Levine told the story without any noticeable self-pity. Instead, he seemed to feel a peculiar pride in his one poor claim to fame.
I said, “It must be lonely.”
“It’s not as bad as you think, Counselor. In fact, I’m married to a woman who defected to Riirgaan in order to make it legal. There’s a community of about forty of us, based on one of their worlds; mostly political refugees, of one kind or another, all as human as I could ask for. We’re just not recognized as human under Confederate Law.”
“Where’s your wife now?”
A smile tugged at his lips. “Back home. I’ll see her again when I’m cycled out in a few months.”
“Do you miss her?”
His smile made his face redden. “Of course.”
“Then, if you don’t mind me asking, what the hell are you doing here?”
That made him laugh without any self-consciousness at all. “Doesn’t make sense, does it? After all, I hate the Dip Corps and the Dip Corps hates me. We shouldn’t have anything to do with one another.”
It hadn’t worked that way, in my case. The Dip Corps and I hated each other, too, but were so integrally connected I’d be wearing its yoke for the rest of my life. But I said, “So?”
“The truth is, I’m here to function as living loophole. The AIsource running One One One only agreed to a small installation of observers, administered by one government and one government alone, required by treaty to share its findings with all the others monitoring the situation here. Humanity got elected. ‘My’ people, the Riirgaans, wanted their own eyes and ears aboard anyway, so they pulled some strings, finagled a separate deal with the Confederacy, and negotiated my presence as independent consultant. The AIsource know my legal status, but either they don’t value citizenship over biology the way the Confederacy does, or they’re not willing to argue the point. So I’m a human without being human.”
“I’m surprised you would want to go along with it. After all, the Corps shafted you twice. You should tell them to go to hell.”
“That’s right in both cases. They did, and I should. And for what it’s worth, they’re not much kinder to me now; some of the careerists, including Mr. Gibb, like to let me know as often as possible what a despicable race-traitor I am. But the Riirgaans gave me a home when I needed one, so I don’t mind taking a little crap for their sake. Besides, my bosses among the Riirgaans say that completing this assignment might give them enough leverage to negotiate a Confederate pardon for me and my friends. Even possible repatriation.”
I decided to give him some free legal advice. “Dual citizenship of some kind would be fine, but it would have to be dual. Confederate and Riirgaan. Don’t ever give up your Riirgaan ties, even for a moment.”
Levine frowned. “I wasn’t planning to, but why?”
“Because it would be just like the Confederacy to return your citizenship in some deal that comes with immunity from prosecution for crimes already charged, welcome you home, and then nail you with another charge they’ve been holding in reserve all along. They’re vindictive bastards, Mr. Levine. I know.”
He saw the conviction in my eyes, thought to question it, then stopped, the awful truth dawning. “Damn. You really think they’d do that?”
I gave him the full force of my certainty. “I’d be astonished if they didn’t.”
“Damn,” he said again, this time rolling the word with special emphasis. He was quiet for a moment, as he weighed the epiphany. Then he looked at me again and said, simply, “Thank you. I appreciate your honesty. Would you be upset with me if I asked you a personal question?”
I didn’t like personal questions in general, but I’d opened the door. And, besides, Levine gave me a feeling I rarely had for my fellow human beings: the sense that he could have been a friend, had I been in the market for friends. “Go ahead.”
“It’s a bad one. I don’t mean any offense.”
“I said go ahead.”
“I’ve known your name for a couple of years now. I know your background, and I know your legal status. It comes up a lot when researching my own. Don’t worry, I haven’t mentioned it to anybody here, but—”
My ears burned. “Just ask your question.”
“I was wondering…if I could defect to get out of a bad legal situation, why can’t you? I mean, I’m not advocating it, or saying that you should. But it’s not like the Dip Corps is an ideal place for you. You’re practically their slave. Haven’t you ever thought of getting some alien government, like mine, to give you sanctuary on its own soil?”
The question’s rudeness was not nearly as breathtaking as its honesty. I decided against going off on him and gave him an answer, even if I could only afford a less than candid one. “I don’t know of any alien governments who wouldn’t hand me over to the Bocaians.”
“Oh,” he said, deflating. “Just a thought.”
And a good one. But his adopted people, the Riirgaans, had been among the loudest raising challenges to my immunity. There were voices among the Tchi who hate me more than you can imagine. The Bursteeni agreed that I was functioning under diminished capacity, but thought that I should establish it once and for all in a Bocaian court, a course of action I considered tantamount to suicide. The K’cenhowten didn’t offer refugees sanctuary. The Cid were downright creepy. That pretty much did it for the major powers. Some of the lesser races regarded me with sympathy, but none had enough clout to buck a concerted interspecies attempt to extradite me. The Confederacy, at least, wouldn’t have forced the Dip Corps to give me up unless I became a much hotter issue than I am now. The Corps might not have loved me, and might have come close to giving me up half a dozen times, but they had invested in my training and could count on results from me. I was an asset, to be hoarded for as long as they had use for me.
And there was another factor I hadn’t mentioned, one that outweighed all the others.
Even if possible, defection amounted to surrender.
I wasn’t crazy about the human race, or the people I worked for, but I’d never been willing to give the bastards the satisfaction.
***
Cif Negelein lived up to his advance billing.
I didn’t recognize the name of his homeworld, but it was either an eccentric place or one that considered him among its more eccentric sons. Squat, neckless, round-eyed, and top-heavy, he affected an extreme form of Hammocktown’s fashionable near nudity, eschewing any uniform but for a thin strip of black cloth around his waist. His chest and arms were so furry they almost rendered any further clothing superfluous anyway. His face and scalp were as hairless as the plasm human surgeons implant on burn victims on worlds without access to AIsource Medical. This had evidently been arranged to clear space on his skin for a tattooed essay in the blocky alphabet of Hom. Sap Mercantile, delivering a small-print personal manifesto in a spiral that began just over his brow and culminated with an ellipsis at the highest point. Affectation, insanity, or gesture of deep commitment to a religion I didn’t even want to guess at, it made eye contact with him almost impossible. In my first few attempts to maintain a conversation with him, the words snaking along from temple to temple kept coming into focus upside down, often shutting me down in mid-sentence. Short of inserting him into a rotating tube and reading the words as he spun, I had to focus on his mouth to avoid being blindsided by any features above his nose.
Negelein, a talented painter of both landscapes and portraits, hadn’t been able to keep conventional art supplies during the eighteen years he’d served, but he’d produced many thousands of works using implants in his fingertips to daub intangible pigments on projected virtual media. He illustrated almost everything he said with finger-twitches that called forth works he’d produced on One One One: from vivid head shots of the people he spoke about to colorful panoramas of his fellow indentures working on the Habitat’s upside-down horizon. He had one portrait of Warmuth, portraying her as a wide-eyed, sallow-faced gamin placed against a nondescript black backg
round. She looked sad, vulnerable, and alone: a facile characterization that completely contradicted the impression I’d gotten from the other images I’d seen. Against that, he offered almost a dozen studies of Santiago, starting with the portrait of a woman simmering in mid-frown, backlit by a nimbus of glowing red light. It taught me nothing either. But as I studied the work, searching for an answer that wasn’t there, he said, “Most of the people here didn’t realize it, but their entire problem lay in the failure to recognize an alien mind.”
“I suppose we’re not talking about the Brachiators.”
He shook his head. “No. Christina. People had a rough time seeing who she was and what she was about; they just saw this sullen little bitch who was ready to bite your head off the first time they even looked at her funny.”
“Like that incident with Warmuth.”
He chuckled. “Like that. And a dozen others I can name. You didn’t get along with Christina. You experienced her.”
“And you’re saying she had an alien mind?”
He drew a curlicue in midair, dabbed a few lines underneath it, and emerged with a fair-to-middling caricature of me. “I suspect you already have a good idea what I mean, Counselor. When you get to the core of it, we’re all aliens to one another, raised according to some common precepts but otherwise ruled by paradigms far removed from those of the people around us. The tragedy is that we tend to judge others by standards that may make perfect sense to us but which are more likely totally irrelevant to them. That’s what you’re doing to me right now, even though you’re doing an excellent job of hiding it, and that’s what most people did to Christina. By the standard of their own worlds, their own heads, she was an intolerable person. But the fact is, she was as sociable toward them as she knew how to be.”
The man’s pontificating was beginning to wear on me. My yawn, another in a series of symptoms that my post-Intersleep crash was coming on fast, might have been just as inevitable on the most energetic day of my life. But I recovered: “What was she, then? Just socially inept?”
Another curlicue. “Think about her background. Her world had mortgaged its entire population for generations. Her family had no tomorrow greater than endless repetitions of today, no dreams beyond returning home at the end of a shift, no options beyond grinding despair and dull-eyed, grim-faced loyalty to the only possible employer. Their rights were so curtailed that they couldn’t even start families without proving it wouldn’t harm production. I don’t even think she encountered the concept of leisure time at all until she got here. It speaks well of her independent nature that she sold herself offworld as soon as she was able to find another buyer, but by then her routines were set, and she came to work for the Corps acting out the same behavior patterns she showed at home, which happened to be: Keep your head down. Don’t make friends. Don’t share confidences. Don’t question orders. Submerge every personal feeling you have: just concentrate on the work and nothing but the work. From everything she’d been taught, this was appropriate behavior. From the viewpoint of everybody else, it made her a pill and a half. Both viewpoints were accurate as long as you bought their starting positions.”
“And yet,” I noted, “you say you got something out of her.”
“Not just say, did.” He projected an image of Santiago, sitting cross-legged on one of the settlement’s rope bridges while the upside-down horizon of One One One curved away in the background. She wore a form-fitting gray jumpsuit fastened tight at the neck and wrists. Her eyes were hooded, her lips thin and unsmiling, but the image stressed the bound curve of her breasts; and the way the light played across her cheeks suggested Negelein, at least, considered her uncommonly beautiful. “I run a little art class here, not a big one, but something for people to do off-hours when they’re not jumping through Gibb’s hoops. I have four, maybe five, students at a time. Nobody produces spectacular work, but then nobody’s required to if they’re only doing it for their own amusement. Christina started visiting within two weeks of her arrival here. She would show up late so she didn’t have to make small talk, listen a little bit, then leave early so she didn’t have to talk with anyone on the way out. The first couple of times she visited, I thought she was just deciding it wasn’t for her. But then the third time she approached me in private to ask a question.”
“What?”
“She asked me to explain what art was good for.”
I wasn’t sure I could have produced a satisfactory answer myself as art just slides off me like I’m a frictionless surface. But I did my best to look duly horrified. “What did you say?”
“Well,” he said, “given that it’s a major part of who I am, a major part of what I need to stay sane, and for me a major part of what makes life worth living, I could have fired off a withering reply that punished her for being ignorant. About a dozen occurred to me before I even opened my mouth. But somehow I recognized it was a well-meaning question, and said, ‘If you make some, maybe you’ll figure it out.’ Not long after that we scheduled private lessons.”
“Was she any good?”
He rolled his eyes. “Was she any good? Please. Good didn’t enter into it. She’d never picked up the basics of perspective or shading or composition or even appreciation: nothing that permits a socialized eye to look at a blob of color and linework and produce the reaction, Gee, that’s pretty. She couldn’t even produce a workable abstract. She didn’t even have the background she would have needed to recognize the building blocks, and may have been too deprived of basic visual education for far too long to ever develop a meaningful imagination. But being good wasn’t the point. Letting out her feelings was. And as she produced one hopeless, primitive piece after another, she started stumbling over the things she would have said if she had the vocabulary. The things she was too alien to say to anybody else.”
“Such as.”
Negelein’s voice grew soft at the moment he seemed to remember that the person he’d been talking about was dead: “Such as what it was like, for her, to spend so much of her life in a cage.”
His eyes welled. No question in my mind: he was seeing her. But which her? A real Christina Santiago, who had revealed herself to him? An imagined version of her he’d projected upon a woman he’d barely known at all? A woman he’d loved, or one he’d pitied? I had no doubt that his grief was genuine, but that meant nothing; some people grieve as easily as other people breathe, and the grief-stricken include some of the very same people who brought on the grief by killing.
After a moment, I asked him, “Who do you think killed her, bondsman?”
He dabbed at his eyes. “Mr. Gibb says the AIsource did, but that doesn’t exactly make sense to me. I can’t see the AIsource doing something that pointless. Maybe something I did contributed. Wouldn’t that be a special trip through hell.”
I could see him turning the wheels in his mind, concocting scenarios, working out various ways his relationship with Santiago could have led to her death. Guilty or not, he had a conscience; guilty or not, it could very well destroy him; guilty or not, he may have wanted it to.
What followed was a calculated risk, based on my own sudden, irrational certainty that he was guilty of nothing except following his own heart. “Mr. Negelein, I’m going to have to ask you to keep this next question to yourself, and not mention it to anybody, not even Mr. Gibb.”
Negelein seemed to notice me again. “All right.”
“One of the lesser pieces of evidence in this case involves threatening hytex messages, containing animated simulations of violence happening to somebody currently aboard One One One. Not Santiago or Warmuth, but a possible future victim. These animations are very realistic, very detailed, and very disturbing. I suppose they qualify as art.”
He sniffed. “They would certainly be craft.”
“Yes, well, either way, is there anybody here to your knowledge that is capable of producing such work?”
He studied me through slitted eyes. “I’d have to see these messages to kn
ow.”
“You can’t.”
“Would that be because they’re classified, or because they no longer exist?”
In both cases, I hadn’t been able to access the signal following the initial delivery. But he didn’t have to know that. “Classified.”
“I see.” He rubbed his chin, looked very tired, and said, “I’m not the final judge of what people can and can’t do, and I can’t give you any answers about those images unless I can study them to figure out how they were made. But though a non-artist with access to source materials could use advanced AI routines to help draft that kind of thing on command, the actual quality of those pictures would depend entirely on the kind of obsession we’re talking about.”
“Assume extreme obsession.”
He thought about it. “That would make anything possible.”
Which happened to be as true for murder as it was for art.
***
My final interview that day was with somebody who, like Negelein, had also been mentioned several times: Exosociologist Second Class Mo Lassiter. She was one of the most solidly built women I’d ever met, muscular even by the exaggerated standards of One One One, with arms that bunched like knots beneath form-fitting black mesh sleeves. She had an olive complexion, centimeter-deep black hair that resembled fuzz, a jaw like a boulder, and brown eyes so tiny that it was next to impossible to see the whites.
Had she met me with a grimace, she would have been the very picture of a frightening thug. Instead, she offered an unforced smile. It made the difference between a face that might have bordered on grotesque and one that possessed its own, eccentric kind of integrity.
When it came to talking about people, Lassiter offered little in the way of in-depth analysis, summing up everybody I asked about in content-free, carefully nonjudgmental sentence fragments. She didn’t become helpful until we began discussing the death of Cynthia Warmuth. “I’ve never had any doubt, Counselor. It had to be a Brachiator.”
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