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TWENTY-ONE Pleasure Before Business

Eichra Oren felt a tautness in his body, a singing in his nerves and muscles, a pleasure that was almost pain. Within the circle of his arms, Estrellita trembled and a tear escaped from the long sweep of her lashes. He released her wrists, keeping his arms around her. "Is it possible," he whispered, "that this incurs a moral debt on my part?"

"I hope—" Her voice came in a rusty croak. She inhaled and began over. "If you're apologizing, Eichra Oren, I, er, deny the debt."

He kissed her again. When some time had passed, he told her, "For the first time I regret the structure of my language. I haven't a shorter name for you to call me by. `Eichra' and `Oren' mean nothing, separate from one another. You've a beautiful name—I meant to tell you that before—and appropriate, since you're beautiful, yourself."

She buried her face against him, her shoulders worked, he felt dampness through his clothing, although she made no sound. He laid the palm of a hand along her cheek and gently turned her head to see her eyes. "You're crying," he told her, and felt like an idiot for stating the obvious.

"You don't know," she answered bitterly. "I'm far from beautiful inside! I'm a Marine officer, a trained killer, and now I'm—"

"And by the same standard, what am I?" he demanded. "The blood of a thousand sapients is on my hands." In the darkness, she heard the whisper of an aircraft as it rose level with the balcony. He turned her so that she stood facing it. "Come," he told her, "we'll steal a few hours and see what you and I are like inside. My wager is that you're beautiful that way, as well."

Without waiting for an answer, he lifted her in his arms, carried her to the rail, set her in the machine, then climbed in beside her. Pilotless, the electrostat slipped sideways from the balcony, gaining altitude. Half reclining in the bottom of the craft, she brushed tears from her cheeks with a sleeve. "You've forgotten your sword."

He shook his head. "I can't forget it, Estrellita, but I can leave it behind for a while. It'll be there when I come back. Unfortunately."

One arm beneath her shoulders, he leaned over to place his mouth on hers again. His other hand operated the release of her weapons belt. Knife and pistol slid to the floor with a dull clunk. He took the toggle of her suit zipper, pulled it down between her breasts to the waist. She wrapped her arms around his neck and clung to him as the aircraft swooped toward the night-black canopy.

* * *

Later, she faced him cross-legged, holding his hands in hers, palms up. They rested on bare flesh; her uniform, which couldn't be said to be lying discarded in a corner only because there were no corners, had been discarded nonetheless. A soft light glowed from beneath the compartment rim. She looked at his hands, which she said seemed perfectly ordinary to her, and at the same time, perfectly extraordinary, then up into his eyes.

"A thousand sapients."

As naked to her as she was to him, he looked at his hands as if they were strange to him, then met her eyes by a more circuitous route than she'd taken, having decided she was very beautiful, indeed. "It doesn't happen every day," he told her. "Most of the time, I'm an arbiter in small matters of rights or property, rather than life. Often my presence will be requested to witness a personal or business agreement, or a potentially disputed event."

"In your official capacity?" she asked.

He smiled, enjoying the feel of the night around them. "I've no official capacity, Estrellita, only a customary one. Occasionally, a client will ask the most awful and fascinating question ever put to me. It's always an uncomfortable moment, and it's long established in formula: `Am I allowing my existence to continue in ignorance of some irreversible breach I've unknowingly committed, some irrevocable restitution I've neglected to make?' "

With a frown, she repeated the words, " `Am I allowing my existence to continue in ignorance of some irreversible breach I've unknowingly committed, some irrevocable restitution I've neglected to make?' "

"Have a care," he warned, reaching to brush a strand of hair from her eyes. She ducked her head, caressed his palm with her cheek and kissed it. "Once the words are spoken in earnest, they can't be taken back. I've no choice but to find an answer and recommend action to be taken in consequence. Sometimes—it's never pleasant—I must take the action myself. In your terms, my profession combines aspects of a rabbi, policeman, psychiatrist, lawyer, accountant, referee, father-confessor, judge, family doctor, philosopher, and, in ultimate resort, executioner."

She released his hand, leaned back against the side of the vehicle and straightened her legs across his thighs. "I get around, for a twenty-nine-year-old former virgin. A rabbi, a cop, a shrink, a lawyer, an accountant, a referee, a priest, a judge, a doctor, a philosopher, and an executioner, all in one day?"

"You've an excellent memory, Estrellita." He let his hands travel the length of her legs, enjoying her soft, flawless skin and the muscles lying beneath it. "And not as good an opinion of yourself as you deserve. It's true that, because of that last aspect, my work brings me, on rare occasion, into violent contact with others—what individual would be willing to trust me in small matters if I hadn't proven myself reliable in large ones?—or at least it presents its more physically active moments."

She laughed, pulling herself forward into his lap and wrapping her legs around his waist. "And what do you call this?"

He let his mouth and hands wander before he answered. "A splendid spirit of cooperation between two investigators. In fact, I'm ready to cooperate all over again, if you are." He moved and she settled lower in his lap.

She sighed, closed her eyes, and enjoyed a pleasant shudder. "So you are! No, don't turn out the lights. This time I want to see your face."

For an hour they were oblivious to anything but one another. Afterward he set the 'stat on a random course among the trees where lights twinkled here and there and she saw things strange and wonderful to her. They skimmed, at a modest distance, past a party of Aelbraugh Pritsch's species, celebrating the first hatching on the asteroid with traditional percussion music which must have sounded to an unaccustomed ear like an industrial accident. In their midst, a great arachnid held the equivalent of bagpipes to spiracles along its abdomen, adding to the racket.

Another pass took them by an off-duty drilling crew of sea-scorpions and cartiloids, no doubt discussing the latest failure as they shared a titanic keg of beer. Aboard the aircraft, their own talk returned to his profession. She expressed surprise that a species wise and ancient as the Elders needed someone like him, in her words, to maintain order.

"Wise and ancient they may be," he replied, "but the Elders are no angels. Their history embraces every good or evil which we, mere butterflies to them, ever conceived in our paltry million years. They've seen five hundred million, and they've long memories. They regard a certain amount of crime as thermodynamically inevitable. It may even measure a culture's health."

She raised her eyebrows. "Crime as a sign of health?"

He nodded. "There's no surer sign that a culture's sickly and on the edge than lack of gumption among its crime-prone members. No matter how much progress is made, it'll always be easier to steal something than to earn it. That's why theft will exist, as Mister Thoggosh says, `for as long as stars of the nth generation continue to fuse hydrogen.' No matter what happens, it'll always be easier to destroy something—"

"And even easier," she added, "just to threaten its destruction."

"Statements of equal relevance to the phenomena of entropy and extortion. The Elders are optimistic; they feel both facts have more to do with the way the universe is constructed than with the behavior of sapients living in it. However, there'll always be people capable of reasoning only as far as those facts and no further. And of making criminal plans predicated on them."

"Which is why you still need police?"

"On the contrary, Estrellita, I'm no policeman. The persistence of crime reveals too much about the origin of authority. In what way could it have begun, other than by some gang threatening a farmer's crops—and the farmer with them—unless he agreed to part with a portion in order to protect the rest? That's the relationship between death and taxes."

"Anarchist! Lenin warned us about you." She laughed and shook her head. "And none of the younger species ever give the Elders an argument?"

"The Elders detest appealing to seniority for validation. Still, over the last hundred million years they've seen this process many times among many different species, beginning with their own. It's also characteristic of them that they're inclined to blame the farmer for inventing agriculture which, by its nature, rendered him helpless in the first place."

"Maybe farmers invented authority to protect them from gangs."

"Authority's always supposed, by history revised after the fact, to have arisen to prevent or punish acts which, in truth, sustain it. How long could authority continue if it were effectively forbidden to steal what others earn, to destroy—or threaten to destroy—what others create?"

"I won't answer," this time her mouth and hands did the wandering, "until you tell me how long I have to wait until you make love to me again."

He laughed. "Keep doing that, and—damn!" His implant shrilled, and for the first time the 'stat faltered in its flight. They were in no danger, the warning was advisory, intended to protect the colony's only means, however imperfect, of returning to the home continuum. "Look," he told her, pointing over the rim of the craft, "it's the dimensional translator!"

It was the largest building on 5023 Eris. He tried to look at it as she must be seeing it. It could have been a particle accelerator, a raceway, or an athletic field. His layman's knowledge of the Elders' ultimate triumph in physics rendered him little less ignorant of its operation than she was. Its foundation, surrounded by jungle, was an enormous isolation field a hundred meters square, inset with a wheel-rim construction almost as large, split into truncated wedges seven meters wide, marching around the rim. Half a dozen pathways met at a hexagon in the center where he and Sam had materialized not long ago amid artificial lightning and a howling storm.

"Pretty," was her only comment. "You're easily distracted, Eichra Oren." She pulled him down, back to the center of the compartment as the craft steered past the installation and away. It was only a minute before she had his full attention again. After a considerably longer interval, their conversation returned, as it always must, given the kind of people they were, to their responsibilities.

"Sometimes I'm compelled—" He stroked her head, which lay against his thigh.

"Employing the least," she grinned, "of your many amazing abilities—"

"I'm compelled, as you suggest, to assist some clients with that sword which constitutes my badge of . . . there isn't a word for it in your language. `Office,' `authority' won't do at all. I said earlier, this is only in the uncommon instance of those few who, for one reason or another, happen to be—perhaps less morally capable—of making the ultimate restitution themselves."

She sat up and turned to face him. "So you force them?"

"On the contrary, Estrellita, no one's forced to the ultimate restitution. It's not even remotely related to capital punishment. But it'll happen that, in the course of collecting lesser debts, or defending my life trying to do so, I'm called on to collect a life. If they've time under such circumstances, even unwilling clients are sometimes grateful for my assistance. If not, their families or associates seldom fail to express a measure of gratitude."

She shook her head. "Sounds crazy to me."

He put a hand on her shoulder, where it displayed a tendency to explore elsewhere. "In a trade society, unwillingness or inability to pay a debt is the worst disgrace imaginable, spoken of afterward, often for millennia, to the detriment of the defaulter's interests. It doesn't happen much."

Despite martial skills, advanced weaponry, and sword of—"office" wasn't the word—Eichra Oren was more in his own mind and in those of others than a bloody-handed executioner. Trouble came when he tried explaining it to someone with Estrellita's background. He pointed out that Earth's barbaric past—not to mention its barbaric present—had plenty of that type. "They do nothing to maintain the moral elevation of cultures they infest. I gather some of these butchers even torture. That kind of savagery, like taxation or slavery, has been absent from our society for millions of years."

She laid a hand on his cheek. "I believe you're not a torturer. Every time you touch me you tell me what you are."

He shrugged. "I'm one of a handful of individuals . . ."

She interrupted. "Unusually capable individuals, Mister Thoggosh told me, upon which all civilization depends. His exact words."

"He generously exaggerates the qualities of all who work with him. I'd say, due to my basic character, as well as to later training, I'm able to take the process of moral reasoning to a conclusion regardless of what may happen as a consequence."

"And no one," she confirmed, "ever benefits from your, er, services unless they contract and pay for them voluntarily?"

"That's absolutely—" He frowned. "Damn, it's more complicated than that. They may, indeed, come to require them as the inevitable result of a chain of events which they initiated by choice."

She nodded. "Like saying a burglar or mugger or rapist dying at the hands of his victim has chosen a complicated way of committing suicide?"

"What else? I'm grateful that, rather than being feared or hated or avoided because of the more sanguinary aspects of my profession, I'm honored out of proportion with my talents or accomplishments."

"You're like a celebrated surgeon," she told him, "one of those rare and valued individuals practicing a profession who are able to do it competently."

He shook his head. "It's seen as having little to do with me. As with your burglar, responsibility lies with the one who came to need my services. I'm seen by everyone, and see myself, as the instrument of his will. Also, despite its fascination, situations which end in bloodshed are rare. In the ordinary course of my profession, I'm more concerned with those who aren't criminals. It's the fervently held wish of the ordinary individual never, by accident, ignorance, or even by appearance, to become such. It's my function to help them any way I can, consistent with principle, to fulfill that wish."

"Don't do me any favors!" She laughed, but there was a nervous tone beneath it. "What about those who won't volunteer?"

"There are always those," he mused, "who for one reason or another are not so particular about maintaining their moral status."

"Sociopaths."

"I've heard the word," he told her. "I disbelieve it has a real referent. The Elders are concerned with the consequences of an individual's acts. The reasons he may present for them are considered secondary, if they're considered at all."

Her eyes widened. "No extenuating circumstances? No mercy?"

"I didn't say that, Estrellita. Putting accountability first, they feel, is responsible for the longevity of their culture and the level of peace, freedom, and prosperity within it."

She looked at her hands. "You didn't answer about nonvolunteers."

"As one of your own philosophers once put it, life becomes impossible for them. No one will trade with them—hire, house, clothe, feed them—no matter what they offer. They wander the land becoming more ragged each day until, from desperation, they turn back—to find me following them."

She shivered and wrapped her arms around herself.

"You're right," he told her, "that few moral cripples such as these are grateful to me. So, out of a prudent regard for survival, let alone my reputation, in addition to pursuing philosophy and logic, I've become proficient at the martial arts."

"Be good at it, Eichra Oren." She placed her hands either side of his face. "Be as good as you are at making a girl feel decent about herself for a few minutes for the first time in her life!"

She wept again for a little while, and they made love all through the remainder of the night.

 

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