Death Sentence

by Roger MacBride Allen

  The two humans stood. "I don't understand," Mendez said. "You traveled all this way to welcome us. Will you not accompany us to the surface so that we may speak more on the way?"

  "I had hoped to have far more time to meet with you here, but I was delayed. Sadly, it is not in the least advisable for me to travel with you. The Elevator car that is about to arrive has been specially modified for your use during your time here on Metran. You will not merely ride it down to the surface. Its living quarters are a detachable module that will be automatically shunted to the rail link that connects the Elevator to our city. The living module will then be transported to a convenient central location in the city. The interior of the car is appointed for human use--including your lower gravity. That is why I may not travel with you to the surface."

  "We are aware that low-gee and zero-gee conditions are unhealthy for Metrannans," said Mendez, "but surely the slight difference between your surface acceleration and ours cannot be enough to cause harm."

  "Metrannans can and do adapt to mild shifts in gravity--in time," said Taranarak. "But until such adaptation, the sensation is most unpleasant. I believe it is equivalent to the maladaption to zero gravity some members of your species suffer. I believe it is called 'spacesickness.' Is that the correct term?"

  Mendez frowned, and his color suddenly darkened by several shades. For whatever reason, Wolfson's demeanor changed as well. If Taranarak was reading her expression properly, something had suddenly amused her.

  "I beg your pardon," said Taranarak. "Have I said something to offend?"

  "No, no, not at all," said Wolfson. Mendez's expression suggested that he did not entirely agree. "We certainly would not wish to cause you discomfort. We will see you again in the city."

  "Very well," said Taranarak. "Then please come this way."

  She led them through the departure formalities into the boarding area and toward their waiting Elevator car. In a few minutes they were gone, and Taranarak left to find her own car down, feeling vaguely worried and depressed--and a trifle dishonest. She could defend herself, to a certain extent. After all, she had not deliberately misled them--and if she had not warned them sufficiently, it could at least be argued that it was because there had not been enough time. But those thoughts were not enough to set her mind completely at ease.

  They would indeed see her again in the city. But she doubted very much that they realized just how much else they would see down there.

  SEVENTEEN

  SIDEWAYS REALTIME DOWN

  Hannah followed Jamie down the access ramp. It moved in a straight line for a while, but then led through a doorway and into a section where what the eye saw and the body felt were two very different things. It looked as if they were walking uphill on an extremely steep ramp, but no matter how far Hannah walked forward, down was always directly beneath her feet, with the way ahead always looking as if it was sloping upward. The local gravitational axis was shifting step by step. She looked ahead at one point and saw the top of Jamie's head as he walked along what appeared, from her point of view, to be a section of wall.

  It was disconcerting, but not surprising, given the Metrannan susceptibility to changes in gravity. The artificial gravity field aboard the Free Orbit Level Station was oriented with "up" being toward the planet below--in other words, upside down as seen from anyone looking up at the Elevator from the surface of the planet. Obviously, at some point in the process of traveling aboard the Elevator between the ground and Free Orbit Level, there had to be some method of transitioning between one orientation and the other.

  As best Hannah could judge, the engineers had decided to make that transition by having passengers walk along a spiral path designed to rotate the gravity field gradually to the orientation used aboard the Elevator car without forcing the walker to move through any area that was not under full and normal Metrannan gravity.

  They reached the Elevator car itself and stepped through a hatch and into its dimly lit interior. Jamie staggered a bit as he went through, and Hannah stumbled herself, almost crashing into him. Gravity had shifted from Metrannan standard to Earth standard right at the entrance. It didn't help matters that the lighting inside the car amounted to nothing but a dim red glow.

  The hatch automatically closed and sealed itself behind Hannah. A moment or two later the room suddenly brightened as light burst in through massive overhead windows, dazzling her. Only after her eyes had adjusted to the sudden shift in light could she see where they were.

  The size and opulence of their elevator "car" was startling--and so was its physical orientation. Hannah had expected something like a large and comfortable standard elevator car, and had been wondering exactly how anything like that could serve as their quarters while on the planet.

  What they had instead was something like an elongated hotel room, built lengthwise into a cylindrical structure about four meters in diameter and twelve meters in length. Hannah took in a general impression of appointments similar to a human-style hotel room--two beds, a table, chairs, a small bathroom--but all that was trivial, minor stuff, compared to the breathtaking and disconcerting view out the top side of the cylinder. The endcaps of the cylinder were solid, and so was the floor under their feet--but the entire top half of the cylinder was transparent and provided a startling view.

  At first she could not even understand what she was seeing, until she realized that down hadn't rotated through the expected one hundred eighty degrees, but instead, somehow, only through ninety. The trip through the access tunnel must have been even more disorienting than she had thought. Down, she decided after a moment, was now toward the cable cluster. To look up was to look outward from the cables, toward the local sun shining down on them, its fearsome light attenuated in some way that also allowed the full glory of the stars to be seen.

  She almost had it worked out. They had entered through a hatch in the rear endcap of the Elevator car. Looking straight ahead was to look at their former "up"--toward the planet itself, though Metran was hidden behind the forward endcap of their Elevator car. Hannah looked behind her, expecting to see the Free Orbit Level Station, and let out a gasp of astonishment.

  The Station was there, all right--but it was already many kilometers away and receding into the distance even as she watched. That bloom of light must have been the moment they moved out of the Station itself and into the sunlight. They had already started moving, and moving fast. They were still accelerating, diving straight for the planet. She had to give the Metrannan engineers credit for their acceleration compensators. There had not been the slightest tremor, the tiniest vibration, that could hint at any motion at all. The car had to be moving at well over a thousand kilometers an hour already, but its interior felt so solid and motionless that it might as well have been bolted to a granite foundation.

  "Maybe it will keep us from going crazy too quickly if we think of this as riding a train with a glass roof headed toward the planet," said Jamie, sounding as dazed as she felt.

  "Yeah," Hannah said woodenly. "That does sound a little better than diving straight down toward the planet at thousands of kilometers an hour."

  "Um, how long does this ride take?" Jamie asked, sitting down heavily at the table.

  "I don't know," Hannah said, still staring up at the fast-receding Free Orbit Station. "We never really got the chance to ask the question. Is there some sort of status display or something?"

  "What I'd like to find is some sort of control to make the roof of this thing turn opaque."

  "I'm with you," said Hannah. "But I bet there isn't one--or a status display either. The Metrannan do things differently than we do, and things that bother us don't bother them so much."

  "And vice versa," said Jamie. "They sure go to extremes to avoid experiencing a shift in gravity."

  "But they sure don't seem to have much in the way of a fear of open spaces. Go figure." She sat down next to Jamie and managed to position her chair so she had a view of the receding station. "But in the me
antime," she said, "we have other fish to fry," deliberately picking an idiom that would make no sense to any Metrannans who might be listening. "You up for pro chat, or do you need a moment?"

  "I'm okay. I guess."

  Hannah laughed. "That's about where I am. I guess. So--what do you think? It's not even presumed surv now--our tour guide pretty much nailed it down as declared."

  "I'll sign off on that," said Jamie with a nod. "Mike is visiting--probably his friend Cam as well."

  "How do we treat it? Ignored, Realtime Safe, or AFS?"

  "Given the designation that started the ride, I say we gotta go with AFS."

  "Bingo. Right answer on the first try. Compact short plus signs?"

  "I'll get the toys," said Jamie.

  Hannah and Jamie might not have ever been in a hotel-room-style Space Elevator car hurtling toward a planet at thousands of kilometers an hour before, but in another sense, they had been where they were many times: in a place utterly controlled by their xeno hosts and vulnerable to any number of eavesdropping techniques. They had developed a lot of practice in dealing with the problem--including how they discussed the problem of listening in. They managed by a combination of slang, jargon, and speaking elliptically. Fleshed out and made coherent to outsiders, their discussion would have been a bit different.

  "What do you think? It's not even presumed surveillance now--Taranarak pretty clearly signaled it was declared surveillance."

  "I agree. They are listening with microphones and probably watching us with cameras as well."

  "How do we deal with it? Do we just ignore it and let them listen and not care, or do we take steps that will keep what we say safe in realtime for now, and not worry if they can understand it later, or do we at least try to keep what we say secret forever by using Attempted Fully Secure procedures?"

  "This case started with a War-Starter designation. I think we should just use AFS protocols."

  "I agree. I suggest we use a combination of written shorthand using BSI's Compact coding and modified American Sign Language gestural language."

  "Agreed. I will get the equipment we need."

  The conversation itself was an attempt at realtime security. Probably whatever Metrannans were listening could manage to understand what was being said in time, if they played it back often enough, and worked with fluent English speakers and made the effort to track down the BSI jargon. But by then it wouldn't matter.

  Attempted Fully Secure protocols were an effort to take secrecy up a notch to a point where there was at least a hope that the listeners could never understand--but it was called Attempted Fully Secure to remind agents that they could never be entirely sure the opposition wasn't able to listen and understand later on--or, worse still, immediately.

  Hannah watched as Jamie reached for his bag and pulled out the tools of covert conversation: a stack of investigator's notebooks and a pocket destruct oven.

  Writing in a pen-and-paper notebook was in and of itself a concealment method in a universe full of Elder Races that could detect virtually any manner of electronic signal. Any process that involved typing to or writing on or tapping on the screen of an electronic device produced some sort of signal that could potentially be recorded and played back to reproduce whatever was written. Not so with scribbling in a notebook. Of course, a camera could be used to read whatever was written on the page, but it was simple enough for agents to use their arms, hands, and bodies to block any outside view of the notebook, and to close the cover whenever the page wasn't being written to or read from.

  Using shorthand was another part of the concealment process--and shorthand also made the writing faster. Even if the opposition took the trouble to learn to read printed English, and even handwritten English, getting from there to the hooks and pockmarks and slang of BSI shorthand would still be a major challenge. Jamie maintained that Hannah's handwriting was bad enough to represent a further barrier to understanding--including his. The destruct oven was the next stage in concealment. As soon as a page was filled, it was fed to the destruct oven's built-in shredder/burner. And that was just one-half of the process. Protocol called for one agent to write in shorthand, while the other read the writing and replied in sign language--and for them to swap roles every few minutes.

  Someday, perhaps, the Kendari Inquiries Service would devote sufficient resources to learning the combination of hand-spelling, symbolic gestures, totally arbitrary gestures, visual representations of spoken puns, and even more esoteric elements that made up the BSI's version of sign language. It seemed unlikely any other species would put in the effort--and even the Kendari had yet to show any signs of trying. It seemed hugely unlikely that the Metrannans would do so.

  "All right," said Hannah, "let's get started."

  Jamie began. "do you knect the dots the way i do?" he wrote. "what tan sed sure made me think trev's msg was sumthing to do w/longlife treatment. formula 4 it? or maybe it's part of formula delib left out?"

  Agreed, Hannah signed back. The timing sure suggests it. Trevor collects a message from Geriatrics Institute. The message gets lost. Not long after a rumor starts spreading, saying longlife secret has gone missing. But why they would send it to us, to humans and UniGov, I don't understand.

  "+ formula isn't missing if they just give trev a copy. unless they give him only copy? crazy idea, but maybe poss. safekeeping? accident destroys all other copies & is no backup? can u think of other reason?"

  I probably could, but there's no point in speculating. Hannah paused for a moment. We must remember rumors are often very wrong. Just because the mob thinks it was a longlife treatment, that doesn't mean it wasn't a cure for Metrannan baldness. And just because we connect the dots that way and it makes a pretty picture, it doesn't make it the right picture. We could be making a wrong assumption--or Taranarak could be deliberately misleading us. And another big question: Why give the secret formula to lowly stupid Younger Race like humans? And why suppress cure for short lives? Many mysteries.

  "many many. like: where r we going? who will we c? what clues could b on this world to tell us y trev offed, who did it, where key is?"

  I was going to ask you all that.

  "i kno. that's y i ask u 1st."

  Thanks a lot, partner.

  They ran through a notebook and a half's worth of paper, and swapped the jobs of shorthand writing and signing back and forth a half dozen times. They thought up a great many more questions, but didn't get much further forward with answers.

  Finally they gave it up and decided to turn in for the night--if it could be called "night" with the full light of the local sun shining down on them. Fortunately, Jamie managed to find a status and control monitor, mounted and positioned and designed in a way that would seem totally counterintuitive to humans. The instructions for it appeared to be posted in six languages, one of which was Metrannan, four of which were completely unknown, and the last of which was very bad written-form Lesser Trade Speech. Jamie followed it well enough to opaquify the overhead half of their cylinder and dim the interior lighting.

  They had brought along their own emergency rations, of course, but it was only common sense to leave those alone as long as possible. After a bit more digging and exploring, they found a cupboard full of ration packs marked as human-edible in several languages, including not only written-form Lesser Trade Speech and Greater Trade Writing, but even English. More or less. The lettering was a bit skewed somehow, and the spelling wasn't all it could be, but the package did say

  Gud Four Humans to Be Eaten

  (Safe Phude Fore Peeple frum Eerth)

  As Jamie pointed out, that was open to interpretation, and might mean it was certified as safe for cannibals, but a quick check with their portable food testers gave the happy news that the Metrannans were better biochemists than linguists. The water tested as safe, even if it had an odd brackish aftertaste. The best that could be said of the flavors of any of the rations was that they were "interesting," but if patience was a BSI job ski
ll, so was an iron stomach. They both got through what Jamie insisted on calling a "meal-like event" without incident.

  Although the food--if one could call it food--was barely acceptable, the beds were beyond reproach, a vast improvement on the roll-up mats and sleeping-bag arrangements they had been using aboard the Sholto, and even better than the beds in their duty quarters back at BSI HQ.

  It took a little doing, but Jamie finally did manage to decode the status display sufficiently to tell them how long it would be until they hit atmosphere and how long until they arrived on the ground. Neither of them wanted to miss either event, so Jamie set the alarm on his datapad to wake them a half hour before they hit air.

  What Jamie hadn't counted on was the absolutely obvious idea that popped into his head the next morning, the moment the alarm went off and he swung out of bed. He hurried over to Hannah's bed to wake her and tell her about it--until he realized that not only was she no longer there, but that she had beaten him into the bathroom and the shower, leaving him with nothing to do but sit down and wait for her.

  But Hannah managed to balance the sin of early rising with the good act of getting in and out of the bathroom quickly. The door soon opened, and she emerged, fully dressed in a slight variation of the business suit she had worn the day before. "Morning!" she said. "I think this thing can't run out of hot water, but I did my best to save you some, just in case. And the controls don't work exactly the way they do at home--to put it mildly. So watch it."

  "But I--"

  "Come on! Hurry up! We don't want to miss the show."

  Jamie opened his mouth to protest--but then he stopped himself. It hadn't taken many missions for both Hannah and Jamie to realize that being in a split-gender field team in close quarters required a specialized etiquette.

  For Jamie, one of the most important lessons was knowing when to notice there was something he wasn't supposed to notice. Hannah might well be not quite as completely put-together as she looked. Some bit of feminine apparel might not be easy to do up in the tight confines of the bathroom. She might want him to get into the bathroom so that she could have a moment or two of privacy outside of it. "I'll be right out," he said.