Songmaster (29 page)

Kyaren didn’t dare bring the paper with her to the office—anything as unusual as paper would attract attention, and that was not what she needed. So she memorized the first three and left the list in the lavatory on the floor below. On her first break she came down, but instead of getting three more names she went to Josif.

“Are you sure you copied these down correctly?”

Josif looked at the names and numbers, punched them into his terminal, and the vitals showed up. All definitely dead.

“On my terminal,” she said, “they’re still very much alive.”

Josif got up from his terminal and she followed him to the corridor, where Josif spoke softly.

“We should have guessed it immediately. It’s a scam, Kyaren. They’re paying those pensions to somebody, but not to these people. Because they’re dead.”

Kyaren leaned against the wall. “Do you know how much
money
that is?”

Josif was not impressed. “Come on,” he said.

“Where?”

“Out of this building, immediately.”

He started pulling her along. She came willingly enough, but completely confused. “Where are we going?”

He wouldn’t answer. They did not go to either of their rooms. Instead they headed for the airport, which was on the eastern edge of the complex. “This isn’t the time for a weekend in Mexico,” she said.

“Just punch in sick.” They stood before the ticket terminal and she did as he said, using her office code. Then he stood at the terminal and punched out two tickets for himself, charging them to his own account.

“I can pay for my own,” she said.

He didn’t answer. He just took the tickets and they boarded the flit headed for Maraketch. It was when they were in flight that he finally began explaining.

“It isn’t just your office, Kyaren,” he said. “It’s mine, too. This thing has to involve a lot of people, in Death, in Disbursements, in Pensions, who knows where else. If they caught you on a simple query, they surely have a program to notice that you just queried the names of three people whose deaths were registered
today
, and that immediately afterward
I
queried the same names. The computer knows that somebody knows there is a discrepancy. And I don’t know how long we’d live if we stayed there.”

“They wouldn’t do anything
violent
, would they?” Kyaren asked.

Josif only kissed her and said, “Wherever you grew up, Kyaren, must be paradise.”

“Where are we going?” she asked again.

“To report it, of course. Let the police handle it. Let Babylon do it. They have the power to freeze everything and everyone there while they investigate. We don’t have any power at all.”

“What if we’re wrong?”

“Then we go looking for jobs about a billion lights away from here.”

They told their story to five different officials before they finally found someone who was willing to take responsibility for a decision. The man was not introduced to them. But he was the first to listen to them without fidgeting, without looking uncomfortable or worried or distrustful.

“Only three names?” he finally asked, when Josif and Kyaren had explained everything.

They nodded. “We didn’t think it was safe to wait around looking for more.”

“Absolutely right,” the man said. He nodded, as if in imitation of their nods a moment before. “Yes, it warrants an investigation.” And they watched as he picked up a phone, stroked in a code, and started giving orders in a jargon that they couldn’t understand.

His face fascinated Kyaren, though she was not sure why. He looked unremarkable enough—not a large man, not particularly handsome, but not unusually ugly, either. His hair medium length, his eyes medium brown, his expression medium pleasant. Kyaren was aware of a constant change, not so much in his face as in her perception of his face; like an optical illusion, his face kept switching back and forth between absolute trustworthiness and cold menace. No one had told them his title or even his name—he was just the one they passed a knotty problem to, and he didn’t seem to mind.

Finally he was through with his call and turned his attention back to Josif and Kyaren. “Very good work,” he said.

Then he began to talk to them, very quietly, about themselves. He told Kyaren things about Josif that Josif had never mentioned: how Josif had attempted suicide twice after Bant left him; how Josif failed four classes at his university in his last term, yet turned in a dissertation that the faculty had no choice but to vote unanimously to accept; how the faculty thereupon booted him out of the school with the worst possible recommendation letters so that it was impossible for him to get work in his field.

“You don’t get along well with authority, do you, Josif?” the man asked. Josif shook his head.

The man promptly started in on Kyaren, talking about her upbringing in the Songhouse, her failure to meet even the most minimal standards, her flight from that place where she was known to be inferior, her refusal to even mention the Songhouse to anyone else since then. “You are determined not to let anyone see you fail, aren’t you, Kya-Kya?” he asked. Kyaren nodded.

She was acutely conscious of the fact that there was so much that Josif hadn’t told her about himself—important things, if she was to understand him. And yet it came more as a relief than as a letdown. Because now he also knew the things she had been deliberately hiding from him; they had no secrets of any importance now.

Was that what the man had been trying to do? Or was he merely being nasty, pointing out to them that their friendship wasn’t all they had thought it was? It hardly mattered. She looked at Josif furtively, saw that he also was avoiding her gaze. That would not do. So she stared at him until the very intensity of her gaze forced him to look back at her. And then she smiled. “Hi, stranger,” she said, and he smiled back.

The man cleared his throat. “You two are a little better than the average. You’ve been artificially, for various stupid reasons, kept in places where you couldn’t accomplish all that you are capable of. So I’m giving you an opportunity. Try to use it intelligently.”

They would have asked for explanation, but he left them without another word. It was the Chief of Planetary Security who finally told them what was happening to them. “You’ve been fired from your previous jobs,” he said, looking as serene as only a man with a great deal of power can look. “And given new ones.”

Josif found himself assistant to the minister of education, with special authority over funds for research. Kyaren was made special assistant to the manager of Earth, where she could get her hands into anything on the planet. Not imperial offices, but about as high as novices could hope to get—work that would give them connections for future advances and all the opportunities they would need to show just what kind of work they were capable of doing.

In a stroke, they had been given a chance to make careers for themselves.

“Who
is
he, an angel? God?” Josif asked the Chief.

The Chief laughed. “Most people put him at the opposite end of things. The Devil. The Angel of Death. But he’s nothing like that at all. He’s just Ferret. The emperor’s ferret, you see. He makes people and he unmakes them, and answers only to the emperor.”

They knew how well he could make people. The unmaking they saw when, a few weeks later, they were watching the vids in their apartment. The day in Babylon had been hot and rainy, until at sunset they had stood on their balcony watching the light glisten on waterdrops clinging to a billion blades of grass, with the long shadows of trees interrupting the lush savannah at random yet perfect intervals. An elephant moved lazily through the tall grass. A herd of gazelles bounded north in the distance. Kyaren and Josif felt utterly exhausted from the day’s work, utterly at peace from the evening’s beauty, a delicious mood of languor. They knew the conviction of the plotters would be cast from Tegucigalpa tonight, and they felt an obligation to watch.

As moments from the trials were presented, with the faces of their former co-workers again and again in the dock, Kyaren began to feel vaguely uncomfortable. Not because she had turned them in—but because she had felt no qualms about doing so. Would she have been so eager to denounce them if they had not so openly excluded her? She imagined what it might have been like if she had come into the Office of Pensions more humbly, not preceded by remarkable tests, not clothed in her perpetual reserve. Would they then have befriended her, gradually admitted her to the plot? Would she
then
have denounced them?

Impossible to know, she realized. For if she had come humbly, she would not have been herself and so who could then predict how she would have acted?

Beside her, Josif gasped. Kyaren looked closely at the vids again. It was just another man in the dock, one she didn’t know. “Who is it?” she asked.

“Bant,” Josif said, gnawing at his knuckles.

In all their thinking, they hadn’t thought of this—that Bant, of course, as head of Vitals, had to be involved. Kyaren had never met him, but felt that she knew him through Josif. Yet what she knew of him was his hilarity, his insistence that lovemaking had to be fun. Kyaren hadn’t enjoyed imagining Josif making love with a man, but that much, at least, had been impossible for Josif not to talk about. Apparently Bant’s greed for sex was just a facet of his overall greed; his unconcern for Josif’s feelings was part of a general unconcern for anyone.

All those charged were convicted. They were all sentenced to five to thirty years in hard labor, deported, and permanently exiled from Earth, permanently barred from employment. It was a severe sentence. Apparently it was not severe enough.

The announcer began talking about the need to make an example of these people, lest others decide that a group scam on government funds might be worth the risks. As he talked, the vids showed a man from the back, walking toward the line of prisoners. The prisoners all had guards behind them; their hands were bound. They looked toward the man who approached them, and their faces suddenly looked alarmed. The vids backed off so that the viewers could see why. The man held a blade. Not a laser—a blade, made of metal, a frightening thing in part because it was so ancient and barbaric.

“Ferret,” Kyaren said, and Josif nodded. The vids didn’t show the man’s face, but they were quite sure they recognized him.

And then Ferret reached the first of the prisoners, paused before him, then moved to the next, paused. It was not until the fourth prisoner that the hand lashed out; the blade caught the prisoner at the point where the jaw meets the ear, then flashed to the left and emerged at the same point on the other side. For a moment the prisoner looked surprised, just surprised. Then a red line appeared along his throat, and suddenly blood erupted and spurted from the wound, spattering those to either side. The body sagged, the mouth struggling to speak, the eyes pleading for the act to somehow be undone. It was not undone. The guard behind the man held him up, and when the prisoner’s head sagged forward, the guard grabbed the hair and pulled the head back, so that the face could be seen. The action also made the wound gape, like the maw of a piranha. And finally the blood stopped pumping and the ferret, his back still to the vids, nodded. The guard let the man drop to the floor.

Apparently the vids had shown this execution in detail because it was the first. As the ferret walked along, snicking the throats of every third, fourth, or fifth prisoner, the vids did not hold close for the dying, as they had with the first; rather the program moved quickly.

Kyaren and Josif did not notice, however. Because from the moment the blade first flashed forward, catching the prisoner in the throat, Josif had been screaming. Kyaren tried to force him to look away from the vids, tried to make him hide his eyes from the man’s death, but even as he screamed piteously, Josif refused to take his eyes from the sight of the blood and the agony. And when the prisoner sagged forward, Josif wept loudly, crying, “Bant! Bant!”

Now they knew how Ferret unmade people. He must, Kyaren thought, he must have known how Josif felt about Bant, chose to kill him knowing that, as if to say, “You can denounce a criminal, but you cannot do it without consequences.”

Kyaren was sure that his choice of victim had been deliberate, for when he got to the last six people, he slowed down, looking each one of them in the eyes. The prisoners were reacting very differently, some trying to be stoic about their possible death, some trying to plead with him, some near vomiting with fear or disgust. With each person he passed, the next became more sure that he was the victim—the ferret had not skipped more than four people in a row before. And then he came to the last one.

The last one was Warvel, who was utterly certain that he would die—five had already been passed over. And Kyaren, her arms around Josif, who wept softly beside her, found herself inwardly pleased, sickeningly pleased, that Warvel would also die. If Bant, then surely Warvel.

Then Ferret snaked out his hand. But not to kill. For the hand now was empty, and he caught Warvel by the neck, pulled him forward away from the guard. Warvel stumbled, nearly fell, his knees were so weak. But the vids carried the sound of Ferret’s voice. “Pardon this one. The emperor pardons this one.”

And Warvel’s bonds were loosed as the announcer’s voice began talking about how the empefor was to be remembered always—because when someone cheated or abused the people, the emperor would be the people’s champion and carry out their vengeance. “But always the emperor’s justice is tempered with mercy. Always the emperor remembers that even the worst of criminals is still one of the emperor’s people.”

Warvel.

Bant.

Whatever Ferret wanted to teach us, Kyaren whispered silently, so that even she could hardly hear the thought as her lips moved. Whatever the ferret wanted to teach us, we have learned. We have learned.

And that was why Kyaren and Josif were in Babylon when Ansset was placed there.