Emissaries from the Dead ac-1

by Adam-Troy Castro

  I tried to imagine the slow-moving creatures I’d seen surprising and overpowering an athletic human being. “Why?”

  “Because it fits their natures. They’re vicious.”

  The dull, barely mobile Brachiators hadn’t struck me as capable of savagery. “How would that work?”

  “All the usual ways. Assault, murder, open warfare, even genocide, when it suits them.” She saw my blank look, and commiserated. “I know it’s hard to believe. They move so slowly that it’s easy to think of them as passive. But they’re anything else. The truth is that they’re as warlike as any other pre-tech sentients I’ve ever seen. They have tribes and they have territory, and they go after each other whenever it suits them.”

  “It’s hard to imagine.”

  “Also hard to justify. One would think they had no reason for it. After all, why are wars fought in the first place? Sometimes out of ideology or fear, but more often because one side covets something the other side wants: territory, natural resources, wealth, what have you. Here, the AIsource made sure all of that was provided in abundance that dwarves the Brachiator population’s ability to consume it—and yet when one tribe encounters another somewhere on the Uppergrowth, without detailed negotiations in advance, one of them has to change course or invite an all-out war that doesn’t stop until one side is eliminated.”

  I had the oddest sensation of wanting to do something but didn’t know what it was. “What does it look like?”

  “Like a slow-motion slaughter. The two sides engulf each other, ripping and clawing. They use those knife-claws of theirs, both attached and detached, and they rip away at each other in parries and thrusts slow enough for my dear old grandma to evade. Sometimes two fighters clinch for as long as twenty minutes, half an hour, before either one succeeds in drawing blood. Sometimes their two tribes savage each other for days on end, fighting a close-quarters war that ancient human villages the same size would have probably mopped up in a matter of minutes. They move so slowly, throughout, that we have time to hover near them on floaters and watch. Sometimes we even talk to them, try to understand what they’re doing and why. They find the question so stupid they can’t even figure out why we ask it.”

  I came close to murmuring that they reminded me of human beings, but that kind of facile cynicism comes so easily to me that speaking it out loud would have been cheap. “And why do you think this explains what happened to Cynthia Warmuth?”

  “The Porrinyards handled most of her training, but I took her out a few times, and just two weeks ago I had the opportunity to show her one of these battles in progress. We were hovering just below, on floaters. She saw one of the Brachs start to lose its grip and started shouting that we had to rescue it. I told her there was nothing we could do. And—”

  Lassiter wiped her eyes, rubbed her chin, scrambled up the curve of the hammock to a water bottle, and allowed herself a deep gulp before returning to me, looking miserable.

  I’d seen that look in so many eyes, over the years, that identifying it wasn’t even hard anymore.

  It was the look of somebody who had just made up her mind to confess.

  “She pulled her floater between two of them: a big pair of alpha-males who hadn’t even reached each other and probably wouldn’t have drawn blood for another ten minutes. She told them their battle was pointless and would only result in death. She said it had to stop. She said she would stay between them to protect them both, and help them talk to each other, so nobody had to die. She said they had plenty of time to try.”

  “And the Brachiators?”

  “Both sides involved in the battle stopped what they were doing and shouted her down. They called her a Half-Ghost and said they had no time to listen to the Dead. They said that a Ghost who interferes in the affairs in the living might soon find herself returning to the Dead.”

  The words hung in the air between us, resonating even as distant laughter, from some of the other residents of Hammocktown, failed to dilute the tension left by their passage. “Why wasn’t I informed of this before?”

  “Because I never reported it,” Lassiter said, looking everywhere but at my eyes. “I didn’t see the need. Cynthia backed off at once. The Brachiators resumed their stupid little war. I took her back home, lectured her about the delicacy of our position here, and didn’t let her go until she admitted that she’d acted without thinking. Later, when the Porrinyards took her for her first solo, they picked a different tribe entirely, one about three hundred kilometers from those she’d offended. It was after what happened to Santiago, but I still didn’t see any reason to worry about Cynthia. Or any reason to believe that she’d get…”

  The sentence ended there. Lassiter covered her eyes, hung her head in abject misery, and shuddered, the very portrait of personal guilt. It wasn’t hard to tell that there was still something else coming, so I waited the close to two minutes it took her to provide it.

  The words, when they came, seemed too soft and distant to emerge from her mouth.

  “They say you’re hunting scapegoats. Will I do?”

  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 adva
ntageous 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 li
ttle 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.”