All My Sins Remembered (17 page)

“No,” she said despondently. She stretched out on the lower bunk, her legs slightly parted and raised. She ran a finger lightly along the inside of her thighs; not in erotic gesture, but the way one keeps touching a persistent pain. “Go ahead. I owe you this much. One more won’t make any difference.”

“I can’t, Rachel.” It was the first time he had ever used her first name.

The door slid open and Rachel tried to cover herself with her hands.

“Well, well,” said the jailer. “You didn’t waste any time.” Otto was halfway to him when he saw the pistol and halted. “I’d think you would’ve have enough of that.”

He threw a bundle of white clothing at Otto. “Put on these, both of you. Now.” Otto separated the smaller items and gave them to Rachel. She turned her back to the jailer and dressed. Otto stood as close to the jailer as he thought prudent and threw his old tunic and trousers at him as he took them off. The jailer jeered and made some pointed remarks about Otto’s anatomy.

The jailer gathered up the gray clothing. “You’re going to have visitors soon. Try to behave until then.”

They sat on the bed together. Otto almost reached out to pat her hand; didn’t. “They’ve never given me a white outfit before,” she said. “Maybe this is the way they dress you for public execution. In a way I hope; so.” Otto knew that if she were going to be publicly executed, she would be dressed only in her bruises. But their inevitable executions were going to be private affairs.

They sat for what seemed like a long time, neither wanting to talk, lost in private thought. Otto wondered, not for the first time, where along the line he had lost the fear of death; the respect for death. Was it just part of his conditioning? That would seem anti-survival, and prime operators were too valuable to the TBII for them to program out the will to live. Maybe it was simply that familiarity breeds contempt.

With some effort of will he thought back to his youth and childhood, trying to recall some incident, some bit of knowledge or disillusionment that eventually led to the invisible army he had joined; that led to this jungle planet and sharing a white mausoleum with—he analyzed the brittle affection he felt for Rachel Eshkol and knew pretty exactly which part of it was sexual, which part was just the somatic sympathy of one injured body toward another, which was atonement for the way he had acted as Ramos, which was retroactive yearning for other women he had loved or had thought he had loved at one time. And some dark growling part of it was probably the cornered beast’s obeying an instinct to take one more chance on the procreative raffle before it was too late (he remembered the first time he had seen the corpse of a man burned to death and his horrified fascination with the corpse’s extreme state of sexual excitement; was it an instinctive antepenultimate urging or a simple matter of increased gas pressure in the corpse’s circulatory system?—he had always meant to ask someone who would know and now he never would). He remembered a boy named Otto McGavin at temple trying his best to meditate while the acrid incense tried to tickle him into sneezing and what a hell of an Anglo-Buddhist he had turned out to be, killing for a living and facing death with no desire for spiritual preparation beforehand—or was that what he was doing? No. What Otto was doing was the closest thing to panic he could allow himself, in the absence of immediate physical danger.

When he was twenty Otto had entertained a conceit about “dying well.” He tried to remember how that felt.

The door slid open and nine people came in, in file. The first was Commandante Rubirez. The next was an old man. Then Ramos Guajana, followed by a squad of six soldiers. Everybody was armed except the old man and one of the soldiers, whom Otto recognized as Private Rivera, the boy who had run from Rubirez’s grisly demonstration. Behind a transparent dressing on the side of his head was a fresh stump where his right ear had been.

The old man looked familiar, and Otto remembered who he was just before Rubirez introduced him. Strange that
that
should have faded.

“El Alvarez wants a word with you two.” He turned to the old man. “One last time, sir. This man is the most dangerous, desper—”

“Enough, Julio. Just leave me your pistol.”

He almost said something but instead handed over the gun. “At least let me handcuff them.” The old man nodded. Rubirez handcuffed Otto’s right wrist to Rachel’s left. Then everybody except el Alvarez filed out and the door clicked shut behind them.

El Alvarez looked around, decided against the indignity of sitting on the toilet, and stood opposite the two, leaning against the wall, the pistol pointed loosely in their direction.

“I asked that this cell be built twenty-some years ago. This is the only cell in the complex that has no cameras and no microphones hidden in it.”

“Or had none twenty years ago,” Otto said.

He shook his head. “I had a trusted person go over it thoroughly last week.”

“You have things to tell us,” Rachel asked, “that you don’t wish known by your own espionage people?”

El Alvarez didn’t answer directly. “How many people on Selva do you think know about the Plan?”

“That would be hard to say,” Rachel answered. Everybody seems to have heard rumors.”

He nodded and smiled. “That’s part of the Plan itself. Actually, I suppose only one out of a hundred or so Selvans knows there is a truly concrete Plan. Most of them belong to Clan Alvarez or are powerful members of their own clans. We haven’t yet made a public statement about the Plan because we don’t want to encourage responsible public debate.” He paused expectantly, but neither of them said anything.

“I believe your Confederación doesn’t think it could possibly work.”

“That’s—”

“Quiet!” Otto snapped.

“I’ve read your orders, Colonel,” he said wearily. “The ones that were in Ambassador Eshkol’s safe. In that regard you have no secrets to protect.

“At any rate, the Confederación is quite right. Oh, we could deliver a few bombs to Grünwelt; we could destroy a few cities and millions of people, perhaps. But I know and you know that war is more than just piracy on a large scale, which is what the Plan distills to. We simply don’t have the economic resources, not by a factor of a thousand, to maintain a war with Grünwelt—even if the Confederación were not to intervene. We could start a war, but Griinwelt would finish it at its leisure.”

“I don’t see why you’re telling us all this,” Otto said.

“It will become clear.”

“One thing that
is
clear—” scorn creeping into Otto’s voice—“is that our analysts were right. You’re willing to gamble the destiny of an entire planet in some convoluted scheme to get more power.”

“No. If I enjoyed the exercise of power I would seek to preserve the status quo. There is no one on this planet more powerful than I am. Except perhaps you two. Which is why I’ve brought you here, of course.”

“You haven’t gone out of your way to make us sympathetic,” Rachel said, and Otto knew her just well enough to hear the leading edge of hysteria.

He ignored that. “I will need your help,” he said, “the Confederación’s help. But first I need your understanding.” He looked at Rachel. “Not your sympathy.”

“The Confederación does not meddle in the internal affairs of its member worlds,” said Otto. “Except when those affairs—”

“I know,” el Alvarez interrupted. “I may know the Charter even better than you do.

“Briefly: What we call ‘the Plan’ is only one part of a larger plan. You are also part of it. It was laid out in some detail by my great-grandfather over a century ago. Juan Alvarez II, a political scientist and… a visionary. A practical man but a dreamer.

“Selva was colonized by dreamers, you know. Political exiles from Terra who brought a primitive kind of communism with them. It lasted less than three generations. It couldn’t survive two crop failures in a row and the efforts of nine strong men—the first clan leaders. To consolidate and maintain their power, their fiefdoms, these nine governed in a brutal, arbitrary way. When their heirs succeeded one at a time, they didn’t change methods—in a crude way, this is how the balance of power was maintained.

“Eventually the brutality and capriciousness became institutionalized and, inevitably, I suppose, filtered into the conduct of daily life at every level. Do people routinely settle arguments by dueling on any other planet?”

“I don’t think so,” Rachel said.

“No,” Otto said.

“That’s one example. There are others. The sum of it, though, is that our way of life is in almost every respect a healthy millenium behind that of any other culture in the Confederación.”

“I quite agree,” Otto said sourly.

“And it has a built-in stability through the method of succession.” He seemed now to be pleading rather than explaining. “But Juan Alvarez II devised a way to subvert that stability.”

“And to implement this, you need help from the Confederación.”

“That’s right. We—”

“Weapons? Money?”
As if I were in a position to make promises
, Otto thought.

“No… well, a little money, maybe. Let me explain. Juan Alvarez II suggested that we need set up only a few initial conditions, not obviously revolutionary changes, in order to slowly shift the base of power away from the clan leaders; eventually transform them into powerless figureheads.”

“What could you possibly have to gain by all this?” Rachel asked.

“You would have to be in my position, Señorita, to truly understand. Most Selvans are reasonably content with their lives because they know no better; their educations and the information they receive about other worlds are carefully controlled. I was educated offworld—as part of Juan the Second’s plan—and I feel, have always felt, dissatisfied. Every bit as manipulated and… helpless as are my subjects. That I am ruled by half a thousand dead men, rather than one live one, makes no difference.”

“Very poetic,” Otto said. “Specifically. What initial conditions?”

“These will be disguised by our preparations for the hypothetical war. Clan Diaz is building a fleet of Foster-type freighters. We are calling them bombers.” Otto vaguely remembered that a Foster drive was a reaction jet, powered by fusion of deuterium. Ancient history. “Unfortunately, they will not be finished in time for this next opposition with Grim-welt—to preserve the element of surprise, we will have to attack when the planets are closest—and there will not be another favorable opposition for five years.

“So for the next five years we will have a fleet of new ships and it will not be unreasonable to suggest we make some money with them. Such commerce as goes on between Selva and her sister planet is almost totally controlled by Grünweltische shipping and tourist firms; we can underbid them and still make a good profit.”

“I begin to see,” Otto said.

“See what?” Rachel asked.

Alvarez made an animated gesture, forgetting the gun in his hand; Otto ducked instinctively. “This way we will have formed a new social class, interplanetary merchants—who will be the only ones with access to wealth outside of our own closed economic system! Each clan will see the fortune to be made, and none will be able to afford
not
to—”

“Wait, wait,” Otto said. “I see something else. The closest thing to a spaceport on this planet is Barra de Alvarez.”

“That’s right,” Alvarez said impatiently.

“So you will be getting first crack at the money; tariffs, docking fees—”

“No, no—that’s part of the plan, too. I will be in a position to encourage interplanetary trade by taking as little—”

“As little as you could and not appear suspicious,” Otto said blandly.

“That’s correct,” he said with flinty pride.

“I’m no sociologist,” Otto said, “and when we studied interplanetary economics… I don’t remember anything one-tenth this bizarre. It’s about the shakiest recipe for social reform I’ve ever heard.”

“I know my people.”

“And what do you need from the Confederación?”

“Mostly advice. And that they not react too quickly if they hear rumors of war.

“As you say, Colonel, you’re not a sociologist, but I’m sure the Confederación has many good people who are. And economists and propagandists and psychodynamicists and… whatever. People who could review Juan Alvarez’s plan, update it, and insure that it would work.”

Otto shook his head. “That sounds contrary to the policy of self-determination.”

“Your presence here implies that the policy is flexible, Colonel.” He smiled. “Besides, the Plan is home-grown. We would only want the Confederación to help us polish it, as I say.”

“El Alvarez,” Rachel said, “are you saying that the clan leaders would eventually become dependent on the… merchant class, and then be ruled by it? Even though the merchant class would have only economic power?”

“Yes. Again: I know my people.”

“Your
people
,” she said, her voice starting to shake, “I don’t think are subtle enough to respond to that kind of pressure.” She pulled the hem of her blouse up a few centimeters, showing the bruises. “Your
people
raped me several times a day and beat me without mercy—just for amusement; no pre-tense of interrogation. I think you are overrating Selva if you think it will be ready for civilization within the next few hundred years.”