An Exchange of Hostages

by Susan R. Matthews

  For now the table was still safe for him. He could take his rhyti from it without shuddering, even knowing as he did what role it would play in his further education as a torturer. Security was posted behind him even now, even though it was only the first of the Levels — a free offering of confession, unassisted. Andrej wondered if Security was as apprehensive as he was to be starting this. Surely even Security had feelings about the work ahead of them all, the blood and the torment of it?

  Without shifting his posture from the position of relaxed attentiveness he had assumed when he sat down, Andrej concentrated on the movements of the two Security troops behind him. He used to try to guess exactly what faces his young nieces and nephews behind him were making at the kneelers during the long hours in chapel on one Saint’s day or another; and now he found that the old pastime had the effect of giving him eyes in the back of his head, where the strictly subservient Security were concerned. The prisoner had not been brought in just yet, and Security seemed to permit themselves a bit more restlessness than they might have had they felt that someone was watching them — or watching them now as opposed to hours later on Record, where they would like as not be out of orb anyway, if the demonstration tapes were any indication. The image in his mind’s eye amused him — a pleasant relief from the fretful night he’d spent.

  “Gentlemen, a little concentration, if you please,” Andrej said, sensing their surprise and stiffening posture. Quite probably they’d never been forced to kneel devoutly for hours at a time while Uncle Radu declaimed at length about the improbably perfect virtue of some probably hypothetical martyr.

  Perhaps he should approach his task from a different angle after all, Andrej mused.

  To take a medical history one had to connect with a patient, and he wanted as little connection with this place as possible. He wasn’t interested in making any person-to-person contact with the prisoner; but he couldn’t take a medical history without engaging his empathic self.

  His final evaluations in that all-critical block of instruction had cited his “genuine and responsive empathy of a very respectable degree,” and he was proud of himself to have won over his own limitations, proud of how completely his proctor had been surprised as she read the commendatory prose from his record.

  It would be better for him if he could turn the empathy off, pretend he’d never fought through the icy bare-rock pass between his mind and heart. It would be better for him to observe clinically, without emotion. Except all that he was and all that he had won at Mayon depended upon his passionate empathy; how could he set that prize aside, and not diminish himself?

  He was no further toward a solution to the problem this morning than he had been last night, talking to Joslire. What had he been talking to Joslire about? There’d been a good deal of wodac after supper. He wasn’t quite sure.

  The warning signal sounded at the door; Andrej remembered. Uncle Radu, the tiresome business of the confessional, and the brutal simplicity of it all. Confess or be unreconciled. Be contrite or unreconciled; accept your penance joyfully. Or be un-Reconciled.

  Reaching for the glass on the table at his elbow, Andrej drank off half the rhyti in one draw, regretting his gesture immediately for the uneasiness that it betrayed.

  Control, he told himself.

  He had to have control.

  “Step through.” He could hear no tremor in his voice, no uncertainty or nervousness. He had confessed and he was contrite, but Uncle Radu — and the whole of the Blood by extension — could not accept that he was truly penitent while he still resisted his father’s will. He left his home for this place un-Reconciled because he couldn’t accept his father’s wishes without protest. Disgraced and unblessed, and sitting here as though he’d been set by the Holy Mother to examine her children for flaw or fault . . . “State your identification. And the crime to which you wish to confess.”

  He looked up only as he ended the first of the listed questions. He had the series set out in text for him on the scroller at his elbow; a Bench catechism of sorts, the litany for preserving the forms of the Judicial order. Perhaps it would be better to approach it that way. As long as he was un-Reconciled, he might as well be irreverent, and be damned for it. His father had kissed him and blessed him as well as he could under the circumstances. But the Church was pitiless.

  The Church and the Bench’s Protocols were well matched for that.

  “Abbas Hakun, Sampfel Sector, Dorl and Yenzing, your Excellency.”

  Familiar as the title was, it startled Andrej to hear it in this place. On his home-world his father was an Excellency, a prince not of the Autocrat’s lineage. And since all of a prince’s sons were princes — regardless of whether they would inherit, regardless of whether there was anything to inherit — Andrej had been an Excellency from his infancy. It only took him a moment to remember. Chonis had warned them that their prisoners were required to address them as if they were already commissioned.

  “The crime to which I wish to confess is that of defrauding the Bench, your Excellency.”

  It is my shame to be un-Reconciled, and if I cannot be relieved of fault by penance I must die nameless and unwept, never to stand in the presence of my Holy Mother beneath the Canopy.

  His prisoner was Mizucash, tall, broad-shouldered, and imposing for all his bound hands and meek demeanor. The language of submission and confession sounded strangely in the Mizucash’s mouth, to Andrej’s ear.

  “In what manner have you defrauded the Bench?”

  Just like the confessional. The crime had to be quantified and categorized before the appropriate penance was assessed. And if the prisoner or child under Canopy did not have answers ready, the questions themselves would elicit information to complete the Record and define the penalty.

  “My employment was in a Judicial Stores contract company, your Excellency. Our contract lay in the provision of the nine flours Standard for fast-meal menus of hominid categories eight, ten, eleven, and nineteen.”

  Yes, my Mother’s servant, I have challenged my father’s will and my father’s wisdom, and not submitted instruction, as a filial child would not fail to do. I cannot accept my father’s will, though I am to do it. He cannot know what he requires of me.

  “Describe the actions that you took, or failed to take, that resulted in the crime of defrauding the Bench.”

  So easy, to pass from the neutral “crime to which you wish to confess” to the necessarily self-incrimination “crime of defrauding the Bench.” One hardly noticed the all-important shift in emphasis. Was this how Uncle Radu felt when he heard confession beneath the Canopy?

  “I operated the sweeper in the packaging area of my plant. My instructions specified that flour sweepings were to be collected and weighed for use as wastage statistics for the development of the billing rates.”

  What was the man talking about, anyway? “Explain how your actions vis-a-vis the floor sweepings defrauded the Bench.” He had to concentrate on the task before him and set aside his brooding. What could be so important about flour sweepings that they would send a man all the way out to Fleet Orientation Station Medical to confess about them? Or was that the point, that it was an unimportant crime, and therefore it was no matter if a Student Interrogator botched the job?

  “Wastage statistics reduce the billing rates by the value of the sweepings in flour by weight. My wife and I, we’re in violation of the recommended reproduction levels, your Excellency, and rations only allow for two children. So instead of bringing the flour to be weighed, I took as much of the sweepings home as I could manage on each shift. In violation of my published procedure.”

  So he was to take the confession of a man who had cheated the Bench out of a few eighths of flour. It had to be a joke. If he were in Uncle Radu’s place, he would have had so pathetic a sinner turned out of sanctuary and beaten for his presumption, or for the sin of aspiring to an excess of piety. One might as well beat the gardener for having chewed on a leaf of jessamine while cultivating th
e plantation. Could this be some sort of an initiation prank, like throwing the class’s best student into the waddler-pond for luck before final exams commenced? Andrej decided to test it, distracted from his private conflicts by the obvious absurdity of the situation.

  “Describe the value of the flour sweepings you have confessed to having misappropriated.” Which would in turn define the degree to which the Bench had been defrauded, so that he could form a better idea of the severity of this crime.

  “We used to have a saucer-cake for the chilties’ morning meal from them. A good eighth in Standard scrip, your Excellency. Sometimes as much as four-eighths, and my Balma would eat, too.”

  Ridiculous.

  He’d have to revise his mental comparison. To prosecute defrauding the Jurisdiction Bench at this level was like selling the gardener’s children into prostitution because the gardener had inhaled too deeply of the jessamine fragrance on three consecutive warm mornings, thereby defrauding the House in concept of some minute amount and unrecoverable amount of the essential oil.

  “Oh, fine,” Andrej said — to the monitor as much as to the prisoner. He felt completely at ease now, his sense of the ridiculous having overpowered his self-pitying introspection. “Very good indeed. You are a very great sinner, Abbas Hakun.” He couldn’t tell whether Security’s sudden twitchiness behind him was affront or the giggles; he didn’t care. He had half a mind to walk out on this farce of a confession right now. “What impelled you to confess your crime to the authorities so that the Judicial order might be preserved?”

  Or else he would continue with the questions as they were written, which had the potential for becoming really rather hilarious in the absurdity of applying them to the theft of a handful of flour.

  “My wife developed an allergic reaction to one of the flours. They’re not available as rations to the mill staff . . . ” It was the first trace of real emotion Andrej had heard from his prisoner; and the desperation he read underneath that neutral statement was too honest to be amusing.

  Perhaps it wasn’t funny.

  But it was no less absurd.

  “She was at risk of being accused for trade on illegal markets, so I turned myself in. It’s true that she ate, but it was me who stole, your Excellency. It is for this reason that I asked to be allowed to make this confession.”

  Torn as he was between his inability to take the crime seriously and his appreciation for the prisoner’s obviously sincere desire to protect his wife, Andrej was unsure as to his next move. Azanry was too rich a world; no one lacked for a handful of flour, at Rogubarachno . . .

  He decided to complete the forms.

  Tutor Chonis would explain the joke — if joke there was — when he and Tutor Chonis went over the tape of this session for critique.

  “Very good. There was no question in your mind at any time that your violation of procedure constituted willful fraud, then.”

  There just had to be a joke in here someplace.

  Chapter Three

  Tutor Chonis was not actually angry. Perhaps a little annoyed. Koscuisko’s scorn had been rather sharp, and as Koscuisko’s Tutor, Chonis took that personally. Annoyed, yes, but not enraged, and that meant that he had to make a conscious effort to compose his face for the desired dismaying effect as he keyed the office’s admit with unnecessary force, making noticeable show of fighting with imperfectly suppressed disgust while awaiting the tiresome membrane to slide slowly apart to allow him entry.

  “Can you really imagine that we’re that stupid?”

  Choosing the blunt unreasonable words carefully, Tutor Chonis all but spat them into Koscuisko’s face before continuing past his startled pupil to take his seat behind his desk. Noycannir was startled as well, of course — but not without a subtle under-shadowing of gratification in her flat, shining hazel eyes. Tutor Chonis wouldn’t have had it any other way. It was his business to set Students at each others’ throats and make them compete for his approval and respect. That was one of the reasons that Tutors handled two Students in the same Term, and on the same shift as well. Receiving a stern reprimand in the presence of a social and professional inferior could, with any luck at all, be counted on to set young Koscuisko’s aristocratic teeth on edge.

  “I’ve reviewed your practical exercise, Koscuisko. I am disgusted with the manner in which you conducted yourself. You seem to think that this is all some sort of a perverse amusement, an adolescent game.”

  And he could all but hear Koscuisko seething where he sat, with his spine locked rigid and his hand that lay on the table suddenly motionless; still, there was no hint of Koscuisko’s fingertips whitening at the point of the stylus in his hand. Koscuisko had control.

  Chonis didn’t know if that was a good thing or not, yet.

  “It is a game.” Sweet and soft, Koscuisko’s reply, but Chonis could hear the confusion and worry behind the response. “You explained it to us yourself, Tutor Chonis. We pretend that the crime deserves its punishment, and in return the prisoner pretends that there is hope of Judicial leniency.”

  It wasn’t the sarcastic route Koscuisko’s reasoning took that disturbed Tutor Chonis. He knew about it already, of course, from Joslire’s reports; and his own experience had prepared him to expect it from a man like Koscuisko. It was not an uncommon psychological defense, especially at the beginning of the Term.

  “Don’t try to mock me.”

  He turned away from the two of them in order to emphasize his displeasure and to analyze its source at the same time. The real problem was that Koscuisko gave every evidence of possessing an unusually healthy sense of the ridiculous. He could not be permitted to leave Fleet Orientation Center Medical with that sense of the ridiculous intact.

  “Capital eight-six. On the appropriate display of the accepted psychological conviction.” Damn the insolent little wretch, Koscuisko was quoting his own lesson citations at him. “The Inquisitor is at all times to display clearly evident conviction that the Jurisdiction’s scale of punitive measures is wise, tempered with mercy, and above all completely just. Correct moral stance on the part of the Inquisitor will greatly facilitate the creation of the appropriate attitudes of contrition and submission to the Law on the part of the prisoner.”

  As if he didn’t know, when he had all but written the text himself. “Leaving apart for the moment the unpleasant flavor created by a Student attempting to lecture his instructor. Dare you suggest that your clownishness in the practical exercise created the appropriate sense of respect for the Judicial order in the mind of your prisoner?”

  He turned slowly back to face his Students again as he spoke. Noycannir first: she seemed to be enjoying the show. If only she could learn from it. Her first exercise had been completely serious — without technical error and with every indication of utter conviction, as if her personal background — her proven skills for survival in the unspeakably sordid circumstances of her earliest years in an ungoverned Port, her demonstrated facility for carrying useful survival strategies to their logical limits — had somehow deadened her imagination. She would not make an adequate Inquisitor without an imagination. A torturer with an intensive medical background and a set of legal parameters to conform to could be considered to be a perversion of a sort, that was true. But a torturer without imagination was only a brute.

  “A man,” Chonis continued, “since you obviously need the reminder, who was honest enough to make a full and free confession. In order to protect his family from the consequences of his own guilty actions. Whose dignity should have been respected.”

  Koscuisko met his eyes squarely, and did not drop his gaze until a precise fraction of a moment before the stare would have become too insolent to be permitted to pass. Koscuisko looked rather more enraged than irritated, very much as if he was considering some internal vision of Tutor Chonis in three pieces. His glare seemed to wash the color out of his pale eyes until they almost seemed all white and no pupil — like the Nebginnis, whose vestigial eyes, no longer functi
onal, had been replaced by sonar sensing. Chonis was gratified with the effect. It had not been easy, but it looked at last as if he had got Koscuisko’s attention.

  He resumed his line of discourse. “Remember well that the dignity of even the guilty must be carefully cherished. . . . And is not the painful disregard of that dignity one of the most severe marks of the Bench’s regretful censure of wrong conduct?”

  Except that if he didn’t watch his own tone of voice he would lose all that he had gained. He sounded almost sarcastic to himself; and if he thought he sounded sarcastic — with his lifetime’s worth of training in picking up linguistic subtleties — then there was the danger that Koscuisko, whose records pointed to a high level of innate empathy, might sense the same thing. Chonis pulled a weapon from Joslire Curran’s daily reports to use against Koscuisko’s formidable sense of center.

  “You are at least nominally an adult, by the Jurisdiction Standard. I understand that in your birth-culture confessions are made only to priests, and all the rules are unwritten. It is not so here.” In Koscuisko’s birth-culture, no man whose father was out of cloister was an adult. The women had it easier on Azanry, in that sense at least, because women became adults with the birth of their first legitimate child — no matter how old their mothers lived to be.

  Koscuisko, seemingly disinclined to be drawn out, had squared his chair to the desk and folded his hands. He appeared to be concentrating on the minuscule text printed on the index line of one of the record-sets on the library shelf, his expression one of mild, polite disinterest as Chonis lectured.