All My Sins Remembered (11 page)

“Very advanced.”

“Well, it works. They started out neo-Maoist… anyhow, here’s the problem:

“On Selva, serious personal differences between adult males are generally settled by dueling—”

“Dueling!”

“Yes, it’s a delightful planet. Usually they duel with swords, sometimes with more exotic weapons. The outcome of the duel usually is just a wounding—first blood wins the argument—but over serious matters they sometimes duel to the death.”

“I haven’t handled a sword since training! Almost twenty years—”

“That long? Well, don’t worry, your persona is quite expert: the boy he murdered, he murdered with—”

“Boy? The boy he murdered?”

“He was sixteen, just a few days past his sixteenth birthday. That’s the legal age limit for duels.

“Which is at the bottom of your assignment. Let me explain. The man behind this interplanetary war idea is a clan head named Alvarez. He wants to attack Grünwelt—”

“Oh, I’ve heard of—”

“Yes, Grünwelt is a comparatively prosperous world: unlike Selva, it has stayed in the mainstream of Confederación life. And they’re practically next-door neighbors. They come as close as sixty million kilometers at opposition.”

“What do they want to start a war for? Haven’t they ever heard of—”

“October? Sure, they’ve heard of October. In their schools, they teach that it’s a myth, that the Confederación is too spineless to ever—”

“Still, why an interplanetary war?”

Ellis shrugged. “This man Alvarez… well, for generations Selvans have been jealous of Ghünwelt, and Alvarez is playing on this jealousy. Reduced to the simplest of terms, he proposes to swoop in and
loot
it.”

“Is Grünwelt aware—”

“Only our representative there. They don’t have any espionage system on Selva: they’ve never seen her as a potential threat. How could they? Selva has only two working interplanetary vessels, not even a Class II spaceport.”

“Then how does Selva propose to—”

“That’s the funny thing. They
could
do it. Sneak attack with ten, twelve small ships. Bomb a couple of cities, threaten to bomb more, collect the booty, and return. Leave a couple of ships in orbit as insurance against retaliation.”

“Never work.”

“I know it wouldn’t work and you know it wouldn’t work and I suspect that Alvarez knows, too. We can only guess at what he’s actually up to.”

“Power base, I suppose. He’ll use the scheme to make himself top man on Selva—”

“—and then perhaps blackmail himself into a position of power on Grünwelt. Who knows? That’s one thing you may be able to find out.

“The man you’ll be impersonating is Ramos Guajana. You’re one of four or five skilled duelists who have been systematically assassinating not those who oppose Alvarez, but the sons of that opposition.”

“As soon as they turn sixteen.”

“When practical.” Ellis lit up a stick and passed the box to McGavin. “It’s all very legal.”

“I’m sure. Thanks. But question: how could this wreck, Guajana, bump off anything bigger than a cockroach?”

“Oh, you’re normally in much better shape, of course. Guajana’s been imprisoned for over two months—starvation diet, beatings almost daily. You’ll be in good fighting trim soon after you escape.”

“But first I have to starve down to where I can slip through the bars—”

“Oh, no. We have a foolproof plan.” Ellis looked at his watch. “Well, you’ll get more detailed orders on the ship. Put out your cigarette, we’ve got to—”

“There’s not
that
big a rush,” Otto said. He smoked slowly for a few minutes. Then he put out the stick and returned to his chair, and Ellis put him under with the sequence of nonsense words.

“When you awaken,” Dr. Ellis said confidently, “you will be about ten per cent Otto McGavin and ninety per cent Ramos Guajana. Your response to any normal situation will be consistent with Guajana’s personality and abilities: only in times of extreme emergency will you be able to call upon your skills as a prime operator.

“Pulpy. Rouge. Battery. Cashew.” He pushed a call button under his desk.

Guajana/Otto shook his head twice and looked across the desk with clear eyes full of pain. His face had changed in subtle ways.

“I will remember you, doctor,” he croaked with a heavy accent.

2.

M
ISSION
P
ROFILE

N
AME
: Guajana, Ramos Mario Juan Federico

A
GE
: 39 S
EX
: M M
AR
S
TAT
: Div

B
IRTHPLACE
: Paracho, Stvo. Or., Selva

A
DDRESS
: Currently detained at Cerros Verdes Clinico Psych’o, awaiting trial for 1st-degree murder.

E
DUC
: Equiv 1–2 yr college

P
ROF
: Dueling master

D
IST
P
HYS
C
HAR
: Body and face covered with dueling scars (see accompanying chart): presently showing effects of severe beating, lack of medical treatment.

A
GENT
: McGavin, Otto (S–12, prime)

P
HYSICAL
/C
ULTURAL
D
IVERGENCE
I
NDEX
:

O
VERALL
0.86

PO S
CALE
: 0.99

T
IME
S
URG
: 3d, 4hr

T
IME
PO: 24d, 12hr

And there were over a hundred pages-after that. It was the only thing to read in the crowded cabin of the tiny T–46, and in the four weeks it took to get to Selva, Otto/Guajana read it over completely sixty-three times.

Most of it detailed Otto’s mission. From past experience, he knew that ninety-nine per cent of the planning would be worthless after the first day or two. And as far as the reams of data about the man he was impersonating… normally that would also be useless; if he ever had to consciously
act
like the man, it would mean his PO was fading and he would soon have to fight or run for his life.

But most personality overlays are done in hypnotic rapport between the agent and the person he is going to impersonate. In this case that had been impossible; Guajana couldn’t be kidnapped for a month and have his copy remain of any use. So they had examined and profiled Guajana as well as possible, and Otto was a very good academic copy of the man. He lacked the important artificial memories that would have been overlaid in hypnotic rapport—but then he could make a good case for having been beaten into amnesia.

So Otto memorized all of the information about Guajana, just in case, which was not too pleasant: Guajana was about the most villainous person Otto had ever impersonated. Cold-blooded murderer of children, for hire. Well, maybe he had a good side. Kind to snakes or something.

It was a cloudy, absolutely starless night when Otto landed on Selva in a small clearing in the mountainous jungle that surrounded Cerros Verdes. His timing was very bad.

The T–46 is about as automated as a spaceship can be. It locks in on a landing signal—generated in this case by Otto’s TBII liaison—and casts about for the nearest thirty-meter stretch of level ground on which to land. But the signal in this case was being generated from the top of a steep hill in the middle of a rain forest so up-and-down that it would drive a cartographer insane.

The ship glided to a stop and Otto pulled from a pocket of his rags a simple signal-detector/rangefinder that told him he was 12.8 kilometers south-southeast of where he wanted to be. A small error in a 145-light-year journey, but Otto/Ramos was understandably upset.

As noted, the T–46 is very automatic: automatic to a fault. Its function is to land an agent safely and get away—its door opens and the agent has sixty seconds to clear out or be automatically ejected. Otto was upset because the hundred-page report had stressed that only rabid sportsmen and other mad-men dared venture into Selvan jungles at night.

Otto got out and felt the ship depart silently behind his back. Laser ready, with his left hand he adjusted his nightglasses and tightened the shoulder straps of his kit. He looked around and saw nothing but then felt a crawly sensation center on his back and whirled.

At neck level and ten meters away a batlike creature with a three-meter wingspan and an excessive number of claws and teeth was sliding rapidly through the air with a bloodthirsty grin on what served it for a face. It seemed to weigh about as much as a human child, and it screamed like a child when the laser opened it up in mid-flight. It tumbled suddenly graceless over Otto’s head to crash in the tall grass behind him, where it thrashed twice. There was a second’s stillness and then a slithering sound and then the crunch of strong jaws crushing bone.

In the flare of the laser, Otto had seen a hundred pairs of hungry eyes. There was no way to whistle the ship back.

It may be better in some absolute sense to accept a known danger, however great, than to forge off into the unknown. Otto knew that the woods probably held a more interesting variety of fauna than this small veldt—but he’d feel safer with a thick tree at his back. He checked his direction bump against the small rangefinder and set off north by northwest.

Twice in ten steps Otto fired at nothing. He cursed himself for nervousness, for wasting power, and then on the twelfth step a red snake with a head the size of a man’s and eyes that actually did glow lunged for Otto’s belt buckle. After the laser severed its head, the body coiled and writhed through eight long meters of grass.

For all the years of training and conditioning and experience, Otto suddenly had no control over the toroidal muscle that makes elimination a polite and private function. His anal sphincter bucked and spasmed in that final reflex that tries to make a trapped creature an unpleasant meal. There was no room in his mind for thankfulness that he had taken the elementary precaution that kept him from fouling himself—there was nothing in his head but primitive panic from ear to ear and he screamed and ran blindly for two seconds, hit dirt in a flat dive, rolled, and came up firing. The laser’s beam made a brilliant arc swinging back and forth in front of him, then behind, saving his life as it killed the bat-creature’s mate. When he took his finger off the trigger the glade was in crackling flames that dimmed and smoldered out in the dampness. At the edge of the woods something gave a bad imitation of a human laugh and Otto’s self-preserving panic reached so high a level that it flipped the final mental switch the conditioners had put into his brain and he was suddenly ice:

McGavin, you are going to die
.

I know that, McGavin
.

What do you do before you die?

Kill as many as I can
.

There is a theory, not provable, that no creature in the Galaxy is more dangerous than man. At any rate, few men could be as dangerous as one who has given up all hope for his own survival—add to that half a lifetime of experience in bloody murder and you may have the only kind of man who could survive three hours alone at night in a Selvan jungle.

The fact that nighttime is so hostile on Selva was the single most important influence on the strange evolution of Selvan politics. The planet was originally colonized by five hundred idealistic volunteers from the Terran country of Uruguay, members of the Programa Politico de Mao, who had bought the planet cheaply from a mining corporation that couldn’t find anybody willing to run their machines.

El Programa arrived with a nice efficient setup, a division of duties and rewards that might have worked very well in a more hospitable environment.

The mining company had not totally misled them about the danger of Selva—they came with guns and electric fences and grim determination and absolutely no desire to go near the jungle at night. But to the planet they were just so many relatively accessible pieces of protein dropped in the middle of about the most competitive land ecology ever discovered—twenty-five thousand kilograms of monster meat.