Deadman Switch

by Timothy Zahn

  “How about Spall?” I asked.

  He snorted. “What, you mean Halloa Heaven? Who’d want to go there?”

  “We do,” I told him, putting some firmness into my voice. I was, after all, supposed to be the one in charge here. “I have to drop my friend here off before continuing on to Collet.”

  He frowned slightly, his sense suddenly becoming uncertain. “I thought this was supposed to be a one-man trip,” he said. “I mean, that’s what we’ve got her serviced and stocked for—”

  “Minor change in plans,” I cut him off. “And I seem to recall the Bellwether’s captain specifying double safety margins for the supplies.”

  A surge of professional pride overpowered the uncertainties. “Oh, sure, there won’t be any problem like that—I mean, Spall’s just five or six hours away.”

  “Good,” I nodded. “Then if you can dig us up a course cyl for Spall, we’ll be ready to go.”

  “Yeah, well—yeah, sure. Let’s see …” He scratched his chin thoughtfully. “I guess the tower banks’ll have a complete set on file. It’ll take a few minutes, but I could send someone over and have them make you some copies. Or if you can tell me where exactly you’ll want to land, I could have a copy of that particular one fed to you while we get you loaded into the cat.”

  “Don’t we have to go to wherever Spall’s launch catapult is?” I frowned. “Or do they have more than one?”

  “They don’t have any at all,” he shook his head. “People who go there pretty much land anywhere they want. All you have to do when you want to leave is gimp your way up a couple thousand meters and then kick in the fusion to get you to ram speed. Uses more fuel than with a cat, ’course, but not as much as you’d think.”

  The thought of using a fusion drive that close to a planetary surface … “What does it do to the landscape?” I asked.

  “Not much good,” he conceded. “Doesn’t matter much, though—practically the whole planet is desert, anyway. So; you want one cyl or the whole batch?”

  I glanced at Calandra, thinking fast. It would be handy to have a complete set—aside from having a wider range of choices, it would help spread the search around when my web of lies eventually fell apart. On the other hand, a list of reference points or even place names wouldn’t do us much good by themselves. “Would the nearest convenient place to the main Halloa settlement be okay with you?” I asked her.

  Once again, she deciphered my train of thought with ease. “A list of all the settlements would be better,” she said. “You do have maps of Spall programmed in, don’t you?” she added to the boss.

  “Oh, sure. For all the good they are—cartographers haven’t exactly fallen over themselves getting the place fine-gridded out. Tell you what; I’ll have the tower feed you course cyls for the six biggest Halloa places, okay?”

  I raised my eyebrows questioningly. “Yes, that should be satisfactory,” Calandra nodded.

  “Okay,” the boss said, relief in his sense as he brushed past us to the control panel. From a box next to one of the contour seats he scooped a handful of blank cyls and laid them out neatly in a row on a grip next to the computer feed. “You put them in here,” he said over his shoulder, demonstrating with the first. “When it beeps, you replace it with the next one—”

  “I am familiar with the procedure,” I told him mildly. “Thank you.”

  “Yeah.” He straightened, took one last look around the cabin at the displays and indicators. “Well, everything seems ready. Just sit down and make yourselves comfortable, and I’ll get the crew started on loading you into the cat. And I’ll get the tower going on those cyls, too.”

  “Thank you,” I said again. He shifted the pepperstick to the other side of his mouth, gave us each a brief nod, and left.

  “Now what?” Calandra asked nervously as the door was sealed behind us with a hollow thud. Her aura of calm, adopted for the boss’s benefit, was gone without a trace.

  “We sit down and make ourselves comfortable,” I told her, trying to keep my voice light. “And we try to think optimistic thoughts.”

  She snorted. Turning her back on me, she chose one of the twin control seats and began strapping in. I followed suit with the other seat, noting that my suggestion about optimistic thoughts didn’t seem to be working for her.

  Not really surprising. They weren’t working for me, either.

  Chapter 15

  SIX HOURS LATER, WE began our final approach to Spall.

  It had been a quiet trip. Both of us had tried to get some sleep, with varying degrees of success; neither of us had felt much like talking. Calandra, I could tell, was still unhappy with both me and the situation, her worrying underpinned by a low-level anger that wasn’t showing much sign of subsiding.

  I could hardly blame her. Once away from Solitaire, with my adrenaline-fueled tension fading as it became clear we had indeed gotten away, I had started having second thoughts myself. Two people, setting off to search an entire planet—it was so utterly ridiculous I couldn’t believe I had actually considered it a rational scheme. And yet, that was all we had left. Two people against a world, with nothing but faith to go on … and my faith very possibly having to do for both of us.

  He brought out his people like sheep, guiding them like a flock in the desert … I could only hope that there was more than poetic imagery behind the words.

  “Doesn’t look very inviting,” Calandra murmured from beside me.

  I looked at the display she was indicating. “The crew boss said it was mostly desert,” I reminded her.

  “I’ve seen other deserts,” she said shortly. “They didn’t look like this.”

  I pursed my lips, studying the landscape slowly scrolling down the screen. She was right; there was far more variation in color and visual texture than in the handful of deserts I’d seen from space. “Well … desert in this case may just mean that most of the soil isn’t easily arable,” I suggested.

  “Maybe.”

  I shifted my eyes to her. “Worried that the Halloas may be just barely scraping a living for themselves, and therefore not inclined toward helping strangers?” I asked.

  The muscles of her face tightened slightly. She could read others without compunction, but she didn’t much care to have the roles reversed. I felt a flash of annoyance at her double standard; a heartbeat later it belatedly occurred to me that I felt exactly the same way. “The thought had crossed my mind, yes,” she growled. “That, along with the normal pattern of outcast societies.” She glanced at me. “Or did the Cana settlement conveniently leave that one out of your curriculum, too?”

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean,” I said, getting the distinct feeling I wasn’t going to like this one.

  “Really,” she said, her voice heavy with contempt. “Well, it seems that religious groups that go off and establish their own societies to escape persecution almost always wind up being just as bad to their own minorities.”

  “The Watchers didn’t—” I began; then broke off.

  A bitter smile touched her lips. “That’s right,” she agreed, following my unspoken thought. “Aaron Balaam darMaupine’s Bridgeway was heading exactly that direction when he was finally stopped.”

  I clenched my teeth. “You don’t know that it would have become that,” I pointed out. But it was a weak argument, and I knew it—besides which, what was I doing playing advocate for darMaupine in the first place? “I don’t recall learning that in Cana, no,” I added, getting back to the issue at hand. “But I wouldn’t think the Halloas have been here long enough to have forgotten their own problems with intolerance.”

  She shrugged uneasily. “I guess we’ll find out soon enough,” she said, nodding toward the display. “We’re coming down.”

  The whole thing went reasonably smoothly, I suppose, especially considering that the Cricket’s autopilot probably cost less than a hundredth of the one aboard the Bellwether and was operating without benefit of a spaceport tower system besides. A few jerks
and stomach-wrenching jolts—a couple of sudden swerves for no reason I could discern—one final thud and a last-second drive shriek that left my ears ringing, and we were down.

  The drive shut itself off, and in the silence Calandra and I looked at each other. “I don’t care if they execute me tomorrow,” she announced evenly. “I’m not riding one of these things again.”

  I took a deep breath. “That’s not especially funny.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be.” Moving stiffly, she began to unstrap. “Any signs of life out there?”

  I found the control for the outside cameras, got them sweeping. “Um … small dust cloud forming over one of the hills. Probably a vehicle approaching.”

  She craned her neck to look; and right on cue, a pair of cars topped the hill and headed toward us. “Reception committee from the Halloas?” she ventured.

  “Probably. I don’t see anything official-looking about the cars.” I hit my own strap releases. “Come on—let’s get the ship ready for the next leg and then go out and meet them.”

  They were waiting patiently outside their cars as we emerged from the Cricket: two men and a woman. At first glance all three struck me as impressive … and it was several seconds before I realized how remarkable that subconscious conclusion actually was. Standing next to old mul/terrain vehicles, dressed in neat but drab clothing, there was no immediately obvious reason why I should find them anything but perfectly ordinary.

  And yet I did … and a couple of seconds later I realized why. There was something in their faces, in the senses of each of the three, that seemed to radiate peace. Not the artificial and short-lived counterfeit of peace available from bottles and pills, nor even the genuine kind of peace that most people experience only rarely and for similarly brief periods. This was a far deeper and more permanent sort of peace; a peace, moreover, with an unshakable dignity of soul attached to it.

  It was the sort of peace I’d seen occasionally among the Watcher elders of my youth … and nowhere else that I’d ever traveled.

  “Good day to you,” the man in the center said with a smile as Calandra and I approached them. “Welcome to Spall.”

  “Thank you,” I nodded to him. About fifty years old, I estimated—perhaps twice the age of each of his companions—with a neatly trimmed fringebeard and the sort of wrinkling about his eyes that comes of long outdoor work and frequent smiling. The eyes themselves … measuring me with a keenness almost Watcher-like in its intensity. “You must be from the Halloas,” I told him. “An elder, I presume?”

  A slight ripple of distaste touched his companions, but the spokesman didn’t flinch. “I’m a shepherd of the Halo of God, yes,” he said, correcting my terminology. “The term ‘Halloa’ is considered derogatory, by the way.”

  “I’m sorry,” I apologized. “We’d never heard you referred to as anything else.”

  His eyebrow twitched. “Ah. I take it, then, that you haven’t come here to join us?”

  I shook my head. “No, I’m afraid not. We have some rather pressing business on Spall … which we were hoping you might be able to help us with.”

  His sense shaded toward wariness. “What sort of business?” he asked cautiously.

  “Life and death business,” I said bluntly, watching him closely. “If we’re unsuccessful, someone will die.”

  His eyes continued to measure me. “People die all the time,” he said, a hint of challenge in his voice. “And death is, after all, only the passage from this life back to God.”

  “Perhaps,” I acknowledged. “But injustice should not be the ticket to that passage.”

  His eyes flicked to Calandra, returned to me. “I’m Shepherd Denvre Adams,” he said; and with his name came a sense of at least provisional acceptance of us. “Two of my associates from the Shekinah Fellowship: Mari Ray and Danel Pommert.” He gestured to his companions.

  “I’m Gilead Raca Benedar,” I told him, watching carefully for reaction. “This is my friend, Calandra Mara Paquin.”

  There was some reaction, certainly, among the three. But not at the level I would have expected from people on the alert for a pair of fugitive Watchers. Carefully, I let out the breath I’d been holding; apparently the alarm hadn’t yet made it this far.

  “So. Watchers.” Adams nodded as if finding a piece to a puzzle. “I should have guessed right away. The aura of alertness surrounding you is very distinctive.”

  “We find it so ourselves,” I agreed, wondering how much of that had been made up on the spot to impress his companions. “Most people manage to miss it, though. Is there some place where we can talk in private?”

  “The Shekinah settlement is only about fifteen minutes away. We can talk there.” His eyes flicked over my shoulder at the ship. “I take it you could use a ride?”

  “Yes, thank you,” I said. “If you’ll give us a minute, though, we need to get our supplies off. And to set our ship to take off.”

  Beside me, I could sense Calandra’s displeasure at my telling him that. I didn’t much like it myself, but I couldn’t see any way around it. The faster we got the ship headed for the outer system, the less inevitable it would be that the search would zero directly in on us here; and trying to concoct a lie about how the ship had accidentally launched itself could easily lose us any Halo of God support we could hope to get.

  Adams’s eyebrows raised slightly. “Without you aboard?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  I stopped, waiting for the questions. Adams’s eyes flicked to Calandra, to the ship, back to me. “Very well,” he said at last. “We’ll wait and drive you to Shekinah.” His sense suddenly went very solemn indeed. “And there, Mr. Benedar, we will talk.”

  If Shepherd Adams was our first surprise, the Shekinah Fellowship settlement was our second.

  With only a sparse scattering of native plant life across the hills between our landing area and the settlement, I had formed a mental picture of a cluster of rude huts clumped together, its inhabitants struggling to eke a living from rocky fields. Nothing could have been further from the actual truth. Even as I unconsciously braced myself for the drab ugliness ahead, we came over the final hill into a shallow valley … and a virtual explosion of greenery.

  Not just small fields, but also well-tended private gardens and even a grassy parkland where a handful of adults could be seen relaxing and conversing as a group of children played a short distance away. The houses, pre-built sectionals, were nevertheless clean and attractive, their positioning well thought out. “I’m impressed,” I told Adams as we drove down toward it.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Some visitors have thought it a bit extravagant for people who are supposed to be seeking God and not their own material comfort. But it’s been my experience that attractive surroundings usually improve one’s meditative abilities instead of detracting from them.”

  I frowned, and took another look at the group of adults in the park. Sure enough, they weren’t talking together, as I’d first assumed. We were close enough now that I could see their closed eyes, the odd combination of concentration and relaxation on their faces. “Scenery is all good and well,” I commented, gesturing toward them, “but wouldn’t they do better to choose a quieter place?”

  “Probably,” Adams agreed easily. “And we certainly don’t start beginners that way, out in the middle of the park. But the more advanced among us can listen to God anywhere at all.” He waved at the surrounding hills. “You see, Mr. Benedar, we believe Spall to be the actual center of God’s kingdom, with the Cloud a manifestation of His halo. Here we can touch Him more easily than anywhere else in the universe; but our goal is not simply to become modern-day monks.”

  Beside me, Calandra stirred. “You mean the way the Watchers have?”

  Adams shrugged, his sense becoming a bit uncomfortable. “It’s not my place to judge anyone else,” he said evasively. “The Watchers were dealt a terrible blow by the actions of Aaron Balaam darMaupine, and if you must withdraw into yoursel
ves for a time, I can understand that. But if we’re truly to be the light of humanity, none of us can hide like that indefinitely.” He gestured again to the surrounding landscape. “Our goal is to become so attuned to God’s presence here that we’ll be able to go anywhere in the Patri and colonies and still feel His touch. No matter the distance, no matter the distractions.”

  I nodded. “Hence the meditation in the park, amidst the universe’s best shot yet at perpetual motion machines?”

  Adams smiled, a crinkling of his face. “Aggravating though they may be at times, children are still one of our most prized treasures. The Watchers proved that the art of observation is best begun in childhood; we hope that will prove true for the art of meditation, as well.”

  Adams’s house was situated near the center of the settlement: an unpretentious structure, indistinguishable at least externally from the others surrounding it. I wasn’t especially surprised; the sense of the man was clearly not that of someone in the job for the wealth or the prestige.

  He parked the car under a two-sided overhang, and we went inside … and got down to serious business.

  Carefully, Adams poured himself a cup of tea, his third since we’d begun our story. He offered us refills, was turned down, and set the pot back to the side. “I’m sure you realize,” he said, gazing into the swirling liquid in his cup, “the awkward position you put me in.”

  “Yes, sir,” I acknowledged, “and we’re sincerely sorry about that. But we really had no one else to turn to.”

  He raised his eyes to me. “Your very presence here threatens our existence,” he said bluntly. “Harboring fugitives is a serious offense—serious enough that the Solitaran authorities could easily use it as an excuse to disband our fellowships and ban us from Spall entirely.”

  The sense of him was not nearly as strong as the words … “Except that they won’t,” Calandra spoke up before I could. “You’re a religious group, which makes you an embarrassment to them, and the last thing they want is to have you around where visitors to Solitaire might stumble over you. Where could they possibly send you where you’d be less visible than you are now?”