Wil McCarthy - The Collapsium

“Nervous, eh?”

“No, sir, just the opposite. My strong impression at the time was that they were guards. Not professional security, you understand—they were kempt and well dressed, but there was no impression of legitimacy about them. It seemed to me that they were posted there explicitly to intimidate passersby. I suspected that some business was going on inside the building, and there was a desire to prevent interruptions.”

“Or witnesses.”

“Exactly, yes.”

“So what did you do? You weren’t a police officer at all at that point, were you?”

“I belonged to a neighborhood watch organization in Xingtai. But you’re correct: I had no official standing in the city of Qingdao. I wasn’t licensed to carry weapons or interfere with lawful enterprise. But the situation looked bad, like someone could easily get hurt.”

“Including yourself,” Bruno noted.

“Yes, sir. I was acutely aware of the fact—any suspicious action on my part could tip them off. Even simply walking past might do it; the smart thing would have been to just turn around the moment I saw them. But I believe in the law. I believe that no one has the right to violate it, especially in flagrant ways that breed disrespect. Calling the police would have been an option, but I worried the suspects would be long gone by the time an officer materialized.”

“A curious worry. What did you do?”

Shiao shrugged. “I called myself at home, and then while the line was open I rapidly approached the two suspects. ‘I need your help,’ I said to them. ‘Someone is chasing me.’ It’s doubtful they would have believed this story for long, and possibly they saw at once what I was doing, which was capturing their coordinates and their images to a remote location. But what certainly gave me away was my own voice on the telephone, screaming that I should get out of there immediately. I was younger then, more impulsive, but it turned out to be good advice: the nearer suspect drew a laser pointer and burned the left side of my face straight through to the bone.”

“Good gods!”

“He was aiming for the phone,” Shiao explained, “and he hit it. At that moment I myself was still an incidental target. Since I was already running, I took advantage of the distraction to engage the suspect physically.”

Bruno didn’t know whether to be impressed or appalled. “Surely you must have been in agony!”

Again, Shiao shrugged. “I assume so. By the time the city police arrived, I was dead, so I never did learn how it all turned out. We didn’t have the kind of scene reconstructions that we do nowadays; it became something of a town mystery. AH I can say is that one suspect was picked up at the scene, having been detained there by an injury, and the other was identified and arrested later based on the video I’d captured. No other associates were ever explicitly identified.”

Shiao’s voice had never once wavered from the precise, restrained, overpolite monotone that had marked good police officersJor centuries, perhaps forever. There was no room for boast or modesty in that tone: the account was purely factual and devoid of emotional overtone, laid out plainly for Bruno’s evaluation. Shiao’s eyes had not looked clouded or sentimental as he told the tale of this major turning point in his life.

“I daresay these gentlemen benefited from the lesson,” Bruno ventured.

Shiao nodded. “I like to think so, sir. A policeman’s job is to chill and frustrate crime—merely punishing it is a symptom of failure.”

“I suppose so, yes. Very insightful. I’m surprised they didn’t promote you directly to captain.”

Again, a factual monotone. “I failed the aptitude, sir. I hope to grow and season with age, but today the Constabulary has dozens of better cops than myself.”

“Dozens? Really?” Bruno blanched inwardly at the thought. With forty billion citizens to choose from, the Queendom certainly had no shortage of compulsive savants to fill its payroll. Better than filling it with incompetents, obviously, but there was something frightening about a really gung-ho interplanetary police force. “I shall be very careful to obey the laws, I think.”

“That’s the idea, sir.” Then, catching something in Bruno’s look, Shiao said, “It makes some people nervous, this kind of concentrated authority. I understand the feeling. But I can assure you of the Constabulary’s complete intolerance for bad cops. Any crook or bigot in our midst, or even a well-meaning authoritarian, would be disowned and prosecuted immediately. Of the seven thousand, six hundred, and eight applicants for the position of lieutenant, more than eighty percent failed the moral aptitude screening.”

“Seven thousand!” Bruno said, surprised. “Goodness, that’s a lot of applicants. What happened to all of them?”

“A few are taken on each year as sergeants,” Shiao replied, “and since local and regional forces have less stringent entrance criteria, they absorb a lot of our near misses.”

“Mmm. How many is a lot?”

Shrug. “Probably a few hundred, that year.”

“And the rest?”

Shiao considered for a few seconds before answering, “I would guess many of them found work in support roles: admin, theory, equipment testing. And there’s always a need for critics and advocates in the policy arena. And actors for the training demos, and I suppose for commercial movies as well. Actors who really understand the police are rare.”

“And the rest?” Bruno persisted.

Now Shiao began to look uncomfortable, and Bruno sensed he was edging into taboo territory. In a meritocracy, what happened to people who lacked merit? People who were lazy or impulsive or foolish could change, up to a point, but could they want to change?

“Neighborhood Watch is a respectable job,” Shiao answered finally. “And they’ll take almost anyone.”

“Almost,” Bruno mused. “Mmm. And the rest?”

Shiao sighed. “There’s always crime itself, sir. It’s not generally a career choice for geniuses.”

“Ah. I suppose not. Seems a bit unfair, though.”

Shiao, to Bruno’s surprise, seemed to find that funny. “ They certainly think so, sir. But good and evil are choices, not fates handed out at birth. We’re talking, probably, about fewer than a hundred of those seven thousand applicants, and if you actually met them, you might find your sympathies reduced.”

“Ah. Maybe so. You’ve little hope of promotion, then? It sounds like an awfully rigid structure.”

“They all are, sir. To get promoted I’d have to displace someone more experienced, which is a huge effort even to attempt. And my own job goes open for recompetition every decade, so I could well be demoted if I start to get sloppy. In theory, we’re encouraged to see demotion as a positive career move—point of maximum competence, as they say. But that’s a fairly new idea. ‘Rigid structure’ is an accurate description. But of course, we’re planning for the long term these days.”

“Mmm. Indeed.”

Shiao had nothing further to say. Neither did Bruno. The conversation was at an end.

The actual docking and boarding were so uneventful Bruno nearly missed them; the cruiser simply pulled up alongside the suspect vessel, selected a standard docking adapter, and mated airlocks with nary a thump. Only when Shiao’s harnesses retracted and vanished and the SWAT robots started running in puppetlike synchrony toward the hatch, flicking on their optically superconducting outer jackets so that they vanished from sight—only then did Bruno realize what was happening. Hastily, he unstrapped himself, prepared to follow once the area was “secured.” This had been explained to him at length—whether he left a copy behind or not, he was neither to risk himself nor interfere with tactical or evidentiary procedures unless some very clear and pertinent reason presented itself.