One of the last things I’d done before the attempt on my life was compose that update for Bringen. Now I found myself worrying that Gibb hadn’t passed it along. For all I knew, maybe he’d sabotaged the hammock himself to keep from having to send it.
Or maybe Lastogne had. The message had queried his background, after all.
Once again I suffered that oddly frustrating certainty that there was something I would ordinarily do now. It was so vague, so hard to pin down, that it disappeared the moment I tried to chase it. “And the AIsource? I sent word I wanted to talk to them as soon as possible.”
He shook his head. “Nothing.”
Which might have made sense, in a different context. Human bureaucracies, and most alien ones, are slow by design, their response times slowed to a crawl despite all the technology we employ to make their progress visible to the naked eye. That’s because they’re still subject to all the delays native to organic life: the mistakes, indecision, the malice, the covering of asses, and the reluctance to transmit even the most urgent message until after a leisurely break for lunch. The AIsource, by contrast, would have gotten my message hours ago, within a millisecond of me sending it. They would have mapped out the consequences of any possible response and been able to answer me, before I even thought of taking another breath.
They were playing games, all right.
They were stirring the pot and watching to see how well the little bug rode the waves, trying not to drown.
But I wasn’t about to wait around for them to decide to count up the score.
***
The skimmer entered the Habitat, rotated to comply with local standards of up and down, and accelerated spinward.
It was the most dizzying of all possible courses. At least a flight along the length of the cylinder turned the Uppergrowth into a conventional ceiling, with a consistent upward curvature to both port and starboard. A flight against the axis of rotation accentuated that curvature and made the landscape above us seem to be spinning, its vines and clumps of manna fruit hurtling toward us as a speed that made me look away.
Mo Lassiter, who was handling the Interface, sensed my losing battle with vertigo and said, “I could fly upside down if you’d prefer.”
Sheer terror at the prospect thrummed my spine like a stringed instrument. “What?”
“It’s sometimes more comfortable for folks still adjusting to the geometry here. It puts the Uppergrowth where you’d expect the ground to be, and that soup below us in the place of an identifiable sky. Don’t worry. Local grav will keep us oriented.”
Pride made me want to refuse. The things happening at the base of my throat made me realize I’d better not. “Please do.”
The biggest mistake I made all day was not shutting my eyes at the moment of rollover. There was no sense of actual movement, but my mind’s sense of up and down lagged behind the skimmer’s by a full second, and I spent that eternity irrationally certain that I was about to be dumped from the vehicle like a fish dumped from its overturned bowl.
After a heartbeat my eyes adjusted to our new orientation and the interior of One One One became close to bearable. The Uppergrowth now below us became a kind of ridge, gently curving downward toward a distant and blurred horizon. By contrast, the sky now high above us became a vast arched ceiling, lined with dark and roiling storms. I considered the toxic ocean hidden behind it, imagined all of those billions of gallons of poison hanging up there with nothing to support them, and felt sick again, this time in an entirely new way.
One One One wasn’t a happy sight from any angle.
“That better?” Lassiter asked.
A thousand savage retorts marched through that atrophied part of my brain responsible for censoring what I say.
None of the other passengers looked any happier than I felt. Hannah Godel, who occupied the seat beside me, sat pressed against the opposite bulkhead, putting as much distance between my body and hers as she could without thinking to step aside. Back at the hangar she’d asked me why I’d chosen her, out of so many other candidates, for this particular expedition; my answer, that it would give us an opportunity to get better acquainted, hadn’t satisfied her a whit, and from the look on her face may have actually disgusted her. Lassiter herself kept gauging me with her eyes. And the Porrinyards, cramped into the row behind us, flashed smiles whenever I looked at them, but those smiles faltered with a regularity that suggested sustained internal dialogue.
I hadn’t thrilled either Lastogne or Gibb with my plan to appoint my own guides as I resumed my investigation inside the Habitat. I was willing to believe their mutual claims to be concerned over my safety, but it would have been much more comfortable, for them, to appoint keepers they could trust to report on my progress. That element of this investigation had only grown more intrusive with Gibb’s arrest, and wasn’t likely to lighten up as long as he remained in custody.
All of which was fine with me.
It didn’t hurt to keep the pot boiling.
Over the next three hours Lassiter took me on a tour of random sights, displaying the uncanny, unearned pride of a human being who thinks she owns a place just because she lives there. Despite the homogenous nature of the Uppergrowth, which had struck me as the kind of place that would have been dull indeed, if not for the fact that it was upside down and likely to kill you if you let go, it did possess highlights of interest to those capable of being interested. There was one place she called Whoopsy-Daisy Fountain, where the irrigation lines had broken and a torrent of water twenty times the skimmer’s radius tumbled from the sky and into the abyss below. It was spectacular, if you liked that kind of thing. Lassiter said, “We talked, once, about diffusing the pressure and adapting it for use as a bathing facility, of sorts; it would have been easy to run regular skimmers out here, turn off the shielding, and just stand under the precipitation to enjoy the shower.”
“What’s the problem?” I asked. “Not hot enough?”
“Naaah. Too acid. And too filled with stuff meant for the Uppergrowth and through it, the Brachs. Get wet with this stuff and you’ll feel dirtier, not cleaner. But it sure is pretty, isn’t it?”
I ticked a mental check-mark next to my longstanding prejudice against ecosystems, and said nothing.
After that she dimmed the shields to protect our eyes and took us as close to one of the glowsphere suns as she dared. From a distance of several kilometers, they were clearly roiling balls of flame, churning the storms near them with the force of their radiated heat. No human or alien habitat I’d ever visited had ever harnessed forces anything like these to warm and light their ecospheres, and I confess my knuckles turned white on the armrest as I wondered just what kept the entire atmosphere from burning. But Lassiter laughed at me.
“They give off about as much warmth, in relation to the space they take up, as conventional fires of the same size. They’re certainly hot as hell, by human standards, but they’re not about to incinerate everything in sight. No, as near as we can figure it, they’re mostly here to give this place its night and day. You want to know what provides One One One with the majority of its heat? Its oceans. Whether by internal forces we don’t know about, or by the force of their own chemical reactions and the sheer atmospheric pressure down there, they’re at a state well above what we consider boiling, and the heat rising from them is more than enough to keep us warm and toasty. The storm patterns are just one huge engine for redistributing the heat.”
“As are all weather patterns,” the Porrinyards said.
“Well, yes,” Lassiter said.
What had I been thinking, about boiling pots? I reminded myself how much I hated ecosystems, on general principle, and kept my own counsel.
***
Then the time for travelogue ended as our attentions turned to the phenomenon we were here to see in the first place.
Lassiter tapped the ROM disk on her forehead. The air before her shimmered and became a blurry 2-D grid marked with isobars and symbols that my eyes read as so
much spaghetti. She impaled one spot with an index finger, rippling the image with distortions. “I’ve done a pretty good job modeling their migration patterns, though it’s not all that hard to do, given their rate of movement. At this point there should be four tribal confrontations of the kind you’re talking about: one just starting, one pretty much over, two which should be entering the most intense stages of their conflict sometime today. I’m taking you to the closest of those two.”
“I don’t see what it has to do with anything,” Godel said. “They don’t have the capacity to engage in high-tech sabotage.”
“Which eliminates what happened to Santiago,” I agreed. “And what happened to me. But Warmuth was attacked with Brachiator weaponry.”
“You haven’t seen Brachiators fighting yet.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Take a look,” Godel said, “and then tell me it makes sense.”
The Porrinyards seemed pinker about the cheeks, which could be either a trick of the light or the beginnings of a shared blush. They were also holding hands, a gesture that might have been easy to mistake as mutual affection but which in their case probably possessed as much real intimacy as an individual choosing to cross his legs while he sat.
I turned back to Godel. “Bondsman Lassiter doesn’t think it’s ridiculous.”
Godel shrugged. “Mo doesn’t think Cynthia had enough sense to defend herself.”
“And you think she did?”
Godel rubbed the bridge of her nose between two index finger and thumb. “How do I put this…! Look. My homeworld has one of those fairy-tale figures adults use to frighten naughty children. He’s a reanimated corpse called the Shadow Man who crawls from the grave to munch on the living. But in every version of the story I’ve ever seen, the Shadow Man can barely move. He shuffles along at two kilometers an hour, waving his arms, somehow catching up to people who should be able to outrun him at a relaxed walk.”
The Porrinyards shared a fond chuckle. “My world has a monster like that too. King Grave. He shuffled along like a man whose toes weighed fifty kilos apiece, but he scared the daylights out of Skye as a child.”
“Not Oscin?” I asked. (I’d almost said Not You? and earned myself another correction.)
“No, not Oscin,” Skye said alone. “He was never the kind to be scared of stories.”
“In any event,” Godel said, with the air of somebody struggling to get a conversation back on track, “the one thing that makes characters like that so frightening, in stories at least, is that their victims are always too paralyzed to run. They just stand wherever they are and watch this clumsy, fanged thing approaching, and somehow never once work up the nerve to take a step. But if you analyze the model, you realize that anybody who stands still and allows such a crippled, barely mobile predator to catch up with him is too stupid to live anyway. Now think of the Brachiators as predators and Cynthia as the idiot who just hung there and watched while they went after her with their claws. I’m telling you. I refuse to believe it unless you can show me why.”
I’d noted her use of Warmuth’s first name. “Were you close to her?”
She grimaced. “I was wondering why you brought me along.”
“Not because of that. But were you?”
“We worked together. We got along. We were friendly, not friends.”
“What kept you from being friends?”
“Nothing in particular. I liked her. Didn’t love her.”
“Again: why not?”
“Friendship is hard enough without dealing with somebody who insists on immediately being your best one. But that doesn’t mean I’d consider her so incompetent that anything as physically useless as a Brach could sneak up on her. I mean, really, Counselor. Watch and see.”
***
The battlefield was a patch of Uppergrowth indistinguishable from any other, marked only by the thirty nearly immobile figures wrapped in what their species must have considered to be frenetic combat. There were two groups, whose paths prior to this moment in their respective histories were easy to track by the vines they’d shredded in their wake. They hadn’t collided head-on, but rather at an angle, joining in battle as soon as both tribes realized that they’d now be competing for the same patch of their world’s ceiling.
The fresh, juicy manna pears hanging in bunches from every vine in sight revealed the conflict as ridiculous, as even Brachiators forced into a course change could have found more food than they could possibly eat within an hour’s travel, but that didn’t matter to them; their armies had met, and their war had to be fought.
I’ve been on a battlefield or two in my time. I’m told some people find it glorious, or thrilling. I’ve never seen the sense of either claim. But if I could concede that some wars are glorious, I would also have to admit the natural corollary, that somewhere in the universe wars are just mind-numbingly tedious.
The Brachiator battlefield looked like an orgy where everybody had fallen asleep in mid-hump. The combatants fought with two limbs apiece, as they needed the others to hold fast to the Uppergrowth, their fighting limbs not much more mobile as they raked at their opponents, clawing slow-motion furrows across flesh. I saw two Brachs who had sunken fangs into one another’s skin, but neither seemed to be chewing or pursuing the battle further; it was as if that first jolt of mutual pain had frozen them both, and rendered them incapable of either retreat or further assault. I saw two others going after one another with claw-knives of the sort that had been used on Cynthia Warmuth. Both Brachiators were already bleeding, and both were winding up for another slash, but they moved more like men afraid of breaking something than soldiers in a battle for their lives.
I’ve seen wells dug more quickly, by people bearing no tools more advanced than shovels.
Some of the Brachs were screaming in pain or rage. Their wordless cries were the same violin-pitch as those coming from the infants clinging to parental backs.
“See?” Godel said. “Even assuming that they had some reason to attack her, and further imagining that she slept through their approach and was surprised by their attack, she would have had more than enough time to do whatever she had to do to protect herself.”
“I always pictured them restraining her first,” Lassiter argued. “Holding her so she couldn’t fight, even as the claws were driven in, in slow motion.”
“I thought of that. But moving as slowly as these beasties do, they would have had to coordinate their movements with machine precision, pinning all four of her limbs at the same instant. Otherwise, if a Brach grabbed one wrist, and even a few seconds passed before another Brach got hold of the other, she would have more than fair warning that something nasty was going on. She could have thrashed around, hollered bloody murder, fought them off, even sent out a distress signal. She wouldn’t just hang there and do nothing. But I can’t see the Brachs executing a smooth four-way assault, either.”
I’d assumed, up until now, that the Warmuth killing had been a low-tech crime, in extreme contrast to what had happened to Santiago. But precision required another solution, possibly one implicating the AIsource. After all, they were precision incarnate, and wouldn’t have had much difficulty directing their creations in a coordinated assault.
The only problem, really, was that the crime still didn’t make any sense.
Lassiter said, “Look over there. Something’s happening.”
Our upside-down orientation had lent the Brachiators a deceptive buoyancy. No longer dead weights, clinging to the Uppergrowth as their only defense against a fatal plunge, they now resembled balloons afraid of floating away. The wounded ones bled upward in drips and streams, the larger drops separating into drizzles as they ascended. The two Lassiter had pointed out, and which she now maneuvered us closer to, were well into their fatal combat. Each was marked by a dozen slashing wounds, with the smaller of the pair clinging to a frayed vine with a single arm that was already more wound than intact limb. The big one had jabbed a claw-blade into his e
nemy’s sole intact shoulder and was sawing it, slowly, ever so slowly, across what remained of the tissue connecting muscle and bone.
It was as close to a hurry as the Brachiators ever got, and my human eyes still insisted on perceiving it as dull, lazy, and drugged.
Lassiter said, “The little one’s going to fall within a few minutes. Poor thing.”
I considered vomiting. The realization that our upside-down orientation would fling it all back in my face made the need more urgent, not less. “Can we save him?”
Lassiter regarded the claws and teeth gouging furrows into flesh. “Getting between those two doesn’t strike me as a good idea.”
“I mean after he falls. Can we hover and give him something to land on?”
Lassiter gave that suggestion the kind of look people reserve for the openly delusional. “Also not a good idea, Counselor. We’re not exactly equipped to offer it medical attention, or a future. And interference of any kind is well beyond the approved scope of our mission here. We could really anger the AIsource.”
“Oh, gee,” I said. “We sure wouldn’t want that.”
“Please, Counselor. I understand your humanitarian impulses…”
“I don’t have humanitarian impulses. But I do need to find out something. Find a way to work it.”
Still she did nothing, instead staring like a woman who expected eye-stalks to sprout from my forehead.
Behind me, the Porrinyards cleared their respective throats, engineering even that noise to come from the empty air between them. “Maureen? In matters involving her investigation, the Counselor has full authority. You have to do what she says.”
Lassiter’s jaw tightened. “Can I just mention, first, that it’s a goddamn stupid order that will accomplish nothing but prolong a sentient creature’s suffering?”
“You just did,” I told her.
She rolled the skimmer again, this time without warning me. The entire world turned upside-down again, the Uppergrowth and sky switching places in less time than my equilibrium would have liked to consider possible. My fear of heights overcame that rational part of me comfortable within the skimmer’s local gravity, and I found myself clutching at my seat, my mouth gaping in soundless, instinctive terror. But the moment passed. The Uppergrowth, now returned to its rightful place as the ceiling of this demented world, hung directly above us again, its strangeness rejuvenated.
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