An Exchange of Hostages (6 page)

He was finished with the strained back muscle. Koscuisko let one arm drop over the edge of the rub-table, pillowing his cheek against the flattened back of his other hand — and grinning like an infant with never a care in the world. Except Joslire could feel the base tension in Koscuisko’s body had yet to yield to massage. Koscuisko kept his nerves to himself. All Joslire could tell the Tutor about Koscuisko’s state of mind was what little he could gain from observation and inference. The muscles in Koscuisko’s sturdy shoulders could no longer be persuaded to relax as completely as they had during the first weeks, even allowing for improved muscle tone. Koscuisko was tense; but that was hardly news, not with the practical exercise scheduled for first thing next first-shift. In the morning. There was nothing new there to tell Tutor Chonis.

Working his Student’s feet, Joslire pondered his problem. Bond-involuntaries who wanted to stay out of trouble kept their mouths shut, so as to avoid giving their governors or their Students cause to discipline them. Joslire desperately wanted to stay out of trouble. But part of his job was to keep Tutor Chonis up to date on what was going on in Koscuisko’s head. Bond-involuntaries learned early on that their best protection was to perfect their duty, gaining a measure of immunity from their governors’ strict censorship by maintaining unchallengeably correct thought and conduct. And Tutor Chonis had gone an extra pace for him before.

“With the officer’s permission . . . ”

Koscuisko grunted inquiringly in response, sounding half asleep. A good start, Joslire decided, and was encouraged to go on.

“The First Level exercise is tomorrow, as the officer will remember. In the past other Students have shared comments of one sort or another. It has often seemed to help to put things in perspective.”

How do you feel? What do you feel? What are you thinking? What is on your mind?

“Hmm. Well. I feel that Jurisdiction wodac is not of the best quality, which is not surprising. And that the instructional material is badly in need of a technical update, in places.”

Not precisely what Joslire had in mind, but there was no way in which he could question more directly — not and keep peace with the governor that the Bench had spliced into the pain linkages in his brain. Joslire stepped back half a pace. “If the officer would care to turn onto his back.”

Koscuisko didn’t mind being uncovered. Aznir Dolgorukij didn’t seem to have privacy taboos about masculine nudity, at least not among men of the same age; though from what Joslire had read about Koscuisko’s ethnicity, relative age made all the difference. There was a Jurisdiction Standard for personal modesty, though, as much a part of the common language as the grammar was. Koscuisko would be expected to conform to those standards once he reached
Scylla.
It was up to Joslire to instruct him by example. Joslire laid a clean towel across Koscuisko’s lap and began to address the upper part of Koscuisko’s right knee, where yesterday’s training bruise was just beginning to mellow to a rich gold-and-purple blotch around the joint.

And after a moment Koscuisko spoke again.

“What is the manner in which an Emandisan frees himself from error, if he has sinned? Is there such a need in your birth-culture?”

It didn’t seem to be related to the issue Joslire had raised, but there was no telling. Chonis had commented on Koscuisko’s effective — but sometimes disconcerting — tendency to come at a question from an angle that was itself part of his answer to whatever problem.

He wasn’t eager to answer all the same; such issues weren’t widely discussed among free Emandisan, let alone enslaved ones. Of which latter category he was the only one he knew. He hadn’t wanted to tell Student Pefisct what his crime had been, either, since it wasn’t information he was required to surrender, on demand; but Student Pefisct had gotten it out of him at the last, when his enforced submission had come too late to do him any good. Joslire decided that he couldn’t face the memory of his last attempt at serious reticence. It would be easier to capitulate to Koscuisko’s casually phrased demand.

“If it please the officer, there is only . . . disrespect. Of steel.” He wasn’t sure how to say it and be faithful. It didn’t translate very well; he’d never tried to put it into Standard before. Perhaps he’d been lucky that his other Students hadn’t been curious about his five-knives. Joslire could imagine no worse torment than to be constrained to discuss what Emandisan steel meant to an Emandisan.

Koscuisko didn’t seem to be disturbed at the vagueness of Joslire’s response. Koscuisko stretched, yawning, and folded his wrists behind his head, staring up at the low gray ceiling of the cool room reflectively.

“You make it sound quite simple. Is something the matter, Joslire?”

Yes. He’d been thinking about Student Pefisct. Joslire ducked his head to obscure his confusion, following a line of muscle down the outside edge of Koscuisko’s shin with the hard knuckle of his thumb. “It never is as simple as it sounds. With the officer’s permission.”

“There is more truth than comfort there, however.” Koscuisko did not seem to suspect any hidden thought, apparently content to follow his own stream to the rock. “Where I am at home, there are three great sins, and all others relate to one or more of them in some way. But none are unforgivable except the three most grievous ones.”

What three great sins were those?
Joslire wondered. He had done all he could with Koscuisko’s knee. Moving around to stand at the head of the rub-table, Joslire began to finish on Koscuisko’s shoulders, listening to his Student talk.

“And the first, perhaps the most difficult thing, is that you must confess yourself, or never hope to be forgiven. This is very annoying, Joslire. One would think that if the whole world knew that one had spoken with disrespect about one’s elder brother or one’s uncle that it would be enough to have one’s penance decided and made known to one, and be done with it.”

This was good. This was the sort of thing that he had been hoping for when he had asked the question. There was every reason to expect that Tutor Chonis would be able to explain what Koscuisko had been getting at, when the time came to give Chonis his report.

“But one would be mistaken. There can be no reconciliation without repentance, and there can be no repentance without acknowledgment of fault, and there can be no acknowledgment of fault without individual confession. I wonder how different it can be when all is said and sung, Joslire.”

Maybe it wasn’t all that different at that. The Jurisdiction required punishment before setting the Record to null, and declined to apply any of the agony that could lawfully be invoked to force confession against the penalty to be assessed.

So Student Koscuisko saw a connection there, and seemed to take comfort from it.

Joslire lifted Koscuisko’s head between his two hands to work the neck back to the relaxed range of supple motion that was normal for his Student.

Somehow he could not quite believe that the two parallels were really so simply aligned as that.

###

It’d been harder than mastering any of the technical material, Andrej remembered that very clearly. With the possible exception of some of the more arcane degenerative diseases among category-four hominids, nothing had been as difficult as learning to take a patient history; and he’d been too grateful for his teachers’ praise when he finally began to demonstrate some skill to worry too much about what that struggle had said about him.

All of his life he had asked whichever question he liked, never needing to consider whether the answer would be readily forthcoming — or accurate, when it did come. All of his life, the function of language had been to communicate his desires for the understanding and instruction of others around him. There were exceptions, of course; the language of holy service was humble and petitioning enough. It was also formalized by centuries of devout practice, and no longer really signified.

But in order to take a good and useful medical history from a patient already ill and not in the most conciliatory mood because of it — that required he learn to ask. To submerge any hint of personal frustration beneath a sincere and, yes, humble desire to know. To set the patient at the very center of the Holy Mother’s creation, to listen with every combined power at his disposal, to subordinate everything he was and everything he knew absolutely to whatever unsatisfactory and imperfect responses his patient would condescend to give.

There’d been times when he had despaired of ever attaining the art. There had certainly been times when his teachers had despaired of him. He’d been counseled by the Administration on more than one occasion to consider abandoning his goal in favor of a technical certification that would require no patient contact whatever, and he’d seriously considered doing just that; but he kept on trying. Graduation with full certification from Mayon Surgical College required demonstrated ability to develop a complete and accurate patient history, one-on-one — on an equal, not autocratic, footing with each patient who came under care.

Now Andrej sat in a padded armchair in the middle of the exercise theater, thinking about these things. The theater and the chair that was provided, he’d seen before; if not this precise theater, then others much like it, as Tutor Chonis reviewed paradigmatic exercises with them during their initial study. There was a door to the right through which the prisoner would enter. There was a table at his left, sturdy enough to support the body of an adult of most of the hominid categories, high enough for him to work at without tiring. Only his rhyti stood on that table now; his rhyti, and the Record. They’d add things gradually as they went along — instruments of Inquiry, then Confirmation, finally instruments of Execution, and there would be a side table for the Recorder.

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.