THE FEAR PRINCIPLE

by B. A. Chepaitis

  After reading the full report from Jaguar's current case, he'd decided not to use her. She had altered Adrian Graff's program radically, against the advice of the testers, and against the specific injunction by the Governors' Board that she stick to protocol or face a reprimand, He'd have to talk to her about it, though he was sure she'd have a reasonable explanation for her changes. She always did. And she was usually right. But that didn't save him from having to run interference between her and the Board. To put her on the Rilasco case, which was already twisting their torques, would be foolish.

  It was too bad, he thought. With her capacity for the empathic arts and her willingness to use them, he was curious to see what she'd do with Clare, how she would proceed to get below her glasslike surface.

  "Lost in thought, or lost in line?" a voice asked him, and he turned abruptly to find himself staring into the grin of Nick Lyola.

  Alex took a step back. Nick never did have a clear idea of physical boundaries. He was always getting in faces, which Alex chalked up to the years he'd spent on NYPD as a homicide detective.

  "Hello, Nick," he said, then gazed around the room. "You here for business?"

  This room had the files for Teachers, and was generally only used by Supervisors or personnel checking records for insurance, pension, employment history, and so on. Teachers most often had reason to use the home-planet file banks, located on the other side of the building.

  "Returning my temporary access code. I had a few things to look up on someone."

  He shifted on his feet and leaned heavily into the wall with his shoulder, bringing his narrow face closer to Alex's. He was a tall man, almost as tall as Alex, and his bright blue eyes didn't have to look up much to meet Alex's. Still, he squinted as if he was looking into a bright light, and Alex noted that there were dark circles under his eyes, a sagging around his mouth from his tendency to grin with one side of it.

  Getting a little old, Alex thought. Or maybe he's just tired. His last case—one he'd been on with Jaguar—hadn't gone well. The prisoner, a repeat offender pedophile, had committed suicide after an attempt was made at emphatic contact. Jaguar's attempt. Something went wrong, she said. Nothing to do with Nick, or her. Just a lousy case. It happened now and then.

  But the two cases preceding that one, which Nick had handled alone, ended up with another prisoner death, and a prisoner who had to be sent on to another Teacher. Something wasn't right.

  Nick reached out his hand, index finger pointed, and jabbed Alex playfully in the chest, grinning his one-sided grin. "I'm glad I found you here," he said. "I understand you're reviewing the Rilasco woman for assignment."

  "News," Alex said, "travels fast."

  "Small Planetoid," Nick replied. "You got her covered yet?"

  "I'm still looking."

  Alex supposed Nick wanted a high-profile assignment to climb back on top of his professional mountain. He had passed on the job of Supervisor when it was offered to him years ago, saying he'd rather be the best Teacher he could be than a lousy administrator. And he was a very good Teacher, too. He believed in the no-frills approach, and abjured the high-tech toys offered for neural access, for dream-pattern interruption, for any number of physical and emotional stresses that could be created to bring fear up from under. He stuck to basics, and for him a clear sense of the multitudinous kinds of evils humans could perpetrate against each other was basic. Nick was good because he understood all the ways a person could lose their soul. He knew the criminals he worked with, could anticipate what they'd do, think, resist, or respond to, as if they occupied his own flesh.

  Alex suspected he had some natural ability in the emphatic arts, but if he was practicing them, he kept it carefully hidden. His skill, his understanding of fear and violence, didn't seem to be a matter of communication or touch. It lived strictly within his own skin, and it served him well in his job. But Alex still couldn't bring himself to like him.

  He repeatedly tried to convince himself that his dislike was a matter of differing styles rather than anything wrong with the man or his work. After all, he had a success rate second only to Jaguar's, and a loss-to-death rate almost lower than hers as well. Granted, he was known to have a short fuse, an intolerance of arrogance, his own way of working. But he'd been with the Planetoid system since its inception, working on Planetoid One when it was just a bubble dome floating in space, arid transferring to the more sophisticated Planetoid Three when it began operations.

  It made sense that he'd see himself as first in line for Clare. Still, Alex had the sense of some other agenda, and decided to probe just a little more.

  "You interested?" he asked.

  "Sure," Nick said. "Who wouldn't be? She's the talk of the town right now. Sounds like a real challenge."

  "That's true. You've worked assassins before?"

  "Four. All male, but the females are so rare anyway. Or maybe they're just smarter, and don't get caught as much, right?" This said with a playful wink.

  Alex wished he could like Nick more, but he just didn't think he could see his way clear to it. That, he reminded himself, was no reason to keep him off a job he might be qualified for. He'd have to come up with something more solid.

  "Haven't you got a home leave coming?" he asked. "You've had a couple of rough ones. Maybe you should take it now."

  Nick's grin disappeared, and his face looked heavier without it, eyes receding into dark circles, flesh hanging a little loosely around his chin. "The last rough one wasn't mine," he said grimly, "and I got a few things to clear up on that."

  Alex raised his eyebrows at him. "Such as?"

  "You'll see. I left something on your desk."

  "You want to tell me anything more?"

  Nick shook his head. "I want you to read it. And you should know, I've talked with the Board, and they're waiting to hear from you."

  Now Alex found himself tensing. Teachers going to the Board without discussing the issue with their Supervisor first was power playing. Alex resisted the urge to pick Nick up by his faded blue shirtfront and ask him who the hell he thought he was. Instead, he assumed his iciest tone and said, "What's this about, Nick?"

  "It's about Jaguar," he said, and nodded knowingly, as if they belonged to the same secret club. "You'll see."

  "Jaguar? What about her?"

  "You'll see. I gotta run, but we'll be talking." He winked, gave Alex a thumbs-up, and left.

  As Nick left, Alex felt the click and hum of foreknowledge—a brief dip into and out of his capacity for precognition, unexpected and coming without his volition. And perhaps it was at that moment, or perhaps it was when he returned to his office and read Nick's complaints, that he decided to do the worst possible thing and put Jaguar on Clare's case.

  2

  Supervisor Alex Dzarny kept a neat office.

  There were no stains from coffee cups on the neatly organized surface of his Formica desk, and no piles of disks leaning off of windowsills and chairs, as there were in some Supervisors' offices. The white walls had no pinholes, no yellow corners of old Scotch tape. Just a posterboard map of the region, and a very small black-and-white reproduction of a primitive pictograph, framed in ebony. That had been a gift, given long ago, by the woman who now sat on the other side of the desk from him.

  She was explaining to him, in her balanced, impeccably lucid way, the reasons for her changes in the Graff assignment. Her subject, Adrian Graff, convicted of larceny fraud, believed that she had helped him to escape to Toronto, and had consented to work a few con games for her. She had set up a program with team members that would result in the con man being conned, and felt that this program, along with a few personal touches she would include, would successfully lead him to his fears. She anticipated a few weeks' worth of work. It was, she said, a relatively simple case. The testers had called his fears accurately except for one.

  "Which one?" he asked.

  "The tests stopped at a surface fear," she said. "The report said that the expressed fear was
penury, masking a principal fear of impotence. In fact, that's a cover fear."

  "For?" he asked.

  "Ordinariness."

  Alex leaned back in his chair and drummed his fingers against his desk. "I'm waiting," he said.

  "I know. That's not one of the protocol fears. But it's his fear. He's terrified of learning that he's as petty, common, and unimportant as he believes himself to be."

  "Dr. Addams—" he used her academic title, as he did when he was about to question her logic—"how did you reach this?"

  She put her hands on the desk and spread the fingers out, flexing them, clenching them, unclenching them. Alex recognized the gesture. It signified, for her, an attempt to touch the assignment at its core. Generally, her attempts were successful. Often they went against protocol, and sometimes against all codes of behavior allowed the Teachers of Penal Planetoid Three. If she wasn't so good, he knew, she would have been out long ago.

  "My subject," she said, "wants to avoid ordinariness because his father was an ordinary and tedious drunk who shot his depressed wife and then himself. Adrian wants to be slick, important, so his father's ghost won't stare back at him in the mirror when he's trying to see himself." She sighed deeply. "He's wrong, of course. His father's ghost controls everything he does, though he left nothing behind except a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel's. Or," she asked, a corner of her mouth turning up, "should I say it was half-full?"

  "I think, in this case, half-empty would be appropriate. How old was he at the time?"

  "He was seventeen when the Serials started, and eighteen by the time Dad shot Mom. He sells false hope, because that's all he has to sell. Real hope—well, that's one of his corollary fears. Along with love. I'll use both in his program."

  "Love?" Alex asked. "Not impotence?"

  She lifted her shoulders and let them fall. "For Adrian, the one implies the other."

  Alex rubbed the tips of his fingers against his temples and thought. Jaguar wouldn't interrupt him, he knew, unless he asked her another question. One of her most valuable traits was her ability to maintain silence. It could be one of her most irritating qualities as well.

  "Okay," he said after some time had passed. "Proceed. We'll have to rewrite the protocols, though. Let's make it ... hmm. Core fear, self-imaging. How's that?"

  "It hardly matters, does it? I'll report back when it looks like we're approaching the fear. Maybe two weeks." She stood, picked up her sunglasses from his desk, and put them on. He held out a hand to stop her.

  "No, you won't," he said.

  She remained standing, one hand resting on top of his desk. After a moment her index finger began to tap lightly on the slick surface.

  "Have a seat," he said, and when she pulled her dark glasses down her nose to peer at him over their lenses, he added, "please."

  She pushed her shades to the top of her head and curled herself back into her chair. He reached over and took a file folder from the top of his pending bin, and handed it to her. She looked at him inquisitively, turned her eyes to the pages inside, and read. Then she lifted a scowling face back to his.

  "Alex," she said, "this is ridiculous. These charges—it wasn't like that."

  "Jaguar," he mimicked, "this is ridiculous. By now you should know how to avoid this kind of trouble. Nick is well and truly pissed at you," he continued over her protestations, "and if I can't talk him down, he'll bring you before the Board."

  "On a charge of—of slander and code breaking? How will he prove that?" she asked.

  "Do I dare ask you, at this juncture," Alex returned rather coldly, "how you convinced Adrian that staying with you would be a good thing?"

  She raised her chin up and blinked her eyes. "You may or may not. What you dare is up to you, not me," she replied coolly.

  "We don't have to argue about this," Alex said.

  They both knew that Supervisors and Planetoid Governors would remain willfully blind to the techniques a Teacher chose in a prisoner's program, as long as the Teacher was successful, and used a little discretion in the wording of her final reports. There were rules against unnecessary sexual behavior or the use of the empathic or ritual arts, but these would only be invoked in cases of repeated failure, repeated deaths, or repeated complaints from team members or Supervisors. Jaguar would have no problem skirting the edges of the rules, if only she would learn to be more politic in her interactions with the Bureaucratic body. Or in her interactions with other Teachers, for that matter. Especially with Nick.

  Alex always thought that Jaguar and Nick were too much alike to work well as a team. He was surprised when she agreed to partner with him, especially since she'd refused to partner with anyone else. But she'd said yes immediately when she found out Nick had requested her, and they were able to bring a series of complex cases to successful conclusion. She said she understood his style, and where he'd learned it.

  There was something more to the relationship than she was willing to share. Some history between them. There was also anger between them, and a consistent wrestling for power, even when they worked well together. And as far as Alex could tell, it had always been like that. What was happening between them now was some old shit, only more of it.

  "Nick says you used sex to get him to agree to certain procedures in a case you were working on together," Alex said to her. "He says you seduced him, using empathic arts in a coercive way, and convinced him that your protocol was the right one. When the program failed, you made him take the fall for it."

  Jaguar looked at Alex carefully from under half-closed lids. "Am I supposed to waste energy responding to that?" she asked. "Or can I get back to work now?"

  "You're supposed to—" Alex started, and then stopped. What did he want from her, anyway? An explanation would be a nice place to start.

  "I know what he claims to be angry about. What is it with you?"

  She brought her sunglasses down from the top of her head and twirled them, grinning at him. "Maybe he had the right key, but was working on the wrong keyhole."

  He pulled in breath, and let it out slowly. She was sitting on something. Something she obviously wasn't going to give him now. The negative side of her capacity for silence, here at its worst.

  "Look," she said casually, "if the prisoner couldn't take the heat, it wouldn't be the first time. He was a pedophile. You know what that's like. But I did not tickle Nick's funny bone to get him to play my way."

  "Then," Alex said, "what did you tickle?"

  "Nothing, Alex. Really. Nick wanted to try to get at the prisoner's fear of women through me, and I said no. He said I slept with everyone else, why not with this guy? I told him because it literally wouldn't do a fucking bit of good. He said I better play along or he'd report me, being senior Teacher and all. I told him to go ahead, if he could get his head unstuck from his ass long enough to find a telecom."

  "I take it," Alex said, "you're reporting this interaction verbatim."

  "And for the record. Also for the record, the conversation was public. At a bar called the Crab Nebula. Seafood a specialty."

  "And you didn't sleep with Nick? At all? Ever? For any reason?"

  "Yes. Two years ago. For fun. But it wasn't, so I didn't repeat the experience."

  "What about the other charge?"

  "The empathic coercion?" She turned her eyes full to his. "What makes you think I'd have to bother?" she asked.

  Alex nodded. She was right. She wouldn't have to do more than crook a finger to get Nick running to her. And he wasn't the only one. He leaned back in his chair and swiveled, considering what he was about to do and wondering if it was the most foolish thing he'd ever done, or just a close second to hiring her in the first place.

  "I'll deal with Nick," he said, "but I want you to deal with Clare Rilasco."

  Jaguar startled, and raised an eyebrow at him.

  "You know the case?"

  "Just what everyone else knows. She's an assassin. Has a whole stableful of dead men to her credit, and got s
nagged on the last one."

  "Gregory Patricks, Governor of Colorado."

  Jaguar rolled her eyes. "What he did I wouldn't call governing. Con man with political backing. Selling snake oil."

  "I take it you didn't approve of him."

  "He cut education funding by half and decided to spend the taxpayers' money to put up casinos so the children of Colorado can all have gainful employment gambling and dancing naked while lonely men masturbate in public. I only wish Rilasco had killed his sidekick, too."

  "Your moral stance leaves much to be desired, Jaguar."

  "Probably," she said agreeably, "but it's a moot point. I'm on assignment already."

  "I know. Adrian's relatively simple—so you say. I want you to start on Clare at the same time. She'll probably take longer, because it's not just a program."

  "What, then?"

  "You're to find out who ordered the hit."

  Jaguar leaned an elbow on his desk and pushed her face close to his.

  "You're serious, aren't you? You really want me to do this."

  "With your ninety-seven percent success rate, it shouldn't ruffle a hair on your head."

  She glared at him briefly, then let it go and leaned back in her chair. "It's ninety-eight percent."

  "I beg your pardon," he said, and handed the Rilasco file to her.

  He let her read, and gave her time to process the information, along with the idea of working two prisoners at once. It was unusual, he knew, though sometimes it had to happen for lack of Teachers, lack of time. The governing bodies of the Planetoids were more interested in funding new technology for the Planetoids than new people, and Alex had to scramble for workers now and then. In this case, he didn't have a shortage of people. He just wanted Jaguar to do it. She would be suspicious of his motives, he knew. When she raised her eyes from the initial report, they were full of questions.

  He nodded, acknowledging them, and asked her simply, "What?"

  "Okay," she said. "First, why'd she get caught on this one?"

  "Good question."

  It was a question Alex himself had asked. Here was a woman who had been working hits for years, and by all accounts had managed to remain both a public figure and invisible at the same time. She'd been seen on the arms of many men, in attendance at political and fashionable public events, and her name was well enough known in the reports of such events. Everyone thought she was just a wealthy socialite, and since her family had money before the Serials, they assumed she'd inherited it when they became victims of an unknown killer.