The Gap into Madness: Chaos and Order (84 page)

I often think about how I
got into this mess.

In a
sense, of course, “how” doesn’t matter. I’m here. I did it to myself. Dealing
with it isn’t optional. As long as I call myself a cop — and I’ve been doing
that all my adult life — I don’t have any choice. What it costs me is
irrelevant. Especially when I consider the price humankind has already paid for
my mistakes. And that price can only increase. Unless I find some way to really
do my job.

I’m
painfully familiar with the argument that despite its terrible flaw the present
arrangement should be preserved because it’s better than the alternatives. The
lesser evil. After all, if I succeed in bringing about my own destruction, the
UMCP will inevitably be what Hashi would probably call “unmanned.” No one else
knows the danger as well as I do, or can use our resources as effectively. No
one else has my fatal gift for inspiring loyalty, or my rather ambiguous skill
at pulling strings. Until whoever takes my place — Min Donner, God willing —
has time to grow into the job, human space will be vulnerable as never before.

But
that argument doesn’t move me. I reject the idea that the cops can serve
humankind better by being stronger-but-corrupt than by being weaker-but-honest.
Nothing corrupt can ever be truly strong. Look at Holt Fasner. He has every
imaginable kind of power. On top of that, he’s my boss. My master. And yet
there’s nothing he can do to stop me from bringing him down. If I fail, it won’t
be because he was strong enough to beat me. It will be because my proxies,
Angus and Morn, have paid too high a price for my complicities — the corruption
I’ve condoned in order to prevent Holt from seeing the truth.

That’s
why I don’t resign. I simply can’t leave the harm I’ve done for someone else to
clean up.

Still I
find myself thinking about the past, looking for hints which might help my
successors avoid my mistakes.

All my
life I’ve been obsessed by strength.

The
foster family that raised me after my parents were killed lived in one of Earth’s
urban borderlands. On one side, the guttergangs ruled. On the other, saner
civilisation prevailed. And on the border between them, safety and violence
struggled back and forth like tides as the balances of power shifted.

I
thought then, as I think now, that the question was one of strength. Within
their territories the guttergangs were strong. They imposed their own order.
Elsewhere more benign structures were potent enough to resist encroachment. But
in the borderlands everyone suffered because no one was strong enough to defy
chaos.

Here, I
thought, there should be cops. The borderlands needed men and women with the
force to extract safety and order from the conflict — and the goodness to do
their jobs without becoming just another kind of guttergang. There was no other
cure.

In a
sense, I’ve been fighting on behalf of the borderlands ever since. First the
borderlands of Earth’s orbital space, where stations and corporations battled
for scraps of wealth and survival, and no planetary authority had the strength
to control them. And later the vaster borderlands created by contact with the
Amnion, borderlands which now exist in virtually every place that can be
reached by warships with gap drives.

In the
specific borderland where I grew up, I did what I could to organise the homes
and families around me for their own protection. I suppose I must have been
trying to defend my foster parents from the deaths that took my mother and
father. But we had no resources. We were good — at least I think so — but we
weren’t strong.

At the
first opportunity, I allowed myself to be recruited by SMI Internal Security. I
had no loyalty to Space Mines Inc. itself — or even to the idea of trying to
procure humankind’s survival by doing research and exploiting resources in
space. On the other hand, I was enormously attracted by the work SMI IS was
supposed to do, which was “to secure” the safety of SMI personnel, operations,
and contracts in that one small section of the orbital borderland. I had
goodness to spare — or so I imagined at the time. Recruitment by IS gave me
access to the support and money, the equipment and people I needed to make my “virtue”
useful.

Valuable
work as far as it went. But it wouldn’t have contented me for long if I hadn’t
learned that Holt Fasner was ambitious. For a man with my obsessions, SMI
Internal Security’s “turf” was simply too small. I knew I could do a better job
— far better — if I had more to work with.

Holt
had bigger dreams. He was in the process of expanding his domain, and therefore
my “turf,” at an exhilarating rate. In addition, he was already old. Perhaps
that was why he seemed — this sounds impossibly naive, even when I admit it to
no one but myself — he appeared wise to me. Certainly his profound
understanding of the uses of power gave an impression of wisdom.

And
during my early years with SMI IS I was still junior personnel, in spite of
some fairly rapid promotions. Holt didn’t trust me enough to let me see inside
his decisions. As far as I could tell, IS was clean. Everything we did looked
legitimate.

Finally
my new prosthetic eye afflicted me with a kind of hubris. Or maybe it allowed
an older hubris to come to the fore. IR vision enabled me to “read” people so
well that I began to think I was infallible. An immaculate judge of truth.

I was
young and driven. Though it shames me now to say it, I had an easy time
convincing myself that there was no inherent conflict between Holt Fasner’s
dreams and my own — that, in fact, the benevolence of his dreams was
demonstrated by the way they carried mine with them.

But I
began to catch glimpses of the truth in the heady days after I became chief of
Internal Security. That was the time of SMI’s acquisition of Intertech after
the Humanity Riots. The time of first contact and first trade with the Amnion.
A borderland situation if ever there was one. I was in my element as never
before when I was forced to recognise that IS didn’t spend so much time and
effort on corporate espionage simply in order to secure SMI from predators.
Holt used stolen secrets to make himself a more effective predator.

For example,
with information IS supplied, he exposed some of Sagittarius Exploration’s
political dealings, which left SagEx ripe for acquisition. And Internal
Security’s files on the “votes” who chartered corporations enabled him to
engage in what he calls “surgical interventions” to protect SMI’s interests.

Well,
blackmail by any other name is still extortion. I was horrified. And confused.
And damn near drunk on the exhilaration of IS’s growing “turf” and resources.
The conflict threatened to tear me apart.

But
Holt has a genius for these situations. He knows when to push and when to hold
back. When to seduce and when to use force. He sat me down and confided a
tailored version of his dream.

He
dreamed, he said, of making SMI such a dominant player in human space that IS
would be the only viable candidate to serve as humankind’s cops. If I gave him
my support, IS would become
the
police for all the borderlands between
the stars.

I was
won over, in spite of my reservations. I believed him. Or rather, I chose to believe
him. I needed some way out of the conflict between exhilaration and horror. My
desire to think he was telling the truth was so intense it made me frantic.

But
frantic men make mistakes. Mine was complicity. I let, even helped, Holt commit
his secret crimes so that I could go on serving the public good.

That’s
no excuse, of course. It’s simply a description. A hint. It shames me — but it’s
worth knowing.

Years
passed before I understood how badly I’d gone wrong, and by then there were no
clean solutions left. I couldn’t think of any way to undo the harm of my
mistakes except by going ahead.

By
pushing my complicity as far as it would go. And by doing everything in my
power to turn that complicity against the man who taught me how to play this
game.

HASHI

B
y some alchemy which he hadn’t expected and barely understood, his
equanimity was restored by the warmth of Earth’s sun on his head and shoulders
as he stepped off the shuttle. How many years had it been since he’d last
exposed himself to his native solar radiance? A dozen? More? Now it shone down
on him out of a sky as clear as innocence. An azure expanse untainted by
centuries of humankind’s despoliation arched over him. Immanent and vast, it
reminded him of something which men and women who lived on stations too easily
forgot: his own littleness. Nothing that he encountered within UMCPHQ had the
scale to dwarf him as this sky did. And of course the station’s steel skin
closed out the vaster dark so that little human minds like his wouldn’t go mad with
insignificance.

This
warmth, this light, that sky: they were positively therapeutic. If Hashi
Lebwohl proved himself stupid and met humiliation before several billions of
his own kind, this light and that sky would take no notice. Reality in both its
subatomic and its galactic manifestations would remain untroubled. He could
only do what quarks and mesons did: ride the electron flux. Combine and
recombine as occasion suggested.

Learn
and — perhaps — serve.

His
nagging sense of inadequacy seemed to melt off his shoulders in the heat of
distant solar fire. By the time he and Koina reached the main entrances to the
GCES complex and moved in out of the light, he’d recovered his poise; his
openness of mind. He was prepared to observe what transpired, respond as he was
able, glean what he could, and be content.

In the
interim, Koina’s two aides, Forrest Ing, and the communications tech had been
absorbed into an entire retinue of guards and functionaries, newsdogs and
ushers. She and Hashi were escorted like visiting potentates — which, in a
sense, they were — into the main building and along the high, diplomatic halls
until they gained the formal meeting chamber of the Governing Council for Earth
and Space.

The
room was easily large enough to hold a hundred or more people without undue
crowding. This was a practical necessity. The Council comprised only twenty-one
Members — twenty-two including President Abrim Len — each sitting at his or her
place at the large, half-oval table which defined the lowest level of the hall,
each with his or her own data terminal and stacks of hardcopy. But behind each
Member sat tier after tier of aides and advisers, secretaries and advocates.
And around the wall above the last seats stood the guards assigned by UMCPED
Chief of Security Mandich to protect this session — at least two dozen of them.
The result was an aggregation of individuals and intentions which felt
unwieldy, almost unmanageable, even though twenty-one was not an unreasonable
number for such a body.

Koina
had good timing. The session wasn’t scheduled to start for another ten minutes:
enough time for her to pay her courtesies and take her place; not enough for
the Members or their aides to accost her with their private agendas.

As the
doors admitted her and Hashi to the hall, leaving most of their new entourage
behind, a wave of sound washed over them — the undifferentiated gabble of aides
briefing their Members, Members issuing instructions to their secretaries,
advisers arguing among themselves. The noise was abruptly cut off, however,
when the two directors entered. The Members and most of their personnel would
have noticed Koina Hannish’s arrival; some would have stopped talking to
acknowledge her. But Hashi Lebwohl’s presence took them all by surprise. Recent
events had made him an electric figure here. And he hadn’t attended a GCES
session in person for at least a dozen years.

He
paused inside the entryway and scanned the startled hall as if the sudden
silence were a mark of respect. All the Members were already in their places:
two from each of Earth’s six political subdivisions, one from each of the nine
major stations. Hashi knew them as well as it was possible to know men and
women he’d never met. Their dossiers had familiarised him with their names and
predilections, their voting records and personal histories. And his prodigious
memory supplied the same information for most of the aides and advisers. His
own people in DA sometimes referred to him as “Data Storage with legs” — for
good reason. If the need arose, the only people in the hall he couldn’t have
addressed by name were the guards.

Most of
the Members were seated; but Abrim Len stood at the centre of the table, bowing
like a marionette to everyone who required his attention. With the exception of
the President, Members were randomly assigned new places for each session, to
avoid any impression of favouritism. It was, therefore, a matter of chance that
two vehement critics of the UMCP had seats beside the President: Sen Abdullah,
the Eastern Union Senior Member, on his right, and United Western Bloc Junior
Member Sigurd Carsin on his left. Nevertheless the coincidence didn’t auger
well.

Other
faces were especially familiar for divergent reasons. Blaine Manse, the Member
from Betelgeuse Primary, was renowned for her persistent and embarrassing
peccadilloes. Punjat Silat of the Combined Asian Islands and Peninsulas had
produced fascinating — if admittedly speculative — writings on the philology of
intelligence. Com-Mine Station Member Vest Martingale had played what she must
have considered an excruciating role in the passage of the Preempt Act.