Have Robot, Will Travel Read online

  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 3

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  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-kilomet-er-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 4

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  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 5

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  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 6

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  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 subor-dinates 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 7

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  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 8

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  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.

  9

  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 10

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  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 11

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  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 12