend to come with you and there is no way – absolutely no way that you can force me to come with you. I am surrounded by my robots. Take one step in my direction and you will be immobilized at once – and if you struggle you will be hurt.”

“I intend no force. You must come of your own accordand you should be willing to. It’s a matter of preventing war.”

“That is the job of governments on your side and mine. I refuse to have anything to do with it. I am a private citizen.”

“You owe it to your world. We might suffer in case of war, but so will Aurora.”

“I am not one of those hypervision heroes, any more than you are.”

“You owe it to me, then.”

“You’re mad. I owe you nothing.”

D.G. smiled narrowly. “You owe me nothing as an individual. You owe me a great deal as a descendant of Elijah Baley.”

Gladia froze and remained staring at the bearded monster for a long moment. How did she come to forget who he was?

With difficulty, she finally muttered, “No.”

“Yes,” said D.G. forcefully. “On two different occasions, the Ancestor did more for you than you can ever repay. He is no longer here to call in the debt – a small part of the debt. I inherit the right to do so.”

Gladia said in despair, “But what can I do for you if I come with you?”

“We’ll find out. Will you come?” Desperately, Gladia wanted to refuse, but was it for this that Elijah had suddenly become part of her life, once more, in the last twenty-four hours? Was is so that when this impossible demand was made upon her, it would be in his name and she would find it impossible to refuse?

She said, “What’s the use? The Council will not let me go with you. They will not have an Auroran taken away on a Settler’s vessel.”

“My lady, you have been here on Aurora for twenty decades, so you think the Auroran-born consider you an Auroran. It’s not so. To them, you are a Solarian still. They’ll let you go.”

“They won’t,” said Gladia, her heart pounding and the skin of her upper arms turning to gooseflesh. He was right. She thought of Amadiro, who would surely think of her as nothing but a Solarian. Nevertheless, she repeated, “They won’t,” trying to reassure herself.

“They will,” retorted D.G. “Didn’t someone from your Council come to you to ask you to see me?”

She said defiantly, “He asked me only to report this conversation we have had. And I will do so.”

“If they want you to spy on me here in your own home, my lady, they will find it even more useful to have you spy on me on Solaria.” He waited for a response and when there was none, he said with a trace of weariness, “My lady, if you refuse, I won’t force you because I won’t have to. They will force you. But I don’t want that. The Ancestor would not want it if he were here. He would want you to come with me out of gratitude to him and for no other reason. My lady, the Ancestor labored on your behalf under conditions of extreme difficulty. Won’t you labor on behalf of his memory?”

Gladia’s heart sank. She knew she could not resist that. She said, “I can’t go anywhere without robots.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to.” D.G. was grinning again. “Why not take my two namesakes? Do you need more?”

Gladia looked toward Daneel. but he was standing motionless. She looked toward Giskard – the same. And then it seemed to her that, for just a moment, his head moved – very slightly – up and down.

She had to trust him. She said, “Well, then, I’ll come with you. These two robots are all I will need.”

Part II-Solaria

5. The Abandoned World

14.

FOR THE FIFTH time in her life, Gladia found herself on a spaceship. She did not remember, offhand, exactly how long ago it had been that she and Santirix had gone together to the world of Euterpe because its rain forests were widely recognized as incomparable, especially under the romantic glow of its bright satellite, Gemstone.

The rain forest had, indeed, been lush and. green, with the trees carefully planted in rank and file and the animal life thoughtfully selected so as to provide color and delight, while avoiding venomous or other unpleasant creatures.

The satellite, fully 150 kilometers in diameter, was close enough to Euterpe to shine like a brilliant dot of sparkling light. It was so close to the planet that one could see it sweep west to east across the sky, outstripping the planet’s slower rotational motion. It brightened as it rose toward zenith and dimmed as it dropped toward the horizon again. One watched it with fascination the first night, with less the second, and with a vague discontent the third – assuming the sky was clear on those nights, which it usually wasn’t.

The native Euterpans, she noted, never looked at it, though they praised it loudly to the tourists, of course.

On the whole, Gladia had enjoyed the hip well enough, but what she remembered most keenly was the joy of her return to Aurora and her decision not to travel again except under dire need. (Come to think of it, it had to be at least eight decades ago.)

For a while, she had lived with the uneasy fear that her husband would insist on another hip, but he never mentioned one. It might well be, she sometimes thought at that time, that he had come to the same decision she had and feared she might be the one to want to travel.

It didn’t make them unusual to avoid hips. Aurorans generally – Spacers generally, for that matter – tended to be stay-at-homes. Their worlds, their establishments, were too comfortable. After all, what pleasure could be greater than that of being taken care of by your own robots, robots who knew your every signal, and, for that matter. knew your ways and desires even without being told.

She stirred uneasily. Was that what D.G. had meant when he spoke of the decadence of a roboticized society?

But now she was back again in space, after all that time. And on an Earth ship, too.

She hadn’t seen much of it, but the little she had glimpsed made her terribly uneasy. It seemed to be nothing but straight lines, sharp angles, and smooth surfaces. Everything that wasn’t stark had been eliminated, apparently. It was as though nothing must exist but functionality. Even though she didn’t know what was exactly functional about any particular object on the ship, she felt it to be all that was required, that nothing was to be allowed to interfere with taking the shortest distance between two points.

On everything Auroran (on everything Spacer, one might almost say, though Aurora was the most advanced in that respect), everything existed in layers. Functionality was at the bottom – one could not entirely rid one’s self of that, except in what was pure ornament – but overlying that there was always something to satisfy the eyes and the senses, generally; and overlying that, something to satisfy the spirit.

How much better that was! – or did it represent such an exuberance of human creativity that Spacers could no longer live with the unadorned Universe – and was that bad? Was the future to belong to these from-here-to-there geometrizers? Or was it just that the Settlers had not yet learned the sweetnesses of life?

But then, if life had so many sweetnesses to it, why had she found so few for herself?

She had nothing really to do on board this ship but to ponder and reponder such questions. This D.G., this Elijah descended barbarian, had put it into her head with his calm assumption that the Spacer worlds were dying, even though he could see~II about him even during the shortest stay on Aurora (surely, he would have to) that it was deeply embedded in wealth and security.

She had tried to escape her own thoughts by staring at the holofilms she had been supplied with and watching, with moderate curiosity, the images flickering and capering on the projection surface, as the adventure story (all were adventure stories) hastened from event to event with little time left for conversation and none for thought – or enjoyment, either. Very like their furniture.

D.G. stepped in when she was in the middle of one of the films, but had stopped really paying attention. She was not caught by surprise. Her robots, who guarded her doorway, signaled his coming in ample time and would not have allowed him to enter if she were not in a position to receive him. Daneel entered with him.

D.G. said, “How are you doing?” Then, as her hand touched a contact and the images faded, shriveled, and were gone, he said, “You don’t have to turn it off. I’ll watch it with you.”

“That’s not necessary,” she said. “I’ve had enough.”

“Are you comfortable?”

“Not entirely. I am – isolated.”

“Sorry! But then, I was isolated on Aurora. They would allow none of my men to come with me.”

“Are you having your revenge?” “Not at all. For one thing, I allowed you two robots of your choice to accompany you. For another, it is not I but my crew who enforce this. They don’t like either Spacers or robots. – but why do you mind? Doesn’t this isolation lessen your fear of infection?”

Gladia’s eyes were haughty, but her voice sounded weary. “I wonder if I haven’t grown too old to fear infection. In many ways, I think I have lived long enough. Then, too, I have my gloves, my nose filters, and – if necessary – my mask. And besides, I doubt that you will trouble to touch me.”

“Nor will anyone else,” said D.G. with a sudden edge of grimness to his voice, as his hand wandered to the object at the right side of his hip.

Her eyes followed the motion. “What is that?” she asked. D.G. smiled and his beard seemed to glitter in the light.

There were occasional reddish hairs among the brown. “A weapon,” he said and drew it. He held it by a molded hilt that bulged above his hand as though the force of his grip were squeezing it upward. In front, facing Gladia, a thin cylinder stretched some fifteen centimeters forward. There was no opening visible.

“Does that kill people?” Gladia extended her hand toward it.

D.G. moved it quickly away. “Never reach for someone’s weapon, my lady. That is worse than bad manners, for any Settler is trained to react violently to such a move and you may be hurt.”

Gladia, eyes wide, withdrew her hand and placed both behind her back. She said, “Don’t threaten harm. Daneel has no sense of humor in that respect. On Aurora, no one is barbarous enough to carry weapons.”

“Well,” said D.G., unmoved by the adjective, “we don’t have robots to protect us. – And this is not a killing device. It is, in some ways, worse. It emits a kind of vibration that stimulates those nerve endings responsible for the sensation of pain. It hurts a good deal worse than anything you can imagine. No one would willingly endure it twice and someone carrying this weapon rarely has to use it. We call it a neuronic whip.”

Gladia frowned. “Disgusting! We have our robots, but they never hurt anyone except in unavoidable emergency – and then minimally.”

D.G. shrugged. “That sounds very civilized, but a bit of pain – a bit of killing, even – is better than the decay of spirit brought about by robots. Besides, a neuronic whip is not intended to kill and your people have weapons on their spaceships that can bring about wholesale death and destruction.”

“That’s because we’ve fought wars early in our history, when our Earth heritage was still strong, but we’ve learned better.”

“You used those weapons on Earth even after you supposedly learned better.”

“That’s –” she began and closed her mouth as though to bite off what she was about to say next.

D.G. nodded. “I know. You were about to say. ‘That’s different. ‘Think of that, my lady, if you should catch yourself wondering why my crew doesn’t like Spacers. Or why I don’t. – But you are going to be useful to me, my lady, and I won’t let my emotions get in the way.”

“How am I going to be useful to you?”

“You are a Solarian.”

“You keep saying that. More than twenty decades have passed. I don’t know what Solaria is like now. I know nothing about it. What was Baleyworld like twenty decades ago?”

“It didn’t exist twenty decades ago, but Solaria did and I shall gamble that you will remember something useful.”

He stood up, bowed his head briefly in a gesture of politeness that was almost mocking, and was gone.

15.

Gladia maintained a thoughtful and troubled silence for a while and then she said, “He wasn’t at all polite, was he?”

Daneel said, “Madam Gladia, the Settler is clearly under tension. He is heading toward a world on which two ships like his have been destroyed and their crews killed. He is going into great danger, as is his crew.”

“You always defend any human being, Daneel,” said Gladia resentfully. “The danger exists for me, too, and I am not facing it voluntarily, but that does not force me into rudeness.”

Daneel said nothing. Gladia said, “Well, maybe it does. I have been a little rude, haven’t I?”

“I don’t think the Settler minded,” said Daneel. “Might I suggest, madam, that you prepare yourself for bed. It is quite late.”

“Very well. I’ll prepare myself for bed, but I don’t think I feel relaxed enough to sleep, Daneel.”

“Friend Giskard assures me you will, madam, and he is usually right about such things.”

And she did sleep.

16.

Daneel and Giskard stood in the darkness of Gladia’s cabin.

Giskard said, “She will sleep soundly, friend Daneel, and she needs the rest. She faces a dangerous trip.”

“It seemed to me, friend Giskard,” said Daneel, “that you influenced her to agree to go. I presume you had a reason.”

“Friend Daneel, we know so little about the nature of the crisis that is now facing the Galaxy that we cannot safely refuse any action that might increase our knowledge. We must know what is taking place on Solaria and the only way we can do so is to go there – and the only way we can go is for us to arrange for Madam Gladia to go. As for influencing her, that required scarcely a touch. Despite her loud statements to the contrary, she was eager to go. There was an overwhelming desire within her to see Solaria. It was a pain within her that would not cease until she went.”

“Since you say so, it is so, yet I find it puzzling. Had she not frequently made it plain that her life on Solaria was unhappy, that she had completely adopted Aurora and never wished to go back to her original home?”

“Yes, that was there, too. It was quite plainly in her mind. Both emotions, both feelings, existed together and simultaneously. I have observed something of this sort in human minds frequently; two opposite emotions simultaneously present.”

“Such a condition does not seem logical, friend Giskard.”

“I agree and I can only conclude that human beings are not, at all times or in all respects, logical. That must be one reason that it is so difficult to work out the Laws governing human behavior. – In Madam Gladia’s case, I have now and then been aware of this longing for Solaria. Ordinarily, it was well hidden, obscured by the far more intense antipathy she also felt for the world. When the news arrived that Solaria had been abandoned by its people, however, her feelings changed.”

“Why so? What had the abandonment to do with the youthful experiences that led Madam Gladia to her antipathy? Or, having held in restraint her longing for the world during the decades when it was a working society, why should she lose that restraint once it became an abandoned planet and newly long for a world which must now be something utterly strange to her.”

“I cannot explain, friend Daneel, since the more knowledge I gather of the human mind, the more despair I feel at being unable to understand it. It is not an unalloyed advantage to see into that mind and I often envy you the simplicity of behavior control that results from your inability to see below the surface.” Daneel persisted. “Have you guessed an explanation, friend Giskard?”

“I suppose she feels a sorrow for the empty planet. She deserted it twenty decades ago –”

“She was driven out.”

“It seems to her, now, to have been a desertion and I imagine she plays with the painful thought that she had set an example; that if she had not left, no one else would have and the planet would still be populated and happy. Since I cannot read her thoughts, I am only groping backward, perhaps inaccurately, from her emotions.”

“But she could not have set an example, friend Giskard. Since it is twenty decades since she left, there can be no verifiable causal connection between the much earlier event and the much later one.”

“I agree, but human beings sometimes find a kind of pleasure in nursing painful emotions, in blaming themselves without reason or even against reason. – In any case, Madam Gladia felt so sharply the longing to return that I felt it was necessary to release the inhibitory effect that kept her from agreeing to go. It required the merest touch. Yet though I feel it necessary for her to go, since that means she will take us there, I have the uneasy feeling that the disadvantages might, just possibly, be greater than the advantages.”

“In what way, friend Giskard?” “Since the Council was eager to have Madam Gladia accompany the Settler, it may have been for the purpose of having Madam Gladia absent from Aurora during a crucial period when the defeat of Earth and its Settler worlds is being prepared.” Daneel seemed to be considering that statement. At least it was only after a distinct pause that he said, “What purpose would be served, in your opinion, in having Madam Gladia absent?”

“I cannot decide that, friend Daneel. I want your opinion.”

“I have not considered this matter.”

“Consider it now!” If Giskard had been human, the remark would have been an order.

There was an even longer pause and then Daneel said, “Friend Giskard, until the moment that Dr. Mandamus appeared in Madam Gladia’s establishment, she had never shown any concern about international affairs. She was a friend of Dr. Fastolfe and of Elijah Baley, but this friendship was one of personal affection and did not have an ideological basis. Both of them, moreover, are now gone from us. She has an antipathy toward Dr. Amadiro and that is returned, but this is also a personal matter. The antipathy is two centuries old and neither has done anything material about it but have merely each remained stubbornly antipathetic. There can be no reason for Dr. Amadiro – who is now the dominant influence in the Council – to fear Madam Gladia or to go to the trouble of removing her.”

Giskard said, “You overlook the fact that in removing

Madam Gladia, he also removes you and me. He would, perhaps, feel quite certain Madam Gladia would not leave without us, so can it be us he considers dangerous?”

“In the course of our existence, friend Giskard, we have never, in any way, given any appearance of having endangered Dr. Amadiro. What cause has he to fear us? He does not know of your abilities or of how you have made use of them. Why, then, should he take the trouble to remove us, temporarily, from Aurora?”

“Temporarily, friend Daneel? Why do you assume it is a temporary removal he plans? He knows, it may be, more than the Settler does of the trouble on Solaria and knows, also, that the Settler and his crew will be surely destroyed – and Madam Gladia and you and I with them. Perhaps the destruction of the Settler’s ship is his main aim, but he would consider the end of Dr. Fastolfe’s friend and Dr. Fastolfe’s robots to be an added bonus.”

Daneel said, “Surely he would not risk war with the Settler worlds, for that may well come if the Settler’s ship is destroyed and the minute pleasure of having us destroyed, when added in, would not make the risk worthwhile.”

“Is it not possible, friend Daneel, that war is exactly what Dr. Amadiro has in mind; that it involves no risk in his estimation, so that getting rid of us at the same time adds to his pleasure without increasing a risk that does not exist?”

Daneel said calmly, “Friend Giskard, that is not reasonable. In any war fought under present conditions, the Settlers would win. They are better suited, psychologically, to the rigors of war. They are more scattered and can, therefore, more successfully carry on hit-and-run tactics. They have comparatively little to lose in their relatively primitive worlds, while the Spacers have much to lose in their comfortable, highly organized ones. If the Settlers were willing to offer to exchange destruction of one of their worlds for one of the Spacers’, the Spacers would have to surrender at once.”

“But would such a war be fought ‘under present conditions’? What if the Spacers had a new weapon that could be used to defeat the Settlers quickly? Might that not be the very crisis we are now facing?”

“In that case, friend Giskard, the victory could be better and more effectively gained in a surprise attack. Why go to the trouble of instigating a war, which the Settlers might begin by a surprise raid on Spacer worlds that would do considerable damage?”

“Perhaps the Spacers need to test the weapon and the destruction of a series of ships on Solaria represents the testing.”

“The Spacers would have been most uningenious if they could not have found a method of testing that would not give away the new weapon’s existence.”

It was now Giskard’s turn to consider. “Very well, then, friend Daneel, how would you explain this trip we are on? How would you explain the Council’s willingness – even eagerness – to have us accompany the Settler? The Settler said they would order Gladia to go and, in effect, they did.”

“I have not considered the matter, friend Giskard.”

“Then consider it now.” Again it had the flavor of an order.

Daneel said, “I will do so. “There was silence, one that grew protracted, but Giskard by no word or sign showed any impatience as he waited.

Finally, Daneel said – slowly, as though he were feeling his way along strange avenues of thought –” I do not think that Baleyworld – or any of the Settler worlds – has a clear right to appropriate robotic property on Solaria. Even though the Solarians have themselves left or have, perhaps, died out, Solaria remains a Spacer world, even if an unoccupied one. Certainly, the remaining forty-nine Spacer worlds would reason so. Most of all, Aurora would reason so – if it felt in command of the situation.”

Giskard considered that. “Are you now saying, friend Daneel, that the destruction of the two Settler ships was the Spacer way of enforcing their proprietorship of Solaria?”

Daneel said, “No, that would not be the way if Aurora, the leading Spacer power, felt in command of the situation. Aurora would then simply have announced that Solaria, empty or not, was off-limits to Settler vessels and would have threatened reprisals against the home worlds if any Settler vessel entered the Solarian planetary system. And they would have established a cordon of ships and sensory stations about that planetary system. There was no such warning, no such action, friend Giskard. Why, then, destroy ships that might have been kept away from the world quite easily in the first place?”

“But the ships were destroyed, friend Daneel. Will you make use of the basic illogicality of the human mind as an explanation?”

“Not unless I have to. Let us for the moment take that destruction simply as given. Now consider the consequence – The captain of a single Settler vessel approaches Aurora, demands permission to discuss the situation with the Council, insists on taking an Auroran citizen with him to investigate events on Solaria, and the Council gives in to everything. If destroying the ships without prior warning is too strong an action for Aurora, giving in to the Settler captain so cravenly is far too weak an action. Far from seeking a war, Aurora, in giving in, seems to be willing to do anything at all to ward off the possibility of war.”

“Yes,” said Giskard, “I see that this is a possible way of interpreting events. But what follows?”

“It seems to me,” said Daneel, “that the Spacer worlds are not yet so weak that they must behave with such servility – and, even if they were, the pride of centuries of overlordship would keep them from doing so. It must be something other than weakness that is driving them. I have pointed out that they cannot be deliberately instigating a war, so it is much more likely that they are playing for time.”

“To what end, friend Daneel?”

“They want to destroy the Settlers, but they are not yet prepared. They let this Settler have what he wants, to avoid a war until they are ready to fight one on their own terms. I am only surprised that they did not offer to send an Auroran warship with him. If this analysis is correct – and I think it is – Aurora cannot possibly have had anything to do with the incidents on Solaria. They would not indulge in pinpricks that could only serve to alert the Settlers before they are ready with something devastating.”

“Then how account for these pinpricks, as you call them, friend Daneel?”

“We will find out perhaps when we land on Solaria. It may be that Aurora is as curious as we are and the Settlers are and that that is another reason why they have cooperated with the captain, even to the point of allowing Madam Gladia to accompany him.”

It was now Giskard’s turn to remain silent. Finally he said, “And what is this mysterious devastation that they plan?”

“Earlier, we spoke of a crisis arising from the Spacer plan to defeat Earth, but we used Earth in its general sense, implying the Earthpeople together with their descendents on the Settler worlds. However, if we seriously suspect the preparation of a devastating blow that will allow the Spacers to defeat their enemies at a stroke, we can perhaps refine our view. Thus, they cannot be planning a blow at a Settler world. Individually, the Settler worlds are dispensable and the remaining Settler worlds will promptly strike back. Nor can they be planning a blow at several or at all the Settler worlds. There are too many of them; they are too diffusely spread. It is not likely that all the strikes will succeed and those Settler worlds that survive will, in fury and despair, bring devastation upon the Spacer worlds.”

“You reason, then, friend Daneel, that it will be a blow at Earth itself.”

“Yes, friend Giskard. Earth contains the vast majority of the short-lived human beings; it is the perennial source of emigrants to the Settler worlds and is the chief raw material for the founding of new ones; it is the revered homeland of all the Settlers. If Earth were somehow destroyed, the Settler movement might never recover.”

“But would not the Settler worlds then retaliate as strongly and as forcefully as they would if one of themselves were destroyed? That would seem to me to be inevitable.”

“And to me, friend Giskard. Therefore, it seems to me that unless the Spacer worlds have gone insane, the blow would have to be a subtle one; one for which the Spacer worlds would seem to bear no responsibility.”

“Why not such a subtle blow against the Settler worlds, which hold most of the actual war potential of the Earthpeople?”

“Either because the Spacers feel the blow against Earth would be more psychologically devastating or because the nature of the blow is such that it would work only against Earth and not against the Settler worlds. I suspect the latter, since Earth is a unique world and has a society that is not like that of any other world-settler or, for that matter, Spacer.”

“To summarize, then, friend Daneel, you come to the conclusion that the Spacers are planning a subtle blow against Earth that will destroy it without evidence of themselves as the cause, and one that would not work against any other world, and that they are not yet ready to launch that blow.”

“Yes, friend Giskard, but they may soon be ready – and once they are ready, they will have to strike immediately. Any delay will increase the chance of some leak that will give them away.”

“To deduce all this, friend Daneel, from the small indications we have is most praiseworthy. Now tell me the nature of the blow. What is it, precisely, that the Spacers plan?”

“I have come this far, friend Giskard, across very shaky ground, without being certain that my reasoning is entirely sound. But even if we suppose it is, I can go no further. I fear I do not know and cannot imagine what the nature of the blow might be.”

Giskard said, “But we cannot take appropriate measures to counteract the blow and resolve the crisis until we know what its nature will be. If we must wait until the blow reveals itself by its results, it will then be too late to do anything.”

Daneel said, “If any Spacer knows the nature of the forthcoming event, it would be Amadiro. Could you not force Amadiro to announce it publicly and thus alert the Settlers and make it unusable?”

“I could not do that, friend Daneel, without virtually destroying his mind. I doubt that I could hold it together long enough to allow him to make the announcement. I could not do such a thing.”

“Perhaps, then,” said Daneel, “we may console ourselves with the thought that my reasoning is wrong and that no blow against Earth is being prepared.”

“No,” said Giskard. “It is my feeling that you are right and that we must simply wait – helplessly.”

17.

Gladia waited, with an almost painful anticipation, for the conclusion of the final Jump. They would then be close enough to Solaria to make out its sun as a disk.

It would just be a disk, of course, a featureless circle of light, subdued to the point where it could be watched unblinkingly after that light had passed through the appropriate filter.

Its appearance would not be unique. All the stars that carried, among their planets, a habitable world in the human sense had a long list of property requirements that ended by making them all resemble one another. They were all single stars – all not much larger or smaller than the sun that shone on Earth – none too active, or too old, or too quiet, or too young, or too hot, or too cool, or too offbeat in chemical composition. All had sunspots and flares and prominences and all looked just about the same to the eye. It took careful spectroheliography to work out the details that made each star unique.

Nevertheless, when Gladia found herself staring at a circle of light that was absolutely nothing more than a circle of light to her, she found her eyes welling with tears. She had never given the sun a thought when she had lived on Solaria; it was just the eternal source of light and heat, rising and falling in a steady rhythm. When she had left Solaria, she had watched that sun disappear behind her with nothing but a feeling of thankfulness. She had no memory of it that she valued.

– Yet she was weeping silently. She was ashamed of herself for being so affected for no reason that she could explain, but that didn’t stop the weeping.

She made a stronger effort when the signal light gleamed. It had to be D.G. at the door; no one else would approach her cabin.

Daneel said, “Is he to enter, madam? You seem emotionally moved.”

“Yes, I’m emotionally moved, Daneel, but let him in. I imagine it won’t come as a surprise to him.”

Yet it did. At least, he entered with a smile on his bearded face – and that smile disappeared almost at once. He stepped back and said in a low voice, “I will return later.”

“Stay!” said Gladia harshly. “This is nothing. A silly reaction of the moment. “She sniffed and dabbed angrily at her eyes. “Why are you here?”

“I wanted to discuss Solaria with you. If we succeed with a microadjustment, we’ll land tomorrow. If you’re not quite up to a discussion now –”

“I am quite up to it. In fact, I have a question for you. Why is it we took three Jumps to get here? One Jump would have been sufficient. One was sufficient when I was taken from Solaria to Aurora twenty decades ago. Surely the technique of space travel has not retrogressed since.”

D.G.’s grin returned. “Evasive action. If an Auroran ship was following us, I wanted to – confuse it, shall we say?”

“Why should one follow us?”

“Just a thought, my lady. The Council was a little overeager to help, I thought. They suggested that an Auroran ship join me in my expedition to Solaria.”

“Well, it might have helped, mightn’t it?”

“Perhaps – if I were quite certain that Aurora wasn’t behind all this. I told the Council quite plainly that I would do without – or, rather” – he pointed his finger at Gladia – “just with you. Yet might not the Council send a ship to accompany me even against my wish – out of pure kindness of heart, let us say? Well, I still don’t want one; I expect enough trouble without having to look nervously over my shoulder at every moment. So I made myself hard to follow. – How much do you know about Solaria, my lady?”

“Haven’t I told you often enough? Nothing! Twenty decades have passed.”

“Now, madam, I’m talking about the psychology of the Solarians. That can’t have changed in merely twenty decades. – Tell me why they have abandoned their planet.”

“The story, as I’ve heard it,” said Gladia calmly, “is that their population has been steadily declining. A combination of premature deaths and very few births is apparently responsible.”

“Does that sound reasonable to you?” “Of course it does. Births have always been few.” Her face twisted in memory. “Solarian custom does not make impregnation easy, either naturally, artificially, or ectogenetically.”

“You never had children, madam?”

“Not on Solaria.”

“And the premature death?”

“I can only guess. I suppose it arose out of a feeling of failure. Solaria was clearly not working out, even though the Solarians had placed a great deal of emotional fervor into their world’s having the ideal society – not only one that was better than Earth had ever had, but more nearly perfect than that of any other Spacer world.”

“Are you saying that Solaria was dying of the collective broken heart of its people?”

“If you want to put it in that ridiculous way,” said Gladia, displeased.

D.G. shrugged. “It seems to be what you’re saying. But would they really leave? Where would they go? How would they live?”

“I don’t know.”

“But, Madam Gladia, it is well known that Solarians are accustomed to enormous tracts of land, serviced by many thousands of robots, so that each Solarian is left in almost complete isolation. If they abandon Solaria, where can they go to find a society that would humor them in this fashion? Have they, in fact, gone to any of the other Spacer worlds?”

“Not as far as I know. But then, I’m not in their confidence.”

“Can they have found a new world for themselves? If so, it would be a raw one and require much in the way of terraforming. Would they be ready for that?”

Gladia shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“Perhaps they haven’t really left.”

“Solaria, I understand, gives every evidence of being empty.”

“What evidence is that?”

“All interplanetary communication has ceased. An radiation from the planet, except that consistent with robot work or clearly due to natural causes has ceased.”

“How do you know that?”

“That is the report on the Auroran news.”

“Ah! The report! Could it be that someone is lying?”

“What would be the purpose of such a lie?” Gladia stiffened at the suggestion.

“So that our ships would be lured to the world and destroyed.”

“That’s ridiculous, D.G.” Her voice grew sharper. “What would the Spacers gain by destroying two trading vessels through so elaborate a subterfuge?”

“Something has destroyed two Settler vessels on a supposedly empty planet. How do you explain that?”

“I can’t. I presume we are going to Solaria in order to find an explanation.”

D.G. regarded her gravely. “Would you be able to guide me to the section of the world that was yours when you lived on Solaria?”

“My estate?” She returned his stare, astonished.

“Wouldn’t you like to see it again?”

Gladia’s heart skipped a beat. “Yes, I would, but why my place?”

“The two ships that were destroyed landed in widely different spots on the planet and yet each was destroyed fairly quickly. Though every spot may be deadly, it seems to me that yours might be less so than others.”

“Why?”

“Because there we might receive help from the robots. You would know them, wouldn’t you? They do last more than twenty decades, I suppose. Daneel and Giskard have. And those that were there when you lived on your estate would still remember you, wouldn’t they? They would treat you as their mistress and recognize the duty they owed you even beyond that which they would owe to ordinary human beings.”

Gladia said, “There were ten thousand robots on my estate. I knew perhaps three dozen by sight. Most of the rest I never saw and they may not have ever seen me. Agricultural robots are not very advanced, you know, nor are forestry robots or mining robots. The household robots would still remember me – if they have not been sold or transferred since I left. Then, too, accidents happen and some robots don’t last twenty decades. – Besides, whatever you may think of robot memory, human memory is fallible and I might remember none of them.”

“Even so,” said D.G., “can you direct me to your estate?”

“By latitude and longitude? No.”

“I have charts of Solaria. Would that help?”

“Perhaps – approximately. It’s in the south-central portion of the northern continent of Heliona.”

“And once we’re approximately there, can you make use of landmarks for greater precision – if we skim the Solarian surface?”

“By seacoasts and rivers, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“I think I can.”

“Good! And meanwhile, see if you can remember the names and appearances of any of your robots. It may prove the difference between living and dying.”

18.

D.G. Baley seemed a different person with his officers. The broad smile was not evident, nor the easy indifference to danger. He sat, poring over the charts, with a look of intense concentration on his face.

He said, “If the woman is correct, we’ve got the estate pinned down within narrow limits – and if we move into the flying mode, we should get it exactly before too long.”

“Wasteful of energy, Captain, “muttered Jamin Oser, who was second-in-command. He was tall and, like D.G., well bearded. The beard was russet-colored, as were his eyebrows, which arched over bright blue eyes. He looked rather old, but one got the impression that this was due to experience rather than years.

“Can’t help it,” said D.G. “If we had the antigravity that the technos keep promising us just this side of eternity, it would be different.”

He stared at the chart again and said, “She says it would be along this river about sixty kilometers upstream from where it runs into this larger one. If she is correct.”

“You keep doubting it,” said Chandrus Nadirhaba, whose insigne showed him to be Navigator and responsible for bringing the ship down in the correct spot – or, in any case, the indicated spot. His dark skin and neat mustache accentuated the handsome strength of his face.

“She’s recalling a situation over a time gap of twenty decades,” said D.G. “What details would you remember of a site you haven’t seen for just three decades? She’s not a robot. She may have forgotten.”

“Then what was the point of bringing her?” muttered Oser. “And the other one and the robot? It unsettles the crew and I don’t exactly like it, either.”

D.G. looked up, eyebrows bunching together. He said in a low voice, “It doesn’t matter on this ship what you don’t like or what the crew doesn’t like, mister. I have the responsibility and I make the decisions. We’re all liable to be dead within six hours of landing unless that woman can save us.”

Nadirhaba said coolly, “If we die, we die. We wouldn’t be Traders if we didn’t know that sudden death was the other side of big profits. And for this mission, we’re all volunteers. Just the same, it doesn’t hurt to know where the death’s coming from, Captain. If you’ve figured it out, does it have to be a secret?”

“No, it doesn’t. The Solarians are supposed to have left, but suppose a couple of hundred stayed quietly behind just to watch the store, so to speak.”

“And what can they do to an armed ship, Captain? Do they have a secret weapon?”

“Not so secret, “said D.G.” Solaria is littered with robots. That’s the whole reason Settler ships landed on the world in the first place. Each remaining Solarian might have a million robots at his disposal. An enormous army.”

Eban Kalaya was in charge of communications. So far he had said nothing, aware as he was of his junior status, which seemed further marked by the fact that he was the only one of the four officers present without facial hair of any kind. Now he ventured a remark. “Robots,” he said, “cannot injure human beings.”

“So we are told,” said D.G. dryly, “but what do we know about robots? What we do know is that two ships have been destroyed and about a hundred human beings – good Settlers all – have been killed on widely separated parts of a world littered with robots. How could it have been done except by robots? We don’t know what kind of orders a Solarian might give robots or by what tricks the so-called First Law of Robotics might be circumvented.

“So we,” he went on, “have to do a little circumventing of our own. As best as we can tell from the reports reaching us from the other ships before they were destroyed, all the men on board ship debarked on landing. It was an empty world after all and they wanted to stretch their legs, breathe fresh air, and look over the robots they had come to get. Their ships were unprotected and they themselves unready when the attack came.

‘That won’t happen this time. I’m getting off, but the rest of you are going to stay on board the ship or in its near vicinity.”

Nadirhaba’s dark eyes glared disapproval. “Why you, Captain? If you need someone to act as bait, anyone else can be spared more easily than you can be.”

“I appreciate the thought, Navigator,” said D.G., “but I will not be alone. Coming with me well be the Spacer woman and her companions. She is the one who is essential. She may know some of the robots; at any rate, some may know her. I am hoping that though the robots may have been ordered to attack us, they won’t attack her.”

“You mean they’ll remember 01’ Missy and fall to their knees,” said Nadirhaba dryly.

“If you want to put it that way. That’s why I brought her and that’s why we’ve landed on her estate. And I’ve got to be with her because I’m the one who knows her – somewhat – and I’ve got to see that she behaves. Once we have survived by using her as a shield and in that way have learned exactly what we’re facing, we can proceed on our own. We won’t need her any more.”

Oser said, “And then what do we do with her? Jettison her into space?”

D.G. roared, “We take her back to Aurora!”

Oser said, “I’m bound to tell you, Captain, that the crew would consider that a wasteful and unnecessary trip. They will feel that we can simply leave her on this blasted world. It’s where she comes from, after all.”

“Yes,” said D.G. “That will be the day, won’t it, when I take orders from the crew.”

“I’m sure you won’t,” said Oser, “but the crew has its opinions and an unhappy crew makes for a dangerous voyage.”

6. The Crew

19.

GLADIA STOOD ON the soil of Solaria. She smelled the vegetation – not quite the odors of Aurora – and at once she crossed the gap of twenty decades.

Nothing, she knew, could bring back associations in the way that odors could. Not sights, not sounds.

Just that faint, unique smell brought back childhood – the freedom of running about, with a dozen robots watching her carefully – the excitement of seeing other children sometimes, coming to a halt, staring shyly, approaching one another a half-step at a time, reaching out to touch, and then a robot saying, “Enough, Miss Gladia,” and being led away – looking over the shoulder at the other child, with whom there was another set of attendant robots in charge.

She remembered the day that she was told that only by holovision would she see other human beings thereafter. Viewing, she was told – not seeing. The robots said “seeing” as though it were a word they must not say, so that they had to whisper it. She could see them, but they were not human.

It was not so bad at first. The images she could talk to were three-dimensional, free-moving. They could talk, run, turn cartwheels if they wished – but they could not be felt. And then she was told that she could actually see someone whom she had often viewed and whom she had liked. He was a grown man, quite a bit older than she was, though he looked quite young, as one did on Solaria. She would have permission to continue to see him – if she wished – whenever necessary.

She wished. She remembered how it was – exactly how it was on that first day. She was tongue – tied and so was he. They circled each other, afraid to touch. – but it was marriage.

Of course it was. And then they met again – seeing, viewing, because it was marriage. They would finally touch each other. They were supposed to.

It was the most exciting day of her life – until it took place.

Fiercely, Gladia stopped her thoughts. Of what use to go on? She so warm and eager; he so cold and withdrawn. He continued to be cold. When he came to see her, at fixed intervals, for the rites that might (or might not) succeed in impregnating her, it was with such clear revulsion that she was soon longing for him to forget. But he was a man of duty and he never forgot.

Then came the time, years of dragging unhappiness later, when she found him dead, his skull crushed, and herself as the only possible suspect. Elijah Baley had saved her then and she had been taken away from Solaria and sent to Aurora.

Now she was back, smelling Solaria.

Nothing else was familiar. The house in the distance bore no resemblance to anything she remembered even faintly. In twenty decades it had been modified, torn down, rebuilt. She could not even gain any sense of familiarity with the ground itself.

She found herself reaching backward to touch the Settler ship that had brought her to this world that smelled like home but was home in no other way – just to touch something that was familiar by comparison.

Daneel, who stood next to her in the shadow of the ship, said, “Do you see the robots, Madam Gladia?”

There were a group of them, a hundred yards away, amid the trees of an orchard, watching solemnly, motionlessly, shining in the sun with the grayish well-polished metal finish Gladia remembered Solarian robots to have.

She said, “I do, Daneel.”

“Is there anything familiar about them, madam?”

“Not at all. They seem to be new models. I can’t remember them and I’m sure they can’t remember me. If D.G. was expecting anything hopeful to come of my supposed familiarity with the robots on my estate, he will have to be disappointed.”

Giskard said, “They do not seem to be doing anything, madam.”

Gladia said, “That is understandable. We’re intruders and they’ve come to observe us and to report on us in accordance with what must be standing orders. They have no one now to report to, however, and can merely silently observe. Without further orders, I presume they will do no more than that, but they won’t cease doing so, either.”

Daneel said, “It might be well, Madam Gladia, if we retired to our quarters on board ship. The captain is, I believe, supervising the construction of defenses and is not ready to go exploring yet. I suspect he will not approve your having left your quarters without his specific permission.”

Gladia said haughtily, “I’m not going to delay stepping out onto the surface of my own world just to suit his whim.”

“I understand, but members of the crew are engaged in the vicinity and I believe that some note your presence here.”

“And are approaching,” said Giskard. “If you would avoid infection –”

“I’m prepared,” said Gladia. “Nose plugs and gloves.”

Gladia did not understand the nature of the structures being put up on the flat ground about the ship. For the most part, the crewmen, absorbed in the construction, had not seen Gladia and her two companions, standing as they were in the shadows. (It was the warm season on this portion of Solaria, which had a tendency to grow warmer – and on other occasions, colder – than Aurora did, since the Solarian day was nearly six hours longer than the Auroran day.)

The crewmen approaching were five in number and one of them, the tallest and largest, pointed in the direction of Gladia. The other four looked, remained standing for a while as though merely curious, and then, at a gesture from the first, approached again, changing their angle slightly so as to head directly for the Auroran three.

Gladia watched them silently and with her eyebrows raised in contempt. Daneel and Giskard waited impassively.

Giskard said in a low voice to Daneel, “I do not know where the captain is. I cannot distinguish him from the crowd of crewmen in whose midst he must be.”

“Shall we retire?” said Daneel aloud.

“That would be disgraceful,” said Gladia. “This is my world.”

She held her ground and the five crewmen came closer in leisurely fashion.

They had been working, doing hard physical labor (Like robots, thought Gladia with disdain) and they were sweating. Gladia became aware of the odor that reeked from them. That would have served to force her away more than threats would, but she held her ground even so. The nose plugs, she was sure, mitigated the effect of the smell.

The large crewman approached more closely than the others. His skin was bronzed. His bare arms glistened with moisture and with shining musculature. He might be thirty (as nearly as Gladia could judge the age of these short-lived beings) and if he were washed and properly dressed, he might prove quite presentable.

He said, “So you are the Spacer lady from Aurora that we’ve been carrying on our ship?” He spoke rather slowly, obviously trying to attain an aristocratic tinge to his Galactic. He failed, of course, and he spoke like a Settler – even more crudely than D.G. did.

Gladia said, establishing her territorial rights, “I am from Solaria, Settler,” and stopped in confused embarrassment. She had spent so much time thinking of Solaria just now that twenty decades had dropped away and she had spoken with a thick Solarian accent. There was the broad “a” in Solaria and the rough “r,” while the “I” sounded horribly like “Oi.”

She said again, in a much lower, less commanding voice, but one in which the accent of Aurora University – the standard for Galactic speech through all the Spacer worlds – rang clear, “I am from Solaria, Settler.”

The Settler laughed and turned to the others. “She speaks la-di-da, but she had to try. Right, mates?”

The others laughed, too, and one cried out, “Get her to talk some more, Niss. Maybe we can all learn to talk like Spacer birdies. “And he placed one hand on his hip in as dainty a manner as he could manage, while holding the other hand out limply.

Niss said, still smiling, “Shut up, all of you.” There was instant silence.

He turned to Gladia again, “I’m Berto Niss, First-Class Shipper. And your name, little woman?”

Gladia did not venture to speak again.

Niss said, “I’m being polite, little woman. I’m speaking gentlemanly. Spacer – like. I know you’re old enough to be my great-grandmother. How old you are you, little woman?”

“Four hundred,” shouted one of the crewmen from behind Niss, “but she doesn’t look it!”

“She doesn’t look one hundred,” said another.

“She looks suitable for a little ding-donging,” said a third, “and hasn’t had any for a long time, I guess. Ask her if she’d want some, Niss. Be polite and ask if we can take turns.”

Gladia flushed angrily and Daneel said, “First-Class Shipper Niss, your companions are offending Madam Gladia. Would you retire?”

Niss turned to look at Daneel, whom, till now, he had totally ignored. The smile vanished from his face and he said, “Look, you. This little lady is off-limits. The captain said so. We won’t bother her. Just a little harmless talk. That thing there is a robot. We won’t bother with him and he can’t hurt us. We know the Three Laws of Robotics. We order him to stay away from us, see. But you are a Spacer and the captain has give us no orders about you. So you” – he pointed a finger –” stay out of this and don’t interfere or you’ll get your pretty skin all bruised up and then you might cry.”

Daneel said nothing. Niss nodded his head. “Good. I like to see someone smart enough not to start anything he can’t finish.”

He turned to Gladia, “Now, little Spacer woman, we will leave you alone because the captain doesn’t want you bothered. If one of the men here made a crude remark, that’s only natural. Just shake hands and let’s be friends – Spacer, Settler, what’s the difference?”

He thrust out his hand toward Gladia, who shrank away in horror. Daneel’s hand moved outward in a flick that was almost too fast to see and caught Niss’s wrist, “First-Class Shipper Niss,” he said quietly, “do not attempt to touch the lady.”

Niss looked down at his hand and at the fingers that enclosed his wrist firmly. He said in a low and menacing growl, “You have till the count of three to let go.”

Daneel’s hand fell away. He said, “I must do as you say for I do not wish to harm you, but I must protect the lady – and if she doesn’t wish to be touched, as I believe she doesn’t, I may be forced into a position where I must cause you pain. Please accept my assurance that I will do all I can to minimize that.”

One of the crewmen shouted joyously, “Give it to him, Niss. He’s a talker.”

Niss said, “Look, Spacer, twice I told you to keep out and you touched me once. Now I tell you a third time and that’s it. Make a move, say a word, and I take you apart. This little woman is going to shake hands, that’s all, friendly-like. Then we all go. Fair enough?”

Gladia said in a low choking voice. “I won’t be touched by him. Do what is necessary.”

Daneel said, “Sir, with all due respect, the lady does not wish to be touched. I must ask you – all of you – to leave.”

Niss smiled and one large arm moved as though to brush Daneel to one side – and to do it hard.

Daneel’s left arm flickered and once again Niss was held by the wrist. “Please go, sir,” said Daneel.

Niss‘s teeth continued to show, but he was no longer smiling. Violently, he brought his arm up. Daneel’s enclosing hand moved up for a short distance, slowed, and came to a halt. His face showed no strain. His hand moved down, dragging Niss’s arm with it, and then, with a rapid twist, he bent Niss’s arm behind the Settler’s broad back and held it there.

Niss, who found himself unexpectedly with his back to Daneel, brought his other arm up over his head, groping for Daneel’s neck. His other wrist was seized and pulled down farther than it could easily go and Niss grunted in clear misery.

The other four crewmen, who had been watching in eager anticipation, remained in place now, motionless, silent, mouths open.

Niss, staring at them, grunted, “Help me!”

Daneel said, “They will not help you, sir, for the captain’s punishment will be all the worse if they try. I must ask you now to assure me that you will no longer trouble Madam Gladia and that you will leave quietly, all of you. Otherwise, I very much regret, First-Class Shipper, that I must pull your arms out of their sockets.”

As he said that, he tightened his grip on either wrist and Niss emitted a muffled grunt.

“My apologies, sir,” said Daneel, “but I am under the strictest orders. May I have your assurance?”

Niss kicked backward with sudden viciousness, but well before his heavy boot could make contact, Daneel had faded to one side and pulled him off-balance. He went facedown heavily.

“May I have your assurance, sir?” said Daneel, now pulling gently at the two wrists so that the crewman’s arms lifted slightly up from the back.

Niss howled and said, half-incoherent, “I give in. Let go.”

Daneel let go at once and stepped back. Slowly and painfully, Niss rolled over, moving his arms slowly and rotating his wrists with a twisted grimace.

Then, when his right arm moved near the holster he wore, he snatched clumsily at his sidearm.

Daneel’s foot came down on his hand and pinned it to the ground. “Don’t do that, sir, or I may be forced to break one or more of the small bones in your hand.” He bent down and extracted Niss’s blaster from its holster. “Now stand up.”

“Well, Mr. Niss,” came another voice. “Do as you are told and stand up,”

D.G. Baley was standing at their side, beard bristling, face slightly flushed, but his voice was dangerously calm.

“You four,” he said, “hand me your sidearms, one at a time. Come on. Move a little faster. One-two-three-four. Now continue to stand there at attention. Sir” – this to Daneel –” give me that sidearm you are holding. Good. Five. And now, Mr. Niss, at attention.” And he placed the blasters on the ground beside him.

Niss stiffened to attention, eyes bloodshot, face contorted, in obvious pain.

“Would someone,” said D.G., “please say what has been going on?”

“Captain,” said Daneel quickly, “Mr. Niss and I have had a playful altercation. No harm has been done.”

“Mr. Niss, however, looks somewhat harmed,” said D.G.

“No permanent harm, Captain,” said Daneel.

“I see. Well, we’ll get back to this later. – Madam” – he turned on his heel to address Gladia –” I don’t recall that I gave you permission to emerge from the ship. You will go back to your cabin with your two companions at once. I am captain here and this is not Aurora. Do as I say!”

Daneel placed an apologetic hand on Gladia’s elbow. Her chin lifted, but she turned and went up the gangplank and into the ship, Daneel at her side, Giskard following.

D.G. then turned to the crewmen. “You five,” he said, his voice never lifting from its flat calm, “come with me. We‘ll get to the bottom of this – or of you. “And he gestured to a petty officer to pick up the sidearms and take them away.

20.

D.G. stared at the five grimly. He was in his own quarters, the only portion of the ship that had a semblance of size to it and the beginnings of an appearance of luxury.

He said, pointing to each in turn, “Now, this is the way we’ll work it. You tell me exactly what happened, word for word, motion for motion. When you’re finished, you tell me anything that was wrong or left out. Then you the same, and then you, and then I’ll get to you, Niss. I expect that you were all out of order, that you all did something unusually stupid that earned you all, but especially Niss, considerable humiliation. If, in your story, it would appear that you did nothing wrong and suffered 00 humiliation, then I’ll know you’re lying, especially as the Spacer woman will surely tell me what happened – and I intend to believe every word she says. A lie will make matters worse for you than anything you’ve actually done. Now,” he barked, “start!”

The first crewman stumbled hastily through the story, and then the second, somewhat correcting, somewhat expanding, then the third and the fourth. D.G. listened, stony-faced, to the recital, then motioned Berto Niss to one side.

He spoke to the other four, “And while Niss was getting his face rightly mashed into the dirt by the Spacer, what were you four doing? Watching? Scared to move? All four of you? Against one man?”

One of the men broke the thickening silence to say, “It all happened so quick, Captain. We were just getting set to move in and then it was allover.”

“And what were you getting ready to do in case you did manage to get to move someday?”

“Well, we were going to pull the Spacer foreigner off our mate.”

“Do you think you could have?”

This time no one offered to make a sound.

D.G. leaned toward them. “Now, here’s the situation. You had no business interfering with the foreigners, so you ‘re fined one week’s pay each. And now let’s get something straight. If you tell what has happened to anyone else – in the crew or out, now or ever, whether drunk or sober – you’ll be broken, every one of you, to apprentice shipper. It doesn’t matter which one of you talks, you’ll all four be broken, so keep an eye on each other. Now get to your assigned tasks and if you cross me at any time during this voyage, if you as much as hiccup against regulations, you’ll be in the brig.”

The four left. mournful, hangdog, tight-lipped. Niss remained, a bruise developing on his face, his arms clearly in discomfort.

D.G. regarded him with a threatening quiet, while Niss stared to the left, to the right, at his feet, everywhere but at the face of the captain. It was only when Niss’s eyes, running out of evasion, caught the glare of the captain that D.G. said, “Well, you look very handsome, now that you have tangled with a sissy Spacer half your size. Next time you better hide when one of them shows up.”

“Yes, Captain,” said Niss miserably.

“Did you or did you not, Niss, hear me in my briefing, before we left Aurora, say that the Spacer woman and her companions were on no account to be disturbed or spoken to?”

“Captain, I wanted only a polite howdydo. We was curious for a closer look. No harm meant.”

“You meant no harm? You asked how old she was. Was that your business?”

“Just curious. Wanted to know.”

“One of you made a sexual suggestion.”

“Not me, Captain.”

“Someone else? Did you apologize for it?”

“To a Spacer?” Niss sounded horrified.

“Certainly. You were going against my orders.”

“I meant no harm,” said Niss doggedly.

“You meant no harm to the man?”

“He put his hand on me, Captain.”

“I know he did. Why?”

“Because he was ordering me around.”

“And you wouldn’t stand for it?”

“Would you, Captain.”

“All right, then. You didn’t stand for it. You fell down for it. Right on your face. How did that happen?”

“I don’t rightly know, Captain. He was fast. Like the camera was sped up. And he had a grip like iron.”

D.G. said, “So he did. What did you expect, you idiot? He is iron.”

“Captain?”

“Niss, is it possible you don’t know the story of Elijah Baley?”

Niss rubbed his ear in embarrassment. “I know he’s your great – something – grandfather, Captain. “

“Yes, everyone knows that from my name. Have you ever viewed his life story?”

“I’m not a viewing man, Captain. Not on history.” He shrugged and, as he did so, winced and made as though to rub his shoulder, then decided he didn’t quite dare do so.

“Did you ever hear of R. Daneel Olivaw?”

Niss squeezed his brows together. “He was Elijah Baley’s friend.”

“Yes, he was. You do know something then. Do you know what the ‘R’ stands for in R. Daneel Olivaw?”

“It stands for ‘Robot,’ right? He was a robot friend. There was robots on Earth in them days.”

“There were, Niss, and still are. But Daneel wasn’t just a robot. He was a Spacer robot who looked like a Spacer man. Think about it, Niss. Guess who the Spacer man you picked a fight with really was.”

Niss’s eyes widened, his face reddened dully. “You mean that Spacer was a ro –”

“That was R. Daneel Olivaw.”

“But, Captain, that was two hundred years ago.”

“Yes and the Spacer woman was a particular friend of my Ancestor Elijah. She’s been alive for two hundred and thirty-three years, in case you still want to know, and do you think a robot can’t do as well as that? You were trying to fight a robot, you great fool.”

“Why didn’t it say so?” Niss said with great indignation.

“Why should it? Did you ask? See here, Niss. You heard what I told the others about telling this to anyone. It goes for you, too, but much more so. They are only crewmen, but I had my eye on you for crew leader. Had my eye on you. If you’re going to be in charge of the crew, you’ve got to have brains and not just muscle. So now it’s going to be harder for you because you ‘re going to have to prove you have brains against my firm opinion that you don’t.”

“Captain, I –”

“Don’t talk. Listen. If this story gets out, the other four will be apprentice shippers, but you will be nothing. You will never go on shipboard again. No ship will take you, I promise you that. Not as crew, not as passenger. Ask yourself what kind of money you can make on Baleyworld – and doing what? That’s if you talk about this, or if you cross the Spacer woman in any way, or even just look at her for more than half a second at a time, or at her two robots. And you are going to have to see to it that no one else among the crew is in the least offensive. You ‘re responsible. – and you’re fined two week’s pay.”

“But, Captain,” said Niss weakly, “the others –”

“I expected less from the others, Niss, so I fined them less. Get out of here.”

21.

D.G. played idly with the photocube that always stood on his desk. Each time he turned it, it blackened, then cleared when stood upon one of its sides as its base. When it cleared, the smiling three-dimensional image of a woman’s head could be seen.

Crew rumor was that each of the six sides lead to the appearance of a different woman. The rumor was quite correct.

Jamin Oser watched the flashing appearance and disappearance of images totally without interest. Now that the ship was secured – or as secured as it could be against attack of any expected variety – it was time to think of the next step.

D.G., however, was approaching the matter obliquely – or, perhaps, not approaching it at all. He said, “It was the woman’s fault, of course.”

Oser shrugged and passed his hand over his beard, as though he were reassuring himself that he, at least, was not a woman. Unlike D.G., Oser had his upper lip luxuriantly covered as well.

D.G. said, “Apparently, being on the planet of her birth removed any thought of discretion. She left the ship, even though I had asked her not to.”

“You might have ordered her not to.”

“I don’t know that that would have helped. She’s a spoiled aristocrat, used to having her own way and to ordering her robots about. Besides, I plan to use her and I want her cooperation, not her pouting. And again – she was the Ancestor’s friend.”

“And still alive,” said Oser, shaking his head. “It makes the skin crawl. An old, old woman.”

“I know, but she looks quite young. Still attractive. And nose in the air. Wouldn’t retire when the crewmen approached, wouldn’t shake hands with one of them. – Well, it’s over.”

“Still, Captain, was it the right thing to tell Niss he had tackled a robot?”

“Had to! Had to, Oser. If he thought he’d been beaten and humiliated before four of his mates by an effeminate Spacer half his size, he’d be useless to us forever. It would have broken him completely. And we don’t want anything to happen that will start the rumor that Spacers – that human Spacers – are supermen. That’s why I had to order them so strenuously not to talk about it. Niss will ride herd on all of them – and if it does get out, it will also get out that the Spacer was a robot. – but I suppose there was a good side to the whole thing.”

“Where, Captain?” asked Oser.

“It got me to thinking about robots. How much do we know about them? How much do you know?”

Oser shrugged. “Captain, it’s not something I think about much.”

“Or something anyone else thinks about, either. At least, any Settler. We know that the Spacers have robots, depend on them, go nowhere without them, can’t do a thing without them, are parasites on them, and we’re sure they’re fading away because of them. We know that Earth once had robots forced on them by the Spacers and that they are gradually disappearing from Earth and are not found at all in Earth Cities, only in the countryside. We know that the Settler worlds don’t and won’t have them anywhere – town or country. So Settlers never meet them on their own worlds and hardly ever on Earth.” (His voice had a curious inflection each time he said “Earth,” as though one could hear the capital, as though one could hear the words “home” and “mother” whispered behind it.) “What else do we know?”

Oser said, “There’s the Three Laws of Robotics.”

“Right,” D.G. pushed the photocube to one side and leaned forward. “Especially the First Law. ‘A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. ‘Yes? Well, don’t rely on it. It doesn’t mean a thing. We all feel ourselves to be absolutely safe from robots because of that and that’s fine if it gives us confidence, but not if it gives us false confidence. R. Daneel injured Niss and it didn’t bother the robot at all, First Law or no First Law.”

“He was defending –”

“Exactly. What if you must balance injuries? What if it was a case of either hurt Niss or allow your Spacer owner to come to harm? Naturally, she comes first.”

“It makes sense.”

“Of course it does. And here we are on a planet of robots, a couple of hundred million of them. What orders do they have? How do they balance the conflict between different harms? How can we be sure that none of them will touch us? Something on this planet has destroyed two ships already.”

Oser said uneasily, “This R. Daneel is an unusual robot, looks more like a man than we do. It may be we can’t generalize from him. That other robot, what’s his name –”

“Giskard. It’s easy to remember. My name is Daneel Giskard.”

“I think of you as captain, Captain. Anyway, that R. Giskard just stood there and didn’t do a thing. He looks like a robot and he acts like one. We’ve got lots of robots out there on Solaria watching us right now and they’re not doing a thing, either. Just watching.”

“And if there are some special robots that can harm us?”

“I think we’re prepared for them.”

“Now we are. That’s why the incident with Daneel and Niss was a good thing. We’ve been thinking that we can only be in trouble if some of the Solarians are still here. They don’t have to be. They can be gone. It may be that the robots – or at least some specially designed robots can be dangerous. And if Lady Gladia can mobilize her robots in this place – it used to be her estate – and make them defend her and us, too, we may well be able to neutralize anything they’ve left behind.”

“Can she do that?” said Oser.

“We’re going to see,” said D.G.

22.

“Thank you, Daneel,” Gladia said, “You did well.” Her face seemed pinched together, however. Her lips were thin and bloodless, her cheeks pale. Then, in a lower voice. “I wish I had not come.”

Giskard said, “It is a useless wish, Madam Gladia. Friend Daneel and I will remain outside the cabin to make sure you are not further disturbed.”

The corridor was empty and remained so, but Daneel and Giskard managed to speak in sound-wave intensities below the human threshold, exchanging thoughts in their brief and condensed way.

Giskard said, “Madam Gladia made an injudicious decision in refusing to retire. That is clear.”

“I presume, friend Giskard,” said Daneel, “that there was no possibility of maneuvering her into changing that decision.”

“It was far too firm, friend Daneel, and taken too quickly. The same was true of the intention of Niss, the Settler. Both his curiosity concerning Madam Gladia and his contempt and animosity toward you were too strong to manage without serious mental harm. The other four I could handle. It was quite possible to keep them from intervening. Their astonishment at your ability to handle Niss froze them naturally and I had only to strengthen that slightly.”

“That was fortune, friend Giskard. Had those four joined Mr. Niss, I would have been faced with the difficult choice of forcing Madam Gladia into a humiliating retreat or of badly damaging one or two of the Settlers to frighten off the rest. I think I would have had to choose the former alternative but it, too, would have caused me grave discomfort.”

“You are well, friend Daneel?”

“Quite well. My damage to Mr. Niss was minimal.”

“Physically, friend Daneel, it was. Within his mind, however, there was great humiliation, which was to him much Worse than the physical damage. Since I could sense that, I could not have done what you did so easily. And yet, friend Daneel –”

“Yes, friend Giskard?”

“I am disturbed over the future. On Aurora, through all the decades of my existence, I have been able to work slowly, to wait for opportunities of touching minds gently, without doing harm; of strengthening what is already there, of weakening what is already attenuated, of pushing gently in the direction of existing impulse. Now, however, we are coming to a time of crisis in which emotions will run high, decisions will be taken quickly, and events will race past us. If I am to do any good at all, I will have to act quickly, too, and the Three Laws of Robotics prevent me from doing so. It takes time to weigh the subtleties of comparative physical and mental harm. Had I been alone with Madam Gladia at the time of the Setters’ approach, I do not see what course I could have taken that I would not have recognized as entailing serious damage to Madam Gladia, to one or more of the Settlers, to myself – or possibly to all who were involved.”

Daneel said, “What is there to do, friend Giskard?”

“Since it is impossible to modify the Three Laws, friend Daneel, once again we must come to the conclusion that there is nothing we can do but await failure.”

7. The Overseer

23.

IT WAS MORNING on Solaria, morning on the estate – her estate. Off in the distance was the establishment that might have been her establishment. Somehow twenty decades dropped away and Aurora seemed to her to be a far-off dream that had never happened.

She turned to D.G., who was tightening the belt about his thin outer garment, a belt from which two sidearms hung. On his left hip was the neuronic whip; on his right, something shorter and bulkier that she guessed was a blaster.

“Are we going to the house?” she asked.

“Eventually,” said D.G. with a certain absence of mind. He was inspecting each sidearm in turn, holding one of them to his ear as though he were listening for a faint buzz that would tell him it was alive.

“Just the four of us?” She automatically turned her eyes to each of the others: D.G., Daneel

She said to Daneel, “Where is Giskard, Daneel?”

Daneel said, “It seemed to him, Madam Gladia, that it would be wise to act as an advance guard. As a robot, he might not be noticeable among other robots – and if there should be anything wrong, he could warn us. In any case, he is more expendable than either yourself or the captain.”

“Good robotic thinking,” said D.G. grimly. “It’s just as well. Come, we’re moving forward now.”

“Just the three of us?” said Gladia, a touch plaintively. “To be honest, I lack Giskard’s robotic ability to accept expendability.”

D.G. said, “We’re all expendable, Lady Gladia. Two ships have been destroyed, every member of each crew indiscriminately brought to an end. There’s no safety in numbers here.”

“You’re not making me feel any better, D.G.”

“Then I’ll try. The earlier ships were not prepared. Our ship is. And I’m prepared, too.” He slapped his two hands to his hips. “And you’ve got a robot with you who has showed himself to be an efficient protector. What’s more, you yourself are our best weapon. You know how to order robots to do what you want them to do and that may well be crucial. You are the only one with us who can do that and the earlier ships had no one at all of your caliber. Come, then –”

They moved forward. Gladia said, after a while, “We’re not walking toward the house.”

“No, not yet. First, we’re walking toward a group of robots. You see them, I hope.”

“Yes, I do, but they’re not doing anything.”

“No, they’re not. There were many more robots present when we first landed. Most of them have gone, but these remain. Why?”

“If we ask them, they’ll tell us.”

“You will ask them, Lady Gladia.”

“They’ll answer you, D.G., as readily as they’ll answer me. We’re equally human.”

D.G. stopped short and the other two stopped with him. He turned to Gladia and said, smiling, “My dear Lady Gladia, equally human? A Spacer and a Settler? Whatever has come over you?”

“We are equally human to a robot,” she said waspishly. “And please don’t play games. I did not play the game of Spacer and Earthman with your Ancestor. “

D.G.’s smile vanished. “That’s true. My apologies, my lady. I shall try to control my sense of the sardonic for, after all, on this world we are allies.”

He said, a moment later, “Now, madam, what I want you to do is to find out what orders the robots have been given – if any; if there are any robots that might, by some chance, know you; if there are any human beings on the estate or on the world; or anything else it occurs to you to ask. They shouldn’t be dangerous; they’re robots and you’re human; they can’t hurt you. To be sure,” he added, remembering, “your Daneel rather manhandled Niss, but that was under conditions that don’t apply here. And Daneel may go with you.”

Respectfully, Daneel said, “I would in any case accompany Lady Gladia, Captain. That is my function.”

“Giskard’s function, too, I imagine,” said D.G., “and yet he’s wandered off.”

“For a purpose, Captain, that he discussed with me and that we agreed was an essential way of protecting Lady Gladia.”

“Very well. You two move forward. I’ll cover you both.” He drew the weapon on his right hip. “If I call out ‘Drop,’ the two of you fall down instantly. This thing doesn’t play favorites.”

“Please don’t use it as anything but a last resort, D.G.,” said Gladia. “There would scarcely be an occasion to against robots. – Come, Daneel!”

Off she went, stepping forward rapidly and firmly toward the group of about a dozen robots that were standing just in front of a line of low bushes with the morning sun reflecting in glints here and – there from their burnished exteriors.

24.

The robots did not retreat, nor did they advance. They remained calmly in place. Gladia counted them. Eleven in plain sight. There might be others, possibly, that were unseen.

They were designed Solaria-fashion. Very polished. Very smooth. No illusion of clothing and not much realism. They were almost like mathematical abstractions of the human body, with no two of them quite alike.

She had the feeling that they were by no means as flexible or complex as Auroran robots but were more single-mindedly adapted to specific tasks.

She stopped at least four meters from the line of robots and Daneel (she sensed) stopped as soon as she did and remained less than a meter behind. He was close enough to interfere at once in case of need, but was far enough back to make it clear that she was the dominant spokesperson of the pair. The robots before her, she was certain, viewed Daneel as a human being, but she also knew that Daneel was too conscious of himself as a robot to presume upon the misconception of other robots.

Gladia said, “Which one of you will speak with me?”

There was a brief period of silence, as though an unspoken conference were taking place. Then one robot took a step forward. “Madam, I will speak.”

“Do you have a name?”

“No, madam. I have only a serial number.”

“How long have you been operational?”

“I have been operational twenty-nine years, madam.”

“Has anyone else in this group been operational for longer?”

“No, madam. It is why I, rather than another, am speaking.”

“How many robots are employed on this estate?”

“I do not have that figure, madam.”

“Roughly.”

“Perhaps ten thousand, madam.”

“Have any been operational for longer than twenty decades?”

‘The agricultural robots include some who may, madam.”

“And the household robots?”

“They have not been operational long, madam. The masters prefer new-model robots.”

Gladia nodded, turned to Daneel, and said, “That makes sense. It was so in my day, too.”

She turned back to the robot. “To whom does this estate belong?”

“It is the Zoberlon Estate, madam.”

“How long has it belonged to the Zoberlon family?”

“Longer, madam, than I have been operational. I do not know how much longer, but the information can be obtained.”

“To whom did it belong before the Zoberlons took possession?”

“I do not know, madam, but the information can be obtained.”

“Have you ever heard of the Delmarre family?”

“No, madam.”

Gladia turned to Daneel and said, rather ruefully, “I’m trying to lead the robot, little by little, as Elijah might once have done, but I don’t think I know how to do it properly.”

“On the contrary, Lady Gladia,” said Daneel gravely, “it seems to me you have established much. It is not likely that any robot on this estate, except perhaps for a few of the agriculturals, would have any memory of you. Would you have encountered any of the agriculturals in your time?”

Gladia shook her head. “Never! I don’t recall seeing any of them even in the distance.”

“It is clear, then, that you are not known on this estate.”

“Exactly. And poor D.G. has brought us along for nothing. If he expected any good of me, he has failed.”

“To know the truth is always useful, madam. Not to be known is, in this case, less useful than to be known, but not to know whether one is known or not would be less useful still. Are there not, perhaps, other points on which you might elicit information?”

“Yes, let’s see –” For a few seconds, she was lost in thought, then she said softly, “It’s odd. When I speak to these robots, I speak with a pronounced Solarian accent. Yet I do not speak so to you.”

Daneel said, “It is not surprising, Lady Gladia. The robots speak with such an accent, for they are Solarian. That brings back the days of your youth and you speak, automatically, as you spoke then. You are at once yourself, however, when you turn to me because I am part of your present world.”

A slow smile appeared on Gladia’s face and she said, “You reason more and more like a human being, Daneel.”

She turned back to the robots and was keenly aware of the peacefulness of the surroundings. The sky was an almost unmarked blue, except for a thin line of clouds on the western horizon (indicating that it might turn cloudy in the afternoon). There was the sound of rustling leaves in a light wind, the whirring of insects, a lonely birdcall. No sound of human beings. There might be many robots about, but they worked silently. There weren’t the exuberant sounds of human beings that she had grown accustomed to (painfully, at first) on Aurora.

But now back on Solaria, she found the peace wonderful. It had not been all bad on Solaria. She had to admit it.

She said to the robot quickly, with a note of compulsion edging her voice, “Where are your masters?”

It was useless, however, to try to hurry or alarm a robot or to catch it off-guard. It said, without any sign of perturbation. “They are gone, madam.”

“Where have they gone?”

“I do not know, madam. I was not told.”

“Which of you knows?”

There was a complete silence.

Gladia said, “Is there any robot on the estate who would know?”

The robot said, “I do not know of any, madam.”

“Did the masters take robots with them?”

“Yes, madam.”

“Yet they didn’t take you. Why do you remain behind?”

“To do our work, madam.”

“Yet you stand here and do nothing. Is that work?”

“We guard the estate from those from outside, madam.”

“Such as we?”

“Yes, madam.”

“But here we are and yet you still do nothing. Why is that?”

“We observe, madam. We have no further orders.”

“Have you reported your observations?”

“Yes, madam.”

“To whom?”

“To the overseer, madam.”

“Where is the overseer?”

“In the mansion, madam.”

“Ah.” Gladia turned and walked briskly back to D.G.

Daneel followed.

“Well?” said D.G. He was holding both weapons at the ready, but put them back in their holsters as they returned.

Gladia shook her head. “Nothing. No robot knows me. No robot, I’m sure, knows where the Solarians have gone. But they report to an overseer.”

“An overseer?”

“On Aurora and the other Spacer worlds, the overseer on large estates with numerous robots is some human whose profession it is to organize and direct groups of working robots in the fields, mines, and industrial establishments.”

“Then there are Solarians left behind.”

Gladia shook her head. “Solaria is an exception. The ratio of robots to human beings has always been so high that it has not been the custom to assign a man or woman to oversee the robots. That job has been done by another robot, one that is specially programmed.”

“Then there is a robot in that mansion” – D.G. nodded with his head –” who is more advanced than these and who might profitably be questioned.”

“Perhaps, but I am not certain it is safe to attempt to go into the mansion.”

D.G. said sardonically, “It is only another robot.”

“The mansion may be booby-trapped.”

“This field may be booby-trapped.”

Gladia said, “It would be better to send one of the robots to the mansion to tell the overseer that human beings wish to speak to him.”

D.G. said, “That will not be necessary. That job has apparently been done already. The overseer is emerging and is neither a robot nor a ‘him.’ What I see is a human female.”

Gladia looked up in astonishment. Advancing rapidly toward them was a tall, well-formed, and exceedingly attractive woman. Even at a distance, there was no doubt whatever as to her sex.

25.

D.G. smiled broadly. He seemed to be straightening himself a bit, squaring his shoulders, throwing them back. One hand went lightly to his beard, as though to make sure it was sleek and smooth.

Gladia looked at him with disfavor. She said, “That is not a Solarian woman.”

“How can you tell?” said D.G.

“No Solarian woman would allow herself to be seen so freely by other human beings. Seen, not viewed.”

“I know the distinction, my lady. Yet you allow me to see you.”

“I have lived over twenty decades on Aurora. Even so I have enough Solarian left in me still not to appear to others like that.”

“She has a great deal to display, madam. I would say she is taller than I am and as beautiful as a sunset.”

The overseer had stopped twenty meters short of their position and the robots had moved aside so that none of them remained between the woman on one side and the three from the ship on the oilier.

D.G. said, “Customs can change in twenty decades.”

“Not something as basic as the Solarian dislike of human contact,” said Gladia sharply. “Not in two hundred decades.” She had slipped into her Solarian twang again.

“I think you underestimate social plasticity. Still, Solarian or not, I presume she’s a Spacer – and if there are other Spacers like that, I’m all for peaceful coexistence.”

Gladia’s look of disapproval deepened. “Well, do you intend to stand and gaze in that fashion for the next hour or two? Don’t you want me to question the woman?”

D.G. started and turned to look at Gladia with distinct annoyance. “You question the robots, as you’ve done. I question the human beings.”

“Especially the females, I suppose.”

“I wouldn’t like to boast, but –”

“It is a subject on which I have never known a man who didn’t.”

Daneel interposed, “I do not think the woman will wait longer. If you wish to retain the initiative, Captain, approach her now. I will follow, as I did with Madam Gladia.”

“I scarcely need the protection,” said D.G. brusquely.

“You are a human being and I must not, through inaction, allow harm to come to you.”

D.G. walked forward briskly, Daneel following. Gladia, reluctant to remain behind alone, advanced a bit tentatively.

The overseer watched quietly. She wore a smooth white robe that reached down to mid-thigh and was belted at the waist. It showed a deep and inviting cleavage and her nipples were clearly visible against the thin material of the robe. There was no indication that she was wearing anything else but a pair of shoes.

When D.G. stopped, a meter of space separated them. Her skin, he could see, was flawless, her cheekbones were high, her eyes wide-set and somewhat slanted, her expression serene.

“Madam,” said D.G., speaking as close an approximation to Auroran Patrician as he could manage, “have I the pleasure of speaking to the overseer of this estate?”

The woman listened for a moment and then said, in an accent so thickly Solarian as to seem almost comic when coming from her perfectly shaped mouth, “You are not a human being.”

She then flashed into action so quickly that Gladia, still some ten meters off, could not see in detail what had happened. She saw only a blur of motion and then D.G. lying on his back motionless and the woman standing there with his weapons, one in each hand.

26.

What stupefied Gladia most in that one dizzying moment was that Daneel had not moved in either prevention or reprisal.

But even as the thought struck her, it was out of date, for Daneel had already caught the woman’s left wrist and twisted it, saying, “Drop those weapons at once,” in a harsh peremptory voice she had never heard him use before. It was inconceivable that he should so address a human being.

The woman said, just as harshly in her higher register, “You are not a human being.” Her right arm came up and she fired the weapon it held. For a moment, a faint glow flickered over Daneel’s body and Gladia, unable to make a sound in her state of shock, felt her sight dim. She had never in her life fainted, but this seemed a prelude.

Daneel did not dissolve, nor was there an explosive report. Daneel, Gladia realized, had prudently seized the arm that held the blaster. The other held the neuronic whip and it was that which had been discharged in full – and at close range – upon Daneel. Had he been human, the massive stimulation of his sensory nerves might well have killed him or left him permanently disabled. Yet he was, after all, however human in appearance, a robot and his equivalent of a nervous system did not react to the whip.

Daneel seized the other arm now, forcing it up. He said again, “Drop those weapons or I will tear each arm from its socket.”

“Will you?” said the woman. Her arms contracted and, for a moment, Daneel was lifted off the ground. Daneel’s legs swung backward, then forward, pendulum-like, using the points where the arms joined as a pivot. His feet struck the woman with force and both fell heavily to the ground.

Gladia, without putting the thought into words, realized that although the woman looked as human as Daneel did, she was just as nonhuman. A sense of instant outrage flooded Gladia, who was suddenly Solarian to the core – outrage that a robot should use force on a human being. Granted that she might somehow have recognized Daneel for what he was, but how dare she strike D.G.

Gladia was running forward, screaming. It never occurred to her to fear a robot simply because it had knocked down a strong man with a blow and was battling an even stronger robot to a draw.

“How dare you?” she screamed in a Solarian accent so thick that it grated on her own ear – but how else does one speak to a Solarian robot? “How dare you, girl? Stop all resistance immediately!”

The woman’s muscles seemed to relax totally and simultaneously, as though an electric current had suddenly been shut off. Her beautiful eyes looked at Gladia without enough humanity to seem startled. She said in an indistinct, hesitating voice, “My regrets, madam.”

Daneel was on his feet, staring down watchfully at the woman who lay on the grass. D.G., suppressing a groan, was struggling upright.

Daneel bent for the weapons, but Gladia waved him away furiously.

“Give me those weapons, girl,” she said.

The woman said, “Yes, madam.”

Gladia snatched at them, chose the blaster swiftly, and handed it to Daneel. “Destroy her when that seems best, Daneel. That’s an order.” She handed the neuronic whip to D.G. and said, ‘This is useless here, except against me – and yourself. Are you all right?”

“No, I’m not all right,” muttered D.G., rubbing one hip. “Do you mean she’s a robot?”

“Would a woman have thrown you like that?”

“Not any whom I have ever met before. I said there might be special robots on Solaria who were programmed to be dangerous.”

“Of course,” said Gladia unkindly, “but when you saw something that looked like your idea of a beautiful woman, you forgot.”

“Yes, it is easy to be wise after the fact.”

Gladia sniffed and turned again to the robot, “What is your name, girl?”

“I am called Landaree, madam.”

“Get up, Landaree.”

Landaree rose much as Daneel had – as though she were on springs. Her struggle with Daneel seemed to have left her totally unharmed.

Gladia said, “Why, against the First Law, have you attacked these human beings?”

“Madam,” said Landaree firmly, “these are not human beings.”

“And do you say that I am not a human being?”

“No, madam, you a human being.”

“Then, as a human being, I am defining these two men as human beings. – Do you hear me?”

“Madam,” said Landaree a little more softly, “these are not human beings.”

“They are indeed human beings because I tell you they are. You are forbidden to attack them or harm them in any way.”

Landaree stood mute.

“Do you understand what I have said?” Gladia’s voice grew more Solarian still as she reached for greater intensity.

“Madam,” said Landaree, “these are not human beings.”

Daneel said to Gladia softly, “Madam, she has been given orders of such firmness that you cannot easily countervail them.”

“We’ll see about that,” said Gladia, breathing quickly.

Landaree looked about. The group of robots, during the few minutes of conflict, had come closer to Gladia and her two companions. In the background were two robots who, Gladia decided, were not members of the original group and they were carrying between them, with some difficulty, a large and very massive device of some sort. Landaree gestured to them and they moved forward a bit more quickly.

Gladia cried out, “Robots, stop!”

They stopped.

Landaree said, “Madam, I am fulfilling my duties. I am following my instructions.”

Gladia said, “Your duty, girl, is to obey my orders!”

Landaree said, “I cannot be ordered to disobey my instructions!”

Gladia said, “Daneel, blast her!”

Afterward, Gladia was able to reason out what had happened. Daneel’s reaction time was much faster than a human being’s would have been and he knew that he was facing a robot against which the Three Laws did not inhibit violence. However, she looked so human that even the precise knowledge that she was a robot did not totally overcome his inhibition. He followed the order more slowly than he should have.

Landaree, whose definition of “human being” was clearly not the one Daneel used, was not inhibited by his appearance and she stuck the more quickly. She had her grip on the blaster and again the two struggled.

D.G. turned his neuronic whip butt-first and came in at a half-run to strike. He hit her head squarely, but it had no effect on the robot and her leg sent him flailing backward.

Gladia said, “Robot! Stop!” Her clenched hands were raised.

Landaree shouted in a stentorian contralto, “All of you! Join me! The two apparent males are not human beings. Destroy them without harming the female in any way.”

If Daneel could be inhibited by a human appearance, the same was true in considerably greater intensity for the simple Solarian robots, who inched forward slowly and intermittently.

“Stop!” shrieked Gladia. The robots stopped, but the order had no effect on Landaree.

Daneel held fast to the blaster, but was bending backward under the force of Landaree’s apparently greater strength.

Gladia, in distraction, looked about as though hoping to find some weapon somewhere.

D.G. was attempting to manipulate his radio transmitter. He said, grunting, “It’s been damaged. I think I fell on it.”

“What do we do?”

“We have to make it back to the ship. Quickly.”

Gladia said, “Then run. I can’t abandon Daneel.” She faced the battling robots, crying out wildly, “Landaree, stop! Landaree, stop!”

“I must not stop, madam,” said Landaree. “My instructions are precise.”

Daneel’s fingers were forced open and Landaree had the blaster again.

Gladia threw herself before Daneel. “You must not harm this human being.”

“Madam,” said Landaree, her blaster pointed at Gladia, unwavering. “You are standing in front of something that looks like a human being but is not a human being. My instructions are to destroy such on sight.” Then, in a louder voice, “You two porters – to the ship.”

The two robots, carrying the massive device between them, renewed their forward movement.

“Robots, stop!” screamed Gladia and the forward motion stopped. The robots trembled in place, as though attempting to move forward and yet not quite able to do so.

Gladia said, “You cannot destroy my human friend Daneel without destroying me – and you yourself admit that I am a human being and therefore must not be harmed.”

Daneel said in a low voice, “My lady, you must not draw harm upon yourself in an effort to protect me.”

Landaree said, “This is useless, madam. I can remove you easily from your present position and then destroy the nonhuman being behind you. Since that may harm you, I ask you, with all respect, to move from your present position voluntarily.”

“You must, my lady,” said Daneel.

“No, Daneel. I’ll stay here. In the time it will take her to move me, you run!”

“I cannot run faster than the beam of a blaster – and if I try to run, she will shoot through you rather than not at all. Her instructions are probably that firm. I regret, my lady, that this will cause you unhappiness.”

And Daneel lifted the struggling Gladia and tossed her lightly to one side.

Landaree’s finger tightened on the contact, but never completed the pressure. She remained motionless.

Gladia, who had staggered to a sitting position, got to her feet. Cautiously, D.G., who had remained in place during the last exchanges, approached Landaree. Daneel quite calmly reached out and took the blaster from her unresisting fingers.

“I believe,” said Daneel, “that this robot is permanently deactivated.”

He pushed her gently and she fell over in one piece, with her limbs, torso, and head in the relative positions they occupied when she was standing. Her arm was still bent, her hand was holding an invisible blaster, and her finger was pressing on an invisible contact.

Through the trees to one side of the grassy field on which the drama had played itself out Giskard was approaching, his robotic face showing no signs of curiosity, though his words might have.

“What has taken place in my absence?” he asked.

27.

The walk back to the ship was rather anticlimactic. Now that the frenzy of fear and action was over, Gladia felt hot and cross. D.G. limped rather painfully and they progressed slowly, partly because of the limp and partly because the two Solarian robots were still carrying their massive instrument, plodding along under its weight.

D.G. looked over his shoulder at them. “They obey my orders now that that overseer is out of action.”

Gladia said through her teeth, “Why didn’t you run at the end and get help? Why did you remain helplessly watching?”

“Well,” said D.G., with an attempt at the kind of lightness he would have showed easily were he feeling better, “with you refusing to leave Daneel, I rather hesitated to play the coward by comparison.”

“You fool! I was safe. She would not have harmed me.”

Daneel said, “Madam, it distresses me to contradict you, but I think she would have done so as her urge to destroy me grew stronger.”

Gladia turned on him hotly. “And that was a smart thing you did, pushing me out of the way. Did you want to be destroyed?”

“Rather than see you harmed, madam, yes. My failure to stop the robot through inhibitions set up by her human appearance demonstrated, in any case, an unsatisfactory limit to my usefulness to you.”

“Even so,” said Gladia, “she would have hesitated to shoot me, since I am human, for a perceptible period of time and you could have had the blaster in your own possession by that time.”

“I couldn’t gamble your life, madam, on anything as uncertain as her hesitation,” said Daneel.

“And you,” said Gladia, showing no signs of having heard Daneel and turning to D.G. again, “shouldn’t have brought the blaster in the first place.”

D.G. said, frowning, “Madam, I am making allowances for the fact that we have all been very close to death. The robots do not mind that and I have grown somehow accustomed to danger. To you, however, this was an unpleasant novelty and you are being childish as a result. I forgive you – a little. But please listen. There was no way I could have known the blaster would be taken from me so easily. Had I not brought the weapon, the overseer could have killed me with her bare hands as quickly and as effectively as she could have by blaster. Nor was there any point in my running, to answer an earlier complaint of yours. I could not outrun a blaster. Now please continue if you must still get it out of your system, but I do not intend to reason with you any further.”

Gladia looked from D.G. to Daneel and back and said in a low voice, “I suppose I am being unreasonable. Very well, no more hindsights.”

They had reached the ship. Crew members poured out at the sight of them. Gladia noticed they were armed.

D.G. beckoned to his second-in-command. “Oser, I presume you see that object the two robots are carrying?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, have them carry it on board. Have it put in the security room and kept there. The security room is then to be locked and kept locked.” He turned away for a moment, then turned back. “And Oser, as soon as that is done, we win prepare to take off again.”

Oser said, “Captain, shall we keep the robots as well?”

“No. They are too simple in design to be worth much and, under the circumstances, taking them would create undesirable consequences. The device they are carrying is much more valuable than they are.”

Giskard watched the device being slowly and very carefully maneuvered into the ship. He said, “Captain, I am guessing that that is a dangerous object.”

“I’m under that impression, too,” said D.G. “I suspect that the ship would have been destroyed soon after we were.”

“That thing?” said Gladia. “What is it?”

“I can’t be certain, but I believe it is a nuclear intensifier. I’ve seen experimental models on Baleyworld and this looks like a big brother.”

“What is a nuclear intensifier?”

“As the name implies, Lady Gladia, it’s a device that intensifies nuclear fusion.” “How does it do that?” D.G. shrugged. “I’m not a physicist, my lady. A stream of W particles is involved and they mediate the weak interaction. That’s all I know about it.”

“What does that do?” asked Gladia.

“Well, suppose the ship has its power supply as it has right now, for instance. There are small numbers of protons, derived from our hydrogen fuel supply, that are ultrahot and fusing to produce power. Additional hydrogen is constantly being heated to produce free protons, which, when hot enough, also fuse to maintain that power. If the stream of W particles from the nuclear intensifier strikes the fusing protons, these fuse more quickly and deliver more heat. That heat produces protons and sets them to fusing more quickly than they should be and their fusion produces still more heat, which intensifies the vicious cycle. In a tiny fraction of a second, enough of the fuel fuses to form a tiny thermonuclear bomb and the entire ship and everything upon it is vaporized.”

Gladia looked awed. “Why doesn’t everything ignite? Why doesn’t the whole planet blow up?”

“I don’t suppose there’s danger of that, madam. The protons have to be ultrahot and fusing. Cold protons are so unapt to fuse that even when the tendency is intensified to the full extent of such a device, that still is not enough to allow fusion. At least, that’s what I gathered from a lecture I once attended. And nothing but hydrogen is affected, as far as I know. Even in the case of ultrahot protons, the heat produced does not increase without measure. The temperature cools with distance from the intensifier beam, so that only a limited amount of fusion can be forced. Enough to destroy the ship, of course, but there’s no question of blowing up the hydrogen-rich oceans, for instance, even if part of the ocean were ultraheated – and certainly not if it were cold.”

“But if the machine gets turned on accidentally in the storage room –”

“I don’t think it can get turned on.” D.G. opened his hand and in it rested a two-centimeter cube of polished metal. “From what little I know of such things, this is an activator and the nuclear intensifier can do nothing without it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Not entirely, but we’ll just have to chance it, since I must get that thing back to Baleyworld. Now let’s get on board.”

Gladia and her two robots moved up the gangplank and into the ship. D.G. followed and spoke briefly to some of his officers.

He then said to Gladia, his weariness beginning to show, “It will take us a couple of hours to place all our gear on board and be ready for takeoff and every moment increases the danger.”

“Danger?”

“You don’t suppose that fearful woman robot is the only one of its kind that may exist on Solaria, do you? Or that the nuclear intensifier we have captured is the only one of its kind? I suppose it will take time for other humanoid robots and other nuclear intensifiers to be brought to this spot – perhaps considerable time – but we must give them as little as possible. And in the meantime, madam, let us to go your room and conduct some necessary business.”

“What necessary business would that be, Captain?”

“Well,” said D.G., motioning them forward, “in view of the fact that I may have been victimized by treason, I think I will conduct a rather informal court-martial.”

28.

D.G. said, after seating himself with an audible groan, “What I really want is a hot shower, a rubdown, a good meal, and a chance to sleep, but that will all have to wait till we’re off the planet. It will have to wait in your case, too, madam. Some things will not wait, however. – My question is this. Where were you, Giskard, while the rest of us were faced with considerable danger?”

Giskard said, “Captain, it did not seem to me that if robots alone were left on the planet, they would represent any danger. Moreover, Daneel remained with you.”

Daneel said, “Captain, I agreed that Giskard would reconnoiter and that I would remain with Madam Gladia and with you.”

“You two agreed, did you?” said D.G. “Was anyone else consulted?”

“No, Captain,” said Giskard.

“If you were certain that the robots were harmless, Giskard, how did you account for the fact that two ships were destroyed?”

“It seemed to me, Captain, that there must remain human beings on the planet, but that they would do their best not to be seen by you. I wanted to know where they were and what they were doing. I was in search of them, covering the ground as rapidly as I could. I questioned the robots I met.”

“Did you find any human beings?”

“No, Captain.”

“Did you examine the house out of which the overseer emerged?”

“No, Captain, but I was certain there were no human beings within it. I still am.”

“It contained the overseer.”

“Yes, Captain, but the overseer was a robot.”

“A dangerous robot.”

“To my regret, Captain, I did not realize that.”

“You feel regret, do you?”

“It is an expression I choose to describe the effect on my positronic circuits. It is a rough analogy to the term as human beings seem to use it, Captain.”

“How is it you didn’t realize a robot might be dangerous?”

“By the Three Laws of Robotics –”

Gladia interrupted, “Stop this, Captain. Giskard only knows what he is programmed to know. No robot is dangerous to human beings, unless there is a deadly quarrel between human beings and the robot must attempt to stop it. In such a quarrel, Daneel and Giskard would undoubtedly have defended us with as little harm to others as possible.”

“Is that so?” D.G. put two fingers to the bridge of his nose and pinched. “Daneel did defend us. We were fighting robots, not human beings, so he had no problem in deciding whom to defend and to what extent. Yet he showed astonishing lack of success, considering that the Three Laws do not prevent him from doing harm to robots. Giskard remained out of it, returning at the precise moment when it was over. Is it possible that there is a bond of sympathy among robots? Is it possible that robots, when defending human beings against robots, somehow feel what Giskard calls ‘regret’ at having to do so and perhaps fail – or absent themselves –”

“No!” exploded Gladia forcefully.

“No?” said D.G. “Well, I don’t pretend to be an expert roboticist. Are you, Lady Gladia?”

“I am not a roboticist of any sort,” said Gladia, “but I have lived with robots all my life. What you suggest is ridiculous. Daneel was quite prepared to give his life for me and Giskard would have done the same.”

“Would any robot have done so?”

“Of course.”

“And yet this overseer, this Landaree, was quite ready to attack me and destroy me. Let us grant that, in some mysterious way, she detected that Daneel, despite appearances, was as much a robot as she herself was – despite appearances – and that she had no inhibitions when it came to harming him. How is it, though, that she attacked me when I am unquestionably a human being? She hesitated at you, admitting you were human, but not me. How could a robot discriminate between the two of us? Was she perhaps not really a robot?”

“She was a robot,” said Gladia. “Of course she was. But – the truth is, I don’t know why she acted as she did. I have never before heard of such a thing. I can only suppose the Solarians, having learned how to construct humanoid robots. designed them without the protection of the Three Laws, though I would have sworn that the Solarians – of all Spacers – would have been the last to do so. Solarians are so outnumbered by their own robots as to be utterly dependent on them – to a far greater extent than any other Spacers are – and for that reason they fear them more. Subservience and even a bit of stupidity were built into all Solarian robots. The Three Laws were stronger on Solaria than anywhere else, not weaker. Yet I can think of no other way of explaining Landaree than to suppose that the First Law was –”

Daneel said, “Excuse me, Madam Gladia, for interrupting. May I have your permission to attempt an explanation of the overseer’s behavior?”

D.G. said sardonically, “It comes to that, I suppose. Only a robot can explain a robot.”

“Sir,” said Daneel, “unless we understand the overseer, we might not be able to take effective measures in the future against the Solarian danger. I believe I have a way of accounting for her behavior.”

“Go ahead,” said D.G.

“The overseer,” said Daneel, “did not take instant measures against us. She stood and watched us for a while, apparently uncertain as to how to proceed. When you, Captain, approached and addressed her, she announced that you were not human and attacked you instantly. When I intervened and cried out that she was a robot, she announced that I was not human and attacked me at once, too. When Lady Gladia came forward, however, shouting at her, the overseer recognized her as human and, for a while, allowed herself to be dominated.”

“Yes, I remember all that, Daneel. But what does it mean?”

“It seems to me, Captain, that it is possible to alter a robot’s behavior fundamentally without ever touching the Three Laws, provided, for instance, that you alter the definition of a human being. A human being, after all, is only what it is defined to be.”

“Is that so? What do you consider a human being to be?”

Daneel was not concerned with the presence or absence of sarcasm. He said, “I was constructed with a detailed description of the appearance and behavior of human beings, Captain. Anything that fits that description is a human being to me. Thus, you have the appearance and the behavior, while the overseer had the appearance but not the behavior.

“To the overseer, on the other hand, the key property of a human being was speech, Captain. The Solarian accent is a distinctive one and to the overseer something that looked like a human being was defined as a human being only if it spoke like a Solarian. Apparently, anything that looked like a human being but did not speak with a Solarian accent was to be destroyed without hesitation, as was any ship carrying such beings.”

D.G. said thoughtfully, “You may be right.”

“You have a Settler accent, Captain, as distinctive in its way as the Solarian accent is, but the two are widely different. As soon as you spoke, you defined yourself as nonhuman to the overseer, who announced that and attacked.”

“And you speak with an Auroran accent and were likewise attacked.”

“Yes, Captain, but Lady Gladia spoke with an authentic Solarian accent and so she was recognized as human.”

D.G. considered the matter silently for a while, then said, “That’s a dangerous arrangement, even for those who would make use of it. If a Solarian, for any reason, at any time addressed such a robot in a way that the robot did not consider an authentic Solarian accent, that Solarian would be attacked at once. If I were a Solarian, I would be afraid to approach such a robot. My very effort to speak pure Solarian might very likely throw me off and get me killed.”

“I agree, Captain: said Daneel, “and I would imagine that that is why those who manufacture robots do – not ordinarily limit the definition of a human being, but leave it as broad as possible. The Solarians, however, have left the planet. One might suppose that the fact that overseer robots have this dangerous programming is the best indication that the Solarians have really left and are not here to encounter the danger. The Solarians, it appears, are at this moment concerned only that no one who is not a Solarian be allowed to set foot on the planet.”

“Not even other Spacers?”

“I would expect, Captain, that it would be difficult to define a human being in such a way as to include the dozen of different Spacer accents and yet exclude the scores of different Settler accents. Keying the definition to the distinctive Solarian accent alone would be difficult enough.”

D.G. said, “You are very intelligent, Daneel. I disapprove of robots, of course, not in themselves but as an unsettling influence on society. And yet, with a robot such as yourself at my side, as you were once at the Ancestor’s –”

Gladia interrupted. “I’m afraid not, D.G. Daneel will never be a gift, nor will he ever be sold, nor can he be easily taken by force.”

D.G. lifted his hand in a smiling negative. “I was merely dreaming, Lady Gladia. I assure you that the laws of Baleyworld would make my possession of a robot unthinkable.”

Giskard said suddenly, “May I have your permission, Captain, to add a few words?”

D.G. said, “Ah, the robot who managed to avoid the action and who returned when all was safely over.”

“I regret that matters appear to be as you have stated. May I have your permission, Captain, to add a few words, notwithstanding?”

“Well, go on.”

“It would seem, Captain, that your decision to bring the Lady Gladia with you on this expedition has worked out very well. Had she been absent and had you ventured on your exploratory mission with only members of the ship’s crew as companions, you would all have been quickly killed and the ship destroyed. It was only Lady Gladia’s ability to speak like a Solarian and her courage in facing the overseer that changed the outcome.”

“Not so,” said D.G., “for we would all have been destroyed, possibly even Lady Gladia, but for the fortuitous event that the overseer spontaneously inactivated.”

“It was not fortuitous, Captain,” said Giskard, “and it is extremely unlikely that any robot will inactivate spontaneously. There has to be a reason for inactivation and I can suggest one possibility. Lady Gladia ordered the robot to stop on several occasions, as friend Daneel has told me, but the instructions under which the overseer worked were more forceful.

“Nevertheless, Lady Gladia’s actions served to blunt the overseer’s resolution, Captain. The fact that Lady Gladia was an undoubted human being, even by the overseer’s definition, and that she was acting in such a way as to make it necessary, perhaps, for the overseer to harm her – or even kill her – blunted it even farther. Thus, at the crucial moment, the two contrary requirements – having to destroy nonhuman beings and having to refrain from harming human beings – balanced and the robot froze, unable to do anything. Its circuits burned out.”

Gladia’s brows drew together in a puzzled frown. “But –” she began and then subsided.

Giskard went on, “It strikes me that it might be well for you to inform the crew of this. It might well ease their distrust of Lady Gladia if you stress what her initiative and courage have meant to every man in the crew, since it has kept them alive. It might also give them an excellent opinion of your own foresight in insisting on having her on board on this occasion, perhaps even against the advice of your own officers.”

D.G. let loose a great shout of laughter. “Lady Gladia, I see now why you will not be separated from these robots. They are not only as intelligent as human beings, they are every bit as devious. I congratulate you on your having them. – and now, if you don’t mind, I must hurry the crew. I don’t want to stay on Solaria for one moment more than necessary. And I promise you that you won’t be disturbed for hours. I know you can use freshening and rest as much as I can.”

After he was gone, Gladia remained for a while in deep thought, then turned to Giskard and said in Auroran Common, a patter version of Galactic Standard that was widespread on Aurora and difficult for any non-Auroran to understand, “Giskard, what is all this nonsense about the burning out of circuits?”

“My lady,” said Giskard, “I advanced it only as a possibility and nothing more. I thought it well to emphasize your role in putting an end to the overseer.”

“But how could you think he would believe that a robot could burn out that easily?”

“He knows very little about robots, madam. He may traffic in them, but he is from a world that doesn’t make use of them.”

“Yet I know a great deal about them and so do you. The overseer showed no signs whatever of balancing circuits; no stuttering, no trembling, no behavior difficulty of any kind. It just – stopped.”

Giskard said, “Madam since we do not know the precise specifications to which the overseer was designed, we may have to be content with ignorance as to the rationale behind the freeze.”

Gladia shook her head. “Just the same, it’s puzzling.”

Part III-Baleyworld

8. The Settler World

29.

D.G.’S SHIP WAS in space again, surrounded by the everlasting changelessness of the endless vacuum.

It had not come too soon for Gladia, who had but imperfectly suppressed the tension that arose from the possibility that a second overseer – with a second intensifier – might arrive without warning. The fact that it would be a quick death if it happened, an unexperienced death, was not quite satisfying. The tension had spoiled what would have otherwise been a luxuriant shower, along with various other forms of renewal of comfort.

It was not till after actual takeoff, after the coming of the soft, distant buzz of the protonic jets, that she could compose herself to sleep. Odd, she thought as consciousness began to slip away, that space should feel safer than the world of her youth, that she should leave Solaria with even greater relief the second time than she had the first.

But Solaria was no longer the world of her youth. It was a world without humanity, guarded over by distorted parodies of humanity; humanoid robots that made a mockery of the gentle Daneel and the thought-filled Giskard.

She slept at last – and while she slept, Daneel and Giskard, standing guard, could once more speak to each other.

Daneel said, “Friend Giskard, I am quite certain that it was you who destroyed the overseer.”

‘There was clearly no choice, friend Daneel. It was purely an accident that I arrived in time, for my senses were entirely occupied with searching out human beings and I found none. Nor would I have grasped the significance of events if it were not for Lady Gladia’s rage and despair. It was that which I sensed at a distance and which caused me to race to the scene – barely in time. In that respect, Lady Gladia did save the situation, at least as far as the captain’s existence and yours were concerned. I would still have saved the ship, I believe, even if I had arrived too late to save you.” He paused a moment and added, “I would have found it most unsatisfactory, friend Daneel, to arrive too late to save you.”

Daneel said, with a grave and formal tone of voice, “I thank you, friend Giskard. I am pleased that you were not inhibited by the human appearance of the overseer. That had slowed my reactions, as my appearance had slowed hers.”

“Friend Daneel, her physical appearance meant nothing to me because I was aware of the pattern of her thoughts. That pattern was so limited and so entirely different from the full range of human patterns that there was no need for me to make any effort to identify her in a positive manner. The negative identification as nonhuman was so clear I acted at once. I was not aware of my action, in fact, until after it had taken place.”

“I had thought this, friend Giskard, but I wished confirmation lest I misunderstand. May I assume, then, that you feel no discomfort over having killed what was, in appearance, a human being?”

“None, since it was a robot.”

“It seems to me that, had I succeeded in destroying her, I would have suffered some obstruction to the free positronic flow, no matter how thoroughly I understood her to be a robot.”

“The humanoid appearance, friend Daneel, cannot be fought off when that is all one can directly judge by. Seeing is so much more immediate than deducing. It was only because I could observe her mental structure and concentrate on that, that I could ignore her physical structure.”

“How do you suppose the overseer would have felt if she had destroyed us, judging from her mental structure?”

“She was given exceedingly firm instructions and there was no doubt in her circuits that you and the captain were nonhuman by her definition.”

“But she might have destroyed Madam Gladia as well.”

“Of that we cannot be certain, friend Daneel.”

“Had she done so, friend Giskard, would she have survived? Have you any way of telling?”

Giskard was silent for a considerable period. “I had insufficient time to study the mental pattern. I cannot say what her reaction might have been had she killed Madam Gladia.”

“If I imagine myself in the place of the overseer” – Daneel’s voice trembled and grew slightly lower in pitch –” it seems to me that I might kill a human being in order to save the life of another human being, whom, there might be some reason to think, it was more necessary to save. The action would, however, be difficult and damaging. To kill a human being merely in order to destroy something I considered nonhuman would be inconceivable.”

“She merely threatened. She did not carry through the threat.”

“Might she have, friend Giskard?”

“How can we say, since we don’t know the nature of her instructions?”

“Could the instructions have so completely negated the First Law?”

Giskard said, “Your whole purpose in this discussion, I see, has been to raise this question. I advise you to go no further.”

Daneel said stubbornly, “I will put it in the conditional, friend Giskard. Surely what may not be expressed as fact can be advanced as fantasy. If instructions could be hedged about with definitions and conditions, if the instructions could be made sufficiently detailed in a sufficiently forceful manner, might it be possible to kill a human being for a purpose less overwhelming than the saving of the life of another human being?”

Giskard said tonelessly, “I do not know, but I suspect that this might be possible.”

“But, then, if your suspicion should be correct, that would imply that it was possible to neutralize the First Law under specialized conditions. The First Law, in that case, and, therefore, certainly the other Laws might be modified into almost nonexistence. The Laws, even the First Law, might not be an absolute then, but might be whatever those who design robots defined it to be.”

Giskard said, “It is enough, friend Daneel. Go no further.”

Daneel said, “There is one more step, friend Giskard. Partner Elijah would have taken that additional step.”

“He was a human being. He could.”

“I must try. If the Laws of Robotics – even the First Law – are not absolutes and if human beings can modify them, might it not be that perhaps, under proper conditions, we ourselves might mod –”

He stopped.

Giskard said faintly, “Go no further.”

Daneel said, a slight hum obscuring his voice, “I go no further.”

There was a silence for a long time. It was with difficulty that the positronic circuitry in each ceased undergoing discords.

Finally, Daneel said, “Another thought arises. The overseer was dangerous not only because of the set of her instructions but because of her appearance. It inhibited me and probably the captain and could mislead and deceive human beings generally, as I deceived, without meaning to, First-Class Shipper Niss. He clearly was not aware, at first, that I was a robot.”

“And what follows from that, friend Daneel?”

“On Aurora, a number of humanoid robots were constructed at the Robotics Institute, under the leadership of Dr. Amadiro, after the designs of Dr. Fastolfe had been obtained.”

“This is well known.”

“What happened to those humanoid robots?”

“The project failed.”

In his turn, Daneel said, “This is well known. But it does not answer the question. What happened to those humanoid robots?”

“One can assume they were destroyed.”

“Such an assumption need not necessarily be correct. Were they, in actual fact, destroyed?”

“That would have been the sensible thing to do. What else with a failure?”

“How do we know the humanoid robots were a failure, except in that they were removed from sight?”

“Isn’t that sufficient, if they were removed from sight and destroyed?”

“I did not say ‘and destroyed,’ friend Giskard. That is more than we know. We know only that they were removed from sight.”

“Why should that be so, unless they were failures?”

“And if they were not failures, might there be no reason for their being removed from sight?”

“I can think of none, friend Daneel.”

“Think again, friend Giskard. Remember, we are talking now of humanoid robots who, we now think, might from the mere fact of their humanoid nature be dangerous. It has seemed to us in our previous discussion that there was a plan on foot on Aurora to defeat the Settlers – drastically, surely, and at a blow. We decided that these plans must be centered on the planet Earth. Am I correct so far?”

“Yes, friend Daneel.”

“Then might it not be that Dr. Amadiro is at the focus and center of this plan? His antipathy to Earth has been made plain these twenty decades. And if Dr. Amadiro has constructed a number of humanoid robots, where might these have been sent if they have disappeared from view? Remember that if Solarian roboticists can distort the Three Laws, Auroran roboticists can do the same.”

“Are you suggesting, friend Daneel, that the humanoid robots have been sent to Earth?”

“Exactly. There to deceive the Earthpeople through their human appearance and to make possible whatever it is that Dr. Amadiro intends as his blow against Earth.”

“You have no evidence for this.”

“Yet it is possible. Consider for yourself the steps of the argument.”

“If that were so, we would have to go to Earth. We would have to be there and somehow prevent the disaster.”

“Yes, that is so.”

“But we cannot go unless Lady Gladia goes and that is not likely.”

“If you can influence the captain to take this ship to Earth, Madam Gladia would have no choice but to go as well.”

Giskard said, “I cannot without harming him. He is firmly set on going to his own planet of Baleyworld. We must maneuver his trip to Earth – if we can – after he has done whatever he plans in Baleyworld.”

“Afterward may be too late.”

“I cannot help that. I must not harm a human being.”

“If it is too late – Friend Giskard, consider what that would mean.”

“I cannot consider what that would mean. I know only that I cannot harm a human being.”

“Then the First Law is not enough and we must –”

He could go no farther and both robots lapsed into helpless silence.

30.

Baleyworld came slowly into sharper view as the ship approached it. Gladia watched it intently in her cabin’s viewer; it was the first time she had ever seen a Settler world.

She had protested this leg of the journey when she had first been made aware of it by D.G., but he shrugged it off with a small laugh. “What would you have, my lady? I must lug this weapon of your people” – he emphasized “your” slightly –” to my people. And I must report to them, too.”

Gladia said coldly, “Your permission to take me along to Solaria was granted you by the Auroran Council on the condition that you bring me back.”

“Actually that is not so, my lady. There may have been some informal understanding to that effect, but there is nothing in writing. No formal agreement.”

“An informal understanding would bind me – or any civilized individual, D.G.”

“I’m sure of that, Madam Gladia, but we Traders live by money and by written signatures on legal documents. I would never, under any circumstances, violate a written contract or refuse to do that for which I have accepted payment.”

Gladia’s chin turned upward. “Is that a hint that I must pay you in order to be taken home?”

“Madam!”

“Come, come, D.G. Don’t waste mock indignation on me. If I am to be kept prisoner on your planet, say so and tell me why. Let me know exactly where I stand.”

“You are not my prisoner and win not be. In fact, I will honor this unwritten understanding. I will take you home – eventually. First, however, I must go to Baleyworld and you must come with me.”

“Why must I come with you?”

“The people of my world will want to see you. You are the heroine of Solaria. You saved us. You can’t deprive them of a chance of shouting themselves hoarse for you. Besides, you were the good friend of the Ancestor.”

“What do they know – or think they know – of that?” Gladia said sharply.

D.G. grinned. “Nothing to your discredit, I assure you. You are a legend and legends are larger than life – though I admit it would be easy for a legend to be larger than you, my lady – and a good deal nobler. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t want you on the world because you couldn’t live up to the legend. You’re not tall enough, beautiful enough, majestic enough. But when the story of Solaria comes out, you will suddenly meet all requirements. In fact, they may not want to let you go. You must remember we are talking of Baleyworld, the planet on which the story of the Ancestor is taken more seriously than on any other – and you are part of the story.”

“You are not to use that as an excuse to keep me in prison.”

“I promise you I won’t. And I promise I will get you home – when I can – when I can.”

Gladia did not remain as indignant somehow as she felt she had every right to be. She did want to see what a Settler world was like and, after all, this was Elijah Baley’s peculiar world. His son had founded it. He himself had spent his last decades here. On Baleyworld, there would be remnants of him – the name of the planet, his descendants, his legend.

So she watched the planet – and thought of Elijah.

31.

The watching brought her little and she felt disappointed. There was not much to be seen through the cloud layer that covered the planet. From her relatively small experience as a space traveler it seemed to her that the cloud layer was denser than usual for inhabited planets. They would be landing within hours, now, and

The signal light flashed and Gladia scrambled to push the HOLD button in answer. A few moments more and she pushed the ENTER button.

D.G. came in, smiling. “Inconvenient moment, my lady?”

“Not really,” said Gladia. “Simply a matter of putting on my gloves and inserting my nose plugs. I suppose I should wear them all the time, but both grow tiresome and, for some reason, I grow less concerned about infection.”

“Familiarity breeds contempt, my lady.”

“Let’s not call it contempt,” said Gladia, who found herself smiling.

“Thank you,” said D.G. “We’ll be landing soon, madam, and I have brought you a coverall, carefully sterilized and placed inside this plastic bag so that it has since been untouched by Settler hands. It’s simple to put on. You’ll have no trouble and you’ll find it covers everything but the nose and eyes.”

“Just for me, D.G.?”

“No, no, my lady. We all wear such things when outdoors at this season of the year. It is winter in our capital city at the present time and it is cold. We live on a rather cold world – heavy cloud cover, much precipitation, often snow.”

“Even in the tropical regions?”

“No, there it rends to be hot and dry. The population clusters in the cooler regions, however. We rather like it. It’s bracing and stimulating. The seas, which were seeded with Earth species of life, are fertile, so that fish and other creatures have multiplied abundantly. There’s no food shortage, consequently, even though land agriculture is limited and we’ll never be the breadbasket of the Galaxy. – The summers are short but quite hot and the beaches are then well populated, although you might find them uninteresting since we have a strong nudity taboo.”

“It seems like peculiar weather.”

“A matter of land-sea distribution, a planetary orbit that is a bit more eccentric than most, and a few other things. Frankly, I don’t bother with it.” He shrugged. “It’s not my field of interest.”

“You’re a Trader. I imagine you’re not on the planet often.”

“True, but I’m not a Trader in order to escape. I like it here. And yet perhaps I would like it less if I were here more. If we look at it that way, Baleyworld’s harsh conditions serve an important purpose. They encourage trading. Baleyworld produces men who scour the seas for food and there’s a certain similarity between sailing the seas and sailing through space. I would say fully a third of all the Traders plying the space lanes are Baleypeople.”

“You seem in a semimanic state, D.G.,” said Gladia.

“Do I? I think of myself right now as being in a good humor. I have reason to be. So have you.”

“Oh?”

“It’s obvious, isn’t it? We got off Solaria alive. We know exactly what the Solarian danger is. We’ve gained control of an unusual weapon that should interest OUT military. And you will be the heroine of Baleyworld. The world officials already know the outline of events and are eager to greet you. For that matter, you’re the heroine of this ship. Almost every man on board volunteered to bring you this coverall. They are all anxious to get close and bathe in your aura, so to speak.”

“Quite a change,” said Gladia dryly.

“Absolutely. Niss – the crewman whom your Daneel chastised –”

“I remember well, D.G.”

“He is anxious to apologize to you. And bring his four mates so that they, too, might apologize. And to kick, in you presence, the one of them who made an improper suggestion. He is not a bad person, my lady.”

“I am certain he isn’t. Assure him he is forgiven and the incident forgotten. And if you’ll arrange matters, I will – will shake hands with him and perhaps some of the others before debarking. But you mustn’t let them crowd about me.”

“I understand, but I can’t guarantee there won’t be a certain amount of crowding in Baleytown – that’s the capital city of Baleyworld. There’s no way of stopping various government officials from trying to gain political advantage by being seen with you, while grinning away and bowing.”

“Jehoshaphat! As your Ancestor would say.”

“Don’t say that once we land, madam. It’s an expression reserved for him. It is considered bad taste for anyone else to say it. – There’ll be speeches and cheering and all kinds of meaningless formalities. I’m sorry, my lady.”

She said thoughtfully, “I could do without it, but I suppose there’s no way of stopping it.”

“No way, my lady.”

“How long will it continue?”

“Till they get tired. Several days, perhaps, but there’ll be a certain variety to it.”

“And how long do we stay on the planet?”

“Till I get tired. I’m sorry, my lady, but I have much to do – places to go – friends to see –”

“Women to make love to.”

“Alas for human frailty,” said D.G., grinning broadly.

“You’re doing everything but slobber.”

“A weakness. I can’t bring myself to slobber.”

Gladia smiled. “You’re not totally committed to sanity, are you?”

“I never claimed to be. But, leaving that aside, I also have to consider such dull matters as the fact that my officers and crew would want to see their families and friends, catch up on their sleep, and have a little planetside fun. – and if you want to consider the feelings of inanimate objects, the ship will have to be repaired, refurbished, refreshed, and refueled. Little things like that.”

“How long will all those little things take?”

“It could be months. Who knows?”

“And what do I do meanwhile?”

“You could see our world, broaden your horizons.”

“But your world is not exactly the playground of the Galaxy.”

“Too true, but we’ll try to keep you interested.” He looked at his watch. “One more warning, madam. Do not refer to your age.”

“What cause would I have to do that?”

“It might show up in some casual reference. You’ll be expected to say a few words and you might say, for instance, ‘In all my more than twenty-three decades of life, I have never been so glad to see anyone as I am to see the people of Baleyworld.’ If you’re tempted to say anything like that initial clause, resist it.”

“I will. I have no intention of indulging in hyperbole in any case. – But, as a matter of idle curiosity, why not?”

“Simply because it is better for them not to know your age.”

“But they do know my age, don’t they? They know I was your Ancestor’s friend and they know how long ago he lived. Or are they under the impression” – she looked at him narrowly –” that 1’m a distant descendant of the Gladia?”

“No, no, they know who you are and how old you are, but they know it only with their heads” – he tapped his forehead –” and few people have working heads, as you may have noticed.”

“Yes, I have. Even on Aurora.”

“That’s good. I wouldn’t want the Settlers to be special in this respect. Well, then, you have the appearance of” – he paused judiciously –” forty, maybe forty-five, and they’ll accept you as that in their guts, which is where the average person’s real thinking mechanism is located. If you don’t rub it in about your real age.”

“Does it really make a difference?”

“Does it? Look, the average Settler really doesn’t want robots. He has no liking for robots, no desire for robots. There we are satisfied to differ from the Spacers. Long life is different. Forty decades is considerably more than ten.”

“Few of us actually reach the forty-decade mark.”

“And few of us actually reach the ten-decade mark. We teach the advantage of short life-quality versus quantity, evolutionary speed, ever-changing world – but nothing really makes people happy about living ten decades when they imagine they could live forty, so past a point the propaganda produces a backlash and it’s best to keep quiet about it. They don’t often see Spacers, as you can imagine, and so they don’t have occasion to grind their teeth over the fact that Spacers look young and vigorous even when they are twice as old as the oldest Settler who ever lived. They’ll see that in you and if they think about it, it will unsettle them.”

Gladia said bitterly, “Would you like to have me make a speech and tell them exactly what forty decades means? Shall I tell them for how many years one outlives the springtime of hope, to say nothing of friends and acquaintances. Shall I tell them of the meaninglessness of children and family; of the endless comings and goings of one husband after another, of the misty blurring of the informal matings between and alongside; of the coming of the time when you’ve seen all you want to see, and heard all you want to hear, and find it impossible to think a new thought, of how you forget what excitement and discovery are all about, and learn each year how much more intense boredom can become?”

“Baleypeople wouldn’t believe that. I don’t think I do. Is that the way all Spacers feel or are you making it up?”

“I only know for certain how I myself feel, but I’ve watched others dim as they aged; I’ve watched their dispositions sour, and their ambitions narrow, and their indifferences broaden.”

D.G.’s lips pressed together and he looked somber. “Is the suicide rate high among Spacers? I’ve never heard that it is.”

“It’s virtually zero.”

“But that doesn’t fit what you’re saying.”

“Consider! We’re surrounded by robots who are dedicated to keeping us alive. There’s no way we can kill ourselves when our sharp-eyed and active robots are forever about us. I doubt that any of us would even think of trying. I wouldn’t dream of it myself, if only because I can’t bear the thought of what it would mean to all my household robots and, even more so, to Daneel and Giskard.”

“They’re not really alive, you know. They don’t have feelings.”

Gladia shook her head. “You say that only because you’ve never lived with them. – In any case, I think you overestimate the longing for prolonged life among your people. You know my age, you look at my appearance, yet it doesn’t bother you.”

“Because I’m convinced that the Spacer worlds must dwindle and die, that it is the Settler worlds that are the hope of humanity’s future, and that it is our short-lived characteristic that ensures it. Listening to what you’ve just said, assuming it is all true, makes me the more certain.”

“Don’t be too sure. You may develop your own insuperable problems – if you haven’t already.”

“That is undoubtedly possible, my lady, but for now I must leave you. The ship is coasting in for a landing and I must stare intelligently at the computer that controls it or no one will believe that I am the captain.”

He left and she remained in gloomy abstraction for a while, her fingers plucking at the plastic that enclosed the coverall.

She had come to a sense of equilibrium on Aurora, a way of allowing life to pass quietly. Meal by meal, day by day, season by season, it had been passing and the quiet had insulated her, almost, from the tedious waiting for the only adventure that remained, the final one of death.

And now she had been to Solaria and had awakened the memories of a childhood that had long passed on a world that had long passed, so that the quiet had been shattered – perhaps forever – and so that she now lay uncovered and bare to the horror of continuing life.

What could substitute for the vanished quiet?

She caught Giskard’s dimly glowing eyes upon her and she said, “Help me on with this, Giskard.”

32.

It was cold. The sky was gray with clouds and the air glittered with a very light snowfall. Patches of powdery snow were swirling in the fresh breeze and off beyond the landing field Gladia could see distant heaps of snow.

There were crowds of people gathered here and there, held off by barriers from approaching too closely. They were all wearing coveralls of different types and colors and they all seemed to balloon outward, turning humanity into a crowd of shapeless objects with eyes. Some were wearing visors that glittered transparently over their faces.

Gladia pressed her mittened hand to her face. Except for her nose, she felt warm enough. The coverall did more than insulate; it seemed to exude warmth of its own.

She looked behind her. Daneel and Giskard were within reach, each in a coverall.

She had protested that at first. “They don’t need coveralls. They’re not sensitive to cold.”

“I’m sure they’re not,” D.G. had said, “but you say you won’t go anywhere without them and we can’t very well have Daneel sitting there exposed to the cold. It would seem against nature. Nor do we wish to arouse hostility by making it too clear you have robots.”

“They must know I’ve got robots with me and Giskard’s face will give him away – even in a coverall.”

“They might know,” said D.G., “but the chances are they won’t think about it if they’re not forced to – so let’s not force it. “

Now D.G. was motioning her into a ground-car that had a transparent roof and sides. “They’ll want to see you as we travel, my lady,” he said, smiling.

Gladia seated herself at one side and D.G. followed on the other. “I’m co-hero,” he said,

“Do you value that?”

“Oh, yes. It means a bonus for my crew and a possible promotion for me. I don’t scorn that.”

Daneel and Giskard entered, too, and sat down in seats that faced the two human beings. Daneel faced Gladia; Giskard faced D.G.

There was a ground-car before them, without transparency, and a line of about a dozen behind them. There was the sound of cheering and a forest of arm-waving from the assembled crowd. D.G. smiled and lifted an arm in response and motioned to Gladia to do the same. She waved in a perfunctory manner. It was warm inside the car and her nose had lost its numbness.

She said, “There’s a rather unpleasant glitter to these windows. Can that be removed?”

“Undoubtedly, but it won’t be,” said D.G. “That’s as unobtrusive a force field as we can set up. Those are enthusiastic people out there and they’ve been searched, but someone may have managed to conceal a weapon and we don’t want you hurt.”

“You mean someone might try to kill me?”

(Daneel’s eyes were calmly scanning the crowd to one side of the car; Giskard’s scanned the other side.)

“Very unlikely, my lady, but you’re a Spacer and Settlers don’t like Spacers. A few might hate them with such a surpassing hatred as to see only the Spacerness in you. – but don’t worry. Even if someone were to try – which is, as I say, unlikely – they won’t succeed.”

The line of cars began to move, all together and very smoothly.

Gladia half-rose in astonishment. There was no one in front of the partition that closed them off. “Who’s driving?” she asked.

“The cars are thoroughly computerized,” said D.G. “I take it that Spacer cars are not?”

“We have robots to drive them.”

D.G. continued waving and Gladia followed his lead automatically. “We don’t,” he said.

“But a computer is essentially the same as a robot.”

“A computer is not humanoid and it does not obtrude itself on one’s notice. Whatever the technological similarities might be, they are worlds apart psychologically.”

Gladia watched the countryside and found it oppressively barren. Even allowing for winter, there was something desolate in the scattering of leafless bushes and in the sparsely distributed trees, whose stunted and dispirited appearance emphasized the death that seemed to grip everything.

D.G., noting her depression and correlating it with her darting glances here and there, said, “It doesn’t look like much now, my lady. In the summer, though, it’s not bad. There are grassy plains, orchards, grain fields –”

“Forests?”

“Not wilderness forests. We’re still a growing world. It’s still being molded. We’ve only had a little over a century and a half, really. The first step was to cultivate home plots for the initial Settlers, using imported seed. Then we placed fish and invertebrates of all kinds in the ocean, doing our best to establish a self-supporting ecology. That is a fairly easy procedure – if the ocean chemistry is suitable. If it isn’t, then the planet is not habitable without extensive chemical modification and that has never been tried in actuality, though there are all sorts of plans for such procedures. – Finally, we try to make the land flourish, which is always difficult, always slow.”

“Have all the Settler worlds followed that path?”

“Are following. None are really finished. Baleyworld is the oldest and we’re not finished. Given another couple of centuries, the Settler worlds will be rich and full of life – land as well as sea-though by that time there will by many still-newer worlds that will be working their way through various preliminary stages. I’m sure the Spacer worlds went through the same procedure.”

“Many centuries ago – and less strenuously, I think. We had robots to help.”

“We’ll manage,” said D.G. briefly.

“And what about the native life – the plants and animals that evolved on this world before human beings arrived?”

D.G. shrugged. “Insignificant. Small, feeble things. The scientists are of course, interested, so the indigenous life still exists in special aquaria, botanical gardens, zoos. There are out-of-the-way bodies of water and considerable stretches of land area that have not yet been converted. Some indigenous life still lives out there in the wild.”

“But these stretches of wilderness will eventually all be converted.”

“We hope so.”

“Don’t you feel that the planet really belongs to these insignificant, small, feeble things?”

“No. I’m not that sentimental. The planet and the whole Universe belongs to intelligence. The Spacers agree with that. Where is the indigenous life of Solaria? Or of Aurora?”

The line of cars, which had been progressing tortuously from the spaceport, now came to a flat, paved area on which several low, domed buildings were evident.

“Capital Plaza,” said D.G. in a low voice. “This is the official heartbeat of the planet. Government offices are located here, the Planetary Congress meets here, the Executive Mansion is found here, and so on.”

“I’m sorry, D.G., but this is not very impressive. These are small and uninteresting buildings.”

D.G. smiled. “You see only an occasional top, my lady. The buildings themselves are located underground – all interconnected. It’s a single complex, really, and is still growing. It’s a self-contained city, you know. It, along with the surrounding residential areas, makes up Baleytown.”

“Do you plan to have everything underground eventually? The whole city? The whole world?”

“Most of us look forward to an underground world, yes.”

“They have underground Cities on Earth, I understand.”

“Indeed they do, my lady. The so-called Caves of Steel.”

“You imitate that here, then?”

“It’s not simple imitation. We add our own ideas and – We’re coming to a halt, my lady, and any moment we’ll be asked to step out. I’d cling to the coverall openings if I were you. The whistling wind on the Plaza in winter is legendary.”

Gladia did so, fumbling rather as she tried to put the edges of the openings together. “It’s not simple imitation, you say.”

“No. We design our underground with the weather in mind. Since our weather is, on the whole, harsher than Earth’s, some modification in architecture is required. Properly built, almost no energy is required to keep the complex warm in winter and cool in summer. In a way, indeed, we keep warm in winter, in part, with the stored warmth of the previous summer and cool in summer with the coolness of the previous winter.”

“What about ventilation?”

“That uses up some of the savings, but not all. It works, my lady, and someday we will match Earth’s structures. That, of course, is the ultimate ambition – to make Baleyworld a reflection of Earth.”

“I never knew that Earth was so admirable as to make imitation desirable,” said Gladia lightly.

D.G. turned his eyes on her sharply. “Make no jokes of that sort, my lady, while you are with Settlers – not even with me. Earth is no joking matter.”

Gladia said, “I’m sorry, D.G. I meant no disrespect.”

“You didn’t know. But now you know. Come, let’s get out.”

The side door of the car slid open noiselessly and D.G. turned in his seat and stepped out. He then held out one hand to help Gladia and said, “You’ll be addressing the Planetary Congress, you know, and every government official who can squeeze in will do so.”

Gladia, who had stretched out her hand to seize D.G.’s and who already felt – painfully – the cold wind on her face, shrank back suddenly. “I must make an address? I hadn’t been told that.”

D.G. looked surprised. “I rather thought you would take something of the sort for granted.”

“Well, I didn’t. And I can’t make an address. I’ve never done such a thing.”

“You must. It’s nothing terrible. It’s just a matter of saying a few words after some long and boring speeches of welcome.”

“But what can I possibly say?”

“Nothing fancy, I assure you. Just peace and love and blah – Give them half a minute’s worth. I’ll scrawl out something for you if you wish.”

And Gladia stepped out of the car and her robots followed her. Her mind was in a whirl.

9. The Speech

33.

AS THEY WALKED into the building, they removed their coveralls and handed them to attendants. Daneel and Giskard removed theirs, too, and the attendants cast sharp glances at the latter, approaching him gingerly.

Gladia adjusted her nose plugs nervously. She had never before been in the presence of large crowds of short-lived human beings – short-lived in part, she knew (or had always been told), because they carried in their bodies chronic infections and hordes of parasites.

She whispered, “Will I get back my own coverall?”

“You will wear no one else’s,” said D.G. “They will be kept safe and radiation-sterilized.”

Gladia looked about cautiously. Somehow she felt that even optical contact might be dangerous.

“Who are those people?” She indicated several people who wore brightly colored clothing and were obviously armed.

“Security guards, madam,” said D.G.

“Even here? In a government building?”

“Absolutely. And when we’re on the platform, there will be a force-field curtain dividing us from the audience.”

“Don’t you trust your own legislature?”

D.G. half-smiled. “Not entirely. This is a raw world still and we go our own ways. We haven’t had all the edges knocked off and we don’t have robots watching over us. Then, too, we’ve got militant minority parties; we’ve got our war hawks.”

“What are war hawks?”

Most of the Baleyworlders had their coveralls removed now and were helping themselves to drinks. There was a buzz of conversation in the air and many people stared at Gladia, but no one came over to speak to her. Indeed, it was clear to Gladia that there was a circle of avoidance about her.

D.G. noticed her glance from side to side and interpreted it correctly. “They’ve been told,” he said, “that you would appreciate a little elbow room. I think they understand your fear of infection.”

“They don’t find it insulting, I hope.”

“They may, but you’ve got something that is clearly a robot with you and most Baleyworlders don’t want that kind of infection. The war hawks, particularly.”

“You haven’t told me what they are.”

“I will if there’s time. You and I and others on the platform will have to move in a little while. – Most Settlers think that, in time, the Galaxy will be theirs, that the Spacers cannot and will not compete successfully in the race for expansion. We also know it will take time. We won’t see it. Our children probably won’t. It may take a thousand years, for all we know. The war hawks don’t want to wait. They want it settled now.”

“They want war?”

“They don’t say that, precisely. And they don’t call themselves war hawks. That’s what we sensible people call them. They call themselves Earth Supremacists. After all, it’s hard to argue with people who announce they are in favor of Earth being supreme. We all favor that, but most of us don’t necessarily expect it to happen tomorrow and are not ferociously upset that it won’t.”

“And these war hawks may attack me? Physically?”

D.G. gestured for her to move forward. “I think we’ll have to get moving, madam. They’re getting us into line. – No, I don’t think you’ll really be attacked, but it’s always best to be cautious.”

Gladia held back as D.G. indicated her place in line.

“Not without Daneel and Giskard, D.G. I’m still not going anywhere without them. Not even onto the platform. Not after what you just told me about the war hawks. “

“You’re asking a lot, my lady.”

“On the contrary, D.G. I’m not asking for anything. Take me home right now – with my robots.”

Gladia watched tensely as D.G. approached a small group of officials. He made a half-bow, arms in downward-pointing diagonals. It was what Gladia suspected to be a Baleyworlder gesture of respect.

She did not hear what D.G. was saying, but a painful and quite involuntary fantasy passed through her mind. If there was any attempt to separate her from her robots against her will, Daneel and Giskard would surely do what they could to prevent it. They would move too quickly and precisely to really hurt anyone – but the security guards would use their weapons at once.

She would have to prevent that at all costs – pretend she was separating from Daneel and Giskard voluntarily and ask them to wait behind for her. How could she do that? She had never been entirely without robots in her life. How could she feel safe without them? And yet what other way out of the dilemma offered itself?

D.G. returned. “Your status as heroine, my lady, is a useful bargaining chip. And, of course, I am a persuasive fellow. Your robots may go with you. They will sit on the platform behind you, but there will be no spotlight upon them. And, for the sake of the Ancestor, my lady, don’t call attention to them. Don’t even look at them.”

Gladia sighed with relief. “You’re a good fellow, D.G.,” she said shakily. “Thank you.”

She took her place near the head of the line, D.G. at her left, Daneel and Giskard behind her, and behind them a long tail of officials of both sexes.

A woman Settler, carrying a staff that seemed to be a symbol of office, having surveyed the line carefully, nodded, moved forward to the head of the line, then walked on. Everyone followed.

Gladia became aware of music in simple and rather repetitive march rhythm up ahead and wondered if she were supposed to march in some choreographed fashion. (Customs vary infinitely and irrationally from world to world, she told herself.)

Looking out of the corner of her eye, she noticed D.G. ambling forward in an indifferent way. He was almost slouching. She pursed her lips disapprovingly and walked rhythmically, head erect, spine stiff. In the absence of direction, she was going to march the way she wanted to.

They came out upon a stage and, as they did so, chairs rose smoothly from recesses in the floor. The line split up, but D.G. caught her sleeve lightly and she accompanied him. The two robots followed her.

She stood in front of the seat that D.G. quietly pointed to. The music grew loud, but the light was not quite as bright as it had been. And then, after what seemed an almost interminable wait, she felt D.G.’s touch pressing lightly downward. She sat and so did they all.

She was aware of the faint shimmer of the force-field curtain and beyond that an audience of several thousand. Every seat was filled in an amphitheater that sloped steeply upward. All were dressed in dull colors, browns and blacks, both sexes alike (as nearly as she could tell them apart). The security guards in the aisles stood out in their green and crimson uniforms. No doubt it lent them instant recognition. (Though, Gladia thought, it must make them instant targets as well.)

She turned to D.G. and said in a low voice, “You people have an enormous legislature.”

D.G. shrugged slightly. “I think everyone in the governmental apparatus is here, with mates and guests. A tribute to your popularity, my lady.”

She cast a glance over the audience from right to left and back and tried at the extreme of the arc to catch sight, out of the corner of her eye, of either Daneel or Giskard – just to be sure they were there. And then she thought, rebelliously, that nothing would happen because of a quick glance and deliberately turned her head. They were there. She also caught D.G. rolling his eyes upward in exasperation.

She started suddenly as a spotlight fell upon one of the persons on the stage, while the rest of the room dimmed further into shadowy insubstantiality.

The spotlighted figure rose and began to speak. His voice was not terribly loud, but Gladia could hear a very faint reverberation bouncing back from the far walls. It must penetrate every cranny of the large hall, she thought. Was it some form of amplification by a device so unobtrusive that she did not see it or was there a particularly clever acoustical shape to the hall? She did not know, but she encouraged her puzzled speculation to continue, for it relieved her, for a while, of the necessity of having to listen to what was being said.

At one point she heard a soft call of “Quackenbush” from some undetermined point in the audience. But for the perfect acoustics (if that was what it was), it would probably have gone unheard.

The word meant nothing to her, but from the soft, brief titter of laughter that swept the audience, she suspected it was a vulgarism. The sound quenched itself almost at once and Gladia rather admired the depth of the silence that followed.

Perhaps if the room were so perfectly acoustic that every sound could be heard, the audience had to be silent or the noise and confusion would be intolerable. Then, once the custom of silence was established and audience noise became a taboo, anything but silence would become unthinkable. – Except where the impulse to mutter “Quackenbush” became irresistible, she supposed.

Gladia realized that her thinking was growing muddy and her eyes were closing. She sat upright with a small jerk. The people of the planet were trying to honor her and if she fell asleep during the proceedings, that would surely be an intolerable insult. She tried to keep herself awake by listening, but that seemed to make her sleepier. She bit the inside of her cheeks instead and breathed deeply.

Three officials spoke, one after the other, with semimerciful semibrevity, and then Gladia jolted wide awake (Had she been actually dozing despite all her efforts – with thousands of pairs of eyes on her?) as the spotlight fell just to her left and D.G. rose to speak, standing in front of his chair.

He seemed completely at ease, with his thumbs hooked in his belt.

“Men and women of Baleyworld,” he began. “Officials, lawgivers, honored leaders, and fellow planetfolk, you have heard something of what happened on Solaria. You know that we were completely successful. You know that Lady Gladia of Aurora contributed to that success. It is time now to present some of the details to you and to all my fellow planetfolk who are watching on hypervision. “

He proceeded to describe the events in modified form and Gladia found herself dryly amused at the nature of the modifications. He passed over his own discomfiture at the hands of a humanoid robot lightly. Giskard was never mentioned; Daneel’s role was minimized; and Gladia’s heavily emphasized. The incident became a duel between two women – Gladia and Landaree – and it was the courage and sense of authority of Gladia that had won out.

Finally, D.G. said, “And now Lady Gladia, Solarian by birth, Auroran by citizenship, but Baleyworlder by deed –” (There was strong applause at the last, the loudest Gladia had yet heard, for the earlier speakers had been but tepidly received.)

D.G. raised his hands for silence and it came at once. He then concluded, “– will now address you.”

Gladia found the spotlight on herself and turned to D.G. in sudden panic. There was applause in her ears and D.G., too, was clapping his hands. Under the cover of the applause, he leaned toward her and whispered, “You love them all, you want peace, and since you’re not a legislator, you’re unused to long speeches of small content. Say that, then sit down.”

She looked at him uncomprehendingly, far too nervous to have heard what he said.

She rose and found herself staring at endless tiers of people.

34.

Gladia felt very small (not for the first time in her life, to be sure) as she faced the stage. The men on the stage were all taller than she was and so were the other three women. She felt that even though they were all sitting and she was standing, they still towered over her. As for the audience, which was waiting now in almost menacing silence, those who composed it were, she felt quite certain, one and all larger than her in every dimension.

She took a deep breath and said, “Friends –” but it came out in a thin, breathless whistle. She cleared her throat (in what seemed a thunderous rasp) and tried again.

“Friends!” This time there was a certain normality to the sound. “You are all descended from Earthpeople, every one of you. I am descended from Earthpeople. There are no human beings anywhere on all the inhabited worlds – whether Spacer worlds, Settler worlds, or Earth itself – that are not either Earthpeople by birth or Earthpeople by descent.

All other differences fade to nothing in the face of that enormous fact.”

Her eyes flickered leftward to look at D.G. and she found that he was smiling very slightly and that one eyelid trembled as though it were about to wink.

She went on. “That should be our guide in every thought and act. I thank you all for thinking of me as a fellow human being and for welcoming me among you without regard to any other classification in which you might have been tempted to place me. Because of that, and in the hope that the day will soon come when sixteen billion human beings, living in love and peace, will consider themselves as just that and nothing more – or less – I think of you not merely as friends but as kinsmen and kinswomen.”

There was an outbreak of applause that thundered in upon her and Gladia half-closed her eyes in relief. She remained standing to let it continue and bathe her in its welcome indication that she had spoken well and – what was more – enough. When it began to fade, she smiled, bowed to right and left, and began to sit down.

And then a voice came out of the audience. “Why don’t you speak in Solarian?” She froze halfway to her seat and looked, in shock, at D.G.

He shook his head slightly and mouthed soundlessly: “Ignore it. “He gestured as unobtrusively as possible that she seat herself.

She stared at him for a second or two, then realized what an ungainly sight she must present, with her posterior protruding in the unfinished process of seating herself. She straightened at once and flashed a smile at the audience as she turned her head slowly from side to side. For the first time she became aware of objects in the rear whose glistening lenses focused upon her.

Of course! D.G. had mentioned that the proceedings were being watched via hyperwave. Yet it scarcely seemed to matter now. She had spoken and had been applauded and she was facing the audience she could see, erect and without nervousness. What could the unseen addition matter?

She said, still smiling, “I consider that a friendly question. You want me to show you my accomplishments. How many want me to speak as a Solarian might? Don’t hesitate. Raise your right hands.”

A few right arms went up.

Gladia said, “The humanoid robot on Solaria heard me speak Solarian. That was what defeated it in the end. Come – let me see everyone who would like a demonstration.”

More right arms went up and, in a moment, the audience became a sea of upraised arms. Gladia felt a hand tweaking at her pants leg and, with a rapid movement, she brushed it away.

“Very well. You may lower your arms now, kinsmen and kinswomen. Understand that what I speak now is Galactic Standard, which is your language, too. I, however, am speaking it as an Auroran would and I know you all understand me even though the way I pronounce my words may well strike you as amusing and my choice of words may on occasion puzzle you a bit. You’ll notice that my way of speaking has notes to it and goes up and down – almost as though I were singing my words. This always sounds ridiculous to anyone not an Auroran, even to other Spacers.

“On the other hand, if I slip into the Solarian way of speaking as I am now doing, you will notice at once that the notes stop and that it becomes throaty with ‘r’s’ that just about neverrr let go – especially if therrre is no ‘rrrrr’ anywherrrre on the vocal panoramarrrrrr.”

There was a burst of laughter from the audience and Gladia confronted it with a serious expression on her face. Finally, she held up her arms and made a cutting movement downward and outward and the laughter stopped.

“However,” she said, “I will probably never go to Solaria again, so I will have no occasion to use the Solarian dialect any further. And the good Captain Baley” – she turned and made a half-bow in his direction, noting that there was a distinct outbreak of perspiration on his brow –” informs me there is no telling when I’ll be going back to Aurora, so I may have to drop the Auroran dialect as well. My only choice, then, will be to speak the Baleyworld dialect, which I shall at once begin to practice.”

She hooked the fingers of each hand into an invisible belt, stretched her chest outward, pulled her chin downward, put on D.G.’s unself-conscious grin, and said, in a gravelly attempt at baritone, “Men and women of Baleyworld, officials, lawgivers, honored leaders, and fellow planetfolk – and that should include everyone, except, perhaps, dishonored leaders –” She did her best to include the glottal stops and the flat “a’s” and carefully pronounced the “h” of “honored” and “dishonored” in what was almost a gasp.

The laughter was still louder this time and more prolonged and Gladia allowed herself to smile and to wait calmly while it went on and on. After all, she was persuading them to laugh at themselves.

And when things were quiet again, she said simply, in an unexaggerated version of the Auroran dialect, “Every dialect is amusing – or peculiar – to those who are not accustomed to it and it tends to mark off human beings into separate – and frequently mutually unfriendly – groups. Dialects, however, are only languages of the tongue. Instead of those, you and I and every other human being on every inhabited world should listen to the language of the heart and there are no dialects to that. That language – if we will only listen – rings out the same in all of us.”

That was it. She was ready to sit down again, but another question sounded. It was a woman’s voice this time.

“How old are you?”

Now D.G. forced a low growl between his teeth. “Sit down, madam! Ignore the question.”

Gladia turned to face D.G. He had half-risen. The others on the stage, as nearly as she could see them in the dimness outside the spotlight, were tensely leaning toward her.

She turned back to the audience and cried out ringingly, “The people here on the stage want me to sit down. How many of you out there want me to sit down? – I find you are silent. – How many want me to stand here and answer the question honestly?”

There was sharp applause and cries of” Answer! Answer!”

Gladia said, “The voice of the people! I’m sorry, D.G. and all the rest of you, but I am commanded to speak.”

She looked up at the spotlight, squinting, and shouted, “I don’t know who controls the lights, but light the auditorium and turn off the spotlight. I don’t care what it does to the hyperwave cameras. Just make sure the sound is going out accurately. No one will care if I look dim, as long as they can hear me. Right?”

“Right!” came the multivoiced answer. Then “Lights! Lights!”

Someone on the stage signaled in a distraught manner and the audience was bathed in light.

“Much better,” said Gladia. “Now I can see you all, my kinspeople. I would like, particularly, to see the woman who asked the question, the one who wants to know my age. I would like to speak to her directly. Don’t be backward or shy. If you have the courage to ask the question, you should have the courage to ask it openly.”

She waited and finally a woman rose in the middle distance. Her dark hair was pulled back tightly, the color of her skin was a light brown, and her clothing, worn tightly to emphasize a slim figure, was in shades of darker brown.

She said, just a bit stridently, “I’m not afraid to stand up. And I’m not afraid to ask the question again. How old are you?”

Gladia faced her calmly and found herself even welcoming the confrontation. (How was this possible? Throughout her first three decades, she had been carefully trained to find the real presence of even one human being intolerable. Now look at her – facing thousands without a tremble. She was vaguely astonished and entirely pleased.)

Gladia said, “Please remain standing, madam, and let us talk together. How shall we measure age? In elapsed years since birth?”

The woman said with composure, “My name is Sindra Lambid. I’m a member of the legislature and therefore one of Captain Baley’s ‘lawgivers’ and ‘honored leaders.’ I hope ‘honored,’ at any rate.” (There was a ripple of laughter as the audience seemed to grow increasingly good-natured.) “To answer your question, I think that the number of Galactic Standard Years that have elapsed since birth is the usual definition of a person’s age. Thus, I am fifty-four years old. How old are you? How about just giving us a figure?”

“I will do so. Since my birth, two hundred and thirty-three Galactic Standard Years have come and gone, so that I am over twenty-three decades old – or a little more than four times as old as you are.” Gladia held herself straight and she knew that her small, slim figure and the dim light made her look extraordinarily childlike at that moment.

There was a confused babble from the audience and something of a groan from her left. A quick glance in that direction showed her that D.G. had his hand to his forehead.

Gladia said, “But that is an entirely passive way of measuring time lapse. It is a measure of quantity that takes no account of quality. My life has been spent quietly, one might say dully. I have drifted through a set routine, shielded from all untoward events by a smoothly functioning social system that left no room for either change or experimentation and by my robots, who stood between me and misadventure of any kind.

“Only twice in my life have I experienced the breath of excitement and both times tragedy was involved. When I was thirty-three, younger in years than many of you who are now listening to me, there was a time – not a long one – during which a murder accusation hung over me. Two years later, there was another period of time – not long – during which I was involved in another murder. On both those occasions, Plainclothesman Elijah Baley was at my side. I believe most of you – or perhaps all of you – are familiar with the story as given in the account written by Elijah Baley’s son.

“I should now add a third occasion for, this last month, I have faced a great deal of excitement, reaching its climax with my being required to stand up before you all, something which is entirely different from anything I have ever done in all my long life. And I must admit it is only your own good nature and kind acceptance of me that makes it possible.

“Consider, each of you, the contrast of all this with your own lives. You are pioneers and you live on a pioneer world. This world has been growing all your lives and will continue to grow. This world is anything but settled down and each day is – and must be – an adventure. The very climate is an adventure. You have first cold, then heat, then cold again. It is a climate rich in wind and storms and sudden change. At no time can you sit back and let time pass drowsily in a world that changes gently or not at all.

“Many Baleyworlders are Traders or can choose to be Traders and can then spend half their time scouring the space lanes. And if ever this world grows tame, many of its inhabitants can choose to transfer their sphere of activities to another less-developed world or join an expedition that will find a suitable world that has not yet felt the step of human beings and take their share in shaping it and seeding it and making it fit for human occupancy.

“Measure the length of life by events and deeds, accomplishments and excitements, and I am a child, younger than any of you. The large number of my years has served merely to bore and weary me; the smaller number of yours to enrich and excite you. – So tell me again, Madam Lambid, how old are you?”

Lambid smiled. “Fifty-four good years, Madam Gladia.”

She sat down and again the applause welled up and continued. Under cover of that, D.G. said hoarsely, “Lady

Gladia, who taught you how to handle an audience like this?”

“No one,” she whispered back. “I never tried before.”

“But quit while you’re ahead. The person now getting to his feet is our leading war hawk. There’s no need to face him. Say you are tired and sit down. We will tackle Old Man Bistervan ourselves.”

“But I’m not tired,” said Gladia. “I’m enjoying myself.”

The man now facing her from her extreme right but rather near the stage was a tall, vigorous man with shaggy white eyebrows hanging over his eyes. His thinning hair was also white and his garments were a somber black, relieved by a white stripe running down each sleeve and trouser leg, as though setting sharp limits to his body.

His voice was deep and musical. “My name,” he said, “is Tomas Bistervan and I’m known to many as the Old Man, largely, I think, because they wish I were and that I would not delay too long in dying. I do not know how to address you because you do not seem to have a family name and because I do not know you well enough to use your given name. To be honest, I do not wish to know you that well.

“Apparently, you helped save a Baleyworld ship on your world against the booby traps and weapons set up by your people and we are thanking you for that. In return, you have delivered some pious nonsense about friendship and kinship. Pure hypocrisy!

“When have your people felt kin to us? When have the Spacers felt any relationship to Earth and its people? Certainly, you Spacers are descended from Earthmen. We don’t forget that. Nor do we forget that you have forgotten it. For well over twenty decades, the Spacers controlled the Galaxy and treated Earthpeople as though they were hateful, short-lived, diseased animals. Now that we are growing strong, you hold out the hand of friendship, but that hand has a glove on it, as your hands do. You try to remember not to turn up your nose at us, but the nose, even if not turned up, has plugs in it. Well? Am I correct?”

Gladia held up her hands. “It may be,” she said, “that the audience here in this room – and, even more so, the audience outside the room that sees me via hyperwave – is not aware that I am wearing gloves. They are not obtrusive, but they are there. I do not deny that. And I have nose plugs that filter out dust and microorganisms without too much interference with breathing. And I am careful to spray my throat periodically. And I wash perhaps a bit more than the requirements of cleanliness alone make necessary. I deny none of it.

“But this is the result of my shortcomings, not yours. My immune system is not strong. My life has been too comfortable and I have been exposed to too little. That was not my deliberate choice, but I must pay the penalty for it. If any of you were in my unfortunate position, what would you do? In particular, Mr. Bistervan, what would you do?”

Bistervan said grimly, “I would do as you do and I would consider it a sign of weakness, a sign that I was unfit and unadjusted to life and that I therefore ought to make way for those who are strong. Woman, don’t speak of kinship to us. You are no kin of mine. You are of those who persecuted and tried to destroy us when you were strong and who come whining to us when you are weak.”

There was a stir in the audience – and by no means a friendly one – but Bistervan held his ground firmly.

Gladia said softly, “Do you remember the evil we did when we were strong?”

Bistervan said, “Don’t fear that we will forget. It is in our minds every day.”

“Good! Because now you know what to avoid. You have learned that when the strong oppress the weak, that is wrong. Therefore, when the table turns and when you are strong and we are weak, you will not be oppressive.”

“Ah, yes. I have heard the argument. When you were strong, you never heard of morality, but now that you are weak, you preach it earnestly.”

“In your case, though, when you were weak, you knew all about morality and were appalled by the behavior of the strong – and now that you are strong, you forget morality. Surely it is better that the immoral learn morality through adversity than that the moral forget morality in prosperity.”

“We will give what we received,” said Bistervan, holding up his clenched fist.

“You should give what you would have liked to receive,” said Gladia, holding out her arms, as though embracing. “Since everyone can think of some past injustice to avenge, what you are saying, my friend, is that it is right for the strong to oppress the weak. And when you say that, you justify the Spacers of the past and should therefore have no complaint of the present. What I say is that oppression was wrong when we practiced it in the past and that it will be equally wrong when you practice it in the future. We cannot change the past, unfortunately, but we can still decide on what the future shall be.”

Gladia paused. When Bistervan did not answer immediately, she called out, “How many want a new Galaxy, not the bad old Galaxy endlessly repeated?”

The applause began, but Bistervan threw his arms up and shouted in stentorian fashion, “Wait! Wait! Don’t be fools! Stop!”

There was a slow quieting and Bistervan said, “Do you suppose this woman believes what she’s saying? Do you suppose the Spacers intend us any good whatever? They still think they are strong, and they still despise us, and they intend to destroy us – if we don’t destroy them first. This woman comes here and, like fools, we greet her and make much of her. Well, put her words to the test. Let any of you apply for permission to visit a Spacer world and see if you can. Or if you have a world behind you and can use threats, as Captain Baley did, so that you are allowed to land on the world, how will you be treated? Ask the captain if he was treated like kin.

“This woman is a hypocrite, in spite of all her words – no, because of them. They are the spoken advertisements of her hypocrisy. She moans and whines about her inadequate immune system and says that she must protect herself against the danger of infection. Of course, she doesn’t do this because she thinks we are foul and diseased. That thought, I suppose, never occurs to her.

“She whines of her passive life, protected from mischance and misfortune by a too-settled society and a too-solicitous crowd of robots. How she must hate that.

“But what endangers her here? What mischance does she feel will befall her on our planet? Yet she has brought two robots with her. In this hall, we meet in order to honor her and make much of her, yet she brought her two robots even here. They are there on the platform with her. Now that the room is generally lit, you can see them. One is an imitation human being and its name is R. Daneel Olivaw. Another is a shameless robot, openly metallic in structure, and its name is R. Giskard Reventlov. Greet them, my fellow Baleyworlders. They are this woman’s kinfolk.”

“Checkmate!” groaned D.G. in a whisper.

“Not yet,” said Gladia.

There were craning necks in the audience, as if a sudden itch had affected them all, and the word “Robots” ran across the length and breadth of the hall in thousands of intakes of breath.

“You can see them without trouble,” Gladia’s voice rang out. “Daneel, Giskard, stand up.”

The two robots rose at once behind her.

“Step to either side of me,” she said, “so that my body does not block the view. – not that my body is large enough to do much blocking, in any case.

“Now let me make a few things clear to all of you. These two robots did not come with me in order to service me. Yes, they help run my establishment on Aurora, along with fifty-one other robots, and I do no work for myself that I wish a robot to do for me. That is the custom on the world on which I live.

“Robots vary in complexity, ability, and intelligence and these two rate very high in those respects. Daneel, in particular, is, in my opinion, the robot, of all robots, whose intelligence most nearly approximates the human in those areas where comparison is possible.

“I have brought only Daneel and Giskard with me, but they perform no great services for me. If you are interested, I dress myself, bathe myself, use my own utensils when I eat, and walk without being carried.

“Do I use them for personal protection? No. They protect me, yes, but they equally well protect anyone else who needs protection. On Solaria, just recently, Daneel did what he could to protect Captain Baley and was ready to give up his existence to protect me. Without him, the ship could not have been saved.

“And I certainly need no protection on this platform. After all, there is a force field stretched across the stage that is ample protection. It is not there at my request, but it is there and it supplies all the protection I need.

“Then why are my robots here with me?”

“Those of you who know the story of Elijah Baley, who freed Earth of its Spacer overlords, who initiated the new policy of settlement, and whose son led the first human being to Baleyworld – why else is it called that? – know that well before he knew me, Elijah Baley worked with Daneel. He worked with him on Earth, on Solaria, and on Aurora – on each of his great cases. To Daneel, Elijah Baley was always ‘Partner Elijah. ‘I don’t know if that fact appears in his biography, but you may safely take my word for it. And although Elijah Baley, as an Earthman, began with a strong distrust of Daneel, a friendship between them developed. When Elijah Baley was dying, here on this planet over sixteen decades ago, when it was just a cluster of prefabricated houses surrounded by garden patches, it was not his son who was with him in his last moment. Nor was it I.” (For a treacherous moment, she thought her voice would not hold steady.) “He sent for Daneel and he held on to life until Daneel arrived.

“Yes, this is Daneel’s second visit to this planet. I was with him, but I remained in orbit.” (Steady!) “It was Daneel alone who made planetfall, Daneel who received his last words. – Well, does this mean nothing to you?”

Her voice rose a notch as she shook her fists in the air. “Must I tell you this? Don’t you already know it? Here is the robot that Elijah Baley loved. Yes, loved. I wanted to see Elijah before he died, to say good-bye to him; but he wanted Daneel – and this is Daneel. This is the very one.

“And this other is Giskard, who knew Elijah only on Aurora, but who managed to save Elijah’s life there.

“Without these two robots, Elijah Baley would not have achieved his goal. The Spacer worlds would still be supreme, the Settler worlds would not exist, and none of you would be here. I know that. You know that. I wonder if Mr. Tomas Bistervan knows that?

“Daneel and Giskard are honored names on this world. They are used commonly by the descendants of Elijah Baley at his request. I have arrived on a ship the captain of which is named Daneel Giskard Baley. How many, I wonder, among the people I face now – in person and via hyperwave – bear the name of Daneel or Giskard? Well, these robots behind me are the robots those names commemorate. And are they to be denounced by Tomas Bistervan?”

The growing murmur among the audience was becoming loud and Gladia lifted her arms imploringly. “One moment. One moment. Let me finish. I have not told you why I brought these two robots.”

There was immediate silence.

“These two robots,” Gladia said, “have never forgotten Elijah Baley, any more than I have forgotten him. The passing decades have not in the least dimmed those memories. When I was ready to step on to Captain Baley’s ship, when I knew that I might visit Baleyworld, how could I refuse to take Daneel and Giskard with me? They wanted to see the planet that Elijah Baley had made possible, the planet on which he passed his old age and on which he died.

“Yes, they are robots, but they are intelligent robots who served Elijah Baley faithfully and well. It is not enough to have respect for all human beings; one must have respect for all intelligent beings. So I brought them here.” Then, in a final outcry that demanded a response, “Did I do wrong?”

She received her response. A gigantic cry of “No!” resounded throughout the hall and everyone was on his or her feet, clapping, stamping, roaring, screaming – on... and on... and on.

Gladia watched, smiling, and, as the noise continued endlessly, became aware of two things. First, she was wet with perspiration. Second, she was happier than she had ever been in her life.

It was as though all her life she had waited for this moment – the moment when she, having been brought up in isolation, could finally learn, after twenty-three decades, that she could face crowds, and move them, and bend them to her will.

She listened to the unwearying, noisy response – on... and on... and on...

35.

It was a considerable time later – how long she had no way of telling – that Gladia finally came to herself.

There had first been unending noise, the solid wedge of security people herding her through the crowd, the plunge into endless tunnels that seemed to sink deeper and deeper into the ground.

She lost contact with D.G. early and was not sure that Daneel and Giskard were safely with her. She wanted to ask for them, but only faceless people surrounded her. She thought distantly that the robots had to be with her, for they would resist separation and she would hear the tumult if an attempt were made.

When she finally reached a room, the two robots were there with her. She didn’t know precisely where she was, but the room was fairly large and clean. It was poor stuff compared to her home on Aurora, but compared to the shipboard cabin it was quite luxurious.

“You will be safe here, madam,” said the last of the guards as he left. “If you need anything, just let us know.” He indicated a device on a small table next to the bed.

She stared at it, but by the time she turned back to ask what it was and how it worked, he was gone.

Oh, well, she thought, I’ll get by.

“Giskard,” she said wearily, “find out which of those doors leads to the bathroom and find out how the shower works. What I must have now is a shower.”

She sat down gingerly, aware that she was damp and unwilling to saturate the chair with her perspiration. She was beginning to ache with the unnatural rigidity of her position when Giskard emerged.

“Madam, the shower is running,” he said, “and the temperature is adjusted. There is a solid material which I believe is soap and a primitive sort of toweling material, along with various other articles that may be useful.”

“Thank you, Giskard,” said Gladia, quite aware that despite her grandiloquence on the manner in which robots such as Giskard did not perform menial service, that is precisely what she had required him to do. But circumstances alter cases –

If she had never needed a shower, it seemed to her, as badly as now, she had also never enjoyed one as much. She remained in it much longer than she had to and when it was over it didn’t even occur to her to wonder if the towels had been in any way irradiated to sterility until after she had dried herself – and by that time it was too late.

She rummaged about among the material Giskard had laid out for her – powder, deodorant, comb, toothpaste, hair dryer – but she could not locate anything that would serve as a toothbrush. She finally gave up and used her finger, which she found most unsatisfactory. There was no hairbrush and that too was unsatisfactory. She scrubbed the comb with soap before using it, but cringed away from it just the same. She found a garment that looked as though it were suitable for wearing to bed. It smelled clean, but it hung far too loosely, she decided.

Daneel said quietly, “Madam, the captain wishes to know if he may see you.”

“I suppose so,” said Gladia, still rummaging for alternate nightwear. “Let him in.”

D.G. looked tired and even haggard, but when she turned to greet him, he smiled wearily at her and said, “It is hard to believe that you are over twenty-three decades old.”

“What? In this thing?”

“That helps. It’s semitransparent. – or didn’t you know?”

She looked down at the nightgown uncertainly, then said, “Good, if it amuses you, but I have been alive, just the same, for two and a third centuries.”

“No one would guess it to look at you. You must have been very beautiful in your youth.”

“I have never been told so, D.G. Quiet charm, I always believed, was the most I could aspire to. – In any case, how do I use that instrument?”

“The call box? Just touch the patch on the right side and someone will ask if you can be served and you can carry on from there.”

“Good. I will need a toothbrush, a hairbrush, and clothing.”

“The toothbrush and hairbrush I will see that you get. As for clothing, that has been thought of. You have a clothes bag hanging in your closet. You’ll find it contains the best in Baleyworld fashion, which may not appeal to you, of course. And I won’t guarantee they’ll fit you. Most Baleyworld women are taller than you and certainly wider and thicker. – but it doesn’t matter. I think you’ll remain in seclusion for quite a while.”

“Why?”

“Well, my lady. It seems you delivered a speech this past evening and, as I recall, you would not sit down, though I suggested you do that more than once.”

“It seemed quite successful to me, D.G.”

“It was. It was a howling success.” D.G. smiled broadly and scratched the right side of his beard as though considering the word very carefully. “However, success has its penalties too. Right now, I should say you are the most famous person on Baleyworld and every Baleyworlder wants to see you and touch you. If we take you out anywhere, it will mean an instant riot. At least, until things cool down. We can’t be sure how long that will take.

“Then, too, you had even the war hawks yelling for you, but in the cold light of tomorrow, when the hypnotism and hysteria dies down, they’re going to be furious. If Old Man Bistervan didn’t actually consider killing you outright after your talk, then by tomorrow he will certainly have it as the ambition of his life to murder you by slow torture. And there are people of his party who might conceivably try to oblige the Old Man in this small whim of his.

“That’s why you’re here, my lady. That’s why this room, this floor, this entire hotel is being watched by I don’t know how many platoons of security people, among whom, I hope, are no cryptowar hawks. And because I have been so closely associated with you in this hero-and-heroine game, I’m penned up here, too, and can’t get out.”

“Oh,” said Gladia blankly. “I’m sorry about that. You can’t we your family, then.”

D.G. shrugged. “Traders don’t really have much in the way of family.”

“Your woman friend, then.”

“She’ll survive. – Probably better than I will.” He cast his eyes on Gladia speculatively.

Gladia said evenly, “Don’t even think it, Captain.”

D.G.’s eyebrows rose. “There’s no way I can be prevented from thinking it, but I won’t do anything, madam.”

Gladia said, “How long do you think I will stay here? Seriously.”

“It depends on the Directory.”

“The Directory?”

“Our five-fold executive board, madam. Five people” – he held up his hand with the fingers spread apart –” each serving five years in staggered fashion, with one replacement each year, plus special elections in case of death or disability. This supplies continuity and reduces the danger of one-person rule. It also means that every decision must be argued out and that takes time, sometimes more time than we can afford.”

“I should think,” said Gladia, “that if one of the five were a determined and forceful individual –”

“That he could impose his views on the others. Things like that have happened at times, but these times are not one of those times – if you know what I mean. The Senior Director is Genovus Pandaral. There’s nothing evil about him, but he’s indecisive – and sometimes that’s the same thing. I talked him into allowing your robots on the stage with you and that turned out to be a bad idea. Score one against both of us.”

“But why was it a bad idea? The people were pleased.”

“Too pleased, my lady. We wanted you to be our pet Spacer heroine and help keep public opinion cool so that we wouldn’t launch a premature war. You were good on longevity; you had them cheering short life. But then you had them cheering robots and we don’t want that. For that matter, we’re not so keen on the public cheering the notion of kinship with the Spacers.”

“You don’t want premature war, but you don’t want premature peace, either. Is that it?”

“Very well put, madam.”

“But, then, what do you want?”

“We want the Galaxy, the whole Galaxy. We want to settle and populate every habitable planet in it and establish nothing less than a Galactic Empire. And we don’t want the Spacers to interfere. They can remain on their own worlds and live in peace as they please, but they must not interfere.”

“But then you’ll be penning them up on their fifty worlds, as we penned up Earthpeople on Earth for so many years. The same old injustice. You’re as bad as Bistervan.”

“The situations are different. Earthpeople were penned up in defiance of their expansive potential. You Spacers have no such potential. You took the path of longevity and robots and the potential vanished. You don’t even have fifty worlds any longer. Solaria has been abandoned. The others will go, too, in time. The Settlers have no interest in pushing the Spacers along the path to extinction, but why should we interfere with their voluntary choice to do so? Your speech tended to interfere with that.”

“I’m glad. What did you think I would say?”

“I told you. Peace and love and sit down. You could have finished in about one minute.”

Gladia said angrily, “I can’t believe you expected anything so foolish of me. What did you take me for?”

“For what you took yourself for – someone frightened to death of speaking. How did we know that you were a madwoman who could, in half an hour, persuade the Baleyworlders to howl in favor of what for lifetimes we have been persuading them to howl against? But talk will get us nowhere” – he rose heavily to his feet –” I want a shower, too, and I had better get a night’s sleep – if I can. See you tomorrow.”

“But when do we find out what the Directors will decide to do with me?”

“When they find out, which may not be soon. Good night, madam.”

36.

“I have made a discovery,” said Giskard, his voice carrying no shade of emotion. “I have made it because, for the first time in my existence, I faced thousands of human beings. Had I done this two centuries ago, I would have made the discovery then. Had I never faced so many at once, then I would never have made the discovery at all.

“Consider, then, how many vital points I might easily grasp, but never have and never will, simply because the proper conditions for it will never come my way. I remain ignorant except where circumstance helps me and I cannot count on circumstance.”

Daneel said, “I did not think, friend Giskard, that Lady Gladia, with her long-sustained way of life, could face thousands with equanimity. I did not think she would be able to speak at all. When it turned out that she could, I assumed you had adjusted her and that you had discovered that it could be done without harming her. Was that your discovery?”

Giskard said, “Friend Daneel, actually all I dared do was loosen a very few strands of inhibition, only enough to allow her to speak a few words, so that she might be heard.”

“But she did far more than that.”

“After this microscopic adjustment, I turned to the multiplicity of minds I faced in the audience. I had never experienced so many, any more than Lady Gladia had, and I was as taken aback as she was. I found, at first, that I could do nothing in the vast mental interlockingness that beat in upon me. I felt helpless.

“And then I noted small friendlinesses, curiosities, interests – I cannot describe them in words – with a color of sympathy for Lady Gladia about them. I played with what I could find that had this color of sympathy, tightening and thickening them just slightly. I wanted some small response in Lady Gladia’s favor that might encourage her, that might make it unnecessary for me to be tempted to tamper further with Lady Gladia’s mind. That was all I did. I do not know how many threads of the proper color I handled. Not many.”

Daneel said, “And what then, friend Giskard?”

“I found, friend Daneel, that I had begun something that was autocatalytic. Each thread I strengthened, strengthened a nearby thread of the same kind and the two together strengthened several others nearby. I had to do nothing further. Small stirs, small sounds, and small glances that seemed to approve of what Lady Gladia said encouraged still others.

“Then I found something stranger yet. All these little indications of approval, which I could detect only because the minds were open to me, Lady Gladia must have also detected in some manner, for further inhibitions in her mind fell without my touching them. She began to speak faster, more confidently, and the audience responded better than ever – without my doing anything. And in the end, there was hysteria, a storm, a tempest of mental thunder and lightning so intense that I had to close my mind to it or it would have overloaded my circuits.

“Never, in all my existence, had I encountered anything like that and yet it started with no more modification introduced by me in all that crowd than I have, in the past, introduced among a mere handful of people. I suspect, in fact, that the effect spread beyond the audience sensible to my mind – to the greater audience reached via hyperwave.”

Daneel said, “I do not see how this can be, friend Giskard.”

“Nor I, friend Daneel. I am not human. I do not directly experience the possession of a human mind with all its complexities and contradictions, so I do not grasp the mechanisms by which they respond. But, apparently, crowds are more easily managed than individuals. It seems paradoxical. Much weight takes more effort to move than little weight. Much energy takes more effort to counter than little energy. Much distance takes longer to traverse than little distance. Why, then, should many people be easier to sway than few? You think like a human being, friend Daneel. Can you explain?”

Daneel said, “You yourself, friend Giskard, said that it was an autocatalytic effect, a matter of contagion. A single spark of flame may end by burning down a forest.”

Giskard paused and seemed deep in thought. Then he said, “It is not reason that is contagious but emotion. Madam Gladia chose arguments she felt would move her audience’s feelings. She did not attempt to reason with them. It may be, then, that the larger the crowd, the more easily they are swayed by emotion rather than by reason.

“Since emotions are few and reasons are many, the behavior of a crowd can be more easily predicted than the behavior of one person can. And that, in turn, means that if laws are to be developed that enable the current of history to be predicted, then one must deal with large populations, the larger the better. That might itself be the First Law of Psychohistory, the key to the study of Humanics. Yet –”

“Yes?”

“It strikes me that it has taken me so long to understand this only because I am not a human being. A human being would, perhaps, instinctively understand his own mind well enough to know how to handle others like himself. Madam Gladia, with no experience at all in addressing huge crowds, carried off the matter expertly. How much better off we would be if we had someone like Elijah Baley with us. Friend Daneel, are you not thinking of him?”

Daneel said, “Can you see his image in my mind? That is surprising, friend Giskard.”

“I do not see him, friend Daneel. I cannot receive your thoughts. But I can sense emotions and mood – and your mind has a texture which, by past experience, I know to be associated with Elijah Baley.”

“Madam Gladia made mention of the fact that I was the last to see Partner Elijah alive, so I listen again, in memory, to that moment. I think again of what he said.”

“Why, friend Daneel?”

“I search for the meaning. I feel it was important.”

“How could what he said have meaning beyond the import of the words? Had there been hidden meaning, Elijah Baley would have expressed it.”

“Perhaps,” said Daneel slowly, “Partner Elijah did not himself understand the significance of what he was saying.”

10. After The Speech

37.

MEMORY!

IT LAY in Daneel’s mind like a closed book of infinite detail, always available for his use. Some passages were called upon frequently for their information, but only a very few were called upon merely because Daneel wished to feel their texture. Those very few were, for the most part, those that contained Elijah Baley.

Many decades ago, Daneel had come to Baleyworld while Elijah Baley was still alive. Madam Gladia had come with him, but after they entered into orbit about Baleyworld, Bentley Baley soared upward in his small ship to meet them and was brought aboard. By then, he was a rather gnarled man of middle age.

He looked at Gladia with faintly hostile eyes and said, “You cannot see him, madam.”

And Gladia, who had been weeping, said, “Why not?”

“He does not wish it, madam, and I must respect his wishes.”

“I cannot believe that, Mr. Baley.”

“I have a handwritten note and I have a voice recording, madam. I do not know if you can recognize his handwriting or his voice, but you have my word of honor these are his and that no untoward influence was used upon him to produce them.”

She went into her own cabin to read and listen alone. Then she emerged – with an air of defeat about her – but she managed to say firmly, “Daneel, you are to go down alone to see him. It is his wish. But you are to report to me everything that is done and said.”

“Yes, madam,” Daneel said.

Daneel went down in Bentley’s ship and Bentley said to him, “Robots are not allowed on this world, Daneel, but an exception is being made in your case because it is my father’s wish and because he is highly revered here. I have no personal animus against you, you understand, but your presence here must be an entirely limited one. You will be taken directly to my father. When he is done with you, you will be taken back into orbit at once. Do you understand?”

“I understand, sir. How is your father?”

“He is dying,” Bentley said with perhaps conscious brutality.

“I understand that, too,” said Daneel, his voice quivering noticeably, not out of ordinary emotion but because the consciousness of the death of a human being, however unavoidable, disordered his positronic brain paths. “I mean, how much longer before he must die?”

“He should have died some time ago. He is tied to life because he refuses to go until he sees you.”

They landed. It was a large world, but the inhabited portion – if this were all – was small and shabby. It was a cloudy day and it had rained recently. The wide, straight streets were empty, as though what population existed there was in no mood to assemble in order to stare at a robot.

The ground-car took them through the emptiness and brought them to a house somewhat larger and more impressive than most. Together they entered. At an inner door, Bentley halted.

“My father is in there,” he said sadly. “You are to go in alone. He will not have me there with you. Go in. You might not recognize him.”

Daneel went into the gloom of the room. His eyes adjusted rapidly and he was aware of a body covered by a sheet inside a transparent cocoon that was made visible only by its faint glitter. The light within the room brightened a bit and Daneel could then see the face clearly.

Bentley had been right. Daneel saw nothing of his old partner in it. It was gaunt and bony. The eyes were closed and it seemed to Daneel that what he saw was a dead body. He had never seen a dead human being and when this thought struck him, he staggered and it seemed to him that his legs would not hold him up.

But the old man’s eyes opened and Daneel recovered his equilibrium, though he continued to feel an unaccustomed weakness just the same.

The eyes looked at him and a small, faint smile curved the pale, cracked lips.

“Daneel. My old friend Daneel.”

There was the faint timbre of Elijah Baley’s remembered voice in that whispered sound. An arm emerged slowly from under the sheet and it seemed to Daneel that he recognized Elijah after all.

“Partner Elijah,” he said softly.

“Thank you – thank you for coming.”

“It was important for me to come, Partner Elijah.”

“I was afraid they might not allow it. They – the others – even my son – think of you as a robot.”

“I am a robot.”

“Not to me, Daneel. You haven’t changed, have you? I don’t see you clearly, but it seems to me you are exactly the same as I remember. When did I last see you? Twenty-nine years ago?”

“Yes – and in all that time, Partner Elijah, I have not changed, so you see, I am a robot.”

“I have changed, though, and a great deal. I should not have let you see me like this, but I was too weak to resist my desire to see you once again.” Baley’s voice seemed to have grown a bit stronger, as though it had been fortified by the sight of Daneel.

“I am pleased to see you, Partner Elijah, however you have changed.”

“And Lady Gladia? How is she?”

“She is well. She came with me.”

“She is not –” A touch of painful alarm came into his voice as he tried to look about.

“She is not on this world, but is still in orbit. It was explained to her that you did not wish to see her – and she understood.”

“That is wrong. I do wish to see her, but I have been able to withstand that temptation. She has not changed, has she?”

“She still has the appearance she had when you last saw her.”

“Good. – but I couldn’t let her see me like this. I could not have this be her last memory of me. With you, it is different.”

“That is because I am a robot, Partner Elijah.”

“Stop insisting on that,” said the dying man peevishly. “You could not mean more to me, Daneel, if you were a man.”

He lay silently in his bed for a while, then he said, “All these years, I have never hypervised, never written to her. I could not allow myself to interfere with her life. – Is Gladia still married to Gremionis?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And happy?”

“I cannot judge that. She does not behave in a fashion that might be interpreted as unhappy.”

“Children?”

“The permitted two.”

“She has not been angry that I have not communicated?”

“It is my belief she understood your motives.”

“Does she ever – mention me?”

“Almost never, but it is Giskard’s opinion that she often thinks of you.”

“How is Giskard?”

“He functions properly – in the manner that you know.”

“You know, then – of his abilities.”

“He has told me, Partner Elijah.”

Again Baley lay there silently. Then he stirred and said, “Daneel, I wanted you here out of a selfish desire to see you, to see for myself that you haven’t changed, that there is a breath of the great days of my life still existing, that you remember me and will continue to remember me. – but I also want to tell you something.

“I will be dead soon, Daneel, and I knew the word would reach you. Even if you weren’t here, even if you were on Aurora, the word would come to you. My death will be Galactic news. “His chest heaved in a weak and silent laugh. “Who would have thought it once?”

He said, “Gladia would hear of it as well, of course, but Gladia knows I must die and she will accept the fact, however sadly. I feared the effect on you, however, since you are – as you insist and I deny – a robot. For old times’ sake you may feel it is incumbent upon you to keep me from dying and the fact that you cannot do so may perhaps have a permanently deleterious effect on you. Let me, then, argue with you about that.”

Baley’s voice was growing weaker. Though Daneel sat motionless, his face was in the unusual condition of reflecting emotion. It was set in an expression of concern and sorrow. Baley’s eyes were closed and he could not see that.

“My death, Daneel,” he said, “is not important. No individual death among human beings is important. Someone who dies leaves his work behind and that does not entirely die. It never entirely dies as long as humanity exists. – Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Daneel said, “Yes, Partner Elijah.”

“The work of each individual contributes to a totality and so becomes an undying part of the totality. That totality of human lives – past and present and to come – forms a tapestry that has been in existence now for many tens of thousands of years and has been growing more elaborate and, on the whole, more beautiful in all that time. Even the Spacers are an offshoot of the tapestry and they, too, add to the elaborateness and beauty of the pattern. An individual life is one thread in the tapestry and what is one thread compared to the whole?

“Daneel, keep your mind fixed firmly on the tapestry and do not let the trailing off of a single thread affect you. There are so many other threads, each valuable, each contributing –”

Baley stopped speaking, but Daneel waited patiently.

Baley’s eyes opened and, looking at Daneel, he frowned slightly.

“You are still here? It is time for you to go. I have told you what I meant to tell you.”

“I do not wish to go, Partner Elijah.”

“You must. I cannot hold off death any longer. I am tired – desperately tired. I want to die. It is time.”

“May I not wait while you live?”

“I don’t wish it. If I die while you watch, it may affect you badly despite all my words. Go now. That is an – order. I will allow you to be a robot if you wish but, in that case, you must follow my orders. You cannot save my life by anything you can do, so there is nothing to come ahead of Second Law. Go!”

Baley’s finger pointed feebly and he said, “Good-bye, friend Daneel.”

Daneel turned slowly, following Baley’s orders with unprecedented difficulty. “Good-bye, Partner –” He paused and then said, with a faint hoarseness, “Good-bye, friend Elijah.”

Bentley confronted Daneel in the next room. “Is he still alive?”

“He was alive when I left.”

Bentley went in and came out almost at once. “He isn’t now. He saw you and then – let go.”

Daneel found he had to lean against the wall. It was some time before he could stand upright.

Bentley, eyes averted, waited and then together they returned to the small ship and moved back up into orbit where Gladia waited.

And she, too, asked if Elijah Baley was still alive and when they told her gently that he was not, she turned away, dry-eyed, and went into her own cabin to weep.

37A.

Daneel continued his thought as though the sharp memory of Baley’s death in all its details had not momentarily intervened. “And yet I may understand something more of what Partner Elijah was saying now in the light of Madam Gladia’s speech.”

“In what way?”

“I am not yet sure. It is very difficult to think in the direction I am trying to think.”

“I will wait for as long as is necessary,” said Giskard.

38.

Genovus Pandaral was tall and not, as yet, very old for all his thick shock of white hair which, together with his fluffy white sideburns, gave him a look of dignity and distinction. His general air of looking like a leader had helped his advancement through the ranks, but as he himself knew very well, his appearance was much stronger than his inner fiber.

Once he had been elected to the Directory, he had gotten over the initial elation rather rapidly. He was in beyond his depth and, each year, as he was automatically pushed up a notch, he knew that more clearly. Now he was Senior Director.

Of all the times to be Senior Director!

In the old days, the task of ruling had been nothing. In the time of Nephi Morler, eight decades before, the same Morler who was always being held up to the schoolchildren as the greatest of all Directors, it had been nothing. What had Baleyworld been then? A small world, a trickle of farms, a handful of towns clustered along natural lines of communication. The total population had been no more than five million and its most important exports had been raw wool and some titanium.

The Spacers had ignored them completely under the more or less benign influence of Han Fastolfe of Aurora and life was simple. People could always make trips back to Earth – if they wanted a breath of culture or the feel of technology and there was a steady flow of Earthpeople arriving as immigrants. Earth’s mighty population was inexhaustible.

Why shouldn’t Morler have been a great Director, then? He had had nothing to do.

And, in the future, ruling would again be simple. As the Spacers continued to degenerate (every schoolchild was told that they would, that they must drown in the contradictions of their society – though Pandaral wondered, sometimes, whether this was really certain) and as the Settlers continued to increase in numbers and strength, the time would soon come when life would be again secure. The Settlers would live in peace and develop their own technology to the utmost.

As Baleyworld filled, it would assume the proportion and ways of another Earth, as would all the worlds, while new ones would spring up here and there in ever greater numbers, finally making up the great Galactic Empire to come. And surely Baleyworld, as the oldest and most populous of the Settler worlds, would always have a prime place in that Empire, under the benign and perpetual rule of Mother Earth.

But it was not in the past that Pandaral was Senior Director. Nor was it in the future. It was now.

Han Fastolfe was dead now, but Kelden Amadiro was alive. Amadiro had held out against Earth being allowed to send out Settlers twenty decades ago and he was still alive now to make trouble. The Spacers were still too strong to be disregarded; the Settlers were still not quite strong enough to move forward with confidence. Somehow the Settlers had to hold off the Spacers till the balance had shifted sufficiently.

And the task of keeping the Spacers quiet and the Settlers at once resolute and yet sensible fell more upon Pandaral’s shoulders than on anyone else’s – and it was a task he neither liked nor wanted.

Now it was morning, a cold, gray morning with more snow coming – though that was no surprise – and he made his way through the hotel alone. He wanted no retinue.

The security guards, out in force, snapped to attention as he passed and he acknowledged them wearily. He spoke to the captain of the guard when the latter advanced to meet him. “Any trouble, Captain?”

“None, Director. All is quiet.”

Pandaral nodded. “In which room has Baley been put? – Ah. – and the Spacer woman and her robots are under strict guard? – Good.”

He passed on. On the whole, D.G. had behaved well. Solaria, abandoned, could be used by Traders as an almost endless supply of robots and as a source of large profits – though profits were not to be taken as the natural equivalent of world security, Pandaral thought morosely. But Solaria, booby-trapped, had best be left alone. It was not worth a war. D.G. had done well to leave at once.

And to take the nuclear intensifier with him. So far, such devices were so overwhelmingly massive that they could be used only in huge and expensive installations designed to destroy invading ships – and even these had never gotten beyond the planning stage. Too expensive. Smaller and cheaper versions were absolutely necessary, so D.G. was right in feeling that bringing home a Solarian intensifier was more important than all the robots on that world put together. That intensifier should help the scientists of Baleyworld enormously.

And yet if one Spacer world had a portable intensifier, why not others? Why not Aurora? If those weapons grew small enough to place on warships, a Spacer fleet could wipe out any number of Settler ships without trouble. How far toward that development were they? And how fast could Baleyworld progress in the same direction with the help of the intensifier D.G. had brought back?

He signaled at D.G.’s hotel room door, then entered without quite waiting for a response and sat down without quite waiting for an invitation. There were some useful perquisites that went along with being Senior Director.

D.G. looked out of the bathroom and said through the towel with which he was giving his hair a first dry, “I would have liked to greet your Directorial Excellence in a properly imposing manner, but you catch me at a disadvantage, since I am in the extremely undignified predicament of having just emerged from my shower.”

“Oh, shut up,” said Pandaral pettishly.

Ordinarily, he enjoyed D.G.’s irrepressible breeziness, but not now. In some ways, he never really understood D.G. at all. D.G. was a Baley, a lineal descendant of the great Elijah and the Founder, Bentley. That made D.G. a natural for a Director’s post, especially since he had the kind of bonhomie that endeared him to the public. Yet he chose to be a Trader, which was a difficult life – and a dangerous one. It might make you rich, but it was much more likely to kill you or – what was worse – prematurely age you.

What’s more, D.G.’s life as a Trader took him away from Baleyworld for months at a time and Pandaral preferred his advice to those of most of his department heads. One couldn’t always tell when D.G. was serious, but, allowing for that, he was worth listening to.

Pandaral said heavily, “I don’t think that that woman’s speech was the best thing that could have happened to us.”

D.G., mostly dressed, shrugged his shoulders. “Who could have foretold it?”

“You might have. You must have looked up her background – if you had made up your mind to carry her off.”

“I did look up her background, Director. She spent over three decades on Solaria. It was Solaria that formed her and she lived there entirely with robots. She saw human beings only by holographic images, except for her husband – and he didn’t visit her often. She had a difficult adjustment to make when she came to Aurora and even there she lived mostly with robots. At no time in twenty-three decades would she have faced as many as twenty people all together, let alone four thousand. I assumed she wouldn’t be able to speak more than a few words – if that. I had no way of knowing she was a rabble-rouser.”

“You might have stopped her, once you found out she was. You were sitting right next to her.”

“Did you want a riot? The people were enjoying her. You were there. You know they were. If I had forced her down, they would have mobbed the stage. After all, Director, you didn’t try to stop her.”

Pandaral cleared his throat. “I had that in mind, actually, but each time I looked back, I’d catch the eye of her robot the one who looks like a robot.”

“Giskard. Yes, but what of it? He wouldn’t harm you.”

“I know. Still, he made me nervous and it put me off somehow.”

“Well, never mind, Director,” said D.G. He was fully clothed now and he shoved the breakfast tray toward the other. “The coffee is still warm. Help yourself to the buns and jams if you want any. – It will pass. I don’t think the public will really overflow with love for the Spacers and spoil our policy. It might even serve a purpose. If the Spacers hear of it, it might strengthen the Fastolfe party. Fastolfe may be dead, but his party isn’t – not altogether – and we need to encourage their policy of moderation.”

“What I’m thinking of,” said Pandaral, “is the All-Settler Congress that’s coming up in five months. I’m going to have to listen to any number of sarcastic references to Baleyworld appeasement and to Baleyworlders being Spacer-lovers. – I tell you,” he added gloomily, “the smaller the world, the more war hawkish it is.”

“Then tell them that,” said D.G. “Be very statesmanlike in public, but when you get them to one side, look them right in the eye – unofficially – and say that there’s freedom of expression on Baleyworld and we intend to keep it that way. Tell them Baleyworld has the interests of Earth at heart, but that if any world wishes to prove its greater devotion to Earth by declaring war on the Spacers, Baleyworld will watch with interest but nothing more. That would shut them up.”

“Oh, no,” said Pandaral with alarm. “A remark like that would leak out. It would create an impossible stink.”

D.G. said, “You’re right, which is a pity. But think it and don’t let those bigmouthed small brains get to you.”

Pandaral sighed. “I suppose we’ll manage, but last night upset our plans to end on a high note. That’s what I really regret.”

“What high note?”

Pandaral said, “When you left Aurora for Solaria, two Auroran warships went to Solaria as well. Did you know that?”

“No, but it was something I expected,” said D.G. indifferently. “It was for that reason I took the trouble of going to Solaria by way of an evasive path.”

“One of the Auroran ships landed on Solaria, thousands of kilometers away from you – so it didn’t seem to be making any effort to keep tabs on you – and the second remained in orbit.”

“Sensible. It’s what I would have done if I had had a second ship at my disposal.”

“The Auroran ship that landed was destroyed in a matter of hours. The ship in orbit reported the fact and was ordered to return. – a Trader monitoring station picked up the report and it was sent to us.”

“Was the report uncoded?”

“Of course not, but it was in one of the codes we’ve broken.”

D.G. nodded his head thoughtfully, then said, “Very interesting. I take it they didn’t have anyone who could speak Solarian.”

“Obviously,” said Pandaral weightily. “Unless someone can find where the Solarians went, this woman of yours is the only available Solarian in the Galaxy.”

“And they let me have her, didn’t they? Tough on the Aurorans.”

“At any rate, I was going to announce the destruction of the Auroran ship last night. In a matter-of-fact way – no gloating. Just the same, it would have excited every Settler in the Galaxy. I mean, we got away and the Aurorans didn’t.”

“We had a Solarian,” said D.G. dryly. “The Aurorans didn’t.”

“Very well. It would make you and the woman look good, too. – but it all came to nothing. After what the woman did, anything else would have come as anticlimax, even the news of the destruction of an Auroran warship.”

D.G. said, “To say nothing of the fact that once everyone has finished applauding kinship and love, it would go against the grain – for the next half hour anyway – to applaud the death of a couple of hundred of the Auroran kin.”

“I suppose so. So that’s an enormous psychological blow that we’ve lost.”

D.G. was frowning. “Forget that, Director. You can always work the propaganda at some other, more appropriate time. The important thing is what it all means. – An Auroran ship was blown up. That means they weren’t expecting a nuclear intensifier to be used. The other ship was ordered away and that may mean it wasn’t equipped with a defense against it – and maybe they don’t even have a defense. I should judge from this that the portable intensifier – or semiportable one, anyway – is a Solarian development specifically and not a Spacer development generally. That’s good news for us – if it’s true. For the moment, let’s not worry about propaganda brownie points but concentrate on squeezing every bit of information we can out of that intensifier. We want to be ahead of the Spacers in this – if possible.”

Pandaral munched away at a bun and said, “Maybe you’re right. But in that case, how do we fit in the other bit of news?”

D.G. said, “What other bit of news? Director, are you going to give me the information I need to make intelligent conversation or do you intend to toss them into the air one by one and make me jump for them?”

“Don’t get huffy, D.G. There’s no point in talking with you if I can’t be informal. Do you know what it’s like at a Directory meeting? Do you want my job? You can have it, you know.”

“No, thank you, I don’t want it. What I want is your bit of news.”

“We have a message from Aurora. An actual message. They actually deigned to communicate directly with us instead of sending it by way of Earth.”

“We might consider it an important message, then – to them. What do they want?”

“They want the Solarian woman back again.”

“Obviously, then, they know our ship got away from Solaria and has come to Baleyworld. They have their monitoring stations, too, and eavesdrop on our communications as we eavesdrop on theirs.”

“Absolutely,” said Pandaral with considerable irritation. “They break our codes as fast as we break theirs. My own feeling is we ought to come to an agreement that we both send messages in the clear. Neither of us would be worse off.”

“Did they say why they want the woman?”

“Of course not. Spacers don’t give reasons; they give orders.”

“Have they found out exactly what it was that the woman accomplished on Solaria? Since she’s the only person who speaks authentic Solarian, do they want her to clear the planet of its overseers?”

“I don’t see how they could have found out, D.G. We only announced her role last night. The message from Aurora was received well before that. – But it doesn’t matter why they want her. The question is: What do we do? If we don’t return her, we may have a crisis with Aurora that I don’t want. If we do return her, it will look bad to the Baleyworlders and Old Man Bistervan will have a field day pointing out that we’re crawling to the Spacers.”

They stared at each other, then D.G. said slowly, “We’ll have to return her. After all, she’s a Spacer and an Auroran citizen. We can’t keep her against Aurora’s will or we’ll put at risk every Trader who ventures into Spacer territory on business. But l’ II take her back, Director, and you can put the blame on me. Say that the conditions of my taking her to Solaria were that I would return her to Aurora, which is true, actually, even if not a matter of written formality, and that I am a man of ethics and felt I had to keep my agreement. – And it may turn out to our advantage.”

“In what way?”

“I’ll have to work it out. But if it’s to be done, Director, my ship will have to be refitted at planetary expense. And my men will need healthy bonuses. – Come, Director, they’re giving up their leave.”

39.

Considering that he had not intended to be in his ship again for at least three additional months, D.G. seemed in genial spirits.

And considering that Gladia had larger and more luxurious quarters than she had before, she seemed rather depressed.

“Why all this?” she asked.

“Looking a gift horse in the mouth?” asked D.G. “I’m just asking. Why?”

“For one thing, my lady, you’re a class – a heroine and when the ship was refurbished, this place was rather tarted up for you.”

“Tarted up?”

“Just an expression. Fancied up, if you prefer.”

“This space wasn’t just created. Who lost out?”

“Actually, it was the crew’s lounge, but they insisted, you know. You’re their darling, too. In fact, Niss – you remember Niss?”

“Certainly.”

“He wants you to take him on in place of Daneel. He says Daneel doesn’t enjoy the job and keeps apologizing to his victims. Niss says he will destroy anyone who gives you the least trouble, will take pleasure in it, and will never apologize.”

Gladia smiled. “Tell him I will keep his offer in mind and tell him I would enjoy shaking his hand if that can be arranged. I didn’t get a chance to do so before we landed on Baleyworld.”

“You’ll wear your gloves, I hope, when you shake hands.”

“Of course, but I wonder if that’s entirely necessary. I haven’t as much as sniffed since I left Aurora. The injections I’ve been getting have probably strengthened my immune system beautifully.” She looked about again. “You even have wall niches for Daneel and Giskard. That’s quite thoughtful of you, D.G.”

“Madam,” said D.G., “we work hard to please and we’re delighted that you’re pleased.”

“Oddly enough” – Gladia sounded as though she were actually puzzled by what she was about to say –” I’m not entirely pleased. I’m not sure I want to leave your world.”

“No? Cold – snow – dreary – primitive – endlessly cheering crowds everywhere. What can possibly attract you here?”

Gladia reddened. “It’s not the cheering crowds.”

“I’ll pretend to believe you, madam.”

“It’s not. It’s something altogether different. I – I have never done anything. I’ve amused myself in various trivial ways, I’ve engaged in force-field coloring and robot exodesign. I’ve made love and been a wife and mother and – and – in none of these things have I ever been an individual of any account. If I had suddenly disappeared from existence or if I had never been born, it wouldn’t have affected anyone or anything – except, perhaps, one or two close personal friends. Now it’s different.”

“Yes?” There was the faintest touch of mockery in D.G.’s voice.

Gladia said, “Yes! I can influence people. I can choose a cause and make it my own. I have chosen a cause. I want to prevent war. I want the Universe populated by Spacer and Settler alike. I want each group to keep their own peculiarities, yet freely accept the others’, too. I want to work so hard at this that after I am gone, history will have changed because of me and people will say, ‘Things would not be as satisfactory as they are had it not been for her.” ‘

She turned to D.G., her face glowing. “Do you know what a difference it makes, after two and one-third centuries of being nobody, to have a chance of being somebody; to find that a life you thought of as empty turns out to contain something after all, something wonderful; to be happy long, long after you had given up any hope of being happy?”

“You don’t have to be on Baleyworld, my lady, to have all that.” Somehow D.G. seemed a little abashed.

“I won’t have it on Aurora. I am only a Solarian immigrant on Aurora. On a Settler world, I’m a Spacer – something unusual.”

“Yet on a number of occasions – and quite forcefully – you have stated you wanted to return to Aurora.”

“Some time ago, yes – but I’m not saying it now, D.G. I don’t really want it now.”

“Which would influence us a great deal, except that Aurora wants you. They’ve told us so.”

Gladia was clearly astonished. “They want me?”

“An official message from Aurora’s Chairman of the Council tells us they do,” said D.G. lightly. “We would enjoy keeping you, but the Directors have decided that keeping you is not worth an interstellar crisis. I’m not sure I agree with them, but they outrank me.”

Gladia frowned. “Why should they want me? I’ve been on Aurora for over twenty decades and at no time have they ever seemed to want me. – Wait! Do you suppose they see me now as the only way of stopping the overseers on Solaria?”

“That thought had occurred to me, my lady.”

“I won’t do it. I held off that one overseer by a hair and I may never be able to repeat what I did then. I know I won’t. – Besides, why need they land on the planet? They can destroy the overseers from a distance, now that they know what they are.”

“Actually,” said D.G., “the message demanding your return was sent out long before they could possibly have known of your conflict with the overseer. They must want you for something else.”

“Oh. “She looked taken aback. Then, catching fire again, “I don’t care what else. I don’t want to return. I have my work out here and I mean to continue it.”

D.G. rose. “I am glad to hear you say so, Madam Gladia. I was hoping you would feel like that. I promise you I will do my best to take you with me when we leave Aurora. Right now, though, I must go to Aurora and you must go with me.”

40.

Gladia watched Baleyworld, as it receded, with emotions quite different from those with which she had watched it approach. It was precisely the cold, gray, miserable world now that it had seemed at the start, but there was a warmth and life to the people. They were real, solid.

Solaria, Aurora, the other Spacer worlds that she had visited or had viewed on hypervision, all seemed filled with people who were insubstantial – gaseous.

That was the word. Gaseous.

No matter how few the human beings who lived upon a Spacer world, they spread out to fill the planet in the same way that molecules of gas spread out to fill a container. It was as if Spacers repelled each other.

And they did, she thought gloomily. Spacers had always repelled her. She had been brought up to such repulsion on Solaria, but even on Aurora, when she was experimenting madly with sex just at first, the least enjoyable aspect of it was the closeness it made necessary.

Except – except with Elijah. – But he was not a Spacer.

Baleyworld was not like that. Probably all the Settler worlds were not. Settlers clung together, leaving large tracts desolate about them as the price of the clinging – empty, that is, until population increase filled it. A Settler world was a world of people clusters, of pebbles and boulders, not gas.

Why was this? Robots, perhaps! They lessened the dependence of people upon people. They filled the interstices between. They were the insulation that diminished the natural attraction people had for each other, so that the whole system fell apart into isolates.

It had to be. Nowhere were there more robots than on Solaria and the insulating effect there had been so enormous that the separate gas molecules that were human beings became so totally inert that they almost never interrelated at all. (Where had the Solarians gone, she wondered again, and how were they living?)

And long life had something to do with it, too. How could one make an emotional attachment that wouldn’t turn slowly sour as the multidecades passed – or, if one died, how could another bear the loss for multidecades? One learned, then, not to make emotional attachments but to stand off, to insulate one’s self.

On the other hand, human beings, if short-lived, could not so easily outlive fascination with life. As the generations passed by rapidly, the ball of fascination bounced from hand to hand without ever touching the ground.

How recently she had told D.G. that there was no more to do or know, that she had experienced and thought everything, that she had to live on in utter boredom. – And she hadn’t known or even dreamed, as she spoke, of crowds of people, one upon another; of speaking to many as they melted into a continuous sea of heads; of hearing their response, not in words but in wordless sounds; of melting together with them, feeling their feelings, becoming one large organism.

It was not merely that she had never experienced such a thing before, it was that she had never dreamed anything like that might be experienced. How much more did she know nothing of despite her long life? What more existed for the experiencing that she was incapable of fantasying?

Daneel said gently, “Madam Gladia, I believe the captain is signaling for entrance.”

Gladia started. “Let him enter, then.”

D.G. entered, eyebrows raised. “I am relieved. I thought perhaps you were not at home.”

Gladia smiled. “In a way, I wasn’t. I was lost in thought. It happens to me sometimes.”

“You are fortunate,” said D.G. “My thoughts are never large enough to be lost in. Are you reconciled to visiting Aurora, madam?”

“No, I’m not. And among the thoughts in which I was lost was one to the effect that I still do not have any idea why you must go to Aurora. It can’t be only to return me. Any spaceworthy cargo tug could have done the job.”

“May I sit down, madam?”

“Yes, of course. That goes without saying, Captain. I wish you’d stop treating me as aristocracy. It becomes wearing. And if it’s an ironic indication that I’m a Spacer, then it’s worse than wearing. In fact, I’d almost rather you called me Gladia.”

“You seem to be anxious to disown your Spacer identity, Gladia,” said D.G. as he seated himself and crossed his legs.

“I would rather forget nonessential distinctions.”

“Nonessential? Not while you live five times as long as I do.”

“Oddly enough, I have been thinking of that as a rather annoying disadvantage for Spacers. – How long before we reach Aurora?”

“No evasive action this time. A few days to get far enough from our sun to be able to make a Jump through hyperspace that will take us to within a few days of Auroraand that’s it.”

“And why must you go to Aurora, D.G.?”

“I might say it was simply politeness, but in actual fact, I would like an opportunity to explain to your Chairman or even to one of his subordinates – exactly what happened on Solaria.”

“Don’t they know what happened?”

“In essentials, they do. They were kind enough to tap our communications, as we would have done theirs if the situation had been reversed. Still, they may not have drawn the proper conclusions. I would like to correct them – if that is so.”

“What are the proper conclusions, D.G.?”

“As you know, the overseers on Solaria were geared to respond to a person as human only if he or she spoke with a Solarian accent, as you did. That means that not only were Settlers not considered human, but non-Solarian Spacers were not considered human, either. To be precise, Aurorans would not be considered human beings if they had landed on Solaria.”

Gladia’s eyes widened. “That’s unbelievable. The Solarians wouldn’t arrange to have the overseers treat Aurorans as they treated you.”

“Wouldn’t they? They have already destroyed an Auroran ship. Did you know that?”

“An Auroran ship! No, I didn’t know that.”

“I assure you they did. It landed about the time we did. We got away, but they didn’t. We had you, you see, and they didn’t. The conclusion is – or should be – that Aurora cannot automatically treat other Spacer worlds as allies. In an emergency, it will be each Spacer world for itself.”

Gladia shook her head violently. “It would be unsafe to generalize from a single instance. The Solarians would have found it difficult to have the overseers react favorably to fifty accents and unfavorably to scores of others. It was easier to pin them to a single accent. That’s all. They gambled that no other Spacers would try to land on their world and they lost.”

“Yes, I’m sure that is how the Auroran leadership will argue, since people generally find it much easier to make a pleasant deduction than an unpleasant one. What I want to do is to make certain they see the possibility of the unpleasant one – and that this makes them uncomfortable indeed. Forgive my self-love, but I can’t trust anyone to do it as well as I can and therefore I think that I, rather than anyone else, should go to Aurora.”

Gladia felt uncomfortably tom. She did not want to be a Spacer; she wanted to be a human being and forget what she had just called “nonessential distinctions. “And yet when D.G. spoke with obvious satisfaction of forcing Aurora into a humiliating position, she found herself still somehow a Spacer.

She said in annoyance, “I presume the Settler worlds are at odds among themselves, too. Is it not each Settler world for itself?”

D.G. shook his head. “It may seem to you that this must be so and I wouldn’t be surprised if each individual Settler world had the impulse at times to put its own interest over the good of the whole, but we have something you Spacers lack.”

“And what is that. A greater nobility?”

“Of course not. We’re no more noble than Spacers are. What we’ve got is the Earth. It’s our world. Every Settler visits Earth as often as he can. Every Settler knows that there is a world, a large, advanced world, with an incredibly rich history and cultural variety and ecological complexity that is his or hers and to which he or she belongs. The Settler worlds might quarrel with each other, but the quarrel cannot possibly result in violence or in a permanent breach of relations, for the Earth government is automatically called in to mediate all problems and its decision is sufficient and unquestioned.

“Those are our three advantages, Gladia: the lack of robots, something that allows us to build new worlds with our own hands; the rapid succession of generations, which makes for constant change; and, most of all, the Earth, which gives us our central core.”

Gladia said urgently, “But the Spacers –” and she stopped.

D.G. smiled and said with an edge of bitterness, “Were you going to say that the Spacers are also descended from Earthpeople and that it is their planet, too? Factually true, but psychologically false. The Spacers have done their best to deny their heritage. They don’t consider themselves Earthmen once-removed – or any-number-removed. If I were a mystic, I would say that by cutting themselves away from their roots, the Spacers cannot survive long. Of course, I’m not a mystic so I don’t put it that way – but they cannot survive long, just the same. I believe that.”

Then, after a short pause, he added, with a somewhat troubled kindness, as though he realized that in his exultation he was striking a sensitive spot within her, “But please think of yourself as a human being, Gladia, rather than as a Spacer, and I will think of myself as a human being, rather than as a Settler. Humanity will survive, whether it will be in the form of Settlers or Spacers or both. I believe it will be in the form of Settlers only, but I may be wrong.”

“No,” said Gladia, trying to be unemotional. “I think you’re right – unless somehow people learn to stop making the Spacer/Settler distinction. It is my goal – to help people do that.”

“However,” said D.G., glancing at the dim time strip that circled the wall, “I delay your dinner. May I eat with you?”

“Certainly,” said Gladia.

D.G. rose to his feet. “Then I’ll go get it. I’d send Daneel or Giskard, but I don’t ever want to get into the habit of ordering robots about. Besides, however much the crew adores you, I don’t think their adoration extends to your robots.”

Gladia did not actually enjoy the meal when D.G. brought it. She did not seem to grow accustomed to the lack of subtlety in its flavors that might be the heritage of Earth cooking of yeast for mass consumption, but then, neither was it particularly repulsive. She ate stolidly.

D.G., noting her lack of enthusiasm, said, “The food doesn’t upset you, I hope?”

She shook her head. “No. Apparently, I’m acclimated. I had some unpleasant episodes when I first got on the ship, but nothing really severe.”

“I’m glad of that, but, Gladia –”

“Yes?”

“Can you suggest no reason why the Auroran government should want you back so urgently? It can’t be your handling of the overseer and it can’t be your speech. The request was sent out well before they could have known of either.”

“In that case, D.G.,” Gladia said sadly, “they can’t possibly want me for anything. They never have.”

“But there must be something. As I told you, the message arrived in the name of the Chairman of the Council of Aurora.”

‘This particular Chairman at this particular time is thought to be rather a figurehead.”

“Oh? Who stands behind him? Kelden Amadiro?”

“Exactly. You know of him, then.”

“Oh, yes,” said D.G. grimly, “the center of anti-Earth fanaticism. The man who was politically smashed by Dr. Fastolfe twenty decades ago survives to threaten us again. There’s an example of the dead hand of longevity.”

“But there’s the puzzle, too.” Gladia said. “Amadiro is a vengeful man. He knows that it was Elijah Baley who was the cause of that defeat you speak of and Amadiro believes I shared responsibility. His dislike – extreme dislike – extends to me. If the Chairman wants me, that can only be because Amadiro wants me – and why should Amadiro want me? He would rather get rid of me. That’s probably why he sent me along with you to Solaria. Surely he expected your ship would be destroyed – and me along with it. And that would not have pained him at all.”

“No uncontrollable tears, eh?” said D.G. thoughtfully. “But surely that’s not what you were told. No one said to you, ‘Go with this mad Trader because it would give us pleasure to have you killed. ‘”

“No. They said that you wanted my help badly and that it was politic to cooperate with the Settler worlds at the moment and that it would do Aurora a great deal of good if I would report back to them on all that occurred on Solaria once I returned.”

“Yes, they would say so. They might even have meant it to some extent. Then, when – against all their expectations – our ship got off safely while an Auroran ship was destroyed, they might well have wanted a firsthand account of what happened. Therefore, when I took you to Baleyworld instead of back to Aurora, they would scream for your return. That might possibly be it. By now, of course, they know the story, so they might no longer want you. Though” – he was talking to himself rather than to Gladia – “what they know is what they picked up from Baleyworld hypervision and they may not choose to accept that at face value. And yet –”

“And yet what, D.G.?”

“Somehow instinct tells me that their message could not have been sparked only by their desire to have you report. The forcefulness of the demand, it seems to me, went beyond that.”

“There’s nothing else they can want. Nothing,” said Gladia.

“I wonder,” said D.G.

41.

“I wonder as well,” said Daneel from his wall niche that night.

“You wonder concerning what, friend Daneel?” asked Giskard.

“I wonder concerning the true significance of the message from Aurora demanding Lady Gladia. To me, as to the captain, a desire for a report seems a not altogether sufficient motivation.”

“Have you an alternate suggestion?”

“I have a thought, friend Giskard.”

“May I know it, friend Daneel?”

“It has occurred to me that, in demanding the return of Madam Gladia, the Auroran Council may expect to see more than they ask for – and it may not be Madam Gladia they want.”

“What is there more than Madam Gladia that they will get?”

“Friend Giskard, is it conceivable that Lady Gladia will return without you and me?”

“No, but of what use to the Auroran Council would you and I be?”

“I, friend Giskard, would be of no use to them. You, however, are unique, for you can sense minds directly.”

“That is true, friend Daneel, but they do not know this.”

“Since our leaving, is it not possible that they have somehow discovered the fact and have come to regret bitterly having allowed you to leave Aurora?”

Giskard did not hesitate perceptibly. “No, it is not possible, friend Daneel. How would they have found out?”

Daneel said carefully, “I have reasoned in this fashion. You have, on your long-ago visit to Earth with Dr. Fastolfe, managed to adjust a few Earth robots so as to allow them a very limited mental capacity, merely enough to enable them to continue your work of influencing officials on Earth to look with courage and favor on the process of Settlement. So, at least, you once told me. There are, therefore, robots on Earth that are capable of mind-adjusting.

“Then, too, as we have come recently to suspect, the Robotics Institute of Aurora has sent humanoid robots to Earth. We do not know their precise purpose in doing so, but the least that can be expected of such robots is that they observe events there on Earth and report on them.

“Even if the Auroran robots cannot sense minds, they can send back reports to the effect that this or that official has suddenly changed his attitude toward Settlement and, perhaps, in the time since we have left Aurora, it has dawned on someone in power in Aurora – on Dr. Amadiro himself perhaps – that this can only be explained by the existence of mind-adjusting robots on Earth. It may be, then, that the establishment of mind-adjusting can be traced back to either Dr. Fastolfe or yourself.

“This might, in turn, make clear to Auroran officials the meaning of certain other events, which might be traced back to you rather than to Dr. Fastolfe. As a result, they would want you back desperately, yet not be able to ask for you directly, for that would give away the fact of their new knowledge. So they ask for Lady Gladia – a natural request – knowing that if she is brought back, you will be, too.”

Giskard was silent for a full minute, then he said, “It is interestingly reasoned, friend Daneel, but it does not hold together. Those robots whom I designed for the task of encouraging Settlement completed their job more than eighteen decades ago and have been inactive since, at least as far as mind-adjustment is concerned. What’s more, the Earth removed robots from their Cities and confined them to the unpopulated non-City areas quite a considerable time ago.

“This means that the humanoid robots who were, we speculate, sent to Earth, would, even so, not have had occasion to meet my mind-adjusting robots or be aware of any mind-adjustment either, considering that the robots are no longer engaged in that. It is impossible, therefore, for my special ability to have been uncovered in the manner you suggest.”

Daneel said, “Is there no other way of discovery, friend Giskard?”

“None,” said Giskard firmly.

“And yet – I wonder,” said Daneel.

... Continued in Volume 11

Sources of Dates

(For Volume 10)

AD =Anno Domini

GE =Galactic Era

FE =Foundational Era

Aurora Takes place a few months after Chimera

Have Robot, Will Travel Takes place 5 years after Aurora. Stated in novel.

Robots and Empire Takes place two hundred years after The Robots of Dawn

Table of Contents

Title page

Copyright

Table of Contents

Aurora

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Epilogue

Have Robot, Will Travel

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Robots and Empire

Part I-Aurora

1. The Descendant

1.

2.

3.

4.

2. The Ancestor?

5.

5A.

5B.

5C.

6.

3. The Crisis

7.

7A.

7B.

8.

9.

4. Another Descendant

10.

11.

12.

13.

Part II-Solaria

5. The Abandoned World

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

6. The Crew

19.

20.

21.

22.

7. The Overseer

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

Part III-Baleyworld

8. The Settler World

29.

30.

31.

32.

9. The Speech

33.

34.

35.

36.

10. After The Speech

37.

37A.

38.

39.

40.

41.

Sources of Dates