Lastogne shrugged. “No big mystery. The Corps had a number of slots to fill and filled as many as they could with qualified people. The rest had to be chosen off the rack, in the hope that they could be tailored to fit.”
“It seems an awful leap from people as completely suited for the job as the Porrinyards, to somebody as completely unsuited, physically and psychologically, as Robin Fish. Weren’t there any more candidates from the middle ground?”
His sideways grimace proved no more mirthful than the one requiring both sides of his face. “What makes you think there weren’t?”
“Were there?”
“This isn’t exactly a typical environment, Counselor. If we’d staffed it with nothing but people trained in climbing and high-altitude gymnastics, we would have fallen short on every other skill set we needed. We would have no linguists, no biologists, no environmental analysts; nobody capable of maintaining the hammocks, nobody qualified to assess the well-being of the Brachiators. So we have several dozen other indentures on-site whose backgrounds offered no special indication of any talent for functioning here. There are even one or two who spent their formative years living on planetary flatlands, without so much as a low rise between them and the horizon, and who never once enjoyed a view from any kind of height until they joined the Corps. I would be lying if I said that everybody found the going easy, but just about everybody adjusted to the conditions better than those three did.”
“It still seems excessive to keep a mere clerk like Fish on-site, doing nothing of any real importance, for two full years. Especially since Mr. Gibb arranged her presence here himself.”
He shrugged again. “Gibb has a thing about quitters, and about admitting a mistake. I think he believes that if he keeps Fish and her friends penned up long enough, they’ll stop being silly, pull themselves together, and rejoin the rest of us.”
“Do you believe that?”
“For what it’s worth, no. People who fall apart can be put back together again, but they’re usually more fragile not less.”
“But you still support what Gibb’s doing.”
Lastogne’s grimace became a smirk. “I may not like the man, and I may think he has his head so far up his ass on this subject that he may never live to breathe fresh air again, but he is in charge, and I have to support his decisions, regardless of my own personal feelings.”
I couldn’t buy Lastogne’s portrait of himself as a man who backed up the boss no matter what. “You gave me the impression that you hate them.”
“Hate’s a strong word,” Lastogne said. “I don’t feel sorry for them. I don’t think they deserve any special sympathy, and I don’t think they have any call to sit there, in their little do-nothing world, feeling persecuted because they failed.”
I nodded, to support the impression that I accepted his response without question. “Which brings us to point two: the strange dynamic between them. Both Li-Tsan and D’Onofrio behaved protectively toward Fish, even as they both seemed to look down on her.”
He seemed astonished that I would even see fit to ask. “Well, she’s low dog in their pack. They’ll piss on her all night and day, but rip out the throat of anybody else who tries.”
“She seemed ill.”
Now he gave me an actual smile. “She does look like shit, doesn’t she? I think she spends her days dosing herself sick on buzzpatches and manna wine. No particular reason to punish her for indulging, since she has nothing else to do and, confined to the hangar the way she is, can’t fall any farther than the floor she’s walking on. Of course, the worse she gets, the less likely it is that Gibb will ever feel comfortable about sending her elsewhere.”
Terrific. Abandon the woman, then do nothing as she destroys herself. “Where does she get manna juice, if the only place to get it is inside the Habitat?”
“Gibb has no problem with our people drinking the fermented stuff as long as they do it outside the Habitat and detoxify before they return to work. So she gets it from indentures on leave. There are some awfully wild parties, going on in that hangar deck.”
“I’m told Cynthia Warmuth went there a lot.”
“Everybody goes there a lot. Even Santiago went. It’s the only place to go if you want a break away from the Habitat.”
“But Cynthia Warmuth especially.”
“Maybe a little more than average. She used to talk about how sorry she felt for them.”
Backing up what the exiles had said about the self-serving nature of her affections. “Did you know she slept with D’Onofrio?”
That got him. His jaw worked as he considered four or five separate responses, and rejected them all. “No. But I’m not surprised. It’s just the kind of stupid-ass thing you would expect the silly quiff to do.”
“Empathy addict, right?”
“To a fault,” he agreed, with more bile than he actually needed.
There comes a point, in some Dipcrime investigations, when I begin to see my suspect pool as a nest of rabid animals, clawing and sniping at one another in a constant effort to inflict scars. It was especially difficult here, as the nearly universal disdain for both victims was beginning to get on my nerves.
Except it wasn’t universal, was it? Gibb and Lastogne both claimed affection for Warmuth. Gibb had even slept with her. Maybe I was just getting a skewed sample.
I glanced up at the blur of Uppergrowth just a few short meters above my head. “Point three. Christina Santiago. Putting yourself in her position: what would you do if your hammock collapsed?”
He smiled. “If I was lucky enough to be somewhere else, I’d get nice and irritated about all the belongings I’d just dumped.”
I think I managed to smile back. “I mean if you happened to be inside it at the time.”
A shrug. “I’d fall.”
“And?”
“What do you mean and? What other and could there be? I’d fall and die, just like anybody else.”
“You’re sure?’
“Counselor,” Lastogne said, with infinite patience, “please don’t tell me you think Santiago’s still alive. I’d be very disappointed in you. It’s not a possibility.”
“Why not?”
“Let’s forget that the fall itself would take her past heavy weather, poisonous clouds, and an acid rain layer before she ever hit anything solid enough to make her splatter. She’d be bones, and then bone fragments, long before hitting the soup. You’re really wondering if anything could have rescued her on the way down. The answer is no. The Brachiators would need to fly, and they can’t, so that lets them out. Not us either; we didn’t have any skimmers in flight when she fell, and wouldn’t have been able to get one launched in time to make a difference. And while the AIsource provide us all the taxi service we want, they express zero interest in playing lifeguard. As far as they’re concerned, any attempt at a rescue would compromise the stark integrity of this place.”
“Have they actually said that?”
“They said it when they agreed to allow a human presence here. They said, Brachiators stay alive by holding on, and any human beings intent on studying them need to learn the same skill.”
This added yet another wrinkle to the game. A longstanding Interspecies Covenant, to which both humanity and the software intelligences were charter signatories, required all participating races to offer reasonable protection to alien diplomatic personnel within their territories. The AIsource’s evident refusal to honor that treaty would have been seen as a massive breach of interstellar law…were it not for their prior refusal to grant our outpost diplomatic status.
Their failure to recognize Hammocktown as an embassy made it a lot easier for human beings to die here.
Which led to the most troubling issue so far, at least as far as Lastogne was concerned.
“Point four. Peyrin Lastogne, who the hell are you?”
If that offended him at all, he did not show it. Instead, he simply flashed a sideways grin, much warmer than his usual grimace, and squeeze
d me once on my upper arm. It was a different kind of intrusive touch than I’d endured from Gibb. That one had felt sexual. This one? More like affection, for sharing a secret joke. “I was wondering how long it would take you to just come out and ask.”
“You have no Dip Corps listing. You have no bio on the hytex.”
The grin remained. “It could be that my background is nobody’s business. Look at yourself, Counselor. Your own life would be a hell of a lot easier if it wasn’t accessible to anybody with sufficient curiosity. Somebody like myself wouldn’t be able to look you up and find all those voices yowling for your extradition. The Tchi really want you, don’t they? And the Bocaians—”
The Tchi just wanted me because they wanted anything that would embarrass the Confederacy; it had rendered them predictable in a manner that ended up saving me once or twice. And the Bocaians, who rarely ventured off their own world, were no real threat to me either. “This is not about me. It’s about you. Why are your records a closed book? What is it we’re not supposed to know?”
“If I told you,” he said, “you would know it.”
“Have you been sending me any messages?”
“No more than the usual, Counselor.”
“Meaning?”
“Nonverbal messages,” he said, batting his eyes. “Some involuntary, but all defensible.”
“Nothing by hytex?”
“Why would I do that? I can talk to you any time I want.”
His answers were driving me crazy. “Did you kill Warmuth or Santiago?”
And instead of a yes or no, he laughed—not with hysterical glee, or superiority, or even with malice, but with a level of bemused affection I found a hundred times more infuriating. “Oh, really. Counselor. What answer could I possibly give, aside from a full confession, that you would ever be willing to believe?”
Now I knew it for a fact. The son of a bitch was teasing me. “Tell me anyway. Did you kill Warmuth or Santiago?”
“No,” he said. “I did not. But you have to keep something in mind.”
“What’s that?”
“That if I was the killer, I’d be saying the same thing.”
11. LEVINE, NEGELEIN, LASSITER
The rest of that day passed in a frustrating blur of interviews with the remaining indentures of Hammocktown. I didn’t want to work in my own assigned quarters, so I requisitioned a long and narrow hammock that served Gibb’s facility as the equivalent of a social hall and communal dining room. I couldn’t imagine being here when it had to bear the weight of dozens. I would have choked on my food, unable to avoid picturing the phenomenon of fraying cables.
I managed to interview maybe half of Gibb’s people before the suns went out. Most of what they had to tell me jibed with what I’d been told: Santiago the misanthrope, Warmuth the determined empath, the three height-sensitives as social outcasts. Opinions of Gibb himself varied from worshipping to resentful. Despite my prior impression that he grated especially hard on women, some of the highest praise came from young female indentures who couldn’t praise him enough. Two or three of those confessed to past, emphasis on past, relationships with him, so anxious to assure me that the breakups had been cordial that my chief question became not whether he’d coached them, but how much.
Nobody had much to add to my skimpy store of intelligence regarding Peyrin Lastogne. As far as they were concerned, he was just a Dip Corps regular, like Gibb—or, as several bothered me by pointing out, me.
Several indentures had witnessed the confrontation between Warmuth and Santiago, which as advertised hadn’t amounted to all that much. The time and place had been a midafternoon gathering in the very hammock where I now sat. Five off-duty indentures had been relaxing with a hytex strategy game one had imported from her homeworld. A few others were sitting around, bitching or chatting or arguing about time off. Santiago wandered in to grab some food and return to her own quarters, intent as always on keeping all social contact to an absolute minimum. Warmuth, who had already been observed trying to talk to her on several occasions, abandoned the game and approached her, speaking at length in a voice not loud enough to carry. Santiago tried to leave without acknowledging her. Warmuth put a hand on her shoulder. Santiago slapped her hand away and cursed her out in some non-Mercantile tongue. Warmuth tried to touch her again, and Santiago gave her a light shove, which left the shaken but uninjured Warmuth bobbing on her back at the hammock’s lowest point.
Nobody knew the meat of the conversation, but everybody had heard Santiago say, “Leave me alone, bitch.”
Despite the subsequent deaths of both participants, nobody thought it had much to do with their eventual fates.
A redheaded medtech named Bill Wilson told me, “This is a small town, Counselor. We’ve had fights before and will have fights again. It doesn’t necessarily lead to murder, and there’s no reason to believe that it led to murder now, just because one followed the other.”
“It’s a place to look,” I said.
“Until,” he said, “you realize there’s nothing there to see.”
And the hell of it was, he was right. The incident had seemed so minor, at the time, that it hadn’t even led to an investigation. There had been no complaint, no follow-up, no disciplinary action, no pattern of subsequent conflict serious enough to merit either official interference or unofficial gossip. As far as I could tell, neither woman had shared her version of the incident with friends or co-workers. Both had determined to put the whole thing behind them, and both had moved on without mentioning it again.
There was no reason to believe it meant anything.
Except that, for all we knew, it might have been the key to everything.
***
Among the subjects of interest: one Jacques Robinette, a nervous type whose stammer, in my presence, betrayed a deep level of guilt over something, even if that something had nothing to do with the investigation under way; a pudgy fellow by the name of Ierck Kzinscki, who had trained alongside Li-Tsan Crin and seemed to harbor a deep crush on her; a conspiracy theorist named Gilian Brenner, who had a theory pinning both murders on the Tchi that went all the way around the Coal Sack Nebula and back working out a scenario that would have enabled them to stage manage the crimes without ever being allowed on station; and a Curtis Smalls, whose pleas for a transfer off One One One pegged him, in my eyes, as a future full-time member of Gibb’s exiled height-sensitives.
The indentures included several utopian idealists, a few revolutionaries, a couple of crackpots, several brimming with enthusiasm for their mission here, and a number of grim lifers just putting in the hours until they collected their passport and went to the world of their choice. Many found it necessary to recount details of the worlds they had come from. As was all too often the case when indentures swapped life stories, there turned out to be a depressing number of stories about military dictatorships, theocracies, places where one family had seized power and delighted in raping the ecosystem everybody needed to survive, and worlds so screwed up by internal conflicts that volunteering for the Dip Corps emerged as the only way to avoid having your head shot off in some stupid war against civilians.
You want to know why humanity’s never been involved in a serious interspecies conflict? Because it’s like going out to eat when you have a pantry full of food at home. Why bother sampling the buffets elsewhere when we haven’t worked out all the great ways to kill each other yet?
I found, out of all Gibb’s staff, maybe half a dozen people who professed deep affection for Warmuth and many more who had a grim, jaw-grinding respect for Santiago. As could only be expected from a small insular community of indentures, working in a dangerous environment under difficult conditions, the web of sexual relationships was almost as tangled as the substructure of Hammocktown. My interviews rang with excited gossip over who’d been with Warmuth (I counted a dozen assignations, all fleeting, before losing track), Li-Tsan (almost as many, but over a much longer period of time), Gibb (“Guess who the boss is d
oing!”), Lastogne (“Who isn’t he doing?”), and the Porrinyards (some of these unlikely, envious, or prurient). The precious little gossip I picked up over Christina Santiago had to do with her alleged nasty attitude, and what seemed to have been a long-term love affair with this Cif Negelein I kept hearing about (“You’ll know him when you see him,” said one indenture, with a theatrical roll of her eyes).
Only a few of the interviewees stood out from the crowd.
Oskar Levine was a sad-eyed, thin-faced, sallow-cheeked young man wearing the insignia of the Riirgaan Republic. He didn’t have much new to say about either Warmuth or Santiago, but his own legal status was such a knot it made mine look simple. Once an indenture in our own Dip Corps, he’d been scapegoated for his actions during a major diplomatic incident he said I could look up for myself, and would have been tried and imprisoned for treason had he not defected to the Riirgaans before prosecution.
Now he sat high up the curve of the communal hammock, his hands performing somersaults in a ballet of nervous overemphasis.
“I look human. I feel human. I even smell human, some days more than others. Any medical examination would confirm that I’m human. But I’m legally nonhuman. No government within the Confederacy is permitted to provide me human status. My Riirgaan diplomatic immunity keeps me safe from any genuinely dangerous consequences, but there have been some unpleasant ones.”
“Such as?”
He rubbed the corner of his eyes. “Well, some worlds enforce very strict residency limitations on nonhumans; I’ve been expelled from a couple of those. And a few years ago I ran into trouble on another world where I served the local Riirgaan ambassador as liaison to the human locals. When the community found out about my relationship with a local girl, they accused me of rape and her of practicing bestiality. I was expelled. The girl was fined, forced to publicly apologize to the community, and prohibited from ever contacting me again.”
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