Timothy Zahn - Deadman Switch

Kutzko snorted. "He's welcome to it. I wonder if he's like this with everyone."

"I doubt it. Not everyone has a Watcher with them."

Kutzko's uneasiness took on a tinge of guilt. "Yeah. Well..."

"What are you going to do with that?" I asked, gesturing to the cyl in his hand.

"Give it to Mr. Kelsey-Ramos, of course. Why?—you wanted to keep it our little secret?"

I shrugged. "I did sort of imply that if Aikman surrendered the cyl we'd keep his squalling to the governor to ourselves."

"You shouldn't make promises you can't keep," he growled. "I have to report this, and you know it."

I just looked at him, and after a minute he sighed. "Oh, all right—I'll gloss over that part if I can. Though I'll bet HTI will be madder at Aikman than Mr. Kelsey-Ramos will—getting Paquin thrown out of the reception meant she was here when the saboteurs tried to get in."

I hadn't thought of it that way, but he was right. God has ensnared the wicked in the work of their own hands... "Good point," I agreed.

Idly, he rolled the cyl across his palm. "I suppose I'd better get this to Mr. Kelsey-Ramos."

I nodded. "When I left him he was in Schock's stateroom getting ready to start sifting through the HTI cyls," I offered.

"Okay." He hesitated. "Gilead... does Aikman have a real case?"

"In other words, can I really read minds?"

He grimaced. "Maybe I should ask how much of people's minds can you read."

I sighed. "I've been working for Lord Kelsey-Ramos for eight years," I reminded him. "If I could read anything more than emotions and surface impressions, don't you think I could easily have stolen the Carillon Group out from under him by now?"

"Even knowing you'd have to answer to God for doing it?" he asked pointedly.

"Aaron Balaam darMaupine felt God wanted him to establish a theocracy on Bridgeway," I countered evenly. "He would have held onto his power a lot longer if he could have read the minds of those who eventually betrayed him."

"Point," Kutzko agreed, some of the tension in his sense easing. "Old Balaam's Ass did crumble pretty quickly once the Patri woke up to what he was doing."

I winced to myself at Kutzko's careless, even automatic epithet. DarMaupine's humility name had been an easy one for the Patri to turn against him: Balaam, the Old Testament prophet who'd had to be told by his own donkey that an angel of death was waiting for him in the road ahead. It was probably the only scriptural passage that even the most rabidly unreligious in the Patri and colonies knew. "Yes, he did," I agreed. "The original Watcher elders didn't unlock any hidden power of the human mind, Mikha. They just learned how to truly see the universe around them."

"Yeah. Well..." Kutzko grimaced, then shrugged fractionally. "You have to admit it gets blazing spooky sometimes. Anyway... I've still got to go find Mr. Kelsey-Ramos. See you later."

"Right."

He left. I waited a minute, then followed, heading back to my own stateroom. He was right, of course: Watcher abilities could indeed be spooky to those who didn't understand.

To those of us who did understand... there were perhaps dangers the elders had never even considered. God does not see as human beings see; they look at appearances but God looks at the heart...

Had we, in our human pride, tried to usurp that role for ourselves? Had that been, in fact, the underlying root of Aaron Balaam darMaupine's treason?—the belief that with God's power to see even partway into men's souls he had also inherited God's power to rule?

Had that pride led to the persecution the entire Watcher sect now suffered under?

I had none of the answers. Not in eleven years of searching for them.

I'd anticipated it, expected it, convinced Randon it would happen. Even so, I was still surprised when Governor Rybakov arrived at the Bellwether the next morning.

"Let me first state for any record you happen to have running," she said after the formalities of greeting were out of the way, "that my presence here is in no way an acknowledgment of any wrongdoing or knowledgeable complicity in wrongdoing."

"Of course," Randon agreed calmly. "Just as by asking you here to retrieve official property I'm in no way accusing you of any such activities."

For a moment they eyed each other in cool silence, while I sat at the third point of the triangle and tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible. Rybakov broke first. "May I have them?" she asked.

Wordlessly, Randon reached into his desk and pulled out the customs IDs we'd taken from the would-be saboteurs the previous evening. Equally wordlessly, Rybakov took them, gave each a sour glance, and slid them into a pocket beneath her capelet.

"I presume you have an explanation," Randon suggested.

"Certainly I have one. Is there any particular reason you deserve to hear it?"

Randon glanced at me, back to Rybakov. "Would it help if I assured you I don't intend to make any of this public?"

It would indeed help, I could tell. Rybakov's tension level decreased noticeably as she decided he was serious. "It came as most things do in politics," she growled at last. "I owed a favor; it was collected."

"What kind of a favor?"

"None of your business," she said evenly.

Again Randon glanced at me. I shrugged in return—all I could tell was that it was something personal, and that it probably really was none of his business. "May I ask, then, who it was who collected on the favor?"

"I'd rather not say."

"It had to be someone from HTI, of course," Randon continued as if she hadn't spoken. "Chun Li?—or was it Blake or Karash? Or one of the middle-level people doing the managers' dirty work for them?"

"I'd rather not say," Rybakov repeated, more emphatically this time.

"Blake," I murmured.

Both sets of eyes turned to me: Randon's with an almost smug satisfaction, Rybakov's with a mixture of anger and resignation. "You sure?" Randon asked.

"It was the name she reacted to," I told him.

"Ah." He shrugged. "Well, it can't always be the unobvious one, can it?"

Rybakov seemed to brace herself. "And now...?"

Randon raised an eyebrow. "And now what? As I said, Governor, I don't intend to either press charges or make this matter public. As far as I'm concerned, it's an internal matter between the Carillon Group and one of its subsidiaries. We'll deal with it from Portslava."

"I see." Again, she seemed to measure his words. "May I ask, then, whether or not you've had a chance to examine the records HTI was so anxious to recover?"

It was as if someone had flipped a switch. Abruptly, the sparring-level tension in the room jumped an order of magnitude. A mutually held secret, I decided, reading the identical emotion in both of them. A secret neither of them really wanted to discuss. "My financial expert and I went over them last evening," Randon told her after a brief pause.

The muscles in Rybakov's face tightened still further. A shared secret, for certain. "And what do you plan to do about it?" she asked quietly.

"That'll be up to my father and the rest of the Carillon board to decide," he said, his voice heavy with condemnation. "And probably the High Judiciary, as well."

Rybakov's face darkened with anger... but it was anger tinged with the awareness that she was standing on a warm ice bridge. "Before you pass judgment, Mr. Kelsey-Ramos," she said, "you should do me the courtesy of listening to my side of the story. And perhaps trying to understand the dilemma Solitaire as a whole is in."

He cocked his head slightly to the side. "I'm listening," he invited.

She glanced pointedly in my direction. "Perhaps this is something best kept between the two of us."

Clearly, Rybakov wanted to get rid of me. Just as clearly, Randon wasn't going to have any of that. "I already told you that my financial expert knows," he reminded her.