Prologue - Bee - My End

It’s hard to imagine your own death. I’ve had plenty of experience with death from this end, of course. Maybe a bit too much. More than a single unavoidable incident. So, I’m the expert at dealing it out. But this time it’s the receiving end I need to be concerned with. I haven’t any experience at that yet. Not many do. You might think that being in violent combat might prepare you to think of the end of your own life, but there isn’t much time for contemplation then. You are mostly concerned with staying alive. After the event, you really don’t want to think about the terror you felt. So, I’ll have to do the prep now. I want to die reasonably well. I don’t want to upset my friends any more than I have already. 

And I really need to think about it to steady myself. I will be going unsuited into a near vacuum in a few minutes. I’m going to self-execute, an obliging murderer in a society with no jails. There is no doubt I have committed the ultimate crime. I killed another person with no justification. Death is the penalty for murder under Mars’ penal code. Will they not enforce the law on a law officer? Then what would law mean? What moral authority would it have? The mix of law with expediency has made it hard to discern one from another anymore anywhere in Human Space. If we do not maintain it here, where will it survive?

I sit on the bare metal suiting bench of Airlock Number One. I have no suit, and that is the point. I look out the door port at the real face of Mars. Not the augmented one we see on the displayscreens, all sunny warmth and postcard desert, but the real planet - harsh, dim, and cold. This Mars looks dusty, and the sunlight is weak. Walking out into it without a suit will be agony, but I will die quickly, as my cells scavenge what little oxygen is left, leaving pinpoint hemorrhages in sightless eyes. Without bacteria in the frigid cold, my body will last a long time. At least until they decide to come out and recover my elements.

I talked with Doctor Syd about it, and he says I will have a few minutes of consciousness before the end, so I will have enough time to get out of the airlock and along the cliff face out of sight. My eyes and nose will bleed, and my blood will boil, in the near vacuum. It will obscure my vision. I'll just head in the right direction and keep on going as long as I can. I don't need to worry. My executioner is dead reliable. It is very cold out there, but the atmosphere is so thin that it won’t transfer heat. I will expire of anoxia long before I freeze. That’s good. I don’t want my friends to be met with my death throes and stiffened body.

Of course, this is an execution by amateurs, so something may go wrong. But Doc says it’s hard to kill a healthy person and he is 'optimistic' that I will have enough time to get out of sight. It's nothing like the instant explosion you see in the space vids. Time to spare them.

It must be done. It does not matter that I am not reviled for my act. It does not matter that Klara and Monica, along with all my other new friends, are crying their eyes out behind me. The sorrow and anger of my spirit sister Monica especially concerns me. She loves me as I do her, but she calls me an idealistic fool. She says I might be able to sidestep this execution. No-one would take any action. Maybe I am a fool. What can I do? A person’s life must mean something. It does not matter that each of them wishes it were different, and that there was some room for clemency. But there is not. How could there be? I am one with my victims in that. With 1500 people, and a world to build, do we have the resources for a jail? And there is no question of sending me home to a storm of publicity, notwithstanding the virtual death sentence of returning someone my age.

I was a lawyer on Earth, so I had a good grounding in the art of arguing the unarguable. I debated my action with Klara Nilsson, the Director here, who includes administrative law among her raft of degrees. We were looking for a way out of executing me. Neither of us could come up with an honest reason how one could overlook such an egregiously illegal act as mine and maintain any fiction of justice. I took the law into my own hands with evidence insufficient even for charges, never mind conviction, in any court of law. That I had convinced myself that the act was necessary for my own private reasons was not nearly enough.

We don’t have an executioner here, so I must do the job myself. It is so much better that way, so none will feel the guilt of killing a friend. I remember stories of people who have done that for someone close, as an act of mercy, and they never resolved the guilt of it. I will not allow that either. Now that I need to pay the penalty, I will not share the guilt.

Everyone has been very kind. They have given me overnight to finish the story of my brief sojourn here on Mars, and they even gave me an external recorder to recount my last thoughts in private. I wrote my story for my family. Mo, my best friend here, has devoted hours on my last night to helping me. I was never going to see my children again anyway. I can tell them how much their errant dad loves them, even if he is a runaway, and I can write a justification of my actions that they may believe. I want them to understand that I have lived a life of satisfaction here, no matter how fleeting, and that I have no regrets for any of it. Despite what I have done, I feel no shame. My friends are safe.

After I lost Marion on the Moon, down to me, I promised myself not to put those close to me at risk again. I have made certain that they will not be. No more innocent people will lose their lives to killers here in my new home. I could not accept the possibility of another such obscenity. You see, I am not the easiest of men. I am willing to pay the price for that.

I am old, not ready for death, but expectant of it. Even in the matured society in which we live, you could not possibly call me young. I am extraordinarily fortunate. I have had enough time to love and enjoy that love with family and friends. My children survive me and I leave them happy and fulfilled. My only regret is that I survived my dear wife, although that is a blessing too. I would not wish that she feel deprived as I felt when I lost her.

Although I have much still to do, I do not feel at all cheated by my early death. I have lived enough. I believe I will leave more than ashes in this world. What greater satisfaction can a man have than to lay down his life for those he loves? Yes, I still have lingering doubts about what I did. But it was a chance I felt compelled to take, to preempt a threat I could not accept. I will not tell you I am capable of telling the whole truth on that. What I can do is to lay out the story I can tell before you. For some, it may be a cautionary tale, but not for me. 

 It’s only fair that I should reveal something more to you before you read this. You may not tolerate men like me. As I have admitted elsewhere, I am different than I seem. I may sound folksy and friendly, a harmless old man. But, as my mother-in-law used to say, appearances can deceive. I am the wolf in sheep’s clothing. You know that I am a killer. Not just one or two. My confirmed kills on arrival here was six. I am not proud of depriving six people of life.

I was a family man. A husband, a father, a paper lawyer only rarely involved in conflict, quiet and unassuming. I thought myself as far away from a man of violence as it was possible to be. But I was wrong. I equated want of temptation with want of capacity.

Then, I was put to the choice. Having the usual degree of self-regard, I killed. And then I was threatened again, and I killed again. Each time the same choice, and each time the same response. Five deaths and one the consequence of my inaction. Six.

I am now a person such as few in our society ever become. Even soldiers, in times past, the professionals of violent persuasion, now are mostly glorified construction workers. They are only occasionally pressed to be policemen, and never, to be soldiers. Earth’s present climate, still in a disastrous state since the Impact, precludes the insanity of war by threatening lives through pervasive and constant danger that cannot be ignored. War in such circumstances would be impossibly difficult and obscenely pointless.

You see. I haven’t gone three paragraphs without mentioning the Impact. No-one who talks about our world can do that. No surprise. It happened eighty years ago, but we still live it – and will into the indefinite future. It is now central to the perception of our place in the universe. No-one can understand us without knowing that. Our species came close to extinction, billions were killed, and those who survived were scarred so extensively that none could forget. It created a mass psychopathy that spans the generations. I am another one scarred by those events, if only indirectly.

But every calamity, no matter how destructive, has diverse effects. The universality of the devastation united mankind. Universal peace is the upside of planetary catastrophe. The unexpected consequence of our unexpected calamity. Because our paradigm has shifted so completely, it is hard now to understand that people before the Impact could not know that it was inevitable; that it would happen someday. That was the kind of mystical doublethink now inconceivable to us in our starkly lit universe. Some blame our recent ancestors for negligence in failing to take steps to preserve our species. But, as events unfolded, no action would have changed history much, and how much can we criticize them for being like us? We are still myopic, just not about that. The kind of impactor that hit us is hard to predict and hard to stop no matter what your technology. And there was no getting out of the way.

This journey to Mars put me at the end of one chapter of my life. I had learned unsettling things about myself too quickly to absorb them with any degree of comfort. I lived the life of a ‘decent’ man, with all the mundane normality that implies. Not character, but the lack of it. Not distinction, but the absence of it. That was the person I thought I was. Not outstandingly good, but not so bad either. I lived that way until I was seventy-three years of age, and then my trial came. It left death in its wake.

Now I look at the flinty faces of my ancestors, male and female, in the family gallery of my fon’s archive, and I see something more than the stern expression I saw before. I see a rock-ribbed determination to survive that makes me uncomfortable, but is familiar, and binds us together. They were pioneers to unfamiliar country and I am like them. They were just not challenged in the same way. None of them were ever put in the position of killer, as I was. But I am now sure that they would have decided as I did; to choose me and mine, over some other.

It made me flinch to look in the mirror, knowing more of what I am made of, curdling the illusions that had carried me smoothly to these times through a charmed life. It would be easy to pretend that it aroused shame, but, truthfully, it did not. It reminded me that I held my own life more precious than I ever realized, and, though I hated the cruelty of taking lives, the maintenance of my own will always be more important. It certainly made me less sure of my rectitude. I knew, that faced with the same choice, I would react as I had before. I remain an unapologetic, if unenthusiastic, killer, bruised and traumatized by the enormities I have committed.

And then, on my final two days on the Rockship I feared that I was to be turned from victim to killer yet again. In the first few days of the trip, I was the target, but I dodged the shots. It was not a physically easy thing to do, either. I had a handicap. I was the only one on the ship who was coming from a place with fractional gravity, so the one gee pull the ship generated by its acceleration was a heavy burden on me in more ways than one. I was used to the Moon’s much lighter gravity. Rigorously keeping up with my exercises helped a bit. But it still felt like I was moving through molasses. And any contest of strength would have found me weakened by osteoporosis as against an Earthly resident. If the confrontations I had on the ship had been physical ones, I would never have survived.

Later, my experience in partial gravity proved to be an advantage. In Mars’ forty percent gravity, both my weight and my vision adaptation were much quicker, and of course I felt better, too. The gravity difference has another irritating side effect that you need to take drugs to help you with. You feel like you have a cold all the time because your head is congested from the additional fluid flow. I was used to that from the Moon, so it let me be just a little faster.

Already, I was having nightmares about the killings. I kept dreaming about Rudy (my victim on the Moon) flying through the air at the apex of the arc of his desperate high jump at us. Then I would catch him in the pink light of my Plaser, stopping his heart and ending his life. He appeared in kaleidoscope dreams of the six deaths I caused. Sometimes the look on the faces was fear, sometimes surprise, and sometimes anger.

Even now, I see the final moments of the others whose lives I have taken over and over again, as if they are taking place before my eyes, both in fantasies of sleep, and, occasionally during my waking hours, in hallucination. Some are more vivid than others, and it seems to depend on how I am feeling. Like the face of Dorka Horvath as she receded out of the hatch of the Rockship. There was a look of fear on her face, but, on reflection, I doubt it was fear of death. She had certainly reconciled herself to that because that was how she was going to kill me. I think she must have feared her sacrifice would be made useless because she was unable to take me with her. It was the loss of benefits promised to her loved ones that she dreaded.

Imagined details like that about my victims reinforced the remorse. A killer is unwise to consider the feelings of those he dispatches from this world. It shades the mind to see some face that reminds you of them. Oh, it didn’t change the need to avoid death. I still preferred my life over those who had decided to take it. But the regret isn’t going away. I expect it to stay with me for the rest of my life. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that revenge, no matter how triumphant, is sweet. It is not. It is a bitter, indigestible, bile, that burns your insides every day. And your only defense of rational motive does no good for that.

Since nobody had told me what was in store for my future, my speculations had filled the void. Certainly, Captain Sagan, on the Rockship, was able to tell me nothing about the unexpected assignment that awaited me. She did know that her superiors appeared to have changed their minds about eliminating me. That they had taken the unusual step of altering her standing orders to leave me to my own devices. Those earlier orders were to allow two of their agents to remove me. Then they had reversed their position and insisted that she take all precautions to land me on Mars healthy and ready for work. She did not allow herself to be at all embarrassed by the reversal, or curious about it.

What kind of work remained a mystery. Sagan did not choose to speculate because she would not involve herself with those who instructed her. She was a cautious fem who knew the dangers of tying oneself too closely to one’s superiors. But it was obvious to me, whose future it was. What else could it have been? They had every other kind of expert on Mars already, and they certainly could not have needed an indifferently qualified legal officer. Unless they had a serious and pressing problem that was distinctly non-legal. The sort of murderous problem that I had just proven encouragingly good at resolving – considering their limited choices at hand.

I speculated that they must have been in deep trouble. Trouble so dire that overlooking their grudge against me was a small price to pay for my contribution to a solution to that problem. A problem needing the action of a person who had a history of taking resolute and violent measures. That was me. No need for false modesty.

They didn’t want to chance disclosure of an embarrassing problem by hazarding the sourcing of a real detective on Earth. Obviously, it was something of importance to the viability of the settlement they had just spent their essence on. To settle Mars, they had scavenged a desperate Earth of money and resources badly needed there, and then done the same on a Moon still needing to continue its development. They only exempted the fledgling colonies in Low Earth Orbit because there was yet no money there. Thus, they harvested the unprecedented amounts they needed to build a small, but sufficient, fleet of interplanetary Rockships, a spaceport on a gigantic mountain, a five hundred-kilometer railway on an airless world, and a cliff-face settlement. This on a planet two hundred million kilometers away. Not the kind of coin to put at chance. 

I speculated that they must have been in deep trouble. Trouble so dire that overlooking their grudge against me was a small price to pay for my contribution to a solution to that problem. A problem needing the action of a person who had a history of taking resolute and violent measures. That was me. No need for false modesty.

They didn’t want to chance disclosure of an embarrassing problem by hazarding the sourcing of a real detective on Earth. Obviously, it was something of importance to the viability of the settlement they had just spent their essence on. To settle Mars, they had scavenged a desperate Earth of money and resources badly needed there, and then done the same on a Moon still needing to continue its development. They only exempted the fledgling colonies in Low Earth Orbit because there was yet no money there. Thus, they harvested the unprecedented amounts they needed to build a small, but sufficient, fleet of interplanetary Rockships, a spaceport on a gigantic mountain, a five hundred-kilometer railway on an airless world, and a cliff-face settlement. This on a planet two hundred million kilometers away. Not the kind of coin to put at chance.

It was certainly at risk, or they would never have selected me. My unexpected survival of two killing attempts on the Rockship would have turned into a credential rather than an aggravation. They had a murder, and not just any murder, but something so disturbing that revelation of it unresolved would discourage settlement in their brand-new colonies and unhinge those already there. They were already having trouble convincing colonists to settle at the end of the line. Witness me, not a volunteer, and Mo, not the obvious choice for her job.

And one isolated murder would not so discompose them. It could only be a repetition of events so heinous that they would cause instant and overwhelming alarm. That would have convinced them to use me when they had been resolved to eliminate me. Being it was at least two, and that many of their colonists were fems, I thought, it was most likely fems who were being killed. The killing of women is still more shocking to us than that of men. They are still seen to be more vulnerable. It is the B side of our residue of misogyny. And knowing the criminal history of my sex only too well, it is very likely a man who had done it. Although there have been some few intrepid female challengers, only my own sex had attained pre-eminent accomplishment in that destructive range of human expression.

And another thing seemed obvious. These crimes were committed in a closed and isolated community. There was no chance there of avoiding eventual detection or escaping to another place. They were thus not comprehensible as rational acts. There would be no such easily seen indicators of guilt such as vengeance, greed, or jealousy, to guide our way to the perpetrator. His motives would be opaque. Yet even though his actions may have been compulsive, he was still lucid enough to hide his identity, or they would not have needed my services at all. So, while needing to discover the identity of the killer with all possible speed, I would be conducting an arduous investigation to find a killer with no apparent motive.

Even though the killer would be invisible to mundane detection, still, I then retained a number of advantages. We had paid a high cost to acquire them on the Moon. That experience that would allow me to arrive with the tools I needed to prosecute the investigation. Tools which could give my new employers some reasonable hope of solving their immediate need to safeguard lives. However, it would be a slog, and prove no less personally dangerous than my last job.

No relatively comfortable exile awaited me after my recent efforts. I would be challenged and endangered by my new task. I was not a real detective, but I was the closest they had to one. I had to do. And, of course, I had that special skill. As well, now, I had attachments again, and was vulnerable anew. Monica and I had formed a bond that went way beyond casual. Certainly, that could not evolve into anything sexual, because, in addition to our great difference in age, she was gay, and I was straight. We were, however, getting to be family-close quickly. 

We were bound by ties of background and character, both being fringe people of an independent frame of mind. It was then common knowledge that we were connected, and that attachment would endanger her. I knew that from my recent experience, and I was almost dizzy with the fear of it. I had failed to protect my friend Marion, and she had died, leaving me a ludicrous imitation of a conquering hero. I knew that this time I would need to protect my friend Monica. I could not allow the profanity of murder to take another of my friends. I simply could not have sustained that.