An Exchange of Hostages

by Susan R. Matthews

  But now that he was away from it, his body only remembered its pleasure with a dim, muffled echo of that same delight. He found he took no new satisfaction either from memory or in anticipation of the morning.

  “What am I, to have done such a thing?”

  He asked the question of the air in a hoarse despairing whisper, his eyes closed in anguished concentration and wonder. To take sexual pleasure from the pain of others had surely never been hinted at in his psychological profiles, else he would have heard of it by now. There was an urgent clinical need for people who were capable of such a response, people whose own psychology enabled them to support the treatment of those whose pain was so extreme and so intransigent that no others could so much as abide in its presence. Some of his trauma studies had left him with horrific nightmares . . . On Mayon there had been no pleasure associated with pain for him. If there had been, he would have noticed.

  And had he not noticed, his teachers would have done.

  “The Student has successfully completed an entirely adequate Fourth Level exercise,” Joslire said.

  Rapt in his own horrified thoughts as he was, it took Andrej a moment to grasp Curran’s meaning, and a moment longer yet to understand why Joslire had spoken at all. He’d asked a question, yes, that was right. He simply hadn’t expected any answers.

  “Oh, not just that. Surely not. I was on fire with my lust to make him suffer, Joslire, and I never knew that I could take any pleasure in rank cruelty, never mind such potent pleasure as I had in him . . . ”

  Of course he had been cruel to the Mizucash and the Bigelblu and the Onymsho, in the Preliminary Levels. But he’d had to force himself to execute the Protocols. And he had not enjoyed any of it.

  “The officer is respectfully requested to remember that the exercise was technically well performed. There was no violation.”

  And everything he said would be Recorded, here in quarters as in exercise theater.

  “The Levels are profoundly flawed, Joslire, but that is not your fault.” He didn’t stop to wonder at the phrase until it was out of him and could not be called back. What did that mean, it wasn’t Joslire’s fault? Surely there was no reason to imply that the point could ever even be in question. It did no good to try to talk to Joslire. It was unfair of him to impose on the man. Andrej reached for something he could safely say to Joslire, something that might communicate his dread in terms that the Administration could not fault him for.

  “I mean that he has already had enough pain for the Level, and a beating on top of that. By rights we should accept the man’s denial, and send him off.” Still, what did rights mean, for a prisoner? He knew the answer to that one well enough. He didn’t like it any better for that.

  “Respectfully request permission. To offer a comment, at the officer’s pleasure.” Joslire was standing at command-wait by his sleep-rack, looking straight ahead. He would have assumed the required position of respectful attention as soon as Andrej had spoken; but Andrej only noticed it now.

  “Please. You don’t speak to me often, Joslire, and I am grateful for your assistance.” In fact Andrej could not remember Joslire ever asking to be allowed to make a comment. Joslire had been watching him, Joslire knew . . .

  “Sir. The Student will know from his education that thinking creatures are capable of responding to a wide variety of stimuli. With all due respect, the Student is encouraged to consult his own knowledge concerning accommodations reached by the intelligent or sentient mind under high-stress conditions. Sir.”

  For a moment the absurdity of the situation overrode the confused welter in Andrej’s mind with a sharp sense of how ridiculous it all was. “Joslire, are you trying to teach me psychology?”

  No. Wrong. It was not a good thing to say to a bond-involuntary; Andrej knew it immediately from the subtle but perceptible stiffening of Joslire’s body at the implicit rebuke.

  “If the officer permit. The orientation of Staff Security includes exposure to a range of concepts that may be of assistance to Students of assignment during apparent crisis. Any misapplication is to be set against the troop’s own failure to judge the officer’s meaning correctly. If there has been a mistake, the troop in question may profit from correction.”

  Joslire’s voice was clear and strong and utterly devoid of any emotion. Andrej pushed himself away from the study set, burying his face in his hands in a convulsion of distress. Correction meant discipline, and discipline was punishment. Andrej tried to put Joslire in the Nurail’s place in his mind’s eye, bitterly fearful of the test. Joslire, with a livid whip-stroke full across his dark intense face. Joslire, breathing in great gasping sobs between clenched teeth, his body wracked beneath the impact of the whip. Joslire, screaming, that hoarse high sound that had so moved Andrej when he’d first heard it from Rab Lussman.

  He could see the image clearly enough, and it did not please him.

  As much as he had wanted to hear his Nurail cry, that much and more he did not want to torment Joslire Curran.

  “Holy Mother. I would to all Saints you could ever be at ease with me, Joslire. Only error is to be corrected. Not a mistake. Still less the truth, no matter how ill-received it may be.”

  The accommodation of a sentient mind to unreasonable stress, a psychological trick played by himself on himself to make it possible for him to perform his task? No, what he remembered had been much too intense and immediate for that, and he dreaded the possibility that it might happen again next time. The body learned more quickly than the mind, and in direct proportion to the intensity of the sensation. It would be difficult not to become addicted.

  Surely it would be easier for him to allow himself to become addicted, and let the perverted appetite of his mind and heart work to help him through . . .

  Andrej had not bidden Joslire to stand down or released him from his position; and yet Joslire stepped up close to Andrej, kneeling down with a species of formal grace to rest with one knee flat to the floor just to one side of where Andrej was sitting on the edge of the seat. He was so close to Andrej that Andrej could feel his body’s heat, and Emandisan were usually on the lower side of the Jurisdiction Standard for normal temperature. Andrej wondered at the man’s intimacy.

  “The officer is under a great deal of pressure,” Joslire murmured, his voice low, his eyes on Andrej’s boots. “There has been no exercise, no release for physical tension. Perhaps the officer would care for an alternate means of relaxation.”

  Sweet Saints.

  Joslire was propositioning him.

  Not only that, but something in his belly looked on Joslire where he knelt and saw a prisoner, and joyfully embraced the concept of abusing him.

  Andrej fought with an instinct to strike Curran, to punish him for even suggesting that he was so depraved as that. There was no reason for Joslire to know that his offer presupposed two kinds of sin, two out of the three most deeply damning sins in the entire Book. This was just another one of the things that Joslire was required to do, to say, when the situation presented itself. That was all.

  “Yes, Joslire, I would like somewhat by way of relaxation. You’re quite right.” A man was forbidden to accept such courtesies. It was an affront to the Holy Mother. And quite apart from that, the last thing he wanted to do, here and now, was misuse the man, regardless of the things the Tutors made Joslire say, regardless of the treachery of his own body. “Wodac, in fact. I think I’ll have my supper early.”

  A man was not to take pleasure from the flesh of children, either. Children were sacred to the Mother of all Aznir; and by extension, servants were not to be exploited for personal satisfaction, since — like children — they were not in a position to refuse to grant their compliance. Andrej carried Joslire’s Bond. He was responsible to the Bench for Joslire’s best interest. To serve Joslire’s “best interest” by gratifying the undiscriminating appetites of his own body at Joslire’s expense would be betrayal of a trust that was sacred to Andrej, no matter how little protection the Be
nch extended to its bond-slaves.

  Joslire hadn’t moved. “The officer will of course be provided with the wodac, but wodac inhibits rather than releases.” Joslire’s voice communicated only promise, no argument. If he sat here for a single breath the more, he was going to take the implied offer greedily. He could not bear the thought of such a thing. Andrej pushed himself out of the chair with an effort and put several paces of safe distance between himself and Joslire before trusting himself to speak.

  “Wodac.” His voice sounded harsh and angry to Andrej, but he wasn’t angry at Joslire. How could he pretend to experience moral outrage after what he had found out about himself today? “Thank you, Joslire, your offer is most charitably presented. But what I want is wodac. Nothing more. I do not wish to hear any such proposal from you again, please mark my will in this.”

  The passion he had learned today was his problem.

  Andrej had no intention of burdening anyone else with it.

  ###

  She was careful to keep her pace measured and deliberate as she returned to quarters with her slave. Nothing was wrong, after all. She had done nothing.

  And she held carefully and grimly to that pretense until she was safely arrived, and the door closed behind her; then she could control her rage no longer.

  “Face to the wall, slave!”

  Pivoting on her heel, she shouted up into Hanbor’s startled face, furious with him for being where he was, furious with him for having witnessed her lapse in Observation, furious with the entire Administration for making her feel the way she did.

  Hanbor’s expression of surprise iced over almost immediately into a safe and inoffensive blank. Bowing, he turned to the wall crisply, standing to attention with his nose scant fractions from the featureless surface. Fine. He could face the wall. She was sick of being watched, all the time watched, every moment under observation.

  There, that was better.

  “Command-wait. Until I call for you.”

  Hanbor was Security. Let him demonstrate his discipline. She had to think.

  Mergau undressed with short, sharp irritated gestures, tearing at the Fleet’s Student uniform impatiently. She despised Fleet, she despised Fleet Orientation Station Medical, she despised the uniform.

  She had to swallow it and manage this somehow. Washing herself with grim determination with the water-stream turned to icy cold, Mergau began to reconstruct the events that had led up to Chonis’s intervention.

  What had happened?

  What would they say she had done?

  She had done nothing she had not seen on instructional tape.

  Belting the sleep-tunic from her closet around her waist, Mergau sat down at the study-set. She knew what she’d seen. She would find proof that she had made no errors.

  She would be ready for them when Tutor Chonis came to blame her for whatever pretended error they could find in her conduct of the exercise.

  ###

  “I ought to be sent back to Orientation processing for this one, Ligrose,” Tutor Chonis commented grimly, watching the diagnostics. “Damned if that little Aznir didn’t distract me.” Not as if that was any excuse. On the one hand Koscuisko was interesting to watch from a professional point of view. The usual tension and uncertainties seemed to have a way of coming out in unexpected ways that surprised Tutor Chonis, even after so many years. And on the other hand, he should have terminated Noycannir’s exercise at the point at which it had become obvious that Idarec was unconscious and liable to remain so.

  No excuse.

  A ruined exercise, and a ruined bond-involuntary, and Fleet didn’t like losing bond-involuntaries. They were more and more difficult to come by these days. Fleet was not going to be impressed by the First Secretary’s protégé, or by Chonis’s handling of her, either.

  “You’re allowed.” Ligrose Chaymalt was the Chief Medical Officer on Station, and the task of running an infirmary for a constant stream of practical exercises seemed to have hardened her over the years. Most of her patients were bond-involuntaries; Fleet valued their pain at somewhat less than the price of expensive medication. Perhaps it was natural that she’d come to value their lives somewhat less than Tutor Chonis felt she should. “You haven’t had a suicide for, what, four Terms now? Nobody here can match that record. Security troops are still easier to find than Ship’s Surgeons, after all. No offense, Harper.”

  The man’s name was Hanbor. But he just bowed politely, no trace of having noticed the careless error on his face. It wasn’t as if her accommodation was an unusual one; there was one Tutor who never bothered to learn their names at all, addressing all Security alike by an obscure ethnic term for “slave.” Chonis had never quite decided if Tutor Heson cared that everybody knew very well what the word meant.

  “Gross neurological. Hmm.” Chonis was too far from the medical training of his youth to be confident that his interpretation of the statistics on Idarec was correct. “Your prognosis, Ligrose?”

  She shut off the imager with a gesture of profound boredom. “Not worth the upkeep. You’re not going to wake him up now, not after — how many times had she kicked him? You?”

  Hanbor probably did know, but Chonis felt that it was in poor taste to ask him. “Too many times,” Chonis answered for Hanbor, accordingly. “We could expel her right now, for gross violation of the Levels. Except that she’s too ignorant to understand exactly what she did wrong.”

  Koscuisko could probably braid a man’s bones into his own muscles and not step one half of a pace out of Protocol. Koscuisko probably knew how to kick a man in the head a dozen times and have him wake up with no worse than a headache. But Koscuisko had education, on top of what seemed to be revealing itself as a native, if latent, talent.

  “Charge the loss back to her patron,” Ligrose suggested. “What’s another few hundred thousand Standard, after all the money he spent getting her here in the first place?”

  Andrej Koscuisko.

  The presence of a Student with genuinely respectable medical qualifications was unusual at Fleet Orientation Station Medical, where most of the Students had been drawn from the ranks of the mediocre. Graduates with good qualifications got jobs in clinics, hospitals, private practice; some went into Fleet as rated practitioners. Fleet Orientation Station Medical generally got what was left once the decent jobs had been filled by decently qualified candidates.

  “You’ve met my other Student?” And then there was Koscuisko, who had graduated at the top of his rated field from the single most competitive surgical college under Jurisdiction.

  “Koscuisko. Yes, you parked him here yesterday in the lab. Too bad he’s not on staff, isn’t it? Bet he could fix Idarec almost as good as new.”

  Ligrose wasn’t totally brutalized by her demanding environment; she sounded almost wistful. But she was right, though he hadn’t realized it in the first flush of his wonderful idea. Koscuisko could not be asked to treat Idarec. Koscuisko would know that the man was bond-involuntary the moment he scanned the nervous system and found the governor.

  Koscuisko would wonder why a bond-involuntary had been injured severely in a way that would surely remind him of the paradigm tapes he and Noycannir had studied. And the use of bond-involuntaries as prisoner-surrogates for training exercises from the First through Fifth Levels was one of the single most sensitive secrets in all of Fleet Orientation Station Medical.

  Well, it had been an idea.

  “Maybe next time,” Chonis offered, rising from his seat in Ligrose’s office. “Hang on to Idarec for now, will you? No sense in terminating until we need the bed.” He’d talk to the Administrator about it. The First Secretary might want to send a medical specialist of his own, to avoid paying the replacement costs.

  But it wasn’t very likely.

  “No sense in keeping the bed on hold, either.” But Ligrose clearly didn’t care one way or the other. “As you like, Adifer. Keep us informed, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  He’d ta
lk to the Administrator tomorrow, when he would have a successful report on Koscuisko to balance it all out. And the Administrator would probably side with Doctor Chaymalt.

  Then it would be out of his hands.

  It was better to leave Hanbor with the impression that Tutor Chonis was at least trying to protect the interest — the life — of the comatose bond-involuntary.

  ###

  Mergau Noycannir had gone to bed without her supper, unwilling to expose herself to the aggravation of speaking to the patient slave in quarters in order to get a meal. Now as she rose — refreshed and confident — from her night’s rest, she was hungry — but still satisfied enough with what she had found out that she could speak to Hanbor with genial good humor as she opened the slider of her sleep-closet to come out.

  “What, still staring at the wall? Release.”

  And had he not been, there would have been penalties assessed; she had very particularly told him to wait to be released. He was to get off easily enough for his fault. She need feel no shame for having let him stare at the wall all night.

  He staggered very slightly as he turned and saluted, shifting his weight to keep his balance. Technically speaking a violation, failure to complete salute in proper form; but she could afford to let the lapse pass. This time at least.

  “I’ll have my fast-meal, Hanbor. But first there’s something we need to get straight between us.”

  Hanbor knew better than to speak before spoken to, and kept his mouth shut. Just as well. She wasn’t interested in anything Hanbor might have to say.

  “I expect to be able to rely on you, Hanbor, to provide the correct training material, according to the Tutor’s plan. There’s a problem with your performance in this area, I’m afraid.”

  It hardly mattered if he knew that she was lying. She was glad she’d found the way out. “There are instructional tapes logged here for my Fourth Level exercise, but somehow — and I don’t mean this as a personal criticism, necessarily, anyone can make a mistake — there are tapes logged for the Fifth Level exercise as well.”