Emissaries from the Dead

12. CRASH

I left the community hammock alone, passing a small mob of hungry indentures carrying ration boxes. I recognized about twenty of them as ones I’d interviewed earlier. The friendlier among them invited me to come in and join them.

I was famished, as I hadn’t eaten either breakfast or lunch. I was also exhausted, as the rush of energy that had powered me since leaving Intersleep had begun to fail, and a break was long overdue. But I was not in the mood, so I took my bag and scrambled up a long mesh bridge to a nested bridge two meters below the Uppergrowth. That spot was advantageous mostly because somebody had been smart enough to protect it with an overhang, which kept the mesh relatively free of the dried sap I’d found covering just about everything else. It was also well out of the normal flow of indenture traffic, which meant that I could sit here, alone, enjoying a few moments of solitude after far too many crowded hours.

I could also watch from a relative height as the indentures went about the routines that ended their working day. From where I sat I observed a dozen human beings scrambling like spiders along the cables that separated one dangling hammock from another, some among them moving with the exaggerated care of those who would never be at home in this place, others zipping back and forth as if they’d never once considered any possible input from gravity.

A hammock near me jostled from the movements of the indentures inside. The material was not quite transparent, but some of the bulges I saw were quite recognizable as the knees and palms of a woman making her way to the lowest point. More bulges followed: a different set of knees and palms. At least two people, in that one.

It struck me that the residents of Hammocktown could always see, from the outside, whether or not a hammock was occupied. They might even be able to identify the inhabitants by the shape of the sag.

I wondered if anybody had recognized the telltale sag that marked the presence of Christina Santiago, in the instants before her hammock fell.

If so, nobody I found complicit in her murder would ever be able to cut their losses by admitting the sabotage but proclaiming themselves innocent of wanting to take human life. It was just impossible to claim they hadn’t known anybody was home.

The crime against her suddenly seemed even more cold-blooded than the crime against Cynthia Warmuth. The Santiago incident had taken place late at night. The suns were off and the only light shone through the material of the hammocks whose inhabitants remained awake. Gibb had told me, just yesterday, that Santiago’s lights had been on at the moment her cables parted. Her hammock would have been as aglow as any lantern. Our unknown saboteur would have been able to see her moving around inside. He would have been able to pick out the one moment when she seemed to have settled in at the hammock’s lowest point and was therefore least likely to reach safety.

It was, of course, possible that he hadn’t been that careful, that he hadn’t waited around for the most advantageous moment, that he’d performed his impossible sabotage the instant he had the opportunity, and simply hoped she’d be taken by surprise.

I couldn’t believe that.

The crime was too perfect. It had been committed without witnesses, using tools that nobody but the AIsource was supposed to have. It showed too much organization to believe that any part of it had been left up to chance. Sitting on my bridge of mesh, watching as silhouettes of two human beings combined to form a larger, deeper bulge in a hammock they shared, I was afraid I knew how coldly our unknown saboteur had watched, plotting for his perfect moment.

Then he had done—what? Pressed a button? Signaled confederates to act? Climbed hand-over-hand to the hammock mooring and taken care of it right then and there?

No; even assuming he had the tools in his possession, the perfect conditions he would have needed could have changed at a moment’s notice, the first time some sleepy Hammocktown denizen made an unscheduled trip to the latrine. He had to do what he did at the instant nobody was watching. He would have had to arrange some kind of remote control to cut Santiago’s cables the instant he thought best.

But even that would have required time-consuming, intense advance preparation, for a single human being working without allies.

And all the logical objections to him doing the job the night Santiago fell also applied to him making preparations at any point beforehand. When would he have had the opportunity to sabotage Santiago’s cables with absolute assurance that he wouldn’t be spotted?

Never, that’s when.

He would have needed machine precision.

That brought me back to the AIsource.

The AIsource could have provided him the tools. The AIsource could have assured him the opportunity.

Hell, the AIsource were so integral to any explanation that made the crime possible at all that they rendered our mysterious, hypothetical saboteur superfluous.

Which brought me all the way back to the solution favored by Gibb and Lastogne, the one Bringen had forbidden. That the AIsource had used their tech to murder Santiago and their engineered sentients to murder Warmuth.

It was the only possible solution.

But against that, I had their fervent denial.

And my own absolute, unwavering certainty that they had been telling me some version of the truth.

I sat and thought, lulled by a wafting scent that reminded me of perfume: a flowering section of the Uppergrowth, summoning the insects that swarmed from place to place. In the rigging below, various indentures spotted me, waved, called up to see if I wanted any help, even climbed up to me to see if I wanted any company. I sent them all away, begging the need for privacy.

One One One’s array of internal suns, sizzling away on the vertical shafts that supported them, dimmed, became pale ghosts difficult to distinguish from retinal afterimages, and then switched off completely, returning the world to night. The “sky” below us turned as black as any other sealed room, with but an occasional flash of light from the storms that churned in the clouds. Any AIsource mechanisms that continued flying after the onset of darkness passed by without sound and without light, confident in vision that had nothing to do with the spectrum used by human beings.

As the Habitat disappeared behind that black curtain, the drop below us seemed to stretch from profound to nearly infinite. Some of the hammocks lit up as their occupants finished their day’s activities. I watched the shadows of their movements, and had no trouble picking out some people talking, others sonicing a layer of sweat from their bodies, still others gathering together in twos and threes and fours, for their off-time.

They were all islands in the darkness; and it was all too easy to imagine what this place would be like if they were gone and I had nothing but the darkness and the Brachiators for company. I tried to imagine enduring the solo overnight stay that to Brachiator eyes elevated their status from New Ghosts to Half-Ghosts: hours and hours and hours, in perfect darkness, feeling all that empty space. Some personalities might enjoy that kind of thing. I could only count myself, firmly, in the camp of those who would have been destroyed by it.

It would be so much easier to jump.

Somebody was scrambling up the mesh to my position. I summoned the expression most likely to support the pretense of everything being all right and called down: “Hello?”

“Hello!” It was Stuart Gibb. “You up there, Counselor?”

I’ve never understood the character flaw, common to so many human beings, of asking questions that establish preexisting knowledge of the answer. “Yes, I’m up here.”

Gibb’s head appeared over the edge of the mesh. The light of the nearest occupied hammock, as cast through the netting, separated his face into a stark black-and-white grid, with distorted squares exaggerating the size of the jaw. “I’m not happy to see you up here by yourself, Counselor. You’re not used to local conditions and shouldn’t be wandering around unescorted.”

“I’m not wandering. I’m taking a break.”

Gibb looked past me, as if suspecting the presence of a very short and narrow person using me for cover. “But unescorted.”

“That is the very definition of a break.”

His only answer to that was a pout. “Peyrin was supposed to watch out for you.”

“Your people are more candid when he’s not around.”

He sighed, pulled himself up onto the netting, slid a little bit toward me, and came to rest still a comfortable distance away. The sag of the material here was much less than in any of the hammocks I’d seen, so it must have been significantly harder for him to justify the constant accidental body contact he’d been so helpless to avoid in our previous meeting. I wasn’t sure that meant I’d misjudged him yesterday, or whether he thought some lines too obvious to cross. He looked anywhere but at me. “It is a hell of a view, isn’t it?”

I said nothing.

“Ten of our people, ten, work full-time on the engineering problems alone. You’d be surprised how many of them come up, in a world this size, that never bothered us in any of the ones we’ve built. The AIsource have given us a few tours. There’s an air-circulation system driven by turbines the size of small moons. There are heat-dispersal units around the suns, designed to keep anything too close to them from boiling. The structural stresses those verticals have to endure are enough to give our experts the screaming shakes. We keep getting moving radiation sources from that toxic sludge down below; we don’t even want to know what’s alive at the lowest levels. It’s all so bloody arbitrary, and at the same time so bloody perfect. Sometimes, when I come out here, and wonder if there was ever a point to all this, I wonder if it’s just something like the Taj Mahal or the Striding Colossus of Parnajan, just something the blips put together to prove that they could: ‘Look On My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair!’ That kind of thing.”

“It’s one theory,” I said.

“No, it’s not. It’s bullshit. It’s just an old Dip Corps hack doing the best he can, with what little he has. I’m more concerned about you. You don’t strike me as the kind of person who goes out of her way for a scenic view.”

I could have pointed out that the darkness that consumed the Habitat at night was the precise opposite of scenic, as it utterly eliminated any view. Instead, I shook my head. “Nothing as frivolous as that, sir. I needed to feel the rhythms of life here. The way your people move when there’s no place they particularly have to be, the way they carry themselves when there’s nothing they particularly have to do. Even the sounds they make when most of them have gone inside for the night. It needed to get a taste of what it was like the night Santiago died.”

He nodded. “Have you arrived at any conclusions?”

“None I’m prepared to share.”

“Fair enough.” He glanced at his lap, seemed to remember the bundle’s presence, and tossed it over. “Nobody seems to remember seeing you eat today. So I had them put together a little package for you. Nothing special: just the usual slop that passes for food locally. It’ll keep you alive, at least.”

The bundle was still warm, and rich with the scents of foods I must have tasted and liked, at some point in the distant past. My stomach growled. I put the bundle aside without opening it. “Thank you. That was considerate.”

He waited for me to attack my dinner and saw that I wouldn’t. “Alternatively, you could save it for later and join me. I haven’t had dinner, either.”

“Thank you,” I said, “but no. I prefer to eat alone.”

Somewhere in Hammocktown, an intoxicated woman exploded in a helpless, delighted peal of laughter. A man said something arch and she laughed again. Love, or at least passion, seemed in the air. Somebody else, a little farther away, argued a deeply felt point. Somebody muttered an obscenity. The wind changed, the network of nets and cables shifted, and the story behind all those random sound fragments vanished, lost behind other atmospheric static.

Gibb, trapped with me when he could have visited any of these other more interesting places, could only look forlorn. “I really wish you’d loosen up, Counselor.”

“You wouldn’t be the first.”

“Ah.” He cast about for something else to say, and settled on being the voice of authority. “Well, if you’re determined to eat alone, maybe you should go back to your quarters. I am responsible for your safety, after all, and I wouldn’t want you to have an accident or something—”

“I understand. But if you don’t mind clearing up some things, first—”

The shift to official business, however grim, freed him from any further need to figure out just what the hell else to do with me. “Go ahead.”

“First,” I said, ticking off three names on my fingers, “Robin Fish, Nils D’Onofrio, and Li-Tsan Crin.”

“Yes.”

“Why haven’t they been transferred?”

He became a martyr, unjustly accused. “Have they been complaining?”

“Answer the question.”

“I’ve answered it many times before,” he said, which was giving away more than he intended, since none of those occasions had involved me. “There’s no reason to transfer them. Confinement to the hangar may not be pleasant for their respective egos, but we do need a full-time staff to maintain those shipboard facilities, and those free do an excellent job providing support for those of us who have proved we can perform the job out here.”

“Yes,” I said, “I’ve heard that. But none of the busywork you assign them actually requires three people—not when Fish, who was stuck there alone for almost a full year, was able to handle those responsibilities, and others you’ve since taken from her, all by herself before Crin or D’Onofrio were ever sent there to help her.”

“Yes, she was,” Gibb said, with the kind of heat that came from repeating an old and familiar argument. “But only just. Her morale has never been exactly high. I didn’t curtail her duties because of overwork, but because she wasn’t performing satisfactorily at the few jobs she had. Her performance has deteriorated even further since Nils and Li-Tsan showed up; from what I gather, even they consider her worse than useless.”

“So you don’t need her.”

“We could survive without her, but we do the best we can with the people we have.”

“You arranged her assignment here in the first place,” I said.

“That’s right. I met a young, ambitious, and determined indenture, trapped in what she considered assignments without a future, who begged, at length, for my help getting her a posting more in line with her self-proclaimed talents. I was impressed with her and remembered her when I needed people to staff my facility here. It turned out that she was much better at self-promotion than she was at delivering on her promises, but what could I do? She was already here by then.”

I’d just been fed about fourteen different flavors of self-contradictory bullshit and told it was all the same shade of vanilla. “So are they necessary, or not? Do you need all three of them, or not? Do they do an excellent job, or are they worse than useless, or what?”

Gibb was getting fed up with this line of questioning. “Let’s just say we might be a little overstaffed in that area, though not entirely by choice.”

More bullshit. In the absence of any other agenda, refusing to transfer them was vindictive, wasteful, and stupid. But only in the absence of any other agenda.

“Second question. Peyrin Lastogne. The man has no Dip Corps file. He has no Confederate file. He’s not even an official member of your delegation. But his authority, here, seems second only to your own. Who the hell is he?”

Gibb showed teeth. I don’t think I could call it a smile. “That’s classified.”

“I’m cleared for that kind of information.”

“I’m sorry, Counselor, but I’m afraid you’re not.”

This was outrageous. “In any investigation of this kind, the Judge Advocate’s office has total access to—”

“—to less than the Judge Advocate imagines,” Gibb said. He did smile then, the kind of unsympathetic smile customer service representatives of major transport lines use to hide their schadenfreude when dealing with troublesome passengers whose belongings have been accidentally dumped into the coldest regions of deep space. “I’m sorry, Counselor. But this comes from the very top. Mr. Lastogne is off limits.”

One of my earliest assignments, about a decade ago, had been to support a task force investigating allegations of high treason in the Confederate Executive Branch. We’d questioned Cabinet members on a daily basis. Nobody, not even the president, had been off limits to us then, which had turned out to be a good thing, since we soon discovered a link to the whereabouts of the fugitive terrorist, Magrison, among the members of the first family. (He still remains at large.) My authority now was at least as high as that shared by the task force then. But sometimes bureaucrats of middling rank, like Gibb, put up more of a fight than the people at the top, who know what their limits are. “All right, then. Without giving up any particulars, is information about his background in your own possession?”

Here came that apologetic smile again. “I only know what I’m cleared to know.”

“You can’t even tell me if you’ve been informed?”

“I’m saying that my knowledge is far from total, and that I’m not cleared to answer that kind of question.”

To hell with this. “Fish told me you’ve taken control of all communication in and out of this Habitat.”

“Yes, but that’s just a security concern. Our position here is such that—”

His last three words were obliterated as I spoke over him. “I don’t need to know your position here to make this particular point, sir. I intend to issue a report to New London tonight. I will send it through you, because that’s the way you’ve set yourself up here, but I will send it coded. Any attempt by you to read that communication before transmission, or to censor its content, will be detected and taken by the Advocate’s office as obstruction of justice. Do I need to advise you of the seriousness of that charge?”

Gibb’s face was a portrait of repressed anger. “You don’t have to act like this, Counselor. I’ve been nothing but cooperative.”

“You’ve been nothing, period,” I said.

Which was excessive. I regretted saying it the second the words left my mouth.

But if you must make enemies, you might as well make make sure you can expect them to stay that way.

Making Gibb escort me to my hammock may have amounted to salting the wound, but I had no choice. The route was vertiginous enough in daylight and might have killed me after dark.

Dropping dead of fear or falling off a rope bridge would have amounted to a cruel practical joke on any investigators who replaced me. They’d no doubt think I was the latest victim of this increasingly murderous conspiracy, and neglect any number of reasonable explanations for the deaths of Warmuth and Santiago that failed to account for my own.

And that’s just if their own deaths were connected. If they were unconnected, then the confusion caused by my also irrelevant passing would be even worse. Imagine anybody trying to float the theory that three different difficult women all died, one after another, from a series of stupid coincidences.

The first person to suggest that unlikely possibility would no doubt find herself marked as a prime suspect.

I preferred not to burden strangers with problems like that.

Not that I’d have the luxury of feeling any guilt if the eventuality came to pass.

The hammock smelled of the previous night’s sweat. I slid down the slope, practicing how to stop midway so I wouldn’t find myself trapped at its lowest point. My progress was minimal. Scrambling back to the circular spine, with somewhat more effort than it would have taken Gibb or the Porrinyards, I tied my bag to one of the restraining hooks, then used one of the cables there to secure myself as well. It wasn’t comfortable, but it felt more secure than coming to rest at the hammock’s lowest point.

Temporarily satisfied, I inhaled the dinner Gibb’s people had packed for me, then activated the hytex and composed a text message to Artis Bringen, confirming that I was on the job but leaving out any of the findings or theories I’d come up with so far. Most Advocates on my level, investigating incidents at remote locations, send obsessively detailed daily updates, documenting every single movement. I’d trained Bringen to tolerate vagueness, on the theory that the less I told him during my investigations, the less I’d have to deal with his second-guessing. I did assure him that while early inquiries seemed to support the theories he’d relayed (unspoken: that the AIsource were as guilty as sin), unforeseen developments suggested a number of other possible interpretations (unspoken: that the search for a scapegoat was proceeding without hitch, thank you). The politician in him would take comfort in that much, and I needed him happy so I could pump him for certain information I wasn’t getting here.

I have had difficulty accessing Confederate files on a Peyrin Lastogne, who is operating as second-in-command under Stuart Gibb.

At this juncture I have no particular basis for suspecting Mr. Lastogne of any involvement in these crimes. His reputation on-site seems to be exemplary. However, I cannot eliminate him from consideration until I am provided his background and diplomatic record. Please forward this information as soon as possible.

I almost sent it, but then thought of something else.

Also, you mentioned that my services were specifically requested by several parties on-site. Neither Gibb nor Lastogne will admit to making this request. As they screen all mail, there seem no other possible sources. Please clarify.

I almost asked him another question, Why would the AIsource say I’m wrong about you? but demurred. That was an issue for a face-to-face meeting, if I even bothered bringing it up at all.

To counter the local protocols that funneled all such messages through Gibb and Lastogne, I scrambled the text and added a subroutine that would reduce the entire message to gibberish if opened by anybody other than Bringen.

A version of that gibberish, forwarded back to me, would provide confirmation, if necessary, that neither Gibb nor Lastogne could be trusted.

I might have done more, but that’s when a fresh wave of exhaustion washed over me.

The delayed-reaction systemic crash that always follows Intersleep by a couple of days is nobody’s idea of fun. I’ve been known to show up at an assignment burning with energy only to later nod off in the middle of a conversation. The supplements I took upon every waking, some of which were prohibited within the Corps, saved me from the worst of it, but I was always hit sooner or later. Between that and the environment on One One One, I was well overdue.

I was not just slow on the uptake right now. I was downright stupid.

Which is one main reason why I failed to be alarmed by the way the gray-green material of my hammock kept wavering in and out of focus.

The effect reminded me of the gray spots I sometimes see in bright light. They’re almost impossible to discern, but they look like little translucent specs of gray receding toward a distant vanishing point. For a few years in my adolescence I thought they were symptoms of the same madness that overcame me on Bocai. Then I mentioned them to one of my doctors and he laughed, assuring me that they were just a common symptom of eye fatigue, experienced by all human beings and not just those guilty of war crimes. They’re maddening, because it’s futile to focus on them: the more you concentrate, the more they remain indistinct blurs, surfing the edge of the eye’s ability to perceive them.

The material of the hammock, lit by the glowing edge of the circular spine, was alive with spots just like those, visible one second, invisible the next. I focused on the effect and found myself drifting, aware of nothing but the sight before me, my thoughts growing duller and more obscured by fog with every instant.

I knew sleep was coming. I could feel the increasing heaviness of my eyelids and the increasing numbness of my limbs. I felt my mouth drop open and my lower jaw brush my chest. I jerked awake, with the sudden jolt of alarm that sometimes interrupts a doze, but recovered, curled my lips into a half-smile, and almost immediately began to relax again.

I think I felt at peace.

A hammock is a nearly perfect bed, after all. It allows the body to seek its own most comfortable position. The give of the material feels comforting, almost womblike. It may be hard for someone afraid of heights to relax on such a thing, when it’s hanging so many kilometers above the nearest solid surface, but once exhaustion takes over, the simpler instincts start to dominate. Oblivion called out to me, in a way it never had in bluegel and rarely did in sleep.

I felt a light breeze on my skin, and stirred in sudden concern. But nothing all that terrible happened, so I fell back asleep.

The dreams that came were not so bad.

I was a little girl of three or four, playing with Mommy and Daddy. For once, I didn’t remember them solely in terms of the tragedy on Bocai. I remembered them sitting together at a table, laughing at some joke I was too young to understand. My father seemed happy, my mother downright merry. For the first time in many years I remembered that she’d been a little taller than my father, who had not been a short man; when they faced each other her eyes addressed his from a height advantage of several centimeters. Her arms had been tanned to a fine leather by a life of working in the sun. Her eyes had been surrounded by a starbust of little crinkles. She’d been stingy with smiles, except when I’d said or done something precocious.

Usually, when I thought of my parents at all, it was not often with anything beyond contempt for the two reckless utopians whose experiment had damned me to spend the rest of my life carrying such a load of insupportable guilt. I almost never thought of them as Mommy and Daddy, and the novelty warmed me for a while, even as I sighed with vague concern over a certain loss of tension in the material that cradled me.

My dreams shifted, passed through a succession of other settings, and turned to the erotic. This was even rarer, as I’d shut off that part of myself, too, after the abuses I’d suffered in isolation. For the first time in longer than I could remember, I imagined being touched by others, without recoiling in revulsion or resentment: hands that emerged from a fog I couldn’t penetrate to caress my face, my thighs, my breasts. I couldn’t tell whose hands they were, or even if they were supposed to belong to any specific person at all. I just knew that they wouldn’t hurt me, and I felt a warmth that rose from my deep, cold center to envelop every frozen part of me. Even in the vagueness of my dream, I felt a little sadness at the thought that, of course, I couldn’t see the face of the unknown lover responsible for making me feel this way, because being the monster I was meant that no such person could ever, possibly, exist. But that regret went away, too, because in a moment I felt everything that had held me back let go all at once.

I felt like I was flying.

The stern voice of a man I despised boomed in my ear:

“Andrea! Wake up if you want to live!”

I resisted the summons, thinking only, Bringen? What the hell is Bringen doing here? Bringen should be nailed to his desk at New London, pulling the wings off various species of fly. He doesn’t care about me. I could be bobbing around in vacuum with less than thirty seconds of air left and he wouldn’t work his index finger enough to push the airlock button. He certainly wouldn’t travel halfway across inhabited space to join me in upside-down land. No, he wouldn’t do that….

I don’t know how many places my mind went after that, but sooner or later the phrase upside-down land reverberated enough for me to remind me that I was on One One One, a place where people had been known to fall from great heights.

I woke up just in time to realize I was looking down at my own legs, dangling loose over a sky lit, for just this instant, by a faraway burst of lightning. Something else, large and shapeless and flapping, was tumbling out of sight, impossible to identify as it was swallowed up by darkness.

Then I began to fall.