This is conveniently enough the same thing human judgment would want.
As for Catarkhan Law, that’s a little more difficult to determine — especially since I’ve been told time and time again that the Catarkhans don’t have laws. But that’s nonsense. They do have laws, and we all know they have laws. They have laws so strict that they never even think of breaking them.
Except we don’t think of them as laws, because we call them instincts instead. They may be hardwired in the genetic code, but they’re definitely rules of conduct — which Catarkhans follow with absolute dedication.
Who ever said we couldn’t consult those laws to see what a Catarkhan would do to somebody like Mr. Sandburg?
We can’t be exact, of course; Catarkhans don’t have murderers. But they do have analogous situations. Specifically, their way of dealing with diseased individuals who threaten the rest of the community. They quarantine such individuals in special chambers where they can’t endanger the rest of the hive with their sickness. They keep those individuals imprisoned as long as the threat remains real. Of course, sick Catarkhans quarantine themselves voluntarily — but, as I recently arranged for Mr. Whalekiller and myself to confirm, when we saturated ourselves with the secretions of one desperately ill individual, sick Catarkhans who don’t quarantine themselves have quarantine forced upon them by the rest of the community. In short, they’re isolated until the illness runs its course, or until they die…whichever comes first.
Mr. Sandburg is a diseased individual whose presence threatens the rest of his community. By human law, he should be imprisoned; by Catarkhan law, he should be quarantined. The difference between that and the human solution is a semantic one, but this is a diplomatic issue; we’re willing to use the word you prefer.
That’s what I meant when I said it doesn’t matter. Because we were all in perfect agreement all along. We just weren’t paying enough attention to see it.
18
The Council went for it, of course. They had no other choice; denying her logic would have meant perpetuating the deadlock that prevented Sandburg from being tried. Nobody wanted that, not even those who would have preferred to keep the shame on Mankind’s shoulders.
The Cort Compromise, as it would come to be called, would be painted a triumph of interspecies diplomacy; her argument would be quoted, analyzed, fussed over, and dissected long after the words themselves became dead things, drained of meaning by their very overuse. In the years to come, they would even be abused, by advocates seeking to overturn local sovereignty in cases of crimes committed by off-worlders; they were applied, with questionable accuracy, to cases of crimes committed against locals far more receptive to communication than the Catarkhans. Andrea Cort’s precedent was as vilified in those cases as it was praised now.
In a subsequent hearing, the Interspecies Council ruled in favor of life imprisonment for Emil Sandburg, that sentence subject to future alteration by Catarkhan authorities — a circumstance that, given the apparent impossibility of communicating with Catarkhan authorities, nobody really expected. Arrangements were made for Sandburg’s transport to a maximum-security facility on New Pylthothus, the same prison housing the convicted culprits in previous diplomatic crimes on Hossti and Vlhan.
An attempt by Counsellor Rhaig to bring censure proceedings against Andrea Cort, on the basis of her physical threats against his person, met with a resounding lack of interest; indeed, the Hom.Sap Embassy forwarded to her several messages from other embassies that had dealt with Rhaig and empathized with the urge. Even so, Rhaig announced his attention to file his complaint with the Dip Corps Judge Advocate. Cort would probably have to face some minor disciplinary action, which wouldn’t bother her all that much; she had always been considered a problematic personality, whose reputation had been soiled beyond repair long before the first day she had ever spent on the job. It didn’t matter when she still got the job done.
Ambassador Lowrey praised her at length for her brilliance; so did Mekile Nom of the Bursteeni, Goodsir Mukh’thav of the Riirgaans, and Haat Vayl of the Tchi. She accepted the compliments without much response, not trusting them to mean what they were supposed to mean on the surface. Politics was after all the creation of sentience. She did what she had to do to respect protocol, and then retreated as soon as possible.
Cort received word of another crime on alien soil — this one a bored embassy worker who had become quite prosperous selling his co-workers the sacred hallucinogens the local indigenes reserved for their honored priesthood. The aliens were willing to settle things by declaring the idiot in question an honorary member of their clergy, but he was desperate to avoid the mandatory gender realignment surgery. It may have been a shit case, as such things go, but Cort found herself looking forward to it; after Catarkhus, it would be a relief dealing with a crime that involved no savagery, and indigenes capable of arguing their own interests.
Everybody thought the matter was settled.
Everybody except Andrea Cort.
When the Hom.Sap Embassy held a victory celebration — one that could not be called a victory celebration without offending the other embassies, but which served precisely that function nevertheless — she declined to attend. Habit would have made her stay away anyway, but there was more to it this time — enough that, as she stood outside the compound walls, buffeted by wind and the sound of distant music, she often trembled despite the warmth of the night. Sometimes she stared into the empty air around her, and asked it questions beneath her breath.
Whalekiller came out, dressed in his formals, carrying a drink for her. He said: “It occurred to me that I ought to stop being mad at you.”
She didn’t take the drink. “That’s your choice.”
“You didn’t know that the Catarkhans would react as violently as they did. You expected a reaction, but not one that extreme.”
“If you say so.”
Whalekiller waited for more, closed his eyes in brief frustration, and spread his hands like a man casting cards upon a table. “You could make a pretense of giving a damn.”
“It wouldn’t be a pretense,” she said. “I’m not a robot.”
“You make a big show of trying to be,” he said.
“Maybe I have to. Maybe that’s what I’m left with.”
There was just enough bitterness in her voice for Whalekiller to assume he knew what she was talking about. He sighed, put the drink down on a post beside her, and said, “And maybe that’s just self-serving bullshit. Maybe we all have garbage in our pasts — some of it petty next to yours, some of it just as bad as yours, some of it downright worse. Maybe some of us away that garbage while some hold on to it like it’s a family heirloom too valuable to lose. Maybe that says less about how painful that garbage was, than about how much we deserve to stay there alone.”
“Maybe,” she said, her gaze level. “And maybe I’m not even close to being alone. Maybe I’ve been surrounded all along. Maybe I’m surrounded now.”
His eyebrows knit. “You lost me with that one, Counselor.”
His incomprehension left her tired. He really thought everything was settled. But if such an intelligent man, who had devoted his entire career to communicating with alien minds, could spend so much time with the Catarkhans and not see the deeper implications, how much of a chance did she have persuading the rest of humanity? For a moment, she wondered if she’d be better off just giving up…
Unfortunately, giving up had never been in her nature.
She accepted the drink he’d offered and swallowed it in one gulp. “You’re a good man, Goodsir Whalekiller. I just hope you find a way to live with it before it breaks your heart.”
“Thank you,” he said. “And I believe you’re a good woman, Counselor Cort. I just hope you find a way to believe it while it can still make a difference for you.”
She wanted to argue the point. But instead she nodded and returned to her quarters without speaking even one more word to anybody.
19
A funny thing she noticed at once: with the fear upon him, the arrogance he affected was easy to see as the mask that it was. The bland and unformed personality his fellow indentures had seen now stood out in sharp relief, revealing a man without distinction, without edges, without blood beneath the skin. He was, as his Dip Corps profile had indicated, a nobody. A void. One who had been able to reap the dubious benefits of infamy for a short interval, but nevertheless, still just a void.
She tried to fight feelings of sympathy for him, and failed. After a moment, she pulled over a stool that somebody had left in his cell and broke longstanding personal policy by sitting down in the presence of another human being. “Hello, Emil.”
“Hello, Pretty Lady.” He attempted to energize his smile with some of his old arrogance, but failed. He was a man trying to reclaim a vocabulary he had possessed for a short time, but which had been lost as completely as his freedom. “Come to gloat?”
“I don’t gloat,” Cort said.
“You probably don’t. You don’t laugh, either. Or cry. Or do much of anything else, I guess. Leftover trauma from your violent childhood, I suppose? Did you enjoy killing as much as I did?”
She wanted to respond with the same sternness she had shown toward him during their first interview, but there was no point; he was already defeated, and this was just bravado. Needing more of him than that, she took a small spherical device from her pocket, flourished it before Sandburg, and placed it on the cell’s pull-down tray table. Depressing a thumb-sized cavity at one end of the device, she said: “There. That’ll scramble the monitor system. Nothing you or I say to each other in the next few minutes will ever be seen or heard by anybody else.”
He licked his lips. “That leaves you awfully vulnerable if I decide to kill you.”
It was a weak threat, uttered because he seemed to think it was expected of him; there was little he could do in light of what the nerve block had done to his reaction time. But she treated it as face value anyway: “You’re free to try, Emil. But as you’re so fond of noting, you’re not the only monster in this room. Provoking me to violence would be a very bad idea.”
An acknowledging tired nod. “So what do you want?”
“I wanted to speak to you one last time about your crimes.”
He seemed infinitely tired. “Maybe we should talk about yours.”
“That’s all right,” she said. “I don’t really want to have a conversation with you, Emil; your gamesmanship is too boring for that. I just wanted to let you know that I figured out your secret. I know what you’re all about.”
“Well, la-de-da.”
“It took a while to see it, mostly because your co-workers here, human and alien, have all been so busily painting you as a sadistic killer.”
“I am.”
“Maybe you are and maybe you’re not. You certainly enjoy having people think you are. You’ve played the role very well, Emil; so well, in fact, that for a while, dealing with you, I had trouble seeing the empty, faceless little man your co-workers described. It must have been fun, being somebody. Even a monster. At the very least it must have been a novelty for you.”
“Shut up.”
“You never came out and said it, but you did everything you could to make us believe that you committed murders before Catarkhus. You encouraged anything that bolstered your image as a sadistic monster. It couldn’t have been hard. It even seemed reasonable in context. After all, killing is such a messy business that it takes genuine enthusiasm for anybody to make a regular habit of it. Sadism would be a good explanation for that kind of thing, and the pleasure you took in taunting us seems to argue for that. Except,” she hesitated, then pressed on: “it doesn’t enter into the killings here, does it, Emil? It couldn’t have. These were Catarkhans. They didn’t feel pain; they didn’t even feel fear. You had to have some other reason for going back to them time and time again.”
“Maybe I have a rich fantasy life,” he said.
“I thought of that; killing Catarkhans, who won’t notice and won’t complain, is a safer alternative to carving on Tchi or Bursteeni or even your fellow Hom.Saps, all of whom would tend to raise more of a fuss. If you wanted to indulge a compulsion at minimal risk, killing Catarkhans would be the way to go. Except — if you really were driven to inflict pain, killing Catarkhans wouldn’t satisfy you for long, would it? A connoisseur of pain, driven by his love of pain, would soon find torturing them about as enjoyable as chewing paper.”
“I know people who chew paper,” Sandburg said. “Disgusting habit.”
“So’s killing,” Cort said, “even in the absence of sadism.”
Sandburg closed his eyes, looked away from her, and began to hum a vapid love song currently popular on the nets. It was, Cort realized, the same song he’d been humming during her first onworld briefing, when the diplomatic staff had shown her the real-time images of his imprisonment. His rendition of it had not improved. But the meaning of it had changed. Back then humming it had seemed the arrogance of a man who didn’t care what happened to him, and now it was just a pathetic series of sounds made by a soul desperate to block out the truth he did not want to hear.
Cort, driven by her own wounds, was the last sentient alive capable of showing him mercy. “A nobody,” she said. “A deficient personality. Low charisma, low empathy. Utterly forgettable. Leaving no impression anywhere he went. Joining the Dip Corps to make contact with something. Anything. Not succeeding even there. Cruelly assigned to establish contact with creatures incapable of even acknowledging his presence.”
He hummed louder; he even started rocking back and forth, like an autistic child desperate to retreat into a world of his own.
She leaned forward and yanked his hands away from his ears. The move took him totally by surprise. He emitted a little squeak, and flinched; a big bad monster, trembling like tissue under a gale-force wind, not afraid of being struck, but terrified beyond reason at the simple threat of being understood.
She whispered it: “You can’t stand being invisible, can you, Emil?”
He yanked his hands free, hugged himself, and faced the floor again.
She said, “You took your time killing them — because you were willing to do anything you needed to do to get them to notice you.”
He said nothing, and did nothing.
“In your own desperate way,” she said, “you were actually attempting First Contact.”
Again, he responded in no obvious way. But without moving a millimeter, without making a sound any of the monitors were record, he succeeded in answering her anyway. She could see the answer in the way all the strength seemed to drain from his bones.
She watched him for several minutes, taking his measure in the weight of his silence. She had thought him another monster, and painted him large enough to fit the role; but there was nothing large about him, nothing substantial that deserved all the time and effort that had been devoted to his case. He had just been the sum total of his illusions, and nothing else. Now that she’d stripped even those away, there was nothing left. It deflated him, reduced him to the nonentity that he had been before and would now be again. Just before she left him for the last time, she could almost imagine she saw his flesh going
the way of his pretenses, his skin and bones and muscle turning transparent as what little substance he had dissipated into the recirculated air of his cell.
Prison would destroy him. He would disappear into a population of true monsters, who would either victimize him or ignore him. Either way, he had nothing to look forward to. Nobody would ever pay any special attention to him ever again.
But he had made a difference, without knowing it.
He said: “Go away.”
She said: “Not yet, Bondsman. There is one other thing I want to share with you. It has to do with what happened at Bocai.”
He murmured: “I wasn’t there.”
“It erupted out of nothing, Emil — there were no resentments fueling it, no unresolved conflicts motivating it. There was just pure, savage hatred, arriving as if by spontaneous generation in the midst of two communities who had committed to living in peace. I never thought I stood a chance of understanding it…until I saw what you did to the Catarkhans.”
He met her gaze again, and this time his despair was mixed with a dose of sheer incomprehension. She didn’t blame him; there was no way he could help her this part. But he was the only other monster present, and therefore the only other person who deserved a share of it.
She said, “We walk among them, talk to them, move them around against their will, get aggravated and — in your case — even murderous because they refuse to notice us. But what makes us think we’re any better? Why are we so sure we’re seeing and feeling and hearing everything there is to see? How do we know there aren’t other First Contact teams, from species we’re not equipped to sense ourselves? How do we know that they’re not all around us? In fact, how do we know that they’re not just like you, frustrated to the point of madness because we don’t have what it takes to notice them?”
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