Emissaries from the Dead

22. EMISSARIES FROM THE DEAD

The mood at the hangar defined grim. The indentures of Hammocktown wandered, directionless, between the sleepcubes set up for them, speaking in hushed voices, weeping, or staring at each other with eyes that could have belonged to any decimated army. With all bravado failed in the aftermath of Gibb’s apparent death, the stench of failure hung over the place like a cloud. Everybody knew that their mission had failed and that the only issue still remaining to them was just how soon they’d be allowed to leave: if they were not prisoners of war or, worse, captives waiting for their own executions.

Lastogne, who remained in charge by default, had taken pity on our condition and allowed us to stop for first-aid and a change of clothes before debriefing. I could have used a quick sonic, but I was so soiled from my ordeal on the Uppergrowth that I locked myself inside the transport and scoured myself with a luxurious hot-water shower. I didn’t restrict myself to the five-minute limit, either. I dialed both the temperature and the water pressure all the way into the red zone and stood with my face in the direct path of the assault, my eyes closed and my arms hanging limp at my sides.

By the time I emerged from the transport, wearing a fresh black uniform, I didn’t need all that much sensitivity to feel the fresh hostility directed against me on all sides. Before, I’d just been a severe, hard-bitten suit from New London: maybe a little cold, maybe a little crazy, but at the very minimum a professional, and a voice of authority who had to be respected. Now I was an irresponsible maverick with a scandalous past whose stunts might have gotten Stuart Gibb killed. I couldn’t take a step without feeling eye-daggers sinking into my back.

Only one person, Oskar Levine, asked if I was all right.

I nodded, astonished him with a hug, then reported to Peyrin Lastogne in the sleepcube where he’d scheduled the debriefing.

The Porrinyards were already there, bracketing Lastogne on both sides, their expressions neutral, their eyes warning me to tread carefully. Oscin wore a plastiskin bandage on his forehead. Skye had treated her right hand with a gloss of burn gel. She hadn’t done anything for her facial wounds, either because she considered them too minor to worry about or, more likely, because she hadn’t had the time. But it was Lastogne who looked haggard. He bore the look of a man who hadn’t slept in days, and who no longer believed he’d manage the trick any time soon. “Counselor. You look cleaner, at least.”

“Thank you,” I said, though I recognized it as the furthest thing from a compliment. “Have you been in touch with New London?”

“I’m not all that sure you’re the one entitled to ask questions here.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but until relieved by my superiors, that’s exactly what I’ll be doing. Have you been in touch with New London?”

His eyes continued to burn like lasers. “I’ve sent a report, but mine won’t cause as much damage as the one the AIsource just shared with me. They’ve declared our entire party persona non grata on this station. They’ve said that no further visitors will be allowed for the foreseeable future, and that any future observers, if permitted, will need to be appointed by one of the other powers, probably the Bursteeni or the Tchi. They’ve further said that we will only be allowed to stay in the hangar until we can be outfitted to leave.”

“Have they given a reason?”

“Yes,” he said. “You.”

My throat tightened. “Me?”

“They say you engaged in hostilities against the Brachiators. Specifically, that you blinded one. Is that true?”

Oh, that. “I was taking action to defend myself.”

“An argument that carries some weight with me. But it would carry more weight if you had been authorized for unsupervised interaction with these indigenes in the first place. We’ve always been very careful to restrict that authorization to people who had been trained for it. You go, without authorization, without training, and without any aptitude at high-altitude survival, and within a few hours alienate them so badly that all of our work building a relationship with them has been busted all to hell.”

“It was already showing cracks, sir.”

“You’re talking about the Warmuth incident. But Warmuth didn’t get us expelled from the Habitat. Warmuth didn’t destroy our entire purpose for being here. Warmuth didn’t drag two of our best people,” he indicated the Porrinyards, who refrained from providing one of their frequent reminders that they only counted as one person, “into such a severe infraction of protocol that they’ll be working off the penalties for the rest of their lives.”

I remained calm. “I agree, sir. But that’s not all Warmuth didn’t do.”

“Really?”

“She also didn’t survive.”

Lastogne’s cheeks twitched. “Necessity will take you only so far, Counselor. Even in the Corps.”

“On the contrary,” I said, with unwavering confidence, “I think it’ll take me just far enough.”

He turned toward the Porrinyards, appealing for answers, but finding nothing except an equanimity that matched my own.

For the first time, it seemed to occur to him that they were not frightened at all: not of him, not of disciplinary action from the Dip Corps, and not of consequences. They were serene, almost happy. He asked them, not me, “What?”

I started to tell him, choked on the first few words, cleared my throat, and found my voice still wanting. “I’ve had a very rough night, sir, and I think this is the first time I’ve ever had a meeting on this station when somebody didn’t offer me a buzzpatch or a drink.”

Lastogne could only twitch with the mortification of any professional diplomat reminded that he’d neglected certain formalities. “What would you like?”

“Anything alcoholic. As long as it isn’t that stuff you make from manna juice. I’ve had enough of that particular taste today.”

The Porrinyards nodded. “Though we have found out, sir, that it is a delicacy that improves with presentation. It’s a fine sauce.”

Allowing this to pass without requesting clarification, Lastogne opened one of the crates and returned with a tube of something amber. I thanked him, sucked it dry, blinked away the warmth that suffused my aching limbs, and contemplated the empty before handing it back to him. “Nobody here ever understood the Brachiator beliefs about Life and Death.”

“These things take time, Counselor. It’s an entire alien psychology.”

“Nonsense,” I said, my voice rising. “The Brachiators may be alien in ways we haven’t come close to exploring yet, but their understanding of these matters are as simple as basic arithmetic.”

“That New Ghost, Half-Ghost nonsense—”

“—is not nonsense. It’s completely sensible. Too bad it’s also a viewpoint that Gibb’s people, as good as you are, have always been woefully ill-equipped to understand. I’m perfectly willing to admit you’re good people. You just happen to be the wrong people for this particular job. It’s, all in all, one of the worst staffing errors I’ve ever seen.”

He shook his head in automatic denial. “I can’t wait to hear you defend this one.”

“It was a simple mistake, sir. When staffing an outpost in an environment whose inhabitants cling to the very sky, it only made sense to seek out people with a special affinity for heights: mountain climbers, acrobats, orbital construction workers, and other people used to working at high altitudes every day. People like that could thrive in the conditions here. But they were also the people least likely to grasp what the Brachiators go on about.”

“I don’t—”

I didn’t let him finish. “People like that, like you, have a three-dimensional mindset. They know the gulf between themselves and the surfaces far below them, and are able to perceive the distance as one that can be traveled, even if only by falling. The unspoken assumption here has always been that the Brachiators share that perception…which is silly, since you only have to look at the way they’re built to notice that they’re designed to spend their entire lives staring at a surface right above their faces. That’s not the perspective of a species destined to understand the panorama. That’s the perspective of a species with limited understanding of up and down, and a perspective your outpost filled with mountain climbers and professional aerialists was not about to grasp. I, on the other hand, have always been afraid of heights, and I know in my gut what the Brachiators know from birth: that the Uppergrowth is Life, and everything below it is Death.”

Lastogne’s mouth fell open. “I’ll be damned.”

“Consider a Brachiator falling. Imagine its prognosis for survival if it falls, let’s say, so much as one meter. I think you’ll agree, that’s not even enough to pick up appreciable speed. Maybe it hasn’t even vanished from peripheral vision yet. We already know that the AIsource won’t rescue it. Does it stand any chance of survival? Whatsoever?”

What followed was the well-known phenomenon of a group, asked a simple question with an obvious answer, that nevertheless remains silent as everybody waits for somebody else to trigger a suspected rhetorical trap.

The Porrinyards were the first to build up enough confidence to say the obvious. “No, Counselor. It doesn’t.”

“Exactly,” I said. “In that instant, it is still breathing, it is still feeling, it is still thinking, but by all standards reasonable to its species, it is as dead as the Brachiator who took a tumble a week ago, or one that fell last year.”

Lastogne rubbed his eyes. “Yeah.”

“Think about it,” I said. “From their perspective, we rise from the place that nothing can survive. We are solid, we are friendly, we speak to them, we are clearly entities with substance, but we are also visitors from the land of the Dead. By all reasonable calculations, we are Ghosts. It is no wonder they resist speaking to anybody who hasn’t spent a night on the Uppergrowth. Doing that gives us a certain link to Life. Not quite the same thing as life, since we still keep coming in and out of existence—”

Lastogne now seemed thoroughly disgusted with himself. “Like Half-Ghosts.”

“Exactly. A natural classification for somebody sometimes alive and sometimes dead: a concept they find strange, but which is evidently within their ability to accept. Unfortunately for her, Cynthia Warmuth didn’t see things that way. She had something else, which several people, including you, have described as a downright compulsive empathy.”

Was that a flicker of pain in Lastogne’s eyes? “Yes.”

“She wanted, too much, to be inside the skin of anybody she spoke to. She made herself a pest about it. So much a pest that people hated her for it. But she would have survived unpopularity if she hadn’t taken it a step too far: the same step I took when I spent a night on the Uppergrowth. She told the Brachiators she wanted to be Alive like them, without ever once considering what they’d think that meant.”

Lastogne now looked downright stricken. “And so…?”

“And so,” I said, “bearing her no malice whatsoever, they nailed her into place.”

Lastogne stood up, turned his back on us, and strode to the cube’s far wall, his arms crossed before him, his head bowed in an attitude of unbearable sorrow. Neither the Porrinyards nor I said anything to disturb him. After several long minutes, he returned to his seat, his grimace now a wan, mournful scowl.

I went on as if there had been no interruption at all. “It wouldn’t have occurred to them that they could hurt her. They didn’t think she was completely Alive in the first place. To their eyes, she was already just a Ghost, with an unnatural half-existence; nothing as linked to everyday existence as a wound should have had any effect on her. No. With the best possible intentions, she asked for their help holding on to Life, and with the best possible intentions, they gave her what she wanted. The negative effect on her came as a complete surprise to them. They told me this themselves. Life is not healthy for Ghosts. It uses them up too fast. Being nailed to Life was no good for Warmuth. She bled to death. It used her up too fast. This was news to the Brachiators, but once it was revealed to them they took it as a cautionary lesson. Which is why they didn’t want to give me the same thing, until I begged them.”

Lastogne eyed the Porrinyards, soliciting silent feedback, finding in their expressions of wide-eyed understanding acceptance of a truth everybody here had failed to see. After a moment he turned toward me once again, but his eyes were not focused on me so much as past me, to some memory only his eyes could see. “I always told her it would hurt her someday.”

Nothing he had ever said to me sounded less like him.

The Porrinyards, who knew him better than I did, turned toward him, their profiles matching studies in incredulity.

I wasn’t surprised at all. “What?”

“Caring, as much as she did.” His voice broke. He heard it, gathered himself together, and shrugged, apologizing for the moment of weakness. “It’s not typical, Counselor. You know how I feel about the system. It cements mediocrity in place. Most of the indentures are just trying to do their time and get out. Most of the careerists are just trying to rise to their own level of incompetence. And when you find an occasional person who really cares, the irritant like poor Cynthia, they turn out to be worse than either. They go and screw everything up by behaving like what they do matters.”

The Porrinyards were alternating aghast glances at me with disbelieving glances at Lastogne.

I couldn’t blame them. Not after everything they’d said about his selfishness as a lover.

But this was still territory I’d expected. “You loved her, didn’t you?”

“I wasn’t drawn to her, at first. It’s like I told you the first day: I don’t look to make friends. The last thing I could ever want was understanding from someone so arrogant she actually believed other people could be understood.” He shook his head, not just once but several times, perhaps even too many times, before raising his eyes back to me. “I always told her it would hurt her someday. I even warned her to be careful it didn’t get her killed. Shows how goddamned perceptive I am, doesn’t it?”

There was an odd, hysterical sense of triumph in his voice. The loss of Cynthia Warmuth hadn’t shattered him at all. It had only reinforced his grim sense of cynical amusement, confirming the hard lessons he’d learned from other losses, other tragedies, other people he’d driven away.

The moment lasted just long enough for Skye to extend her hand, almost touch his shoulder, then draw her hand back, deciding the touch a bad idea.

Then he pulled himself together, took a deep breath, and noticed me again, this time with a dark resentment that bordered on bile. “But it’s not sufficient, Counselor. It doesn’t explain Santiago. Or the attempts on your life. Or that attacker who went after Oscin and Skye. Or what’s happened to Hammocktown.”

I looked him right in the eye, and nodded. “You’re right. It doesn’t.”

“What do you expect me to think? That Gibb’s behind all this? That he’s somewhere in the Uppergrowth, waiting for another fresh victim to come along?”

“That remains a possible explanation, sir.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“No, sir. I think what the evidence tells me.”

“And you’re not about to tell me what that is.”

“Not until I’m sure.”

“So how can that even begin to compensate for everything else you’ve done?”

“By itself,” I said, “it doesn’t. But this was never just one mystery, with one solution. It was several, all mixed up and getting in the way of a comprehensive explanation. I had to clear away all the smaller issues, like Gibb and like Warmuth, just to get at the bigger picture. And that’s the one last thing I still have left to do.” I took a deep breath. “Who are you, Peyrin Lastogne?”

He stared at me as if unsure whether to give me a medal or punch me in the mouth. Then he glanced at the Porrinyards, first one and then the other, to determine just how much they’d been infected by my madness. When they just nodded, he threw up his arms and stomped back to the same corner he’d retreated to before, turning a number of different colors.

He’d said all he was going to say.

The assembled indentures watched as the Porrinyards and I marched back to the skimmer dock, their eyes either accusatory or imploring. I had thought them people under siege before, the day I’d arrived here, but I’d been wrong. This was what being at siege was like. How many of these people were trying to persuade themselves they had a chance of surviving the rest of the day? How many had already decided they wouldn’t?

I could have given them a little reassuring speech, like Gibb had tried to do after the evacuation of Hammocktown, but I’d never been the reassuring speech sort. Maybe that was another area I could work on, in the future. If I had a future.

Oskar Levine was the only one who rushed up to us, just before we left the hangar; he’d been working on the bluegel crypts not long beforehand, and was so stained by the stuff it was hard to find much of his skin’s original color. I confess being relieved when he didn’t obey what looked like his initial impulse to hug me. “Is it true?” he demanded. “Is Hammocktown gone?”

“It’s true,” I told him.

“And Gibb? He was there when it went?”

He seemed more concerned than I would have expected of a man who Gibb had treated like a traitor. I wanted to see if he would fake grief. It hardly seemed in character for him, but people contradict their own natures in times of crisis. So I said, “Yes,” and waited.

It took him several heartbeats to work up his next question, but he ultimately let it out, all in one breath. “Do you think he’s dead, or just in hiding?”

It was a fair question.

I said, “I don’t know,” and left him.