Deadman Switch

by Timothy Zahn

  I grimaced, feeling a curious sadness growing within me. “We all have the potential for deceit,” I sighed. “Even Watchers.”

  He snorted gently. “As Aaron Balaam darMaupine so graphically proved.”

  Aaron Balaam darMaupine. “It’s funny, you know,” I said, the words sounding distant in my ears. “Every Watcher for the past twenty years has had to suffer because of darMaupine—the parents’ sins bringing punishment indeed on the children and grandchildren. His name’s a curse and an insult everywhere in the Patri and colonies—for years I despised the sound of it, and even now I can’t hear it without cringing. And yet, it was that name that gave me the key to what we’ve just done.”

  Kutzko’s forehead furrowed. “I don’t understand.”

  “His humility name. Balaam.” I blinked sudden moisture from my eyes. “You remember the story of Balaam, don’t you?”

  “Sure—he was a prophet sent by someone to curse the Israelites. The one whose donkey talked to him.”

  I nodded. “The one whose donkey revealed what was waiting for him in the road ahead—”

  I broke off as Adams’s body subtly reanimated. “Well?” I asked the thunderhead. “What have you decided?”

  There was no answer; but the dead hands groped for position on the ceiling handholds, turning Adams’s body back toward the helm chair. Visibly steeling himself, Kutzko moved to assist … and a couple of minutes later, the stars vanished and gravity returned.

  I watched Kutzko lean over Adams’s shoulder to study the heading indicators; and even before he spoke, I could tell from his posture what the thunderheads had decided. “We’re heading back to Solitaire,” he announced quietly.

  I closed my eyes. God then opened Balaam’s eyes and he saw the angel of God standing in the road with a drawn sword in his hand; and he bowed his head and threw himself on his face … “I guess,” I murmured, mostly to myself, “even thunderheads know the angel of death when it stands before them.”

  Kutzko looked back over his shoulder. “The Invaders?”

  I shook my head. “Us.”

  Chapter 39

  THE WIND HAD PICKED up over the past half hour, cutting between the Butte City cliffs like frigid stirring spoons intent on whipping up the snow into as many miniature spinstorms as possible. Sitting a few meters up the sloping ridge Calandra and I had climbed so long ago, I listened to the wind whistling past the visor of my insulalls and watched as Lord Kelsey-Ramos gestured Kutzko to remain below and then crunched his way up to meet me. “Lord Kelsey-Ramos,” I nodded as he came within earshot. “This is a surprise—I would have expected you to call.”

  “I’d have expected that, too,” he grunted, sitting down carefully beside me. A few snowflakes landed on his shoulder and quickly melted; for all the extra cost of his expensive insulalls, they weren’t quite as good as my plain Pravilo-issue ones. “But then it occurred to me you’d probably have found the quietest and most private place around, and that I might as well take advantage of that. The encampment still has a lot of madhouse about it.” I nodded. “I take it you have news of my fate?”

  “Actually, I’m more here just to talk,” he shook his head. “Officially, the Pravilo’s still batting your case back and forth between departments; though unofficially, Admiral Yoshida has pretty well conceded that they really don’t have any choice but to turn you loose. Much as he’d love to nail you to a wall somewhere for preempting his strike, he’s smart enough to know that if he brings you up on charges, he’ll have to do the same to Eisenstadt and me.”

  “And both of you have too many friends in high places?”

  He nodded without embarrassment. “That, plus the truism that sailfish attract more attention than guppies. They put us on trial—especially on charges of treason—and the security cover they’ve so carefully woven around Solitaire would be gone within two weeks. The Patri’s not ready for all this to become public knowledge; not yet, anyway.” He made a sound that was half chuckle, half snort. “Besides which, the scheme worked. Awfully hard to argue against success, you know.”

  I grimaced. “So I get off scot-free.”

  Lord Kelsey-Ramos cocked his head to peer at me. “You wanted to go to prison?”

  Quietly, at my sides, I clenched my hands into fists, my eyes drifting to the snow-dusted thunderheads below. Each of them had developed a crisscrossing of thin black lines across their bodies in the past few days—a seasonal occurrence, I’d been told, that had to do with their hormonal response to cold weather. For a moment I watched the subtle changes in the tall white shapes as the souls within them flitted back and forth, and wondered that I’d ever seen them as nothing more than plants. “Have the thunderheads accepted the situation yet?” I asked.

  Lord Kelsey-Ramos threw me another look, and I could sense the underlying concern there. “Like the Pravilo, they don’t have much choice,” he said. “As you so elegantly established, their lives are pretty well entwined with both ours and the Invaders’ at the moment. Even if that triangle is no longer exactly equilateral,” he added.

  The doubt in his voice was impossible to miss. “I gather the commission still isn’t convinced of that last point?”

  He sighed, the blast of warm air momentarily fogging a spot on his visor. “Afraid not,” he conceded. “For that matter, I’m not entirely convinced myself. I don’t argue your reasoning, but I also see no guarantee that the Invaders will follow the logic the same way we do.”

  “They were logical enough to understand the implications of a rocheoid that kept appearing and disappearing from in front of them,” I reminded him.

  “It was hardly an implication they could miss,” he returned dryly. “Especially with you broadcasting the whole time on pseudograv-generator radio frequencies. Even the most fanatical admiral would think twice before taking on a defense force whose Mjollnir drive worked where his wouldn’t.”

  I nodded. “The point remains that they know we could have killed them all—or even just destroyed a couple of ships as a demonstration—but that we deliberately avoided doing so.”

  “True enough,” he shrugged. “On the other hand, though, we did make them abort a campaign that they’ve already invested nearly a century in. That could put a considerable damper on whatever gratitude they’re feeling toward us.”

  “I suppose that’s possible,” I admitted. “Still, everything that they’ve done indicates beings who take a long-term view of things. I really think that our balance sheet with them will work out all right when we’re finally able to talk with them.”

  “Perhaps. Not much we can do at the moment but hope you’re right about that, too.” He shook his head. “That was still an awful chance you took out there, Gilead.”

  I looked down the slope to where Kutzko was standing his usual casual-looking guard. “I know. You’ll remember, sir, that I tried to keep it down to just Shepherd Adams and me.”

  He nodded. “Which means that you knew right from the start that the thunderheads might leave you out there to die.”

  The question in his voice was unobtrusive but obvious. “I deliberately glossed over that point during the debriefing, sir,” I told him. “Our relationship with the thunderheads is strained enough; I didn’t want to add to that tension by explaining why they were so angry with me.”

  “Because you’d lied to them?”

  I shook my head. “Because they had an alternative scheme in mind. One which depended on them making sure I didn’t contact the Invaders.”

  He frowned. “But you’d already proved to them that the Invaders had to live.”

  “No, sir,” I told him, some of the bitterness in my soul seeping out into my voice. “All I’d proved was that some of them had to live.”

  For a long moment he was silent … and then he swore, quietly. “You’re right,” he said, his voice grim. “Absolutely right. And all they really had to do was pretend to cooperate with us; guide all the rocheoids out there, right on schedule … and then allow one of t
hem to miss its target.”

  I nodded, the image sending a shiver up my back. “And there wouldn’t have been a single thing we could have done about it afterwards. As long as any of the Invaders were alive we’d still have had to leave the Cloud in place—otherwise the survivors would escape home on Mjollnir drive with the news of what had happened.”

  “And before we knew it we’d have had a full-scale war on our hands.” Lord Kelsey-Ramos swore again, viciously this time. “A war we ourselves would have effectively started.”

  His anger was like an almost physical wave of heat. “I’d appreciate it, sir, if you’d keep all this to yourself,” I said. “There’s no proof, after all, that that’s really what they had in mind.”

  He sent me a hard-edged look. “Besides which, you don’t believe in emotions like anger and hatred?” he bit out. “Even honest ones?”

  If your enemy is hungry, give him something to eat … “We still have to work with them,” I reminded him quietly. “Unless you’re prepared to abandon Solitaire. Try to remember, too, that we still don’t know what the quarrel is between the thunderheads and the Invaders … or what the consequences would have been for the thunderheads if they’d lost.”

  Slowly, almost reluctantly, the anger faded from his sense. Not all of it, but enough. “Well …” he said at last, “I don’t suppose any single example of thunderhead deceit would make the Patri any less vigilant in their dealings with them. Besides, it may not hurt to have something we can hold over their heads again.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Don’t thank me,” he snorted. “I’m considering it an extremely temporary secret, one I expect I’ll be using against them somewhere along the line.” Moving carefully on the slippery rock, he got to his feet. “Anyway; break time’s over. I’d better get back before some blazing fire-eater talks Yoshida into bringing you up on charges and never mind the consequences. You want a lift back to the encampment?”

  “With your permission, sir,” I said, avoiding his eyes, “I think I’ll stay here a little longer.”

  For a second he didn’t move, and I didn’t have to see his face to know he was frowning down at me. “If you’d like,” he said, his voice overly casual. “I’ll keep you advised of developments.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I said again. “I appreciate all you’re doing.”

  “No problem,” he grunted. “All I want is to clear up all the loose ends and get back to Portslava. Preferably without having to leave my Watcher behind.”

  Nodding, he turned and made his way down the ridge. At the bottom he paused and conferred briefly with Kutzko. A moment later he was walking back across the Butte City toward where he’d left the car, and Kutzko was heading up toward me. “Aren’t you derelicting your duty or some such?” I asked as he approached. “Letting him go off by himself that way?”

  “Daiv Ifversn’s waiting in the ear,” he said equably, sitting down where his employer had been a minute earlier. “Besides, he ordered me up here—thought I might want to talk to you.”

  “I had the impression that coming up here was your idea,” I told him mildly.

  He shrugged, unconcerned at my once again being able to read straight through him. “Well, he concurred with it, anyway,” he said easily, glancing around at the sea of thunderheads below. “Nice view. You just waiting around to see if Ninevah gets destroyed?”

  I blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “The story of Jonah,” he amplified. “Prophet told to preach doom to Ninevah, ran off and got swallowed by a fish, then did as he’d been told and got mad when the city was let off the hook.”

  “I remember the story, thank you,” I said. “I hardly think it applies here—if you’ll recall, I’m the one who was ready to risk his life so that the thunderheads wouldn’t be destroyed.”

  “That wasn’t what I was referring to, exactly,” he said. “I was thinking more about the part that goes, ‘Next, when the sun rose, God ordained that there should be a scorching east wind; the sun beat down so hard on Jonah’s head that he was overcome and begged for death, saying, I might as well be dead as go on living.’ Sound like anyone you know?”

  “I see you’ve been reacquainting yourself with your personal heritage,” I commented sourly.

  “A little,” he nodded. “So you going to loosen up and tell me why you’re sitting out here hoping the thunderheads will decide to blaze you?”

  “That’s not why I’m here,” I growled. “Anyway … whatever they think of me, if they were going to do something like that they would have done it days ago.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, entirely too knowingly. “So the thought had crossed your mind.” His sense softened. “Because of Calandra?”

  My stomach tightened into a knot. “Not really,” I told him. “I see you know all about it.”

  “Most of it,” he admitted, his own discomfort deepening a little. “I helped Lord Kelsey-Ramos sift through the transcripts of her first trial. Look … it still wasn’t murder, you know—once she’d fingered the saboteur and gotten his bomb away from him, tossing it out a window was probably the only way she could think of to get it out of the building. Just because her throw didn’t make it all the way across the street doesn’t change that.”

  “She said she was innocent,” I told him. “No mention of extenuating circumstances, no niceties of distinction between manslaughter and murder. Innocent.”

  Kutzko took a deep breath. “Let me tell you something, Gilead. Two things, really. One: when she told you all that, she thought she’d be dead within two weeks. That would have been the end of it … except that she’d have had a friend for those last few days.” He shrugged. “She didn’t exactly expect you to jump on a white horse and go charging off into the middle of it like you did.”

  There was authority in his words; in his words, and in the way he said them. Not speculation, but certain knowledge. “I’m glad to see she was willing to talk to someone before leaving for Outbound.”

  “You blame her for not wanting to face you?” he asked pointedly. “Especially feeling the way you are right now?”

  “Do you blame me for wanting honesty instead of lies?” I countered.

  He cocked an eyebrow. “Oh, is that how it goes? All right, then, here’s some honesty for you. One, she thought she’d be dead in two weeks; and, two, you wanted to believe she didn’t do it.”

  “If you mean I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt—”

  “Oh, come off it,” he snapped. “I was there, remember? Even I could see how much it bothered you to think that a Watcher could have fallen off the golden ladder—and if I could see it, she sure as blazing could, too. All she did was tell you what you wanted to hear.”

  I sighed, the flash of anger fading into heartache. What I wanted to hear. After all of Aikman’s hatred and paranoia—after all the Patri’s suspicions and fears—it turned out that I was just as capable of prejudice and willing self-blindness as anyone else. Somehow, down deep, I suppose I’d wanted to believe that as Watchers she and I were somehow different from the rest of humanity—I’d been raised, in fact, to believe that, and it was one of the few solid handholds I’d always been able to hold onto in Lord Kelsey-Ramos’s soul-numbing world.

  Only now I knew better. Just one more example of willing self-blindness.

  “It’s not just Calandra,” I told Kutzko, shaking my head. “It’s the way that this …” I waved a hand helplessly, trying to find the right words. “Well, the way that nothing has worked out the way it should have.”

  He gave me an odd look. “We got contact with an alien race, we didn’t get into a war, and Calandra’s going to get a new trial. How should it have worked out?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “So explain it to me.”

  I took a deep breath. “I started this whole thing, Mikha. I lied and stole and betrayed people’s trust right and left—I shredded half of my ethical standards, first for Calandra and then for the Inva
ders.”

  “And, what, you want more of the credit?”

  “You’re missing the point,” I said bitterly. “Lord Kelsey-Ramos and Dr. Eisenstadt are up to their chins in trouble with the Pravilo, the Halo of God has been pretty well destroyed as a religious community, Shepherd Adams died out there, for heaven’s sake … and I’m not even going to get a slap on the hand.” Tears rose to my eyes; angrily, I blinked them back. “In every case, someone else has had to pay for my actions.”

  I expected a quick and possibly glib reply. I got, instead, a long silence. “You know,” Kutzko said at last, his voice unusually reflective, “my parents used to talk like that. Used to say that we were here in life to suffer. Oh, not in those words—they talked about it as building character and patience and stuff like that. But that’s what it all came down to in the end: that suffering was how you proved you were doing what you were supposed to.” He nodded toward the thunderheads. “Now, the way I like to look at things is to count up what got accomplished and then compare it to whatever extra it cost. And I’ll tell you right now, Gilead, that except for Adams, you accomplished a blazing lot for practically nothing.”

  I glared at him. “You don’t consider Lord Kelsey-Ramos and the Halo of God worth all that much, do you?”

  “I said whatever extra it cost,” he reminded me with strained patience. “You know full well that Lord Kelsey-Ramos and Eisenstadt are too important for any of this to stick to them; and if you weren’t so bent on feeling sorry for yourself, you’d admit you didn’t do anything to the Halloas the thunderheads wouldn’t have done by themselves in a few months. They had to make contact with us pretty blazing soon if they wanted us to tackle the Invaders for them—they were probably waiting until we’d just have enough time to do the job but not enough to stop and think about it.”