Free Deadman Switch by Timothy Zahn

her trial and appeals, she’d finally resigned herself to her approaching death … and now I was threatening that acceptance. Threatening her once again with uncertainty. “I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “I know this isn’t going to be easy for you—”
    â€œYou know that, do you?” she said sarcastically.
    â€œI’m trying to help you!” I snapped abruptly. What with Aikman and now Calandra, I’d finally had enough. “I’m your friend, Calandra. Whether you believe it or not; whether you like it or not. You’re going with us tomorrow because maybe it’ll get Randon Kelsey-Ramos on our side.”
    â€œOh, wonderful,” she sneered. “Well, it may come as a shock to you, but I don’t happen to want your Kelsey-Ramos’s help.”
    â€œThen you’re going to die,” I said bluntly.
    â€œThere are worse things than death,” she shot back. “Such as helping the rich get richer at the expense of everyone else, for instance. If Carillon’s money hadn’t scraped all the ethics off your precious Watcher label I wouldn’t have to tell you that.”
    A stab of fury slid white-hot through my heart. Fury, strongly edged with guilt. She saw it, and took an involuntary step backward, eyes suddenly wary. “Then don’t help,” I snarled at her. “You can act like the bottom of a growth tank tomorrow if you want. But you are coming along.”
    She was still standing there, staring at me, as I turned and stomped out.
    She was still glowering the next morning when we got into the car with Randon, Dapper Schock, Kutzko, and Daiv Ifversn and headed for Cameo. She was still glowering, and I was still feeling guilty.
    Unreasonably guilty, after all, considering that this was nothing less than an attempt to save her life. But the awareness of good motives had always been a feeble kind of comfort with me, and this case was no exception … especially since I wasn’t fully convinced I was doing the right thing.
    So always treat others as you would like them to treat you; that is the Law and the Prophets … I was certainly willing to obey … but could I really know how I would want to be treated under these circumstances? Calandra was right; without being in her position, I could only guess at what she needed from me.
    And if I guessed wrong, I would wind up making her last days of life that much harder to bear.
    Absorbed in my own thoughts, I withdrew most of my attention from the world around me … and was therefore almost startled when I suddenly realized that Calandra was beginning to pay a somewhat grudging attention to our surroundings.
    To a normal person, I supposed, it wasn’t all that interesting a view. Once out of Rainbow’s End itself, the few modestly tall spaceport buildings disappeared, replaced by the squatter structures that nearly always dominated underdeveloped places like this where land was cheap and plentiful. Beyond and between the buildings were scatterings of the giant, multi-trunked native plants that seemed to take the ecological place of trees on this world. Simple, quiet, and at first glance almost prosaic … but for Watchers, nothing about God’s universe was really prosaic. For me, as for Calandra, the landscape outside was a rich and varied study into the spirit of a world.
    A world of people, I quickly realized, who were still not at rest with their planet.
    The tension manifested itself in a thousand different ways, through a thousand different details. Here, we passed a home whose owner was fighting to keep aloof from the planet, his property ringed with imported trees and bushes; elsewhere, there were the mute signs of others who’d given up such attempts but still hadn’t found any peace. I’d felt all this the night before, and it was no less unsettling in the full light of day … especially since I had no idea what it was they