With Unclean Hands Read online

  With Unclean Hands

  Copyright © 2011 Adam-Troy Castro.

  All rights reserved.

  This ebook edition published in 2014 by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

  Cover design by John Fisk.

  ISBN 978-1-625671-09-7

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  With Unclean Hands

  Appendix: Andrea Cort Chronology

  Also by Adam-Troy Castro

  Introduction: Her First Bow

  Andrea Cort, a descendant of Sherlock Holmes in temperament, literary tradition, and, according to a couple of references here and there in the series, genetic fact, has been the protagonist of three of my novels and three of my novellas.

  To say that she is a favorite of mine, among my creations, is to put it mildly. I unabashedly happen to love her, to the point where I am frankly determined to keep occasionally producing stories about her adventures despite the (with luck) temporarily moribund state of the novel series.

  One of the fun things about the series is that Andrea is not a template character, by which I mean one who doesn’t change through the years of her life, but a human being who for all her damage does happen to change and grow, while remaining recognizably herself throughout. There is therefore, at this point, an existing last Andrea Cort story, “Hiding Place,” after which she must either become something other than the Andrea Cort we know, or regress to some earlier version of herself. There is also an existing first Andrea Cort story, and you happen to be looking at it. This is a story that could only take place near the beginning of her career, while she’s still a total emotional mess held together by sheer force of will; before she builds a reputation for brilliance, before she shifts her allegiances, before she finds herself surrounded by the one thing she least expected, a family. Any story taking place much earlier would have to be about her as a student. She’s brittle, uncertain of herself, alone, and as vulnerable as she’ll ever be.

  So naturally, the point here was to kick her real hard.

  The results were quite nice for me -- not just my favorite among Andrea Cort’s shorter adventures, but a Nebula nominee in the novella category.

  This e-book is the first salvo in an ongoing project to bring all the existing Andrea Cort stories and any that I might produce in the future back into availability as E-Books. Yes, before you ask, this will eventually include the third Andrea Cort novel, War of the Marionettes, heretofore only available in print in a German edition, or in English as an audio book. The Amazon page for the excellent Audible.com edition of that particular volume is filled with the bilious reviews of customers who, to document they love me, slammed the audio book for not being something they can read -- logic that escapes me, frankly, as it’s still punching the author in the teeth, but, honestly, an omission that is being addressed. Understand that the stories will now be released as e-books in the order in which they take place in Andrea’s life, departing from that chronological order only when I produce a new story in the interim.

  So here’s the young Andrea Cort, on a very simple assignment that turns out to have implications greater than she ever expected. Enjoy.

  Adam-Troy Castro

  With Unclean Hands

  Counselor Andrea Cort escaped the reception at the Zinn capitol at something like the local equivalent of midnight, feeling more out of place among her fellow human beings than most people feel when visiting alien civilizations.

  It had been a grim occasion. For three hours she’d had to endure the conversations that pointedly excluded her, the snatches of overheard scandalized conversation that were about her, the banal embassy politics that had nothing to do with her, and the thousand-and-one manifestations of interpersonal drama that had started before her arrival and would no doubt continue in their endless variety after she left, so unaffected by her passage that she might as well have been a ghost, incapable of any affect but the offensive.

  Cort was only a couple of solo assignments into her Dip Corps career. She was still young and untested, had yet to develop a professional reputation, and was not yet inured to the nauseated look that appeared on the faces of her purported colleagues when they put face to name and recognized her as the infamous child war criminal whose blood-soaked image had once scandalized civilized space. Her personal armor was a harsh and even off-putting personality marked by cold manners and a habitual scowl on a face that otherwise might have been perceived as delicate or even beautiful. Within a very few years her frigid mask would become notorious. But it had not yet become impermeable. At this point, she was still capable of exposing weakness when her feelings were hurt.

  So she wandered away from the discordant Zinn music and the even more discordant banter between her human colleagues, got lost in the labyrinthine corridors of the ancient Zinn capitol and found herself outdoors, on a balcony garden just outside a chamber she guessed to be the equivalent of a chapel.

  It was a cool evening, tinged with the spice of the unspoiled forest that grew, undisturbed by civilization, on much of the Zinn homeworld. There were only a few lights shining up from the valley below, site of the ancient city of Purehome that now housed the entire population of the once-numerous, once galaxy-spanning race. In the dark, Cort could not see just how high this mountaintop embassy loomed over the city and thus didn’t have to fight the special kind of vertigo that always came complete with the overwhelming urge to jump. She could imagine herself still aboard one of the orbital habitats she had long preferred to planets, peering through a viewport at stars too far away to burn.

  Lightheaded from the intoxicant buzzpops she’d taken to settle her nerves before the party, she found a small knee-high retaining wall enclosing a clutch of swaying pink flowers, for the moment enjoying the absence of any oppressive, intrusive, condescending, despicable, patently other people. For a few seconds she did not wasn’t to die.

  Then an unaccented voice asked, “Are you in pain?”

  It sounded like a human girl. It could, of course, be any one of a number of different species currently maintaining embassies on this world; though the reception had been meant for the human contingent only, she had spotted a Tchi, a K’cenhowten, and a Szabi among the alien dignitaries visiting from their respective embassies. But when Cort turned, she saw that the questioner was a Zinn, albeit one who stood only as tall as her, which made it approximately half the height the species averaged in adulthood. Its head was a thin vertical crescent ringed at the midpoint with a dozen black marble eyes, its torso a series of boneless, puffy sacs connected at hinged joints and descending in a train three-quarters of the way to the tiled floor. The two multi-jointed limbs that served as the Zinn’s legs and the two that served as its arms were all anchored at the disk-shaped shoulder bone, just below that sickle of a head.

  Cort had not been on-planet long enough to master the subtle visual cues a human needed to distinguish any one of the race’s four sexes from another, let alone whatever they used for body language, but it was simple enough to make an elementary deduction from this one’s relatively short stature. “Are you a child?”

  The little Zinn emitted a series of short whistles that might have been its kind’s equivalent of laughter. “Yes. Are you?”

  “I may be a little on the short side for females of my species,” Cort said, “but not by that much. I’m an adult.”

  More whistles. “I apologize for any offense.”

  “None taken. I’m impressed by your command of Hom.Sap Mercantile. Do you live here?”

  “Yes. I am the project administrator’s fotir.”

  That was the word for an offspring belonging to the Zinn’s egg-producing gender, not the comple
tely separate egg-incubating gender or the two actually responsible for copulation. Under the circumstances, it was simplest, and most acceptable under local interspecies etiquette, to consider this individual as a little girl.

  But even before Cort finished working that out, the Zinn child said, “I am still concerned. Are you in pain?”

  “Why would you ask me that?”

  “I know a little bit about the emotional displays of human beings. Your eyes are leaking fluid.”

  Cort dabbed at her cheeks and discovered to her chagrin that some tears had escaped. “It’sjust an involuntary discharge. It doesn’t always indicate pain.”

  “Why then are you not with the others at the reception?”

  Truth, Cort decided, was simplest. “I was not enjoying myself.”

  “Adults can be boring,” the alien child agreed, with a slight dip of the head.

  “Sometimes worse than boring,” Cort said.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Andrea Cort. And yours?”

  The little fotir provided a long string of unpronounceable sounds, punctuated by whistles and snorts and extending long enough to fill several sentences in Cort’s preferred tongue of Hom.Sap Mercantile. “Our names are more like what you would call autobiographical essays, and get longer as we age. For simplicity you may call me First-Given.”

  “It is an honor to meet you, First-Given.”

  “And to meet you, Andrea Cort. You are my first human being.”

  Cort found that odd. “This is your capitol. Alien ambassadors must visit here all the time.”

  “I have met Riirgaans, Tchi, Bursteeni, and even a few K’cenhowten. I like the Bursteeni best; they’re funny. But I’ve always been told to stay in my room when human beings are around. My parents said that my presence would disrupt the negotiations.”

  Cort didn’t see how, but supposed that alien parents could be as inscrutable as human ones. “So you’re breaking the rules by talking to me?”

  “I don’t believe so. The exchange is almost settled, now, and everybody’s so excited about the prisoner you’re turning over to us that the family security’s gotten careless and I was able to get out and find you. This makes me glad. It is a good thing in a short life to have made friends with one human being.”

  Cort reflected that it was more than she‘d ever managed to do, then shook her head angrily; aside from being untrue, it was also downright maudlin. “It’s not that impressive an accomplishment, First-Given. We’re awful.”

  “I know that a few of you are supposed to be. My teachers have told me frightening stories about ones like your Hitler, your Dunnevad, your Beast Magrison. And then, of course, there’s the prisoner; he is evil in ways we find impossible to understand. We have no such individuals in my species. But I do not make the mistake of believing that you’re all like those.”

  Or like me, Cort thought with a pang. “Your species is fortunate, First-Given.”

  “My species is not fortunate,” First-Given said. “My species has been dying for longer than yours has been rising.”

  The collapse of the Zinn empire might have taken thousands of years, but it had been no less inexorable for that, a total retreat from other advancing civilizations that had amounted to the ceding of entire clusters without so much as a shot being fired. These days they barely stirred themselves to procreate, and would likely fall below the critical genetic viability threshold within a very few generations. It hadn’t ever occurred to Cort, before, how much that knowledge would weigh on the young of the species. “I’m sorry.”

  “There is no need to apologize,” First-Given said. “This has been a short life and I do not have time for it. May I think of you as a friend?”

  Cort usually responded to offers with the firm announcement that she wasn’t looking for any. But the innocence of the request, and the apparent absence of the hidden agendas Cort had grown used to finding in the overtures of the kind of people capable of wanting to collect the likes of her as friend, touched a part of her she had considered buried since childhood. “Yes, First-Given. I would like that.”

  “As would I,” the alien child said. “I suspect it will prove a comfort.”

  Cort was about to ask First-Given how old she was, by the standard of her species, when a sudden commotion erupted behind her.

  She had just enough time to say “What the hell…” before the Confederate Ambassador, Mira Valcek, grabbed her by the arm and yanked her off her feet.

  Valcek loomed two heads taller than the athletically-built Cort. She had bulging athletic shoulders and a flat, fearsome face with cheeks rippling from parallel lines carved into the flesh from some kind of ritual scarification. Her eyes were a cold arctic blue beneath red locks cut into a fierce military buzz. The inescapable implications about the kind of society she must have come from, and what it said about her that she’d still ended up working for an organization devoted to keeping the peace, rendered her a formidable enemy, if that was indeed what she wanted to be. The jury was still out on that; she’d been courteous, if cold, since Cort’s arrival on-world three days earlier. But there was nothing but fury in her eyes now. “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  There were a dozen other figures, all told, some human and some Zinn, all scandalized, all indignant and what seemed to be a massive breach of protocol and all determined to stop the conversation between Cort and First-Given before it went any further. Four adult Zinn had surrounded First-Given and were now sweeping her away without so much as a word; about twice as many human beings backed Valcek, providing her with a physical advantage she didn’t even come close to needing.

  Cort said, “In most advanced civilizations it’s known as talking.”

  “In diplomacy,” Valcek said, “it’s unauthorized contact.”

  “She’s a child, Ambassador. She spoke to me, I returned the favor. What was I supposed to do? Treat her like she was beneath my notice?”

  Valcek’s furious glare might have drawn blood from someone less exquisitely armored. “At your level of inexperience you don’t just wander away from an embassy reception, where the attending locals are authorized to speak to you, to have unsupervised conversations with those who aren’t. You could be affecting issues you don’t even have a clue about, endangering agreements that we were hammering out a year before you showed up to provide your official rubber-stamp. At the very least, you could be endangering your own…”

  A tuxedoed Dip Corps functionary who Cort had overheard earlier that evening referring to her as a monster pressed his way past the phalanx of indentures and leaned in close to whisper in Valcek’s ear.

  Valcek’s eyebrows knit. She gave the functionary a sour look. He murmured something else Valcek couldn’t hear, and Valcek’s rage burned darker.

  “They want you,” she said.

  * * *

  Flanked by a pair of adult Zinn who towered above her like construction cranes, Cort was escorted down a series of hallways, up a series of graduated rises that might have qualified as a human stairway had the steps been uniform in interval or height, and down a corridor where, for no reason making sense to her, the walls all waxed convex, giving the space between them the outline of an hourglass. She was left in an egg-shaped room with a rippled, glowing floor and a pair of thick fabric slings hanging from the ceiling.

  There was no obvious place to sit, so Cort just stood beside one of the hanging slings waiting for the consequences to play themselves out until something not quite a door-opening happened at the far side of the room and an adult Zinn appeared there.

  It spoke to her in a voice not quite as unaccented as the little fotir’s, the tinny Mercantile testifying to the use of a hidden translator. “There is no furniture designed for the use of human beings in this part of the facility, but you may use the sling as a improvised seat, if you wish. It will bear your weight as well as it bears ours.”

  Cort sat, her legs dangling in a manner that brought back vivid memories of
a swing set the local children had played with during a childhood she had not yet known to be doomed.

  The Zinn rested its weight on the other sling, its head and all four of its limbs dangling over the side closer to Cort, its segmented torso dangling to the ground on the other. The position looked hideously uncomfortable to her, but then she didn’t have Zinn anatomy; for all she knew the pose might have been downright indolent.

  It said, “My name is.” Then it erupted into a series of whistles and snorts and grunts, three times longer in duration than the one Cort had heard from First-Given. “I am the administrator of the project involving the prisoner. You may call me by my job title, Feeder-Of-Prisoners.”

  Cort’s heart thumped. “Is that what I am to you? A prisoner?”

  The crescent-shaped head tilted at her. “Do you believe that you should be?”

  “Not for anything I’ve done tonight. Am I correct that First-Given is your child?”

  The translation program conveyed a certain wry amusement. “She is in a greater sense our world’s child. But yes, she is genetically mine.”

  “Then, if by exchanging friendly words with her I violated some primal law or taboo of your society, or local diplomatic protocol, I did so without malice, and I apologize.”

  The crescent-shaped head tilted to one side, and the dozen black marble eyes blinked, one after another, as if in reaction to an invisible object passing close to the concave curve of the face. After a moment, Feeder-of-Prisoners said, “You have committed other crimes in your life. Crimes against children.”

  Oh. So that’s what this was about. “Yes, I did. Many years ago, when I was only a child myself.”

  “Tell me about them.”

  Cort had spent too much of her life attending to those who wanted the gory details to recount the same old story without protest. “It’s common knowledge, sir. It also would have been provided to your people, when you were sent my credentials…”

  “Nevertheless. Tell me about them.”