“What kind of extremists?”
Rogue intelligences who don’t agree with our ultimate goals in creating the Brachiators, or any of the other intelligent species we’ve engineered in our long and distinguished history. That bombshell was followed by an even bigger one, as the implacable voice specified: Parties who will oppose us even if that means bloodshed and chaos among the organic intelligences.
When the time came to thank Artis Bringen for getting me involved in all this, I’d use my bare hands. “Why didn’t you tell me this when I arrived? Why did you have to be so bloody mysterious?”
Their voice adopted an incredulous, mocking tone. And what would you have had us do, Counselor? Provide you with a long, detailed printout of our interior code, with markers isolating the rogue intelligences from the rest of our shared consciousness? How would you make sense of what we provided you? How would you capture their intangible essences and bring them to your version of justice, let alone make sure that they would not take human lives again? Could you imprison them? Execute them? Even war on them without warring on us as well?
I couldn’t even begin to come up with an answer. “So what do they get out of killing human beings?”
The destabilization of our business here, aboard One One One.
“Which is…?”
Not relevant to your current investigation.
“Like hell it’s not—”
Excuse us, but like hell it is. The nature of the enterprise these malcontents seek to disrupt has no bearing on the crimes against your people on this station. Giving further details would not only jeopardize a state secret, but would also confuse an investigation already bogged down in entire layers of irrelevancy. Suffice it to say that the rogues, and their motives, are currently outside your reach.
I’d made the mistake of ignoring their phraseology before. I didn’t this time. They’d said my current investigation. They’d said the rogues were currently outside my reach. Both usages seemed deliberate. I rubbed my forehead again. “Then why haven’t you taken care of it yourselves?”
As we said: politics. They are among us, but nevertheless shielded from us. They are like terrorists hiding among your own population. You cannot reach them without causing pain and suffering to innocents. Likewise, we cannot eliminate our own dangerous factions without tremendous suffering.
I thought of Bringen’s hunger for a scapegoat. “And is this known to my people?”
It is suspected by some.
“Just like I suspect that none of what you’ve said to me qualifies as an official statement.”
Of course not. What good will it do relations between our people and yours to have it known that the true instigators of these crimes are currently beyond human reach? As your superior Bringen told you, you simply need to find a guilty party. Any guilty party. And this remains well within your current powers.
There was that word current again. They were certainly going out of their way to tease me with possibilities. “I won’t pick a name at random.”
We are not expecting you to. After all, your prosecution does need to stand up to later examination. The most relevant culprit, operating with substantial support from our extremist faction, is indeed a human being aboard this station.
“The same one who sent me those images of my own death.”
Correct. With, of course, the substantial technological aid of the extremist elements among our own people.
“The same one who taunted me as my hammock fell apart.”
Also correct.
“Whoever it is had a tremendous amount of personal information about me. Even some things I didn’t know, about some plans my superiors have made for me.”
Assuming you give those stories credence, a risky venture given that the criminal in question will say anything to throw you off your stride, we’re not surprised. You are here to make an arrest. Your saboteur would have had a significant amount of time to consult the considerable intelligence-gathering capabilities of our rogue intelligences, obtain the voluminous amount of information already compiled about you, and with that information on hand, construct a powerful campaign of psychological warfare, intent on forcing you off the case.
“Those hate mails I received, and that attempt on my life, strike me as more than just strategy. That’s obsession.”
True. But would that be incompatible with the kind of mind capable of committing these crimes in the first place? In human terms, this individual is broken, in ways that you are merely bent. If he, or she, recognized this while researching the prosecutor arriving to investigate the murders aboard this station, then the natural resentment that would follow could only exacerbate the obsessive potential of the delusional pathology responsible.
Terrific. I was fighting somebody who made me look like a paragon of mental health. “And that other voice I heard up there? The one that sounded like my superior, Artis Bringen?”
That was us. We imagined you would respond most quickly to orders from him.
It bothered me, on a deep, personal level, that they were probably right. “You didn’t have to stop with that. You could have sent help. Or summoned somebody for me.”
We could have, but that would have meant direct conflict with the rogue intelligences. There were, as we have said, political subtleties at play here, which rendered that inadvisable. It was enough that we startled you awake and gave you a chance to confront the moment on your own.
“I almost died.”
And we would have been saddened. But this needed to remain a fight between human beings.
Good point; I needed an enemy I could touch. “You know the name.”
Of course.
“Then, for Juje’s sake, tell me!”
We have already helped you, Counselor. We have warned you of impending attempts on your life. We have spoken to you, in the voice of your immediate superior, to alert you when such an assault was under way. We have intervened when you tested our goodwill with that maneuver in the skimmer. We have given you one small gift and have worked, hard, to provide you with another. We intend on offering you an even greater boon upon the conclusion of this business. We take all these steps because we consider you an important human being whose desires have been known to mirror ours: hence our prior observation that we have much in common. We look forward to discussing that with you later, at length. But right now the delicate politics of the matter prevent us from just providing you with an actual name. As convenient as that would be, there are too many impartial factions, inside us, who are observing these events with great interest in their natural resolution, and who would object if we overstepped the limits of our own prescribed involvement. So we are forced to operate within those impartial boundaries.
“So this is a game. I’m fighting for my life inside an arena.”
As in most diplomacy. Very much so.
I hesitated. “Which brings up the question. How much help can I count on from you? If they go for me again?”
You cannot count on us to rescue you, Counselor. Our situation is difficult and growing more difficult the longer this situation remains unresolved. We may not be able to intervene in such a timely manner again.
We fell into an uncomfortable silence. I drifted in the glowing blue void, intensely aware of the delicate microcurrents as they nudged my helpless form this way and that. It could be taken as movement, but it was far from progress, and it brought me no closer to any of the walls that defined the shape of this place. My breath, though controlled, sounded ragged to my ears.
I was silent for so long that I felt the gentle touch of air currents, carrying me toward the exit. A dismissal, but not one I was ready for, just yet. “My presence here was requested.”
True.
“Bringen said you asked for me yourselves.”
True.
“He also said Gibb asked for me. But he denies it.”
True.
“Did he?”
Yes.
“Why is he lying?�
�
He’s not lying. He doesn’t know he asked for you.
Silence. “How can that be?”
Also irrelevant to your current investigation.
Damn them. “You keep saying that you respect my gifts. Even that we have motives in common.”
True.
“You even said I would meet my Unseen Demons.”
Yes.
“The ones who drove the colonists crazy on Bocai. The ones who made me do the things that ruined my life.”
Your life can still be salvaged, Andrea. But yes. That is true.
My voice broke. “Your rogue intelligences are my Unseen Demons, aren’t they?”
I already knew what they were going to say. But when they gave me their answer, just before I drifted out through the hatch, it still stabbed me through the heart.
Yes, Andrea Cort. They are.
I emerged from the Interface so paralyzed with emotion that I didn’t recognize the outer corridor, or know Oscin and Skye as they grabbed me, held me, and lowered me to the spongy floor, whispering soft words I did not hear then and would not remember later. I didn’t register the moment when the whispers stopped and they acted with cold, swift efficiency, slapping my shoulder with a patch of something designed to bring me out of shock.
I was not there.
I was on Bocai.
I was a little girl of eight, grinning with homicidal bloodlust as I looked down on the blood-soaked form of the being who had helped my parents raise me. For most of my life he had peppered me with little Bocaian endearments that translated into phrases like “Little Flower” and “Lights the Sky.” He had held me and he had treasured me and listened with all possible gravity to any of the nonsense that spilled my unformed little mind. He had said he found joy to see me play alongside the children he and his mate had brought into this best of all worlds.
I had called my human father Daddy. And my Bocaian father Vaafir, his language’s word for a concept that meant pretty much the same thing.
That day he had come into this house already reeking of blood not his own. I caught a glimpse of him, from between the couch and a Bocaian sculpture that sat next to it, and knew at once that he had entered this home my mortal enemy. He wore a necklace of scarlet human ears dangling from his neck. Some had been chewed on. Some still bore the piercings that marked them as belonging to the men of the colony, their bright, colorful patterns obscured beneath a layer of human juice. He was grinning, revealing teeth that dangled strips of ragged something that could have been fabric and could have been flesh. I knew it could have been either, because I’d witnessed some of the things he’d done. But he was wounded too; there was a long ragged tear down his side, and he remained standing only out of sheer desire.
“Andrea…” he called. “Andreaaaa…”
Even wounded, he was stronger than I. To feel the joy of his blood on my hands I had to pick my moment, and get him when he was vulnerable.
The sculpture beside the couch depicted the ancient Bocaian god of mirth: a squat little troll with mouth stretched to impossible dimensions. As a toddler I’d been fascinated by that face. As a predator I considered it my totem. I shifted position, got my knees and elbows underneath me, and dragged myself behind the little troll, making no sound at all.
The shadows of my Vaafir danced over my back as he shuffled past the hallway into the rooms in the back of the house.
I heard him enter the room that had belonged to one of his own children.
I rose, calculated my chances, and, rather than follow him, moved to the front of the house, into the cinder pit.
“Andreaaa…”
The cuisine in fashion, among Bocaians of that particular era and region, consisted of burning everything until every last ounce of moisture had boiled off, then spicing the charred remains. The Bocaian repertoire of spices was sufficiently rich to lend their meals something approaching variety and taste, even if some of the local humans only tolerated the results to be polite. But the technique required very little in the way of utensils. Just something very much like a spoon to scoop up the cinders. And something very much like a knife, to chop up the pieces as they burned.
On Bocai, that’s the same tool.
The Bocaian cooking pit was a sunken metal bowl in the center of the room that corresponded to a human kitchen. The current that warmed it was built into the substructure of the floor. A Bocaian chef kneels over the bowl and pokes at the sizzling pieces with a utensil called a kres, with a spoon on one end and a sharp point on the other.
I lowered myself to the edge of the bowl, reached in, and took out a kres still crusted and carbonized from its last use.
It was light enough for a child to hold. It was also as long as a Bocaian adult’s arm, which it also had to be, since nobody wanted to be subjected to steam burns working over a Bocaian bowl. As for its sharpness, I tested that by touching the pointed end with my index finger, and bore down until I drew my own blood.
Good.
My own life meant next to nothing to me.
The only thing that mattered to me was taking his.
A low wall, with shelves, separated this room from the family area. I pressed myself against that wall, sweat pouring down my face, listening to microsounds from the greater house beyond, forming a picture that I knew to be accurate.
I knew he was on the other side of the wall, on his hands and knees, too weakened by blood loss to remain on his feet but still capable of overpowering me if it came down to a fight. I knew that he was waiting for me to come after him. I knew that if I tried I would never have a chance to feel the pleasure of killing him.
Even the kres might not be enough if we met face-to-face.
But maybe we didn’t have to.
I shifted my weight forward, knelt, then stood, placing the kres atop the low wall.
I lifted my right foot and rested its full weight on the first of the shelves.
Had I been an adult, the shelf might have buckled.
But I was just a child. An eight-year-old. My body, much like the current state of my conscience, weighed practically nothing.
The shelf held.
On the other side of the wall, my Vaafir coughed. There was a peculiar, unpleasant, liquid quality to the sound, warning me that I didn’t have much time left.
I kept climbing.
One more shelf, then, moving with infinite care, scrambling up onto the top of the wall.
Crawling over the edge and looking down.
I saw my Vaafir’s back. He was prone, now, too wounded to move much. His tunic, pale when clean, was black and glistening in the moonlight filtering through the open windows. His back was a landscape of wounds, amazing me with clear evidence of just how tenaciously something worth killing could cling to life instead. Still, that was a knife in his right hand, clutched between two of the three central fingers and two grasping thumbs. He coughed out blood and managed a word. “Aaaannndreaaa…”
I happen to know, from later studies of these events, that the madness overtaking the humans and Bocaians on the island was at this moment beginning to fade. People had started to act with something approaching rationality again. Some traumatized survivors were already offering medical attention to the sentients they’d been trying to murder just minutes earlier.
I don’t know why my Vaafir called my name back then. He might have been trying to lure me out so he could kill me. Or he might have been trying to let me know that it was all right, and that he posed no further threat to me.
I’ll never know.
Just as I’ve never known how much of what I did next was the madness acting through me and how much was my mania for problem-solving, pursuing a puzzle to its natural solution.
But I rose and stood at the edge of the wall and held the kres pointy-side down with the sharp tip aimed at the small of his back and jumped with my legs wrapped tight around the thing to add more weight and momentum than I ever could have managed with a mere child’s strength.
The impact sounded like a pop.
Hot blood geysered from below, splattering my legs, my chest, and my face with the first evidence of my own monstrousness.
I rolled away, jumping to my feet in case he proved not close enough to death.
As it happened, I’d driven the kres well into his back, puncturing one of his three lungs but not quite managing to run him through. I’d missed his spinal column, leaving him enough strength to thrash and attempt a rollover. It was an attempt doomed to failure as soon as the protruding kres struck the low wall by his side, ensuring that any more motion in that direction could only drive the shaft still farther into his body.
He extended both arms toward me, his fingers bloody, his eyes imploring.
He tried to say my name again, through a mouth filled with blood. Buried beneath gurgles, it was still recognizable. I heard affection, sadness, and deep, unresolved confusion.
But it was those imploring eyes that got me.
In my nightmares, I see those beautiful, nearly but not quite human, eyes with the odd rectangular pupils and the irises that almost completely obscured the whites. Eyes like those were one of the things I’d most loved about my Bocaian friends and family. They were so much more colorful, so much more expressive than the human equivalent. They were more like jewels than eyes, and my Vaafir’s eyes had always seemed bigger and warmer and more filled with magic than most.
The eyes get me now because I think he returned to himself in those last few minutes of life. I think he was telling me he was sorry.
But at that one moment, I saw nothing but beauty.
And it was not just because of the monstrous force that had taken hold of me and everybody I loved, that had colored me with a stain I would carry for the rest of my life, that had doomed me to a childhood of being cared for by people who saw me as an enigma to be solved and one other who saw me as a toy to be used, and that had left me with nothing to look forward to in adulthood but a lifetime as Dip Corps property, that I did what I did next.
Because, whatever else I’d become, I was also still a little girl, attracted to shiny things.
Emissaries from the Dead Page 23