An Exchange of Hostages by Susan R. Matthews

easily ignored. His face did not much please Andrej this morning. It was too pale; and it had always seemed to him that some proportion or other had been neglected when the issue of his likeness had been controverted among his genes in utero. To be fair, his pallor was perhaps his own fault. He had taken a good deal of wodac with his third-meal, yet again, last night.
    Still, a man needed more emphatic a nose if he were to go through life with such wide flat cheekbones — or at least eyebrows with dash and flair, or eyes that made some sort of an impact to draw a person’s attention away from the crude materiality of his skull. Too much cheekbone and too deep a jaw; there was no help there. A plank of wood with a chip of nothing for his eyes, which were of no particular color; a splinter for a nose; and his mouth would never carry a debate against his cheek — there was too much distance there from ear to front. No color, no drama; he might as well not have a face at all. There was paint, of course, but not even the best of that had made his brother Iosev any less unpleasant to look at, so there was no help to be found in that direction.
    He was only trying to put off the morning, and he knew it. Sighing to himself at his own transparent motive, Andrej dried his damp face briskly with the towel and combed his hair back from his face with the fingers of his left hand. His brother Mikhel had all the face in the family, and all of the beard as well. Mikhel, and perhaps Nikolij, too. But, then, Nikolij was such an elf-faced child. There was hope for Nikolij. And even Lo — as blond and as bland of face and feature as Andrej himself — Lo had some of Meeka’s height. There was no justice in the world. Where was the benefit of being the eldest of his father’s sons if all he could hope to inherit was all of the land, and all of the property, and all of the authority, and all of the estate?
    Joslire would be getting nervous, and it wasn’t fair of him to make Joslire wait when none of it was Joslire’s fault. Andrej set his mind to silence, stubbornly determined to not think of the morning’s work until he was well into it.
    Successfully distracted by the simple pleasures of the fast-meal table, Andrej found himself sitting in the Student Interrogator’s chair once more without a very clear idea as to how he had got there. It wasn’t how he’d come back to this room that needed his attention, though. Not really. It was how he was to get out of it again that posed the more immediate problem. The Second Level of the Question — and there was every chance that Tutor Chonis would take any deviation from form as a personal insult, after his reaction to the First Level — would be more difficult.
    The First Level had been Inquiry pure and simple. The Second was Supported Inquiry — a little pressure was to be brought to bear. That was what Fleet called it, Supported Inquiry. Mayon would have called it patient abuse, and summarily stripped any Student who so much as threatened a patient with physical violence of any chance for patient contact ever again in any Bench-certified facility — which also meant, realistically speaking, losing any chance of graduating with the prestigious Mayon certifications. But these weren’t patients in any usual sense of the word, so what did it matter?
    Except that in Andrej’s home dialect, the word for the Standard “patient,” someone seeking medical care, came from the same root as the verb that signified suffering, or to bear physical pain. Andrej did not care to mull over the double meaning. It was too unfortunately apt for his comfort.
    He wouldn’t have thought that he would mind simply hitting people so much, not really, and that was all today’s exercise should entail — hitting someone. Hitting them frequently, perhaps, and the fact that they were not to be permitted to hit back was certainly distasteful, but they need suffer no permanent ill effect from the blows. He