All My Sins Remembered
Joe Haldeman
Language: English
Pages: 155
ISBN: 0575072814
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Otto McGavin is peaceful and idealistic by nature, an Anglo-Buddhist, who seeks employment with the Confederación because he believes in it and its mission to protect the rights of humans and nonhumans. The only problem is that the Confederación needs him as a Prime Operator for its secret service, the TBII, and the TBII wants Otto as a spy, a thief and an assassin.
It's not, of course, a problem for the Confederación, which simply uses immersion therapy and hypnosis for Otto's training, and then sends him out in deep cover on a variety of dangerous missions on a number of bizarre worlds.
But for Otto, it's a different matter: what he has to witness and what he is forced to do take a terrible toll on him . . .
soon as Crowell stepped into his billet, the radiophone started buzzing. He stood beside it for several seconds; then, with a mental shrug, he picked up the transceiver. “Crowell here.” “Isaac? Where have you been at this hour? This is Waldo—I’ve been trying to get you since three.” “Oh, I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep… so I took a little walk to tire myself out.” “Well, I… look, pardon me for calling so late, but… that sample you gave me—some of the cells in it are still alive!”
cornered beast’s obeying an instinct to take one more chance on the procreative raffle before it was too late (he remembered the first time he had seen the corpse of a man burned to death and his horrified fascination with the corpse’s extreme state of sexual excitement; was it an instinctive antepenultimate urging or a simple matter of increased gas pressure in the corpse’s circulatory system?—he had always meant to ask someone who would know and now he never would). He remembered a boy named
mentioned it to the S’kang. They said it had gotten too cold. So they’d moved in closer. The amount of energy required to move a Cinder-sized planet from where it was supposed to be to where it was came to about 1034 joules. That’s equivalent to the conversion into energy of a hundred million megatons of matter, with one-hundred-percent efficiency—enough energy to run all the planets of the Confederación for a Standard century. Energy is power; power, money. A great many people would have given
She could have his balls on a platter. Amused, a little bit charitable, she rescued him from his temporary aphasia. “Let’s go on down to my tent; it’s air-conditioned.” She spoke to Balaam’s: “Is that you, Prescott?” “Ay-firmative.” “Thought so. What’s the square root of the Talmud?” “Guilt.” Thump. She laughed. “You’re insane. Want to come with us?” “Rather go to the library.” It craned an eyestalk at Joshua. “Where should I put the wine?” “Prescott?” he said. “Sure, I have seventeen
You understand why you have to answer these questions, don’t you? Yes, I understand, it’s part of retiring Very good. Now tell me: who was the fourteenth person you killed? Stuart Fitz-Jones That you remember them by number is singular. The twenty-first—who, where, and why? That was Ajuji D’ajuji, on the planet Ojubwa, circumstantially implicated in an Article Seven violation (cybernetic penetration of international credit matrix on sister planet Fulgor), he may or may not have been guilty