Doyle Phoebe Heejanus
Phoebe trotted toward her dead constable. Of all people, Weard — guileless Weard, so attentive to
her lecture on gedogen, so nonplussed at those witches in a dark canyon a couple of Large Square
Dances ago — posed in a pool of trampled grass that reflected the struggle he put up against his
attackers. The crazed angle of his chin, nuzzling a shoulder blade, vouched for that struggle's
futility.
She dragged air deep into her lungs, trying to ignite the grief that smoldered in her heart, hoping
to draw energy from the resulting blaze of anger. Instead, the pain worsened. She fumbled around
for another distraction outside herself and found Roca standing right behind her.
A slight woman from-Samoa, Roca didn't show the strain in her face, but in her posture, shoulders
stooped, neck sagging under the weight of her head, her slight pot-belly pressing against her
jumpsuit's fabric. Phoebe pulled herself up by her own topknot just to make sure she didn't look
like that. With a sigh, Roca straightened up too, all the while staring up at Phoebe.
Phoebe wanted to extend sympathy, but couldn't, not till she understood what had happened. "Why
was a rookie like Weard out here by himself?"
"Gastarbeiterbande."
A new term, twisting an old meaning. Phoebe responded evenly, "Director Derkinit has looked for
gangs at the Rendezvous. None of the seminars report any signs. Neither do the gong-she."
Roca caught Phoebe's elbow and steered her out of ear-shot of the constables investigating the
scene, then she said, "Then he isn't looking hard enough. Gastarbeiterbande exist, and they kill
anshin. It's clear if you look at the data. Those of us out here on the paths every day have
figured it out."
"I work the paths!" Phoebe flared.
"You used to, Phoebe, but now you just visit the paths. You fill in, then head on back to
Central Station in your patrolcraft. You don't wake up with them dominating your future, and you
definitely don't have to decode their secrets. Not anymore, you don't."
She's right. Phoebe closed her eyes against the sting of tears. Gut it! She hated forfeiting the
tactical to work the strategic. Stuff it! She used to be able to manage both. And mount it on
the wall! Winning the long-term palled before Weard's and the two others' short-term loss, yet she
had to do it. Still, she couldn't descend judgment on Roca now without widening the gap between
them, between her and the blisters who lived and died in the tactical. Phoebe drew her next words
up through the ache of the tactician's classic bind.
"Tell me," she said to Roca as gently as she could.
Roca wavered then, defiance draining off and taking her good posture with it. She looked away and
waved haphazardly around them, meaning the Incident Site, but also the Rendezvous Campus and all of
Ganj Dareh beyond that.
"The scuttlebutt started that first day when ... when anshin — not just zhee-tely, but anshin —
died on the paths."
"Eighty-seven altogether that day," Phoebe whispered.
Roca nodded. "I lost one myself: Sa Rahflann Quikeremail. She'd just returned from maternity
leave. Another two since then." She turned back to Phoebe. "I explained those first rumors about
a conspiracy as shock, but I didn't try to put any 'management perspective' on it. I let it go
on. As a release."
"Yes," Phoebe approved.
"I don't remember exactly when I first heard 'Bande Gastarbeiter,' but it showed up soon, maybe the
second day after the dreamsticks failed. It referred to gangs within the Rendezvous who targeted
anshin. They might commit other violence, you know, against zhee-tely, but they definitely went
out there every day trying to kill us. Not as an initiation — too many of us were dying; they
wouldn't be adding members that fast."
"Four-hundred nineteen so far," Phoebe said quietly, "as of two-kay seconds ago, and the day's not
over yet."
Roca acknowledged with a curt jerk of her chin. "Maybe for sport, but more likely, a
ritual. We didn't understand that back then, but it made my constables mad nevertheless.
Still blind, I started to talk against the rumor, at shift briefings, in conversations. It didn't
seem to do much good.
"Then, yesterday, I looked at the data, filtered, graphed, and interpreted. I finally saw what our
constables had guessed all along." Roca glared behind the words.
Phoebe eased away from the challenge by raising her eyebrows in lieu of a question.
Roca explained, "There's an initiation-gated klatsch, run by constables, admitting only constables,
in the will-hear. One of my own took me in there yesterday. I — I hadn't known about it." Her
voice twisted with regret. "They didn't want me in there."
Phoebe shared the regret. She wasn't aware of such a constable klatsch either.
Roca straightened her body and her voice. "Anyway, they'd laid out two basic patterns about these
'Target: Anshin' Incidents.
"First, a pattern in the 'how': Trouble starts, usually a fight between factions of some kind.
Someone calls for the constable-on-patrol. When the cop shows up, she's ambushed. A single,
skilled chui attacks and usually kills her.
"Not so much anymore, of course. More of us are surviving these fights because we're interviewing
the hell out of witnesses, we're posting all reports in this klatsch, and we're talking about it
there. And we're finding patterns like these."
Phoebe glanced off at the distant crews roaming purposefully across the extensive grounds allocated
just three days ago to the Rendezvous. Somewhere among those crews were anshin-killers.
No! I don't know that for sure. Neither does Roca.
Aloud, Phoebe said, "That doesn't mean they're organized — or that they're necessarily
Gastarbeiter. We're the enforcers. We're the stick behind the patterns. We're bound to make
enemies, even among our own zhee-tely. And because everyone is taught to be Open-and-Accountable,
grudges are usually settled one-on-one."
Roca quirked her mouth in a sad, not-quite-smirk. "So I thought as well, only I'm willing
to let facts pierce my pre-conceptions, Phoebe. Listen to this next pattern about the 'where.' I
could show you the graphs, but I'll just tell you:
"Every anshin kill has occurred within sight of a High Place."
The Herald of Pandaemonium would not allow such consistency! Stunned, Phoebe echoed, "High
Places?"
Roca nodded. "I don't know if Ganj Dareh has more of them than other direvnya, but we've got
enough to spread these Incidents around. Not apparent until you throw automata at them. But it's
true." She flared then. "Some bastards are sacrificing our people. Sacrificing them to some
backwoods idolatry. And we've never caught a single one of them. Even when the cop lives through
the fight, she's too injured to secure an arrest, and the zhee-tely —" she snorted disgust "—
the zhee-tely are absolutely no help.
"So I decided to fix that. I would capture Gastarbeiterbande."
Phoebe interjected, "You didn't talk to me about it."
"Did I need your permission?"
"No, but obviously, you needed my advice. You got three constables killed!"
"I couldn't just watch this go on day after day without doing something about it. You
weren't doing anything about it!"
Phoebe pointed over at Weard's body. "We're better off now?" She spread her arms to the whole
campus. "In the midst of the Rendezvous? Gast- und einheimischer Arbeiter all around! You lost
three people and didn't capture a single chui. Everyone in town knows that by now."
"But you believe in Gastarbeiterbande now, don't you?"
"Where's your High Place around here?" Despite the sharpness of the question, Phoebe worried that
Roca's decisions here reflected a greater pattern of failure — one she'd overlooked in her own
obsession with fixing the greater good.
"What?" Roca circled in a dazed search. Even the tallest of the trees standing aloofly around
them didn't exceed the four-story limit as only High Places were allowed.
Suddenly, Roca whipped back to Phoebe. "We broke their pattern! We baited Gastarbeiterbande with
rookies so that they couldn't resist, rookies shadowed by my best fighters."
More alarmed at these appallingly lax tactics, Phoebe reigned in her tone as she asked, "What
happened?"
"I used overlapping, lopsided-eight patrols and other precautions from the Amorphous-Crowd Pattern
to keep gaps small. I had the backup constables wear mufti and mix with the crews from
Rendezvous. They paralleled the patrols as best they could. They even hid in the woods on the
backside of the campus, but there were places they couldn't stay close and not seem obvious. In
precisely those places, Gastarbeiterbande struck." Roca pointed at each Incident Site in
turn. "One snuck up from the riverbank. One dropped from a tree. One broke from a seminar
audience sitting in a meadow. We watched them strike — and kill! — then escape ..." Her firm
gestures faltered. "Into the crowd. Into a nearby neighborhood. Into the river. We just
couldn't get there in time!" She spun back and scowled with her conclusion. "Doesn't that show
they're organized? Not random, individual, but Bande? Doesn't it?"
Phoebe stared down at Roca, the only one out of the hundred forty-four community tacticians that
Phoebe had considered to be a protégé, the only one that seemed to share her concern about
zhee-tely and anshin alike, and saw how the strain had attacked her reason and above all, her
caution. The same strain that affected all anshin tacticians in the direvnya.
Despite my safeguards and lectures about it. I'd better do something different and fast!
In the meantime, she had better handle Roca's situation. "Call your Alternate Tactician, Roca,"
she said calmly. "Call Ta Nialong Femcorrespond."
"No! I wasn't wrong here. Gastarbeiterbande exist."
"I'm not dismissing your conclusions, only saying we need more eyes on them. I'll have Central run
a similar analysis, and we'll talk about it at tomorrow's tactical meeting. But you won't be
there, Roca; you'll be at home, sleeping, catching up on those chores you've been putting off,
decompressing, so I can put you back in this job. So, call your Alternate to take over, then go
home."
Roca turned away with a few slow steps, her slump worst than before. After a moment, though, she
slipped her llevar free from her belt and placed the call. Policyware would reroute
Sungaipenuh-related communications to Nialong until Phoebe cancelled the re-assignment. Then, Roca
turned and across that distance between them, said, "Put me on the paths if you need help, Phoebe,
and get me back on this job just as soon as you can."
"The sooner you get some rest, the sooner you'll be back. I promise."
Struggling a little at the effort, Roca pulled herself upright again and walked away. After a few
moments, she disappeared behind a crew arguing amiably about something, something totally unrelated
to death and disruption. Phoebe wished she could join them. A sprite of satisfaction visited
briefly, pointing out that she had given those people that opportunity. Then, closer by, the
investigative team gathered to remove Weard's corpse.
Phoebe watched them bag the body, then carry it toward a ground-ambulance waiting on the nearest
green street, a ritual that had come about over the past few days, a small rite that wrested some
order out of the chaos flooding around them. Then, her furloughing of Roca dragged another somber
cloud over her mind. She knew people needed to find patterns in zhuhndí; that's how their minds
worked. She knew people wanted to find conspiracies because they couldn't accept that Life
was such a bitch and the Universe so uncaring as to wipe them out for being at the wrong place at
the wrong time.
However, she couldn't allow her Community Tacticians to fall prey to that wishful
thinking. Too much depended on their objectivity. Too many lives.
Phoebe gazed after the funereal group, huddled around Weard's hidden and still form, remembered his
eager innocence, trying to learn, trying to fit in with her rules as well as his colleagues, and
knew she would miss helping him mature into a fine anshin. Then, she turned slowly around and
trudged back to her patrolcraft.
