Warring States

by Susan R. Matthews

  As a line of banter, it was successful, as far as it went. There didn’t seem to be much genuine camaraderie in it, though. It should have carried an “and wasn’t I embarrassed, too” scent to it rather than the faint whiff of “yes, and any really good Bench specialist would have done exactly the same in my place.”

  “How did you manage that?” Rinpen asked, apparently interested. Jils went along between the two of them, listening to Nion talk.

  “Cintaro,” Nion said, as if that explained everything. Rinpen laughed as though it did. Jils kept shut, concentrating on the route, waiting for it to deviate from the direction in which she expected it to be going.

  “What a flopper,” Rinpen said, after a moment in which it apparently became clear that Jils did not mean to react had elapsed. “Did you ever hear about that one case in Circuit, Ivers? The one with the three stud bulls and the — ”

  Yes, she had. It sounded absurd enough on the surface, and the judge’s approach to a solution had certainly been unique and original. It had been unique enough to have stopped the situation from escalating. The judge had won that case, in Jils’ estimation; and had never minded that she looked a little silly all the while.

  “Yeah, I heard.” Jils laid an extra layer of respectful appreciation on top of her meaning, just for the sake of being difficult. “Brilliant jurisprudence. Brilliant.”

  Nion looked at Jils a little sideways now, and Jils noted her expression approvingly. You do know when you’re being laughed at.

  “No need to tile that hearth, Ivers,” Nion said. “You’re here for Chilleau. But Capercoy likes you. It won’t be as if it was your own Judge who won, but he’ll share the wealth, he’s decent. Reasonable.”

  For a moment Jils didn’t know what to think. For one, the Second Judge at Chilleau Judiciary was no more “her” judge in any sense than she was Chilleau’s Bench specialist assigned — Bench specialists were based, but not assigned, precisely in order to avoid the development of particular interests. That was one of the things that made Padrake’s level of intimacy with Secretary Tirom a little unusual.

  But more than that, Nion’s choice of adjectives could hardly be a coincidence. Reasonable people were corrupt. Unless Nion was trying to imply something about Capercoy it was in very poor taste to say any such thing, and if Nion was trying to do just that she’d better have evidence to back up her insinuations.

  While Jils was trying to decide how to react Nion caught Jils’ eye, and winked. Jils relaxed, only slightly mortified. What was meat for one Bench specialist was grain for another. Payback, that was all, no more and no less, and here they were at the end of the communal kitchen area where three Bench specialists were sitting on stools around the high sleek-metal surface of the work-table, waiting for them.

  Simms Balkney was there with Rafenkel, looking very owlish — he had larger eyes than most people she knew, and very deep-set they were. Cadaverous skeletal structure, so far as his head went in any case, and the effect only got more pronounced as he grew older and the flesh slowly thinned across his face.

  He had a cup of kilpers ready, and pushed it across the high broad chromed-steel table-top toward her. “Nice to see you, Jils,” he said. “Things have been interesting at Second, I guess. Tell me about it. We’re starving for gossip here, starving.”

  Now that Padrake was here, that would change. Jils could be confident of that. Karol’s note had indicated that Balkney hadn’t done the murder; that didn’t mean he wouldn’t murder her. The thought gave her a place to start as Nion and Rinpen joined them at the table with their own beverages of choice. Zeman was here, too, but Zeman was snacking on a cracker of some sort with nothing to drink at all.

  “Not interesting enough, Balkney. For interesting we’d have to have developments, and this is going on slimmer than anything I’ve ever seen. It’s ugly. I’m glad to be here — on vacation. I still haven’t heard from Vogel, though.”

  Rafenkel drank her rhyti, looking at the blurry reflection of her face in the table-top.

  Zeman looked at Balkney, who shrugged. “So far as I know nobody else has, either,” Balkney said. “I heard he’d left for Gonebeyond, though. To take up with a woman he used to know.”

  A woman? That was absurd. Karol didn’t know any women. Not in anything like a going-off-to-Gonebeyond sense of the term. She’d never even heard gossip about . . . oh. The Langsariks’ Flag Captain. Walton Agenis.

  It could be. Karol had cherished — or at least harbored — feelings for that woman, feelings that had been complicated by his sense of frustration over the failure of the amnesty he’d arranged. Jils wasn’t sure Verlaine had ever forgiven Karol for his creative solution to that particular problem, but the issue was all academic, now.

  “Mixed up with Malcontents, is what I heard,” Rinpen admitted. Jils glanced over at Rafenkel quickly, curious to see if she would react to the suggestion; but Rafenkel gave no sign of finding it of any more than merely passing interest. “At least there were indications that some Malcontents were looking for him. I didn’t think he even liked Dolgorukij. Maybe that was why they were looking for him.”

  She could explain that she had asked the Malcontent for help in finding out what had happened to Karol, whether he was living or was dead. That would entail a moderate amount of embarrassment, though, and maybe it was just as well to let people speculate on why the Malcontent might be interested in Karol’s whereabouts. Karol needed more dark hints in his dossier to keep it interesting.

  “Tell me what’s been going on around here,” she suggested, instead of bothering to explain. “What’s our plan?”

  “Well, we had one,” Balkney said. “We even got started a little early. We weren’t sure when you’d make it through and we all need to be back on the job, the other job, I mean.” Keeping the peace. Assisting the judges. Carrying out the Bench’s instructions. “But we weren’t entirely satisfied. If we can rule out Fontailloe and Chilleau at the beginning some of us can leave right away. Or not, of course.” And if they couldn’t rule out either or both Judiciaries at the onset they’d be no further behind because of it.

  “Tanifer is all for a break in tradition.” It was a bit of a surprise to hear Rafenkel speak; she’d been quiet throughout, nursing her rhyti. “Nion is pretty adamant about Chilleau’s unfitness, aren’t you, Nion? Maybe you should refocus your investigation, Jils.”

  In other words, maybe Nion had done it. That wasn’t even funny. It was particularly unfunny because she’d thought along the same lines, and made sure that no Bench specialist had been anywhere near Chilleau at the time — no Bench specialist but her, that was. And maybe Karol, since nobody knew where he was and could therefore not say where he hadn’t been.

  “Oh, yes,” Nion said, as if playing along. “I killed Verlaine because Chilleau was the only thing standing between Supicor and the Selection. Yes. Right.” Was it her imagination — Jils asked herself — or was there a note of genuine resentment, there? “But we all know it wasn’t you, Ivers. You’d have been set for life. Bench specialist presiding at Chilleau Judiciary with a First Judge in residence — you’re the last person who could have wanted Verlaine dead.”

  No, the Second Judge was the last person. Second to the last person. Surely the last person who could have wanted Verlaine dead had been Verlaine himself. “I expect to reap my reward when the time comes,” Jils retorted frostily. “But only if Supicor takes it. As we planned, Nion.”

  Still there was that odd undernote, an assumption that a Bench specialist had a personal stake in the Selection and could expect to reap a personal profit.

  Balkney snorted into his flask of water. Or water-like whatever, he certainly seemed relaxed and comfortable enough, though Jils didn’t smell alcohol or any other fragrant intoxicant. “Sorry you lost your post, in that case, Ivers,” Balkney said. “When everybody knows it’s Cintaro.”

  About whose Judge Nion and Rinpen had just been joking in less than complimentary terms. “I can neither a
ffirm nor deny your assertion,” Jils said. She needed to shut herself up and sleep. Fatigue and stress were eroding her faculties. There were no hidden motives to be adduced from two Bench specialists mocking a Judge. It was in poor taste, but that was all. “It’ll be interesting to see what history makes of it, after the fact, when the First Judge is presiding at Chilleau Judiciary.”

  Bench specialists, suggesting that their peers were reasonable. But there was a point to be made there. Sooner or later reason would prevail. She had no reason to have assassinated Verlaine, and — if base motives were to be appealed to — every reason not to. She could only be guilty if there were undisclosed motives or a sincere conviction that Chilleau’s proposed reform program would do more harm than good, and she trusted in the intelligence and common sense of her peers to conclude that such was not the case. All she had to do was wait.

  It would help if she could find the way through to the identity of the murderer while she was waiting. For that she had to get through Convocation, and back to Chilleau.

  A warning tone sounded across the station’s internal comm; Nion looked up at the speaker in the ceiling. “They’re back,” she said. That would be Padrake and Capercoy, Jils assumed, back from escorting Secretary Tirom back to the surface. “Let’s go. The sooner we can settle this whole problem the sooner we can all get back to the real world.”

  Jils’ sentiments, almost exactly. Carrying her flask of kilpers Jils went with Balkney and Rafenkel, Nion and Zeman and Rinpen, to sit down and discuss where they would start to argue for the least worst solution to the chaos into which Verlaine’s murder threatened to plunge all of Jurisdiction space.

  ###

  Bond-involuntaries were criminals. So much was clearly understood by everybody in Fleet, with the possible exception of Andrej Koscuisko. They were no ordinary class of criminals, however; the Bond could only be imposed in cases of crimes against the Judicial order, which was generally held to apply to sabotage, persons vandalizing or otherwise damaging Bench property, some minor political dissidents, and — in recent years — Nurail.

  It was a privilege extended only to people whose psychological profiles gave a reasonably good assurance that they could survive the ferocious stress that life under governance meant for a Security slave, or a service slave, because there were people under Bond in the service houses, but they never earned back the cost of their indoctrination and benefits package so there were fewer of them. They didn’t last. Someone was always taking a bribe on the sly to let a patron alone with a service Bond for a few hours, and then professing shock and outrage when something happened.

  It had happened to a service bond-involuntary in Port Burkhayden not very long ago, Robert knew. He knew because the service bond-involuntary had been his sister, and the officer had been sent ahead to make good the property damage before the officer’s cousin Paval I’shenko Danzilar could file a grievance for delivery of damaged goods.

  Fleet hadn’t been making Bonds for very long — the technology had been slow to perfect, and there were the cost-benefit problems, of course. It was expensive to put a man under Bond because the governor itself was a sophisticated piece of deviltry, training and indoctrination took time and effort, men had to be taught to fight and fear and there were still altogether too many unfortunate accidents.

  A man under Bond could kill himself if he could face the consequences both of making a sloppy job of it and of succeeding in ending his life but not in concealing the self-willed nature of his death. Failed suicide attempts were interpreted by governors as willful damage to valuable Fleet property and punished accordingly, and Robert couldn’t remember what it had been like when his governor had started to cook off on him in port Burkhayden, but he knew it must have been impressively terrible because Chief Stildyne had been much kinder to him since, even when he wasn’t thinking about it.

  Success in killing oneself but failure to disguise the intentioned nature of the act meant that the Bench would cancel the waiver it held as a guarantee of good behavior against prosecution of your family and friends and their families and families’ friends and their kye and their domestic poultry and the rodents behind the stove in the cook-house for crimes against the rule of Law and the Judicial order, and all of your suffering on their behalf to try to protect them would be for naught.

  If you were Nurail that didn’t so much matter because the Bench had already had your goods and chattel but they would still try to find somebody who could be made to repay the cost of your training, maintenance, and upkeep.

  Not more than forty years, Standard. The Bench had not been making bond-involuntaries for longer than that. It had been only forty years ago since the Bench had begun to authorize some people, and not others, to inflict torture, as an attempt to control the use of torture as an instrument of State and bring the abuse of sentient creatures under the control of the rule of Law. It had been well intentioned, perhaps. The people who had built up the system of Inquiry had felt that it was humane and pitiful of them to do so. If they’d only been able to see where they’d been going . . .

  There had been forty years for bond-involuntaries to learn how to manage with a governor, how to live to claim the prize that waited for them on the Day that their sentence was completed. On that day a bond-involuntary became a reborn soul with accumulated pay and benefits, a full pension with honors, exemption from all local taxes and tariffs wherever he wished to go and from most of the Bench assessments as well, free passage on Fleet transport on demand — so many perquisites and privileges that it hardly seemed possible to grasp. But Robert had seen it happen.

  When he’d been on Scylla, one of Koscuisko’s teams had pulled a narrow one through a narrower cleft, preventing some saboteurs from gaining control of one of her main battle cannon, saving the ship. Captain Irshah Parmin had petitioned for revocation of Bond in light of this signal service. Joslire had been dead by the time the petition had been approved, but three others of Robert’s fellows had gone free.

  Over forty years a culture of self-defense had developed from nothing. It was a culture of finger-code, and groupings, the unwritten but strictly observed convention that a bond-involuntary could not be teased or tormented with questions or demands that could place any man in conflict with himself and engage his governor — and one of those conventions was that bond-involuntaries were never to be quartered but with other bond-involuntaries, and their quarters were not to be under surveillance.

  They were under thirty-two hour surveillance by definition. Ship’s Security declined to intrude on what limited privacy they had, and there were penalties assessed any unbonded troops caught in bond-involuntary quarters unless as a party of three or more with at least one officer of the rank of Chief Warrant or higher — another provision intended to protect bond-involuntaries from more abuse or punishment than their lives were to them already, though it didn’t always work out quite as well as that.

  There were only six of them assigned to the Ragnarok. There were technically speaking quarters for twenty-five, but nobody knew of any ship with a full complement of bond-involuntaries and the fact that they were six gave them two que-bays, enough space for ten. The common areas could be connected. They were connected now. Everybody was here except for Pyotr, and there was suspicion and confusion in the air.

  “He wouldn’t,” Godsalt said flatly. “Makes no sense, to take us out from underneath that thing and then just have to put the screws down again. I don’t care. I haven’t got family.”

  Bonds didn’t talk about their families. Not about their crimes, not about their experiences with the dancing-masters, not about where they’d come from or hoped to return to. Bond-involuntaries especially never talked about the future. It was too painful to fantasize about that out loud.

  “So he knows,” Hirsel argued back. Godsalt was tall and lean and limber in the conventional sense, but Hirsel was as curly-headed as a yearling. “Robert?”

  He was responsible for finding things out, and just
because he liked people and they generally seemed to like him back for whatever reasons of their own that they might have. Especially female people. He was the intelligence officer of the group, he supposed, but shouldn’t that mean that he got custard for bribes?

  Two liked custard, and when you wanted a favor you could generally obtain at least a hearing with the promise of a dish of custard to be delivered well out of Koscuisko’s ken. Desmodontae did not digest milk sugars very effectively. She liked custards, but they gave her a belly-ache, and she and the officer had been squabbling over the issue almost since he had come to the Ragnarok, and Robert with him.

  “Just after he came back,” Robert confirmed. “Trips down to Intelligence, and couriers. Also no questions asked about stomach-powders. And she said something to me about my mother’s brother’s wife’s family, so I think he was doing his research.”

  They generally gave him more credit than he thought he actually deserved as a Koscuisko expert. Just because he had known the officer for longer than any bond-involuntary still living in Fleet, because the only bond-involuntary that Koscuisko had known longer had been Joslire, who was dead.

  Kerenko was Sarvaw, and Sarvaw was a kind of Dolgorukij. Kerenko should know if anybody did; but Kerenko was chewing his under-lip thoughtfully. “And there’s a Malcontent involved. You never know what Malcontents are about. They’re capable of anything.”

  This was something esoteric and private to the shared experience of Sarvaw and Aznir Dolgorukij that Robert did not understand at all. He had no difficulty understanding why Chief Stildyne was in so cheerful a mood since Cousin Stanoczk’s courier had come on board, however. Two days ago. The officer’s cousin had had a letter for Kerenko that Kerenko had received with astonished pleasure, read to himself and without his lips moving, and carried around in his bosom ever since.