Judgment at Proteus

by Timothy Zahn

  The cross-corridor was just as deserted as the previous one had been, and I took advantage of the lack of obstacles to break into a fast jog. Fortunately, Doug didn’t jump to the wrong conclusion, like that I might be trying to ditch him, but merely trotted along beside me, with no indication that he thought a nice afternoon run was anything out of the ordinary. Probably he was enjoying the exercise. I reached the end of the curved corridor and turned into the main radial one.

  I’d been wrong earlier about everyone in the neighborhood being at the funeral. There were three of them waiting twenty meters down the radial corridor from my intersection: big, strong males, all of them dressed in the same style as those I’d seen in the dome. Apparently, they’d been at the funeral and had decided to duck out of the proceedings early. They were clustered together in the middle of the corridor, glowering at me as I came skidding around the corner. Directly behind them was an apartment door decorated with an archway made of pieces of colored paper, in the same color gradation from bottom to top that I’d noticed with the floating balloons in the dome.

  {You desecrate Yleli’s former place of life,} the Filly in the center of the group said, his thin nose blaze darkening with anger, his voice just loud enough to be audible above the eulogy still going on down in the dome. {You will leave here at once.}

  “Hello there,” I said cheerfully, slowing to a casual walk and continuing toward them. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Doug suddenly turn his head to look behind us. “Any of you speak English?”

  The three Fillies exchanged quick and slightly confused glances. Apparently, my presumed lack of understanding of their challenge was something they hadn’t expected. {You desecrate Yleli’s former place of life,} Thin Blaze tried again, his voice still angry but now with a tinge of uncertainty. {You must leave at once.}

  “Did you see one of your fellows come this way?” I asked, picking up my pace a little. Walking up to three angry Fillies, all of whom were bigger than I was, was not my first choice on how best to spend a quiet morning. But Doug’s over-the-shoulder look a moment ago strongly implied there was a fourth member of the group back there, and stopping or slowing would just give him time to catch up and jump me from behind. Better to play the ignorant tourist as long as I could and hope for a decent opening before I reached the point of no return.

  I made it three more steps, and was just starting to wonder if this had been such a good idea after all, when I got my break. Stepping away from his fellows, Thin Blaze started toward me. {You will leave at once!} he snarled, bunching his hands into fists.

  I smiled grimly to myself. Now, instead of facing three-to-one odds, I would have a one-to-one followed by a two-to-one. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the best I was going to get.

  I was two steps from combat range with Thin Blaze when I suddenly remembered Doug.

  They will keep you from traveling where you should not go, Hchchu had said about the watchdogs’ job, and prevent you from harming anyone.

  And suddenly, I realized this might not be a simple single and duo after all. It might instead end up as a single and a duo plus a pineapple-backed dog under strict orders and with the teeth to back them up. I had no idea how far Doug would go to prevent me from taking out the Fillies, but even if he just hung on to my ankle he was going to severely cramp my style, possibly badly enough to get me killed.

  Unless I got creative.

  Thin Blaze was almost to me now. I extended my right arm toward him, as if offering to shake hands. Back on the super-express Quadrail I’d successfully nailed Emikai with this one. Time to see if the average non-cop Filly would fall for it, too.

  He did. He reached for my extended arm, and as he did so I smoothly withdrew it, forcing him to lean forward as he tried to chase it down.

  His full attention was still on the annoyingly elusive arm when I reached across with my left hand, grabbed his right hand, and twisted it up and back. Simultaneously, I grabbed and locked his elbow with my right hand and swiveled around on my left foot, twisting the trapped arm upward and forcing the Filly to bend forward at the waist.

  During my sparring sessions with Emikai aboard the Quadrail, I’d always stopped at that point. Here, with three-plus assailants whose ultimate intentions were still unknown, I couldn’t afford to be so charitable. Turning the helpless Filly another ninety degrees, I gave his arm a hard shove and sent him flying straight into his two startled friends.

  Their shrieks of surprise, protest, and anger were drowned out as Doug let out a howl of his own, possibly a shot-across-the-bow warning that I’d just crossed the line. The howl turned suddenly into a startled yip as I reached down, scooped him up by his midsection, and hurled him as hard as I could behind me.

  My aim and timing were perfect. The two Fillies who were hurrying in from that direction had just enough time to goggle in disbelief before Doug slammed across both their torsos. The impact sent all three of them sprawling in a confused tangle of arms and legs and claw-tipped paws.

  There was a farcical aspect to it, but I didn’t have time to properly appreciate the show. Spinning around again, I charged into the first group of Fillies, still off-balance after having had their spokesman slammed into them. Thin Blaze still had his back to me, so I took him first, hammering a blow into one of his upper-leg nerve centers and dropping him hard onto the deck. One of the others, attempting to do a tiger leap at me, instead caught a foot on his friend’s shoulder and took himself down even more efficiently than I could have done. The third managed to actually get off a punch, which I dodged with relative ease before taking him down with a pair of jabs of my own. Leaping over the twitching bodies, putting them between me and my final two opponents, I turned around and prepared for round two—

  Only to discover that the fight was over. The two who’d been trying to sneak up on me were still extricating themselves from their entanglement with a dazed-looking Doug, but already they were backing as quickly as they could toward the cross-corridor behind them. By the time they disappeared around the corner the three at my feet were heading in the same direction, crawling then hobbling and finally limping as feeling and function began returning to the relevant parts of their bodies. I watched them go, ignoring their looks of impotent rage, until the last of them had vanished around the corner.

  {Incompetent fools,} a voice growled from behind me.

  I turned around, simultaneously taking a long step away from the voice toward the middle of the corridor. The door to Yleli’s apartment had slid open, and standing beneath the arch of multicolored paper was the Filly whose furtive exit from the funeral ceremony had caught my attention and sparked this whole thing in the first place.

  And now, up close, I saw that I’d been right. Sticking prominently through the V-neck of his tunic was the oversized throat the Filly genetic engineers had given him. The mark of professional singers and Shonkla-raa.

  {So be it,} he said, taking a step out of the apartment toward me and letting the door slide closed behind him. {I’ll simply have to do this myself.}

  NINE

  The mourners in the dome had gone silent again, giving the air the quiet stillness of a midcontinental Western Alliance afternoon just before a thunderstorm. The Filly’s eyes were dark and malevolent, his hands large and ready, the whole package topped off with an unholy glitter of anticipation.

  Which didn’t mean I should assume he knew everything. “Sorry—what did you say?” I asked, reprising my ignorant tourist role and wondering how far I could push the game this time.

  As it turned out, not very. “Don’t play the fool, Compton,” the Filly said contemptuously, switching to excellent English. “We know all about you, and about your war against my servant the Modhri. A Human of your talents and experience most certainly is capable of understanding Fili.”

  “Which you expect to be the language of the future?” I suggested, giving him a quick but careful study. Filly faces were tricky for Humans to tell apart, but I was almost positive that this wa
s the Filly I’d dubbed Blue One, one of the group of Shonkla-raa that Usantra Wandek had dragged Bayta and me in to see when we first arrived at Terese’s medical facility.

  “Of course,” he said. “As it was also the language of the past.”

  “I’ll have to take your word for that one,” I said. He hadn’t bought my game of pretending not to understand Fili, but maybe I could still convince him I didn’t know the Shonkla-raa were on the rise again. “As to that comment about incompetent fools, what did you expect from local talent? What did you do, grab the nearest bunch of yokels and tell them I was going to trash Yleli’s place?”

  “Something like that,” the Filly said, taking another step toward me. “But I didn’t expect anything more from them than to soften you up.”

  “You might be surprised at how little softening has actually taken place,” I warned, taking a couple of hasty steps back.

  “Oh, don’t look so concerned,” the Filly chided, coming to a halt. “At the moment, you’re worth more to us alive than dead.”

  “That’s comforting,” I said, a hard knot forming in my stomach. Of course I was worth keeping alive. Why kill me when a touch of Modhran coral would turn me directly into one of their slaves? “How about you? Are you worth more alive, too?”

  He smiled, a thin, evil thing. “If you wish for more combat, I can certainly oblige you.”

  “I’m sure you can,” I murmured, trying desperately to think. He could almost certainly take me—that much we both knew. Yet for all that brimming confidence, he didn’t seem in any hurry to get things started. Was he waiting for backup to arrive? More locals, or another Shonkla-raa or two? In either case, giving them time to get into position was a guarantee that I would get my head handed to me.

  But what were my other choices? Turning tail and trying to run for it wouldn’t work—from my fight with Asantra Muzzfor aboard the super-express Quadrail I knew that Shonkla-raa were pretty fast on their feet. Besides that, I didn’t much care for the image of being run to ground like an antelope on the Serengeti.

  But facing him straight-up and unarmed this way wasn’t going to work, either. What I needed was to find a weapon.

  Or maybe I already had one.

  There was a slightly dazed-sounding rumble from somewhere to my left. “Doug?” I called, wanting to look and see how he was doing but not daring to take my eyes off Blue One. “Hey, boy. You okay?”

  The watchdog rumbled again. Maybe he’d hit the deck harder than I’d realized. “Yeah, sorry about that,” I apologized.

  “A most clever maneuver, by the way,” the Filly commented. “Although I expect Chinzro Hchchu will be annoyed if you permanently damage one of his msikai-dorosli.” He smiled thinly. “If you wish to try throwing him at me as well, feel free to do so.”

  “Sorry, I never do a trick twice for the same audience,” I told him. “Speaking of tricks, why did you kill Tech Yleli? If it’s not a professional secret, of course.”

  “If anyone bears the blame for his death, it’s you,” he said darkly. “You were the one who disabled the monitors in the dome. That was what allowed him to die unseen.”

  I felt my forehead crease. I was the one who’d disabled the monitors? “An act of petty vandalism hardly rises to the level of murder,” I pointed out. “I also notice you’re ducking the question. What did he do? Or did he see something he shouldn’t?”

  The Filly snorted again. “You Humans have such a narrow way of viewing the universe,” he said. “You insist on dealing with reality purely in terms of cause and effect.”

  “And how should we deal with it?”

  “By seeing through to the ultimate goal,” he said. “The path itself is meaningless. You must look to the goal, and to reach it no matter what obstacles lie in your way.”

  “Ah, yes—the old end justifying the means,” I said, nodding. “We tossed that one into the ethical ash heap centuries ago.”

  “Of course you did,” he said calmly. “You’re an inferior being, among a race of inferior beings. Your goals certainly don’t justify your path.”

  “That’s only for superior beings like you, I gather,” I said. “My mistake. So which of your higher goals did Tech Yleli’s death serve?”

  The Filly lifted his finger, his head half turned in the direction of the community center. “Wait,” he said. “Do you hear?”

  I frowned. Then, drifting down the corridor toward us, came the first strains of music.

  It began as a single voice lifted in quiet song. A few bars later a second voice joined in, then a third, then a fourth, and then an entire chorus in full Filiaelian five-part harmony.

  “The time of meditation is over,” the Filly said, a grim satisfaction in his voice. “And with the raised voices to mask your screams of agony, we may finally proceed.” Settling his hands into the lock-jointed knives I’d faced aboard the super-express Quadrail, he started toward me. “Or would you prefer to come quietly?” he added.

  “Careful,” I warned, backing up at his advance. “You and your friends want me alive, remember?”

  “Alive can also mean not quite dead,” he pointed out. “It makes little difference to me.”

  “I suppose not,” I said, still backing up. I passed Doug, who was standing more or less where I’d tossed him earlier. He turned to face me as I continued by, his eyes tracking me balefully, his mouth half open to show his teeth. I’d caught him by surprise the last time, but he wasn’t going to fall for my quick-grab tactics again. The Filly picked up his pace, closing the gap.

  And I took a long step to my left, putting Doug squarely between the two of us.

  The Filly stopped, his blaze paling a little with clear surprise at my maneuver. “You’re not serious,” he said, looking at Doug and then back at me.

  “I’m not?” I asked. The Filly took a step to his right, and I responded with a step to mine, keeping Doug between us.

  “Please,” the Filly said condescendingly. He did a little two-step, clearly enjoying the novelty and, probably, the ultimate uselessness of my stalling technique.

  I did a mirror-image two-step and jammed my hand into my side pocket. “Okay, that’s far enough,” I said in as stern a voice as I could manage. “Back off, right now, or you’ll regret it.”

  “You disappoint me,” the Filly said, a tone of regret in his voice as he feinted left and then took another step to the right. “Do you Humans truly believe your skill at bluffing is so potent a weapon? Chinzro Hchchu is barely intelligent enough to qualify as a sentient being, but even he knows how to properly disarm a potential threat to his precious station.”

  I grimaced. “Someday you’re going to be wrong,” I said, reluctantly withdrawing my hand from the pocket. “I just hope I’m there—”

  Right in the middle of my sentence he leaped toward me, his tucked feet clearing Doug’s head and back by a good half meter as he arced over the oblivious watchdog. I caught a motion-blurred image of his right hand extending toward my throat and his left cocked ready at his waist just in case he needed to kill me after all.

  And flipping around the uncapped hypo I’d palmed, I twisted my head and torso out of the Filly’s path and stabbed the needle as hard as I could into his left thigh.

  He shrieked, a resonating combination of pain and rage and disbelief that included a set of upper harmonics that nearly took off the top of my head. His left hand knifed reflexively toward me, as he perhaps momentarily forgot he wanted me alive, but the sudden jolt of agony had thrown off his timing and aim and the hand slashed harmlessly past my shoulder. He hit the ground, his newly paralyzed left leg collapsing beneath him and sending him tumbling toward the floor. I took a step toward him, my second hypo ready in my hand.

  And dodged back barely in time as he twisted around at the waist and slashed his right hand viciously toward my torso. The blow missed, and he slammed shoulder-first against the deck. His hand slashed out again, this time aiming for my knee, and as I again dodged the blow I reached over
and down and buried my second needle in his upper arm.

  He was making another attempt to kill me with screeched sound waves as I pushed his long nose to the side with my foot and slammed my fist into the nerve center beneath his right ear. His screech abruptly cut off, and he collapsed limply onto the deck.

  For a moment I stood there, one foot on his good wrist, the other on the side of his nose, breathing heavily and trembling as my adrenaline level slowly subsided. “To see it,” I finished my interrupted sentence.

  I crouched down beside the Filly and looked over at Doug. “You okay, boy?” I asked. “He attacked first, you know.”

  Doug gave a snuffle, and plodded a little unsteadily over to me. I tensed, but he merely pressed his snout against my sleeve as if reminding himself who I was. He had a sort of lopsided, dit-rec-cartoon look in his eyes, and I winced a little as I wondered briefly if my toss had done him any serious damage.

  But he merely gave my sleeve another sniff and then sat back on his haunches. “Right,” I agreed. “Back to work.”

  The singing from the dome was still going strong, making for an odd but pleasant counterpoint as I went through the unconscious Filly’s clothes. Lady Luck was definitely on my side today: the first two pockets I tried yielded a handful of plastic quick-lock restraints and one of the passkey cards that our Filly escort had used to let Bayta and me into our room two days ago.

  I got the restraints securely onto his wrists and ankles, then took a moment to look around. Yleli’s apartment, where Blue One had lain in wait for me, was the one place within reach where I was pretty much guaranteed we wouldn’t be disturbed. On the other hand, it was also the first place his buddies would come looking for him when he failed to bring me in on schedule.