“Can’t remember a thing about it.”
“Mn. At any rate, we’re having a problem with el Cervantes. He appeared to be with the Plan from the beginning, but lately… well, the details aren’t important.”
“He’s having doubts?”
“Perhaps worse than that. El Alvarez suspects treachery.”
“Does el Cervantes have a conveniently aged son?”
“Unfortunately not. He’s an old man; his son is almost fifty.
“But it’s a good situation. His only grandson is twelve years old, and there is nobody in the family who can take over in the Senado should something happen to the son.” He smiled pleasantly. “They have been cursed with daughters.”
“Then I am to challenge this fifty-year-old man and kill him.”
“Yes. It would be that simple, except for one thing.” He leaned back against the tree. “There’s a price on your life now, Ramos. In every clan except Alvarez. El Tueme offers ten thousand for your head.
“So first… we have to change your head.”
“Plastic surgery?” Once the scalpel touches plastiflesh…
“Of course. We’ve discussed the possibility.”
“Seems extreme. Could they change me back afterwards?”
“I don’t know. I imagine not.”
“I don’t like it.”
Julio shrugged. “It’s your head, Ramos. I’d hate to see you lose it out of vanity.”
“Let me think… do you have a copy of the picture they’ll be using to identify me?”
“Yes.” He rose. “Come with me.” The Commandante led him past two sets of armed guards into the opulent house. He thumbed open the door to a large study.
He opened a heavy wooden filing cabinet—also thumb-locked. “Here.”
Ramos studied the picture, a good likeness but evidently taken toward the end of his imprisonment. “No problem. Look.” He held the picture next to his face. “I don’t have the prison pallor anymore, and in this picture my face was puffy with bruises. If I shave off my mustache and crop my hair close, nobody would recognize me.”
Julio looked back and forth between the picture and Ramos. “Probably. I’d be happier if you went ahead with the surgery, though.”
“It bothers me, Julio. I mean… I have so few solid links with the past as it is. I have the feeling that if I lose my face…”
“All right. Fine.” Julio took the picture back and refiled it. “Tell you what, I’ll have Ami bring you some of that lotion, what do they call it, that woman use to darken their complexion.” He locked the drawer and took Ramos by the arm. “No more work tonight. Let’s finish that bottle of wine.”
Ami was waiting for Ramos when he returned home. She massaged Sol Instante into every square inch of his skin, and it did a very convincing job. Ramos considered the maxim that a soldier had best abstain from sex on the eve of a battle, and rejected it.
6.
With papers and currency appropriate for a citizen of Clan Amarillo, Ramos had no trouble getting into Cervantes. He didn’t want to go directly to Castile Cervantes; instead, he monorailed to a small town a safe distance from the border, then took a coach to an even smaller town, one primitive enough not to have video service on its phones.
It was a lovely little resort town, Lago Tuira, and he rested for a day and a night at the inn there. Then he placed an anonymous call to the castle guard at Castile Cervantes, briefly warning them that a hired assassin was after the younger Cervantes. The teniente he spoke to tried to keep him on the line, but he rang off, shouldered his knapsack, and slipped out of the inn.
Clan Cervantes was the oldest settled part of Selva and the part where mankind had most effectively modified the environment. The jungle around Lago Tuira resembled a garden gone to seed more than a typical Selvan jungle. The largest creatures there were no more dangerous than a Terran bear or large cat, and relatively rare. So Ramos could travel through the early morning dark with little fear of betraying his presence by laser use.
Under cover of darkness, Ramos walked back down the crude corduroy road, slipping into the jungle whenever a vehicle approached. Nobody seemed in any great hurry to get to Lago Tuira, and none of the vehicles had any official markings. They either hadn’t had time to trace back his call, or had thought he was a crank and hadn’t bothered.
At dawn Ramos got off the road, working along parallel to it behind twenty or thirty meters of jungle. By noon he found a climbable tree, pitched his camouflaged hammock in the lower branches, and slept soundly until dark. Then he walked through the cool night until he reached the town that had the monorail terminal. He waited in the woods outside of town until a couple of hours after sunup, then walked down to the terminal, treated himself to a shower and a change of clothes and a hearty meal, and then caught the morning train to Castile Cervantes.
He had no intentions, of course, of actually trying to maneuver Ricardo Cervantes III into a duel. But he had to make the appearance of setting it up.
Castile Cervantes was the largest city Otto/Ramos had seen on Selva; nearly a quarter million people. He decided a good starting point would be trying to get some sort of job in the castle itself.
Getting off the train, people had to show their identification to a pair of armed soldiers, who checked their faces against a photograph. When Ramos’s turn came, he craned his neck to see the picture; it was the same as the one he had seen in Julio’s study.
“Who’s that, amigo?” he asked one of the soldiers.
The man looked at him coldly. “Just be glad it isn’t you.”
“How long have they been doing this?” he asked the man in line next to him.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Come in here two or three times a week; never happened before.” Maybe the phone call had worked.
At an employment agency Ramos found out that most jobs in the castle required a security clearance. One that didn’t was “Dishwasher, Grade 2.”
The next day he was in the castle commissary washing pots and pans and keeping his ears open. By afternoon he had learned that Ricardo III wasn’t anywhere near Clan Cervantes.
The day after the phone call, he had taken his physician’s advice and gone on a long vacation; hunting and fishing for the month that remained before the Senado was to reconvene.
Whether he had precipitated the man’s disappearance or not was immaterial. There was nothing to keep him in Clan Cervantes, so he chewed out the kitchen foreman and stalked away. He took an indirect route, through Clan Amarillo, to Castile Alvarez. He called Julio and the Commandante said to come right over, even though it was late.
Bone-tired, Ramos sagged over to the mansion and met Julio in the garden. He recounted a plausible version of what had happened in Clan Cervantes.
“… so it looks like we’ll have to wait, take care of him next month. It shouldn’t be any problem.”
Julio had been reserved, silent through the whole report. At this he nodded abruptly and said, “All right. We wait.” Rising: “Come with me, Ramos. I have something that ought to interest you, in the study.”
He opened the door to the study and ushered Ramos in. At the far end of the room a man sat on a swivel chair, reading, with his back toward them. Julio said, “He’s here.” The man snapped his book shut; turned and stood, smiling.
It was Ramos Guajana.
“Who is this—imposter?” Otto/Ramos said, drawing his sword. The Commandante laughed, one monosyllable.
“Simply another version of yourself,” Guajana said, “with no inconvenient amnesia.” His own épée danced fluidly into a garde position. “Shall I kill him, Julio?”
“No. El Alvarez will have questions for him… you may hurt him, though. With a minimum of bleeding, please. This rug is the very devil to clean.”
“It’s strange,” Guajana said, advancing. “Almost like fencing before a mirror. But my reflection has pitiably bad form.”
Danger imminent, he was all Otto McGavin. Who hadn’t fenced in f
ifteen years. And was exhausted.
Guajana took the initiative with an attack en cuatro and Otto swatted the blade away, advanced with a series of short jabbing thrusts. Guajana parried them easily, laughing, then did a simple cutover and pinked Otto just above the right knee.
Guajana jumped back and held his sword up in ironic salute. “Primera sangre.”
“I think he’s good for a little more,” Julio said. “Try for the face.”
Got to get inside his blade and use my hands and feet. The wound didn’t yet hurt much, but Otto could feel his leg stiffening. Sticky bloodstain creeping toward his ankle.
Guajana came in blade high, en seis, relaxed. Otto stepped forward, ducked, felt the blade graze his scalp, delivered a sidekick to Guajana’s leading shin, heard it break, dropped the sword and struck the man’s throat with bunched fingers (left hand) while seizing his sword-wrist; held the weapon high out of the way (decided this instant to not use the neckbreaker, let him live) and punched him hard just below the sternum, felt Julio’s forearm snake across his throat, dropped the broken Ramos, shifted weight, slid a foot grating down the man’s shin to crunch on his instep—breaking Julio’s hold on his throat—shifted weight again and spun the heavy man over his shoulder and stepped forward to deliver the final kick and saw laser pistol glint in Julio’s hand and knew he couldn’t kick it out from this distance and (wondering that he was still alive) stepped back, raising hands: “Don’t shoot. I’m through.”
Otto heard running footsteps outside the study. The leg wound hurt with a deep ache that he knew meant the large muscle was torn. His hair was matted with drying blood and he had the first intimation of a monumental headache.
With his free hand Julio was feeling for Guajana’s pulse. “If you’ve killed him I will personally castrate you with a dull knife.” He said this calmly, without any sign of hyperbole.
“Join your friends.” The guard pushed Otto into the cell roughly; his injured leg gave out and he rolled along the damp floor. It smelled of old urine and mildew. One man stood with his back to Otto, staring through the barred window into the lighted yard. On the double bunk was another person, female, crying softly.
“God! Is that you, Eshkol?” She responded by crying louder.
“That’s her.” Octavio turned and even in the dim light it was obvious how roughly he’d been handled. His face was one puffy bruise, eyes swollen almost shut. His tunic was crusty with black blood.
“What happened? How?”
“How, we don’t know. Five or six men broke into the hotel last night, after midnight—”
“What were you doing there? I told you—”
“I felt that Rachel needed protection.”
“Thanks for trying,” Otto said. “Go on.”
“They disarmed me and then took Rachel prisoner; forced her to open the door to Guajana’s room. He didn’t seem to surprised to see them.”
“Figures. What then?”
“They bound and gagged us—Rachel and me—and took us down the trail to a helicopter. We were here by dawn.”
“And they spent the rest of the day trying to make you talk.”
“That’s right. But I didn’t.”
“Obviously. You’re still alive; they must have further use for you. Did they do the same to her?”
“N-no,” she said, quavering. “Tomorrow, they said.”
“Tomorrow I’m sure it will be,” Otto said brusquely. “They’re going to kill you both, anyhow. Me too, most likely.”
“How can you be so sure?” Slight overtone of contempt, hardening her voice.
Otto felt anger rising, knew it was a Ramos-reaction, tried to ignore it. Pause: “Think about it, lady.”
“It seems to me,” Octavio said, “that they would want to take as little chance of angering the Confederación as possible.”
Otto shrugged and knew it was too dark for them to see the gesture. “The Confederación has already expressed its interest by sending me. It will be much better for Alvarez if she just disappears—you too—rather than have you sitting around as evidence that they abducted… what is to the Confederación the most valuable woman on this planet.”
“But what about you—”
“Shut up. There’s a recorder somewhere taking down every word we’re saying. Don’t let them know anything they don’t already know… least of all, about me.”
Octavio went to sit on the bunk with Rachel and Otto took over his place at the window. He idly tested the bars; they were solid.
The door opened with one loud rattle and Otto could see, next to the jailer, the silhouette of a man carrying a laser rifle.
“You’re next,” he said. “Colonel.”
7.
They knocked him around a bit and drugged him and then knocked him around some more but Otto, because of his conditioning, could look at it dispassionately. Finally they hurt him so badly that he could do the Zen trick and nothing could hurt him any more. They threatened him with simple death and then imaginative, and to both he only smiled pleasantly.
A tiny voice that he heard only very infrequently—so profound was his conditioning—said, They really are going to kill you this time; you might live with the right combination of truth and bullshit.
Another, perhaps the rational, voice said, Your only chance is to throw in with them.
Or perhaps the rational one was the voice that said, They have bound themselves to kill you no matter what you do.
And the trapped animal inside him said without words: Do anything to live.
But all of this debate, rational to venal to visceral, came to nothing. If the next beat of his heart would betray the Confederación, the thou shalt not imprinted on every cell of his body would hold that organ still.
The fourth time he fell unconscious they didn’t shock him back to wakefulness.
Otto woke up in a white room, in bed. Each arm and leg was individually secured, but only two by jailer’s cuffs. His left arm and right leg, as well as two fingers of his right hand, were immobilized in orthopedic tractors; he remembered when the fingers and leg had been broken, but the other must have been while he was unconscious.
His tongue counted seven teeth missing. Four had been extracted with pliers, the balance with a truncheon. Amateurs. He knew at least eleven ways to cause greater pain without leaving any mark. He toyed with the fantasy of demonstrating his skills on the men who had interrogated him. Woozy with anesthetic and fatigue, and having no real reason to stay awake, he carried that fantasy with him into darkness.
When he woke up the second time, a man in a white tunic was withdrawing a hypodermic gun from his arm and in a fraction of a second all the pains came back in one electrifying spasm. He fought it and then bent with it and then was above it; the pain was there but it was only a testimony that he still lived.
“Gul’ morzhling dogther,” he said, and then adjusted to the indignities inside and around his mouth: “Good morning, doctor.”
The man just looked over his head and wrote something down on a clipboard. Then he walked out of Otto’s field of view and said, “Go ahead.”
Julio Rubirez came in with a chair and sat down at the foot of Otto’s bed. “Commandante,” Otto said.
Rubirez regarded him for long seconds. “I can’t decide whether you are the best-trained soldier I have ever seen or are simply not human.”
“I bleed.”
“Perhaps the Confederación can make robots that bleed.”
“You won’t find out from me.”
“Not by torture, granted.” He stood up and, holding on to the bedrail with clenched fists, leaned closer to Otto. “You present an unusual problem.”
“I should hope.”
“I’ve been in conference with el Alvarez. He has the idea that perhaps you can be convinced… of the value of the Plan. Perhaps not only tell us what we need to know, but even lend your talents to the execution of the Plan.”
“You don’t agree.”
“Of
course not. El Alvarez is intelligent and dedicated but he has never been a soldier; he doesn’t know enough about pain. He will not believe what I tell him about the kind of person you must be. He thinks he can reach you.”
“He may be right.”
Julio smiled wanly. “Name a price.”
He thought. “I have been… what I am—”
“You can say ‘prime operator.’ Some things we do know.”
“—a prime operator, then, nearly half my life. I’ve been shot and knifed and burned and, in general, have been treated poorly so many different ways and times that I’ll have to admit that in a way you’re right. I have no illusions left and few emotions.”
Otto smiled and knew how ugly it looked. “But I was really sentimental about my left upper molar; it was the only real tooth I had left. So a deal: if you bring the man here who pried my tooth out and cut his throat in front of me, I might talk business.”
“Do you know which one he was?”
“No.”
“Very well. Orderly!” A young man jogged over, snapped to attention. “Bring me Tenientes Yerma and Casona. And a sharp knife…” He thought. “Detail yourself a squad, and bring them bound.”
“Sir.” Click, about-face, jog.
“You’re serious,” Otto said.
“About killing them, yes. As to influencing you, I suspect it will not, but… I promised el Alvarez I would try.
“Besides, both of them disgust me. They are mariposas, the dear boys. And they enjoy other people’s pain too much.”
You hate to see that part of yourself reflected, Otto thought. “If you know that I’m a prime operator, then you must know what kind of trouble will follow from killing me.”
“It’s a calculated risk.”
“An easy calculation to make… it’s an extravagant gesture, killing me; rather like assassinating an ambassador. And you’re going to do that, too.”
“Probably.”
“The very least that will happen is brainwipe for el Alvarez and you and everyone else of high rank. And if you drop one bomb on Grümwelt, you’ve forfeited the destiny of your whole planet. You know about October.”