“What’s wrong?” Kearn asked.
Cort’s voice was very weak and terrified. “Do me a favor, will you, bondsman?”
“Anything.”
“If you ever think I’m in danger of using that monstrous tech to clear my record…I want you to punch me.”
* * *
By the time they made it back to the embassy, night had fallen. Cort went looking for Pendrake in her office, found it locked, then checked the rec room next and found it occupied by a couple of young indentures cheating each other at cards. When she finally found Pendrake, the ambassador was in the dining hall eating and in too foul a mood to tolerate disturbance, regardless of urgency. Cort arranged an appointment for two hours later and returned to her quarters, where she spent too much time under a shower heated perilously close to the threshold of pain.
At the appointed time she dressed in a fresh black suit and went to see Pendrake.
Perhaps in compensation for her vulnerability during their last meeting, when she had been dressed down for her boxing match with a phantom, Pendrake took this one in her office. It was a shabby little place by the standards of most ambassadorial sanctums, which tended to focus on home-world banners, displays of awards received, images of reflected glory dominated by moments spent in the company of more famous dignitaries. By contrast the walls here were plain white stone, bereft of decoration, stark in the way that the architecture of the surrounding world was stark…and they would have rendered the space cold as well if not for the heat Pendrake kept up to maximum, turning the air in the chamber to a level just short of sweltering.
As if in compensation for her spartan chambers, Pendrake appeared in full formal dress of the sort that must have been only rarely called for on this protocol-averse world. She’d pinned her hair up and affixed a holo generator cycling through her career honors and medals; a display that Cort was not about to say she’d found pathetic, because it started repeating after too short a time. She found herself wishing that she hadn’t gone out of her way to antagonize this already antagonistic woman on their last meeting, when what she needed most, right now, was an ally.
Pendrake must have sensed some advantage in Cort’s hesitation. “Don’t waste my time.”
Cort was unused to entering such negotiations in the position of a supplicant, where her own native formidability would not serve as advantage. “I…find myself in the position of needing to trust you.”
“Poor you. Why?”
“We have a problem.”
Warily: “Oh? How bad is it?”
“So bad that if it was just up to me I’d use every connection I have to advocate cutting off all diplomatic relations with this world, and further for a permanent military blockade keeping them from ever opening trade with anyone else.”
Pendrake’s forehead wrinkled in disbelief. “Really.”
“Yes. Really. But I’ve done that before and it’s the kind of thing anybody could ever get away with doing more than once in so short a time. I’m hoping you’ll take the lead on this one.”
“You are crazy.”
“I understand why you’d say that,” Cort said. “I do.”
“And I understand why you’d be used to it,” Pendrake snapped. “It is what everybody thinks, after all. Even the people who believe in you say you’re some kind of wind-up savage. But this. How could you possibly think I’d go along with…”
Cort cut her off. “I know. It’s the kind of position that can destroy an ambassador’s career, even if she manages to sell the idea to her superiors. That kind of escalation gets looked upon as a shameful failure, even if it’s justified. The ambassador I dealt with on the other occasion was permanently ruined. But this planet is such a clear and present danger to human civilization that once we’re done with all obligations regarding Varrick, we need to do whatever we can to discourage any more contact with these people.”
Pendrake tapped her fingers against her desk, the drumbeat turning martial despite herself. “And assuming you can even support this insanity, why should I cooperate with someone who’s already threatened my career?”
“If you go with me on this, I will drop that earlier matter. I will, in fact, spin things so that it looks like you always knew exactly what you were doing in repressing this technology; tell our superiors that far from being incompetent, you were visionary. Your career won’t advance, I’m afraid, but then you’ll have to admit, it hasn’t exactly been stellar. You’ll be able to retire early…and I’ll see to you that you get the kind of benefits the Corps only accords its most accomplished leaders.”
More finger-drumming. “And if I don’t want to retire?”
“There’s only so much I can do, Ambassador. I’m playing straight with you here. But this is bigger than you and bigger than me. If we allow Varrick to take this treatment, and then don’t repress that information, the damage we do to humanity may be catastrophic. You can count on that.”
Pendrake seemed to realize what her fingers were doing and pulled them away from the percussive instrument her desktop had become. “You better tell me what the hell you’re talking about.”
Cort found herself in the position of a drowning woman, struggling to reach a floating object against current that carried her farther away with every stroke. “I saw something wrong the first time it was even mentioned to me: the over-the-top sadism of the execution, offered alongside what is superficially at least a more humane alternative. I walked out of that meeting wondering: what society would even evolve such an essential contradiction?”
Pendrake shrugged. “Most human societies are built on contradictions. Like capital punishment and life imprisonment, as possible punishments for the same crimes. That’s a contradiction right there.”
“A limited one,” Cort said. “Life imprisonment is still taking away the rest of a prisoner’s life, separating him from the pleasures of comfort and family and most matters involving personal choice. It’s execution of a different kind, a slow death rather than a swift one.”
“I could debate that.”
“You wouldn’t be the first. But this is a contradiction of an entirely different magnitude: die in horrible agony, over what must feel like an eternity of suffering…or get a box put in your brain and go back to doing what you would do anyway. The very fact that few prisoners offered the choice take life has to give you pause. It has to. I submit that it’s because Caith raised on a world where this is a known choice understand that such all-encompassing control has to be torture of a more insidious kind. I’m not sure what form that torture takes. But I’m morally certain it exists. It has to. Otherwise, the existence of the option, from a justice system that doesn’t seem to care all that much about mercy, doesn’t make any sense.”
Pendrake’s expression remained blank. “I’m not sold. But go on.”
“The Caith can afford to have this in their society,” Cort said. “They number only thirty million or so, under only one government; they have a stable system, even if it’s also a brutal one.
“But humans have many tens of thousands of worlds, administered under hundreds of different forms of government, under Juje alone knows how many local forms of corruption. What happens when news of this technology starts to spread? You think humanity’s going to limit it to treating murderers?
“I’ve experienced some of this personally, Ambassador. I know. We’re the species that has tortured and murdered its own for reasons far more trivial than that: slight physical differences from the local norm. Ancestral conflicts going back centuries. Disagreements over small matters of philosophy. Sexual orientation. Gender itself. Even perversity: the sheer hunger for someone to oppress.
“You let this evil technology get out, and I’m telling you it won’t be long before we start using it to control people convicted of crimes a lot more picayune than murder. Rape will be next. Why not? Nobody sane approves of rape. Might as well control any bastard prone to it. Other forms of assault? Theft? Nobody approves of that, either.
Let’s make sure nobody gets to do it twice! How about standing up for your rights when the government starts making intolerable demands of you? Hey, that just makes you a trouble-maker! From now on, we can shut you up in a second!
“And then, the human animal being what it is, it’s only a matter of time before some governments start using the technology pre-emptively. On some worlds, children will have their implants installed as soon as it becomes a medical possibility. Entire populations will be kept in slavery, unable to do anything but what their implants, and the few privileged in charge, tell them to do. Nobody will be able to protest. They’ll want to…but their implants will keep them grinning and complacent and cooperative in any way that their owners define as cooperation, even if they’re almost insane with fury. There won’t even be any possibility of rebellion. People with the implants will become commodities, sitting with folding hands while they’re traded from one powerful owner to another.
“That’s what this is all about, Ambassador. And everything between us aside, that’s what you need to help me stop.”
Pendrake had gone pale and stricken, in the manner of a woman suffering a terrible wound who had not yet figured what kind of weapon had struck her and how mortal the injury had been. Several seconds passed before she even seemed to realize that her mouth had fallen open. When she did, her teeth clicked. “This…” she started, then swallowed. “Juje.”
She got up, crossed the room to a functional cabinet that fit the rest of her décor as well a tumor fits the biology of the organism around it, and came back with a crystal bottle bearing a bright orange liquid. The vessel narrowed so sharp that the aperture was almost microscopic, a function she demonstrated by wetting two glasses from her desk drawer with no more than three drops, apiece.
She handed one to Cort. “Drink.”
Cort preferred to imbibe her intoxicants in solitude, but an illegal conspiracy was being forged here, and certain rituals were only to be expected. So she took the glass, lifted it to her lips, waited just long enough to confirm that Pendrake was also going to drink, and threw it back. The three drops burned like fire as they hit the back of her throat, but in the heartbeat that followed she felt an overwhelming euphoria, as every pleasure receptor in her body fired at once.
The effect was intense and lasted only thirty seconds, before being trailed by a precipitous emotional plunge back to the cold squalor of Pendrake’s office.
Cort found herself missing the brief interval of bliss as if its loss amounted to a promise that she would never know happiness again. “What the hell was that?”
“You’re better off not knowing its name,” said Pendrake, as she returned the bottle to her cabinet. “On the world I come from, there’s a serious social problem with people becoming addicted to it. Those who use it too frequently burn out the brain’s pleasure centers and can’t ever know a moment of joy, ever again. I commit a genuine personal risk just allowing myself access to it – which I do only because I’ve found no other intoxicant that matches it. I only partake on special occasions. As a sacrament, you might say. For things like the forging of important conspiracies.”
“So…we’re agreed?”
“I come from the world that has forsaken unimaginable wealth by not producing that stuff in quantities that could addict the rest of human civilization.” Pendrake flashed gray teeth. “So I think you can say I’m familiar with the premise of taking responsibility for the common good.”
* * *
They broke for the night without resolving all the problems their little conspiracy would cause. They still had to work out a means of breaking off diplomatic relations, while hiding the reason why. They had to work out another of avoiding the humanitarian consequences of abandoning the Caiths to the uncertainties of their own fragile agriculture. They finally had to figure out what they were going to do about Varrick, who was still entitled to decide on his own fate.
None of this would be easy. Cort would have to work with Pendrake, a woman she’d alienated and considered a second-rate hack, for months.
It wasn’t the most onerous task she’d ever stumbled into. But it just might have had the highest stakes.
Exhausted, aware that a terrible door had been opened and that it might now take all of her efforts to close it, she returned to her guest quarters and took care of her first order of business, a dispatch to her immediate supervisor at New London. His name was Artis Bringen, he was more enemy than confidante, and though she despised him for more reasons than she could even list, she had managed to break him in; forcing him to the epiphany that he could expect better results if he just let her have her own way. That would make prevarication here only a little easier than impossible, because Bringen was no fool.
She didn’t provide details because she and Pendrake hadn’t come up with any. She just wrote,
Serious complications. Details to follow. – Cort
Even with a tamed supervisor like Bringen, there was no way that would ever be enough. The indenture’s duty to account for every hour of every assignment meant that she couldn’t just take continue to stay at the site of an away assignment forever unless she could produce somedefensible reason. That, like everything else, would have to wait until she had some sleep.
For a long time she sat on the edge of her cot, her thoughts fuzzy, her stomach churning as the implications of the Caithiriin treatment stretched out before her. For a while she lost herself in one of the unhelpful spasms of self-pity that had always been part of her personal pathology. Why, she wondered, was it always so hard? Why did it have to be her, instead of any one of the Dip Corps’s other fully competent prosecutors, whose routine assignments got sidetracked to such awful destinations? Then the lateness of the hour and the long day her system had spent being punished by the tension of breathing even with assistance in Caithiriin spaces began to get to her, and she found that even depression took more energy that she had.
She fell asleep without having resolved a thing, the very last thought in her head being that Pendrake had been far easier to sway than she ever would have guessed.
The metabolic after-effects of the orange narcotic hit her less than an hour after she closed her eyes, turning an already deep sleep into a drugged one without any noticeable transition.
Had she been awake and aware that she was in danger, she might have noticed the grogginess and fought it off; even taken one of a number of counter-agents she carried, to force her back to sobriety and return her capacity for self-defense. Asleep, she welcomed the dreamlessness; asleep, she accomplished a state she rarely felt, peace.
She was therefore incapable of reaction when the door to her quarters slid open.
* * *
The first stages of Varrick’s execution were by far the most watchable part of an ordeal that would only get more horrific as time went on; right now it was only a naked and terrified Varrick , strapped to a cold stone floor as the basin atop the slab that pinned him received its first few trickles of water. He would not stop screaming that this should not be happening, and was still capable of achieving volume, because his breath was not even close to being constricted yet; later, Andrea had been told, he would be reduced to whispers, released with what little air he could manage. Other, more awful manifestations had been described to her: the various ways the body would empty under pressure, the various sounds it would make as bones splintered and fractured; the more graphic things that would happen when the skin stretched past the breaking point finally split and began to spill its cargo of blood. That was not anything any human witness, short of a monster, would have wanted to stick around for. Cort had to look away, thinking that sometimes the sheer volume of pain in the universe was more than the human heart could contain, and that her failures here were not just to this terrible man, but to herself.
That night Andrea sat in her quarters compiling her nightly report on the progress of Varrick’s execution, which was still expected to take a couple of days yet, and found that sometime during t
he day she’d received a dispatch from Bringen, demanding to know just what kind of complications she could possibly be talking about, with the execution already happening.
This was no surprise. Bringen was always going to be a problem. He had always treasured his position as the man holding her leash, and indeed professed a kind of affection for her, even if that affection had more than once taken the form of outright opposition. He still knew her better than any other human being: a fact she considered appalling, because she did not want to be known by anybody.
She cast about for a fiction that might stand a chance of satisfying him, and finally wrote:
You got me. I confess. There are no “complications.”
You want to know the real answer, Artis, I’m tired; more tired than I’ve ever been; even more tired than I was after Bocai.
The futility of this one got to me. The man was doomed before I even got here, doomed in large part by his essential nature, doomed beyond any human means of reaching him. If he hadn’t committed his idiot crimes here, he would have committed them somewhere else, and damned himself in some other manner – perhaps even while under the jurisdiction of some other government crueler than this one.
The saddest thing is how avoidable it was. We knew about his criminal proclivities from the various offenses he committed at his earlier assignments, but because of the time-debt he owed to the Corps, we satisfied ourselves with slaps on the wrist and continued to place him in positions of greater and greater risk. We tested him to destruction, until he was destroyed.
I may have felt this more than I feel most of the cases I work on, because I have so much in common with him. But it’s going to take me a while to absorb this. In the meantime, the embassy here needs a little legal work, involving certain minor disputes between us and the locals – and though I’m overqualified to handle them, I feel I can best occupy my time handling those two-finger exercises, while figuring out what all of this means for my future. You’ll have the request from Ambassador Pendrake under separate cover. She’s a good woman, and she’s becoming a good friend.
The Coward's Option Page 8
