of work done on id’s and papers for Q, and all of that was scrapped. Papers had
been stolen and destroyed to such an extent in Q that no paper could be trusted
to be accurate. Most of the claims to paper were probably fradulent, and loudest
from the dishonest. Affidavits were worthless where threat ruled. People would
swear to anything for safety. Even the ones who had come in good order were
carrying paper they had no confirmation on: security confiscated cards and
papers to save those from theft, and they were passing some few out where they
were able to establish absolute id and find a station-side sponsor for them—but
it was slow, compared to the rate of influx; and main station had no place to
put them when they did. It was madness. They tried with all their resources to
eliminate red tape and hurry; and it just got worse.
“Tom,” he keyed, a private note to Tom Ushant, in the defender’s office, “if you
get a gut feeling that something’s wrong in any of these cases, appeal it back
to me regardless of procedures. We’re putting through too many condemnations too
fast; mistakes are possible. I don’t want to find one out after processing
starts.”
He had not expected reply. It came through. “Damon, look at the Talley file if
you want something to disturb your sleep. Russell’s used Adjustment.”
“You mean he’s been through it?”
“Not therapy. I mean they used it questioning him.”
“I’ll look at it.” He keyed out, hunted the access number, pulled the file in
comp display. Page after page of their own interrogation data flicked past on
the screen, most of it uninformative: ship name and number, duties… an
armscomper might know the board in front of him and what he shot at, but little
more. Memories of home then… family killed in a Fleet raid on Cyteen system
mines; a brother, killed in service—reason enough to carry grudges if a man
wanted to. Reared by his mother’s sister on Cyteen proper, a plantation of
sorts… then a government school, deep-teaching for tech skills. Claimed no
knowledge of higher politics, no resentments of the situation. The pages passed
into actual transcript, uncondensed, disjointed ramblings… turned to
excruciatingly personal things, the kind of intimate detail which surfaced in
Adjustment, while a good deal of self was being laid bare, examined, sorted.
Fear of abandonment, that deepest; fear of being a burden on his relatives, of
deserving to be abandoned: he had a tangled kind of guilt about the loss of his
family, had a pervading fear of it happening again, in any involvement with
anyone. Loved the aunt. Took care of me, the thread of it ran at one point. Held
me sometimes. Held me … loved me. He had not wanted to leave her home. But Union
had its demands; he was supported by the state, and they took him, when he came
of age. After that, it was state-run deep-teach, taped education, military
training and no passes home. He had had letters from the aunt for a while; the
uncle had never written. He believed the aunt was dead now, because the letters
had stopped some years ago.
She would write, he believed. She loved me. But there were deeper fears that she
had not; that she had really wanted the state money; and there was guilt, that
he had not come home; that he had deserved this parting too. He had written to
the uncle and gotten no answer. That had hurt him, though he and the uncle had
never loved each other. Attitudes, beliefs… another wound, a broken friendship;
an immature love affair, another case in which letters stopped coming, and that
wound involved itself with the old ones. A later attachment, to a companion in
service… uncomfortably broken off. He tended to commit himself to a desperate
extent. Held me, he repeated, pathetic and secret loneliness. And more things.
He began to find it. Terror of the dark. A vague, recurring nightmare: a white
place. Interrogation. Drugs. Russell’s had used drugs, against all Company
policy, against all human rights—had wanted badly something Talley simply did
not have. They had gotten him from Mariner zone—from Mariner—transferred to