Foundation And Chaos (10 page)

Above all, he must not reveal himself to be a robot. For all the robots in Daneel's
cadres, this was of paramount impor-

Tritch was finding this harder and harder to believe. “I will ask no more questions, ” she
said, and tucked the bottle under her arm. Apparently Planch was no longer so attractive
to her, and henceforth their relationship would be strictly professional.

Planch regretted this, but only slightly.

When he delivered Lodovik Trema to Madder Loss, he would be a very wealthy man, and he
would never have to work for anyone again. He imagined buying his own luxury vessel- one
that he could keep in tip-top condition, which was more than could be said for most
Imperial ships.

As for the strange and tightly disciplined man in the hold, a man who could stay enclosed
in a coffin for days without complaint or need...

The less he thought about that, the better.

tance. It was essential that humans never learn the extent to which robots had infiltrated
their societies.

Lodovik put his human overlay into the background and began a complete memory check. To do
so, he had to shut down his control of external motion for twenty seconds. He could still
see and hear, however.

It was at this moment that something bumped against the box. He heard fumbling outside,
then the sound of metal scraping against metal. The seconds ticked by... five, seven,
ten...

The lid of the box was pried open with a metallic groan. With his head turned to one side,
half facing the wall of the box, he could only gather a blurry glimpse of one face peering
in, and a fleeting impression of one other. Eighteen seconds... the memory check was
almost complete.

“He certainly looks dead. ” A woman's voice.

The memory check ended, but he decided to remain still.

“His eyes are open. ” A male voice, not that of Mors Planch.

“Turn him over and look for identification, ” the woman said.

“Sky, no! You do it. It's your bounty. ”

The woman hesitated. “His skin is pink. ”

“Radiation burns. ”

“No, he looks healthy. ”

“He's dead, ” the man said. “He's been in this box for a day and a half. No air. ”

“He just doesn't look like a corpse. ” She reached in and pinched the tissue of his
exposed hand. “Cool, but not cold. ”

Lodovik blanched his skin slowly, and dropped his external temperature to match the
ambient. He felt inefficient and incompetent for not having done that earlier.

“He looks pale enough to me, ” the man remarked. Another hand touched his skin. “He's cold
as ice. You're imagining things. ”

“Dead or whatever he may be, he's worth a fortune, ” the woman said.

“I know Mors Planch by reputation, Trin, ” the man said. “He won't just hand his prize
over to you. ”

Lodovik, on his conveyance into the rescue ship, had heard the name “Trin” applied to a
woman he gathered was second-in-command to the captain, Tritch. This could be a very
serious situation.

“Take his picture, ” Trin said. “I'll get a message out this sleep and we'll learn if he's
the one they want. ”

A camera was lifted over the box and silently recorded his image. Lodovik tried to model
all the possible causes for this behavior, all the scenarios and their potential outcomes.

“Besides, Tritch has given her word to Planch, ” the man continued. “She's known to be
honorable. ”

“If we succeed, we'll make ten times what Planch is paying Tritch, ” Trin said tightly.
“We could buy our own ship and become free traders on the periphery. Never have to deal
with Imperial taxes or inspections again. Maybe even go to work in a free system. ”

“Pretty rough territories, I hear, ” the man said.

“Freedom is always dangerous, ” Trin said. “All right. We're here. We've broken the seals
on the box. We're committed. Make an incision in his scalp and let's get what we came for.
”

The man withdrew what sounded like a scalpel from his pocket. Lodovik activated his eyes
and watched them in the dim light of the hold. The man swore under his breath and brought
the scalpel down.

Lodovik could not allow himself to be cut. He would bleed from any superficial wound, but
even an untrained eye would see that he was not human if the scalpel cut deep. Lodovik
quickly calculated all the pluses and minuses of any particular action he might take, and
arrived at the optimal, based on what he knew.

His arm shot up from the box. His hand wrapped around the wrist of the man with the
scalpel. “Hello, ” Lodovik said, and rose to a sitting position.

The man seemed to have a fit. He jerked and shrieked and tried to pull his hand away, then
shrieked again. His eyes rolled up to show nothing but white and foam appeared on his
lips. For several seconds he twitched in Lodovik's grasp, as Lodovik appraised the
situation from his new perspective.

Trin backed toward the hatchway. She looked terrified, but not as terrified as the man in
his grip. Lodovik judged the man's condition and carefully removed the scalpel from his
fingers, then released him. The man clutched his shoulder and gasped, his face turning a
medically questionable pale green.

“Trin, ” the man groaned, twisting toward her. Then he collapsed. Lodovik climbed from the
box and bent to examine him. The woman near the hatch seemed transfixed.

“Your friend is suffering a heart attack, ” Lodovik said, glancing at her. “Do you have a
doctor or medical appliances on this ship?”

The first mate gave a small, birdlike cry and fled.

Klia Asgar approached her contact in Fleshplay, a tough though popular family and labor
resort on the outskirts of Dahl, near the entertainment Sector of Little Kalgan. Here,
acts and rides from Little Kalgan itself were tried on very tough customers before they
were exported around Trantor.

Fleshplay was full of brilliantly illuminated signs climbing up the walls of buildings
almost to the ceil of the dome, announcing new shows and performance teams, old favorites
revived in the Stardust Theater, popular beverages, stimulk, even outlaw stims from
offworld. Klia glanced at the pouring cascades of projected beverages with a dry and
thirsty appreciation.

She had been standing in a store alcove for twenty minutes waiting for her contact, not
daring to abandon her position

even for the time it might take to get a drink at a nearby street-vendor stall.

Klia watched the crowds with more than just her eyes, and saw them in more than just
surface detail. On the surface, all seemed well enough. Men, women, and children at this
evening hour strolled by in what passed for leisure-time dress in Dahl, white blouses and
black culottes with red stripes around the waist for the women, pink jumpsuits for
prepubescent children, a more rakish cut of black worksuit for the men. A more than
cursory examination showed the strain, however.

These were the higher citizen classes in Dahl, the more fortunate day-shift and managerial
workers, functionally the equivalent of the omnipresent gray-clad bureaucrats in other
Sectors, yet there was a grimness in their faces when they weren't actively responding to
banter or forcing smiles. Their eyes seemed tired, a little glazed, from months of
disappointment and extensive layoffs. Klia could read the colors of their internal moods
as well, caught in brief flashes, since she was otherwise occupied: angry purples and
bilious green murmurings hidden within the deep holes of their minds, not auras, but pits
into which she could glimpse only from certain mental perspectives.

Nothing extraordinary in all this; Klia knew what the mood of Dahl was, and tried to
ignore it as often as possible. Full immersion would not just distract her, but could even
infect. She had to remain isolated from the general herd to keep her edge.

She recognized the boy as soon as he walked into view across the street. He was perhaps a
year older than she, shorter and squat, with a pinched face marked by several small scars
on his cheek and chin, gang marks from Billibotton's tougher streets. She had delivered
goods and information to him several times in the last year, when better courier jobs were
not to be had. Now, she realized she might be seeing even more of him, and she did not
like it one bit. He was tough to convince...

Good jobs had become almost impossible to find in the

past few days. Klia was known to be marked; few trusted her. Her income had plummeted
almost to nothing, and worse still, she had narrowly escaped being captured by a gang of
thugs whose leader she had never seen before. There were new folks in town, with new
allegiances, providing new dangers.

Klia still had confidence in her ability to worm her way out of any tight situation, but
the effort was exhausting her. She longed for a quiet place with friends, but she had few
friends- none willing to take her in the way things were.

It was enough to make her rethink her whole philosophy of life.

The pinch-faced boy caught sight of Klia when she wanted to be seen, then went through a
deliberate masquerade of casually ignoring her. She did the same, but edged closer,
looking around as if waiting for somebody else.

When they were within earshot, the boy said, “We're not interested in what you're carrying
today. Why don't you just slink out of Dahl and plague someone else?”

Brusqueness and even rudeness meant little, she was so used to them. “We have a contract,
” Klia said casually. “I deliver, you pay. My day boss won't take it well if you-”

“Word here is your day boss is in the sinks, ” the boy said, staring at her boldly. “And
so's every other day or night boss who used you. Even Kindril Nashak! Word is he's been
threatened with Rikerian, held with no charges! A free warning, girlie. No more!”

The noose was closing. “What do I do with this?” Klia asked, lifting the thin box under
her arm.

“I take nothing and pay nothing, that's the word. Now slink!”

Klia glanced at him for less than a second. The boy shook his head as if touched by a
buzzing insect, then looked right through her. He would not report having seen her.

If everybody wanted her to vanish, and there was no longer any work or reason to stay, it
really was time to vanish. The

thought scared her; she had never been outside Dahl for more than a few hours. She had
less than two weeks' living in credits, a lot of those black-market exchanges good only
for local merchants-who might shun her business now anyway.

Klia walked up the street to a less prosperous neighborhood, known euphemistically as
Softer Fleshplay, and ducked through a fractured plastic front into an abandoned food
stall. There, among scattered old wrappers and broken sticks of furniture, she cut the
security seal on her package and opened it, to see if it contained anything valuable
outside Dahl.

Papers and a bookfilm. She leafed through them and examined the seal on the bookfilm;
personal stuff, in code, nothing she could decipher or sell anywhere. She had known that
before she opened the package. She was handling only cut-rate deliveries anyway, often
enough backup deliveries, information too tricky to risk being sent where security eyes
could intercept it, yet not so tricky anyone wanted to pay large sums for better
couriers...

And once she had been the very best of couriers, one of the highest paid in Dahl,
inheritor of a tradition thousands of years old, as convoluted and ornate with language
and ritual as any religious commerce off Trantor. Sometimes, even official and public
papers were handed to the Dahlite couriers by legitimate day bosses, just to ensure faster
delivery now that other communications systems were so often stalled or subject to
surveillance by the Commission.

For her, it had all come to nothing, in just a few days!

With a jerk, she realized she was crying, silently, but nevertheless crying.

She wiped her face and blew her nose on a reasonably clean if dusty wrapper, dropped the
package in the litter, and took to the street again.

Once outside, she crossed the street and waited for a few minutes. Soon enough Klia saw
her tail, the one she expected would be after her if the delivery failed. It was a small,
thin girl

only a few years younger than she, pretending to play in the streets, dressed in a
scaled-down version of a black heatsink work jumper. Klia was too far away to exert any
persuasion, or learn anything; but she did not need to.

The girl darted into the abandoned stall and emerged a few seconds later with the shredded
wrappings and contents of the package.

Klia had tailed couriers at the very beginning, sometimes cleaning up after failed
deliveries. Now, it was being done to her. This was the last slap in the face, the final
insult.

The street traffic was increasing. With the darkening ceil, the lights on the marquees
above the streets would become brighter and more frantic, the crowds would jam shoulder to
shoulder, looking for a moment's relief from dreary lives. For a hunted person, such a
crush could be fatal. Anything could happen in a crowd, and she would be hard-pressed to
persuade, hide, make the masses forget, or even just get away quickly; she might be found
and killed.

She thought of the man in dusty green. The memory of him did not make her scalp itch, but
she would have to fall much lower before she gave up her independence and actually joined
a movement, even if they claimed to be like her...

Perhaps especially if they were like her! The thought of being among people who could do
what she did-

Suddenly, everyone around her made her scalp itch. With a moan, she pushed through the
roiling crowds, looking for the entrance to a plunger, the large, ancient elevators that
worked the levels in Dahl and most of the other Sectors of Trantor.

Vara Liso, exhausted and haggard, begged the stolid young major by her side to let her
rest. “I've been here for hours, ” she groaned. Her head ached, her clothes were drenched
in sweat, her vision blurred.