Unseen Demons

Copyright © 2017 by Adam-Troy Castro
All rights reserved.

Originally published in 2002 in Analog Science Fiction and Fact.

Published as an ebook in 2017 by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

Cover design by Jack Fisk

ISBN: 978-1-625672-96-4

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

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This one’s for Joey and Debbie Green

Preface

So this is it. The story that introduced my series character Andrea Cort and (though it took a while to happen), altered the direction of my career; the story three-quarters of a way to a novel length that demonstrated to me and to others that I might conceivably pull off this novel trick even if the characters weren’t pre-existing.

As the first composed Andrea Cort story, this one does all the heavy lifting. It introduces the character, provides you with the central tragedy of her life and the mystery that will drive the novels, in a few short years. It surrounds her with most of the important alien races who will complicate her life in the years to come, and provides her with her mission. It is an unusual story for her in that is not a crime story in science-fictional clothing, but otherwise it establishes that this is not a woman one should mess with.

Close readers will note that it contradicts some facts of Andrea Cort’s life – notably, the reaction of the Bocaians to her infamy – as laid down in the novels and novellas to come, but she is embryonic here, and still taking form. The stories that take place earlier in her life incorporate innovations I came up with later. I could go through the MS and correct the points of disagreement, but here choose not to. I might as well leave the archeological signs, allowing them to function as the literary equivalent of Spock’s uncharacteristic smile in the first STAR TREK pilot, “The Cage.” He changed as further stories cemented his character in place. So will Andrea.

In any event, this story takes place approximately one year before her novel debut in Emissaries From The Dead. As far as I am concerned, no subsequent stories will be slipped into continuity between this one and that one. This is the one that starts to change everything for her.

Enjoy.

1

The other monster sat at the edge of his cot, staring at the floor of his immaculate white cell. He held his hands clasped between his knees in a manner that might have signified despair in another prisoner, but which in his case seemed to demonstrate an obscene lack of concern instead. He showed no fear, no guilt, no uncertainty. He did seem bored, but not like he was oppressed by that boredom; rather, like he considered his confinement a welcome vacation from his more pressing responsibilities.

The other monster was a pleasant-looking young man, of average height and unremarkable build. He had pale blue eyes, sandy brown hair and a corn-fed complexion. There was nothing about him that suggested hidden depths, of depravity or anything else. There was instead an undeveloped element of charm in his half-smile, and in the way he hummed currently popular love songs as he waited for his hour of judgement.

Andrea Cort stood at the entranceway of a meeting room elsewhere in the Embassy compound, studying the other monster’s projected image. Several times life-size, it dominated the space above the long conference table, haunting the forms of two dozen desperately unhappy indentured diplomats who had been haunted by the deeds of the real man for months now.They had reserved a chair for Cort at that table, but she remained the only person in the room still standing. It had been her way, since early in life; as long as there was any way to avoid it, she tried not to sit in the presence of other people. Or eat. Or sleep.

As a monster herself, she was acutely aware that she had more in common with this other monster than she did with them.

The man in the projected image shook his head, as if enjoying Cort’s self-consciousness.

Her brown eyes narrowed to slits. “This a real-time image?”

“Linked to his cell,” one of the diplomats said.

They all avoided looking at the other monster’s image themselves, as if afraid his madness might prove infectious. They also avoided looking at Cort, though whether that was because they’d learned of her own monstrousness, or because they feared catching some of the blame for this particular fiasco, was hard to say.

She hated having to read them; she wanted to be the enigma herself. She wanted them to see her as a whip-lean bureaucrat in black, professional with every breath, human only on occasion and then only by oversight. She wanted them to worry themselves into knots wondering what she was going to do. To this end, she kept her comportment severe. She wore sharp but functional blackclothing; she kept her hair buzz-cropped but for a single band that dangled at shoulder-length; she kept her expression blank and her voice distant, eschewing any attempt at charm. If this assignment went like all her others, the locals would soon call her bitch behind her back. That was, of course, exactly the way she needed it: not just on the job but everywhere else.

She gnawed the tip of her thumb, taking herself past the threshold of pain. “Does he know you’re monitoring him?”

“Yes.”

“Does he know we’re watching right now?”

“We monitor him constantly. If you mean, does he know the Advocate ís getting her first look at him right now, the answer’s no.”

Ambassador Lowrey himself, a dull career man whose true level of expertise was probably inversely proportional to his self-importance, muttered: “Not that he gives a damn.”

“You have been holding him in almost complete isolation for six months, Hom.Sap Mercantile,” Cort pointed out. I would have been surprised if a certain amount of apathy hadn’t set in by now.”

“But look at him. That’s not apathy — that’s not giving a damn.”

She conceded the point with a nod. “What was he like before his arrest?”

The indentured diplomats around the table glanced at each other, silently negotiating the appointment of a spokesperson. A slender young woman in her early twenties provided the officially sanctioned shrug. “Polite. Well-behaved. Friendly.”

“Dull,” another of the diplomats said.

That’s it,” the young woman said. “Dull. Not the kind of guy you get close to.”

“No real personality at all,” said another.

Behind that remark was the unspoken thought: Like You.

She appreciated that.

Ambassador Lowrey said: “I’ve heard his guards say he’s put on a little attitude since.”

“What kind of attitude?” Cort asked.

“The kind that comes from spending six months in a cell, waiting for the Advocate to arrive from New London.”

New London was a wheelworld complex in Hom.Sap space, the home of billions, which happened to house many human communities and the central offices of the Confederacy Dip Corps. An austere apartment in the administrative complex was as close as Cort had ever permitted herself to having a permanent home.

She clicked her thumbnail against her teeth. “He didn’t seem upset when he was caught?”

“No,” the young woman said, “He was smiling, just like that.”

There was a chorus of general agreement, and Cort said: “Is it possible he doesn’t comprehend what he did? There’s still room in the Protocols for insanity exemptions.”

“We thought of that while you were still enroute,” said Roman Whalekiller.Whalekiller, her official liaison here on Catarkhus, was despite his fierce-sounding name an innocuous, round-shouldered stuffed animal of a man whose bright round face did not easily accommodate expressions of moral revulsion. His dislike of the other monster was so extreme that he managed it anyway. Aware of Cort’s appraisal, he rubbed the back of his neck, sharing with her the degree of his aggravation. “We even promised him his choice of treatment facilities if he just helped us support the claim. But he wouldn’t go for it. He said he knew exactly what he was doing, and would do it again in a heartbeat.”

“Cocky little bastard is right, then,” Cort said.

“And why not? He knows nothing’s going to happen to him. —Frankly, Counsellor, I think he considers this situation he’s put us in half the fun.”

Cort, who suspected the same thing, worried her thumb a little bit more. “You think that might have been the point? Embarrassing us in front of all the alien delegations?”

“That occurred to me, too; it wouldn’t be the first time. But the slug doesn’t have a political bone in his body. He’s just having a good time watching us run around in circles trying to clean up the mess he made.”

To Whalekiller, who at least seemed to know what he was doing: “And what about all the alien delegations? What have they been saying about this?”

“Unofficially? They think he’s right. He is going to get away with murder. They’re not stupid; they understand the locals have limitations; they know why handing him over to them won’t work. But that hasn’t stopped them from painting us as co-conspirators trying to cover up the latest in a long series of atrocities.”

Cort grimaced at the thought. The long history of human relations with alien civilizations, both within and outside the species, had always been a study in trying to live down the crimes of the past. Crimes like those committed by the man in the cell — among others — provided plenty of ammunition to those who said the Hom Saps had squandered the last of its second chances. Feeling tired, she murmured: “Are they at least going to give me enough room to work?”

“They’ll make a show of it,” said Whalekiller. “But they’ll be on your back before you’ve been here twenty-four hours. Not much longer after that they’ll be portraying you like you’re as big a monster as he is.”

Cort remembered a night filled with warring shrieks, and thought: I am.

It just didn’t make the task ahead of her any less impossible.

2

Catarkhus was just another lumpy rock, dominated by deserts but seasoned with a mixture of inland seas and rainforests that formed a verdant belt around its equator. Andrea Cort had seen enough to sate her before leaving orbit. The skimmer tour Whalekiller had insisted on providing her on the way to the briefing hadn’t served to endear the place to her any further. Nor did the scent of the air, which was neither acrid nor perfumed, but the kind of instantly noticeable tinge that every new biosphere manufactured for its very own. Folks who liked worldhopping cooed that such grace notes gave each new planet a special signature. Cort had always found that they gave her a headache.

She couldn’t help it. She hated worlds. Having spent all but the first few years of her childhood in a safe wheelworld habitat, and having devoted the majority of her legal career to constantly untangling the disasters that inevitably took place wherever human beings were allowed to interact with naturally evolving life-systems, she far preferred artificial environments. They at least could be forced to make sense. Worlds, by contrast, repelled her — and first contact nexus or not, this one seemed more repugnant than most. As far as she was concerned, the other monster had lent it what little distinction it had by murdering several of the natives.

His name was Emil Sandburg. The file she’d been provided contained all the empty facts about his life without explaining why he would decide to start slicing up alien sentients as a hobby. He’d lived twenty-four years Old Earth Standard, an economic refugee from some failed industrial cooperative on the edge of Confederate Space. His indenture screening had listed him low normal in empathy, low normal in charisma, low normal in imagination; a determined nonentity who just happened to score extremely high normal in inductive thinking. He had been on Catarkhus for three years, forming distant but entirely cordial relationships with the rest of the Embassy staff; he was reported to be reasonably competent at cooperative relations with the representatives of the seven other spacefaring species maintaining first-contact Embassies here.

Everybody had liked him, in the sense that everybody always likes people who don’t get in the way. Nobody could claim to know him. They had called him bland, forgettable, free of personality. Dull. They had seen no indications that he was in any way deranged. But now it seemed that on at least six separate occasions during his tour of duty here, he had descended into the underground colonies of the native sentients, isolated random individuals among the population, and taken his time cutting them to pieces. He might have indulged this hobby indefinitely if a representative from the Riirgaan delegation hadn’t discovered one of Sandburg’s murders in progress.

Cort was scheduled to talk to the Riirgaan in question later this afternoon, and she was supposed to have a meeting with the local interspecies council as soon as she produced her recommendations; if she was lucky, and the council was feeling sufficiently charitable, she might be able to establish some moral distance between this one demented human and the rest of the species that had spawned him. But it was going to be tough. After the Hossti debacle, and the (*Tone*)-Shtok crisis, and the embassy massacre on Vlhan — (three spectacular diplomatic incidents that had within the past couple of decades left interspecies confidence in the good faith of human beings at an all-time low) — the diplomatic community wasn’t exactly motivated to give the perpetually bumbling Hom.Saps the benefit of the doubt again.

3

The Hom.Sap Embassy had no jail facilities, so Sandburg’s cell was a hastily-converted quarantine booth tucked away in the Embassy’s on-site clinic. The one guard was a skinny, and somewhat sheepish, first-year indenture armed with nothing but a cryogenic foamer; even so, he wasn’t trained for security work, and the pretense at high security rendered him almost apologetic as he dampened the door field to allow her admittance. Having won her argument with her security-minded escort Whalekiller, she went in alone, noting a handful of realbooks and a scan-only hytex before the figure on the bed had time to demonstrate how he was going to react to her arrival.

It turned out to be with a shy smile and an extended hand. “Hello.”

“Hello,” she said, without returning either.

Sandburg let his hand remained extended for five full seconds before dropping it with a fatalistic shrug. “You’re a new one.”

“Just landed.” There was no place to sit other than the cot, which she wouldn’t have wanted to share with him, so she remained standing. “I’ve travelled a long way to see you, Emil.”

He flashed a tentative grin, forcing her to upgrade her upgrade her assessment of the smile. it was not warm so much as insolent. “Oooh. Officialdom.”

“Andrea Cort. Legal Counsel for the Dip Corps Judge Advocate.”

“Big-time officialdom,” he said, his grin acquiring several additional degrees of off-center tilt. “Took you long enough to get here, ma’am.”

Cort, who had spent the last two subjective months of her life being sick to her stomach at high g, didn’t particularly need to be reminded. “Well, I’m here now.”

He appraised her. “I don’t know whether I ought to be real happy about that, ma’am. I mean, you are a pretty lady and all, and I love your legs, but you were sent here to make sure I get a proper lynching, weren’t you?”

This was the man cited as bereft of personality? His current persona was obnoxious, but that was as far from bland as he could get. “I’m not your prosecutor, Emil.”

“Maybe not, but I can sure as hell see in your eyes that you wish you were part of the jury.” He chuckled without bitterness at that, thus establishing himself as a man who expected to be hated but didn’t give a shit. He patted the mattress beside him. “It’s not a sexual overture, pretty lady, but I’m really do wish you’d sit down. Otherwise, I’m going to get a crick in my neck just talking to you.”

He meant it to be disarming, but just being in the same room with him was enough to raise the acid levels in her belly. “There’s a solution to that, Bondsman. You can stand. In fact, I’m going to require you to.”

Sandburg rolled his eyes, but clapped his hands against his knees and rose to his feet with the air of a long-suffering martyr. “Yes, ma’am.”

Cort wished she had a paper to look at, a doc-reader to scan, even a colleague to pull off to one side and consult; anything to delay the rest of the interview by the two or three beats she needed to compose myself. “I’m told that you were caught in the act of disemboweling a Catarkhan whose limbs you had already amputated; that in the time since your initial arrest you have confessed to committing the same crime at least half a dozen times in the past. I have also been told that you say you did this for no reason other than your own personal recreation. “Is all of this accurate, Emil?”

“They’ve briefed you real well, ma’am.”

She went nose-to-nose, so her words could burst against his skin in puffs of breath. “You enjoy killing things, Emil?”

His eyes remained amused. “Sometimes.”

“Torturing them?”

“That’s the fun part.”

“You tortured the Catarkhans?”

“Not sure the word applies in this case, ma’am. Not with this species.”

Neither was she, damn him. That was part of the problem.

“For the sake of the argument: you enjoy slow kills.”

“Sometimes, Ma’am.”

“Do you only do it to Catarkhans? Or have you ever practiced this particular hobby on other sentients?”

He showed teeth. “None of your damn business. Ma’am.”

She knew then, as she was meant to know, that he had; that somewhere in his past, on some other world he’d known, there’d been other bodies left behind in dark places. He had probably enjoyed the usual childhood experimentation on animals, and might have taken down a few human beings before hitching his star to the Dip Corps gave him the opportunity to indulge himself with a wider variety of sentients. Maybe she could link him to some unsolved crimes in his past, wrest jurisdiction from the locals, and resolve her current dilemma that way — but somehow, she already knew that she would find nothing. A monster like Sandburg wouldn’t be so playful if he thought the game was going to be that easy for her. So she smiled back at him, with equal unpleasantness. “All right. This is a Catarkhan matter. I’ll confine my inquiries to the matter of the dead Catarkhans.”

He nodded. “That should save us some time, ma’am.”

“Why did you do it, Emil?”

“You ever stomp on bugs, ma’am?”

(She remembered a shattered and bleeding alien form, unable to rise, trying to ward her off with imploring hands: the face behind those hands so swollen from previous beating that it was nearly unrecognizable, the eyes still clearly close of a being she had once considered a second father.)

“You find that an appropriate description of what you’ve done?”

“Pretty much, yeah. Watch them for a while and tell me it’s not.”

“These so-called bugs were sentient beings.”

That’s what you people keep telling me,” he said, without any particular heat. The crooked smile came back. “Personally, I don’t see it.”

“Is that your defense? That they weren’t sentient?”

“I don’t know if they are or not. I just don’t see it, that’s all.”

The bastard wasn’t intimidated; he wasn’t even worried. He knew that all diplomatic precedent placed him outside the reach of human punishment. He also knew that the very nature of the creatures he’d killed probably placed him outside the reach of their punishment as well. She had to hand it to him; he’d chosen a perfect species to victimize. But she moved closer to him and said: “You committed six murders, Emil. If you think I find anything cute or endearing about that, or have any interest in what you see or don’t see, you’re even sicker than I thought you were. I promise you, I will see you pay for that.”

“A lot more than six,” he said, still without any particular heat. “And yes, I did enjoy myself doing it; it’s really not like there was anything better to do on this rock. But if you want me to pay for it, you do have a problem, don’t you?”

“One I’ll solve. You can be confident about that.”

He yawned in her face. “Yeah. Right. I think we’re done with this conversation, Ma’am. I need a nap.”

He sat down on the bed, rolled over on his side, and began loud, theatrical snoring.

Cort stood there staring at his back for a while, contemplating the attractions of pure, unadulterated sociopathy. Her work had placed her in close proximity with several specimens of this type over the years (as many behind desks as behind bars; she still shivered at the thought of her narrow escape from one Ambassador Virila Pendrake), and her reaction had always been the same: the instinctive, natural revulsion almost matched by something else she had come to acknowledge as envy. She tried to imagine what it was like, for people like Sandburg, being able to live their lives with absolutely no internal governors, to be able to do anything they could manage to get away with without later feeling shame or regret or even embarrassment at the worst of what that meant. It must have been an interesting form of freedom. Not one she liked being able to recognize as human, and not one that she would ever want to live herself, even if it made it easier to bear the blood on her own hands — but one as compelling, in its own way, as any other alien form of life. Which was just one of the many good reasons she was determined to destroy him.

She turned and headed toward the exit.

He called before she got there. “Oh, one last thing? Andrea?"

Unwillingly, she turned. “Yes?”

His smile was now broad, confident, hateful.

“Good luck finding yourself a judge and jury.”

4

Roman Whalekiller was smart enough to recognize Cort wanted silence and professional enough to give it to her for almost five minutes. They were on their way out of the Embassy hospital when he demonstrated that he wasn’t going to let it last forever. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.” Her tone underlined just how much she resented the condescension.

“I’m sorry. It’s just that you look a little shaken…”

“It’s the air; a little thinner, here, than I’m used to. Get me down to the plains where your aboriginals live and I’m sure I’ll look a lot better.”

“If you say so,” Whalekiller said, providing official agreement wedded to the texture of denial — always a diplomatic specialty.

It irked her. “He’s not my first murderer, Bondsman.”

Whalekiller stiffened at the title, reminder of the gulf between his mortgaged status and her freewoman rank. “I know that. I’m sure you’ve known many of them.”

She shot him a glare, certain she heard rank accusation in his words — then realized he had been referring to the people she met in her role as Advocate. “A few,” she said. Then, seeing she’d already shown a little too much arrogance, and knowing it would do her no good to pointlessly alienate this man, she retreated: “I can’t say it’s something I’ve ever gotten used to.”

“That’s good,” Whalekiller said, his tone so dry it was impossible to determine whether it was conciliatory or sarcastic.

They left the Embassy hospital, then crossed the quad, a cheery acre the Dip Corps indentures had gone to far too much effort designing. With offworld flora a forbidden element, they’d transplanted trees and shrubs and grass-analogues from all over Catarkhus and arranged them in oval plots set off with arrays of polished white glowstones, with a Dip Corps flag fluttering atop a pole in their midst. The overall effect was neither human soil nor Catarkhan, but some uneasy graph position that lay midway between the two extremes. There weren’t many people visible; even now, with the crimes of Emil Sandburg still casting its pall over the human presence here, most of the research personnel had better reason to be elsewhere on the planet. But a group of three young indentures who were sharing lunch and buzzpops under the warm Catarkhan sun did look up as she and Whalekiller passed, with something like morbid fascination in their eyes: That’s her, that is the Advocate, that is the one they sent to deal with the Sandburg Problem.

She was afraid they’d try to delay her with conversation, but they were too well-trained; they knew urgency when they saw it. They let her and Whalekiller pass.

She thought that meant she was home free.

Then Whalekiller led her through the arched corridor that bisected the staff dormitory, rounded a long white structure of uncertain purpose, saw what was waiting for them by the vehicle hangar, and muttered a long, eloquent: “Shit.”

The four aliens waiting for them by the entrance to the hangar — a squat little Bursteeni, a cadaverous long-necked Tchi, a gravely expressionless Riirgaan, and a hovering flatscreen representative of the AIsource — were no doubt officially visiting the Hom.Sap Embassy Compound for reasons that had nothing to do with Cortís still-embryonic investigation. After all, first-contact delegations did have to share their data from time to time, and some of that information exchange was best performed on-site. But it was still convenient for these four, appearing here at this time, on this day, representing such a neat cross-section of the interspecies mission to Catarkhus, to so carefully position themselves in Cort’s path. Whatever they had been talking about, if it was anything other than concocting a common excuse for their presence, they immediately stopped and converged on Cort and Whalekiller.

“You don’t have to speak to them now,” Whalekiller said. "You haven’t even been out in the field yet.”

Cort, of course, knew that, but she also knew that as the official charged with settling the Sandburg problem, she was also bound to function as the whetstone necessary for the grinding of certain axes. “Don’t worry about it. We’re going to have to get this out of the way sometime.”

The Tchi, an angular string of a creature topped with a thatch of curly gray hair, was the first to accost her. He raised his patrician chin and murmured, “Excuse. You are the Hom.Sap legal counsel known as Andreacort?”

She wondered how her name had circulated so quickly. “Yes. Can I help you?”

The round little Bursteeni, demonstrating its species’ tendency toward excessive enthusiasm, bounced up and down with excitement. “It is an honor to meet you, Counsellor Cort. I am Mekile Nom of the Bursteeni delegation, and I understand that you have had a long and distinguished career dealing with questions of legal jurisdiction—”

“A career,” the Tchi said, its dust-dry air of innate superiority immediately cutting its friendlier colleague off in mid-sentence, “that achieved such impressiveness mostly because her species has provided her since her very early childhood with many opportunities to investigate criminal acts on alien soil. No doubt, if her people continue to wreak havoc among aboriginals, she will have many more chances to display her talents — a state of affairs that, demanding as it might be for her, still presents what must be seen as a remarkably ugly display by humanity. Your weak standards betray you here, Mekile; I myself would hesitate to call that excellence.” It turned a measuring gaze toward Cort, and said: “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Counsellor Gayre Raigh, of the Tchi Republic’s own Committee on First-Contact violations. I arrived on-world twenty-two local days ago, and have been busily conducting my own investigation as insurance against the expected human attempt to subvert justice in this matter.”

Cort did not smile, but she didn’t raise her voice either. “I can assure you, Mr. Raigh: subverting justice is absolutely the last thing the Confederacy has in mind.”

“Your own presence here provides strong evidence to the contrary. I have already established from my own research that you supported human over native jurisprudence in at least sixty percent of the cases you’ve investigated. How do you intend to justify such gross misuse of your power in this case?”

This was another diplomatic specialty that some representatives of the Tchi had always been able to practice with special skill: the kind of question that, like when did you stop beating your wife? allowed no non-incriminating answer. Cort hid her annoyance behind a content-free: “I’ll be happy to answer your questions when I’ve completed my investigation.”

“Of course,” Raigh said. “Given the poisonous extent of Hom.Sap chauvinism, you first have to determine whether they’re sufficiently similar to your own species before you decide whether you can be forced to acknowledge the grievous sins committed against them.”

Whalekiller broke in: “Well, that shows real impartiality, Goodsir…”

Though sharing his anger, Cort deferred the remainder of his words with a gesture. “We don’t need to be forced, Mr. Rhaig. Nobody, except possibly Sandburg himself, minimizes the seriousness of his crimes.”

“Then why is he still in Hom.Sap custody, except to deny the indigenous people of this planet an opportunity to judge him?”

“You know why,” Whalekiller said.

“I know the reason alleged to be why. I have yet to see proof that the Hom.Sap embassy intends on using at anything more than a convenient excuse.”

Cort said: “We need to establish that the Catarkhans have the capacity to judge him.”

“Ah,” said Raigh. “And if you determine they have no capacity? Given the demented history of your own species, what makes you believe that you possess such capacity yourselves?”

There were any number of answers Cort could have given to that: the diplomatic answer, the legal answer, the defensive answer, even the angry answer. None of them qualified as the definitive answer; none of them provided anything like a sufficient rebuttal to all the human history Cort knew to be written in spilled blood; none of them erased her own vivid memory of bodies falling on a clear, sun-dappled morning.

Before she could speak, the representative from the Riirgaan delegation cut in, with the high-pitched trilling that provided his species’ closest equivalent to laughter. “Indeed. None of us envy your task, Counsellor. It is difficult to come up with answers to questions that do not permit the existence of any. But it is your fellow human Sandburg who has placed you in that position.”

“He certainly did. But I will find the answers.”

“Then we will all no doubt be very interested in hearing your proposals.”

The flatscreen from the AIsource flashed agreement. <> WE ARE ALL MOST INTERESTED IN JUSTICE. <>

In context, it sounded as challenging, and as threatening, as the monster Sandburg’s crack about finding a jury.

After all, as she’d been told again and again, justice on Catarkhus was probably not a possibility.

But then, she was used to that.

5

As Whalekiller piloted their skimmer high over the Catarkhan desert, the paucity of cloud cover ensured a constant, clear view of the streaked landscape below; it was a dull pattern of light brown against slightly darker brown, with the darker areas representing cultivated sections farmed by the oft-discussed aboriginals. On their first flight over, Whalekiller had rhapsodized about how beautiful it was. Cort couldn’t see it. Maybe it was as magnificent as he said, and maybe (as she suspected), people who got assigned to the same world for too long became so starved for beauty that they created some out of their own heads.

Timing was all. No sooner had she registered Whalekiller’s appraising look than he opened his big mouth again. “I hate Tchi.”

She glanced at him. “Odd thing for a diplomat to say.”

“I know. By contract, I’m supposed to respect everybody. And I really try. I like the Riirgaans, I like the Bursteeni, I even enjoy playing logic games with AIsource…but the Tchi, and their air of incessant superiority, make me want to bang my head against a wall. Does that make me a bigot, Counselor?”

“No,” she said. “It makes you what the Tchi want you to be. They do it on purpose, you know.”

“What? Act obnoxious?”

“That does happen to be one way of putting it, but their culture teaches them to treat most social interactions as a series of verbal challenges; they tend to keep upping the ante until their opponents either overcome them or back down. They’re very aggressive about it, particularly against those they imagine capable of pushing back…which makes it hard to tell whether somebody like Rhaig is just following protocol or preparing to be a real threat.”

“And here I thought they were just assholes.”

“Most of them are. But culturally so.”

“And what do you make of Rhaig, specifically? Is he just giving you the closest Tchi equivalent to a friendly hello, or is he really going to be a problem?”

“I’m not sure yet,” she said. But she was already thinking: A problem.

He blinked at her. “Something else I picked up during that meeting. You don’t like aliens much, do you?”

Cort clicked her thumbnail against her incisors. “They’re all right.”

“You’re uncomfortable around them.”

Another click. “I’m uncomfortable around everybody.”

Whalekiller’s brow furrowed. “Shyness, Counsellor? I wouldn’t have believed it in a woman capable of rising to your position.”

“It’s not shyness, but preference. I just don’t have a very high opinion of sentient life in general.”

The furrows grew more furrows. “All sentient life?”

“You show me something that can think, and I’ll show you something that can’t be trusted.”

Whalekiller’s mouth worked in ways common among people trying to determine just how seriously they should take her. “But you can think, Counselor.”

“I don’t count myself as an exception.”

“Ummm. Leaves you with a limited number of choices as far as friends are concerned, doesn’t it?”

“One reason,” she said, making sure he received the eye contact, “that I’ve never been particularly interested in looking for any.”

He turned away from her and studied the empty airspace ahead of them — a pretense of active involvement in the skimmer’s flight that might have been persuasive if she hadn’t seen him load their destination. After a while, not looking at her, he said: “Would you be very offended if I told you I found that sad?”

“No,” she said. “You can find it any way you like.”

Whalekiller left it at that, fortunately. Had he questioned her further, she might have been forced to explain that she’d derived her opinion honestly, from years of personal and professional experience. She might have said that she’d seen genocide close up as a child; she might have said that she’d seen madness as an adult; she might have said that she’d seen brutality as an Advocate. She might have said that for the ability to think carried with it the potential for joy, but also the potential for self-torment. She might have said that it made bad things happen, and that any species capable of sustained abstract thought spent much of its existence piling those thoughts into rickety, unwieldy, top-heavy structures…some of which made sense, some of which were downright brilliant, and some of which were top-heavy nonsense that needed constant attention to keep from collapsing under their own weight. She might have concluded that while sentience was the source of all human and alien civilization, it was also where all evil and madness came from. It was, after all, where people liked Emil Sandburg came from. In the end, she might have said all that, and found herself unable to hold back all the other places those dark, damnable, never-silent thoughts had taken her.

Maybe ten minutes passed before Whalekiller, who probably felt as oppressed by the silence as she did, cleared his throat. “Counselor?”

“Yes?”

“I’ve got to ask you: that thing the Tchi said, about you favoring humans in so many jurisdiction disputes? Is that true?”

Relieved to be distracted by business again, she brushed a strand of black hair away from her face, and said, “No. It’s a gross distortion.”

“I figured as much. What precisely did he leave out?”

“The fact that none of the cases I managed to flip to human courts were ever about crimes committed against native sentients. They may have been committed on alien soil, but they were all human-on-human crimes — disputes between Dip Corps personnel, ranging from petty theft to one particularly stupid murder. The indigenes were always entitled to jurisdiction if they wanted it, but I was usually able to persuade them that humanity was the injured party and therefore entitled to our own justice. If they agreed to extradition, it was because they were relieved they could.”

“Wish you could manage that in this case,” said Whalekiller.

“So do I,” Cort said. “It would make things a lot easier.”

He hesitated. “You ever surrender somebody like Sandburg to the locals?”

“Somebody like Sandburg? No. Not in this specific context. I had somebody worse, who had already willfully surrendered to alien justice; and the questions I faced then were well past what would have been right or wrong for him. But I had a case not too long ago: some indenture hiking cross-country got caught in a rainstorm, hid out in a cave, took a leak in there while he was at it. Some pilgrim saw him doing it and accused him of desecrating a holy tomb. The punishment was public flogging followed by banishment. We didn’t even fight that one: the guy was a real do-his-duty type, said he could take ten lashes if it meant honoring native law. We gave him something to deaden the pain, fixed him up afterward, then re-assigned him. It probably helped his career. I think he’s now an Ambassador somewhere.”

“But he didn’t really deserve the punishment.”

“We didn’t think he deserved any,” Cort said. “The site wasn’t marked and hadn’t been mentioned before. He just did what came naturally, and handing him over kept the indigenes happy without doing him any permanent damage. Sandburg, on the other hand…”

She let the sentence trail off.

He finished it for her. “—deserves anything they could possibly do to him.”

She nodded. “Did you know him, Bondsman? I mean, before?”

“Know him? I think it’s pretty clear that nobody knew him. If we’d known him, we would have shipped him off-world before the damage was done.”

“But did you think you knew him?”

Whalekiller considered that. “I think I tried talking to him three, four times. Casual conversation. He was polite enough. He tried to be friendly. But the man had nothing to say. Everything he said was just…empty. Like everything he said was being edited by a committee intent on making sure that nothing of any real content ever escaped his mouth.” He shivered. “I don’t know. Maybe that was as close as he could come to normal. Maybe the only alternative to being a nobody was revealing what a sick bastard he was every time he opened his mouth.”

“Maybe,” she said, trying to reconcile that with the cocky Sandburg she’d interviewed.

“One thing’s for sure, Counselor: whatever’s in this head of his is downright evil. The Riirgaans provided footage of what he did, and it’s enough to make you ashamed to be human.” He closed his eyes, shook his head, and said: “it’s too bad. About our problem, I mean. Too bad the Catarkhans don’t have laws.”

“Yes. It certainly is.”

She fell into silence as she watched the endless brown of the Catarkhan desert passing by far below. It would indeed be easier if Sandburg could only be extradited. The Dip Corps would have made damn sure he received the maximum punishment for his crimes — if not out of moral outrage, then at least out of concern for its own reputation.

But Emil Sandburg’s offense had been a crime of violence against locals, a distinction that, under the First Contact Protocols supported by all the major spacefaring races, required trial under the local version of justice.

It didn’t matter a whit that in this case, there was no local version of justice, or of crime, or of right and wrong. Nor did it matter at all that there was no way, short of warfare, that adherence to the policy could be practically enforced against any spacefaring race that decided in any given situation to ignore it. The policy was still seen, and treated, as an inviolate rule, one which all the major spacefaring races had instituted to minimize the kind of disasters that so frequently occur when one culture decides the run roughshod over another. Failing to honor it, even here, would seriously damage humanity’s prestige and moral capital and whatever right it had to claim that the worst of its sins was in the past.

The locals had to provide judge and jury.

Even if they had no such thing. Even if they had no even distant equivalent.

Even if, as in this case, they might have been incapable of ever understanding that a crime had been committed.

6

One of the worlds Cort’s work had inflicted upon her in the past boasted an herbivore the local aboriginals had given a name that sounded like a slow air leak. The closest human analogue to the sound was a sibilant sssssss, pronounced in a barely audible whisper. The abos called it that because the beast moved at a rate that seemed about as fast as erosion, blinking maybe once an hour, breathing about twice that much, reacting to everything that happened in its vicinity half an hour after it had passed into the realm of history. The beast was fortunate to be as stupid as a brick, since any creature with greater intelligence would have been driven insane by the boredom of its own existence.

The Catarkhans were downright manic by comparison, in that when excited they moved at roughly half the rate of human beings assaying a relaxed walk. They were sluggish, but just enough to seem more deliberate than decrepit. Had they shown any awareness of anything happening anywhere around them, the trait might have been endearing. But they were easily as oblivious as the sibilant-s herbivores Cort remembered; the world around them was simply not part of their equation.

“They have no justice system,” Whalekiller explained, soon after they landed. “They have no laws, no societal structure, no philosophy, no religion, no rituals, no real sense of the individual, and no behaviors that seem independent of whatever’s hardwired into their genes.”

Cort’s thumb was starting to ache from all the nibbling. “Have we ever been able to conduct any kind of communication with them at all?”

“Are you kidding? We haven’t even been able to alert them we’re here.”

The Catarkhans were gray, but not elephant-gray; elephants have character, and Catarkhans had nothing of the kind. Imagine a gray that was not just the absence but the thoroughgoing rejection of color. Imagine a gently-curved kidney of a torso about .75 of a meter in length; an inverted cone of a head that would have been entirely featureless if it didn’t provide space for a brain and didn’t have a thicket of perpetually-writhing cilia around the perpetually-open mouth. Imagine no teeth and no tongue and no fixed jaw, just a solid funnel leading right down the gullet. There were six limbs, each articulated with two knees apiece, the lower set lined with a layer of cilia somewhat finer than that which bracketed the mouth. There were clumsy grasping appendages, a compromise between hands and feet, at the bottom of those limbs; they were just strong enough to pick up and manipulate small objects, which usually meant the globby mash Catarkhans directed toward that cavernous mouth.

Catarkhans could dig, and in fact they lived in hives. But the excavation took forever and required the constant effort of hundreds in order for any real progress to be made. Individuals were very weak in relation to their size, and weighed about as much as a bubbles of hollow flesh — one of the main reasons Emil Sandburg would have had no problem overpowering one. A small human child probably could. But that wasn’t the least of their shortcomings.

The greatest of those was that they were practically insensate. They were islands unto themselves. They perceived almost nothing. They were blind and deaf because they had no accommodation for eyes and ears; they had an at-best rudimentary sense of smell thanks to the chemical receptors in their cilia, but that was just enough to recognize food, and perhaps smell it, certainly not enough to distinguish tastes. Nor was there any pain center in their brains; shoot them, cripple them, shatter their limbs, set fire to their skins, and they just blundered on, dragging the nonfunctional parts of themselves out of sheer inability to recognize their injuries. The only sense they had in functional quantities was tactile, and that on only a relatively small part of their body — the cilia that lined the limbs below each second knee. If they were removed or incapacitated, the Catarkhans were cut off from the rest of the universe, reduced to bubbles of empty consciousness unaware even that there was anything around them subject to awareness. It was no wonder their life-support behaviors needed to be hardwired; otherwise, they would have survived as a species for only as long as it took the entire population to starve.

Cort found standing in the midst of thousands of them, who inched along the ground in multiple files as they headed toward the cultivated farms that surrounded their hive in concentric circles, a lot like not existing at all.

It was her first encounter with the creatures the law had so perversely designated her jury pool.

After about ten minutes of silent observation, she said, “Shit.”

“You’re beginning to see the size of your problem.”

“I saw it before, Whalekiller; I’m just now beginning to feel it. There’s no way to interact with them at all?”

“Try it, why don’t you.”

Hesitating only a moment, Cort reached out and pulled one of the deaf-and-blind marchers from its parade. The hardest thing about that was figuring out where it was safe to touch one; they had no real offensive capabilities, so there was no possibility of it being able to hurt her, but she had no intention of hurting it and therefore ending up another diplomatic nightmare occupying the cell next to Emil Sandburg. She settled on placing her palms on either side of its bean-shaped torso to gently steer its progress away from its parade and toward her. The degree of pressure she needed to influence its course was so negligible she might have been manipulating a balloon, or a toy boat. The Catarkhan meekly turned away from its fellows, moved toward Cort, then stopped, either paralyzed by its unexpected detour, or confident that she would soon provide it additional guidance.

The Catarkhans who had been marching along behind the one she’d captured did not follow. They ignored the disruption and continued their march without interruption. As far as Cort could tell, there was no way of telling whether this was obliviousness, deliberate judgement, or robotlike devotion to their previous programming.

The one she had pulled from its place on line just stood there, waiting. It didn’t see her at all. She wasn’t there. She may have been an incomprehensible natural force capable of producing changes in its daily routine, but she was still as invisible as a spirit.

“Or a Demon,” she said, thinking of Emil Sandburg.

Whalekiller said, “What?”

“Nothing.”

The cilia around the Catarkhan’s wide-open mouth writhed like anemones. The only indication that it was trying to perceive anything other than itself, engaged in perceiving anything other than itself, they too looked deaf and blind — aware that something was happening, but forever unable to determine exactly what. Cort tried and failed discern patterns in the way they danced. “Can I touch those?”

“For all the good it will do,” Whalekiller said.

Cort was wearing the gloves she usually wore for planet work; the risk of getting dirt, real planetary dirt, on her fingers was just one of the many things she didn’t appreciate about worlds. She doffed the right one and touched those undulating little worms with the tip of her index finger. They weren’t slimy, as expected; they had a sandpapery, feverish warmth that didn’t feel organic at all, but more like some kind of fabric that had been stored under hot conditions. They didn’t react to her touch at all, and neither did their host.

She glanced at Whalekiller. “Nothing?”

“It doesn’t have taste receptors for anything you’re made of,” Whalekiller said.

“So I’m still invisible to it.”

“That’s right. It can’t sense you at all.”

“Doesn’t it have any idea what’s happening?”

“To know how much it understands, we first have to get into its head, and to date, nobody, not even the Riirgaans, has ever succeeded in doing that.”

Cortís grimace grew broader. “Then how the hell do we know it’s sentient?”

“The same way we know the Vlhani or the Thlane or the Farsh are sentient.”

They were three pre-technological species who had presented particularly tough first-contact problems. They were all clearly sentient, but they were all so alien, not only by the standards of human beings but also by the standards of all the other known spacefaring species, that the task of establishing some form of substantive communication with them had been dragging on for years. But the comparison was not perfect, because while little communication with the Vlhani and the Thlane and the Farsh had progressed beyond the equivalent of baby talk, all three species had at least noticed that somebody was trying to talk to them. The Vlhani had even progressed to the point of allowing human beings to participate in their most sacred rituals — and in raising holy hell when the idiot human Ambassador tried to interfere. But seven earth-standard years of constant study had left the Catarkhans still cut off, disconnected, oblivious.

She said, “How do we know? Wishful thinking?”

If Whalekiller was offended by her sarcasm, he did not show it; instead, he launched into a speech so polished that he must have honed it during many previous briefings. “By measuring the data content of their interpersonal communication.”

“There is some?”

“It all takes place in the hive. There’s an incredibly complex language that has to do with how many cilia they touch or refrain from touching at any one time — I don’t get most of it myself, but the Riirgaans, who made the breakthrough, mapped the informational traffic, and found grammatical structure, consistent themes, individuality, complex repeated sequences, and even regional accents. It’s as dense as an AI stream. It’s sentient communication. But nothing in it seems affected by anything they do in their daily lives — it feels as abstract as philosophy or religion or poetry, and it’s totally inaccessible to us without some kind of clear way in.”

“I don’t know, Whalekiller. Sentience implies a certain minimal level of free will, and I don’t see any of that in their behavior.”

“They have plenty of free will — as far as talking to each other is concerned. They just don’t need any to handle their behavior. Their behavior is hardwired.”

“Instinct,” she said. “Or reflex.”

“Something like that. See, Counsellor, Catarkhus has such a stable ecosystem it’s ridiculous. They don’t have any predators. They don’t have any enemies. They don’t have any seismic activity. They don’t have any heavy weather. They only have a limited number of contagious diseases. They never needed the capability to react to unforeseen circumstances. They never needed a wide array of senses to provide constant data about an unstable and potentially dangerous environment. They never needed pain to teach them which things were bad to do. And they never needed individual variation to provide their population with a complementary and competitive skills. They just needed food gathering and reproductive instincts, and primitive tactile and olfactory senses to help them out on those rare occasions where that wouldn’t be enough. They didn’t need brains this evolved, or a communication system this complex. That’s all devoted to higher thinking. —In fact,” he added, “as if just remembering it at right that very moment, there’s a school of thought, among many of the exolinguists here, that says the Catarkhan mind isn’t aware of what the body does at all — that the intelligence they possess is totally disconnected from a daily life run by their involuntary nervous system. It would explain a lot. But either way, their adaptations made them totally helpless when something genuinely alien did enter their environment.”

“Us.”

“Well,” Whalekiller shrugged, “the Bursteeni first. They discovered the species and named the planet. Then the Riirgaans, who established Catarkhan sentience. Then a couple of others, and then us. We were the last to join this particular Contact mission. But we’re all alien here…and we’re all new concepts to a creature biologically incapable of perceiving new concepts.”

Nodding, dazzled by the size of it, Cort murmured: “We’re non-happenings. Rumors.”

“Not even rumors,” Whalekiller said. “Invisible demons.”

There was that word again. It applied uncannily well to Emil Sandburg. The Catarkhans he’d torn apart hadn’t known that anything was happening to them; they hadn’t suffered in pain, or in terror, or in sheer rage that the universe would select them for such torments. The ones he’d left behind, the ones he hadn’t had time to touch, probably didn’t even know that any of their number were missing. For them, the crimes of Emil Sandburg had been non-events in an existence so unchanging that even ten thousand generations would not provide one sentence of actual history.

It hadn’t touched them at all.

“What?” Whalekiller asked.

“Did I say something?” Cort said.

“No. But you’re smiling.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Believe me, you are,” Whalekiller said. “It’s the first time I’ve seen you do that since I ferried you down from orbit.”

That surprised her. She so rarely smiled. But now that it had been pointed out to her, she could feel the telltale tension in her cheeks. She fought down the feeling, buried it, and drove a stake through its heart. “Come on. We still have a lot to do.”

7

They caught up with the Riirgaan witness, one Goodsir Vighinis Mukh’thav, at their own Embassy Compound on the edges of a Catarkhan temperate rainforest. Like most of the other embassies, it was a site far removed from the habitat of the indigenous sentient species; it was a standing policy instituted to avoid contaminating the culture of the locals with excessive exposure to offworld technology, but the truth was that the Riirgaans might have picked it anyway. They just enjoyed environments like that, for some reason beyond Cortís comprehension; though their own world wasn’t anything at all like that, and they seemed far too intelligent to enjoy nasty things like bugs and venomous plants and mud under their feet all the time, they considered the hothouse jungle a paradise. They even liked swimming, which had always struck Cort as, war excepted, the most insane habit that any sentient race had ever cultivated for itself; after all, people drowned in water. It’s a planet thing, she supposed. And as a species that seemed to enjoy ferreting out and establishing contact with the most unlikely alien sentients imaginable, they would have had to harbor a fair degree of tolerance for planet things.

Mukh’thav was, according to Whalekiller, what the Riirgaans call a First Contact Prime, a position which should have kept him out in the field living as close to the natives as possible. But now they had him assigned to full-time vehicle maintenance, a job that kept him securely within their Embassy perimeter. He explained why as the three of them sat together at an outdoor table the Riirgaans had carved into one of the ornate historical friezes that decorated so much of their artifacts, Cort and Whalekiller drinking the hot coffee the Riirgaans had been kind enough to provide, Mukh’thav lowering his flat, masklike features to inhale the vapors from fermented mush that bubbled and roiled in a bowl set before him. “I am polluted,” Mukh’thav said, “with a sadness that broke through the infamous Riirgaan reserve. “I have seen an atrocity, and I still feel the filth on my skin. I am here, performing menial labor instead of the work I trained for, because I do not know if I will ever feel clean again.”

“You were not responsible,” Whalekiller said.

Mukhíthav cocked his head in the unreadable Riirgaan manner that could have been any emotion from annoyance to affection to distaste to warmth. “Do you expect me to take comfort in that? Is that the way you Hom.Saps think? That if a terrible crime occurs when you are not present to stop it, you are not at heart responsible? It is no wonder you have historically always been able to live in comfort and complacency when others of your people conducted genocides in other parts of your habitat. My people find such detachment profoundly alien. But I suppose that, given your tendencies, many of you cultivate the knack in order to remain sane.”

Cortís voice was very tight and very controlled. “I’m not detached from this, Mr. Mukh’thav.”

The Riirgaan made the kind of noise that seemed to concede the point while simultaneously establishing that nothing had been conceded at all. “Forgive me, andreaCort: I am sure you believe that. But you are also a bureaucrat, well-used to professing deep personal compassion as a matter of policy. It is still not real to you.”

“Real enough to feel polluted; to still feel the filth on my skin; to know that I’ll never feel clean again. Think what you want of us in general, Goodsir, but I am not detached.”

What followed was a noticeable pause, as Riirgaan and Human faced each other, like a pair of imperfect reflections recognizing the face on the other side of the glass.

It was not telepathy; neither individual was wired for it. But some knowledge is so shattering that people who share it can recognize each other. In Cortís case it took the form of a night filled with screams. In Mukh’thav’s, it was the sight of Emil Sandburg plying his deadly hobby. They were different lessons, learned in different places — but while the particulars were different, the resonances were still great enough to fill the air between them.

Whalekiller, abandoned somewhere outside the loop, glanced from one impassive face to the other, saw the moment of clear understanding that passed between them — and seemed terribly frustrated by his own inability to partake of it. He hesitated only a second or two longer before breaking the silence: “None of us approve of what Sandburg did, Goodsir. We all want justice.”

Mukh’thav turned toward him, as if reminded of his presence. “Yes. Justice.” He slumped. “As if that is even possible in this case.”

“I intend to make it possible,” Cort said.

“I did not expect to believe you, andreacort, but I suppose I do, now. Will you require me to describe what I saw?”

Cort held off responding long enough to take another sip of coffee and set it down on the mat the Riirgaans had provided to protect their intricately carved wood. “No particular need for that; your testimony has been recorded, and the crime itself has already been established to our satisfaction. Sandburg himself admits it. What hasn’t been established, at least in my mind, is just what the crime was.”

There was a moment of silence. The impassive, inexpressive Riirgaan face, locked as it was in one blank mask, nevertheless seemed to change aspect four times in the interval before Mukh’thav’s answer. “You know very well it was murder.”

“I do. I am wondering whether you believe it was also torture.”

Mukh’thav considered that for what seemed a small eternity before raising his face out of the thickest vapors, leaning back, and linking hands in a gesture so deliberate that the fingers seemed to knit in slow motion. “It is an interesting question, AndreaCort. Is it also an important one?”

“I’m just collecting data,” said Cort.

“Very well, then.” Mukh’thav’s head cocked again; this time, she experienced no difficulty interpreting the reaction as the expansiveness of an any expert enjoying the opportunity to show off his knowledge. “The victim was a Catarkhan. It wasn’t capable of being tortured. It wasn’t in pain. It wasn’t afraid. It wasn’t even aware. It was a creature being violated that had no sense of violation; a being ripped apart which wasn’t equipped with the senses it needed to understand what being ripped apart meant; a conscious, thinking creature that couldn’t hear its executioner’s laughter. Death, when it came, wasn’t a blessing or a surprise; if the Catarkhans have an afterlife, they may not even notice the passage.” He lowered his head to the vaporous bowl one more time; when he raised his head, bits of smoke roiled around his carapace, making him resemble a demon who had just emerged from one of the hotter pits in hell. “If it is your Hom.Sap intention to argue that this small mercy somehow diminishes the crime…”

“Not at all, Goodsir.” She picked up the coffee cup again, emptied it to the dregs, and placed it down again, before rising and gesturing for Whalekiller to do the same. “I’m just establishing what the crime really is. And what it is not.”

Whalekiller was about to suffer a hernia withholding his curiosity.

Mukh’thav’s face roiled with vapors. “You are done?”

“Not even close,” said Cort.

8

The Tchi Embassy was a snow-white pylon stabbing the sky from somewhere in the most inhospitable wastelands of the Catarkhan polar region; it was the very vessel which had brought them here, imbedded in ice, facing the sky as if thinking it might have been thinking it never expected to see the stars again. The minimal living space within the vessel itself was supplemented by about a dozen small inflatable structures that sprouted from the surrounding glacier like mushrooms, and one big transparent dome that rested on the pylon’s flat summit. The dome, which turned out to be one of their bubblewall inflatables, was as warm as toast, comfortably furnished, perfumed with a fertilizer scent Cort assumed to be an import from the Tchi homeworld, and wholly insulated from its constant assault by the most hostile landscape Catarkhus had to offer. The Tchi did everything they could to see to the physical well-being of their guests Whalekiller and Cort, bringing refreshments, inquiring after their comfort, and even altering the humidity level on request — but Cort was still miserable there; every time a gust of wind lashed the bubblewalls with snow, she gripped her couch reflexively, certain that their precariously-balanced platform was about to break off and spiral away into the distance.

Really, she didn’t understand anybody who liked planets one bit.

They were there for about one hour, waiting, before Whalekiller, who had been pretending to be engrossed in the view, broke away with an explosion of hoarded breath. “Counselor…I know I’m supposed to give you room to work, here…but just what the hell was going on, there, between you and Mukh’thav?”

Cort avoided his eyes. “Nothing unexpected, Bondsman. Just evidence-gathering, nothing more.”

“I don’t mean your line of questioning. I’m sure you have something in mind. I mean that moment earlier on, when you took all his contempt for us and flung it back in his face. He saw something in you that I didn’t. What was it?”

She gave him a look. “Empathy.”

The muscles in his face twitched. “I’m going to figure you out sooner or later.”

“Let me know when you manage it,” she said.

After a moment, he nodded and returned to the edge of the bubblewall, where he could lose himself in the ice-fields of the Catarkhan north.

Cort was grateful to be left alone, if only for a few minutes, but genuine peace eluded her; the second she permitted her mind to drift, it came across the image of Emil Sandburg, slicing away at a Catarkhan victim. Her mind refused to reconstruct what Emil had done — if only because she still didn’t know what a Catarkhan looked like beneath its skin — but it showed real enthusiasm imagining the face he’d worn during the act. Possibilities paraded themselves before her: the dispassionate killer, the gleeful killer, the leering killer, the orgasmic killer, the killer who didn’t seem to know what he was doing. None of them made any immediate sense. By the time she gave him a face filled with fear, she realized that the image in her mind was not Sandburg’s face at all…and that the Catarkhans she imagined were not the funnel-faced hive-creatures Whalekiller had shown her. No, these were more humanoid. They were mammalian, they were humanoid enough to possess human expressions, they had bright green eyes filled with humor and curiosity, and their screams were resonant baritone rumbles, backed by a chorus of more human cries.

She opened her eyes and discovered that Whalekiller, still standing against a backdrop of frozen wasteland, was now staring at her with frank concern.

She blanked her expression and stared back until he looked away.

It was an eternity before Haat Vayl, the Tchi exolinguist they’d come to see, arrived for the interview. Thin even by the slight standard of his species, an attribute which might have been a measure of advanced age, Vayl was also marked by an air of deliberate gravity and a set of forlorn, droopy eyes that together made him resemble the most unctuous bureaucrat ever to take secret pleasure in giving bad news. He wore a long diaphanous robe so delicate that it seemed about to tear with every step he took.

Unfortunately, Counsellor Rhaig, the Tchi who had accosted Cort earlier, was with him, and considering himself in charge. His pale skin reddened from wind-burn, his fringe of curly gray hair frizzed with moisture, he nevertheless bustled across the chamber with an easy grace that left his feebler colleague Vayl far behind. “Forgive us the delay, Counsellor — but I was out in the field, observing the indigenes.”

“You didn’t have to cut your observations short for us,” Cort said. “We were here to see Dr. Vayl.”

“I’m aware of that,” Rhaig said, as he claimed a seat opposite her, “but the doctor here thought it wise not to speak with you unless I was personally here to advise him on his answers.”

Cort would have bet a considerable sum that the policy was not Haat Vaylís’s personal idea. “That isn’t necessary, Counselor. The Doctor isn’t a defendant in danger of incriminating himself.”

“He most certainly is not, but since humans are universally recognized as masters at the art of the malleable misquote, he did consider it prudent to have an advisor at hand.”

Overstepping his bounds, Whalekiller said: “You really do go out of your way to be unpleasant, don’t you? What kind of distortion could you possibly be afraid of, here?”

Rhaig fixed him with a cool glare. “If I truly wanted to be unpleasant toward you, Mr. Whalekiller, I would make obvious remarks about the irony inherent in your having a name that so aptly commemorates one of your species’ most infamous past acts of xenocide. But my determination to treat you with basic civility will not prevent me from doing everything I can to counter the human tendency toward gross revisionism.”

Whalekiller collapsed into the chair beside Cort. “You’ll notice he didn’t answer the question.”

Cort, who had indeed noticed, addressed Krieg: “Do you have a personal problem with human beings, Counselor?”

“It is not a personal problem at all. I have dealt with several tolerable members of your species. The best of you seem to mean well, even if your inborn inadequacies prevent you from accomplishing it. Alas, the best of you constitute only a small percentage of your population — and the collected mass of you refuses all responsibility for the acts of the worst. I think that makes you dangerous. I think it makes you something that should be contained.”

“Like a disease,” Whalekiller said.

“Precisely,” said Rhaig. “There’s nothing wrong with human beings that a good military quarantine couldn’t cure.”

Cort’s own dislike of the Tchi Counselor was so intense she almost wanted the argument to run its course, but her time here was limited, and she had another agenda to pursue. So she addressed her next words to the weary, silently-waiting exobiologist who had just taken a seat at Rhaig’s side. “Goodsir. Forgive us. You are a scientist caught in an argument between bureaucrats.”

“I’ve noticed this,” Vayl said, in the craggy, desert-wind tones of any human old man. He was frail, all right; the very effort of speech seemed to diminish him.

“My name is Andrea Cort; I’m here to help determine the issue of jurisdiction in the Emil Sandburg case. What I need from you, as the ranking researcher here, is your perspective on the Catarkhans. You do agree with the accepted judgement, that the Catarkhans are sentient?”

Vayl’s voice was a rasp that barely travelled the short distance to Cortís ears. “I do.”

“A very learned human once defined sentients as creatures capable of unpredictable behavior.”

Rhaig cut in: “I will not allow you to use a human definition for the sake of human convenience.”

Vayl lowered his head. “I will accept it for the sake of discussion, Counsellor. Continue.”

Cort resisted the temptation to stick out her tongue at Rhaig. “Once, a long long time ago, I had a puppy who met that standard. Thetis a small domesticated animal some human beings have as pets; they’re pretty rambunctious and hard to control when they’re young. There is never any way to predict what they’re going to do, and they do show a fair degree of skill at problem-solving, in things that matter to them — issues such as, let’s say, getting into a cabinet filled with food, or evading capture when it’s time to put them back in their pens. Puppies pass the Turing test, but nobody would ever declare them sentient.”

Rhaig, who had been rolling his eyes throughout, now heaved a heavy sigh. “Is this another example of the way human beings think? Demeaning murder victims by comparing them to domestic animals?”

“No,” Vayl said, silencing the Tchi counselor with a gesture. “I’ll answer that.” A tiny pink tongue emerged from his beaklike lips, performed a full circuit of his mouth, and then retreated. He addressed Cort: “I can see where you’re going with this, Counsellor, but this Turing of yours provided a very unreliable means of measurement. Certainly, there are high-ranking officials among both our peoples who would never pass it — hidebound personalities whose responses are fixed in stone by their prejudices but who yet remain sentient by every measurable standard.” He made a point of glancing at Rhaig, who blinked several times before Vayl continued: “The same is true for the Catarkhans, but only more so. Their regimented existence may provide them with a limited range of responses we can understand, but every single analysis done so far establishes that they have a wide range of responses when communicating with each other.”

“You are absolutely certain of that?” Cort asked.

“Yes, I am. But whether we will ever be able to establish any form of communication with them, or how you’re going to provide them the means to prosecute your murderer, remains to be seen.”

“Thank you,” Cort said. She lowered her gaze to the floor, took a deep breath, and continued: “I have one more question.”

“Perhaps a relevant one this time,” Rhaig suggested.

She ignored him. “Assume for the sake of argument that your own people had never experienced any previous contact with human beings. Assume that we hadn’t agreed on a common diplomatic language, assume that you knew nothing of us except that we had been judged sentient by somebody whose expertise you trusted. Assume that we were now meeting for the first time. Assume I now marched in, crossed the room, and without any previous provocation punched Mr. Rhaig here in the mouth.” (Rhaig’s head rose a little higher on his neck at that one.) “Eliminating all interspecies chauvinism, would that gesture communicate to Mr. Rhaig the message that I don’t like him?”

Dr. Vayl’s eyes narrowed enough to suggest that he was either deeply offended or deeply enthralled by the image; his sudden animation seemed to suggest the latter. “I would be inclined to believe so, myself, but bereft of data I would also have to admit the possibility that human beings always said hello to other sentients that way.”

“Too often they have,” Rhaig said.

Whalekiller, giving the devil his due, actually chuckled at that.

Cort only had eyes for Dr. Vayl. “All right, then. Forget meaning. Would it qualify as any kind of message at all?”

Vayl’s eyes were almost closed, now. “I would have to say so.”

Whalekiller, whose own enjoyment of the turn the conversation had taken had lit up his face like sunrise, seemed almost giddy.

“So what you’re saying is — inflicting pain qualifies as communication.”

“Not in any articulate manner, of course — but yes, I would have to say so. In fact, at the bare minimum, pain is the body’s message to itself. Unfortunately, I don’t see how that is relevant here; as I’m sure you’ve been told by now, the Catarkhans==”

“—don’t feel pain. I know.” Cort stood, bowed, and signaled the still-goggling Whalekiller that the interview was over. “Thank you very much, Goodsir Vayl, Goodsir Rhaig; I have all I need for now.”

9

That night, back at the Embassy, Cort sat on the edge of her bed that was the only item of furniture in the small cubicle she had been provided. It was her second set of quarters; the first had been the local equivalent of VIP accommodations, tiny by the standards of some official residences where she’d stayed but downright palatial considering the limited resources available to most first-contact embassies. There was room to pace, a desk, a soft chair, a dry-flotation mattress on the bed, a sleep inducer, full sonics in the bath, and a full-sensory hytex link. She would have been absurdly comfortable there; the inducer alone would have ensured the kind of dreamless full night’s sleep that she rarely achieved in a lifetime of nights too often interrupted by bad dreams and cold sweats. But she had wanted a smaller room with fewer amenities, and had successfully fought Ambassador Lowey’s protests to the effect that an important visitor like her clearly deserved the best.

These second quarters were even smaller than the medical isolation cell provided to Emil Sandburg — the only item of furniture was a bed that folded up into the wall, and the only amenity was a sonic shower tucked away in one corner. The idea of pacing, in that small amount of floor space that remained, was a joke; any observer would have thought she was merely spinning in circles. It was very much like being in prison, which was precisely what Cort liked most about it. Let other VIPs have rooms large enough to get lost in. Cort didn’t approve of rooms she could get lost in any more than she approved of planets. Quarters this small reduced everything to its bare minimum: herself, and her task. As far as she was concerned, there was nothing more. Everything else was static, and an invitation to unwanted dreams.

She’d rejected an invitation to dinner with Lowrey and the rest of his command staff, eating in the room as she pored over the life story of Emil Sandburg. It was, strictly speaking, irrelevant to the case she was putting together — interspecies law didn’t allow for sympathy based on cruel childhoods — but it provided an interesting picture. Or rather, the lack of one.

His parents were nonentities, zeroes in political affiliation, religious background, and lateral economic movement. He had gone through thirteen years of schooling without distinguishing himself in the locally mandated intelligence tests, personality profiles, socialization ratings and emotional intelligence scores. None of the tests had indicated either antisocial activity or any kind of personality at all. His Dip Corps Psych Evaluation described him as dull and humorless but worth signing because of a compensatory drive to succeed; it was even noted that he wouldn’t be popular among his fellow indentures but wouldn’t be a noticeable irritant either. (It was, she noted with grim humor, pretty much what the same required evaluation had said about her.) There had been no sign of murderous tendencies or the arrogance he had shown in his meeting with Cort. Maybe he’d been repressing his true personality. Or maybe the personality he showed now was the put-on…? Maybe he enjoyed being a monster?

It was not a point of view she could share; being a monster had blighted her life. But then her monstrousness had come early, reducing everything she’d done since to expiation. Sandburg’s monstrousness — or at least, the discovery of it — had come late, as if it was something he’d needed to work hard to achieve. Maybe he saw it as an accomplishment, something to be proud of…?

Something resonated there. She flagged the question for later perusal.

From there she moved on to historical and legal precedent, examining the stories of historical crimes against natives on a flat view image projected against the plain white wall. She went back centuries, back to the old single-system days, even back to the single-planet days, and was depressed by just how many there were, though there were of course many more in the days when the Confederacy was still trying to be a colonial power, and understanding the aboriginals was not nearly as great a priority as making sure they were subjugated. It was such a litany of human madness that it made even Cort, who was already familiar with much of it, nauseated at the sheer waste.

Habit, and masochism, led her to call up the well-worn story about the massacres at Bocai. It was an old tale, and one she knew by heart; she didn’t need to read the file. But she did spend some time examining the one image known to have survived the event: a still shot of the ragged survivors being loaded into a rescue shuttle. It was not the best neurec image of all time: a poor signal had blurred the captured memory and turned the finer details into mush. But even so, it was easy to tell that the survivors were traumatized to the edge of sanity; their faces looked vacant, uncomprehending. One, a little girl who stood alone by the edge of the frame, staring at nothing, had pale eyes old enough to have witnessed the shattering of worlds.

Don’t trust anything sentient, she thought.

Then the hytex image scrambled with a voice message that the Ambassador needed to see her in his office immediately.

She found him dressed for bed and pacing in circles like a man who believed the floor to be mined and who was so irritated at the inconvenience that he was trying to set one off just for spite. He had worked himself into serious frenzy; his forehead was a spotlight, and his hair an explosion of greasy thickets. Whalekiller, who must have caught some of the shrapnel already, stood just outside Lowery’s orbit, studying the floor so intently that he might have subscribed to the mine theory himself.

The Ambassador stopped in mid-circle the instant he saw Cort. He glared at her, his eyes round, his face the color of blood. “Counselor. I was assured that you were good at your job. I was told that you were a professional.”

Cort answered with perfect calm. “I am.”

“I just spent the last three-quarters of an hour calming the Tchi Ambassador. He says you threatened violence against their man Rhaig. Is it typical Tchi bullshit or is he telling the truth?”

“He might think he is,” Cort said.

That broadsided Lowrey; clearly, he’d expected a flat denial. He approached and faced her from less than a meter away. “And just what the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that since their Ambassador wasn’t personally present when we met with Rhaig, he only knows what Rhaig told him. He might not be a part of the lie.”

Lowrey studied her eyes as if expecting the answer to scroll across them in readable type. “Rhaig says you threatened to punch him.”

“I did not. I just presented a hypothetical first-contact situation that included me punching him in the face. I never said that I intended to do it, or even that I wanted to. I just used it to set up my question.”

Lowrey’s cheeks twitched. “Rhaig says that you were trying to intimidate him into ceasing his support of the Catarkhans.”

“Rhaig has yet to accomplish one damn thing for the Catarkhans. And he was sitting next to another member of the Tchi delegation who had absolutely no trouble understanding the difference between a hypothetical question and a genuine threat.”

Lowrey’s anger was fading, now; but like most people who have felt anger slipping away, he used the tools he had to try to prevent it from leaving. “He says Dr. Vayl will testify for him.”

Cort met his look with a far steadier one. “I’m not fond of the Tchi. But unless I hear that from Dr. Vayl himself, who I would consider a reliable witness, I would have to consider the Counselor a bigot, a paranoid and a liar.”

“The Ambassador absorbed that, then gave a barely perceptible nod and retreated to the safety of his desk, collapsing in his seat with the suddenness of a man yanked down by invisible strings. “Shit,” he said, patting the desktop. “Shit. Shit. Shit.” And then, several seconds afterward: “Shit.” The bluster of a few seconds earlier was completely gone now, replaced with a weariness so palpable it seemed to be what he had instead of blood. His features sagged, and his eyes aged about ten thousand years, and he said, “Do you know why the Dip Corps assigned me to this place, Counsellor? Not because I’m good at first contact; I’m not. I never have been. They gave me this job because seniority demanded it. They figured I couldn’t mess things up too badly on a planet of beings blind, deaf, and dumb. Nobody saw how I could possibly manage a diplomatic incident out of that. Nobody ever thought that anything on this rock could possibly be that important.” He sighed. “But one thing even I know is that if you don’t know how alien cultures think, you run the risk of making matters worse.”

Cort moved to one of the chairs and sat down. “With all due respect, sir, I’ve spent my career arbitrating legal disputes with alien cultures. And I strongly suspect this particular misinterpretation has less to do with Counsellor Rhaig being a Tchi than it does with Counsellor Rhaig being a flaming asshole.”

Forgotten in his corner of the room, Whalekiller tried very hard to stifle a laugh.

Lowrey, shooting him a look, and trying equally hard to remain stern when his own ability to maintain a straight face hung by a thread, said: “He’s going to hurt us for this, Counselor. He’s going to demand sanctions.”

“Not a loss, sir. He was going to try to do that anyway. He had it planned when he got here. It’s his agenda. He practically admitted as much – he’s thrown in with those who want us censured and crippled by a total diplomatic quarantine. Unless I’m wrong, he really believes he can use this situation to cut us off from all influence in matters of interspecies policy.”

Lowrey blanched. “And can he?”

“Of course not. It’ss a fringe-group opinion; he doesn’t have nearly enough influence, even among his own people, to push through what would essentially be an act of war. He can only use our failure here — if we fail — to build some additional support for his cause. And I won’t let him, because I have no intention of failing. I’m going to make justice happen here, whether the Catarkhans are capable of providing it or not.”

Lowrey almost looked afraid, now; he wore the same paralyzed-rabbit expression that his indentures had shown during this morning’s briefing. “I think you’re taking bigger risks than you think. He’s got more influence than you think.”

“Then it’s twice as important to settle this. And I intend to.”

The Ambassador sighed, linked his fingertips, and examined her like a man who had just boarded a ride he couldn’t leave. “How?”

She turned toward Whalekiller. “Something you said earlier — about the Catarkhans not having many contagious diseases.”

“That’s right. They’re very simple organisms, on a cellular level. They—”

“I don’t need that much detail. It just occurs to me that saying they don’t have many contagious diseases is another way of saying that they do have some.”

Whalekiller immediately looked wary. “And?”

“Any fatal ones?”

We’ve catalogued a few. “Why?”

“I want to see what Catarkhans do when they’re dying.”

10

The void the skimmer travelled was not the vacuum of space, but it could have been. It was night on a world without artificial light, a condition that rendered the landscape below them effectively invisible; it was a stabilized vehicle so unbuffeted by local weather conditions she could pretend she wasn’t moving at all; it was filled with air so filtered that even her hypersensitive nose couldn’t discern any of the annoying local smells. Cort found that comforting, in a way: but for the trace level of unease she always felt in the presence of other sentients, it was pleasantly like being safe in an egg. It was amazing, she thought, just how much the absence of anything involving planets or other people improved the general ambience of things.

Whalekiller naturally did his best to disrupt that ambience, banging around an equipment locker in the rear of the skimmer as if all human civilization depended on his ability to make percussion noises with every tool in his inventory. Worse, he insisted on chatting: “I know it’s night here, but we’re going to make things easy on ourselves. We’re going to hop hemispheres, pick a hive someplace where its mid-day.”

“Fine,” said Cort.

“It really doesn’t matter one way or the other, of course. There’s no natural light underground; wherever we go, we’ll still have to carry in helmet lights. But most people exploring downside feel more comfortable knowing that there’s still a sun burning somewhere up above.” More clanking and clanging; a muffled curse. “I don’t know why that is. Psychological, I suppose.”

“Fine,” Cort said again.

Whalekiller backed out on his hands and knees. Then he sealed the locker, stood, arched his back in a manner that suggested a dedicated project to realign each and every vertebra, then collapsed into the seat beside Cort. Collapsed was the precise word; he didn’t so much lower himself into the chair as permit gravity to pull him there. His weariness showed in the dark circles lining his eyes. “Of course, waiting till tomorrow would have been good, too.:

“Sorry. I figured we were up anyway. Might as well get the job done.”

“Up and exhausted, and the job could have waited. Or don’t you ever sleep?”

“As little as possible,” Cort said.

“Bad dreams?”

“Better things to do.”

He accepted that, and pretended to consult the display, which was now projecting a miniature topographical map of the dark regions passing by far below. With the course laid in, the map was a best a formality, designed to provide a pilot the illusion of having something to do with controlling the vehicle; it was rendered even more irrelevant by the exaggerated vertical scale, a sop to clarity that turned even the gentlest foothills into jagged Himalayan spires. As a navigation resource, it was next to useless; as reassurance that the vehicle remained in charge, it was invaluable. But Whalekiller’s expression as he regarded it seemed lost in more ways than one…and more tired than mere physical weariness could have accounted for.

He didn’t look at her when he said it. “Bocai, right?”

A lump of molten lead, composed of equal parts anger, embarrassment, shame, and fear, materialized all at once in the center of her chest. She wanted to kill him. “You’ve been investigating me.”

He still wouldn’t face her, so deeply engaged in the navigation display that it might have been offering him a life-sized landscape in which to hide. “It didn’t take much, Counselor. I didn’t have to read anything classified. It’s all in your Dip Corps profile — maybe a couple of levels deeper than most searches would penetrate, but nevertheless available for any sufficiently interested person to find.”

“Nobody invited you to be interested.”

Whalekiller’s eyes flickered toward her. “I’m an exopsychologist. Poking my nose into alien minds is what I do.”

Cort felt more violated with every word he spoke. “I’m not an alien, mister. And I’m not a mystery put here for you to solve.”

He looked at her, and though his own eyes were as dry as hers, the sadness she saw there seemed, like hers, far too great to have accumulated in only one lifetime. “Everybody’s an alien, Counsellor. And everybody’s a mystery. We weren’t necessarily put here to understand — but we were sure as hell put here to try.” He let that hang for a heartbeat, as if believing that it might be enough — then apparently saw that it wasn’t, and shrugged, providing the ultimate inexpressive gesture for the ultimate inexpressive moment. He regarded the navy display again, and said: “It makes no sense. Two small communities. One human, one indigenous sentient. Living together, in a remote region of the indigenes’ homeworld, in what seems like perfect harmony for twenty years. The two species trading, communicating, participating in each other’s festivals, so psychologically compatible that they fool themselves into believing they’re also psychologically identical. So pleased with how they get along that two families, acting with the approval of their respective leaders, experiment with raising each others’ young.

And then, with no warning…: He shook his head. “Do you even remember what set it off? What would make both sides go after each other with such hatred? And why would…”

She cut him off with the most acidic voice she could muster. “I’ve answered these questions before, Bondsman.”

But Whalekiller remained unfazed. “You’ve said you don’t remember. From what I could see, none of the other survivors did, either. Oh, they told plenty of horror stories about what the Bocai did to the humans, and what the humans did to the Bocai…but nobody’s ever said word one about what started the killing. Nobody’s even come up with a workable theory. All I can tell is that one little girl with one foot in both worlds walked away saying she hated humans and Riirgaans both. That she would never trust sentients again.” He looked away from the navscreen, and bored his eyes into hers. “It’s what you said to me. You’re a bigger mystery than Sandburg, you know that?”

“I was eight years old,” she said, hating the defensiveness that always came over her whenever she was questioned about the hated summer. “It was a long time ago.”

“No, it wasn’t. I just have to look at you to know it’s still happening.”

Cort wanted to rip the prying son of a bitch a new asshole, but for the life of her she couldn’t think of anything to say.

He astonished her with what he said next: “You’d be surprised how much we have in common…”

11

The hive Whalekiller had selected (Calcutta, he said), was nestled in a chain of remote rust-colored hills somewhere in the temperate band of Catarkhus’s southern hemisphere. It occupied pebbly ground that crunched with every step they took — the kind of terrain that would have rendered stealth impossible on any world where the deafness of the natives wouldn’t have rendered stealth irrelevant. The vegetation was so sparse and scrubby it seemed to have established a toehold here out of obstinacy alone.The main entrance to the Catarkhan hive was a spiral funnel, sinking diagonally into the earth. There were a handful of Catarkhan footprints near the entrance, but otherwise no sign that anything lived below.

Cort hesitated when, taking her first step into the tunnel, she sank up to her ankles into soft sand, considerably more yielding than the desert terrain she had just left. She was not yet ready to forgive Whalekiller enough to speak to him, but necessity obliged her: “Just how stable is this place?”

Whalekiller saw she was about to stumble, and steadied her with a tug on her upper arm. “Very stable, Counselor. The walls aren’t made of this stuff, fortunately; they would collapse in a second if they were. This is just flooring the Catarkhans carry from a sand quarry about seven klicks away. The walls themselves come from some tougher kind of gravel the locals gather somewhere else; they do something biological to it that makes it liquify into a kind of malleable cement. It’s an entirely different kind of construction than that used by their cousins in the other hive I showed you — but that was half a world away, where they have a different set of raw materials.”

She pulled free of Whalekiller, tested her footing with another step, and decided that it seemed safe enough, if a clumsy medium for human feet. Several steps further in, her eyes narrowed: “So their behavior isn’t all hardwired, after all.”

“Not entirely. They’re sentient, after all; they can override instinct when they absolutely have to. But it’s not so much creative thinking or the ability to learn as it is a facility for rewriting survival behaviors on a group-by group basis. For instance, the guys down here don’t have any decent farmland, like their cousins up north; they’d starve if they tried to support themselves that way. So they subsist on some kind of foul-smelling yeasty stuff they cultivate in ground water cisterns about half a kilometer straight down. Itís nasty, but it sustains life.”

“Which shows a certain degree of adaptability,” Cort said.

“Within a very narrow range. If you took a bunch of random Catarkhans from this hive and transplanted them to the location I showed you before, most of them would starve to death; a few of them would rewrite their personal software to match the new paradigm, and thrive up there while becoming totally helpless here. None of that equips them to deal with a truly random factor, like a cave-in, an offworld maniac cutting them up for fun, or…”

“Jury duty,” Cort said.

He nodded. “Yes.”

It was, after all, the problem at hand.

They descended deeper into the hive, leaving even the ghost of daylight. Their portable lights provided poor alternative. They were bright enough, but something about the congealed stone burrows openly rejected illumination; the little circles of daylight Whalekiller and Cort carried with them seemed tentative and afraid in this place, as if recognizing how unwelcome they were and unwilling to completely banish the darkest of the shadows. Things didn’t get any better when Whalekiller and Cort travelled far enough to encounter their first residents, a parade of Catarkhans who marched along in single file, intent on their robotic errand and oblivious of the two invaders who had just landed in their midst.

“This is as close to the surface as these guys usually get,” Whalekiller explained. “No topside farms to tend. They’ll go up for building materials, but not for much more than that. I’d call it a cultural difference if I was willing to think culture had anything to do with it.”

Cort considered just how often the various diplomats here were reduced to disparaging the limitations of the natives. She didn’t blame them; the more she heard about this species, the more she found herself thinking of them as a locked door with no available key.

They descended still further, into realms where the air started to deteriorate. They passed more Catarkhans conducting errands, immobile Catarkhans who seemed to be sleeping, and communicating Catarkhans who knelt funnel-face to funnel-face, linking the cilia on their lower legs. Every pair of communicating Catarkhans she encountered looked like every other pair; she knew she’d been assured how intricate and complex their conversations were, but there was nothing else in the Catarkhan demeanor to provide a context capable of allowing her human eyes to see those conversations as prayers, negotiations, ironic banter, dirty jokes, heated arguments, or any combination of the above. Still, the stiff robotic regimentation she had encountered on the upper levels seemed absent in those encounters; whatever these particular Catarkhans might have been saying, they were in the residential district, and they gave the impression of being at leisure. That might not have been recognizable sentience, but it was a start.

“I call this the Main Boulevard,” Whalekiller said. “It’s a section common to most hives, where they have what passes for their social life.”

“When do we find a dying one?” Cort asked.

“It’s not all that easy, most hives. Like I said before, Catarkhans don’t seem to get sick much; disease isn’t totally unheard-of, but they usually just wear out when they get too old.”

“And this hive is different?”

“Yep. The stuff these particular folks cook in the cisterns has a tendency to turn septic if allowed to sit too long. They’re susceptible to the infections. The death rate here is much higher here than anything you’d find elsewhere on-world. As it happens, I’ve been here a few times and I’ve seen what they do to the afflicted. — Down this way.”

Whalekiller led her through another series of tunnels. The Catarkhan traffic, crowded in the busier sections of the hive, here grew sparse, then nonexistent. The air got worse, and they switched to oxygen distillers, with masks worn over nose and mouth. They descended another set of tunnels; a nearly vertical shaft they had to descend on ropes. Cort reeled, wondering just how far the hive extended, and how it endured the weight of all the earth pressing down upon it. But just as she began to doubt that Whalekiller really knew where he was leading her, they came to the place he called The Sick Ward.

12

It was a long, narrow chamber stuffed with a huge writhing sea of Catarkhans giving their all for the right to occupy the same space at the same time. They all wanted to be at the center; they all wanted to be surrounded by all the others. The result was a lot like watching maggots swarm over something recently dead; there were so many of them, in such a constricted space, that they literally swam in a sea of each other’s bodies, submerging when they could, emerging when the struggle taking place all around them ejected them from the composite body mass. Some of those she saw on the surface were clearly dead, but she couldn’t keep her eyes off one twitching specimen whose limbs had been broken by the eternal struggle. Constantly hurled free of the fight, he just as constantly struggled back, managing a return to the sick ward only to be fling free once again.

Andrea Cort had seen sentient beings slaughter each other. She had seen people she loved, meaning only to protect her, commit acts that had poisoned the very memory of their faces. She had visited worlds wracked by poverty, and worlds where war and starvation and disease had ripped across entire populations in waves, leaving hollow-eyed survivors whose only deliverance was to stand weak and defenseless against whatever came next. She had hardened her skin in a vain attempt to become unshockable, but she had found that there were always fresh horrors capable of touching the soft spots between the scabs. This was one of them. “What are they doing?”

“Are you all right?”

“No, I’m not. What are they doing?”

“Quarantining themselves. There’s almost no infectious disease among the Catarkhans — they seem largely immune to it, and most of the researchers here have never seen any — but what little they do have prompts a quarantine response. Most of the hives we’ve explored have a special chamber set aside for just that purpose; we don’t usually find more than three or four residents. Sometimes they get better, and rejoin the hive; sometimes they die, only to be walled in where they drop.”

“But that’s not the way it’s working here.”

“Clearly,” Whalekiller said. “No, unfortunately for these fellas, the little food-poisoning problem of theirs activates the quarantining instinct — and they’re too ruled by their hardwiring to build larger chambers for increased demand. They’ll keep jamming themselves into this space until they reduce each other to fruit squeezed of its juice.”

Cort winced at the phrase. “It’s horrible.”

“It’s the way they are.”

She watched a little while longer and wondered whether she should revise her feelings about sentience. True, it offered tremendous capacity for evil and madness; it was the soil which nurtured tragedies like Vlhan and Bocai; but instinct, raw robotic instinct, was potentially even worse. Instinct could never be reasoned with. Worse still was the idea of sentient creatures so chained by instinct that they were incapable of ever making any decisions for themselves. She didn’t want to know if the Catarkhans before her now had any idea what they were doing; both possibilities struck her as equally terrible.

“What happens if there’s an infected Catarkhan too sick to move?”

“They tend to realize they’re sick before they show symptoms. But if they don’t come down here on their own, they get dragged or carried.”

She found herself focusing on one Catarkhan in particular - an emaciated, bloody thing with only three functioning limbs out of the original six, the others so bloodied and broken that they hung from its torso like flexible ropes. Banished by weakness to the outer edges of the sick ward, unable to fight its way deeper into the place where it was obliged to lie down and die, it seemed to be spending most of its passage from this life stumbling, falling over, struggling to stand, attacking the wall of writhing bodies, and then stumbling once again. It was pathetic and it was trapped and it was incapable of giving up, even when another of its limbs snapped, and it fell back, twitching and trembling and gathering up the will for another go.

Surprising herself, Cort bolted from Whalekiller’s side, seized the prone Catarkhan by its hindlimbs, and began to drag it away from the riot at the threshold to the Sick Ward. As if in protest, it dug two of its forelimbs into the tunnel floor, clawing deep gouges in the sand as she pulled it farther from the impossible destination its hardwiring demanded. The gesture seemed less reluctance than reflex. Beyond that, the Catarkhan didn’t particularly seem to mind; it didn’t struggle or grow frantic or slash at her in its eagerness to escape. It just continued trying to crawl forward, with a typical Catarkhan lack of awareness that anything was interfering with its progress.

Whalekiller rushed to her side and grabbed the Catarkhan too. “Please tell me what you think you’ re doing.”

“I’m taking a look,” Cort said.

“You don’t actually think you can help this guy? —Look at him. He’s holding on to life like it’s just a bad habit he’s ready to drop.”

“I see that,” Cort said. “But hold on to him anyway. I want to figure out something. She passed the Catarkhan’s hind legs to Whalekiller, then scrambled around its body to face the hollow, unmoving funnel up front. Even now, after years of dealing with aliens, after a career spent teaching herself that facial expressions were just illusory anthropomorphic structures that couldn’t even be considered reliable windows to the soul on human beings, and meant even less when used to judge sentients from elsewhere, she found herself searching that eyeless noseless faceless face for how it regarded such a violation. She waved that thought away and grabbed the edges of its funnel-mouth with both hands.

Whalekiller held the Catarkhan in place with no difficulty. “Again, Counselor: what are you doing?”

“Taking a message.”

The cilia at the edges of the creature’s funnel-mouth were slimy with blood and other bodily excretions, and gritty with sand from the tunnel floor. She thought of human equivalents and gagged, but brushed her hands through the little undulating fingers anyway. She circled the funnel-mouth twice, then knelt, grabbed the forelimbs seeking purchase in the sand. and brushed her hands through the limb cilia as well. They were if anything even more moist; when she pulled her hands away, her gloves glistened in the glow of Whalekiller’s lamp. So did Whalekiller’s.

Then she stood, and stepped out of the way. “I’m done. You can let it go, now.”

Whalekiller released the Catarkhan’s hindlegs. It hit the ground and immediately began to thrash its broken limbs, struggling with every ounce of strength in its possession to reach the Sick Ward that had expelled it so many times. At its current speed and apparent stamina, it might have managed to get there in an hour or so; Cort was not willing to place any bets about the journey being at all worth the effort. She said, “I really do wish there was something we could do for him. For all of them.”

Joining her, Whalekiller said: “You’ve already been given one impossible job on this planet. You don’t really want to try for two.”

“It doesn’t stop me from wanting it, “she said, with sadness so palpable that her voice cracked from the weight of it. “I don’t like death.”

“I don’t either,” he said — and the sympathy in his voice, while real, was like a knife cutting into old wounds. “But sometimes, if you’ve seen enough of it, you stop feeling it. It was like that where I came from. And down here, with the Catarkhans, you get clinical. You stop feeling. There’s a—”

“Get me the hell out of here,” she said, cutting him off.

He blinked, taken off guard by the return of the iron in her voice. For a moment, he looked like he was going to insist on showering her with his empathy. But then he straightened, nodded, and began the task of leading her out.

But then they were attacked by Catarkhans on their way out.

13

Both before and after Mankind met its first alien sentients, Hom.Sap popular culture was filled with scenarios where heroic human protagonists withstood assault by wave after wave of marauding monsters.

All of those scenarios presupposed that the marauding monsters in question would be dangerous in some way.

Cort and Whalekiller were several minutes into this attack before either one of them realized that the Catarkhans were not just blindly blundering into them by accident, but ramming them with deliberate intent. The Catarkhans moved so slowly it was more like an organized jostling than a riot. It caused the two humans no damage whatsoever, and rendered escaping the hive just like struggling through any other large crowd. The greatest hardship Cort and Whalekiller suffered was tempering the force of their own struggle to escape enough to avoid doing the delicate Catarkhans any harm.

Whalekiller said: “I don’t believe this. They’ve noticed us.”

Cort had suspected they might. “We can get past them, right?”

“I don’t think getting past them will be our biggest problem.”

A Catarkhan rammed its head into Whalekiller’s chest, not inconveniencing him at all. Another grabbed hold of his arm and tugged; he flexed, and easily lifted the feeble creature off the ground. It lost hold and tumbled to the tunnel floor in a scramble of arms of legs, with still more Catarkhans, moving no faster than molasses, already scrambling over its body for another attack. He pressed himself against a tunnel wall and said: “You get it? We’re like heroes out of myth in here. As long as the tunnel prevents them from coming after us in numbers, we can knock down hundreds of these guys. The problems going to be getting past them without harming any. Kill one, and we start sharing a cell with Sandburg.”

“That would amuse him,” Cort said.

“Yeah, well, amusing multiple murderers is not one of my life’s greatest ambitions.”

They inched along the wall, all but impervious to the assaults of Catarkhans trying to drive them back by the sheer weight of their massed bodies. Slow as they were, the Catarkhans seemed frantic, even desperate — maddened by the need to keep the two humans from leaving; but it might have been an attack by origami animals, incapable of wreaking harm despite all the ferocity they could muster. Cort had a memory-flash of the massacres at Bocai, but the thought was a mere reflex, with no real weight behind it. At Bocai, two species of equivalent strength had turned upon each other in spasms of equivalent madness; the war had been like many wars, filled with hundreds of life-or-death dramas where the only real factor in who lived and who died had been who was fast enough to strike the killing blow first. This was something else. This was total war fought against a blind enemy that possessed all the strength of a soft breeze brushing against exposed skin. This was not violence, so much as delusion.

Then one of the Catarkhans, launching itself against Whalekiller, scraped a forelimb against his face. He yowled, shoved it aside, and fell back, clutching at his eyes. “Shit!”

“What happened?”

“Lucky shot — poked my eye. Bastard could have blinded me if it had known what it was doing. Hurts like hell.”

“You all right?”

“Can’t see out of the thing, if that’s what you mean! Watch your face!”

The Catarkhans swarmed even more thickly now, clogging the tunnel up ahead, forming a wall of their own bodies. There was no question of ever being able to get past them now — not without smashing their fragile forms to pieces. It was still more comical than frightening; Cort couldn’t look at the way their funnels craned toward the two humans without picturing an orchestra filled with angry trumpets. She had the crazy thought that if all those musical instruments blared at once, they’d all play a single note with perfect pitch — one so distinguished by its absolute clarity that it would explain everything all the exolinguists assigned to the world had never been able to understand. But the thought died, replaced by another: that if the silent Catarkhans had been able to make any noise at all, they would have been screeching with rage.

These Catarkhans hated them. As intruders.

Or as invisible demons.

She shouted: “Fall back! Get to the Sick Ward!”

“We’ll be trapped in there!”

“That’s the point! Do it!”

Whalekiller would have argued, but the wall of bodies the Catarkhans had built to prevent him from moving further down the tunnel had transformed from a wall to a tidal wave, breaking down on top of him. It was still like being pelted with creatures made of paper, but he was being buried in them, and their sheer persistence was driving him back anyway. He cursed, reached for Cort, found her hand, and allowed her to pull him out of the densest part of the Catarkhan mob, and back toward the Sick Ward. The Catarkhans who had driven them back followed, but not in the manner of creatures who wanted to overtake them; rather, they were more like shepherds herding a wayward flock back into a pen. Whalekiller and Cort outdistanced them with ease.

Whalekiller, still holding his eye, grunted in fresh dismay.

“What?” Cort asked.

“I think the little fuck blinded me.”

“That can be fixed.” Even with the eye a complete loss, the Embassy clinic could grow a new one overnight.

“But it still hurts like hell,” he said. It didn’t need to be said; his walk had become an agonized lurch, dependent on Cort’s support.

They descended closer to the side-tunnel that housed the Sick Ward. Their pursuers fell back, giving them room, leaving them alone as long as they continued their retreat. At one point Whalekiller’s knees buckled; Catarkhan shadows loomed on all sides; Cort forced him back to his feet and pulled him further along the tunnel; the shadows retreated. It was hard to tell, when Catarkhan fury was so hard to discern, but what there was calmed to something like casual interest.

Just outside the Sick Ward, only a few meters from the site where dying Catarkhans fought to bury themselves in the bodies of other dying Catarkhans, she and Whalekiller sank to the tunnel floor, their breaths reduced to ragged gasps.

“Just…my luck,” he managed. “Hundreds…of diplomats…running all…over this…mudball…without ever…getting noticed…and I happen…to be the bastard…who…finally…makes contact…”

Cort lurched to her feet, wobbled, held her head, and faced the threshold, where dozens of ailing Catarkhans warred to fit themselves into a space too small to accommodate them. Their bodies, illuminated by her helmet lights, glistened with the blood pouring from their wounds they had inflicted upon each other fighting in that pointless war. The ground beneath them was sodden with it. She focused on that blood now, forcing herself to remember a similar sea of spilled blood; it would have been just another pointless way to upset herself, had she not wanted to be upset, had she not needed the strength that came from being angry. “Have you been able to call for a rescue team?”

Whalekiller tapped his throat mike. “Doing it now.” Two minutes of anguished subvocalization later, he reported: “ETA three hours, if Lowrey…can scramble his team quickly. Maybe less than that…if one of the alien field teams intercept. We’ll be okay if the bugs don’t swarm us again.”

“They won’t,” she said. “Tell them to bring isolation suits and we’ll be okay getting out, too.”

He froze then, regarding her for long minutes through his one intact eye. The look was cold, appraising, and a churning cauldron of emotions ranging from pity to disgust; the kind of look one gives other human beings only after deciding that they are not human beings after all, but representatives of an older and more predatory species that should have died out before the first human beings carved the first club out of bone.

Cort had no trouble facing that expression, mostly because she’d been encountering it, off and on, for most of her life. She’d first seen it in a rescue worker’s eyes when she was eight years old. She couldn’t pretend it didn’t bother her. But it was what she had to work with.

Whalekiller’s voice was hurt, betrayed. “You knew this would happen, didn’t you? You expected it.”

“I expected something like it. It solves a lot of problems.”

“And you didn’t let me in on it?”

“I wasn’t sure,” she said. “And I didn’t want to be wrong.”

He grimaced, more out of revulsion than pain, but relayed the message.

She sat down again, her back to the tunnel wall, descending into a silence disturbed only by the sound of Catarkhans, mobbing each other for the right to die in splendid quarantine.

14

The Catarkhans didn’t bother them again. As long as the two humans stayed within a certain distance of the Sick Ward, they were left alone, to stew in their separate flavors of misery.

Whalekiller was silent at first, but when he injected himself with an anesthetic to dull the pain, it made hash of his prior decision to ostracize her. It didn’t put him out, or render him any less rational, but it did unleash a flow of words, and gave them a distracted, otherworldly quality, like dispatches from another country so distant that its nature was of interest to serious scholars only. He talked a little about his homeworld, Greeve, a place so dominated by ocean that only a few speckled islands emerged above the usually placid surface; and about his name, a reference to the massive ocean-dwelling beasts who occasionally entered the shallows long enough to provide the colonists there with the one source of food they didn’t have to synthesize, grow themselves, or import from somewhere offworld. Perhaps because his tongue had been loosened by the neural block, or perhaps because he couldn’t forget that he was in the presence of a Dip Corps advocate, he told her about twenty times that these whales had been named for their extinct terrestrial counterpart only because of their physical resemblance. They were not sentient. They were not even possibly sentient. They were not endangered. They were not even close to endangered. Harvesting them was not a crime. They were mobile meat. They were nothing more.

He was innocent. He was. They all were. Greeve was a good place: a paradise. Really.

But then the non-sentient classification had been challenged in the light of new evidence — and it now seemed clear that the whale hunting on Greeve had been another in a long line of Hom.Sap crimes against thinking beings.

“I didn’t know,” Whalekiller murmured. And then, “It was my home.”

She didn’t point out that he had sold himself into the Dip Corps to escape it. She had no business criticizing; in a sense, it had been what she had done, too. She may have been a freewoman, but she had been fleeing her guilt too long to believe that anybody ever truly enjoyed that condition.

At one point during the wait of several hours, Whalekiller said that his injured eye was showing a lot of sensitivity to light. He asked if she had any problems with sitting in the dark a while. She said she had none, and they turned off their lamps. Darkness descended. The sounds of sick and dying Catarkhans mobbing each other at the entrance to the Sick Ward continued; they were moist sounds, violent sounds; sickening sounds. Cort, who was sitting cross-legged against the tunnel wall, immediately found herself covering her ears with both hands, blocking out not the sound of Catarkhan fighting but the even more immediate sound of humans and Bocai tearing each other to pieces in another place, worlds and lifetimes ago.

Whalekiller had been wrong about how much she remembered. She remembered hating them, that’s all. She had been eight years old, and a living symbol of interspecies harmony, and she played with the Bocai young, and she ate at the Bocai feasts, and she amused her human parents with how well she had learned the Bocai songs. She even had a Bocai name, emblem of her honorary adoption into a Bocai family, a name she had impossibly even learned how to speak perfectly, despite the harsh differences between the human and Bocai vocal apparatus, which had always rendered their interspecies parley such a comic-opera litany of malaprops and mispronunciations. She had loved them as much as she had loved her own family and she had been loved as much by them in return, but then she’d hated them. and they had hated her, and she had been too small to participate in the fighting, the killing, the burning, the two-way war of annihilation erupting for no conceivable reason one day like any other. Her father’s head had been smashed to jelly beneath Bocai farming implements suddenly transformed to clubs, her mother had been torn to pieces beneath Bocai hands suddenly transformed into claws. Andrea, too small to participate, and too afraid of the monsters overpowering and destroying her, had hid in a dark alcove, watching, listening, hating, waiting for her moment, emerging only as her Bocai second father crawled away from the fighting, lay there helpless, bleeding, sobbing, helpless. And she had emerged from her little dark place and looked down at the being who had called her his daughter and she had hated him, hated the very idea of him, wanting to expunge him, to erase him, to free the universe of the very idea of his existence. He had pleaded with her, that being, in his last moments. Perhaps the madness that had rocked his people and hers had already passed from him. But it had not passed from her.

After that day, she had wanted no family. Not anymore. She wanted no world. Not anymore. She had wanted no friends. Not anymore. She had harbored no trust for sentients, of any species, not even her own. Not anymore.

She just wanted to fight the monsters.

It was the only way to atone for having been one of them.

She closed her eyes, and pressed her hands harder against her ears, and retreated into a private place where there was no such thing as time or blood until, lifetimes later, she felt something or somebody shaking her by the shoulders. For one terrible instant her heart spasmed in her chest, as she half-expected it to be a Catarkhan, fully aware of her presence, wanting her awake so it could make her pay for the crimes of Emil Sandburg. Or worse, a Bocai, arriving here from across the years, to hold her accountable for the crimes she’d committed once upon a time. But then she opened her eyes and saw that it was neither. It was a Tchi: not one of the ones she’d met so far, but a younger, shorter individual, whose gray eyes had narrowed in frank confusion.

“Are you injured, Counselor?”

She looked past him: saw a petite human woman tending to Whalekiller, a grave Riirgaan staring open-mouthed at the perpetual riot that raged at the mouth of the Sick Ward, and a flatscreen from the AIsource hovering between them, flashing its symbols for fascination and dismay.

The Tchi asked her again: “Are you injured?”

She felt herself twitch at the corners of her mouth. “Not…recently.” Allowing the Tchi to help her to her feet, she said: “And Whalekiller?”

He has sustained an injury to the eye. “Painful, but not as bad as it looks; it will probably not require replacement. He suffers from shock, nothing more.”

“That’s good,” she said, oddly surprised to find that she meant it. “Did they give you any trouble getting this far? The Catarkhans, I mean?”

“The Catarkhans were Catarkhans. They didn’t even notice us. I will be interested in learning why they provided such an impediment to you.”

She said, “They’ll be an impediment again unless you brought isolation suits.”

“Your call for help specified you’d needing them. They’re here.”

“Good,” she said.

The Tchi said, “It will be interesting to see if you’re right.”

“I am,” she said.

She was referring to more than the suits, but she didn’t let him know that.

15

The meeting of the local interspecies council was held five days later.

It was not a trial. Nobody here could have gotten away with calling it a trial. Trials imply the right to hold them. Nobody wanted to call it a hearing either, as even that term seemed to impart official weight to any conclusions it happened to draw. It was a meeting, nothing more.

The Bursteeni, who had discovered and named Catarkhus, as well as the first to suggest that its inhabitants might be sentient, hosted the inquiry in their own Embassy, which they’d constructed in a salt desert. It was a graceless, windowless block with a flat roof and an interior empty enough to qualify as cavernous. There was nothing about it that seemed to reflect the Bursteeni character; they were traditionally lovers of luxury at home and in the field. But here, in their planetary base of operations, they behaved differently; they kept almost no equipment and absolutely no furnishings here, but instead stored the things they really needed at various drop points around the planet, and conducted the day-to-day business of their Embassy at this hall so large it would have seemed almost as empty if it could house everything they possessed. Nobody had been able to explain this to Andrea Cort, who in the end just wrote it off as one of those maddening alien-psychology quirks that, like the mysteries of the Catarkhans themselves, seemed to exist only to twist the brain of human observers into Gordian knots.

Regardless: the site’s nondescript flavor made it infinitely adaptable to any purpose, and therefore perfect for those rare occasions where the various first-contact teams on Catarkhus all needed to meet in one place. Each of the various alien races on-world brought their own native version of furniture to accommodate themselves — the Hom.Saps their functional tables and chairs, the Tchi their imposing portable stages, the Riirgaans their ornately-carved reclining benches, the various other races odder artifacts ranging from hammocks to poles with protrusions to dangle from. The Bursteeni sat on the floor and a flatscreen representative from the AI hovered two meters above it all, its usually-colorful surface now projecting a studiedly neutral black. They were all gathered in an approximate circle, creating an empty stage at the center where the various presentations would be made.

Almost all the human beings on Catarkhus attended, but most of those at the outer fringes of the audience. There were only three people seated at the table provided for the Hom.Sap contingent — Ambassador Lowrey, the fully-healed Roman Whalekiller, and, confined to a paralysis chair for security reasons, the cause of all this bother, Emil Sandburg himself. He managed to look chipper despite his temporary, artificially-induced state of quadriplegia; he was cheerful enough to catch Cortís eye, and smile at her. At that, he was friendlier than Whalekiller, who had refused to accept her visit during his stay at the Embassy Clinic, and had been nothing but chilly and professional to her since his return to duty, eliminating all the affability that had previously made him such a trial for somebody with Cortís reserve.

Cort, who had as per her usual habit rejected a seat of her own, stood by herself until Sandburg winked at her. Then she crossed the stage to stand before him. “Still enjoying yourself, I see.”

Sandburg beamed. It was the look of a man in control, who expected to remain in control. “Why shouldn’t I be? I love theatre.”

“And that’s all this is to you?”

“I’ll be more specific. It’s not just theatre; it’s farce. It’s just a bunch of sentients who wish they could take me out back and shoot me, but are too hamstrung by their own rules to do anything but cluck.”

“You’re not worried, then. You’re that certain the Catarkhans can’t judge you?”

He sneered. “The Catarkhans can’t judge anything.”

She nodded, not because it might have been literally true, but because she recognized the nature of Sandburg’s anger. It crystallized something she’d come to realize about his crimes, something that rendered the most basic assumptions about them a lie.

Whalekiller, who was seated beside Sandburg, grimaced: “There’s that smile again.”

A few days earlier, during her investigation, the words would have reeked of wry affection; now, nothing informed them but resentment.

She confronted it head on. “I’ve got to watch that. I wouldn’t want to get obvious. How’s the eye?”

“Fine. You got this handled?”

“It’s handled,” said Cort.

Lowrey lowered his head and spoke with soft urgency. “It’s not going to be that easy, you know; I’ve been told that Rhaig’s lying in wait for you.”

“We already knew that.”

“We knew his agenda. We also knew that he’s been wanting to politicize this since day one. We suspected, but didn’t know for sure, until now, that he was going to aim much of his attack against you.”

“And how do you know that?”

Wringing his hands so tightly that he might have been trying to remove them at the wrists, Lowrey said, “Rhaig went to the Riirgaans to try to recruit supporters for his side. He figured they’d want to support him; they were after all key in cleaning up the ambassador’s screw-ups during the Vlhani mess. But we still have a supporter or two over there, and one of those called to let us know that he’s ready to cut you off at the knees.”

“So he’s making this about me,” Cort said.

“What else did you expect, when you insulted him to his face?”

And she smiled again, without any warmth at all, making sure it was clearly visible to everybody in sight.

“I expected him to make this about me,” she said.

At precisely the moment the schedule dictated, Mekile Nom of the Bursteeni called the meeting to order by praising every race represented there at excessive length. He was, he assured everybody in turn, a longtime admirer of all their cultures, all their accomplishments, and all their efforts in the allied fields of Exosociology, Exolinguistics, and Exodiplomacy. He praised them further for the spirit of cooperation that occasioned this hearing, expressed his extreme gratification that so many distinguished sentients had chosen to participate, and conveyed his approval of the conclusions that were about to be reached, whatever they were going to turn out to be. He seemed so pleased by the sheer wonderfulness of everything that the hearing might as well have been a party with himself as the guest of honor. That was the Bursteeni; they tended to get carried away with their enthusiasm. By the time Nom relinquished the floor to Cort, so she could give her report, she felt like she’d won half the battle just by curbing the tidal wave of superlatives.

But she had barely begun her first sentence when Rhaig stepped forward and said: “Excuse me — but with all due respect to the purpose that brought us here today, I must raise serious objections to this woman’s presence here.”

The general murmur that greeted this statement was punctuated by a few angry shouts, most of those human. The cries of protest from Ambassador Lowrey were especially loud; unfortunately, so were the hoots of laughter from Emil Sandburg. Cort herself said nothing, content to let the next few seconds play themselves out.

Nom’s face wrinkled with a series of dumbfounded blinks. “Her presence? On the grounds?”

“On the grounds that the real issue here today isn’t the psychological aberration of one diseased individual, but the habitual Hom.Sap arrogance toward less developed peoples.” Rhaig’s words boomed across the chamber, dominating the assemblage despite the dull roar that began to swell before he was even finished with his sentence. He didn’t wait for the tumult to subside, but instead spoke louder, riding out the spectator reaction, beating it down, and finally conquering it. “Justice isn’t about punishing crimes, or even about providing victimized peoples the means to fight for justice; it’s about taking steps to ensure that such crimes never happen again. To do that, in this case, we must recognize where these crimes are coming from. To do that, we must recognize that the human species has been committing such crimes with monotonous regularity since they first climbed down from the trees — and that they haven’t slowed down after finding their way to the stars. It’s a constant, with these people.” He gestured at Andrea Cort. “Even with our colleague, the learned Counselor from the Hom.Sap Confederacy. That’s why I protest her involvement: because she has a history of participating in crimes just as heinous.”

The roar erupted again: a tidal wave of noise, overwhelming the decorum of the proceedings, turning the room into a polyglot of shouted words in a dozen separate languages. Even the AIsource flatscreens, which usually communicated only in raw fact, scrolled their text so frantically that the flashing effect made them seem to be shouting. Andrea Cort, still keeping her own counsel, noted only that Whalekiller was among those shouting…and that the smiling Emil Sandburg was not.

Rhaig continued: “It happened a long time ago, so you might not all know the facts of the case — but many years ago, on a world called Bocai, a small colony of Hom.Sap settlers turned on the indigenes who had been living alongside them in peace with a savagery that outdid anything the demented Mr. Sandburg has done. From all reliable reports, every able human being in the colony participated — even the children — and the peaceful Bocai needed to resort to violence themselves to defend their families. One of the human criminals, caught with Bocai blood beneath her fingernails and between her teeth, was a young child only eight years of age by the human mercantilescale; a child who sane justice would have condemned as a threat to everything to lived, but who was instead rewarded — REWARDED!” he shouted, with sudden rage, “with adoption by the Diplomatic Corps and training in a career with their Judge Advocate! Do we want to honor their hypocrisy by allowing such a creature to speak? Do we?”

The roar that had filled the chamber now engaged in pitched battle with itself, the universal desire to shout louder, to protest louder, to be louder, acting as natural enemy to the simultaneous need to choke back all that noise and hear whatever Andrea Cort had to say in response. Cort did not make the amateur mistake of trying to answer the Tchi’s charges too soon; instead, she just remained silent, her face impassive, her demeanor calm, her attitude that of a woman in no particular hurry to be heard.

It was an open dare to Counsellor Rhaig, to continue haranguing her.

But Rhaig, who had evidently expected the kind of fight that would have permitted him to shout her down, had peaked too early. He had nowhere else to go. He had to fall as silent as everybody else, awaiting either Cortís reaction or the reaction of whoever stepped forward to defend her.

The roar died to a murmur. Then a moment of hoarded breath.

Cort did not rush to fill the silence. She just waited, one two three beats, while the mood of the gathering evolved moved from anticipation to out-and-out worry.

Mekile Nom leaned forward. “Counselor Cort? Do you have any response to that?”

She held the silence one more heartbeat, and said, “Yes.”

She stepped forward, speaking in a soft murmur that commanded attention from all the sentients who otherwise might have been moved to drown her out. “Counselor Rhaig is correct. I was at the Bocai Massacre. I participated in the Bocai Massacre. I—“ She paused to allow the renewed hubbub another second or two to die down. “I was a child at the time. I will further point out that the incident in question involved not one, but two separate communities both erupting in unmotivated violence against each other for no apparent reason. The madness they shared was so savage and so unmotivated that debate has raged for years over the possible existence of an organic or environmental factor beyond their conscious control. No independent investigation has ever succeeded in determining the cause.”

“And their fear of human reprisals had nothing to do with that?” Rhaig said. “Counselor! Really!”

Cort proceeded as if he hadn’t spoken. “If anybody present here today wishes to review the facts to determine whether I’m truly as guilty of great crimes as Counselor Rhaig claims, please feel free. I personally agree with him, and I’ve taken the precaution of sending the full text of the interspecies investigation on Bocai to each of your embassies by hytex. But regardless of how you ultimately judge me, NONE,”she said, repeating the word for emphasis, “NONE of what you decide to believe about me should affect what I came here to say; the facts I offer cannot be changed by the character of the sentient who speaks them. The implication that they might has more to do with Counselor Rhaig’s private agenda, and his own complete shamelessness, than it does with the reason we’re here.”

She let that thought sink in, and scanned the room for reaction; she saw sympathy, disgust, admiration, loathing, anger, and even sheer confusion. But they were all listening. They were, if anything, paying closer attention than they might have if Rhaig hadn’t smeared her. She spotted Mukh’thav among the Riirgaans and Haat Vayl among the Tchi; neither had shown her particular sympathy during their interviews, but they were both rapt as hungry men offered their first meals after long enforced fasts. She glanced at the Hom.Sap contingent next, and saw that (the grinning Sandburg aside) they’d all been affected the same way — but then they couldn’t be blamed for such a reaction after Rhaig had attempted to magnify the issue hero into a judgement on the entire human race. She had their support, for whatever that may have been worth.

She certainly had Whalekiller’s. Though still seated, he resembled a coiled spring about to leap. His eyes flickered toward Rhaig, then caught hers. She could not quite read what she saw there, but anger on her behalf was part of it.

She allowed her lips to twitch, and moved on: “However, one thing Mr. Rhaig said is relevant to my point. He cited what he called the human attitude toward less developed peoples. I liked that phrase. Less developed peoples. It says less about human beings than it does about the assumptions that brought us here today. Our assumptions toward the very people whom this hearing is supposed to be about.” Addressing Rhaig, she asked: “Is it your belief that the Catarkhans are inadequate in some way? That they need to be developed? That they’d be developed, in part, by the ability to communicate with us?”

Rhaig feigned nausea. “The Counselor is twisting my words—”

There was more, but she rode over it, reclaiming the floor as easily as he’d claimed it for his previous attack on her. “I am pointing out that the First Contact Protocols which have served us so ably elsewhere are less than appropriate for this species. As much as all our own races have benefited from our mutual association, from our cultural and technological exchanges, from our free trade and from the opportunity to see existence through differently evolved perspectives, we all should admit that the Catarkhans were doing just fine by themselves before we came along. Maybe all our attempts to contact them have just been an exercise in gratifying our own egos. Maybe we think we can elevate them by finding some way to make them notice us. And that’s not true. We can’t make them notice us. We can only disturb them in ways they’re not evolved to handle.”

“Ways that include murders committed by humans,” Rhaig said.

“By a single diseased human,” Cort said, “but yes. —And what about our insistence on including them in our efforts to seek justice for crimes committed on their soil? It’s well-meaning enough, and it’s perfectly appropriate when we’re dealing with species capable of understanding concepts like crime, but isn’t it perverse to require Catarkhan input when providing input of any kind seems utterly alien to their fundamental nature? Doesn’t that say more about what we need from them, than from what they need from us?”

Rhaig, who had been staring at her throughout her speech, unable to determine where she was going with this, took another shot. “You all see where the Hom.Sap counselor is going with this. She is making excuses…:

“No, I’m not,” she said, with an insistence that immediately shut him up again. She turned as she spoke, addressing all the gathered sentients in turn. “There are no excuses here. I want Mr. Sandburg to face justice as much as you all do. But I’m asking you to recognize that requiring him to be judged by Catarkhan standards is, by definition, requiring them to develop standards. That’s defining them by our rules. That’s denying them protection from people like Mr. Sandburg, because we have trouble living with the awareness that they don’t need the rest of us either. And that,” she said, directing her last words to Mekile Nom, “is a crime, just as surely as anything Mr. Sandburg did.”

That disturbed the little Bursteeni. Silencing Rhaig, who had a no-doubt outraged response to this, with an outstretched hand, he regarded Cort through eyes turned grey with moral exhaustion. “These are not exactly startling arguments,” he said, “and they don’t change anything about the essential problem here. The First Contact Protocols—“

“…don’t apply here,” Cort said.

That caused a stir. A small one, that didn’t even begin to match the response to Rhaigís revelations about her, but a stir nevertheless. All around her, the chamber turned electric with the knowledge of a net about to drawn tight.

Nom, wary but unable to anticipate her intent, said, “The last thing I heard, Counsellor, this was supposed to be a First Contact mission.”

She directed her next words not at the presiding chairman but at the entire chamber: “Then, why, precisely, aren’t there any Catarkhans attending?”

Silence.

“They’re not here,” Cort said, “because it makes no sense for them to be here. They wouldn’t participate. They wouldn’t pay attention. They wouldn’t understand. They wouldn’t care. They wouldn’t even know that any of this was happening. Oh, we could bring some here by force, but they wouldn’t be ambassadors; they’d be prisoners. Or worse — specimens.”

“That doesn’t excuse killing them!” Rhaig shouted.

“No, sir, it does not. But it does change the nature of the crime, and it does simplify the issue of finding justice. It eliminates the need to shackle ourselves with the Protocols for First Contact.”

Rhaig practically exploded at that. “How?”

“The Catarkhans,” she said, smiling broadly now, “have not been contacted.”

16

The pandemonium that followed arrived in slow-motion. It was Nom who got it first. Typically, for a member of his species, he reacted with effusive appreciation, bobbing up and down in his seat like a cork, waggling his fingers with glee. “Oh, very good, andreacort! Very good!” The Hom.Sap contingent erupted with gasps and muttered damns. Emil Sandburg woo-hooed, the AIsource flatscreen flashed A FINE ARGUMENT in Hom.Sap. standard lettering, the Riirgaans exploded with frenzied consultation, and then the shock just rippled through the room in waves, turning the gathering into a babble of voices demanding to know if it could possibly be as simple as all that.

Rhaig attempted to reclaim the floor: “I fail to understand how my colleagues can celebrate such a self-serving Hom.Sap tactic.”

“They celebrate it,” Cort said, “because they felt as trapped by the seeming confines of the law as we did. They knew there was no way Sandburg could be judged by the Catarkhans. They just didn’t see, until now, how we were going to get around that fact.”

“Justice,” Rhaig said, “is not an inconvenience to be…gotten around.”

“Nor is it something to be penned behind false barriers,” Cort said. “That was in danger of happening here. You believed that because you were here on first-contact missions, that this was a first-contact situation — while the facts quite clearly illustrate that it’s nothing of the kind. It can’t be. First contact hasn’t been made yet.”

“I would call murdering sentients in their homes a pretty definitive form of contact, Counsellor.”

“I would, too — but then my human perspective, and your Tchi viewpoint, are both totally beside the point here. That’s why I spent so much time during my investigation consulting so many of you, confirming that Mr. Sandburg’s crimes didn’t constitute a form of contact.” She addressed Rhaig: “Remember, Counselor? When I asked your expert Dr. Vayl if punching you in the face would qualify as a form of communication?” The gathering rippled with laughter, some of it from Dr. Vayl. She continued: “Vayl said yes, even if the differences between our species prevented you from knowing what that punch signified. He said that inflicting pain qualifies as communication. A low form of communication, he said, but communication nevertheless. And I agree, it does. If the Catarkhans victimized by Mr. Sandburg had been able to suffer pain, then the First Contact protocols would be in force now.

“But Dr. Mukh’thav of the Riirgaans assured me that Mr. Sandburg’s crimes, brutal as they were, did not include torture, because it was utterly impossible for the Catarkhans to have felt pain, or even to know what was happening to them. A message may have been sent, all right…but none was received. Therefore, no First Contact.

“I’ll even cite a precedent. There was a case, several years ago, where a starship from a species I won’t name jettisoned waste radioactive waste in an inhabited system. It was a stupid and irresponsible thing to do, and it resulted in serious environmental damage when the waste entered the gravity well of the world with sentient aboriginals. There were arguments, then, that the criminals in question should have be judged by the aboriginals they had so grievously harmed. This would have presented serious difficulties, as there had been no actual physical contact, and explaining the nature of the crime to the aboriginals would have required first making contact, then establishing communication, then explaining radioactivity and space travel to them first. It was judged that the crime itself did not constitute first contact, and that the crime could be dealt with by existing interspecies law. So, too, with this.”

“That was accidental contamination!” Rhaig shouted. “This was deliberate murder! You can’t compare the two!”

“I don’t intend to,” Cort said, “since, as it turns out, assigning jurisdiction doesn’t really matter here anyway. The action we would take if left to ourselves and the action the Catarkhans would take if the question could be put to them are equal.”

Whereupon she told them what they should have known all along.

17

The closing statement of Counsellor Andrea Cort, edited to remove various ineffectual interruptions by the Tchi Gayre Rhaig:

A. CORT: Ironically, even if this hearing eventually finds against this argument, and concludes that the First Contact Protocols still apply in this case — that still has no bearing on what we ought to decide.

Politics aside, interspecies resentments aside, our decision on the matter of Emil Sandburg turns out to be an obvious one; we just haven’t examined the situation closely enough to recognize the inevitable even as it looms before us waiting for us to notice it.

But when the story of this case is told, the students of interstellar law will note that there were really, always, only a limited number of ways we could have dealt with Sandburg.

If you eliminate letting him get away with his crimes — an option we must all as civilized peoples reject with total revulsion — there are, in fact, only three.

We could have judged him by our best approximation of Catarkhan law.

We could have deferred the question, until we were able to establish communication with the Catarkhans and find out for sure what they wanted.

Or we could have judged him by Human law, since Sandburg also broke the laws of the Corps he was supposed to represent.

Three possible approaches.

All equally legitimate; our wrangle over jurisdiction has prevented any one of them from being chosen.

But let us examine their implications.

Deferring judgement would delay this case for years, maybe even lifetimes. Mr. Sandburg would have to be imprisoned until he could be judged. If we never establish contact, it amounts to a life sentence.

This is conveniently enough the same thing human judgment would want.

As for Catarkhan Law, that’s a little more difficult to determine — especially since I’ve been told time and time again that the Catarkhans don’t have laws. But that’s nonsense. They do have laws, and we all know they have laws. They have laws so strict that they never even think of breaking them.

Except we don’t think of them as laws, because we call them instincts instead. They may be hardwired in the genetic code, but they’re definitely rules of conduct — which Catarkhans follow with absolute dedication.

Who ever said we couldn’t consult those laws to see what a Catarkhan would do to somebody like Mr. Sandburg?

We can’t be exact, of course; Catarkhans don’t have murderers. But they do have analogous situations. Specifically, their way of dealing with diseased individuals who threaten the rest of the community. They quarantine such individuals in special chambers where they can’t endanger the rest of the hive with their sickness. They keep those individuals imprisoned as long as the threat remains real. Of course, sick Catarkhans quarantine themselves voluntarily — but, as I recently arranged for Mr. Whalekiller and myself to confirm, when we saturated ourselves with the secretions of one desperately ill individual, sick Catarkhans who don’t quarantine themselves have quarantine forced upon them by the rest of the community. In short, they’re isolated until the illness runs its course, or until they die…whichever comes first.

Mr. Sandburg is a diseased individual whose presence threatens the rest of his community. By human law, he should be imprisoned; by Catarkhan law, he should be quarantined. The difference between that and the human solution is a semantic one, but this is a diplomatic issue; we’re willing to use the word you prefer.

That’s what I meant when I said it doesn’t matter. Because we were all in perfect agreement all along. We just weren’t paying enough attention to see it.

18

The Council went for it, of course. They had no other choice; denying her logic would have meant perpetuating the deadlock that prevented Sandburg from being tried. Nobody wanted that, not even those who would have preferred to keep the shame on Mankind’s shoulders.

The Cort Compromise, as it would come to be called, would be painted a triumph of interspecies diplomacy; her argument would be quoted, analyzed, fussed over, and dissected long after the words themselves became dead things, drained of meaning by their very overuse. In the years to come, they would even be abused, by advocates seeking to overturn local sovereignty in cases of crimes committed by off-worlders; they were applied, with questionable accuracy, to cases of crimes committed against locals far more receptive to communication than the Catarkhans. Andrea Cort’s precedent was as vilified in those cases as it was praised now.

In a subsequent hearing, the Interspecies Council ruled in favor of life imprisonment for Emil Sandburg, that sentence subject to future alteration by Catarkhan authorities — a circumstance that, given the apparent impossibility of communicating with Catarkhan authorities, nobody really expected. Arrangements were made for Sandburg’s transport to a maximum-security facility on New Pylthothus, the same prison housing the convicted culprits in previous diplomatic crimes on Hossti and Vlhan.

An attempt by Counsellor Rhaig to bring censure proceedings against Andrea Cort, on the basis of her physical threats against his person, met with a resounding lack of interest; indeed, the Hom.Sap Embassy forwarded to her several messages from other embassies that had dealt with Rhaig and empathized with the urge. Even so, Rhaig announced his attention to file his complaint with the Dip Corps Judge Advocate. Cort would probably have to face some minor disciplinary action, which wouldn’t bother her all that much; she had always been considered a problematic personality, whose reputation had been soiled beyond repair long before the first day she had ever spent on the job. It didn’t matter when she still got the job done.

Ambassador Lowrey praised her at length for her brilliance; so did Mekile Nom of the Bursteeni, Goodsir Mukh’thav of the Riirgaans, and Haat Vayl of the Tchi. She accepted the compliments without much response, not trusting them to mean what they were supposed to mean on the surface. Politics was after all the creation of sentience. She did what she had to do to respect protocol, and then retreated as soon as possible.

Cort received word of another crime on alien soil — this one a bored embassy worker who had become quite prosperous selling his co-workers the sacred hallucinogens the local indigenes reserved for their honored priesthood. The aliens were willing to settle things by declaring the idiot in question an honorary member of their clergy, but he was desperate to avoid the mandatory gender realignment surgery. It may have been a shit case, as such things go, but Cort found herself looking forward to it; after Catarkhus, it would be a relief dealing with a crime that involved no savagery, and indigenes capable of arguing their own interests.

Everybody thought the matter was settled.

Everybody except Andrea Cort.

When the Hom.Sap Embassy held a victory celebration — one that could not be called a victory celebration without offending the other embassies, but which served precisely that function nevertheless — she declined to attend. Habit would have made her stay away anyway, but there was more to it this time — enough that, as she stood outside the compound walls, buffeted by wind and the sound of distant music, she often trembled despite the warmth of the night. Sometimes she stared into the empty air around her, and asked it questions beneath her breath.

Whalekiller came out, dressed in his formals, carrying a drink for her. He said: “It occurred to me that I ought to stop being mad at you.”

She didn’t take the drink. “That’s your choice.”

“You didn’t know that the Catarkhans would react as violently as they did. You expected a reaction, but not one that extreme.”

“If you say so.”

Whalekiller waited for more, closed his eyes in brief frustration, and spread his hands like a man casting cards upon a table. “You could make a pretense of giving a damn.”

“It wouldn’t be a pretense,” she said. “I’m not a robot.”

“You make a big show of trying to be,” he said.

“Maybe I have to. Maybe that’s what I’m left with.”

There was just enough bitterness in her voice for Whalekiller to assume he knew what she was talking about. He sighed, put the drink down on a post beside her, and said, “And maybe that’s just self-serving bullshit. Maybe we all have garbage in our pasts — some of it petty next to yours, some of it just as bad as yours, some of it downright worse. Maybe some of us away that garbage while some hold on to it like it’s a family heirloom too valuable to lose. Maybe that says less about how painful that garbage was, than about how much we deserve to stay there alone.”

“Maybe,” she said, her gaze level. “And maybe I’m not even close to being alone. Maybe I’ve been surrounded all along. Maybe I’m surrounded now.”

His eyebrows knit. “You lost me with that one, Counselor.”

His incomprehension left her tired. He really thought everything was settled. But if such an intelligent man, who had devoted his entire career to communicating with alien minds, could spend so much time with the Catarkhans and not see the deeper implications, how much of a chance did she have persuading the rest of humanity? For a moment, she wondered if she’d be better off just giving up…

Unfortunately, giving up had never been in her nature.

She accepted the drink he’d offered and swallowed it in one gulp. “You’re a good man, Goodsir Whalekiller. I just hope you find a way to live with it before it breaks your heart.”

“Thank you,” he said. “And I believe you’re a good woman, Counselor Cort. I just hope you find a way to believe it while it can still make a difference for you.”

She wanted to argue the point. But instead she nodded and returned to her quarters without speaking even one more word to anybody.

19

Early the next morning, she arranged admission to Emil Sandburg’s cell. She knew as soon as she entered that the other monster had experienced a night almost as bad as her own; the arrogance and sarcastic affability that had distinguished their first meeting was now completely gone, replaced with a red-eyed desperation that his keepers had misdiagnosed as a mere psychotic mood swing. Fear that he might try to hurt himself, or attack one of his infrequent visitors, had led them to fix him up with partial nerve block; it didn’t paralyze him all the way, like the chair that had imprisoned him during his trial, but it did lend every move he made a curious slow-motion quality, as if the very air around him had been thickened to the consistency of gelatin. There was nothing slow about his trembling, though. The man was terrified.

A funny thing she noticed at once: with the fear upon him, the arrogance he affected was easy to see as the mask that it was. The bland and unformed personality his fellow indentures had seen now stood out in sharp relief, revealing a man without distinction, without edges, without blood beneath the skin. He was, as his Dip Corps profile had indicated, a nobody. A void. One who had been able to reap the dubious benefits of infamy for a short interval, but nevertheless, still just a void.

She tried to fight feelings of sympathy for him, and failed. After a moment, she pulled over a stool that somebody had left in his cell and broke longstanding personal policy by sitting down in the presence of another human being. “Hello, Emil.”

“Hello, Pretty Lady.” He attempted to energize his smile with some of his old arrogance, but failed. He was a man trying to reclaim a vocabulary he had possessed for a short time, but which had been lost as completely as his freedom. “Come to gloat?”

“I don’t gloat,” Cort said.

“You probably don’t. You don’t laugh, either. Or cry. Or do much of anything else, I guess. Leftover trauma from your violent childhood, I suppose? Did you enjoy killing as much as I did?”

She wanted to respond with the same sternness she had shown toward him during their first interview, but there was no point; he was already defeated, and this was just bravado. Needing more of him than that, she took a small spherical device from her pocket, flourished it before Sandburg, and placed it on the cell’s pull-down tray table. Depressing a thumb-sized cavity at one end of the device, she said: “There. That’ll scramble the monitor system. Nothing you or I say to each other in the next few minutes will ever be seen or heard by anybody else.”

He licked his lips. “That leaves you awfully vulnerable if I decide to kill you.”

It was a weak threat, uttered because he seemed to think it was expected of him; there was little he could do in light of what the nerve block had done to his reaction time. But she treated it as face value anyway: “You’re free to try, Emil. But as you’re so fond of noting, you’re not the only monster in this room. Provoking me to violence would be a very bad idea.”

An acknowledging tired nod. “So what do you want?”

“I wanted to speak to you one last time about your crimes.”

He seemed infinitely tired. “Maybe we should talk about yours.”

“That’s all right,” she said. “I don’t really want to have a conversation with you, Emil; your gamesmanship is too boring for that. I just wanted to let you know that I figured out your secret. I know what you’re all about.”

“Well, la-de-da.”

“It took a while to see it, mostly because your co-workers here, human and alien, have all been so busily painting you as a sadistic killer.”

“I am.”

“Maybe you are and maybe you’re not. You certainly enjoy having people think you are. You’ve played the role very well, Emil; so well, in fact, that for a while, dealing with you, I had trouble seeing the empty, faceless little man your co-workers described. It must have been fun, being somebody. Even a monster. At the very least it must have been a novelty for you.”

“Shut up.”

“You never came out and said it, but you did everything you could to make us believe that you committed murders before Catarkhus. You encouraged anything that bolstered your image as a sadistic monster. It couldn’t have been hard. It even seemed reasonable in context. After all, killing is such a messy business that it takes genuine enthusiasm for anybody to make a regular habit of it. Sadism would be a good explanation for that kind of thing, and the pleasure you took in taunting us seems to argue for that. Except,” she hesitated, then pressed on: “it doesn’t enter into the killings here, does it, Emil? It couldn’t have. These were Catarkhans. They didn’t feel pain; they didn’t even feel fear. You had to have some other reason for going back to them time and time again.”

“Maybe I have a rich fantasy life,” he said.

“I thought of that; killing Catarkhans, who won’t notice and won’t complain, is a safer alternative to carving on Tchi or Bursteeni or even your fellow Hom.Saps, all of whom would tend to raise more of a fuss. If you wanted to indulge a compulsion at minimal risk, killing Catarkhans would be the way to go. Except — if you really were driven to inflict pain, killing Catarkhans wouldn’t satisfy you for long, would it? A connoisseur of pain, driven by his love of pain, would soon find torturing them about as enjoyable as chewing paper.”

“I know people who chew paper,” Sandburg said. “Disgusting habit.”

“So’s killing,” Cort said, “even in the absence of sadism.”

Sandburg closed his eyes, looked away from her, and began to hum a vapid love song currently popular on the nets. It was, Cort realized, the same song he’d been humming during her first onworld briefing, when the diplomatic staff had shown her the real-time images of his imprisonment. His rendition of it had not improved. But the meaning of it had changed. Back then humming it had seemed the arrogance of a man who didn’t care what happened to him, and now it was just a pathetic series of sounds made by a soul desperate to block out the truth he did not want to hear.

Cort, driven by her own wounds, was the last sentient alive capable of showing him mercy. “A nobody,” she said. “A deficient personality. Low charisma, low empathy. Utterly forgettable. Leaving no impression anywhere he went. Joining the Dip Corps to make contact with something. Anything. Not succeeding even there. Cruelly assigned to establish contact with creatures incapable of even acknowledging his presence.”

He hummed louder; he even started rocking back and forth, like an autistic child desperate to retreat into a world of his own.

She leaned forward and yanked his hands away from his ears. The move took him totally by surprise. He emitted a little squeak, and flinched; a big bad monster, trembling like tissue under a gale-force wind, not afraid of being struck, but terrified beyond reason at the simple threat of being understood.

She whispered it: “You can’t stand being invisible, can you, Emil?”

He yanked his hands free, hugged himself, and faced the floor again.

She said, “You took your time killing them — because you were willing to do anything you needed to do to get them to notice you.”

He said nothing, and did nothing.

“In your own desperate way,” she said, “you were actually attempting First Contact.”

Again, he responded in no obvious way. But without moving a millimeter, without making a sound any of the monitors were record, he succeeded in answering her anyway. She could see the answer in the way all the strength seemed to drain from his bones.

She watched him for several minutes, taking his measure in the weight of his silence. She had thought him another monster, and painted him large enough to fit the role; but there was nothing large about him, nothing substantial that deserved all the time and effort that had been devoted to his case. He had just been the sum total of his illusions, and nothing else. Now that she’d stripped even those away, there was nothing left. It deflated him, reduced him to the nonentity that he had been before and would now be again. Just before she left him for the last time, she could almost imagine she saw his flesh going the way of his pretenses, his skin and bones and muscle turning transparent as what little substance he had dissipated into the recirculated air of his cell.

Prison would destroy him. He would disappear into a population of true monsters, who would either victimize him or ignore him. Either way, he had nothing to look forward to. Nobody would ever pay any special attention to him ever again.

But he had made a difference, without knowing it.

He said: “Go away.”

She said: “Not yet, Bondsman. There is one other thing I want to share with you. It has to do with what happened at Bocai.”

He murmured: “I wasn’t there.”

“It erupted out of nothing, Emil — there were no resentments fueling it, no unresolved conflicts motivating it. There was just pure, savage hatred, arriving as if by spontaneous generation in the midst of two communities who had committed to living in peace. I never thought I stood a chance of understanding it…until I saw what you did to the Catarkhans.”

He met her gaze again, and this time his despair was mixed with a dose of sheer incomprehension. She didn’t blame him; there was no way he could help her this part. But he was the only other monster present, and therefore the only other person who deserved a share of it.

She said, “We walk among them, talk to them, move them around against their will, get aggravated and — in your case — even murderous because they refuse to notice us. But what makes us think we’re any better? Why are we so sure we’re seeing and feeling and hearing everything there is to see? How do we know there aren’t other First Contact teams, from species we’re not equipped to sense ourselves? How do we know that they’re not all around us? In fact, how do we know that they’re not just like you, frustrated to the point of madness because we don’t have what it takes to notice them?”

Sandburg stirred. “Unseen Demons.” A little of the monster’s previous arrogance came back to him, then. “You’re crazier than I am.”

“And if some imaginative Catarkhan told his friends that there were invisible people walking around among them, trying to get them to pay attention? What would they say to that?”

He looked past her, through her, through even the walls of his cell, seeing not the shape of his cage but the shape of the idea that was forming. His lips twitched, the look of a man fed an exotic treat who was trying to decide whether he liked it.

Cort said, “Maybe it’s the kind of idea you have to be crazy to imagine. Maybe it’s the kind of idea you can only believe if you’re desperate for absolution. But that doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea — just an old one we thought we could safely outgrow. Maybe the demons who we used to believe influenced all our worst impulses do exist — and we were only wrong about what they were and where they come from. Maybe they come from all around us, and we’re just not equipped to see them. Maybe that frustrates them so much they get even by pulling our strings.” She took such a deep breath that the rest of her words emerged in a half-hysterical shudder. “Maybe one was with us on Bocai. Maybe one was with you here.”

For a moment, Sandburg seemed desperately anxious to believe it. Then he shook his head and delivered the verdict with as much contempt as he could. “And maybe this is just you, seizing on any explanation that frees you from the ultimate responsibility for what you did.”

“I thought of that, too,” Cort said. “I just don’t believe it anymore.”

The black rage bubbled up in him, then, dispelling — at least for the moment — any remaining sense of defeat in his bearing. His face contorted in a grimace, his hands curled into fists, and he stood so suddenly that she winced, imagining imminent violence — but no; the nerve block was still in place. It was disgust and not bloodlust that had returned some semblance of power to his limbs. “Then I’m better than you, Counsellor. Because I know I did what I did, and I don’t look for excuses. If you must, you should listen to Rhaig and read a history book sometime. Because we don’t need Demons to act the way we act.”

“Maybe,” she said, facing his anger with an equally dangerous calm. “And the hell of it is, you’re almost certainly right. But from this moment on, my life’s about finding out one way or the other.”

She stood, and placed her hand on the scrambler device, resting her thumb on the activation switch, but not yet applying the miniscule degree of pressure that would once again allow Sandburg’s warders access to everything that was said and done in this room. She wanted to press it now; strictly speaking, she even should. But part of her resisted, knowing that once she did she’d have to return to the greater world outside, a place where she would be once again be infinitely more alone than she ever could be here, in the presence of another monster.

Sandburg, who perhaps sensed the same thing, and maybe even sympathized with her against his will, simply glared at her, waiting.

She smiled at him before she left, the same smile Whalekiller had seen and come to dread. And made her promise.

“When I do find them, I’m going to make damn sure they’re properly judged.”

Appendix:

Andrea Cort Chronology

The Andrea Cort stories are part of what I now call the “AIsource Infection” universe, which details a substantial alteration in the nature of humanity.

As the stories in this larger universe take place over a period of many years, and in fact begin approximately a century from now, some stories merely use this history as background and others are more important to the grander story being told. Andrea Cort is one woman whose life is especially touched by the critical events.

Most stories now being written take place at the beginning of her career. This chronology is current as of November 2017.

“With Unclean Hands” (ANALOG, November 2011) is likely to remain her first recorded adventure. She is still an unformed thing of very little personal influence, though this will change as it becomes clear to her superiors how very formidable she is.

“Tasha’s Fail-Safe” (ANALOG, April 2015) In this story, she is still suffering the political fallout from her extreme actions in “With Unclean Hands.”

“The Coward’s Option” (ANALOG, March 2016) Once again trusted enough to be sent on a mission, though she’s not expected to be much more than a rubber stamp. As frequently happens with Andrea, there are complications.

There is now a gap of several years, into which almost all new short fiction will be inserted. During these years she is continuing to work on various missions, some of which cement her ruthless reputation. She also zealously maintains her social isolation, a situation that will not improve for her until the novels.

Following the gap, we are introduced to her again with the first Andrea story I wrote, “Unseen Demons” (ANALOG July / August 2002), by which time she is a well-known controversial figure in the Diplomatic community, and widely recognized as a force to be reckoned with. In this story, she receives her mission in life, reaching the epiphany that leads into the trilogy of novels.

About a year later, she appears in the first novel, EMISSARIES FROM THE DEAD, which changes her status quo, changes her agenda yet again, and introduces her to the great love of her life, the linked man and woman with one personality, Oscin and Skye Porrinyard. They remain with her for the rest of the series so far.

This is followed by the second novel, THE THIRD CLAW OF GOD, in which she travels to the planet Xana and learns something she never suspected about her past.

The story finished yet still to be published, “A Stab Of The Knife” (ANALOG, 2018) takes place after she returns from Xana, and is in part driven by the relationships formed there. She in fact still has the very un-Andrea hairstyle she obtained in that novel, though she didn’t like it at the time; maybe the Porrinyards do.

The final Andrea Cort novel for now, WAR OF THE MARIONETTES, the one currently available in English only as an Audiobook, but planned for an upcoming e-book, wraps up the trilogy and ends with her making a very personal decision that will change her forever.

The novella “Hiding Place” (ANALOG, April 2011), takes place less than a year later and will likely remain the final Andrea Cort story chronologically, as it concludes with her facing significant changes. At this point Andrea Cort will either move on and become a completely different person, or will retreat from her personal growth and back off from its implications. I cannot move on from this point at shorter than novel length, and that is unlikely to occur unless things change spectacularly. (But there’s always talk.)

ALSO BY ADAM-TROY CASTRO

THE ANDREA CORT SERIES

Emissaries from the Dead

The Third Claw of God

War of the Marionettes (in Germany)

With Unclean Hands*

The Coward's Option*

Unseen Demons*

THE GUSTAV GLOOM SERIES

Gustav Gloom and the People Taker

Gustav Gloom and the Nightmare Vault

Gustav Gloom and the Four Terrors

Gustav Gloom and the Cryptic Carousel

NOVELLAS, SHORT STORIES & COLLECTIONS

Vossoff and Nimmitz*

Her Husband's Hands and Other Stories

Night of the Living POTUS*

Fuel*

Sleeping Dogs*

HUMOR BOOKS

Z is for Zombie

V is for Vampire

*available as a Jabberwocky ebook

For a complete bibliography of all books and short stories, visit Adam-Troy Castro's website.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam-Troy Castro is the author of the Andrea Cort series, which includes the Philip K. Dick Award winning novel Emissaries from the Dead. His short fiction has been nominated for six Nebulas, two Hugos, and two Stokers. The novella “The Astronaut from Wyoming,” written in collaboration with Jerry Oltion, won the Japanese Seiun Award for Best Short Story in Translation. His twenty books also include Z is for Zombie and V is for Vampire, both of which were illustrated by Johnny Atomic, and the Grossett and Dunlap series. Adam lives in Miami with his wife Judi and three world-famous cats named Uma Furman, Meow Farrow, and Harley Quinn.

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