All My Sins Remembered (10 page)

He could hear Kindle moving—about twenty meters away, he estimated. Still couldn’t see the man, but he chucked a rock in his direction.

The laser glared in answer. It roasted the boulder he had been using as a shield; he could hear the rock crackle and smelled a sharp tang of ozone and nitrogen dioxide.

“Getting warm back there, McGavin? I know where you are—I heard my little friend go up there. Might as well just step out and save yourself the wait.” He gave the rock another short burn.

Now he could just make out Kindle. There were three Bruuchians walking with him. He was stepping very cautiously, watching the ground. Otto immersed himself up to his nose.

“This is it, McGavin. Now you’re a dead man.” Otto looked over the edge and saw Kindle’s back some five meters away. If the knife were working, he could throw it for an easy kill. But two inches of plain steel required closer action.

He picked up the knife and quietly pulled himself out of the pit. He ran softly toward Kindle, who was shouting at the rock, laser at eye level. Almost too easy.

Then one of the Bruuchians jerked his head around, seeing Crowell. Kindle caught the movement and turned. Otto dove for his knees, to tackle him. The beam brushed Otto and his shoulder and half his face burst into flame, then snuffed out immediately as he piled into Kindle and both men went down heavily. Otto pinned his gun-arm to the ground and the ravening beam spent itself uselessly on the big rock while Otto plunged the knife again and again into Kindle’s back, even in a white fury of pain and hate instinctively going for the vulnerable kidneys. The shock reactivated the knife; the rest of the blade hummed out and then it slipped with equal fluidity through flesh and bone and organs. Kindle arched his back and was still.

Otto got to his knees and saw that Kindle still held the laser in a spastic grip, doing a fair job of melting the rock. He couldn’t pry the pistol from Kindle’s fist, and he stopped trying as wave after wave of intense pain throbbed through his body and he remembered his training.

Still crouched over Kindle’s body, he closed his eyes and repeated over and over the mnemonic that, from his hypno-training, isolated the pain and squeezed it into a smaller and smaller space. When it was a tiny pinprick as hot as the interior of a star, he pushed it just a millimeter outside of his skin and held it there. Very carefully he sat down and slowly released for use those parts of his mind that weren’t occupied with keeping the pain outside.

He touched his face with the back of his hand and when he withdrew it, long filaments of melted plastiflesh still clung to it. He noted that his other hand was still dripping with gore, with Kindle’s life, and he felt absolutely nothing, triumph or remorse.

The material of his shirt had vaporized, and the plastiflesh over his shoulder had melted completely away. The real flesh ran from angry pink to deep blistered red to a black charred mass the size of his hand. A trickle of blood oozed from the well-done area, and Otto dispassionately decided it wasn’t enough blood loss to justify bandaging the wound.

The two younger Bruuchians came out from behind the rock and stood over Kindle. The older one limped out and rattled off something in the informal mode, too fast for Otto to translate.

They picked up Kindle’s stiff body and balanced it on their shoulders to carry it away like a log. Suddenly it dawned on Otto that Kindle wasn’t really dead; the oldest and youngest had passed him into stillness while his knife was doing its work. ‘He looked at the rictus of pain on the man’s face and remembered Waldo’s evidence.

The man was not dead, but he was dying. And he would die slowly for hundreds of years. Otto smiled.

Dr. Norman and two stretcher-bearers picked their way across the desert and got to Crowell just before noon. Thirty years of medical practice couldn’t have prepared the doctor for the sight of a critically injured man sitting in front of a pool of dried and putrifying blood and gore, half his face a burned and running ruin, and the other half smiling beatifically.

Biographical check, please, go
:

I was born Otto Jules McGavin on 24 Avril AC 198
Skip to age 18, please
, go:

The only thing I went to university for was to get out into space, I didn’t have any talent for science or mathematics so took courses that would qualify me for offplanet Confederación service

Skip to age
33,
please, go
:

Took six months of PO to recover from the Bruuch assignment, they segued me from Isaac Crowell persona to Heart-is-sacred-to-Manson, minister plenipotentiary on Earth from Charlie’s World, infiltrating assassination ring from the top
Skip to age
35,
please, go
:

New arm didn’t take, had to go back into the hospital for two months, have it amputated and regrown, then pushed papers most of the year, then went to Sammler as Eduardo Muenchen, supposedly a professional gambler who actually coordinated espionage group from Jardin (Article Seven violation, economic interference), TBII liasion set me up for identity spill, had to shoot my way out, O God, nine people dead, six of them innocent

The new arm worked all right? Please, go
:

Worked better than the old one, my God, the look on the little girl’s face

Skip to age 37, please, go
:

They tried to use her as a shield, she kept looking at me while she died

Skip to age 37, please, go
:

She never even looked at her wound, O God, guts spilling out, just kept staring at me while I tried to get the door

I said skip to age
37,
please, go
:

Right action is abstaining from killing, stealing, and

Cashew, battery
.

right livelihood is earning a living

Rouge
.

is earning a living in a way not harmful to any living thing.

Right effort

Pulpy
.

is to avoid evil thoughts and overcome them.

Now sleep
.

A uniformed aide opened the door of the TBII Personality Overlay section and stood aside as Otto McGavin crept out. He shuffled painfully, leaning on a weathered stick, the rustling of noisome rags an unpleasant counterpoint to his adenoidal panting. His nose looked—was—freshly broken, and his face and arms were covered with running sores. The aide managed without touching him to guide him through a door marked B
RIEFNG AND
D
EBRIEFING
—J. E
LLIS
, P
H
.D.

Inisde the office, the aide parked him on a straight-backed chair facing a nervous young man who sat in a government-gray chair behind a government-gray desk. The aide left quickly, once he was sure that his charge wasn’t going to fall out of the chair.

“C-cashew,” the young government man stuttered. “Battery. Rouge. P-pulpy.”

A light glimmered behind the rheum in Otto’s eyes and he levered himself out of the chair, staggered, and almost fell. “What…” He touched his face, winced, and stared at the sticky dampness on his fingers. He dropped back into the chair.

“Now this time, this time it’s gone too far.” He plucked at the rags and a fragment came away between his fingers. “Exactly who am I supposed to be this time… the Ancient Mariner? The Wandering Jew? Or just a garden-variety leper?”

“Now, Colonel McGavin, I assure you, uh…”

“Assure me and be damned! This is three times in a row—three times I’ve been some weak old cob. Somebody in Planning must want my ass dead!”

“No, no, not at all…that’s not it at
all.”
He shuffled some papers at his desk, not looking at Otto. “You have a good, uh, extremely good record of success… under severe PO handicap, especially—”

“So think of how much better I could do if you clowns would let me be a normal human being for a change!” He grasped his raggy left arm, almost able to encircle bicep and triceps with one bony hand. “ ‘PO handicap.’ If you’d kept me under for another week, you’d have handicapped me into the grave.”

“You know it’s only, uh, temporary—”

“Temporary! Young man—”

“Dr. Ellis,” he said mildly.

“Young
doctor
; it might only take me a couple of weeks starving in a null-gee field to lose all of this muscle, but I’ve got to get it back the old-fashioned way. Even with hypnosis—”

“No, Colonel, it
is
temporary… I mean…”

“What
do
you mean?”

“Well, you’re expected to… recover while on the assignment. Your persona is that of a, well, you might say a professional athlete.”

“Yeah, the hundred-meter crutch relay, I can—”

“But no… no, you don’t see, he’s been…” Ellis shuffled papers some more. “If we can get on with the briefing, I’ll—”

“All right, all right. Nobody ever lets me bitch. What, I’m going to infiltrate a hospital? A health spa?”

“Oh no, no, neither. First a police station. The individual you’re impersonating is in jail, awaiting sent—”

“For dripping on somebody.”

“Uh, no, for murder. Premeditated first-degree murder. Assassination, actually.”

“Hey, that’s really fine. A new experience. Brainwipe.”

“Uh, well, you won’t be on Earth, you see, uh—”

“I think I get the picture.”

“On Selva they punish murderers either by burning at the stake or public cas—”

“I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to
do
it.”

“You have no choice, of course.”

“Ah, but I do,” Otto said, tensing. “All I have to do is kill you before you can—”

“Pulpy—rouge—battery—cashew!” he shouted. Otto slumped in the chair, face slack. Dr. Ellis sighed and blotted his forehead, got up, and rummaged in a file until he found a holstered laser. He beat the dust off it, sat down again, drew out the gun, and pointed it at the center of Otto’s chest. “Cashew. Battery. Rouge. Pulpy.”

Otto shook his head to clear it and looked down the barrel of the weapon. Quietly: “Put that Goddamn thing away before you electrocute yourself. The battery selector’s on ‘charge.’”

No ten-year-old would fall for that, but Dr. Ellis had evidently spent his youth in the pursuit of scholarship. He reversed the weapon to look at the power matrix, holding it very gingerly. Otto smacked it out of his hand and, not moving too swiftly, picked it up off the rug.

“Pulpy, uh…”

“No.” Otto had the weapon shoulder-high, the muzzle of it wavering a meter from the man’s nose. “Calm down.”

He went back to his chair, keeping the doctor covered, and sat. He shook his head.

“You bureaucrats are really max. Really max. Can’t take a joke.” He tossed the gun to the doctor’s desk, but it didn’t quite make it. It clattered against the edge and went spinning to the floor.

“That’s government property,” Ellis said.

“So am I, Goddamnit.” Otto leaned back and started when a joint popped loudly. “So am I.” He studied the doctor for a few silent seconds. “Go on. I’m this murderer…”

“Ah. Yes.” Ellis relaxed, lacing his fingers together. “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We have a problem on Selva.”

“I gathered.”

“Um, yes, it’s a problem. On the level you’re operating, it’s a problem of murder. Of systematic assassination, really.”

“So I’m an assassin.”

“In a… manner of speaking. But the problem is much larger than that.”

“I should hope.”

“Yes, well, it’s war.”

“So? Nothing in the Charter—”

“Interplanetary war.”

Otto leaned forward, smiling slightly. “Inter
planetary
war? You’re pulling my fern. Nobody—”

“I know.” He sighed. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves again.”

“Begin at the beginning, then.”

“I was going to say, yes. Do you know anything about Selvan politics?”

“Look, I can’t keep up with every jerkwater—”

“All right, that’s what I thought. Don’t worry, your persona knows all it has—”

“Of course. Go on.”

“Well, Selva is classified as an hereditary-representative oligarchy.”

“Like you say, I’ll know all of this.”

“Patience, please. There are forty-two hereditary clans who send one representative apiece to an interclan ruling council, the
Senado Grande
. This representative is the eldest son of the head of the clan. He will eventually head up the clan himself, and send
his
son to the
Senado.”

“Just a puppet for the old man, I assume.”

“Generally, yes. In practice, the
Senado
serves as a training ground, preparing the young men for the more difficult jobs waiting for them when their fathers die or step down.

“Selva doesn’t have a strong central government; hasn’t had one for centuries, and the
Senado
just formalizes into law agreements made between the various clan heads in secret meetings.”