FSF Magazine, August 2007 Page 9

  "How's the outer door opened?"

  "The control's on the bulkhead just beyond the metal detector. It won't work until the inner door is sealed. Two people have to cooperate to open the airlock, one inside and one outside. The system's intended as a fail-safe, to prevent accidents and suicides."

  "A fail-safe that failed."

  "Clearly."

  Time for me to make my pitch. “Look, Sister. I've gotten to trust you. And I need your help."

  She smiled a little, folded her hands. She had hands like Anna's, small but competent, clean blunt nails, no jewelry, no lacquer. I had the feeling she'd been waiting for me to speak out.

  "Well, Colonel, I've gotten to trust you, too. And I'll help any way I can. Could I first ask why you've decided that I am, as the ancient Americans used to say, okay?"

  "You were right from the beginning about the CM. I know that now. In fact, he's even worse than you thought."

  Briefly I filled her in about Kendo, about Ion, about the CM's racket. She wasn't as surprised as I expected she'd be. Just listened carefully and nodded.

  "There's a kind of in-group of dubious characters surrounding him,” she said. “The brothers and sisters call them the Pack. They aren't real monks, anybody can tell that. Trouble is, our robes and our rules of silence make anonymity so easy here, and monastic discipline makes questioning authority so hard."

  "How many in the Pack?"

  "Maybe a dozen in all. Ironically, poor Kendo wasn't one of them. Maybe he was too nonviolent to be useful. But now I do understand why the CM didn't give him a job in the treasurer's office."

  To my astonishment, her gray eyes filled with tears, the first I'd seen her shed.

  "Sometimes I felt so sorry for him. Isolated among religious people whose viewpoint he couldn't share and criminals who were so much worse than he was."

  "Yeah, it's too bad,” I muttered, not really meaning it, because I didn't care about Brother Kendo one way or the other. “Now, Sister, what I really need right now is—"

  She wiped the tears and started to say at the same time, “What I think you need right now is—"

  And we both finished together. “To meet the Master."

  * * * *

  As we entered Spoke Seven, she whispered the news that seeing Master Po wouldn't be easy for me. He was the CM's prisoner, and had been for over a year.

  "He's watched all the time. The CM used to spy on him through the monitoring system, and Brother Ion practically camped outside his door. A guard bot's stationed inside the Master's quarters, partly as his servant and partly as his keeper. It's not armed, but it's physically powerful and its command port has been sealed, so it can't be reprogrammed."

  "How do you get in?"

  "The CM wants Master Po alive for a while longer as a front for his schemes. So I'm permitted to check on his health. As soon as I understood the situation, I became his ally and his channel to the outside. After the monitoring system went down, the Master and I began talking to each other in indirect language, quoting haiku with a word or two changed—devices like that. Things the bot's brain is too rigid to catch."

  Things were starting to connect up. “Were you the one who disabled the monitoring system?"

  "Yes. We couldn't have the CM watching us. He'd have understood in a second what we were up to. All I did was cut the main optical cable. The whole thing's so old—late twenty-first century—that I thought a breakdown would seem quite natural. But the CM's paranoid, so he decided it must be part of a plot. And of course he was right. Well, you know, paranoid people have real enemies."

  Spoke Seven contained the usual line of anonymous doorways. She paused at one, opened it quickly and checked inside. Then beckoned.

  "Wait here,” she whispered. “The Master's cell is just across the corridor. He and I have a signal worked out. When I say ‘satori,’ he'll feign an attack—his blood pressure's low, sometimes he goes into syncope—and I'll send the bot to fetch adrenaline. It's programmed to respond to medical crises, so I think it'll obey. The errand will only take it a few minutes, so you have to be in and out before it comes back. But you'll have time to meet the Master and let him know he has a new ally."

  The door slid shut. I was in a cell much like my own, except for the lack of civilian clothes and two clean habits hanging from hooks in the clothes rack, their hems clipped to a bar below to hold them straight. The desk had been turned into an altar, with statues of Jesus, Buddha, and the Goddess of Mercy. A picture of a many-armed smiling god had been taped to the bulkhead above and a teaspoonful of charred incense still smoked faintly in a covered burner. Whoever lived there had a Hindu background and thought that all embodiments of compassion were avatars of Vishnu. I was surprised he missed Mother Teresa who, I understood, had become a goddess with her own temple in New Calcutta.

  I put my ear to the door and listened."Yes, it's me,” said Sister Jann's voice. She was speaking louder than usual to make sure I heard.

  A bot's unmistakable flat tones answered, though I couldn't distinguish the words.

  "I know it's not the usual day.... No, no one came with me.... Well, if you think you heard an extra pair of footsteps, you're wrong—"

  Atonal voice again. Goddamn bots anyway, you never knew how acute their sensory equipment was until too late. I barely had time to step between the white robes in the rack when the door opened. Smell of heated metal. It was a little guy, about a meter ten. It rolled on sticky tires into the room. Sounded like an irritated snake.

  I stepped out, hit the back of its “head"—the sensory center—with the edge of my right hand. The shock sent an aluminum plate flying and exposed a nest of glassy cables inside. I reached in and tore out a bunch. I didn't care what they did—they must have done something essential.

  The bot started off on one wheel, whirled, flipped over and started spinning around the deck. I slipped out, letting the door close behind me. Sister Jann was holding the door across the hall open and I slid into the Master's quarters.

  "I have more than a few minutes now,” I told her.

  "What about the bot?"

  "Forget the bot."

  The Master, like Mmahat, lived in a suite. The main room was austere, with no chair, no desk, only tatami mats glued to the deck and a low Japanese table or two. On one wall hung a scroll with a black-and-white Zen drawing of their prophet Bodhidharma, a ferocious-looking old gent with bulging eyes. A Japanese verse ran vertically beside the picture.

  "Do you read kanji?” asked a creaking voice like a cricket's song.

  "Sorry, no."

  "It says, What's the sound of one hand clapping? Do you know what the koan means?"

  The day before I'd have said no, and gotten irritated to boot with what used to sound like gibberish. Today I said, “Possibly."

  He chuckled. “Well, that's a beginning. Tea?"

  Master Po looked like a cicada shell—small, elaborately wrinkled, dry and brown. His eyes twinkled like black diamonds. He sat on the deck cross-legged behind the Japanese table, and at his gesture I settled down facing him. Sister Jann brought cups covered with plastic, with straws inserted through nipples.

  "I don't usually serve menfolk,” she explained. “But I make an exception for Masters and guys who fight bots and win."

  We toasted each other with green tea while she and the Master exchanged amused glances. He treated her as an equal with whom he shared some sort of secret joke.

  "So you've come up from Terra to examine our dirty laundry,” the Master said. His tiny, ancient voice scraped, squeaked, and whispered, but was perfectly clear.

  "Not my own doing, Master Po. Now, you won't have heard yet about the murder of so-called Brother Ion—"

  "So it's happened, eh? And Sister just told me you've discovered Brother Aung Chai's little game."

  "Yes."

  "He was my worst mistake,” sighed Master Po. “One of the Christian holy books warns against false prophets so sly they can deceive even the Chosen Ones. Wel
l, I'm not sure I'm a Chosen One, but I know that he deceived me. What's enlightenment but the discovery of our oneness with all beings? Once confirmed in it, we pursue right action naturally, like Jesus when he discarded the laws and the prophets for his gospel of love. But what if someone went only halfway? What if someone learned just enough to despise conventional morality without truly entering the enlightened state? He'd be a kind of walking cancer, you see, with no law and no love either."

  "And that's the Chief Monk."

  The Master nodded. “His schemes don't end with enriching himself. He means to leave the Order, return to Terra, and get himself into the Council of State with the aid of that pompous ass Mmahat. He's got brains, forcefulness, a legion of rich supporters, an unearned reputation for being holy, and a genuinely mesmeric personality. So you see why we had to stop him."

  "Shutting down his spy system was the first step,” said Sister Jann, taking up the tale. “Then we had to kill his enforcer."

  "We?” I gazed at the old gent, now well into his second century, and the serene-looking nun, over whose pale face a delicate blush was beginning to spread.

  "Well, I did at his command. It was very, very difficult for me to do. But for the sake of true religion we have to overthrow Aung Chai and restore the Master to rule and guide us."

  I felt like a man who'd just taken one of those banana-peel pratfalls you see in ancient comedies. Why did I think, in this of all places, that the motive had to be something practical, something worldly?

  "What about Kendo?” I demanded, with anger directly proportional to my embarrassment over my blunder. “Did you kill him, too?"

  The delicate pink darkened to rose on her pale cheeks. “I made a mistake. A terrible mistake. I was quite anxious anyway, I'd never tried to kill anybody before, and with the dim lights and so forth I thought I'd spotted Brother Ion. But I got the wrong man. It was terribly distressing."

  "Especially for Kendo. Poor guy, hiding from a measly fraud charge, and first he loses all his money and then he gets stabbed by a nun. Where'd the knife come from?"

  "It was a sample from a medical-supply outfit on Terra. It came in a miscellaneous shipment of new equipment and went through the scanners unnoticed. A disposable scalpel made of mirror duroplast, not steel, and sharp as an obsidian blade. After I ... used it, I dropped it into a waste-materials vent. We've got kilometers of solar panels on the station's exterior and they generate huge amounts of energy. Well, mirror duroplast's got a relatively low melting point, only 550 degrees, so the knife was gone forever. Of course I'd worn gloves, and I threw them in, too. A tiny drop of blood got on the sleeve of my habit, but I was the one doing the neoluminol studies, so that didn't matter."

  The Master waved a small, dry, clawlike hand. “Try not to be so conventional, Colonel. One death was a tragic accident, the other a well-merited execution. What matters is that Aung Chai's enforcer has been removed by Sister Jann. Now I understand you've eliminated his bot as well. Next step: the man himself."

  "Perhaps,” I murmured, “Sister Jann can lure him into the airlock, as she did Brother Ion."

  She looked like I'd slapped her. “Maybe I deserved that,” she whispered. “It was rather a vile thing to do, exploiting his lust. But I simply couldn't think of anything else. He was a professional killer, as you know, and after Kendo's death he was on his guard."

  "Did the fact that you're a nun bother him?"

  "I think it excited him,” she said slowly. “Like Nero wanting to rape a vestal virgin. And he was bored with his usual prey, these foolish females who are our guests. He not only pursued them himself, he pimped for the Chief Monk, who surely is Rasputin reborn."

  Master Po raised his teacup, but suddenly halted the gesture and spoke out.

  "Enough talk! We must purge Heaven's Footstool and return it to right practice and the true path! I order the Chief Monk to be deprived of the place he has dishonored. Arrest him, bind him, hold him for an open trial before all the brothers and sisters."

  He sucked his tea down to the last drop. His hand descended and the cup rapped the table like the gavel of a hanging judge. I stared at him with exasperation and awe, thinking: A man who can put death and damnation into a teacup needs watching.

  "Aung Chai is no ordinary man,” the cricket voice resumed. “He's as big as you are and several decades younger. He recognizes no law but his own ego. Like the tyrant Hitler in the ancient world, he possesses the demonic power of alienation—because he cares for nothing, he's capable of anything. And he will be aided by the criminals he's brought here, for their survival depends on his.

  "You must operate under difficult constraints. We have many friends among the brothers, who could make a good fight of it. Yet we can't afford a bloodbath. Nor can Aung Chai. For him it would be a political disaster. For us, it would shame the Order and make the White Monks infamous. The Chief Monk must be removed suddenly, as if struck by a thunderbolt. I can't compel you to aid us, Colonel, but it's the only way you can carry out your obvious duty to eliminate a refuge for Terra's felons. Once Aung Chai is gone, you can return home with a shuttlecraft full of scoundrels for whom there are outstanding warrants. You'll be a hero down there."

  I smiled a little ruefully. Nothing was working out as I expected. First I got the wrong man in my sights. Then I found out that my ally, the good sister, did the killing. Now I was being invited to lead a coup d'état for the sake of true religion.

  And it looked like I'd have to. That nest of felons did need cleaning out, and this was the only way to do it. Master Po was a hundred and twenty-eight, and on Earth would have weighed maybe fifty kilos, but he had me in the mental equivalent of a headlock.

  "Master,” I asked, “in your younger days, did you practice judo?"

  "Yes, and was quite good at it. I could throw a man twice my own size."

  "That's easy to be—"

  But I didn't have time to get out “believe.” The door slid open behind me and I turned to find the gap overfilled by the Reverend Aung Chai, with four chunky spooks behind him.

  "So there's a transmitter in the bot,” I remarked, “and it sounded a silent alarm."

  He and his friends entered the room, pushing back their hoods, Regulation 19 or no Regulation 19. With a sinking sensation I recognized three of his spooks from times and crimes past. Killers, armed robbers, brutes. Speaking religiously, an Unholy Trinity—and I felt sure the fourth was no better than the ones I knew.

  A few minutes later I was sitting on the deck, back against a bulkhead, ankles tied together, knees under my chin, wrists tied behind me—the only one they bothered to tie up, which I suppose was a compliment of sorts. Sister Jann sat to my left, Master Po at my right. He was in the meditation position, hands against his hara, back ramrod straight, face composed and eyes cast down. He seemed to be ignoring the enemy whose career he launched and now had failed to stop.

  My omni reposed in the CM's left sleeve, where it continued to pick up our voices and the messages emanating silently from the chip in my larynx.

  The CM was not a generous winner. “For you, the airlock,” he told me. “Later, when our honored guests are asleep. You're nothing but a retired cop with a blot on your record, so I don't imagine the accident will cause much stink on Terra."

  He smiled at Sister Jann, exposing his long teeth. She'd been his nemesis, and he acted accordingly. “She's yours,” he told one of his followers, a short thick individual with a scar-seamed dark face and arms longer than his legs.

  His name floated across my mind—Sirathan Radhakrishnan, an up-to-date thug and devotee of skull-garlanded Kali, who made himself quite a career in the international settlement at New Angkor, killing for pay and disposing of the bodies in the fish farms that dot the big lake of the Tonle Sap. He'd been missing three or four years. Now he grinned, bent down, grabbed Sister Jann and swung her over his shoulder with one smooth motion. He'd had a lot of practice moving bodies, though not live ones. Sirathan stepped into the Master's bed
room and the door slid shut behind him.

  I asked Aung Chai, “Did you have to do that?"

  "Yes. I want her to suffer, and if I know the gentleman she's with, she will.” He gave me his ferocious smile.

  I try not to act in anger, you do dumb things that way, but at this point I just let go. What did I have to lose, anyway?

  In standard gravity I'd have had a hard time moving. As it was, I pushed down hard with my heels and the equal and opposite reaction brought me halfway to my feet. Another hard kick pulled my stickums off the deck and sent me into a graceful arc, like a slow rocket, against the Chief Monk's face and chest. I had only one available weapon, so I used it. I got my teeth into his throat and bit down on the windpipe as hard as I could, trying to strangle him.

  Christ, it was like getting a mouthful of brambles. He made a gargling noise. Hands grabbed at me, trying to pull me off while I made like a bulldog, now tasting the salt in his goddamn blood. Then a heavy fist thumped the back of my neck and I saw stars and flashes. They yanked up on my bound hands and pain shot up through my shoulders and when I gasped they pulled me loose from the CM.

  I twisted and turned like a gaffed eel in midair, folded up my legs and kicked as hard as I could. My feet sank into somebody's gut, then rattled somebody else's ribs and I heard a bone crack, or maybe two bones. There was yelling and curses as I broke loose and launched myself off a bulkhead at the CM and hit him in the belly with my hard, hard head. This time he was knocked loose from the deck and caromed off another bulkhead and came back at me.

  His neck was bleeding, his thumbs were extended, he wanted my eyes, and when the others grabbed my arms again I was beginning to think he'd get them. Then Master Po hurled his frail body against Aung Chai. Did no damage, but deflected him for a few seconds, during which one of my captors screamed, doubled up, turned me loose and made a slow, elegant somersault while droplets of bright arterial blood sprayed, spread, and drifted in midair.That's when I realized that Sister Jann had joined the melee. She was holding something like a gleaming shard of mirror. She clutched my hand and ducked behind my back and I felt the blade slide through the cords binding my wrists like a butcher's knife slicing the tendons of a chicken. She stabbed another of my assailants in a motion so practiced and quick the gleaming blade vanished and reappeared almost in the same instant, only not as bright as before.