A Matter of Oaths

by Helen S. Wright

  “If I’m not, the Commander has got a lot to do with it,” Rafe said sourly.

  “I was assuming that.” Joshim put both hands on Rafe’s shoulders and pushed him down to sit on the bed. “What else is wrong beside the nausea?”

  “It’s quite enough on its own,” Rafe admitted, resting his head against Joshim’s forearm. “You’d think they could come up with some more dignified way of reinforcing the identity-wipe,” he complained. “At least they had the sense to put a delay mechanism in. If this had hit me during combat…” He shivered.

  “Was that the trigger?” Joshim asked, alarmed.

  “Yes,” Rafe said miserably.

  Joshim took a deep breath. Rallya had attributed it to her reference to Buhklir. If it had been the encounter with the raider, the experience of being in the web during combat … He had a clear vision of Bhattya as a sphere of debris spreading in the wake of the convoy because of a lapse in Rafe’s concentration or in his web control. As Webmaster, Joshim thought unhappily, he might have to bar Rafe from the web for this. As Rafe’s lover … that had to be a secondary consideration, he chided himself.

  “All right,” he told Rafe steadily. “Lie down. I’ll go and fetch my drug-pack. We’ll get rid of your sickness and then we’ll talk.”

  He stopped on his way, to ask Jualla to switch shifts with Rafe: four more hours to solve this. She agreed readily, and offered to ask her team and Rafe’s if they were willing to make the change permanent. Elanis’s news was travelling fast, Joshim thought wryly. Jualla had been in the web during the argument in the web-room, but she had already heard about it. A permanent change would put Joshim and Rafe on the same shift pattern, give them more time out of the web together. He thanked Jualla and gave her permission to ask.

  An ampoule broken under his nostrils gave Rafe relief from his symptoms. As he regained his normal colour, Joshim wished there was as easy a cure for their cause.

  “Jualla has swapped shifts with you,” he said, sitting down across the room from the bed. If he sat beside Rafe, it would be harder to maintain the separation between Webmaster and lover, too great a temptation to take Rafe in his arms and comfort him. He already knew that comfort was not enough; he had comforted Rafe every time that he woke from a nightmare, and the nightmares still continued. He had to offer something more specific than comfort: a solution, or an attempt at a solution. It was his responsibility, both as a Webmaster and as somebody who cared very much about Rafe.

  “When did this start?” he asked. “Exactly.”

  Rafe grimaced. “I was fine until I disengaged. Then I was almost sick in the shub.”

  “You’re sure it isn’t just the stress of combat?” Joshim asked hopefully.

  “I’m sure.” Rafe sat up and characteristically hugged his knees. “You’re worried about allowing me in the web again.”

  “Yes,” Joshim admitted. “While there’s a chance that this will happen again, I’m worried about allowing you in the web.”

  “There’s always that chance,” Rafe said heavily.

  “Not if we find a way to prevent it,” Joshim pointed out.

  “What? You can’t give me any drugs to suppress the sickness while I’m in the web. If you did, the conditioning would only express itself another way.”

  “Then we work on the cause and not the symptoms,” Joshim said calmly.

  Rafe laughed harshly. “What are you going to do? Undo the conditioning? Restore my memory? Hell, Joshim, if it were possible, do you think I’d have waited this long?” His voice was rising.

  “Have you ever tried?”

  “No.” Rafe let out a long sigh. “I wouldn’t know how to start. Or what damage it might do.” He looked away, looked back again. “Sorry I shouted. I’m just scared.”

  “What are you scared of?”

  “Having my mind messed around anymore. Losing my web. Losing you. Finding out who I used to be. It’s a comprehensive list, isn’t it?”

  “Why shouldn’t it be? And I don’t have a definite answer, Rafe, only an idea that might work, if you want to try it.”

  “What is it?”

  “An Aruranist technique. You know that we believe in reincarnation?” Rafe nodded. “It’s important to us, remembering as many of our previous lives as we can, so that we don’t waste the current one covering old ground. I could teach you the methods we use to remember.”

  “Working on the theory that, if they work across multiple reincarnations, they might work across identity-wipe?” Rafe asked doubtfully.

  “I’m not promising,” Joshim warned.

  “I know you’re not. And I’m not saying I believe in reincarnation, but…” Rafe shrugged jerkily. “How many do you remember?”

  “Three. That isn’t many. There’s a woman in Jasan who remembers twenty-eight.”

  “And you remember them all clearly?”

  “No. The first one is hazy, just snatches of detail. One day I’ll improve it.” Joshim laughed softly. “Although I’ve been saying that for years. I suspect I remember enough not to want to remember any more. I don’t like her very much.”

  “Her?”

  “Yes. I was a woman last time too. A priestess in a temple outside the Empires. Salu’i’kamai. The Hand of the Goddess is on the Earth,” he translated.

  “With my luck, I’ll end up with a complete memory of a previous life as a night-soil porter on Rasasara, and nothing else,” Rafe muttered. “You know we’ll be violating our Oaths if we do this?”

  “Yes.” Joshim wondered exactly when he had realized. At the time he had first wondered whether the recall techniques would work for Rafe, he decided, and that had been nights ago, watching Rafe fall into the uneasy sleep that followed yet another nightmare. It was suddenly absurd that he was planning to break his Oath while sitting as far as he could from the man for whom he would do so. He went to Rafe’s side and took his hands.

  “If it works, you can’t go back to being who you were,” he warned.

  “Not without getting us both wiped,” Rafe agreed grimly. “And I don’t want to go back. All I want is to be able to live comfortably inside my own head.” He squeezed Joshim’s hands hard. “You’re crazy to even think about this,” he said fiercely. “I won’t let you involve yourself.”

  “It’s too late to stop me.” Joshim traced Rafe’s cheekbone with a kiss. “And I don’t let anybody make my choices for me.”

  “I won’t let you break your Oath for me,” Rafe insisted. “Emperors, Joshim, I may be called an Oath-breaker but I haven’t broken my Oath yet and I never will!”

  “Would it be Oath-breaking?” Joshim queried. “You’re not the person you were ten years ago. Even if you remember who you were, you won’t be that person. You’ve no intention of bolting back across the Disputed Zone. What harm will it do if you remember who you were?”

  Rafe shook his head firmly. “I don’t know, Joshim, but … If we did this, how could we ever know again what was Oath-breaking and what wasn’t? If I’d sworn false allegiance to the Old Emperor ten years ago, then contrived to cross the Disputed Zone again, would that have been Oath-breaking? Or would it have been all right, because nobody knew I’d sworn falsely, because no harm had been done?

  “And if we can justify this to ourselves, what will we be able to justify next? And how could we object if the Guild changed its interpretation of the Oath it swore to us? If the Emperors changed their interpretation of the Oaths they’ve sworn to the Guild? Those Oaths are too important, Joshim. If we break our Oaths, we can’t hold them to theirs. And if we can’t hold them to theirs, they’ll plunge the Twin Empires into full-scale war. We have to keep our Oaths, Joshim. We haven’t any choice.”

  Joshim took Rafe’s hands in his again, raised each one in turn to kiss it. The vehemence of Rafe’s reaction had shaken him, left him ashamed of the ease with which he had proposed that they break their Oaths.

  “When you put it like that, we don’t have any choice, do we?” he agreed reluctantl
y. “It shouldn’t have been necessary for you to convince me of it.”

  “Convince you? I was convincing myself,” Rafe said bitterly. “Hell, Joshim, do you think I’m not tempted? Do you think I don’t dream about waking up one morning and knowing who I am? But if I break my Oath now, I might as well have broken it ten years ago and spared myself all this!” He made an angry gesture. “You’d better bar me from the web. I’m a danger to everybody else in it, and that’s Oath-breaking as well.”

  “Stop taking the Webmaster’s decisions for him,” Joshim said, deliberately lightly. “You can stay in the web on two conditions. One: you don’t take the key-position. Two: you disengage if you suspect your conditioning is beginning to operate. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.” There was only dull resignation in Rafe’s voice. “I’d better get some sleep. Can I have a sleeper?”

  “I’ll get you one.”

  There was nothing else he could offer Rafe at the moment, Joshim realized, watching him take the drug. A few hours of unbroken sleep, and Rafe’s place in the web, and Joshim was not certain that he had made that decision solely as a Webmaster. This was why you never involved yourself in the web-room, he reminded himself: you always doubted your own ability to make decisions about the people you love, rightly doubted it. He ruffled the sleeping head fondly. It was too late to pull back now, even if he had wanted to.

  From the Gazetteer of the Old Empire,

  revised 5030

  Jalset’s World (Aramas Zone) : a lightly settled agricultural world, sole source of the recreational drug blissdream; a typical frontier backwater, with no features of physical, biological, or cultural interest. Passage can be obtained on cargoships departing from Aramas station.

  251/5043

  ARAMAS ZONE, OLD EMPIRE

  Rallya breathed in the spice-ridden air of Jalset’s World and gagged.

  “How the hell does anybody live in this?” she demanded.

  Lilimya grinned. “The dirtsiders will probably tell you they couldn’t live anywhere else, ma’am.”

  Rallya shaded her eyes to watch Bhattya’s shuttle lift off with the returning liberty party, then turned to address the party that had come down with her.

  “You’ve got ten hours,” she reminded them. “If you can find anything to do with them down here—you could spit from one side of this town to the other. Keep out of trouble, and if you can’t keep out of trouble, don’t bring it back to the ship. The Webmaster has better things to do with his time than treat the local variety of sexbug—ask Rafe if you don’t believe me.” She glanced around the inattentive faces: they had heard it all before, even Fadir, and were impatient to be on their way. “Go on, vanish,” she urged them. “Anybody who isn’t back here in good time for the shuttle will forfeit their next ten liberties.”

  The town was overflowing with liberty parties, the dirtsiders making the most of the influx of fresh money by doubling their normal prices. Rallya took a desultory look through one of the small shops: nothing she had not seen before on maybe a hundred other worlds. Sixty years, two or three different worlds every year. Yes, call it a hundred, and none of them in any way memorable. Friends on half a dozen of them, retired webbers who had found a world they liked, or claimed to like. Ex-friends. Once they were forced to retire, there was always the loss of everything they had had in common, the unspoken jealousy in the look they gave her web-bands: why has she still got her web? And always her relief at the end of a visit, the escape from a reminder of her inevitable future.

  She shook herself irritably, stood with hands on hips in the middle of the main street and glared along it. The best cure for morbid thoughts was a drink, and at least this dirtball did not have restrictive drinking laws. For the hundredth time, she wondered why she had bothered to accompany a liberty party, and answered herself: it was simply good sense to have one of the Three on hand if anybody got into real trouble. Not that anybody from Bhattya would dare get into real trouble, but there was always a first time.

  She chose one of the quieter bars, found that she could eat there too and ordered a meal. The food tasted heavily of the local spices but was better than she had expected. From her seat on the veranda, she could see all the activity along the main street. She ordered another beer—also better than she expected—and lifted her feet onto the rail around the veranda. With another nine hours to kill, there was no need to hurry anywhere.

  One of the dirtsiders drifted over to join her, wanting to know if the tales about webbers were true without actually saying as much. A nice looking lad, about a third of Rallya’s age. She considered accepting his offer, to fill an hour or so, then decided against it. He would find somebody to tumble with: there were enough webbers in town. Maybe Lilimya: she was renowned for being generous to the curious. Rallya told him she was old enough to be his grandmother and pointed him in the direction of the most brightly lit bar, amusing herself by being gentle with him. There were plenty of dirtsiders she had dismissed hot-faced with the question: does your mother know you’re out?

  “Excuse me, ma’am. Have you seen Captain Sajan?”

  Hajolir, Rallya remembered with an effort, Sajan’s Third. She had met him briefly back on Aramas station. A tall man, tall enough to give her a pain in the neck and the sun in her eyes if she looked up at him.

  “Didn’t know she was dirtside,” she answered.

  “She came down with the rest of us eleven hours ago, but we were due to return an hour ago and she hasn’t turned up for the shuttle.”

  “Is that unusual?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Very.”

  “Might she be sleeping off a drunk? Or too busy in the local joy-house to notice the time?” Rallya suggested the two most common reasons for overstaying a liberty, although Sajan had not seemed that irresponsible a woman.

  “We’ve checked the joy-house. She hasn’t been there. And we’re checking all the bars now,” Hajolir said. “The last time anybody saw her was eight hours ago. That was in one of the shops on the north edge of town, looking at cloth.”

  Rallya frowned. “Shopkeeper see her leave?”

  “She says so. And that’s the respectable side of town, the dirtsiders tell me.”

  Hajolir had obviously run out of ideas, was hoping for guidance. Rallya swore and dropped her feet to the ground.

  “If she turns up drunk, or tumbling, Hajolir, I’ll have your ears to make my next wrist-bands. And hers to make the neck-band,” she threatened. “This is not how I planned to spend my liberty. Go find every webber able to stand, including the ones who are currently horizontal. I want them here within thirty minutes. Refer any arguments to me.” She glanced at the position of the sun. “We’ve two hours left of good light—we’ll sweep the town. Every street, every alleyway, every public building.” She watched him dash off, relieved that the responsibility for finding Sajan was no longer his. “Hell, if my liberty is going to be ruined, so is everybody else’s,” she muttered angrily.

  Thirty minutes later there was a crowd of webbers blocking the main street and an irate leader of the local peace-force complaining that Rallya was not going through the right channels. Rallya spared him enough time to inform him that Sajan was a webber; that the right channels were the webbers waiting for instructions; and that he could either shut up and keep out of the way, or make some constructive suggestions about what might have happened to Sajan in his town. He made a few more noises of protest, then suggested that they start their sweep on the west side of town, which was not quite as respectable as the rest.

  It was forty minutes before Lilimya’s group found Sajan’s body. She had been dragged to the end of an alley and covered with the refuse from the eating-house that backed onto it from the main street. She had been stabbed once in the back, the knife nowhere close by, and robbed of everything she had been carrying. Naturally, nobody in the eating-house had seen anything or heard anything. Naturally, the leader of the peace-force was aghast that a webber had been murdered, would make every effort to bri
ng the killer to justice. Rallya cut through his platitudes, told him curtly that the other members of Sajan’s Three would be in touch to make arrangements for disposal of the body and left him to mouth his apologies to Hajolir, who had no choice but to stay.

  Back in the bar, she bought herself a drink of Jalset’s firewater, then one for Lilimya, who wandered up with Fadir in tow and no inclination to drift on. The main street was full of webbers in angry groups. Rallya watched them carefully, alert for any sign that they might vent their anger on local people or property. It would not be the first time it happened.

  “Lilimya, go back to the shuttleground and call Commander Noromi,” she ordered. “Tell him that I said to cancel all liberty throughout the convoy and recall existing liberty parties at once. Fadir, you stay here, in case I need a runner. Or are you too drunk to run?”

  “No, ma’am,” he said indignantly.

  “Good. What are you waiting for, Lilimya?”

  “On my way, ma’am!”

  Rallya watched her go. “Fifteen minutes, then we’ll spread the good news,” she told Fadir absently. “Do you want a beer?”

  “No, thank you, ma’am.”

  “Have one anyway. It might stop you fidgeting.” She bought the beer from a anxious-looking owner. “Don’t worry,” she told him drily. “Yours is the safest bar on the street, with me in it.” It did not seem to reassure him.

  “Do you think there will be trouble, ma’am?” Fadir asked nervously.

  “There already has been,” Rallya reminded him. “Emperors, if you’ve got enough sense to stay out of dark alleys with strangers—and I’m assuming you have—then Sajan should have known better too!”

  It was not only the waste of it that angered Rallya, it was the stupidity. Sajan was a veteran, with as much experience as the party of webbers who had found her body all taken together. It was sheer negligence to let a dirtsider kill her so easily.

  “It didn’t look as if she’d put up a fight, did it, ma’am?” Fadir ventured.