Mark Tiedemann: Chimera

"Do you know who sent it?"

"No. Not specifically."

"When did this happen?"

"Yesterday afternoon. I tried to comm you, but you were unavailable. I decided late last night to withdraw rather than hurt the Church."

Coren wanted to argue with him, tell him that people would understand, that they would support him because blackmail was so odious. But he knew better. The appearance of hypocrisy and the suggestion of a lie, even one of omission, turned people crudely incapable of compassion and robbed them of the ability to think when it came to politics. Coren had worked for the government, seen too many politicians go down in a mangle of innuendo simply because their constituency thought they had been betrayed by a promise compromised. There was nothing else Looms could do.

"Why didn't you tell me?" Coren repeated.

"I didn't tell anyone. It was nobody else's business. It was my own grief, my own horror. No one else has a right to that."

"Ree Wenithal knew."

Looms turned toward him. "Wenithal? What in god's name are you doing with him?"

"He came up. There was a kidnapping case and evidently you were part of it. "

"Wenithal is a corrupt policeman who failed to follow through on that investigation. I was peripheral to his case at the time, but we had several interviews because of Jerem."

"Jerem? That was your child's name?"

Suddenly, Looms' eyes flowed with tears. His hands curled into fists and he looked toward the ceiling. "Why won't you let this end?"

Coren waited again. Looms sighed shakily and sat down on the edge of a couch. " Jerem was born with a compromised immune system. Unusual, but not unknown; standard treatments exist for it. But they didn't work. It got worse. When he was a year old, it was obvious something was killing him. Finally, he was diagnosed with a nonorganic system infection. A nanotech disease. A leftover. " He glared suddenly at Ariel. "A gift from our flirtation with technologies we should never have allowed. " The fury waned as quickly as it had emerged, and his gaze returned to the floor. "No treatment. Life support was available in certain institutions, but we had to…surrender him into their care…"

He sobbed loudly. "It was easier. They offered anonymity and promised to make him comfortable till he died. "

"Did they tell you when he died?" Coren asked.

"No. That was part of it. We had to walk away. In return, we guaranteed that it would never be made public."

"What about birth records?"

"Security locks. The system has been in place for a long time."

"Locks can be picked, Mr. Looms," Ariel said. "This one was."

"Let me guess," Coren said. "You bought shares in Nova Levis because they offered research into exactly what killed Jerem."

"Oh, much more than that. I named the place! Nova Levis. 'New Light.' Something I'd…borrowed…from the Church." Looms shook his head. "I was naive. I hadn't yet realized that the original anti-robot movement had been absolutely correct in their analysis that any concession on the issue of nonorganic life was nothing but a danger, a complete betrayal of all things human. That this idea was fundamentally destructive and could never be controlled. "

"We've proven them wrong," Ariel said.

"Have you? You're so utterly dependent on your robots that you're dying out. You don't even reproduce anymore."

"That's-"

"What? Untrue? What is the average birthrate on a Spacer world? Is it sufficient for replacement? Or are your populations dwindling?"

Ariel said nothing.

"Life is good among the Spacers," Looms went on, warming now to his own arguments. "Two, three hundred years to explore the insides of your own psyches to the exclusion of all else, even the future. The possibilities of self-indulgence are so wonderful that you forget the most basic necessity of organic life-to breed. It's seen as an oddity, a curiosity, a peculiarity. Solarians don't even share the same households, they can't stand to be near others. They breed ex utero. Aurorans find children too undignified and simply avoid the whole embarrassing thing. But you compensate-you make life through your robots. I imagine that this goes quite a distance in fulfilling the void in your hearts by the absence of real children."

"We don't have orphanages to warehouse the unwanted and uncounted," Ariel said.

Looms stared at her.

"Why did you sell your shares?" Coren asked.

"Um…the research took a direction that repulsed me." He frowned. "They began developing symbiotic prostheses-nonorganic augmentation that combined with organic systems, became essentially one with them. I found this… unacceptable. "

That's a lie," Coren said. "You got out because Jerem died."

Looms glared at Coren. "I know my own mind. Jerem died two years before I sold my holdings."

"But it frightened you," Ariel said. "The research."

"Yes, Ms. Burgess, it did. To preserve the few, we were threatening the very definition of 'human.' "

"Isn't that a little extreme?"

"Is it? Where's the line? Do you know where it is? Would you call your positronic creations 'living; Ms. Burgess? I wouldn't. And I saw no good in blurring the distinctions further, no matter how many suffering infants it saved. "

"So you bailed out," Coren said. "Did you know there was a sister lab on a Settler colony?"

"No. But that wouldn't have changed my decision."

Coren sighed wearily. "It's too late to stop this, Rega. I have to finish. "

"Why? I left it alone for almost thirty years, why can't you drop it now?"

"I…" Coren coughed. "I loved Nyom. This is personal for me."

"You work for me."

"I quit. "

Looms' face reddened.

"This is out of your hands anyway, Mr. Looms," Ariel said. "Aurora has a joint interest in this with Terran authorities. Nova Levis is the source of a problem to which your naivety may well have given birth. "

"You can't make me responsible for any of this."

"No? Try this: If you hadn't turned your back on what you did and pretended since that it never happened, maybe what's happened now would never have gotten this far. You surrendered any chance of control over it when you surrendered your responsibility."

"I did not act alone!"

"None of us ever do. Some of us forget that, though. Then there's a mess to clean up." She stepped up to Coren. "Mr. Lanra, Aurora offers you a job working on our behalf in this matter. Along with that comes our sanction and protection."

Coren could not look away from Looms, even when he said, "I accept, Ambassador Burgess."

A day earlier, the expression of betrayal he saw on Looms' face would have broken his heart. Now it only annoyed him.

"Very well," Looms said finally. "If you insist on going ahead. Use whatever facilities DyNan has. Both of you. Any assistance my company may offer, feel free to use, Ms. Burgess."

He walked past Coren, to the door. For a moment, Coren thought he might look back. But Looms passed through, out of the suite.

"You didn't tell him that his son is still alive," Ariel said.

"I see no purpose in cruelty now." Coren looked around the office as if trying to memorize its details. "Besides, " he said at length, "is it really his son anymore?"

The configurations in the memory buffers are nonstandard, Derec. "

Derec glanced at the console. "That's what I expected, Thales. Can you access them?"

"Yes, but I cannot guarantee any degree of coherence."

Everyone had gathered around the platform on which lay the slightly viscous mass of cyborg brain tissue and nearly fifty centimeters of what resembled spinal column. Instead of distinct vertebrae separated by disks, the spine was composed of overlapping sheathes that attached on clusters of bearing-like spheres.