An Exchange of Hostages (7 page)

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 the 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 functional, 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.

“Confession is a deadly serious legal action. And the penance voluntarily accepted by the transgressor is serious, too, Koscuisko, remember that.” In order to provide the correct exemplary deterrent. “It isn’t the sort of risk you ever took. That is, if you’re religious.”

Confession and penance. Koscuisko had nerved himself up to his ordeal by drawing the analogy himself. Koscuisko had been thoroughly scolded now, and Noycannir put on notice as to what sort of reception her first stumble would earn her. Perhaps one final pious admonition . . .

“After all, whatever penance you might have risked could hardly be said to equate with the just outrage of the Judicial Bench.”

Koscuisko stared him in the face once more, and this time his gaze was frank and honest — no trace of resentment or rebellion.

“You never had to confess to Uncle Radu after an anniversary party,” Koscuisko said.

Humor.

Koscuisko’s ability to find humor in the current situation only indicated that there would be more problems yet down the time-stream.

“Very well. We will speak no more about it.” But the Administration would watch and wait, record, and meditate.

“As you will have noted, the next practical exercise is scheduled for five days from now. We will be defining the Second Level of the Preliminary Levels. Please direct your attention to your screens.”

Humor and a sense of proportion were both unpredictable traits, not subject to reliable manipulation. Koscuisko’s unpredictability had to be explored, detailed, and controlled.

Because an unpredictable Inquisitor with a sense of the ridiculous and an imperfectly submerged sense of proportion was potentially more disruptive of the Judicial order than even the Writ in Noycannir’s ignorant hand could be.

###

Standing in the lavatory, Andrej stared at himself in the reflector. He could hear Joslire in the outer room; it was a familiar set of sounds, easily ignored. His face did not much please Andrej this morning. It was too pale; and it had always seemed to him that some proportion or other had been neglected when the issue of his likeness had been controverted among his genes in utero. To be fair, his pallor was perhaps his own fault. He had taken a good deal of wodac with his third-meal, yet again, last night.

Still, a man needed more emphatic a nose if he were to go through life with such wide flat cheekbones — or at least eyebrows with dash and flair, or eyes that made some sort of an impact to draw a person’s attention away from the crude materiality of his skull. Too much cheekbone and too deep a jaw; there was no help there. A plank of wood with a chip of nothing for his eyes, which were of no particular color; a splinter for a nose; and his mouth would never carry a debate against his cheek — there was too much distance there from ear to front. No color, no drama; he might as well not have a face at all. There was paint, of course, but not even the best of that had made his brother Iosev any less unpleasant to look at, so there was no help to be found in that direction.

He was only trying to put off the morning, and he knew it. Sighing to himself at his own transparent motive, Andrej dried his damp face briskly with the towel and combed his hair back from his face with the fingers of his left hand. His brother Mikhel had all the face in the family, and all of the beard as well. Mikhel, and perhaps Nikolij, too. But, then, Nikolij was such an elf-faced child. There was hope for Nikolij. And even Lo — as blond and as bland of face and feature as Andrej himself — Lo had some of Meeka’s height. There was no justice in the world. Where was the benefit of being the eldest of his father’s sons if all he could hope to inherit was all of the land, and all of the property, and all of the authority, and all of the estate?

Joslire would be getting nervous, and it wasn’t fair of him to make Joslire wait when none of it was Joslire’s fault. Andrej set his mind to silence, stubbornly determined to not think of the morning’s work until he was well into it.

Successfully distracted by the simple pleasures of the fast-meal table, Andrej found himself sitting in the Student Interrogator’s chair once more without a very clear idea as to how he had got there. It wasn’t how he’d come back to this room that needed his attention, though. Not really. It was how he was to get out of it again that posed the more immediate problem. The Second Level of the Question — and there was every chance that Tutor Chonis would take any deviation from form as a personal insult, after his reaction to the First Level — would be more difficult.

The First Level had been Inquiry pure and simple. The Second was Supported Inquiry — a little pressure was to be brought to bear. That was what Fleet called it, Supported Inquiry. Mayon would have called it patient abuse, and summarily stripped any Student who so much as threatened a patient with physical violence of any chance for patient contact ever again in any Bench-certified facility — which also meant, realistically speaking, losing any chance of graduating with the prestigious Mayon certifications. But these weren’t patients in any usual sense of the word, so what did it matter?

Except that in Andrej’s home dialect, the word for the Standard “patient,” someone seeking medical care, came from the same root as the verb that signified suffering, or to bear physical pain. Andrej did not care to mull over the double meaning. It was too unfortunately apt for his comfort.

He wouldn’t have thought that he would mind simply hitting people so much, not really, and that was all today’s exercise should entail — hitting someone. Hitting them frequently, perhaps, and the fact that they were not to be permitted to hit back was certainly distasteful, but they need suffer no permanent ill effect from the blows. He certainly hadn’t come all the way through his medical training without ever hitting anybody. There was a difference, of course, when it was strictly after class hours, outside the patient environment, usually in a tavern of some sort, and never without either having been hit or being immediately hit back. He had done his share of recreational brawling, with a little thin-blade dueling thrown in. Violent physical exercise could be a great reliever of stress, and as far as Andrej could remember, he’d enjoyed it — not the residual bruises, no, but the energy surge had been a tremendous mood enhancer.

Though conservative of traditional Aznir ways, in many respects Andrej’s father was a progressive man who didn’t think children or servants should ever be beaten for their misdeeds, and who refused to tolerate any such behavior within his Household. Therefore it had come to pass that Andrej had never struck anybody in his life who had not been in a position to retaliate, without hesitation or restriction. Andrej supposed it was a handicap, of sorts.

He heard the signal at the prisoner’s door. Well, soonest started was soonest sung. “Step through.” Still, there was something he’d wanted to remember. Something his teachers on Mayon had said about hurting people. What had it been? “State your identification, and the crime of which you have been accused.”

This prisoner was a Bigelblu, his legs almost as long as Andrej was tall. He sauntered into the room insolently before sinking into cross-legged repose in front of Andrej where he sat.

“You c’n call me Cari.” He had a deep voice, the prisoner had. Nearly as deep as Meeka’s singing voice, which was so low that the saint’s-windows shook in sympathetic vibration when he sang “Holy Mother.” “I dunno, Soyan, s’a mystery to me.”