She allowed herself a morbid smile. “I also wonder if your old friend Lieutenant Foote is going to let you see any of this, particularly my speculations on the nature and purpose of information control. But I suppose if he chops any of this, it will only prove my point.” Her smile broadened. “I’ll look forward to hearing from you. Let me know how your next exercise turns out.”
The orange End Transmission symbol appeared on the screen. Apparently Foote had tried to disprove Sula’s argument by not cutting any of the message.
Clever Sula, Martinez thought.
Martinez saved the message to his private file as he thought about censorship. It had always been there, and he’d never spent a lot of time thinking about it except when it intruded on his time, as when he was ordered to censor the pulpies’ mail.
As for official censorship, he’d always thought of it as a kind of game between the censors and himself. They’d try to hide something, and he’d try to read behind the censors’ words to find out what had really happened. From an exhortation to Unceasingly Labor at Public Works, it was possible to conclude that a major building project had fallen behind schedule; likewise, a news item praising emergency services often implied a disaster at which emergency services had been employed, but which was too embarrassing for those in charge to admit. An item praising certain ministers could be a tacit criticism of those ministers who were not mentioned, or a criticism of one junior minister could in reality be a disguised assault on his more senior patron.
Reading behind the news was a game at which Martinez had grown expert. But unlike Sula he’d never thought of censorship having apurpose, in part because it seemed too arbitrary for that. What was cut, and what permitted, was so capricious as to seem almost stochastic: sometimes he wondered if the censors were amusing themselves by cutting every sentence with an irregular verb, or any news item in which appeared the word “sun.”
Sula’s notion that censorship was aimed at giving certain people a monopoly on the truth was new to him. But whowere these people? He didn’t know anyone who didn’t have to deal with the censorship—even when he’d worked on the staff of Fleet Commander Enderby, he’d discovered that Enderby’s public pronouncements had to be reviewed by the censors.
Possiblynobody knew what was really happening. Martinez found that more frightening than Sula’s theory of a conspiracy of elites.
It would have been hard, for example, to work into any theory of censorship the conversation he’d had the previous day with Dalkeith. They’d had a breakfast meeting about ordinary ship business, and at the end, over coffee, she’d given him a puzzled look, as if she didn’t know where to begin, and then said, “You know I’m censoring the other lieutenants’ mail.”
Censorship, like all tasks that no one really wanted, was a job that tended to fall quickly down the ladder of seniority. The most junior cadets censored the messages of the enlisted; and the most junior lieutenant censored the cadets. Dalkeith censored the two lieutenants junior to her, and Martinez was left free of all responsibility but that of reviewing her messages only—a light task, as they consisted entirely of dull but heartfelt greetings to her family back on Zarafan.
“Yes?” Martinez prompted. “Is there a problem?”
“Not a problem, exactly.” Dalkeith lips twisted, as if searching for an entry point to this subject. “You know Vonderheydte has a lady friend on Zanshaa. Her name is Lady Mary.”
“Is it? I didn’t know.” He rather doubted that the lady’s name was of any great relevance.
“Vonderheydte and Lady Mary exchange videos, and the videos are of a…” She hesitated. “…highly libidinous nature. They exchange fantasies and, ah, attempt to enact them for the camera.”
Martinez reached for his coffee. “You haven’t encountered this before?” he said. “I’m surprised.” When he was a fresh young cadet aboard ship for the first time, he had been deeply shocked by both the ingenuity and depravity of the holejumpers whose messages he’d been called on to review. By the end of the second month of this involuntary course in human nature, he’d become a cynical, hard-boiled tough, a walking encyclopedia of degeneracy, incapable of being surprised by any iniquity, no matter how appalling.
“It’s not that,” Dalkeith said. “I just wonder at thepersistence. They spendhours at it, and it’s all very elaborate and imaginative. I don’t know where Vonderheydte gets the energy, considering we’re under acceleration.” Her troubled eyes gazed into his. “There’s a relentless quality to it that seems unhealthy to me. You don’t suppose he’s doing himself actual physical harm, do you?”
Martinez put down his coffee cup and paged through the mental encyclopedia of depravity he’d acquired as a cadet. “He’s not getting involved in, ah, asphyxiation?”
Dalkeith shook her head.
“Or use of ligatures? Around, say, vital parts?”
Dalkeith seemed dubious. “Depends on how vital you consider hands and feet. Well, one hand actually.” She looked at him. “Would you like to see the next set of outgoing messages?”
Martinez explained to his senior lieutenant that, however much she failed to enjoy watching a young man engage in acts of self-stimulation, he would enjoy it even less.
“I don’t care what he’s doing so long as it’s on his own time, and so long as he remains undamaged,” Martinez said. And then he added, “You can fast-forward through it, you know. I very much doubt Vonderheydte is giving away state secrets during these interludes. Or you can have the computer make a transcript and review that.”
Dalkeith sighed. “Very well, my lord.”
Cheer up, he thought, the reading might be more fun than the watching. All fantasy, without the reality of Vonderheydte’s contortions.
After that conversation, the rest of ship’s business had seemed very dull.
A chime on the comm interrupted Martinez’s remembrance. He answered, and heard Vonderheydte’s voice through his earphones.
“Personal transmission from the squadcom, my lord.”
Since the revelations of the previous morning, Martinez had found that Vonderheydte’s voice, even carrying a perfectly innocent message, seemed filled with libidinous suggestion. The dread scepter of the squadcom that hovered over his head, however, drove all suggestive notions out of Martinez’s head. His imagination flashed ahead to a rebuke, asCorona had once again fumbled in the morning’s maneuver.
“I’ll accept.” And as Do-faq’s head blossomed on the display, he said, “This is Captain Martinez, my lord.”
Peg teeth clacked in Do-faq’s muzzle. “I have received an order from the Commandery, lord captain. Your squadron is to increase acceleration, part company from the heavy squadron, enter the Hone-bar system ahead of us, and return to Zanshaa at the fastest possible speed.”
“Very good, my lord.” In truth, Martinez had been anticipating this order for some time. No enemy were expected at Hone-bar, and every ship in Faqforce was badly needed back at the capital. He had considered suggesting the separation himself, but held back for fear of being accused of being greedy for an independent command…that, and the fact that by now he quailed from the very idea of harder accelerations.