第12章 The Question

Braque received her at the fourth bell in the office on the diplomatic ring, which meant he had decided, for reasons of his own, that he was safe. That was useful. Men who think they are safe answer questions. He had set out tea, which she did not drink, and the tray of recordings was still at the edge of his desk, still sorted by delegation, still holding the thin stack of other people's voices. She had thought about that stack for three nights and had only just understood what it was for. "You sent me the offer to leave," she said. "No." He said it easily. "I am not the one with the money, Ilyse. I am the one with the keys." "Then you wrote the amendments and someone else paid for the keys." He was quiet. She watched his hands, which were steady, which was how she knew he had rehearsed this conversation and had not rehearsed what she was about to say. "The *refuge* change is correct in both grammars. The *line* change is correct in both grammars. Nobody on this station can do that but you and me." She watched his face. "It was not me." "It was not me." "The amendments were made from the cargo ring. From bay seven, where Tobin Skarrow died doing an inventory he had not been scheduled for." She let the name sit between them. "He was crushed under a drum that had been set down on him after he was already dead. Somebody welded a scene. Somebody who had never had to do it before, because the burn on his collar came from a discharge tool held the wrong way, too close, by a hand that was shaking." Braque's steady hands were not steady anymore. He set down the teapot he had been holding and did not pick it up again. "You think I killed him." "I think you were in bay seven and I think you did not mean to," Ilyse said. "I think someone offered you money and you took it because you have spent fourteen years translating a war and no one has ever offered you anything, and then the maintenance tech walked in on something he was not supposed to see, and whatever happened next, you have been carrying it since." She leaned forward. "I have not come to arrest you, Adem. There is no arrest to make. Solvig has suspended me, the archive is going to be signed, and one month from the signing the war-houses read the record and the whole thing comes apart. If I am right, you have not bought anything with the money. You have rented a bomb and the timer is already running." He looked at her for a long time, and she watched the fourteen years move across his face. Then he did something she had not expected. He turned the tray of recordings toward her, and picked up the thin stack at the edge—the one sorted separately—and set it in her hands. "I kept everything," he said. "That is the flaw in every careful man. I could not file the proof away, so I filed it as work." He pulled a single disc from the stack and held it up. "Every session I rendered, for four months, and the three sessions where I rendered the amendments into the working draft and filed them with her name off the record. It is all here. The commission, the broker, the route, the account. I wrote it down because I could not go one more shift without admitting to somebody what I had done, and now I am admitting it to you instead of a judge, which is probably the last bad translation of my career." "Whose name is off the record?" "Quorin's," he said. "Veyra Quorin. The brokerage holds the freight on the closed route. There is a clause in the accords about tolls on the reopened lane, and if the lane opens with a scandal attached, the tolls revert to whoever held the old contracts, which is Quorin, which is why Quorin paid to put a bomb in the peace." He turned the disc so she could see the seal. "The proof is on here. Take it, and do not come back to this office, because the next person through that door will not be you." She played the first recording while she stood there, because she could not help it and because she needed to know what she was carrying. It was Braque's voice, four months old, rendering a session in the witness chair with the same precision he had brought to every session of his life, and it was clean. The second recording was not a session. It was Braque talking to himself, off the record, in the small hours, and it was the sound of a man unscrewing a lid he had kept tight for fourteen years. "I am recording this because I cannot say it to a person," he said. "I have accepted money to amend the corpus. I have told myself the amendments are conservative readings, that both forms are defensible, that a translator is permitted to choose among defensible readings. That is true and it is also the cover, and I knew the cover the moment I used it." He went on, and the picture that came out was small and ugly and entirely human. A debt, years old, grown past what a translator's salary could carry. A first small payment that had looked like a favor. A second payment that had come with an instruction, and then the instruction had a face, and the face had a name, and the name was Quorin, and by then Braque had been in it too far to climb out without losing everything he had ever been. "The person who approaches me does not sign anything," he said. "He walks. He comes to the diplomatic ring with a greeting and leaves with a commitment, and nothing on the station records him as having been there, because his job is to be a courtesy meeting. His name is Delane." Then there was a long silence, and Braque said one more thing, and it was the thing Ilyse would carry out of the darkened office and into everything that followed. "I am not the only hand that has held this pen. The first instruction I was given was not an instruction. It was a correction that was already in the corpus when I opened it. Somebody had been here before me, four years ago, and I never found out who, and I have decided that I do not want to." She stood in the dark office with the disc running and let the last sentence do its work. Four years ago. Before Quorin's account, before the standardization pass, before the war's last profitable quarter. Somebody had taught this method, or inherited it, or used it and moved on, and Braque had spent four years not wanting to know. She did want to know. That was the difference between them, and it was also the whole of her job. She took the disc and put it in her coat and stood up, and at the door she asked the only question she still had the right to ask. "Was it you who walked the centerline on deck six?" Braque did not answer. He looked at the tray, at all the other people's voices filed in his careful hand, and he said the thing that would follow her for the rest of the night. "I have not walked the spine in four years, Ilyse. There is someone else who has my keys." The lights in the corridor went out as she stepped through the door, all of them at once, the way they only ever did when something had been cut rather than broken, and somewhere behind her in the dark office Adem Braque said her name once, quietly, and then did not say anything again. ---