How Dark the World Becomes (13 page)

*   *   *

Mostly what we did on the shuttle was walk around the wheel, explore its different levels, and work out expediency plans. We poked around in closets and maintenance access bays, looking for places where a kid could hide from a grown-up, and we gave the places numbers. I learned the numbers, and a few other words, too, in aGavoosh, so if I needed to, I could tell Tweezaa where to hide. 

My only bad scare with the kids came our fourth day out, when Barraki went missing one afternoon. We were all back in the cabin, and he must have slipped out when nobody was looking. I got the LeMatt automatic out and showed Marfoglia how to use it—how to put the safety on and off, how to reload, and had her dry fire it to see what the trigger pull was like. Then I told Marfoglia not to let Tweezaa out of her sight until I got back, strapped on the Hawker, and went looking for Barraki.

It didn’t take long to find him; he hadn’t really been trying to sneak around or hide his tracks. He was all the way down on the observation deck, looking out the big rear ports at Prime. It seemed to spin slowly around as the wheel turned. It wasn’t much of a sun, this far out, but it was bigger than anything else in the sky. 

I should have kicked his ass, but he was crying, and I just sat down next to him. 

Yes, Varoki cry . . . sort of. No tears, but repetitive sobbing a lot like us. Most animals born live probably do something similar to get the breathing started, and the really smart species remember it and use it as a lament. Coming into this world is not for the faint of heart.

I figured he was crying because of his father being dead, but I was only half right. He looked over at me and then looked down and away. 

“Why do you not hate me?” he demanded, his voice quivering.

“Huh?”
I asked. 

Normally I’m a little more articulate than that, but the question caught me flat-footed
. Hate him?
 

“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked him. “Why would I hate you?”

“What we did to you. On Peezgtaan,” he said.

“Did I miss something back there? I don’t remember you doing anything that would even irritate me, let alone make me hate you.”

“Not to you. I mean, to Humans. What my family did to your people on Peezgtaan. Why do you not hate me for that?”

He was serious, and he wanted a serious answer, not just some
hey, kid, don’t worry about it
bullshit.

“Well, I look at it this way, sport,” I said finally. “If I was going to hate someone for what was done forty years ago, it’d be someone a lot older than you.”

He looked at me, and I could tell it wasn’t enough of an answer for him. I held my open left hand out, palm facing him, fingers splayed. 

“Here, spread your hand like this and match it up against mine,” I told him. He did, and even though his hand was smaller in most respects, his fingers were longer. The hands were functionally the same—five digits, one of which was an opposable thumb—but the proportions were different, and the skin even more so. 

“You got longer fingers than I do,” I told him. “You want me to hate you for that?”

He frowned and shook his head. 

“No, that would be stupid, wouldn’t it?” I said. “Because you don’t have any control over how long your fingers are. Well, connect the dots, Barraki.”

“But it is not fair what happened,” he insisted.

“No argument there, pal. It just wasn’t on your watch.”

“Someday it will be my watch. What then?” he asked.

“Well, then we’ll see.” 

He looked out at the stars for a while before speaking again.

“My father . . . was very sad, since my mother died.”

“How long ago was that?” I asked. I hadn’t known his mother was dead, but I’d noticed she wasn’t in the picture.

“Almost four years. He did a lot of things . . . I think because he was so sad. Then a year ago, he got better. He said there was a poison in our blood, but he was going to cure it. He worked hard on it. He had never worked before, but this last year he worked very hard. And he was happy. He was almost done. That is why we came to Peezgtaan, to finish the work.”

“What was here? Some kind of medicine?” I asked. I wasn’t really sure what that “poison in the blood” stuff meant. Barraki shook his head.

“No medicine. Just councilors—lawyer I think is the word. They were for the . . . mmm . . . I think the word is
faiths
?” 

Faiths? That sounded religious, but no religion I know of uses lawyers to make the mumbo jumbo work. I shrugged and shook my head.

“They were for the money, to hold it,” he said.

“
Trusts!
” I said. “Trust funds?” 

He nodded. “Yes, that is the word.”

“Your father was setting up some charitable trusts on Peezgtaan? Maybe to help poor people?”

It made sense. Rich playboy loses rich wife, goes into mourning, wonders about the meaning of life, decides to spend the rest of his life “doing good,” or at least until he gets bored and decides that big-game hunting would be better. Not nice to think that of the dead, I know, but I’ve seen a lot of rich people sling hash in St. Mike’s soup kitchen, and never for very long. 

But Barraki was shaking his head.

“No, the trusts were for Tweezaa and me. He said they would take care of our education, and give us some money for a while, but then we would have to work, like everyone else.”

Work? 

The e-Traaks? One of the ten richest families in the
Cottohazz
?
Work?

“Um . . . So, like, what was he doing with the family fortune?”

“He was giving it to the Humans on Peezgtaan, to all of them. No, not giving. There was a different word . . .
entailing
? Do you know that word?”

“Sort of,” I answered, but I still wasn’t clear on this whole giving-away-the-fortune concept. “What do you mean by ‘it’? As in entailing
it
?”

He looked at me, unsure what I was asking. 

“Everything,” he answered. “All of the family holdings. Well, there are private estates which are already entailed to others—he had no control over them. But the ownership in all the different companies, like this one—Simki-Traak. I think we own a lot of it, yes? I am not sure. But he had a plan; he told me all about it.” 

Barraki turned to face me now, and he was getting excited. 

“There would be a big company, and it would own all of the other things, and every Human living on Peezgtaan today would have one share—just one share—and that’s all the shares there would be. But you could never sell your share—that is what I think
entailed
meant. When you died, your share was gone, but all of your children would have a share of their own, and no one person could ever own more than one share. There were other things . . . I forget. But that was the main thing. He said that he had set it up so that only Peezgtaan Humans could ever own it. Ever.”

He stopped then, and his enthusiasm faded. 

“Then they killed him,” he said. 

What Barraki was talking about—what his dad had dreamed up—was revolutionary stuff. It would have shaken the Varoki establishment to its foundation, that’s for sure, which was okay, I guess. But more importantly—at least to me—it would have given everyone on Peezgtaan a chance. No overnight millionaires—just a decent stake in the world around them. That was something to think about, wasn’t it?

I put my arm around Barraki’s shoulder. No wonder somebody killed his dad. And no wonder they wanted to kill him and his sister, too—the poison was gone from their blood.

*   *   *

A lot of my memories concerning the shuttle ride are missing in action, for reasons you’ll understand later. The parts that remain are not necessarily the most important parts. Well, one of them is, but the other one is just a lunch, of all things—lunch with the Hlontaas. 

I remember I didn’t like how often Hlontaa shared meals with us, but that was because I didn’t like the guy, not for any professional reason. I could have kept him away and cited security—used the power of the job to get something I wanted—but once you start down that road, it gets easier and easier to keep going, and pretty soon you’re the manager of some city, screwing everyone who elected you just so you can line the pockets of your pals, who only pretend to like you anyway because you own the trough. No thanks. 

So there we were. The tables were eight-tops, so it was the four of us, plus Hlontaa and Madame Hlontaa, and another Varoki couple, husband and wife, both councilors—lawyers—criminal prosecutors, as it turns out, from Akaampta. They had been on Peezgtaan as consultants, helping the Munies set up a new organized-crime task force.

That was kind of creepy. 

Hlontaa was explaining one of his theories—this one about criminal justice—to the table in general, but mostly to the two prosecutors from Akaampta. He’d figured out that the reason there was so much Human crime on the jointly occupied worlds was that Humans placed this lower value on their lives—a recurring theme with him—and so normal deterrence didn’t work. You needed harsher penalties for the same crime with Humans, just to get the same deterrent effect. He thought the death penalty was appropriate for a wide range of crimes—at least for Human offenders. Not because he didn’t like Humans—he actually liked them very much, just ask him. But because he liked them, he understood them better than most Varoki, and once you understood them, you saw that they needed a firmer hand, for their own good. 

I don’t know much xeno-psychology, because I haven’t had to interact with all the different races. I know that the Katami are very gregarious, more so than us. The Trand are as well, which is why it was so odd to see just one of them on the ship, and probably why he looked so unhappy. I don’t know what’s going on with the Kuran, and I don’t particularly care. The two races of the
Cottohazz
I’ve bumped up against most are the Varoki and the Zaschaan, and psychologically, they’re not that different from us. The Zaschaan tend to be cranky, but I know plenty of cranky Humans, too. Maybe the Zaschaan just don’t bother to cover it up with a phony smile. The Varoki are a lot like us, and I think that, secretly, they’d like to be even more like us, which is odd, considering we’re the ones inside the apple barrel.

I mention all of this by way of explanation as to why the two Varoki prosecutors sort of studied their menus and blushed while Hlontaa was laying all this out, and when Varoki blush, with that iridescence skin tint, you can really see it. Barraki was blushing, too, but not the Dark Princess. I figured she had more sense than to be embarrassed by what some other fool was saying.
She
wasn’t saying it, after all.

“Capital punishment is barbaric,” I said while he was catching his breath. The whole table looked at me, and Marfoglia and Barraki looked particularly surprised. Barraki translated for Tweezaa, and she nodded and went back to looking around the club deck. 

Hlontaa smiled condescendingly. “And yet so many Human nations use it,” he said, as if that was some killer argument.

“Lots of Humans fart at the dinner table,” I answered. “Doesn’t mean I have to.”

“Do you mean that in your . . . line of work,” he said with obvious distaste, “you’ve never killed anyone?”

Marfoglia and Barraki got real interested in their own menus right about then.

“Yeah, I’ve killed people. It’s not the same thing.” 

“No,” he said sarcastically. “It never is.”

I should probably mention that my confession that I’d killed someone didn’t elicit much surprise from the two prosecutors, nor was it a damaging admission. Back in those days, the frontier planets were a bit like the old American wild west. Thug, private security specialist, and lawman were job titles, not distinct classes of people. There was a lot of the “It takes one to catch one” philosophy going around, so not only did people not look too closely at the criminal past of security specialists, there was a tacit assumption—even an expectation—that they had been on the wrong side of the law at one time or another, at least for Humans. Varoki were supposed to all be good little boys and girls.

“Just for the sake of argument,” he said, “how is it different?”

“You shouldn’t kill people for points,” I answered.

“Points?” he repeated. “You mean like in a game?” 

I looked up at him.

“No. Like in an argument. It’s wrong to kill people to make a point. People are more important than points.”

“But most important points people try to make are
about
people,” he said.

“My point exactly,” I answered, and went back to the menu. The chicken
katsu
was sounding pretty good, but there was this Paleo Special—flame roasted on a spit and guaranteed to have the authentic flavor of prehistoric Terran mastodon. It was soy protein, of course, but it was based on the flavor of some genetically reconstructed meat. 

“That does not even make sense,” he said.

“Huh?” I asked, my mind still on genetically reconstructed mastodon meat.

“Capital punishment is not about making a point,” he said.

“
All
punishment is about making a point,” I answered. “Don’t do that, or
this
will happen to you.”

“Deterrence, yes. But there is retribution, also.” 

“Revenge. Sure. But that’s just a different point, one you make to yourself. You chopped my hand off, but I got even, so there. But since that doesn’t get you back your hand, all you’ve done is make a point.”

“And I suppose you’ve never killed someone to make a point—or to get even?” he demanded.

I sat and thought about that for a while, mentally going through the list. After about half a minute he started to look uncomfortable.

“Well?”

“I’m thinking,” I answered. I didn’t want to lie.

“How many people have you killed?” Marfoglia asked quietly, speaking for the first time, her brow wrinkled in concern. I looked at her. Not that it was any of her business . . . well, I guess it was, come to think of it. Her life was pretty much in my hands, so I suppose she had a right to know how bloody those hands were.

“Eleven that I’m sure of,” I answered, and it was interesting to see four pairs of adult Varoki ears fold up and back in perfect unison, like a ballet.