Timothy Zahn - Deadman Switch

"You want me to bring a zombi to a high-level business meeting." The ice in his gaze thickened a bit. "And you want me to believe my father would approve of it?"

"Why not?" I countered. "No one there has to know who or what she is."

"Benedar, she's a condemned killer. Remember?"

"Well, yes," I admitted. "But as long as we keep her away from tall buildings and bombs..."

It had been the right thing to say. Randon's eyes goggled; then, almost grudgingly, he snorted out a chuckle and the ice began to melt. "I trust you realize that if I take a criminal into a meeting with me I'll never live it down."

I shrugged. "A reputation for mild unpredictability can be useful. As your father well knows."

For a long minute he just glared at me in silence. Then he snorted again, gently. "You're not fooling anyone, you know," he said. "I can see through your game. You want me to get as emotionally involved with this little crusade of yours as you are. Making Paquin more useful to me alive than dead would be a good way to start, wouldn't it?"

Sharp, indeed. "I'll admit that's part of it," I agreed without embarrassment. "But the logic still holds. Especially since the HTI people presumably know that I'm coming."

"So they know. What can they do about it?"

"There are several possibilities. Not the least of which would be barring me from the meeting."

"Let them try." But he said it thoughtfully. For a long minute he gazed at me, and I kept my peace and watched the sense of him change. "I'll talk it over with Kutzko later," he said abruptly. "If he thinks it'll be safe enough, I may consider it."

I nodded. "Thank you, sir."

"Uh-huh," he grunted. "Can we get back to the real business at hand now? Thank you. All right; let's start with the basic HTI organizational structure..."

Randon had a tendency to underestimate just how quickly I could assimilate information, and hitting the "high points," as he'd called it, took about an hour longer than was probably necessary. But at last we were done. Dropping the cyl he'd given me in my own stateroom on the way, I made straight for Calandra's cell to give her the good news.

Or what I had expected would be good news.

"No," she said firmly. "I'm not going."

I stared at her, trying through my stunned astonishment to read her. All I could get was anger and disgust, most of it directed at me. "Calandra, maybe you don't understand what this means—"

"Oh, I understand, all right," she growled. "You thought that I'd leap at the chance to get out of this room, to see the universe in all its glory again."

I gritted my teeth. Once again she was reading me with supremely casual ease. "And why not? Any normal person would."

She glared at me. "Well, then, maybe I'm not normal anymore. Maybe when you've been condemned to death you'll have a different outlook on life, too."

For a moment we stood facing each other. A thought occurred to me through the haze, and I reached out with every bit of skill I had... and this time I found it. Well buried beneath all the anger, I found the fear.

In retrospect, it was obvious. Sometime along the line, during or after the months of her trial and appeals, she'd finally resigned herself to her approaching death... and now I was threatening that acceptance. Threatening her once again with uncertainty. "I'm sorry," I said quietly. "I know this isn't going to be easy for you—"

"You know that, do you?" she said sarcastically.

"I'm trying to help you!" I snapped abruptly. What with Aikman and now Calandra, I'd finally had enough. "I'm your friend, Calandra. Whether you believe it or not; whether you like it or not. You're going with us tomorrow because maybe it'll get Randon Kelsey-Ramos on our side."

"Oh, wonderful," she sneered. "Well, it may come as a shock to you, but I don't happen to want your Kelsey-Ramos's help."

"Then you're going to die," I said bluntly.

"There are worse things than death," she shot back. "Such as helping the rich get richer at the expense of everyone else, for instance. If Carillon's money hadn't scraped all the ethics off your precious Watcher label I wouldn't have to tell you that."

A stab of fury slid white-hot through my heart. Fury, strongly edged with guilt. She saw it, and took an involuntary step backward, eyes suddenly wary. "Then don't help," I snarled at her. "You can act like the bottom of a growth tank tomorrow if you want. But you are coming along."

—

She was still standing there, staring at me, as I turned and stomped out.

She was still glowering the next morning when we got into the car with Randon, Dapper Schock, Kutzko, and Daiv Ifversn and headed for Cameo. She was still glowering, and I was still feeling guilty.

Unreasonably guilty, after all, considering that this was nothing less than an attempt to save her life. But the awareness of good motives had always been a feeble kind of comfort with me, and this case was no exception... especially since I wasn't fully convinced I was doing the right thing.

So always treat others as you would like them to treat you; that is the Law and the Prophets... I was certainly willing to obey... but could I really know how I would want to be treated under these circumstances? Calandra was right; without being in her position, I could only guess at what she needed from me.

And if I guessed wrong, I would wind up making her last days of life that much harder to bear.

Absorbed in my own thoughts, I withdrew most of my attention from the world around me... and was therefore almost startled when I suddenly realized that Calandra was beginning to pay a somewhat grudging attention to our surroundings.

To a normal person, I supposed, it wasn't all that interesting a view. Once out of Rainbow's End itself, the few modestly tall spaceport buildings disappeared, replaced by the squatter structures that nearly always dominated underdeveloped places like this where land was cheap and plentiful. Beyond and between the buildings were scatterings of the giant, multi-trunked native plants that seemed to take the ecological place of trees on this world. Simple, quiet, and at first glance almost prosaic... but for Watchers, nothing about God's universe was really prosaic. For me, as for Calandra, the landscape outside was a rich and varied study into the spirit of a world.

A world of people, I quickly realized, who were still not at rest with their planet.

The tension manifested itself in a thousand different ways, through a thousand different details. Here, we passed a home whose owner was fighting to keep aloof from the planet, his property ringed with imported trees and bushes; elsewhere, there were the mute signs of others who'd given up such attempts but still hadn't found any peace. I'd felt all this the night before, and it was no less unsettling in the fall light of day... especially since I had no idea what it was they were all striving against. The Solitaran environment was supposed to be one of the most benign in the colonies.

"Perhaps it's the Cloud," Calandra murmured.

I looked at her, both startled and chagrined that she'd once again read my line of thought so easily. "The Cloud's not supposed to affect people," I reminded her.

"Unless they're already dead?" she retorted grimly.

I swallowed, the sharp-acrid reminder of what she was facing curling my stomach. "Point, I suppose. But a lot of researchers have studied the Cloud, and none of them has ever mentioned any effect on the living."

"How long have any of them been in it?" she countered. "Some of these people have probably lived here all their lives. Even then, you can see how subtle it is. Would the average researcher even notice it?"

"Unlikely," I admitted. It would almost certainly take a Watcher to see it... and according to Randon, we were the first Watchers to come here.