The Cause of Death

by Roger MacBride Allen

  "Be it known and published throughout this world that I hereby extend, directly and personally, the Protection of the Thelm's Hand over Georg Hertzmann, adoptive son and heir of Lantrall, Thelm of all Reqwar. Whosoever harms this same Georg Hertzmann, or compasses harm against him, shall be judged as having harmed the Thelm and shall pay the full and heaviest penalty for that crime."

  Even to the Thelm, the grand words of ritual seemed faintly absurd when there was no one there but the two of them. But the words of the pronouncement had meaning and value, and were legally binding in the moment they were spoken.

  All that remained was to place the chain around his son's neck and speak the final words. "Arise, Georg Herztmann," he said. Informality was all very well for a family chat--but not for the Extension of the Hand. If Georg had remained sitting, then the Thelm would have been obliged to bow or even kneel slightly in order to place the chain properly, and that would never do.

  Georg stood, and Thelm Lantrall placed the chain around his neck. It was only then that he remembered that Georg already wore a pendant--the Pax Humana Hand. There was something comforting about that idea--two hands, one Pavlat, one human, one extended to protect, the other offering help. If only it were that simple.

  The Thelm moved back a step or two before intoning the last words of the ritual. He spoke with greater conviction than he had a moment before, a conviction that he truly felt. "Now it is done. Now none will dare to harm Georg Hertzmann, so long as Lantrall, Thelm of all Reqwar, shall live." Except, of course, those responsible for enforcing the sentence already handed down against you for the crime of which you stand convicted. There was nothing the Thelm could do to protect Georg from that peril. Perhaps placing the Hand on his adopted son could do nothing but ease Lantrall's own guilt and shame, if only by the merest trifle. But if the High Thelek got impatient for Georg's death, or, if, by some miracle, a way out was found, then perhaps putting Georg under the protection of his Hand would have some practical use.

  Georg bowed low, straightened up, and looked upon his adoptive parent. "Thank you, Father Lantrall," he said, a storm of unreadable emotions playing across that strange and alien face. But his feelings, and the Thelm's, were unimportant. None would dare to harm Georg Herztmann without the law's consent so long as Lantrall lived. That was the main thing.

  And therein lay an irony so deep, so vast, that no possible single emotion could do it justice.

  FIFTEENMINDER

  Jamie Mendez leaned across the windowsill and glared out the hexagonal window of Room Four of the Biped Wing of the Standard-Grav-Standard-Air Floor Number Two of Hotel Number Two.

  He looked down across fabulous downtown Thelmhome. He was not impressed. Thelmhome was a small, tired, worn-out place. Somehow the entire city looked as if it needed a coat of paint. Thelmhome was immediately adjacent to Thelm's Keep, and to about twenty other things and places with the word "Thelm" in them.

  Jamie turned from the hexagonal window to look around the hexagonal cream-colored room he was sharing with Hannah. Or maybe hexagonal prison cell would be more to the point, because even though they could go through the oddly impractical hexagonal door, and even take the hexagonal elevator down to the hexagonal entrance level, that was as far as they could go. Jamie had considered charging through the guards down there and making a break for it, if only for the pleasure of seeing something that didn't have six sides to it. But they weren't allowed out of the hotel unless they had an escort, and the escorts were really quite good at keeping themselves unavailable.

  All the room's furnishings appointments were cream-colored, and, if at all possible, hexagonal: the tables that were too high, the perching stools that were wrongly proportioned, the bowls they ate out of. Even the foods in the bowls, no matter what they tasted like, were cream-colored.

  If there had been a way to make the various bland-flavored pastes hexagonal, Jamie had no doubt the hotel cooks would have done it. Hannah and he had to eat the stuff to conserve their own emergency stores, but the local cuisine was not up to the standard of BSI field rations--and that wasn't saying much.

  But it wasn't just being cooped up, or the bizarre room, or the bland food. It was that none of the murk and muddle seemed to worry Hannah. She had been out in the field plenty of times when her instructions amounted to little more than "solve whatever the problem turns out to be," but he wasn't used to it.

  "So how long are we going to be here?" Jamie asked.

  "I have no idea," Hannah replied placidly. She was leaning over the table, sketching on a large pad of paper. It was a view from the pilot's seat of the Lotus, looking down through the viewport at Thelmhome Spaceport. Jamie had no idea whether she was doing it for her own amusement, to pass the time, or whether she intended it for use in some sort of evidentiary report, if and when they got out of this.

  "What the devil is keeping Zahida?" he asked. "What's she planning to do with us--or to us?"

  Hannah looked up from her sketch and gave Jamie a wry smile. "See previous answer," she said. "No sense asking me when I know as little as you."

  "Sorry," said Jamie. "You're right, I know. But I'm just not used to this sort of thing yet."

  "If you're going to be a BSI agent, you'd better learn that patience is a job skill."

  "Well, I haven't quite developed it yet."

  When Zahida had promised to take them to a place of safety, Jamie had imagined some rustic campsite hidden deep in the forests. But Zahida had different ideas about safety. In a forest camp, they could have disappeared without a trace. In the middle of the city of Thelmhome, that would be much more difficult to arrange.

  And so Hannah and Jamie found themselves ensconced in comfort, or at least relative comfort, at the imaginatively named Hotel Number Two, as public and visible a place as one could hope to find, with instructions to wear their Thelm's Hand medallions at all times, just to be on the safe side.

  Jamie did not feel "hotel" was the most precise description of their temporary home. After two days in the place, he concluded that Hotel Number Two could have been more accurately named "Medium Security Storage and Confinement Facility for Potentially Troublesome Aliens." But, as Hannah pointed out, that might not be good for business, or easy to fit on a sign.

  The Pavlat obviously viewed aliens as an unpleasant necessity, best kept out of the way and out of sight, but close to hand in one place for ease of control. Hotel Two was where all that was accomplished. Hotel Number One was evidence that Reqwar Pavlat xenophobia extended to their own species. It was directly next door, catering to off-world Pavlat, with the idea of keeping them all safely penned up as well, so as to prevent the spread of dangerous un-Reqwar ideas.

  It took a day or two to learn even that much, while they were very politely but firmly confined to Hotel Number Two. Meanwhile Zahida flitted in and out, checking on them and reporting on the status of an important meeting she was working to arrange--though she was vague on what the meeting was for, or with whom it would be. Jamie and Hannah got the distinct impression that Zahida thought someone else might be listening in.

  All she would tell them was that they would need to see the parties in question before the agents did anything else--which left them with no clearer idea of what they were expected to do, or ought to do.

  Getting themselves more or less organized and settled after losing everything in the crash kept them somewhat occupied. Clothes were less of an issue than they might have thought. There were one-size-fits-all-but-not-very-well coveralls in one of the emergency packs, which gave them something to wear besides the long-john-style garments worn under their pressure suits. Better still, on the morning after their arrival, Hotel Number Two's Technical Service Department delivered what appeared to be human-style, hand-tailored clothes: undergarments, socks, semiformal working clothes, and even fairly credible shoes. The clothes fit so well that Hannah concluded that (a) Tech Services' database on human clothing was a lot better than their information on human food, (b) Tech Services ha
d done body scans of both of them, probably while they were sleeping, and (c) Tech Services didn't really care if Hannah and Jamie knew how closely they were being observed.

  Jamie crossed to the table and refilled his hexagonal cup with coffee. That was the one minor miracle that made it all bearable, somehow: Tech Services had found a way to synthesize something very close to real tea and coffee, and was willing to provide both in unlimited amounts. The trouble was, of course, unlimited amounts of coffee was not the best idea if one was already restless and agitated.

  Jamie set his cup down untasted. "I can't take it anymore," he said. "I'm headed up to the General Room." They spent much of their time in the General Room, which was something like a hotel lobby, but not quite, mainly because there was precious little to do in their own room.

  "Suit yourself," Hannah said, as she worked on shading in a corner of her drawing. "I'll see you back down here when you can't take it anymore up there."

  Jamie couldn't quite find the right words to reply. He settled on a low growl, pulled open the hexagonal door, and stomped out into the hexagonal corridor.

  * * *

  Hannah did her best to put on a good show. She sketched. She napped. She wrote letters to family that she knew perfectly well she might never be able to send. She was not as calm and at ease as she pretended to be for Jamie's sake, but she was, after all, the senior partner. It wouldn't do for her to start pacing the room. Better to let Jamie blow off as much steam as he could, while putting up a placid front herself. If patience was a job skill, waiting was even more of one.

  But there were things she had to tell Jamie at the first opportunity and they dared not talk in the room. They couldn't even risk writing notes to each other--not when they were using pens and paper provided by Tech Services. T.S. might have embedded nano-sized motion detectors in the pens or put pressure sensors in the paper. If so, they could literally play back every movement of the pen, or reproduce every mark on the paper exactly. Even if they hadn't gone to that much trouble, Hannah was sure there were also cameras hidden in the ceiling. Tech Services could simply read over their shoulders.

  The necessity of silence, and the urgent need to talk, kept her anxious, in spite of her calm exterior. But real conversation would have to wait until they were able to take an afternoon stroll around the city, away from the insultingly blatant surveillance of Tech Services. Until then, there was little to do but continue her drawings. She sighed and studied her rendition of the Lotus's control panel, then started reworking the perspective on the left side of the sketch.

  * * *

  The chance to get out came on their third day. Hannah came back into the room after yet another completely pointless prowl around the General Room to find Jamie rushing about their room, getting himself ready--though ready for what Hannah couldn't quite tell. "What's going on?" she asked.

  "We've been assigned an escort!" Jamie said, pulling clothes from the cupboard. "We've got permission to go outside. We can leave in"--he checked his wristaid--"eight minutes."

  "Let's not keep them waiting," Hannah said. The two of them had some practice with a shortage of privacy. They carefully turned their backs on each other and started changing clothes.

  Hannah had thought about this moment, when they were finally allowed out, and planned it out in some detail. She was determined to wear nothing but garments they had brought with them, and never mind if her badly fitting coveralls gave a poor impression of BSI agents to the local populace. Her newly made, locally made clothes were not to be trusted. Tech Services could have easily woven any number of subminiature mikes and transmitters into their nice new outfits. It was a problem that the BSI had faced before, and their BSI-issue clothes actually had jamming circuits and other countermeasures literally woven into the fabric.

  She got into her human-made stuff as fast as she could. She even went so far as to wear the big ungainly boots from her pressure suit instead of the much better locally made shoes. "I'm done," she said. "Ready for me?"

  "All set."

  Hannah turned around--and was more pleased than surprised that Jamie had likewise changed back into nothing but human-made gear. She hadn't dared to warn him, for fear T.S. would overhear and take further steps. She smiled at him. "Those coveralls aren't much," she said. "But on you they look good."

  * * *

  It was a vast relief to get out of the hotel and walk the small and tired city of Thelmhome. Never mind that the sky was gloomy, or that the streets and buildings were shabby, or that the locals glared at them with something between belligerent curiosity and pure hostility, or that their escort--supposedly their guide, but very obviously in fact their minder--was a steady sixteen paces behind them, watching every step they took.

  The minder did not speak English, but instead relied on a speech generator that would more or less translate to and from Reqwar Pavlat, or else respond to keyboard commands. To Hannah's amusement, every speech that came out of the generator started with "Honored sirs." As Jamie pointed out, that was at least 75 percent wrong. Only one of them could possibly be a sir, and neither of them was being honored all that much. Their minder was constantly hurrying up to urge the honored sirs to go this way or that way, or suggest the honored sirs look at this shop or not bother about this one. They decided to return the compliment and called their minder Honored-sir.

  At least they were out, under an open sky, without anyone trying to kill them. Better still, Zahida had sent word that she had finally arranged their meeting for that very night. There was the prospect of learning the score, of knowing enough to take action, in the very near future.

  And at last they could talk. There were, no doubt, dozens of ways for Hotel Number Two's Tech Services--or whoever Tech Services worked for--to listen in on them, even if they were walking in the open. All it would require would be for Tech Services to try hard enough. Hannah, however, had a very strong hunch they wouldn't bother. The whole setup had the feel of a place where the local security thugs tried to watch and listen to everything, simply as a matter of routine. It was meant to intimidate as much it was intended to gather information--and probably both those motivations took a backseat to sheer habit. The local spooks watched and listened simply because they had always done that to aliens, and always would.

  The flaw in that approach was that it gathered in too much data. It was impossible to evaluate it all quickly--especially when it was in a completely alien language. In all likelihood Jamie and she would be off the planet--or have gotten themselves killed--before the collected material could be translated, analyzed, and put to use.

  But there was no point in taking chances, or in making it easy on Tech Services. The two of them stuck to entirely inconsequential topics of conversation until they came upon a very busy and very noisy demolition site, where some decrepit old structure was being taken down long after it should have been. The work crews were going to have to hurry if they were going to tear it down before it collapsed of its own accord.

  It was impossibly loud directly in front of the worksite, but it faced on a sort of bedraggled park, full of half-dead plants. The other three sides of the park were formed by low buildings that produced a splendid barrage of echoes for every boom and crash from the demolition site.

  In the center of the park was a small stand of trees and overgrown decorative shrubbery with a path leading into its interior, a small and private space just right for a moment's quiet relaxation--except for the building being torn down next door. So far as Hannah was concerned, it was near to ideal for a private chat. They could talk normally without much need to worry about eavesdroppers, and their minder could stand outside the copse waiting for them for as long as he liked.

  "?Habla Espanol?" Jamie asked. It was a sensible tactic; the Reqwar Pavlat barely had facilities for dealing with English, let alone any other human languages.

  "Un poquito," Hannah answered in the same language. "Closer to Spanglish, really. We can switch back and forth when I don't remember th
e words. That might even make it harder for them than just staying in Spanish. But don't think it will stop them if they really want to know what we say."

  "Comprende. There could be a high-power distance mike on us right now, good enough so they can hear me better than you can," Jamie said.

  "That's about right." They both knew that even if Tech Services couldn't understand their conversation, they could still record it, then sell the recording to the Kendari Inquiries Service--and the Kendari IS could and would translate it all and add the transcripts to their databases. Hannah sometimes wondered just how thick the IS file on her was. She had not the slightest doubt that the IS had already started a file on Jamie.

  Even if the Kendari learned nothing about this case in time for it to do any good, they might pick up something about BSI procedures or even on Hannah's and Jamie's attitudes, beliefs, and habits of thought. The Kendari might pull out those files ten years later, while trying to figure out how to deal with Agent Mendez or Agent Wolfson in some other context.

  "So we should not talk at all?" Jamie asked.

  "Podemos hablar. Necessito hablar." We should talk. We must talk. "But no matter what precautions we take, the risks are there--Comprende?"

  "Comprendo."

  "Mucho bueno," said Hannah. "Because we need to get a few things straight e nostromos habemos solo um rapiod tempo." We won't have much more time. "Honored-sir is going to find some excuse or other to come in, or else he'll discover some security problem that means we have to come out. So let me get to it." She looked at Jamie, hard, for a moment. "We don't know what's going on, but they wouldn't have tried to kill us if the stakes weren't high. Maybe it's the genetic reclamation job. If Georg Hertzmann's taken out of the equation, maybe that job collapses and the whole ecosystem dies. We don't know.

  "I've never met Georg Hertzmann. All I know is what I've read in the files and reports, and what we've learned about what he's doing out here. Ele e simpatico, no?" He's easy to like, isn't he? "And he's in trouble. I want to be on his side. Help him. And I'm guessing you feel the same way."