Unseen Demons Page 2

  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.