Death Sentence

by Roger MacBride Allen

  As a matter of justice and logic, Hannah knew there was no real difference between what the Metrannans were eating--and how they were eating it--and eating a fresh lobster that had just been boiled alive. Even so, she was just as glad that her hosts didn't expect her to try a scuttler for herself. Sometimes, having an incompatible biochemistry was a good thing.

  Instead, she noted that a small bowl of what appeared to be yogurt or porridge and a plastic spoon had been set at her place. Somehow, she couldn't work up much of an appetite for that, either. She noticed the servers didn't bring anything at all to the Xenoatrics. She had no idea what they ate, if anything. Maybe they simply plugged themselves into recharging receptacles.

  The Metrannans at her table seemed intent on ignoring her, and instead conversed among themselves in Metrannan. Based on the nervous glances they directed at Tigmin, who was seated at a nearby table, her guess was that they were waiting for some sort of cue from the powers-that-be before they risked dealing with an alien, especially one from a disreputable Younger Race species.

  The Xenoatric to her right, however, was quite another story. "I am Maintainer of Calm," it announced in mechanically accented Lesser Trade Speech. "You are either the human Wolfson or the human Mendez."

  "I am Wolfson," said Hannah, a trifle startled. Should she have spoken first? Introduced herself? "Forgive me if my actions do not suit the required etiquette. This is all quite new to me."

  "Your apology is needless. The general rule is for the senior party to speak first, and the junior party not to speak until addressed."

  So all the Metrannans around the table are the ones violating etiquette. Interesting. "I thank you for clarifying that point." It occurred to Hannah that it was possible this Unseen One could provide her with some useful information. "I have almost no experience of your people. Bulwark of Constancy was present at a--ah--ceremony--I attended this morning, and Bulwark of Constancy is here tonight, but I have not noted that being speaking to anyone at all. I had started to wonder if that was the way of all the Unseen." She glanced across the room to the table that held Bulwark of Constancy and saw Bulwark was still motionless.

  "Ah, yes, the well-named Bulwark of Constancy. But what does such a Bulwark do when the landscape itself shifts and changes around oneself? It is not unknown for those of our kind to behave in the manner of Bulwark of Constancy when under great stress."

  "And perhaps the recent changes in how the Metrannans govern themselves have been stressful enough to cause Bulwark of Constancy's behavior?"

  "Perhaps," Maintainer of Calm said doubtfully. "But while I have found the pace of change unpleasant, you will observe that I have not become excessively withdrawn, and neither have any of the other Unseen present here this evening. I would suggest there must be some other, additional cause for Bulwark's behavior, though I could not say what it might be. But I wish to learn more about your own mission here. There are many conflicting stories. Are you in fact here to avenge your fallen colleague?"

  Hannah hadn't heard that idea before. "Ah, no. We are here seeking the cause of his disappearance. So far we have not found anything to suggest that it was anything more than an accident." Hannah felt a twinge of guilt for lying to the kindly Xenoatric. It was, after all, the first being she had met on this world who didn't want anything from her or suspect her of crimes.

  "Indeed? You surprise me. But perhaps you are in possession of facts you have not yet integrated."

  It was the most polite way anyone had ever told Hannah that it was obvious she was lying. "You are very kind," she said.

  "In any event, there are many, Unseen and Metrannan alike, who would be most interested in your missing colleague's mission. It is said in many versions of the tale that he was somehow involved in an attempt to recover the lost longlife treatment."

  "But why would that be of so much interest to the Unseen?" Hannah asked.

  "Because we are few, and the Metrannans are many. Our Enclave in the city is smaller than it once was, and in fact has grown smaller and smaller across the centuries. If the Metrannans suddenly were longer-lived, there would no doubt be many more of them. There would be still greater pressure on the Enclave--and what would become of us?"

  You could always move somewhere else. Hannah thought the words, but was not foolish enough to speak them. The idea might seem obvious to her, but she was from a species whose entire recorded history wasn't long enough to be a rounding error in the annals of the Unseen Beings. She could not even imagine how much remaining in a particular place could affect a culture that had lived in that same spot for millions of years.

  There were other populations of the Unseen on other worlds--but that was far from saying that the Unseen of Metran would be welcome there. Then Hannah thought of the Xenoatrics she had seen headed for departing spacecraft at Free Orbit Station. Perhaps there were some Xenoatrics desperate enough to migrate--but that was no solution for the Enclave as a whole. Every Xenoatric who left was making the problem of the remaining group's survival more difficult. "I thank you for speaking openly with a stranger about such difficult questions."

  Maintainer of Calm made a dismissive gesture. "The difficulty is in living with the questions. Speaking of them is not difficult at all."

  Hannah could not help but look again at Bulwark of Constancy, still motionless, semicata-tonic. Speaking of them was hard enough for some.

  At that moment a chime sounded. Hannah blinked, and looked down at the feeding vat to see that all the scuttlers were gone. Time to change tables--preferably before she had to watch the servers bring in fresh supplies of the critters.

  She said her sincere and grateful farewells to Maintainer of Calm and allowed her escort to guide her to the next table.

  Jamie glared down at his third bowl of yogurtlike pap and sighed in resignation. "'Safe Phude Fore Peeple frum Eerth,'" he muttered to himself. If someone could have given some sort of assurance that eating a bland but human-digestible paste while wearing a black-and-white monkey suit and being ignored by a succession of tablesful of snooty aliens was going to be the official low point of his BSI career, that would have been of some help--but right at that moment, he was fully prepared to believe that it was all going to be downhill from there on in. It was only a minor consolation that Hannah hadn't had any better luck than his on her last two tables, after she had managed to draw what appeared to be a talkative Xenoatric the first time out.

  His attention had wandered a bit, and it was only after the senior member of the table had arrived that he suddenly realized that his luck had changed--but he couldn't be sure if it was for better or worse. He found himself sitting next to Fallogon of the Three. The being who had interrogated him that morning.

  "We are known to each other, and may dispense with introduction ritual," Fallogon said in Lesser Trade Speech the moment he sat down.

  As Jamie sat, he noticed out of the corner of his eyes that the four other Metrannans at the table, and indeed most of the other Metrannans in the room, were watching in what looked rather like astonishment, and even outright envy. Who was this pap-eating Younger Race alien to be addressed by one of the Three? "Yes," he agreed meaninglessly, "we are known to each other."

  "It is a pity that your biochemistry is incompatible with ours," Fallogon said. "I am told that this thatchberry soup is superb." With that, he lifted a long metal tube from the table, stuck it into fluid in the large bowl-shaped depression in front of him, and used it as an oversized drinking straw. The other Metrannans around the table did the same, and Jamie reflected on the differences in etiquette and sanitary practices from one species and culture to the next. "The soup is excellent," said Fallogon, "and I was most careful to arrange matters so that I would sit next to you at a table otherwise occupied by complete blockheads who did not speak a word of any language other than their own. And I have taken other precautions that need not concern you to ensure that, in spite of speaking in the center of a large and crowded room, we may converse in perfect privac
y."

  And you probably picked me to speak to instead of Hannah because she asserted her seniority. You're hoping I'll be easier to intimidate. You might even be right. He decided that the best way to keep from being pushed around would be to do some pushing of his own to start. "I see," he said. "Plainly you have arranged matters so that you might tell me something. Might I ask what?" And ain't that a respectful way to address a planetary leader who could make you vanish even more completely than Trevor anytime he wanted?

  "You are not entirely correct," said Fallogon, staring intently at him. "I have arranged matters so that I could ask you a question. The question is as follows: Would you like to know the exact coordinates of the Irene Adler?"

  Jamie forced down his shock and surprise as fast as he could and spoke before he had a chance to think, because he didn't dare take the time to think. "Yes, of course," he said. "That is what we came here to find out. If we can find the Adler, we stand a very good chance of knowing what happened to Agent Wilcox."

  "Nonsense," said Fallogon, in a gruff, unflappable tone of voice. "Your present ship, the Bartholomew Sholto, arrived in our star system docked to the Adler. The damage to the Sholto is consistent with a cable under tension snapping loose. The other end of that cable was attached to the Adler. You did your best to mask the Adler's maneuvers behind the Sholto's braking burn, but you were tracked by an off-axis station that had a clear view. The Adler is in a distant orbit, waiting for your return."

  "Your off-axis tracker must have spotted some other spacecraft in the same general volume of space. Why would we go through all that elaborate effort?" Jamie asked, in what he hoped was a calm and unworried tone. "Or more accurately, what in space made you think we'd go through all that effort?"

  "There are two of you. The BSI has craft designed to carry two people. The Sholto is too cramped and small to be a suitable two-person craft. According to your statements, you were dispatched here because things were quiet enough so that your service felt you two could be spared. That makes it highly unlikely that there was a shortage of available two-person craft. Therefore, you flew here aboard the Sholto for some particular reason. The Sholto is the same type and class of ship as the Irene Adler. The use of identical objects when that use is odd or inconvenient always suggests an effort at deception to an intelligence professional. It does not require much imagination to come up with possible scenarios where it would be useful to have one ship masquerade as the other.

  "Furthermore, if there is cable damage to the Sholto, there is likely similar damage, perhaps more damage, to whatever it was docked to when the cable snapped. You requested far more repair compound than would be needed by the Sholto. If the damage occurred back at base, you would not need additional repair compound--but you would if the cable was attached to another vehicle, and it snapped while you were traveling to Metran, and the other vehicle was damaged as well. Do I need to go on?"

  "No," said Jamie, his heart pounding, his palms sweating. "You are obviously much practiced at interpreting data--and, with respect, perhaps at overinterpreting it. Why would we bring the Adler with us? What point would there be to our mission in the first place if we had already recovered the Adler?"

  "Frankly, I don't know," Fallogon said. "I have been puzzling over the matter since the moment your vehicles were detected. Is Trevor Wilcox alive? Did he deliver the message? Did he complete his mission? If so, why are you here? The only reason I can think of for bringing the Adler along would be to have it available quickly for some reason--and yet you have left it at the edge of the star system, where it will take several days to reach it."

  Fallogon was not even bothering to see if Jamie would answer the questions he asked, as if he were assuming Jamie would deny everything and simply didn't wish to bother playing out the charade.

  "At last I came up with a theory that more or less fit the facts. Wilcox died or was badly incapacitated on the flight home. The Adler was recovered only recently. The message itself was recovered from the ship--but the decryption key was not. Or perhaps it was the key that was located, but the message that was lost. Your agency--correctly--determined that the message contained information of paramount importance, and decided--perhaps incorrectly--on the high-risk plan of sending the Adler along on your mission in hopes of recovering the sense of the message as rapidly as possible.

  "Your desire to find out how Wilcox was killed or injured is no doubt sincerely felt, but finding that out is merely your cover story. Your true mission is to search here on Metran for any clues to where the decryption key or the message was hidden aboard the Adler, or else to recover a backup copy of the missing part."

  "If you believe these remarkable theories to be true," said Jamie, "then why are we here? Why aren't you continuing the interrogation from this morning instead?"

  "Because, contrary to what my two colleagues in the Three seem to believe, you can do us no harm," Fallogon said calmly. "They saw much the same evidence that I did and invented plots and conspiracies, plans to land the Sholto on the planet and kidnap--well, let us say that the list of possible victims was quite extensive and required you to have some remarkably complex motives for your actions."

  Jamie wondered if he should be worried that Fallogon was willing to tell a no-account Younger Race xeno that he thought Tigmin and Yalananav were paranoid fools. Dead men tell no tales, so tell the dead whatever you please. "I am glad to learn that you do not fear us," he said.

  "If I regarded you as a threat, you would no longer exist," Fallogon said bluntly. "If you were a mere inconvenience and offered no potential benefit to me, or to the Three, or to the peoples of Metran, you would no longer exist. However, you represent a chance--a very slim chance, at this point--for great benefit to all. I will ask you no questions at this time. Instead I call upon you to reflect and consider. But time is very short, and we do not have the leisure to play games. Therefore, I will give you these facts, with no further effort to lie or mislead on my part.

  "The message carried by Wilcox contained vital data concerning the longlife treatment. Data that we have not been able to reconstruct, and likely will not be able to reconstruct anytime soon. In my estimation--not shared by my colleagues--our new Bureaucratic Order can only hold things together for a brief time. After the inevitable collapse, there will be no hope at all of reconstructing the data.

  "We have a copy of the message itself--but not the decryption key. If what you call my 'remarkable theories' are in fact correct, and you are here in search of the decryption key, I can tell you flatly that it is not on this planet--or if it is here, it is hidden in such a way that an all-out search by hundreds of agents with intimate knowledge of local culture, custom, technology, and geography, working day and night with unlimited resources for months on end did not locate it.

  "Every locale, every object, every vehicle even remotely connected to Hallaben, or Agent Wilcox, or anyone else associated with the case has been searched and searched and searched again. It is difficult to prove a negative. For that reason, and that reason alone, I cannot say with absolute certainty that the decryption key is not on Metran. But the odds of you and your partner locating it after we have failed are, at best, astronomical."

  Jamie tried his best to give nothing away. "Is there any chance of the message being decrypted without the key?"

  "Our scientists estimate that a range of ten to twenty Metran years--say, eight to sixteen of your years--as the earliest time they could have any hope of decrypting the message manually. It might take--will almost certainly take--much longer, perhaps twelve twelve-years. That is unfortunate, as I very much doubt we have even a single twelve-year left."

  "But you imply that the longlife formula could save you, somehow. Wouldn't it upend things again, destabilize your society even more than it has been?"

  "For all of our history, we have seen the other Elder Races with double, triple, twelve times our life span, some of them far longer than that. We learned to accept the brevity of our lives beca
use we had to. The uprising happened not because our people had been given hope for longer lives but because that hope had been offered, and then snatched away. The Bureaucratic Order has not changed that fact--it has only imposed sufficient repression to subdue the violence--for a time. It cannot keep our people from dreaming of what they could do with lives that were twice as long--or of looking for someone to blame because that dream has been denied.

  "For endless years our civilization was stable, as stable as that flat plate before you on the table. Now it is as if that same fragile plate were balanced precisely on a knifepoint. My colleagues call that 'stability.' I do not."

  "But I say again, the longlife formula would simply inject a massive new instability into the situation. How could that help?"

  "Because the people will be able to look forward to what they might have, what they will have, rather than backwards to what was stolen from them. They will have hope. The change in life span will alter many things--but, unless you care for armed guards everywhere, blackened buildings, and three old fools issuing orders for more and more security that will only end when everyone is locked up, I would suggest that things need alteration. Do you agree, or do you have another view?"

  "I am not suicidal; therefore, I will not answer that question."

  "Well put. But allow me to finish my statement, that you may reflect on it fully. If it is the case that you have the decryption key, but not the message, then there could be nothing easier than giving you another copy of the message. You may return home with it, match it with the decrypt key in the presence of our representatives, and all will be well."