“I suppose so, yes. Very insightful. I’m surprised they didn’t promote you directly to captain.”
Again, a factual monotone. “I failed the aptitude, sir. I hope to grow and season with age, but today the Constabulary has dozens of better cops than myself.”
“Dozens? Really?” Bruno blanched inwardly at the thought. With forty billion citizens to choose from, the Queendom certainly had no shortage of compulsive savants to fill its payroll. Better than filling it with incompetents, obviously, but there was something frightening about a really gung-ho interplanetary police force. “I shall be very careful to obey the laws, I think.”
“That’s the idea, sir.” Then, catching something in Bruno’s look, Shiao said, “It makes some people nervous, this kind of concentrated authority. I understand the feeling. But I can assure you of the Constabulary’s complete intolerance for bad cops. Any crook or bigot in our midst, or even a well-meaning authoritarian, would be disowned and prosecuted immediately. Of the seven thousand, six hundred, and eight applicants for the position of lieutenant, more than eighty percent failed the moral aptitude screening.”
“Seven thousand!” Bruno said, surprised. “Goodness, that’s a lot of applicants. What happened to all of them?”
“A few are taken on each year as sergeants,” Shiao replied, “and since local and regional forces have less stringent entrance criteria, they absorb a lot of our near misses.”
“Mmm. How many is a lot?”
Shrug. “Probably a few hundred, that year.”
“And the rest?”
Shiao considered for a few seconds before answering, “I would guess many of them found work in support roles: admin, theory, equipment testing. And there’s always a need for critics and advocates in the policy arena. And actors for the training demos, and I suppose for commercial movies as well. Actors who really understand the police are rare.”
“And the rest?” Bruno persisted.
Now Shiao began to look uncomfortable, and Bruno sensed he was edging into taboo territory. In a meritocracy, what happened to people who lacked merit? People who were lazy or impulsive or foolish could change, up to a point, but could they want to change?
“Neighborhood Watch is a respectable job,” Shiao answered finally. “And they’ll take almost anyone.”
“Almost,” Bruno mused. “Mmm. And the rest?”
Shiao sighed. “There’s always crime itself, sir. It’s not generally a career choice for geniuses.”
“Ah. I suppose not. Seems a bit unfair, though.”
Shiao, to Bruno’s surprise, seemed to find that funny. “They certainly think so, sir. But good and evil are choices, not fates handed out at birth. We’re talking, probably, about fewer than a hundred of those seven thousand applicants, and if you actually met them, you might find your sympathies reduced.”
“Ah. Maybe so. You’ve little hope of promotion, then? It sounds like an awfully rigid structure.”
“They all are, sir. To get promoted I’d have to displace someone more experienced, which is a huge effort even to attempt. And my own job goes open for recompetition every decade, so I could well be demoted if I start to get sloppy. In theory, we’re encouraged to see demotion as a positive career move—point of maximum competence, as they say. But that’s a fairly new idea. ‘Rigid structure’ is an accurate description. But of course, we’re planning for the long term these days.”
“Mmm. Indeed.”
Shiao had nothing further to say. Neither did Bruno. The conversation was at an end.
The actual docking and boarding were so uneventful Bruno nearly missed them; the cruiser simply pulled up alongside the suspect vessel, selected a standard docking adapter, and mated airlocks with nary a thump. Only when Shiao’s harnesses retracted and vanished and the SWAT robots started running in puppetlike synchrony toward the hatch, flicking on their optically superconducting outer jackets so that they vanished from sight—only then did Bruno realize what was happening. Hastily, he unstrapped himself, prepared to follow once the area was “secured.” This had been explained to him at length—whether he left a copy behind or not, he was neither to risk himself nor interfere with tactical or evidentiary procedures unless some very clear and pertinent reason presented itself.
It took a whopping forty-five seconds to secure the suspect spaceship.
“One occupant,” the human SWAT commander stated flatly as he materialized to usher the royal committee from their berths. “A modified human, male, deceased.”
“Modified?” Bruno asked, curious and a little afraid. “Deceased?”
“You’ll see.”
“Hmm.”
The inside of the ship was remarkably cramped and colorless, like a half dozen prison cells strung end to end. The ship was much smaller on the inside than the outside, since after all it was mostly engine, fuel tank, and superconducting battery. But it was so dim, so ugly. There were no windows of any kind, and no effort had been made to smooth or pad the many corners, nor to hide the various plumbing and wiring that connected the ship’s systems. It looked like a utility closet, and would have been an inhospitable place even without the twenty black-shelled SWAT robots crowding it.
The “one occupant” lay on a kind of acceleration couch near the ship’s bow, from which all manner of hoses and cables radiated. The couch appeared to be the ship’s only actual furnishing. The “deceased” status of said occupant was obvious; Bruno’s external air pressure gauge read a flat 0.00, and the figure was naked, somewhat shriveled looking, and was both covered and surrounded by odd pools and knobs and jagged crystals of red-colored ice. “Male” was there for anyone to see, and as for “modified human,” well, that was unequivocal as well; there were wires and tubes feeding into every part of the dead man’s body. The ones running into his head looked blackened and scorched and melted, as if they’d carried a brief but enormous electrical surge.
The fact that he had six arms—each gripping its own joystick on the wide, gray shoulders of the couch—was actually one of the least disturbing things about him. People hadn’t done this much in Bruno’s day, wholesale modifications of their body forms, but even then, the absence had been recognized as a matter of fashion. The idea itself was hardly a shocking one, given that the capability was there in any fax machine.
What did shock Bruno was that the face, shriveled and bloody and burned as it was, looked painfully familiar. “I know this man,” he said, and his voice sounded unnerved even to him. “I’ve seen him. On my last visit to the Queendom, I think. On Maxwell Monies, on Venus.”
“It’s Wenders Rodenbeck,” Tamra agreed, and her voice sounded unnerved as well. “The playwright.”
“Activist against collapsium,” Deliah added. “Yes, we hear from him frequently at the ministry. I’ve never known him to wear six-armed body forms, though, nor to travel in space. He’s the typical hypocrite: faxing himself daily through the collapsiter grid he claims to despise. He’s pleasant about it, though—a natural charmer. I actually like him. Can this be the same person?”
“Where are his injunctions and restraining orders now?” Marlon murmured, as if to the body itself. “Is this his final settlement, a head full of burnt wires? I’ll wager I know Wenders better than any of you. A happy prankster, yes. Now a killer? Now lying here with six arms, and blood all over his face? Is this a trick? God, excuse me, I think I’m going to vomit.”
And so he did, inside the bowl of his helmet. Familiar with the hazard, the SWAT robots slapped his purge valve, then whisked him away to the fax machine before he could move wrong or breathe wrong and suck down a choking glob. Crystals of purged, rapidly freezing vomit spun after him, as if terrified of being abandoned here without him.