Gordon R. Dickson - Childe Cycle 05 (20 page)

-whatever help any other decent, law-abiding man could give him.

But I owed something to myself, too, and to the fact that we were not all villains, like Pel, on St. Marie.

"I've got something to tell you," I said. "It's about General Sinjin."

He nodded, slowly.

"I've been waiting for you to come to me with that," he said.

I stared at him.

"You knew about Pel?" I said.

"We knew someone from the St. Marie authorities had to be involved in what happened," he said.

"Normally, a Dorsai officer is alert to any potentially dangerous situation. But there was the false dinner invitation; and then the matter of the assassins happening to be in just the right place at the right time, with just the right weapons. Also, our Hunter Teams found clear evidence the encounter was no accident. As I say, an officer like Field Commander Graeme is not ordinarily killed that easily."

It was odd to sit there and hear him speak Kensie's name that way. Title and name rang on my ears with the strangeness one feels when somebody speaks of himself in the third person.

"But Pel?" I said.

"We didn't know it was General Sinjin who was involved" Ian said. "You identified him yourself by coming to me about him just now."

"He's Blue Front," I said.

"Yes," said Ian, nodding.

"I've known him all my life," I said, carefully. "I believe he's suffered some sort of nervous breakdown over the death of your brother. You know, he admired your brother very much. But he's still the man I grew up with; and that man can't be easily made to do something he doesn't want to do. Pel says he won't tell us anything that'll help us find the assassins; and he doesn't think we can make him tell us inside of the six hours left before your soldiers move in to search Blauvain. Knowing him, I'm afraid he's right."

I stopped talking. Ian sat where he was, behind the desk, looking at me, merely waiting.

"Don't you understand?" I said. "Pel can help us, but I don't know of any way to make him do it."

Still Ian said nothing.

"What do you want from me?" I almost shouted it at him, at last.

"Whatever," Ian said, "you have to give."

For a moment it seemed to me that there •was something like a crack in the granite mountain that he seemed to be. For a moment I could have sworn that I saw into him. But if this was true, the crack closed up immediately, the minute I glimpsed it. He sat remote, icy, waiting, there behind his desk

"I've got nothing," I said, "unless you know of some way to make Pel talk"

"I have no way consistent with my brother's reputation as a Dorsai officer," said Ian, remotely.

"You're concerned with reputations?" I said. "I'm concerned with the people who'll die and be hurt in Blauvain if your mercenaries come in to hunt door-to-door for those assassins. Which is more important, the reputation of a dead man, or the lives of living ones?"

"The people are rightly your concern, Com-missioner," said Ian, still remotely, "the professional reputation of Kensie Graeme is rightly mine."

"What will happen to that reputation if those troops move into Blauvain in less than six hours from now?"

I demanded.

"Something not good," Ian said. "That doesn't change my personal responsibilities. I can't do what I shouldn't do and I must do what I ought to do."

I stood up.

"There's no answer to the situation, then," I said. Suddenly, the utter tiredness I had felt before was on me again. I was tired of the fanatic Friendlies who had come out of another solar system to exercise a purely theoretical claim to our revenues and world surface as an excuse to assault St. Marie. I was tired of the Blue Front and people like Pel. I was tired of off-world people of all kinds, including Exotics and Dorsais. I was tired, tired… It came to me then that I could walk out. I could refuse to make the decision that Padma had said I would make and the whole matter would be out of my hands. I told myself to do that, to get up and walk out; but my feet did not budge. In picking on me, events had chosen the right idiot as a pivot point. Like Ian, I could not do what I should not do, and I must do what I ought to do.

"All right," I said, "Padma might be able to do something with him."

"The Exotics," said Ian, "force nobody." But he stood up.

"Maybe I can talk him into it," I said, exhaustedly. "At least, I can try."

Once more, I would have had no idea where to find Padma in a hurry. But Ian located him in a research enclosure, a carrel in the stacks of the Blauvain library; which like many libraries on all the eleven inhabited worlds, had been Exotic-endowed. In the small space of the carrel Ian and I faced him; the two of us standing, Padma seated in the serenity of his blue robe and unchanging facial expression. I told him what we needed with Pel, and he shook his head.

"Tom," he said, "you must already know that we who study the Exotic sciences never force anyone or anything. Not for moral reasons alone; but because using force would damage our ability to do the sensitive work we've dedicated our lives to doing. "That's why we hire mercenaries to fight for us, and Cetan lawyers to handle our off-world business contracts. I am the last person on this world to make Pel talk"

"Don't you feel any responsibility to the innocent people of this city?" I said. "To the lives that will be lost if he doesn't?"

"Emotionally, yes," Padma said, softly. "But there are practical limits to the responsibility of personal inaction. If I were to concern myself with all possible pain consequent upon the least, single action of mine, I would have to spend my life like a statue. I was not responsible for Kensie's death; and I am not responsible for finding his killers. Without such a responsibility I can't violate the most basic prohibition of my life's rules."

"You knew Kensie," I said. "Don't you owe anything to him? And don't you owe anything to the same St.

Marie people you sent an armed expedition to help?"

"We make it a point to give, rather than take," Padma said, "just to avoid debts like that which could force us into doing what we shouldn't do. No, Tom.

The Exotics and I have no obligation to your people, or even to Kensie."

"—And to the Dorsai?" asked Ian, behind me.

I had almost forgotten he was there, I had been concentrating so hard on Padma. Certainly, I had not expected Ian to speak The sound of his deep voice was like a heavy bell tolling in the small room; and for the first time Padma's face changed.

"The Dorsai…" he echoed. "Yes, the time is coming when there will be neither Exotics nor Dorsai, in the end when the final development is achieved. But we Exotics have always counted on our work as a step on the way to that end; and the Dorsai helped us up our step. Possibly, if things had gone otherwise, the Dorsai might have never been; and we would still be where we are now. But things went as they have; and our thread has been tangled with the Dorsai thread from the time your many-times removed grandfather Cletus Grahame first freed all the younger worlds from the politics of Earth…"

He stood up.

"I'll force no one," he said. "But I will offer Pel my help to find peace with himself, if he can; and if he finds such peace, then maybe he •will want to tell you willingly what you want to know."

Padma, Ian and I went back to the police station where I had left Pel and Moro locked up. We let Moro out, and closed the door upon the three of us with Pel. He sat in a chair, looking at us, pale, pinch-faced and composed.

"So you brought the Exotic, did you, Tom?" he said to me. "What's it going to be? Some kind of hypnosis?"

"No, Pel," said Padma softly, pacing across the room to him as Ian and I sat down to wait. "I would not deal in hypnosis, particularly without the consent of the one to be hypnotized."

"Well, you sure as hell haven't got my consent!" said Pel.

Padma had reached him now and was standing over him. Pel looked up into the calm face above the blue robe.

"But try it if you like." Pel said, "I don't hypnotize easily."

"No," said Padma. "I've said I would not hypnotize anyone; but in any case, neither you nor anyone else can be hypnotized without his or her innate consent. All things between individuals are done by consent.

The prisoner consents to his captivity as the patient consents to his surgery—the difference is only in degree and pattern. The great, blind mass that is humanity in general is like an amoebic animal. It exists by internal laws that cohere its body and its actions. Those internal laws are based upon conscious and unconscious, mutual consents of its atoms—ourselves —to work with each other and cooperate. Peace and satisfaction come to each of us in proportion to our success in such cooperation, in the forward-searching movement of the humanity-creature as a whole. Non-consent and noncooperation work against the grain. Pain and self-hate result from friction when we fight against our natural desire to cooperate…"

His voice went on. Gently but compellingly he said a great deal more, and I understood all at the time; but beyond what I have quoted so far—and those first few sentences stay printed-clear in my memory—I do not recall another specific word. I do not know to this day what happened. Perhaps I half-dozed without realizing I was dozing. At any rate, time passed; and when I reached a point where the memory record took up again, he was leaving and Pel had altered.

"I can talk to you some more, can't I?" Pel said as the Outbond rose to leave. Pel's voice had become clear-toned and strangely young-sounding. "I don't mean now. I mean, there'll be other times?"

"I'm afraid not," Padma said. "Ill have to leave St. Marie shortly. My work takes me back to my own world and then on to one of the Friendly planets to meet someone and wind up what began here. But you don't need me to talk to. You created your own insights as we talked, and you can go on doing that by yourself. Goodby, Pel."

"Goodby," said Pel. He watched Padma leave. When he looked at me again his face, like his voice, was clear and younger than I had seen it in years. "Did you hear all that, Tom?"

"I think so…" I said; because already the memory was beginning to slip away from me. I could feel the import of what Padma had said to Pel, but without being able to give it exact shape, it was as if I had intercepted a message that had turned out to be not for me, and so my mental machinery had already begun to cancel it out. I got up and went over to Pel. "You'll help us find those assassins, now?"

"Yes," he said. "Of course I will."

He was able to give us a list of five places that were possible hiding places for the three we hunted. He provided exact directions for finding each one.

"Now," I said to Ian, when Pel was through, "we need those Hunter Teams of yours that were pulled off"

"We have Hunters," said Ian. "Those officers who are Dorsai are still with us; and there are Hunters among them."

He stepped to the phone unit on the desk in the room and put a call in to Charley ap Morgan, at Expeditionary Headquarters. When Charley answered, Ian gave him the five locations Pel had supplied us.

"Now," he said to me as he turned away from the phone. "We'll go back to my office."

"I want to come," said Pel. Ian looked at him for a long moment, then nodded, without changing expression.

"You can come," he said.

When we got back to the Expeditionary Headquarters building, the rooms and corridors there seemed even more aswarm with officers. As Ian had said, they were mostly Dorsai. But I saw some among them who might not have been. Apparently Ian commanded his own loyalty, or perhaps it was the Dorsai concept that commanded its own loyalty to whoever was commanding officer. We went to his office; and, sitting there, waited while the reports began to come in.

The first three locations to be checked out by the officer Hunter Teams drew blanks. The fourth showed evidence of having been used within the last twenty-four hours, although it was empty now. The last location to be checked also drew blank

The Hunter Teams concentrated on the fourth location and began to work outward from it, hoping to cross sign of a trail away from it. I checked the clock figures on my wrist unit. It was now nearing one a.m. in the morning, local time; and the six hour deadline of the enlisted mercenaries was due to expire in forty-seven minutes. In the office where I waited with Ian, Pel, Charley ap Morgan, and another senior Dorsai officer, the air was thick with the tension of waiting. Ian and the two other Dorsai sat still; even Pel sat still. I was the one who fidgeted and paced, as the time continued to run out.

The phone on lan's desk flashed its visual signal light. Ian reached out to punch it on.

"Yes?" he said.

"Hunter Team Three," said a voice from the desk "We have clear sign and are following now. Suggest
you
join us, sir."

"Thank you. Coming," said Ian.

We went, Ian, Charley, Pel and myself, in an Expedition Command Car. It was an eerie ride through the patrolled and deserted streets of my city. lan's Hunter Team Three was ahead of us and led us to an apartment hotel on the upper north side of the city, in the oldest section.

The building had been built of poured cement faced with Castlemane granite. Inside, the corridors were old-fashionedly narrow and close-feeling, with dark, thick carpeting and metal Avails in imitation oak woodgrain. The soundproofing was good, however. We mounted to the seventh story and moved down the hall to suite number 415 without hearing any sound other than those we made, ourselves.

"Here," finally said the leader of the Hunter Team, a lean, gnarled Dorsai Senior Commandant in his late fifties. He gestured to the door of 415. "All three of them."

"Ian," said Charley ap Morgan, glancing at his wrist unit. "The enlisted men start moving into the city in six minutes. You could go meet them to say

.,*•*« we've found the assassins. The others and I—"

"No," said Ian. "We can't say we've found them until we see them and identify them positively." He stepped up to one side of the door; and, reaching out an arm, touched the door annunciator stud.

There was no response. Above the door, the half-meter square annunciator screen stayed brown and blank