The Ethic of the Assassin

Tip-toeing down the cold tile hallway, buttoning up against the cold breath of the dome ventilators with his left hand while he gripped the skar with the strong, surgeon's fingers of his right, he looked more like a tousled-headed boy than a doctor, until a year ago chief surgeon on an intergalactic liner.

Quiet as he was, Taen's huge, fierce eyes met his around the varicose-veined marble pillar in the vestibule.

"Poisoned, sire." Taen's harsh voice contained more statement than question as he hopped forward, three-jointed legs still folded in his servile stance, for erect he would have stood even taller than Jeff, and rising from one's customary place indoors, according to Taen, was unthinkable. At Jeff's suggestions that he stand, he would wave his white, prosthetic hands in horror. It was not in accord with "the unwritten laws."

"Sire, see the three-circle brand on its thorax. And listen: it is said The Assassin has repurchased the necklace of his profession from the moneylenders. A very broad-shouldered Earthman masked in brass climbed the long path to The Assassin's crags two nights ago. No doubt he purchased your wife's life, enabling The Assassin to reclaim his necklace."

Jeff leaned wearily against the pillar. "Konrad."

Taen raised his kauri on its perch-staff in assent. "No doubt he retained clothing that had touched her body and with that The Assassin was able to train the skar." Taen whipped the hood from the kauri and it clattered its beak and hummed its incredibly small wings. "Are we in turn to purchase the death of Konrad?"

"No."

With the mismatched hands the doctor had fitted him from the Body Bank, Taen unsheathed his kauri's spurs. A year before, when Jeff found this mountain man lying with bleeding wrist stumps in the jungle he readily admitted he had killed without hiring The Assassin. Caught, he had been maimed and left to die in the jungle. Since only The Assassin could directly take life, since he was too expensive to be hired to execute any but the most aristocratic murderers, Taen had been merely maimed and deserted. Against his protests of the unthinkableness of it, the young doctor had saved his life and given him arms.

Taen rasped, "Then The Assassin shall not profit from my master. Though I again shatter tradition, though Konrad is Manager of the City and guarded by walking machines and ones of my people who love the imitation of power, I will do the job myself if you so wish, sire."

"You misunderstand," Jeff replied. "I would buy Konrad's life in the customary way if it would give me back my wife's. But while he lives there is a chance he will relent and leave us in peace."

"Peace is gone, sire. The bargain has been made. The honor of the countless generations of his clan demands The Assassin do his job. It has always been so. For him to fail or to accept a bribe is unthinkable. Only the purchasing party, Konrad, could cancel the agreement."

"You can't visualize Konrad doing that, can you."

"Sire, it is said that in this last year he has become a mad man of steel and poison."

The young doctor shook his head. His voice rushed out, a pressure leak of his tension. "No Taen, he was always that way. But before he lost Kit he felt safe. He felt he owned us both. He felt he owned the power of the city, and, since few clashed with his managerial decisions, for they were usually wise ones, this illusion grew in him until he felt like a god holding the world in the palm of his hand. Kit's loss is a blow at everything he thinks he holds. Now he strikes back desperately at Kit and me, at anything that threatens his power."

Jeff fumbled in his pajama pocket for his cigarettes, but they weren't there. "What can I do? He has always been set to go that way. I saw his inability to take the loss of anything, the way he identifies even small possessions with the core of himself. When I first accompanied him into the jungle to hunt suri," Jeff smiled grimly, "he lost his wrist watch, a very ordinary wrist watch, but he made us camp two days while we looked for it. He drove those beaters like animals. We had exhausted our supply of tablets for purifying the water of the jungle puddles, but, no matter, we must find his watch. He had won it in some sort of athletic contest in his youth. Although he began to blister with the fever, that fool wouldn't go to his hammock. He could hardly stand, but he kept thrashing the bushes, looking for his watch. He shouted and raved and finally tried to shoot some of the beaters. We stayed until we found his watch."

Taen shifted uneasily. "Your wife is safe until the spies of The Assassin report they see her alive, that the skar failed. Skars are expensive. He won't send another till then. We have at least until morning to do the only thing we can do, to go to him, to give him presents and please him with us so that he will rub the most expensive poison on the beak of the next skar and let your wife die as painlessly as possible."

Jeff flashed Taen a look of utter hatred. With a curse he smashed the skar against the pillar. Then he swung his fist against it with a grunt of pain, again, as though he would smash the inevitable.

"Don't punish yourself, sire. It is Konrad who must suffer."

Kit ran down the hallway to them with her hair streaming across her sleep-swollen face and her negligee clutched tight across her swelling bosom. She threw her arms about Jeff.

His face must have been very strange, for she said, "Jeff, have I done something? You wanted a baby, you said you did."

Wearily he stroked her brow. "I'm all right. Nightmare. Walking in my sleep."

Taen nodded eager assent, then stalked off as he always did in the face of sentimentality.

"Smile, Kit. I dreamt I was defending you--and our son. Of course I want a son. What gives you such funny ideas?"

She sniffed and rubbed her cheek against his chest. "I don't know. Sometimes when I start thinking of all the planets you've seen, the strange and wonderful people, the monsters and kings you've healed, I get frightened. This one planet--and I--won't be enough to hold you. I'll wake up some morning and where your head should rest I'll find a dent in the pillow. I'll hear the rockets blast off and you'll be gone wandering among the stars the way Konrad said you would."

He stiffened at Konrad's name. But she rushed on: "He used to call you The Wanderer, you know." Then she smiled at him. "I think wanderers are afraid of babies, just like seafaring men in story books were afraid of reefs and mudbanks."

Jeff managed a smile. "You're wrong, dimple cheeks, babies aren't mudbanks, they're anchors. Sure they're troublesome. You have to lug them around, hoist them up and down, clean off the rust. But without an anchor in a storm, a ship, a man and a woman, will go on the rocks.

"Taen?" Jeff called. Hawklike eyes appeared around the pillar. "Would you ask Garth to come sit with Kit."

"You going someplace at this time of night." Then she inhaled with a great gasp of breath as she noticed the crushed skar. "Konrad!"

"Very unlikely. He's probably more interested in bossing the city than in carrying out any crazy threats he once made. This airsquid undoubtedly blundered through the dome ventilators. It's a wild one. Now you go back to bed while Taen and I go raise a fuss with the Security Guards."