Emissaries from the Dead

by Adam-Troy Castro

I returned to the cooking pit and hunted up another kres.

  I needed the end with the spoon.

  When I came back to myself, I found myself comforted by two pairs of arms.

  Skye Porrinyard sat with her back against the wall, allowing me to use her lap as a pillow. Oscin lay curled on my other side, his hands cupping mine. He had brought my bag, and wore it slung around his shoulder. I could hear Skye’s heart, and only had to shift a fingertip against Oscin’s wrist to feel his pulse. The two beats surprised me by being out of synch.

  I didn’t want to move. But the sense of wrongness, of inconsistency, still nagged at me, like a distracting distant sound heard at the edge of sleep. “No. This isn’t me. I’m not comforted by other people. It’s not something I do.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with trying.”

  Their shared speech had always seemed to originate from some undefined point between them, but when they were this close to me, and I lay between them, that undefined point seemed to be somewhere inside my own head.

  My voice was a croak. “They want me to trust you, don’t they? The AIsource, I mean.”

  Did their grip tighten, a little? “Yes.”

  “Are they doing anything to me to help me trust you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did they arrange for you to save me from falling?”

  “No. That was just luck. Like I already said, I was coming to visit you already.”

  “That’s the truth?”

  Skye alone: “Don’t ask that again, Andrea. It’s hurtful.”

  “But they’re still doing something. To help me feel what I’m feeling.”

  Now Oscin: “Yes.”

  “I should resent the hell out of that. I don’t much like being manipulated.”

  The joined voice again, surrounding me all sides, confident and beautiful: “They’re not manipulating. Not with this. They’re just freeing.”

  “It’s still not right,” I insisted.

  They shifted, together, pulling me into a standard seated position. I didn’t resist as I was moved. Once they were done, I was still cradled by them, but able to take in both sets of eyes at once. Skye’s heart pounded a hypnotic tattoo in my ear. Oscin glanced at her, as if seeking some kind of confirmation he couldn’t discern through everything else they shared. Then Skye spoke alone, in a voice as gentle as any I’d ever heard from her, her words soft and evocative as she began a fairy tale. “A woman spends her entire life cursed by evil forces outside of her control to carry a stone so heavy that her back creaks beneath its weight. Because of all the years she’s carried this burden, without a single moment of rest, her arms have grown incapable of ever putting it down. Because she has never had freedom from that burden, she’s grown strong. Because she will never know freedom, that strength is useless. For as long as she lives she will never be able to hold anything else in her hands, let alone release the burden that torments her.”

  I missed the point when Oscin took up the story. He might have taken over from her in mid-syllable, or simply faded in with his own voice easing into dominance while hers faded breath by breath. “Then, one day, she sees a caravan blocked by an obstacle. It is a stone, identical to her own. She is the only person in sight gifted with enough strength to move that second stone out of the way, so the caravan can proceed. The problem is that she will not be able to do so, and join her fellow travelers, until someone relieves her of the stone she’s already carrying. Which, thanks to the curse, they cannot do. She cannot drop the weight, and she cannot do anything else until she does.”

  During the next few sentences, control of their shared voice gradually returned to Skye. “When a magical hand reaches down from the clouds, and plucks that first weight from her back, freeing her to stand up straight, do what must be done, and live whatever life she chooses to lead, she should be happy. But her first reaction is anger.”

  Their next words emerged in a spooky duplication of my own New London accent. “‘Who are you,’ she asks the clouds, ‘to just take away what I’ve carried for so long? It’s not right! That stone was mine!’”

  “Believing it by then to be some kind of treasure—” Skye spoke alone.

  “And not what it actually is,” Oscin concluded, “a crippling burden.”

  I wanted to wrest myself free of their shared attentions, and curse them for thinking they could understand me so easily.

  Somehow, I didn’t move.

  Skye used her fingertips to draw circles in my hair. “It is like I told you yesterday. The individuals Oscin and Skye were once very angry people. They each carried their own weights, their own secrets, that might have been as terrible as any of yours: secrets that even included blood on their hands. Neither Oscin or Skye thought they could possess enough strength to carry anything else. They even wanted to hoard their burdens, afraid that sharing such things would mean giving up everything.” Oscin’s voice joined hers, forming a new gestalt that filled the chamber to its ceiling. “But they were burdens, and not treasures. They could be shared. And if that boy, and that girl, needed a little help, then that help was not wrong. It was a gift.”

  The AIsource had spoken of three gifts: one they’d already given me, one they were still in the process of giving me, and one they hoped to offer me at the end of this business. I wondered just what I was experiencing now.

  Either way, it was growing increasingly difficult to maintain even the pretense of not trusting this. The warmth, rising from the base of my spine, felt like it belonged to me even if it originated from someplace else.

  Desperate to deny the feeling, and drive it away by any means possible, I seized Skye by her wrist, digging my fingertips into her tendons to inflict the greatest possible degree of pain. “When I was eight years old I killed my Bocaian father. My Vaafir. I stabbed him through the back and felt joy doing it. I scooped out his eyes while he was still able to feel the hurt. When the Dip Corps found me, I was sitting on his floor, playing with them, my hands covered with his blood.”

  Skye placed her free hand on the back of mine, and with a mere touch loosened my grip on her wrist. “I know that, Andrea. It’s like I said: I’ve looked up your background. And you were just one small child among an entire peaceful community that went mad all at once.”

  “A community contaminated,” Oscin said, “by nothing you could have controlled.”

  “But that’s the whole point. I’m still contaminated. That’s why they still call me a war criminal. Why they locked me away. Why they made me their property. Why they keep saying I’ll never be forgiven.”

  My field of vision was now dominated by two faces, his and hers.

  “Politics.”

  Damn it, I wasn’t going to let this happen. It was one thing to weep coming out of Intersleep or alone in my quarters on New London, another thing entirely to weep where other people could see it. Other people weren’t something I could go to for comfort. They were part of the puzzle I’d been left alive to solve.

  But I didn’t have enough voice to stop them. “I’m a monster.”

  Oscin leaned in closer, while Skye held me tight.

  “You’re beautiful,” they said together.

  First one at a time, and then together, they kissed me.

  For the first time in longer than I could remember, I felt myself coming close to putting down the burdens I’d been carrying my entire life. None of it seemed important: not what I’d seen, not what I’d done, not what people thought of me and would always think of me, not the Unseen Demons and everything they had come to mean to me. All of that remained part of the broken but sharp-edged thing I had become—and for a moment none of it mattered, because it was only noise. None of it had anything to do with the realization, surprised and comical but no less delighted, as I overcame my paralysis: Great Juje, they’re right, they are only one person.

  For just a moment I responded. I pulled Oscin close, not out of preference but because he was easier to reach. Skye, murmuring, kissed the back of my
neck. A hand, that could have belonged to either one of them, that I now had to remind myself belonged to both, fluttered along my spine, the touch so light I might have imagined it, or just hoped for it.

  But then something happened.

  There’s a certain disquieting moment everybody’s experienced at least once. It happens when you’re lying in bed, hovering on the very edge of sleep, your eyes closed and your thoughts sludgy, your consciousness and all the crap that goes with it about to sink into the welcoming darkness.

  Sometimes, just before you surrender to sleep, you feel a sudden, terrifying sensation very much like free fall, and jerk yourself awake, your previous feeling of well-being lost.

  I wasn’t approaching sleep, but I was losing control, in a way I hadn’t permitted myself in years, so the sudden alarm was the same. I stiffened, sat up, and scrambled away, a fresh tightness seizing my throat. The Porrinyards made no attempt to come after me, instead choosing to remain where they knelt, watching as I curled into a ball and hugged myself with both arms.

  “It’s not you,” I said. It was a sentence I’d spoken before, after other failed experiments with intimacy. It had felt just as stupid and inadequate then as it felt now.

  “It’s all right,” the Porrinyards told me. “I didn’t take it personally. We have time.”

  I didn’t turn to face them. “No. No, I’m sorry, but we don’t.” I straightened my collar, used the back of my hand to wipe the stray tears from my eyes, and stood, taking a moment to regard the chamber’s plain luminescent walls.

  The space didn’t feel as empty as it had felt not too long ago. But nothing that inhabited it now was any kind of improvement. The things that inhabited it now were angry.

  I turned back to the Porrinyards and found a pair of identical stricken expressions.

  They said, “Do you mean we don’t have time now, or we won’t have time ever?”

  “Please understand. I can’t get involved in…anything…until my job here is done.” More tired, physically and emotionally, than I’d been at any point since my arrival, I fought off another manifestation of the vague sense that I’d left something undone, and murmured: “The thing is, this is not just one case, but several. At least two. Maybe three or four. All unrelated, all happening to take place in the same place at the same time. The irrelevancies have gotten so jumbled up that I don’t even know what end is up anymore.”

  The Porrinyards grinned. “Confusion between up and down being a pretty common complaint, on this station.”

  I matched their grin, despite myself. “Well, yes.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  I took my bag from Oscin, and slung it over my shoulder. “I’m going to start cutting the knots.”

  19

  KNOTS

  We returned to the skimmer, where Godel and Lassiter were stewing in resentful silence, and from there flew back to the hangar, where I spent the rest of the day in the transport, conducting more interviews with the indentures of Hammocktown.

  I didn’t need to know much, just confirm what I already suspected. Most of what I found out confirmed information already given, as always amazing me with how insistent truth can become, once uncovered. A couple of the younger indentures even laughed at me for not figuring it out before. They’d been certain I already knew.

  Interviewing Li-Tsan again didn’t take any longer than expected; the woman was still paranoid and abusive and wrapped up in her victimhood. She didn’t answer any questions. But her reactions, when I told her what I knew, proved interesting indeed. As did Nils D’Onofrio’s, when I spoke to him. He was just as embittered and almost as defensive.

  Robin Fish was lost, distant, and filled with a sadness that might have overwhelmed me had I been any more receptive to pity. She actually wept. But I expected that. She’d already established herself as maudlin and sloppy. She was also relieved to get the truth out in the open. She gave me more names, some of whom gave up the truth at once, some of whom I had to threaten, and some of whom I just didn’t bother speaking to at all, because by then the picture was clear and I was able to infer the continuation of the pattern from their individual files.

  It all comprised one hell of a large domino.

  Now all I had to do was topple it onto the next one.

  Before I went I composed another coded message to Artis Bringen. It could have been the longest; part of me wanted to start with an essay, explaining why I wanted to know or conceding that I might have been wrong. But everything I added to the question kept distorting its intent. Eventually I just went with what I needed to know, and fired off the shortest dispatch I’d ever sent him. It was a question that could translate as, Are you my enemy, or not? The words were different, but the meaning was the same.

  I did not know whether I’d have the guts to send it.

  When I emerged from the transport into the brighter but no more cheerful light of the hangar, I found that the mood among Gibb’s delegation had degenerated further since the events of the previous night. The same people who had shown determination and defiance during the evacuation had now enjoyed a full day of inactivity and gathering tension. Many sat around outside the sleepcubes, lost in conversations ranging from grim to ribald.

  Some glanced at me and muttered comments to friends: no doubt the fortieth or fiftieth distorted conversation about my insane, suicidal behavior on the skimmer. A snatch of laughter attracted my attention and turned out to be a number of indentures indulging in buzzpops. I saw a deeply inebriated Cif Negelein, looking like he’d rubbed himself in every patch of organic matter between here and New London, pulling the woman with purple hair into a sloppy kiss. But the numbers were off. Whenever I passed an open sleepcube, there were indentures lying asleep, indentures sitting on the edge of cots with their heads in their hands, indentures who looked as if they expected the very deck beneath their feet to open up and swallow them at any moment.

  Peyrin Lastogne sat with two men and one woman beside a storage crate drafted into service as a table, playing a game involving little silver spheres, golden pyramids, and a tiny holographic hoop that revolved around the center of the table, flashing red whenever it faced one of the players. I didn’t know the rules, but the body language of the players was enough to establish Lastogne himself as the runaway winner.

  His mood rose a notch the instant he saw me. “Counselor. You’ve had quite an adventurous day, haven’t you?”

  He made the word adventurous sound like a curse. “Interesting. And you?”

  “Anything but. My duties at the moment seem limited to cheerleading. I have enjoyed watching that steady stream of people, going in and out of that transport, and trying to guess just what you’ve determined.”

  The three indentures at the table all joined him in waiting expectantly for my answer.

  “Would you like to discuss it?” I asked.

  “Alone?”

  “Of course.”

  “All right.” He stood, deactivated the game, apologized to the others, and escorted me to a sleepcube a short distance away. The practically narcoleptic Cartsac was already sleeping in there, but when he saw who needed the space he pulled himself upright and shuffled out the door, wearing the expression of a man who only wanted another place to lie down. Lastogne sealed the flap, sat on one of the cube’s two cots, gestured at the other, and said, “I know what you’re thinking. Is all this intoxication wise?”

  I didn’t sit. “I was about to say.”

  He shrugged. “Trust me, they’ve recovered from worse. They’ll hop to attention if we need them to.”

  I just nodded. “It is all about down-time, isn’t it?”

  The silence that followed was not broken when I activated the hiss screen.

  Every external indication marked Lastogne as a calm, measured professional, determined to avoid the appearance of any reaction, either good or bad. But on this one point, at least, there were no secrets between us. “It’s a little outside the stated goals of your
investigation, isn’t it, Counselor? I wouldn’t have considered you the type to indulge in that kind of silly witch-hunt.”

  “It’s not silly,” I said, “but you’re right. It is beneath my notice.”

  “Then why go so far out of your way to ruin a man?”

  “Why risk your own career by protecting him?” When he failed to answer, I lowered my voice in pretend-conspiracy. “I know it’s not respect. You’ve already indicated what you think of him. So what is it? What hold does he have on you?”

  He surprised me by laughing out loud: a rich, hearty laugh filled with affection for both Gibb and myself. “Is that what you think, Counselor? That he pulls my strings? I’m sorry, but you’re way off. I could leave this station tomorrow and forget his name by the middle of next week.”

  “Then why protect him?”

  “Because he’s a mediocrity. And I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for mediocrities.”

  Li-Tsan had intimated as much, just yesterday. “Come on—”

  “No, no, no, I’m serious. Do you have any idea how unbearable life would be if everybody excelled? If everybody was noble, perceptive, courageous, and selfless? If everybody had open eyes and saw the forces that really ran things? It would be a madhouse. You need a few empty-calorie people like Gibb just to dilute the mix.”

  The man actually seemed to be serious. “In my experience, mediocrity in life-or-death situations gets people killed.”

  He looked knowing. “Read your history. Greatness kills more.”

  There was nothing I could say to that.

  He shrugged. “So I take care of Gibb, like a pet. As long as the work gets done, or as close to done as the circumstances here allow him to accomplish, and nobody gets hurt by any moments of actual incompetence, I see no harm in just letting him have his way.”

  “Except that’s the whole point,” I said. “People have been hurt.”

  His eyes widened. “Oh, come now. You can’t seriously blame what happened to Warmuth and Santiago on Gibb’s stupidity.”