Over the next couple of days, we went to all the common meals, got to know the other passengers, and tried to figure out if any of them were Markov plants. To be honest, it was pretty boring work. People are interesting—Father Bill taught me that. Take the time to get to know them, and just about everyone you run into has a story that’s worth hearing, and not just for its entertainment value. People go through life, they have their disasters and triumphs, no matter how big or how small, and they learn stuff along the way. Listen to them, and you can learn something about life, too.
Father Bill was the closest thing to a real father I could remember, and I didn’t even meet him until I was sixteen, so I guess the damage was done by then. I’d already been living on the streets for nine years, the first six of them as part of a bezzie-pack, and although I’d developed scruples, I had no compunctions, if you understand the difference.
So Father Bill saw this wild, violent thing, and he liked me. Well, he liked almost everyone. Some people, when they say that, it means they like the idea of liking people, but that’s all. Not Bill. He found people really interesting. He’d tell you all these interesting things about other people’s background he’d found out, or about what they thought, and it was stuff that would never even occur to you until he told you, and then it really was amazing. He found everything about me amusing and intriguing and even admirable. I guess he taught me to see a bit of that in other people, too.
But the truth is, if you’re looking for someone trying to kill you, insights about the meaning of life just don’t hold your attention. And that tells you something about the meaning of life right there, if you think about it.
The shuttle had a capacity of 170 passengers, but there were probably only half that many on board—the travel business was in a slump lately. The passenger cabins were in the sternward wheel, along with the common spaces and dining. That way, passengers never had to go up to the spine and grapple with zero gee. The stewards lived forward, in the bow wheel. The flight crew had cabins in the bow wheel as well, and spent their off-duty time there. We passengers never saw any of the flight crew, only the stewards. That old Earth custom of VIP passengers dining at the captain’s table was beginning to be observed on some of the classier routes—there’s that Terrakultur thing again—but nobody was likely to call the Peezgtaan in-system shuttle a classy route.
Of the eighty or so passengers other than us, I’d guess that no more than a dozen were Human. Most of the rest were Varoki, but there was a solitary Trand, small and wrinkled and lonely looking, five Zaschaan, and the same gregarious group of eight Katami I’d seen at H’Tank’s Six-Star Club—I guess it really is a small world. All we were missing was a couple Kuran witchlocks for a complete set of the six sentient races, but Kuran don’t get out much, and that’s fine by me.
Most of the passengers had reservations which predated the original killings—I knew this because I bribed the steward—so they were clear . . . unless Kolya had managed to pull the old swicheroo and at the last minute substitute a silencer for one of the legitimate passengers. I considered that unlikely—he’d have to not only find out this was our real flight, but he’d have to do it far enough ahead to set up the switch—which meant document work, research . . . it just sounded like too many moving parts to me.
Not that I ignored the possibility—I’d been ass-bitten by long shots too many times. But nobody seemed terribly suspicious, and—much more importantly in my experience—nobody seemed too terribly non-suspicious, either.
There was a Varoki security contractor who got really interested in me once he figured out I was the muscle for our little group, but it turned out he wanted to recruit me. Private security was getting to be a big growth industry, and hard-eyed Humans were the bodyguards of choice for the rich and powerful. Arrie was right about that—the Zaschaan might be bigger and tougher than us, but there was something sexy and cool about Human thugs that the Zacks could just never match. If you wanted to convince people that you were wealthy, influential, and sophisticated, you’d hire a dark elf as your exotic bodyguard, not some bugger-eating troll.
And why was private security getting more profitable? Because we lived in interesting times. Karl Marx dreamt of a day when government would wither because there was no further need for it. A lot of rich guys had the same dream and, unlike Marx, they were used to getting their way.
There were a couple other guns on board. One of the passengers was the Varoki wattaak from Peezgtaan—basically like a senator back in North Am. He had four security people: two Varoki and two Human, and I didn’t know any of them, which was a good thing, because that meant they didn’t know me.
Okay, civics lesson. The Wat was the upper house of the Cottohazz’s assembly—one wattaak from each “nation” of the Cottohazz. Each home world, which means each of the six races, had twenty-seven nations, because that’s how many national polities there were on Hazz’Akatu, the Varoki home world, when the Cottohazz had been formed—so everybody else also got twenty-seven, and how they made that work was their problem. From Hazz’Akatu there was uKa-Maat, uZ’mataan, uBakaa, and twenty-four other Varoki national governments I hadn’t heard of or didn’t remember. With all five of the original sentient races, there had been 135 wattaaki at first. When Terra joined, they added twenty-seven more—the United States of North America, the Western European Union, the United Arab Republic, the Republic of Canton, India, Russia, Brazil, and eighteen more, some of them pretty awkward political unions.
The colony worlds were usually part of a nation back on one of the home worlds, but at a certain point, some were recognized as separate nations, with their own wattaak. Our guy from Peezgtaan was the newest wattaak, and it brought the total number to 171. Peezgtaan had been an uZ’mtaanki colony originally, but we got our nationhood because we raised and sent troops—Human troops—to Nishtaaka, to help suppress the rogue mutiny. Since independence, all us Human Crack Trash had become uPeezgtaani citizens, which was probably an improvement over “stateless alien residents,” which had been our previous status.
So now we had our own wattaak—Varoki, of course—his election campaign paid for by AZ Simki-Traak Cottos, all nice and legal. And in its small way, it was good for Peezgtaan economically—it gave us another product to produce and export for hard currency: legislators.
They call it democracy, because there are no hereditary rulers, no kings, and everything is done according to laws passed by elected representatives. You can’t inherit power, or titles, or political office. What you can inherit is money, and when a world like Terra, with about nine billion people on it, gets to elect just twenty-seven representatives, money shouts, and everything else murmurs. They call it democracy, but it’s just a puppet show.
* * *
Mostly what we did on the shuttle was walk around the wheel, explore its different levels, and work out expediency plans. We poked around in closets and maintenance access bays, looking for places where a kid could hide from a grown-up, and we gave the places numbers. I learned the numbers, and a few other words, too, in aGavoosh, so if I needed to, I could tell Tweezaa where to hide.
My only bad scare with the kids came our fourth day out, when Barraki went missing one afternoon. We were all back in the cabin, and he must have slipped out when nobody was looking. I got the LeMatt automatic out and showed Marfoglia how to use it—how to put the safety on and off, how to reload, and had her dry fire it to see what the trigger pull was like. Then I told Marfoglia not to let Tweezaa out of her sight until I got back, strapped on the Hawker, and went looking for Barraki.
It didn’t take long to find him; he hadn’t really been trying to sneak around or hide his tracks. He was all the way down on the observation deck, looking out the big rear ports at Prime. It seemed to spin slowly around as the wheel turned. It wasn’t much of a sun, this far out, but it was bigger than anything else in the sky.
I should have kicked his ass, but he was crying, and I just sat down next to him.
&nb
sp; Yes, Varoki cry . . . sort of. No tears, but repetitive sobbing a lot like us. Most animals born live probably do something similar to get the breathing started, and the really smart species remember it and use it as a lament. Coming into this world is not for the faint of heart.
I figured he was crying because of his father being dead, but I was only half right. He looked over at me and then looked down and away.
“Why do you not hate me?” he demanded, his voice quivering.
“Huh?” I asked.
Normally I’m a little more articulate than that, but the question caught me flat-footed. Hate him?
“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked him. “Why would I hate you?”
“What we did to you. On Peezgtaan,” he said.
“Did I miss something back there? I don’t remember you doing anything that would even irritate me, let alone make me hate you.”
“Not to you. I mean, to Humans. What my family did to your people on Peezgtaan. Why do you not hate me for that?”
He was serious, and he wanted a serious answer, not just some hey, kid, don’t worry about it bullshit.
“Well, I look at it this way, sport,” I said finally. “If I was going to hate someone for what was done forty years ago, it’d be someone a lot older than you.”
He looked at me, and I could tell it wasn’t enough of an answer for him. I held my open left hand out, palm facing him, fingers splayed.
“Here, spread your hand like this and match it up against mine,” I told him. He did, and even though his hand was smaller in most respects, his fingers were longer. The hands were functionally the same—five digits, one of which was an opposable thumb—but the proportions were different, and the skin even more so.
“You got longer fingers than I do,” I told him. “You want me to hate you for that?”
He frowned and shook his head.
“No, that would be stupid, wouldn’t it?” I said. “Because you don’t have any control over how long your fingers are. Well, connect the dots, Barraki.”
“But it is not fair what happened,” he insisted.
“No argument there, pal. It just wasn’t on your watch.”
“Someday it will be my watch. What then?” he asked.
“Well, then we’ll see.”
He looked out at the stars for a while before speaking again.
“My father . . . was very sad, since my mother died.”
“How long ago was that?” I asked. I hadn’t known his mother was dead, but I’d noticed she wasn’t in the picture.
“Almost four years. He did a lot of things . . . I think because he was so sad. Then a year ago, he got better. He said there was a poison in our blood, but he was going to cure it. He worked hard on it. He had never worked before, but this last year he worked very hard. And he was happy. He was almost done. That is why we came to Peezgtaan, to finish the work.”
“What was here? Some kind of medicine?” I asked. I wasn’t really sure what that “poison in the blood” stuff meant. Barraki shook his head.
“No medicine. Just councilors—lawyer I think is the word. They were for the . . . mmm . . . I think the word is faiths?”
Faiths? That sounded religious, but no religion I know of uses lawyers to make the mumbo jumbo work. I shrugged and shook my head.
“They were for the money, to hold it,” he said.
“Trusts!” I said. “Trust funds?”
He nodded. “Yes, that is the word.”
“Your father was setting up some charitable trusts on Peezgtaan? Maybe to help poor people?”
It made sense. Rich playboy loses rich wife, goes into mourning, wonders about the meaning of life, decides to spend the rest of his life “doing good,” or at least until he gets bored and decides that big-game hunting would be better. Not nice to think that of the dead, I know, but I’ve seen a lot of rich people sling hash in St. Mike’s soup kitchen, and never for very long.
But Barraki was shaking his head.
“No, the trusts were for Tweezaa and me. He said they would take care of our education, and give us some money for a while, but then we would have to work, like everyone else.”
Work?
The e-Traaks? One of the ten richest families in the Cottohazz? Work?
“Um . . . So, like, what was he doing with the family fortune?”
“He was giving it to the Humans on Peezgtaan, to all of them. No, not giving. There was a different word . . . entailing? Do you know that word?”
“Sort of,” I answered, but I still wasn’t clear on this whole giving-away-the-fortune concept. “What do you mean by ‘it’? As in entailing it?”
He looked at me, unsure what I was asking.
“Everything,” he answered. “All of the family holdings. Well, there are private estates which are already entailed to others—he had no control over them. But the ownership in all the different companies, like this one—Simki-Traak. I think we own a lot of it, yes? I am not sure. But he had a plan; he told me all about it.”
Barraki turned to face me now, and he was getting excited.
“There would be a big company, and it would own all of the other things, and every Human living on Peezgtaan today would have one share—just one share—and that’s all the shares there would be. But you could never sell your share—that is what I think entailed meant. When you died, your share was gone, but all of your children would have a share of their own, and no one person could ever own more than one share. There were other things . . . I forget. But that was the main thing. He said that he had set it up so that only Peezgtaan Humans could ever own it. Ever.”
He stopped then, and his enthusiasm faded.
“Then they killed him,” he said.
What Barraki was talking about—what his dad had dreamed up—was revolutionary stuff. It would have shaken the Varoki establishment to its foundation, that’s for sure, which was okay, I guess. But more importantly—at least to me—it would have given everyone on Peezgtaan a chance. No overnight millionaires—just a decent stake in the world around them. That was something to think about, wasn’t it?
I put my arm around Barraki’s shoulder. No wonder somebody killed his dad. And no wonder they wanted to kill him and his sister, too—the poison was gone from their blood.
* * *
A lot of my memories concerning the shuttle ride are missing in action, for reasons you’ll understand later. The parts that remain are not necessarily the most important parts. Well, one of them is, but the other one is just a lunch, of all things—lunch with the Hlontaas.
I remember I didn’t like how often Hlontaa shared meals with us, but that was because I didn’t like the guy, not for any professional reason. I could have kept him away and cited security—used the power of the job to get something I wanted—but once you start down that road, it gets easier and easier to keep going, and pretty soon you’re the manager of some city, screwing everyone who elected you just so you can line the pockets of your pals, who only pretend to like you anyway because you own the trough. No thanks.
So there we were. The tables were eight-tops, so it was the four of us, plus Hlontaa and Madame Hlontaa, and another Varoki couple, husband and wife, both councilors—lawyers—criminal prosecutors, as it turns out, from Akaampta. They had been on Peezgtaan as consultants, helping the Munies set up a new organized-crime task force.
That was kind of creepy.
Hlontaa was explaining one of his theories—this one about criminal justice—to the table in general, but mostly to the two prosecutors from Akaampta. He’d figured out that the reason there was so much Human crime on the jointly occupied worlds was that Humans placed this lower value on their lives—a recurring theme with him—and so normal deterrence didn’t work. You needed harsher penalties for the same crime with Humans, just to get the same deterrent effect. He thought the death penalty was appropriate for a wide range of crimes—at least for Human offenders. Not because he didn’t like Humans—he actually liked th
em very much, just ask him. But because he liked them, he understood them better than most Varoki, and once you understood them, you saw that they needed a firmer hand, for their own good.
I don’t know much xeno-psychology, because I haven’t had to interact with all the different races. I know that the Katami are very gregarious, more so than us. The Trand are as well, which is why it was so odd to see just one of them on the ship, and probably why he looked so unhappy. I don’t know what’s going on with the Kuran, and I don’t particularly care. The two races of the Cottohazz I’ve bumped up against most are the Varoki and the Zaschaan, and psychologically, they’re not that different from us. The Zaschaan tend to be cranky, but I know plenty of cranky Humans, too. Maybe the Zaschaan just don’t bother to cover it up with a phony smile. The Varoki are a lot like us, and I think that, secretly, they’d like to be even more like us, which is odd, considering we’re the ones inside the apple barrel.
I mention all of this by way of explanation as to why the two Varoki prosecutors sort of studied their menus and blushed while Hlontaa was laying all this out, and when Varoki blush, with that iridescence skin tint, you can really see it. Barraki was blushing, too, but not the Dark Princess. I figured she had more sense than to be embarrassed by what some other fool was saying. She wasn’t saying it, after all.
“Capital punishment is barbaric,” I said while he was catching his breath. The whole table looked at me, and Marfoglia and Barraki looked particularly surprised. Barraki translated for Tweezaa, and she nodded and went back to looking around the club deck.
Hlontaa smiled condescendingly. “And yet so many Human nations use it,” he said, as if that was some killer argument.
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