Emissaries from the Dead

4. BRACHIATORS

Navigating through Hammocktown required a mix of confidence and coordination that taxed my shaky nerves. The hammocks were linked by a cat’s cradle of nets and cables, only some of which seemed to have been designed for safety. Most routes from place to place required a confident athleticism that my own high level of conditioning, fine for most environments, was not able to match. Other routes seemed more precarious: the shortcuts of those confident enough, or arrogant enough, to scorn safety. There were rope bridges that swayed with every step; great taut expanses of fishnet that, like the hammocks themselves, needed to be negotiated on all fours; even places where the residents seemed to take a kind of perverse pride in jumping between fixed platforms. There were a few, tiny places where it was possible to stand upright, like a human being: solid surfaces that had more to do with supporting the community than with humoring the human prejudice favoring upright locomotion.

At times it was necessary to pass through the hammocks themselves, some of which were occupied by off-duty personnel. I was introduced to close to two dozen people, none of them long enough for register as individuals. I noticed a few places where indentures, in various states of undress, lay huddled together in low-lying hammocks, in gatherings that had more to do with the leveling effects of gravity than with the erotic possibilities so much closeness suggested. I wondered if I’d misjudged Gibb. In this place, you’d lose your sense of personal boundaries very quickly.

One sleeping man, curled in a ball at his tent’s lowest point, didn’t even stir when we made our way past him, even though our very passage through his domain made his body slide across the canvas like a stone in a sack.

“Cartsac,” Lastogne sniffed. “Has something like a twelve-hour sleep cycle. Makes him useless, most of the time.”

“And the rest of the time?” I asked.

“Marginal.”

Interesting. Yet another complaint about this outpost’s standards of competency.

At the higher latitudes, the Uppergrowth itself hung close enough to touch. The vines were dotted here and there with bunches of engorged fruits, hanging from buds like candy. Parts of the outpost’s support structure were so streaked with juice that I had trouble seeing how anybody who worked here stayed clean.

Lastogne plucked a fruit. “Taste one if you want. It’s good.”

“No, thank you. What is it?”

Lastogne took a bite, made a face, and gave the barely touched fruit an underhanded toss into the clouds. “We call them manna pears. The AIsource engineered them as a staple of the Brachiator diet, but humans can metabolize them too. Our generous bosses in the Dip Corps tried to take advantage of that fact to cut down on our food drops, until we rebelled and said we wouldn’t subsist on an exclusive diet of the crap.”

The speed with which Lastogne had disposed of the uneaten portion gave me the nasty suspicion the flavor would have appalled me. “What’s wrong with them?”

“They’re an acquired taste. I like them, in moderation. They’re easy to ferment, by the way, but I warn you away from any invitation to partake.”

“That bad?”

“That strong. The intoxicant stays in your system for close to forty-eight hours. It’s an excellent drunk if you don’t mind being impaired for up to two days Mercantile…a bad idea if you’re still getting used to the conditions here.”

Substance abuse is an endemic problem in the Dip Corps, where so many indentures are, like Warmuth and Santiago, driven more by economic need than any passion for the work. But the risks that such a form of escape carried here seemed greater than in most places. I thought of all the daredevil indentures navigating Hammocktown, and focused on one young woman who was now traveling hand-over-hand across a slack line strung between hammocks, unmindful of the many kilometers of empty space that yawned below her. Just how many of you have tried that trick drunk, or buzz-popped, or worse?

I shuddered and, to distract myself from the image of a drunken indenture taking a one-way slip into the lower atmosphere, asked, “What about those giant flying things I saw on the way here? The dragons?”

“What about them?”

“Well, what do they eat?”

“There’s a whole complex food chain going on down there. The clouds contain heavy organic compounds, an insect form which metabolizes them, a birdlike thing that eats the insects, and the dragons, which eat some combination of the above I’ve never bothered to ask about. I think there are only about four or five of them, all told, and that they function as living air purifiers, sweeping that level of atmosphere for compounds the AIsource want to get rid of it, and happily shitting whatever they want. Like vacuum cleaners with a mythological edge.”

“Have you ever gotten a close look at one of the dragons?”

“Enough to satisfy my curiosity. They’re not sentient, you see, so they’re outside the scope of our mission here.”

“Are we sure about that? Them not being sentient?”

“The AIsource say they’re not.”

“AIsource honesty has already been called into question once today.”

“Maybe so,” Lastogne admitted, “but it seems silly for them to call attention to one bunch of unlikely sentients we never would have known about and then deny the sentience of another bunch who would have been just as easy to keep a secret.”

Unless they saw some advantage in feeding us a partial impression. “Has anybody bothered to investigate?”

“We could, Counselor, but we only have a handful of people here, and this world brings an entirely new meaning to the phrase ‘bottomless pit.’ There are more different atmospheric environments the lower you descend, and they all have their own life-forms, increasingly alien as you go down, and there’s no point in wondering just how many of those creatures down there might be sentient when the AIsource won’t allow us to import the equipment we’d need to map those lower altitudes properly. The only vehicles we’re allowed have trouble surviving the intense conditions below that cloud cover. Maybe we’ll get down there someday. If we do I’d love to be part of it. But right now it’s enough to worry about the Brachiators. They’re our assignment, just as Warmuth and Santiago are yours.”

Farther on, he pointed out another pair of young indentures, making their way across the outpost. One man and one woman, they were clearly a couple, maybe siblings and maybe lovers. Both had stubbly silver hair and square faces, and both were clad only in shiny silver briefs and another thin strip of the same material across their chests. Their arms were as well developed as any I’d ever seen, and their abdominal muscles as rock-hard, which must have aided them as they traveled hand-over-hand on the Uppergrowth itself, using its many protruding roots like the rungs of an overhanging ladder. They moved with the practiced speed of people who traveled that way on a daily basis, and their dangling legs, kicking back and forth as they went, gave them the look of people running across a floor tangible only to themselves.

My personal aesthetic left little room for appreciation of beauty, but they qualified. I felt an undeniable awe, which I quickly repressed. “Who are they?”

“The Porrinyards.”

Oscin and Skye. “What can you tell me about them?”

“They hail from some world where the settlements are built on the branches of mile-high trees. They were scrambling branch-to-branch from infancy, so they were natural choices for assignment here.”

“How would you assess their relationship with the victims?”

“Helpful,” Lastogne said.

“Just helpful?” I pressed.

“Just that. They’re professionals at what they do.”

“And nothing more?”

“They’re cylinked. They don’t make friends in the usual sense.”

I’d heard that said about other cylinked pairs, but I’d never encountered anybody with that particular enhancement, so I didn’t know whether to consider Lastogne’s claim accurate. “Do you?”

He wasn’t shocked. “No. But it’s different for me, you see. I make no friends because it’s too time-consuming, and they make no friends because their condition makes the idea superfluous. What about you, Counselor? I gather from your treatment of Mr. Gibb that you don’t make friends either.”

“I don’t.”

“Repugnance, disinterest, or sheer misanthropy?”

“None of your business.”

He took no offense. “I shouldn’t be surprised, considering your background.”

I chilled still further. “What do you know about me?”

“Everything unclassified and much that’s not supposed to be. You’re not exactly obscure, Counselor. The Bocai incident, the Magrison’s Fugue Reparations Trial, the Cort Compromise—they’re all pretty famous to people interested in that kind of thing.”

More chill: “And what kind of thing is that?”

“Diplomats being diplomats.”

Given his already established opinion of diplomats, I was not foolish enough to take this as a compliment.

He continued. “It’s fascinating. We have a lot in common, the four of us—you, me, and our linked pair, the Porrinyards—all antisocial by inclination, all obliged by profession to make nice with others.”

I gave my voice all the cold I could muster. “It occurred to me a long time ago, Mr. Lastogne, that diplomacy has very little to do with making friends.”

Lastogne’s expression resembled a warm smile about as much as a heap of blasted rubble resembled a home. “No, Counselor. It doesn’t.”

He then took me to the opposite end of the installation for my first closeup look at a lone Brachiator, clinging to the Uppergrowth five meters from the nearest bridge.

The thing was a collection of four furry, muscle-bound arms, radiating from the edges of a torso streaked and matted with manna juice. The head was a small, neckless bump situated at its center of that torso, bearing facial features reminiscent of the fabled, but extinct, human cousin known as the chimpanzee, except with three eyes and a toothless mouth twisted in what looked like a perpetual grimace. The position of that face atop the torso dictated a life spent facing the Uppergrowth. If any manuever within its range of movement allowed the Brach to face the cloudscape below, it would have included falling as a necessary first step.

The creature was so sluggish that I needed several seconds to be sure it was actually moving. Its edges looked fuzzy until I realized it was surrounded by a halo of insects, scavenging manna drippings from its fur.

“They’re messy eaters,” Lastogne said. “The vines spout sap when punctured, so the average Brach spends its lifetime covered with sticky glop.”

“Which explains the bugs.”

“Yes. We were a little worried about those, at first. An infestation, on Hammocktown, would be seriously unpleasant. But the bugs don’t want anything to do with us, even when we’re covered with juice ourselves. Humans are just, well, naturally repellent.”

I refrained from saying that this was hardly news. “Is it old or disabled in some way?”

“No. That’s as speedy as they get. Makes sense, though, this being an environment where being sure of every move you make bears a definite evolutionary advantage. And with food everywhere and no natural predators supplied by their landlords, they don’t need all that much speed anyway.”

I was reminded of another species I’d encountered, on the case that had given me my secret mission in life. The Catarkhans had been blind, deaf, mute, insensate by all human standards, and so slow-moving that their entire lives had been a ballet of pathetic obliviousness. The dull, inexorable momentum of this Brachiator reminded me of the average Catarkhan. “Is it even aware we’re here?”

“Oh, he can hear us fine. And he’ll be able to see us, too, if we can get within his range of vision. We pretty much have to be next to him, or on top of him, for that to happen. We can even have a chat. They speak Mercantile.”

The dominant language of human trade and diplomacy was a crass and unpoetic tongue, engineered long ago to edit out elements that could be culturally offensive to any of humanity’s thousands of squabbling subcultures. There was not a single beautiful phrase in it. Encountering it among the Brachiators raised my suspicions a notch. “That’s a little too convenient, Mr. Lastogne.”

“Thank the AIsource. They had the whole species fluent by the time our team arrived. A stab at hospitality, I suppose.”

Or a sneaky way of suppressing the real Brachiator language, so Gibb’s team couldn’t comb it for insights into Brachiator thought processes. One One One was aptly named: it seemed to have circles within circles within circles. “So let’s have a talk.”

He scared me silly by grabbing hold of the Uppergrowth and climbing hand-over-hand to the creature’s position. A few seconds of conversation later, he returned, dropping back onto the mesh bridge with such ease that it erased any impression he’d been showing off.

I needed all my self control just to avoid being sick, but kept my face stony as the Brachiator, moving with significantly less grace than Lastogne, obeyed the summons. Unlike Lastogne, who’d managed his feat in seconds, it needed almost a full minute to traverse the distance, greeting us in a scratchy, high-pitched whine. “Peyrin the Half-Ghost asks me to speak to New Ghost. Can New Ghost hear me?”

Lastogne nudged me.

I said, “Yes.”

“I am Friend to Half-Ghosts,” the Brachiator said. “I am not Friend to New Ghosts. I speak to New Ghost only as courtesy to friend Peyrin.”

Lastogne nudged me again.

“I am Counselor Andrea Cort. Friend to,” I hesitated, then felt the correctness of my instinctive response, “the Living.”

The Brachiator needed long seconds to consider that. “Will you stay a New Ghost or become a Half-Ghost like Peyrin?”

Lastogne placed his index finger before his lips.

But I never shut up when told to shut up. “What if I don’t want to be a ghost of any kind? What if I wish Life?”

The Brachiator sniffed, in what may have been its equivalent to the snobbish dismissal humans of self-proclaimed quality reserve for others, below their station, who insist on applying to the same clubs. “Life is not good for ghosts. It exhausts them.”

I ignored Lastogne’s increasingly annoyed gestures. “I breathe air. I eat food. I sleep and wake. These are conditions of Life.”

“You may live, but you are not of Life.”

“And if I become a Half-Ghost?”

“Then you can touch Life.”

“Just touch it?” I asked.

“Yes. And perhaps keep it a little while.”

“I can’t have it?”

“Having it,” the Brachiator said, “is too much for a Half-Ghost to expect.”

Lastogne said, “Thank you, Friend. Now, if you’ll excuse us…”

I bit down hard on the tip of my thumb, found focus in the moment of clarifying pain, and said, “One last question. What do you know about the beings my people call the AIsource?”

Friend to Half-Ghosts said, “We are of the AIsource. We breathe the air of the AIsource. We know the AIsource with every breath. The AIsource know us with every breath. There are no secrets from them.”

“And are they alive or dead by your definition?”

“The AIsource are not Life.”

“Then they’re Ghosts?”

“They are not Ghosts. They are the hands in Ghosts. They are not Life, but the vessel of Life. They.” Friend to Half-Ghosts halted in mid-declaration, like any other sentient searching the air around itself for the phrase best suited for capturing a difficult thought. But the silence went on, and on, and on, stretching so long that the sentence already begun closed itself off like a malignant tumor excised before it could cause irreparable damage to surrounding tissue. Then it twitched its head and said, “I apologize, Peyrin. I have broken the laws of my people. I cannot answer any more of Counselor Andrea Cort’s questions while she remains a New Ghost. Please tell her we can speak if she becomes a Half-Ghost.”

“She understands,” Lastogne said.

The Brachiator turned and embarked upon its long and laborious journey back to its previous feeding place. At the rate it traveled, the trip would cost it many minutes, but the Brachiator seemed undisturbed by the inconvenience, a genetic aversion to haste being a clear evolutionary advantage in any species that could do nothing in a hurry.

Not that evolution, as it usually worked, had been a factor on One One One.

Why would the AIsource, a species with a computation speed that qualified as instantaneous by human standards, create a species this slow of thought and deed? The Brachs could have been acrobats. Instead, they were sloths.

I looked at Lastogne. “That’s some hierarchy they have. New Ghosts. Half-Ghosts. Life. What do you make of it?”

“Pretty much what I see you’ve started to get already. They refuse to believe in human beings as actual living creatures. The New Ghost designation they gave you is simple enough to figure. It’s what they call people like yourself who are newly arrived and have not yet been initiated into their circle. We have yet to figure out why we’re dead to them, unless it’s pure, garden-variety species chauvinism, but they’re pretty serious about it. They won’t talk to any of us for long unless they first declare us Half-Ghost, with one foot in the living world. And that requires us to prove we can spend hours hanging from the Uppergrowth as they do. Cynthia Warmuth was undergoing that very rite of passage, with a tribe about an hour’s flight from here, the night we lost her.”

“Is there any reason a Brachiator couldn’t have killed her?”

“They might have. They had the opportunity, and of course the means. They even have the temperment, to some extent; you can talk to Mo Lassiter about that. But every human being at this outpost, you excepted, has undergone the same rite, and Warmuth was our first bad experience. If a Brach killed her, it was a behavior we haven’t encountered before, and it’s difficult to separate it from what happened to Santiago.”

“Which doesn’t mean it was linked in fact. They could be unrelated incidents.”

“True,” Lastogne said. “That’s another thing you’re here to figure out.”

One of the camp’s hammocks had been cleared for my personal use while I was on-site. It was a space exactly like Gibb’s, complete with hytex link, blankets, spare clothing, and enough emergency provisions to keep me alive for weeks. Lastogne gave me a quick orientation, concluding, “The lights and the hytex are voice activated; you can work here, reading the files, familiarizing yourself with the rest of the background, for as long as it takes. If you want to talk to any of our people, call me and I’ll make sure they come to you. If you need escort anywhere else, link to me and I’ll be over right away. If you need anything to make you comfortable…”

“Well…”

He anticipated my next question. “We have a latrine structure at the center of the camp. No need to flush, the waste just drops out the bottom, with the environment below us functioning as the most elaborate chemical toilet in this solar system. Some of us don’t bother to make the trip, as we can accomplish the same trick by unzipping the access flaps in the bottom of our hammocks.”

I frowned. You normally don’t want to introduce untreated waste into a habitat not evolved to break it down. “I’m surprised the AIsource even allow that sort of thing.”

“You shouldn’t be. The most sensitive part of the ecosystem, the Uppergrowth, is above us, and shit, once released, doesn’t gain altitude. Not even a trained diplomat’s. As for everything below us, well, there isn’t a single compound in the human body capable of surviving the lower atmosphere intact. The ocean layer won’t even feel the ker-plop.”

I thought again of a human being falling that distance, and shuddered. “Anything else?”

“For bathing, you’ll have a sonic kit in that pack over there.” He indicated one of the many bundles hanging from the O-shaped spine on hooks. “If, on the other hand, you’re one of those people who absolutely can’t do without running water, our ship in the station hub has full recycling systems. Our exiles there have nothing better to do than take care of you. It’ll take you the better part of an hour to fly there and back, but it can be done, and it’ll even save you some time, since you have to be at the hub for your interface with the AIsource first thing tomorrow morning anyway. Do you want a ride?”

It sounded like a test, one that made perfect sense: stationed in this place, I might have been equally unwilling to trust anybody who couldn’t stand local conditions. “No. I can wait for the morning.”

Lastogne didn’t bother to show even conditional approval. “Then, if you need nothing else, I’ll let you rest, so you’ll be fresh when the suns switch on.”

He didn’t wait for my response but instead scrambled up the flexible floor to the exit. There was no haste in that wordless retreat, no rudeness, just the swift and assured efficiency of a man who believed he’d already provided every answer I could want. As my long list of hates includes having my needs anticipated, I waited for him to reach the threshold before calling him back. “I’m not done.”

The bastard didn’t even turn. “Oh?”

“A few final questions.”

When he slid back down the slope to my side, his grin was so insolent I knew that he’d expected the summons. “I doubt very much that they’re ‘final,’ Counselor. You strike me as the thorough type.”

“I try to be. But for now: Who sent for help from the Judge Advocate? Was it you or Gibb?”

“Gibb had me take care of it.”

“Did he ask for me in particular?”

“No. I don’t think he ever heard of you, before today.”

I’d suspected that when he greeted me with actual human warmth. I don’t often get that from people who already know my background. “Did you request me?”

“I would have if I’d thought of it, but I had no way of knowing you were available. No. I just sent word to New London and let them decide who to send.”

Bringen had told me I’d been specifically requested. “Did the message pass through any hands other than Gibb’s, or your own?”

“No. We currently approve all out-station traffic. Why?”

Somebody here was lying, though I didn’t have enough information to determine whether that liar was here or back home. “You called Warmuth an idealist.”

“She was.”

“You also make it pretty clear that you did not consider that a compliment.”

“I didn’t and I don’t.”

“You didn’t like her?”

He hesitated. “It wasn’t a matter of personal like or dislike.”

“Did you or didn’t you?”

“I enjoyed her company.”

“But you don’t think she was as wonderful as Gibb says?”

He hesitated a second time, just long enough to establish that he didn’t want to speak ill of the dead. “I suppose you could say she had an excessive hunger for novelty. She kept saying that she left her homeworld because she wanted exotic experiences, and that being open to such things was part of being alive, but there was a self-serving element to the way she went about it. It gave the impression she saw people and strange places as entertainments the universe programmed for her specific amusement. Talk to the Porrinyards; they’ll tell you.”

“And the other victim? Santiago?”

“She was even more unpleasant, but straightforwardly so. Had a bitter streak, in part because of the kind of place she came from. Wanted everybody to know she’d suffered more than the rest of us. Had the distinctively subversive edge of somebody who would have razed all human society to the ground if she could. She liked to tell everybody how corrupt and useless she found the Confederacy. I’m sympathetic to such talk, so I tried to engage her in personal conversation a couple of times, but ideological ranting was all she was set up for. Professional enough, but determined to just do her job and earn out her contract. She hated Warmuth, by the way.”

“Why?”

“Warmuth kept trying to understand her.”

“And that’s a problem?”

“Some people resent being treated as research projects.”

Having lived much of my childhood under a magnifying glass, I empathized. “Were there any confrontations between them?”

“Just Warmuth being invasive and Santiago freezing her out. If they weren’t both dead, I would mark them as perfect suspects to finish each other off.”

“Was it really that bad?”

“Santiago was like us,” he said. “You and me, I mean. She did not want friends. Warmuth was of the opinion that everybody needs friends even if they believe otherwise. She declared Santiago a personal project and kept pushing. Santiago finally got mad and pushed her around a little, at which point Warmuth declared Santiago persona non grata.”

“I’ll want the report on the incident. As well as the names of any witnesses.”

“Expected. I don’t see it as all that relevant anyway. We investigated Warmuth’s recent activities when we lost Santiago, and I can assure you she had neither the means nor opportunity to do that kind of damage to Santiago’s hammock.”

I nodded. “And Gibb? What’s your personal take on Gibb?”

“You’re talking about my immediate superior, Counselor.”

“Answer the question.”

“I will,” he said. “But I’d be interested in hearing your own take first.”

I considered telling him it was none of his business, but supposed the question harmless enough. “He gave the impression he tries too hard.”

“He does. And he’s somewhat more dangerous than he initially seems.”

“Are you implying he’s responsible for these deaths?”

“Not at all. But he’s a Dip Corps lifer. You know what that means.”

“Tell me what you think it means.”

“As far as I’m concerned,” Lastogne said, with weary contempt, “the Dip Corps is a meritocracy in reverse. By its very design, nobody who sticks around is any good. The genuinely talented work off their bonds quickly thanks to incentives and bonuses. The incompetent get fined with extra time and find themselves shunted to more and more irrelevant assignments. Everybody in the great big mediocre middle, and everybody insane enough to fall off the scale entirely, winds up assigned to Management—and Management’s never been interested in really doing the job, not at any point in human history. Management’s true agenda has always been making things more pleasant for Management.”

It was a harsh but defensible portrait of the way things worked. “And Mr. Gibb?”

“Mr. Gibb considers himself a dedicated public servant.”

“And is he?”

“As a public servant,” Lastogne said, “the man is Management in its purest form. Let’s just say I don’t consider him exceptionally talented.”

“You’re wearing your resentment out front, Mr. Lastogne. How’s your own career going?”

“More than fine,” he said.

“Nothing else to tell me? No disciplinary actions in your past? I warn you, it is something I’ll check.”

“Feel free. My record is the very definition of clean.”

I didn’t trust that secretive half-smile of his, the kind that not only harbored a private joke but teased me about his refusal to share it. I backtracked to another subject he’d already shown eagerness to cover. “Both the victims are women. Gibb seems a little grabby around women. What’s your take on that?”

“No take. I’ve heard some of our female indentures call him smarmy, and I’ve noticed it myself, but that’s not a crime. Neither is his ambition to fuck any indenture who will have him. We’re all going to be here a long time, and life would be pretty damn unbearable if we had to live like celibates. I don’t think he killed Santiago or Warmuth, if that’s what you think. I just think he’s out for himself.”

“What about you, Mr. Lastogne? What are you out for?”

He made a noise. “The big picture.”

This was profound noncommunication, but I noted it and moved on. “Who do you think killed them?”

He didn’t look at me. “Some faction among the AIsource.”

“But they told us about the Brachiators. They arranged our presence here.”

“Some of them may disapprove.”

“To the point of committing murder?”

He looked disgusted. “Why not? Assassination’s just diplomacy by other means.”

“So’s war, sir.”

“Exactly.”

I waited for a clarification and received none. After a few seconds I decided he didn’t know what was going on any more than I did. It was just more of what Gibb had called his facile nihilism. So I altered course. “What do you think about their position? Do you think it’s right for sentient creatures to be owned?”

He emitted a short, cynical laugh, driven by the kind of anger that drives entire lives. “We’re all owned, Counselor. It’s just a matter of choosing who holds the deed.”