Emissaries from the Dead

by Adam-Troy Castro

  Lastogne’s mouth fell open. “I’ll be damned.”

  “Consider a Brachiator falling. Imagine its prognosis for survival if it falls, let’s say, so much as one meter. I think you’ll agree, that’s not even enough to pick up appreciable speed. Maybe it hasn’t even vanished from peripheral vision yet. We already know that the AIsource won’t rescue it. Does it stand any chance of survival? Whatsoever?”

  What followed was the well-known phenomenon of a group, asked a simple question with an obvious answer, that nevertheless remains silent as everybody waits for somebody else to trigger a suspected rhetorical trap.

  The Porrinyards were the first to build up enough confidence to say the obvious. “No, Counselor. It doesn’t.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “In that instant, it is still breathing, it is still feeling, it is still thinking, but by all standards reasonable to its species, it is as dead as the Brachiator who took a tumble a week ago, or one that fell last year.”

  Lastogne rubbed his eyes. “Yeah.”

  “Think about it,” I said. “From their perspective, we rise from the place that nothing can survive. We are solid, we are friendly, we speak to them, we are clearly entities with substance, but we are also visitors from the land of the Dead. By all reasonable calculations, we are Ghosts. It is no wonder they resist speaking to anybody who hasn’t spent a night on the Uppergrowth. Doing that gives us a certain link to Life. Not quite the same thing as life, since we still keep coming in and out of existence—”

  Lastogne now seemed thoroughly disgusted with himself. “Like Half-Ghosts.”

  “Exactly. A natural classification for somebody sometimes alive and sometimes dead: a concept they find strange, but which is evidently within their ability to accept. Unfortunately for her, Cynthia Warmuth didn’t see things that way. She had something else, which several people, including you, have described as a downright compulsive empathy.”

  Was that a flicker of pain in Lastogne’s eyes? “Yes.”

  “She wanted, too much, to be inside the skin of anybody she spoke to. She made herself a pest about it. So much a pest that people hated her for it. But she would have survived unpopularity if she hadn’t taken it a step too far: the same step I took when I spent a night on the Uppergrowth. She told the Brachiators she wanted to be Alive like them, without ever once considering what they’d think that meant.”

  Lastogne now looked downright stricken. “And so…?”

  “And so,” I said, “bearing her no malice whatsoever, they nailed her into place.”

  Lastogne stood up, turned his back on us, and strode to the cube’s far wall, his arms crossed before him, his head bowed in an attitude of unbearable sorrow. Neither the Porrinyards nor I said anything to disturb him. After several long minutes, he returned to his seat, his grimace now a wan, mournful scowl.

  I went on as if there had been no interruption at all. “It wouldn’t have occurred to them that they could hurt her. They didn’t think she was completely Alive in the first place. To their eyes, she was already just a Ghost, with an unnatural half-existence; nothing as linked to everyday existence as a wound should have had any effect on her. No. With the best possible intentions, she asked for their help holding on to Life, and with the best possible intentions, they gave her what she wanted. The negative effect on her came as a complete surprise to them. They told me this themselves. Life is not healthy for Ghosts. It uses them up too fast. Being nailed to Life was no good for Warmuth. She bled to death. It used her up too fast. This was news to the Brachiators, but once it was revealed to them they took it as a cautionary lesson. Which is why they didn’t want to give me the same thing, until I begged them.”

  Lastogne eyed the Porrinyards, soliciting silent feedback, finding in their expressions of wide-eyed understanding acceptance of a truth everybody here had failed to see. After a moment he turned toward me once again, but his eyes were not focused on me so much as past me, to some memory only his eyes could see. “I always told her it would hurt her someday.”

  Nothing he had ever said to me sounded less like him.

  The Porrinyards, who knew him better than I did, turned toward him, their profiles matching studies in incredulity.

  I wasn’t surprised at all. “What?”

  “Caring, as much as she did.” His voice broke. He heard it, gathered himself together, and shrugged, apologizing for the moment of weakness. “It’s not typical, Counselor. You know how I feel about the system. It cements mediocrity in place. Most of the indentures are just trying to do their time and get out. Most of the careerists are just trying to rise to their own level of incompetence. And when you find an occasional person who really cares, the irritant like poor Cynthia, they turn out to be worse than either. They go and screw everything up by behaving like what they do matters.”

  The Porrinyards were alternating aghast glances at me with disbelieving glances at Lastogne.

  I couldn’t blame them. Not after everything they’d said about his selfishness as a lover.

  But this was still territory I’d expected. “You loved her, didn’t you?”

  “I wasn’t drawn to her, at first. It’s like I told you the first day: I don’t look to make friends. The last thing I could ever want was understanding from someone so arrogant she actually believed other people could be understood.” He shook his head, not just once but several times, perhaps even too many times, before raising his eyes back to me. “I always told her it would hurt her someday. I even warned her to be careful it didn’t get her killed. Shows how goddamned perceptive I am, doesn’t it?”

  There was an odd, hysterical sense of triumph in his voice. The loss of Cynthia Warmuth hadn’t shattered him at all. It had only reinforced his grim sense of cynical amusement, confirming the hard lessons he’d learned from other losses, other tragedies, other people he’d driven away.

  The moment lasted just long enough for Skye to extend her hand, almost touch his shoulder, then draw her hand back, deciding the touch a bad idea.

  Then he pulled himself together, took a deep breath, and noticed me again, this time with a dark resentment that bordered on bile. “But it’s not sufficient, Counselor. It doesn’t explain Santiago. Or the attempts on your life. Or that attacker who went after Oscin and Skye. Or what’s happened to Hammocktown.”

  I looked him right in the eye, and nodded. “You’re right. It doesn’t.”

  “What do you expect me to think? That Gibb’s behind all this? That he’s somewhere in the Uppergrowth, waiting for another fresh victim to come along?”

  “That remains a possible explanation, sir.”

  “But you don’t think so.”

  “No, sir. I think what the evidence tells me.”

  “And you’re not about to tell me what that is.”

  “Not until I’m sure.”

  “So how can that even begin to compensate for everything else you’ve done?”

  “By itself,” I said, “it doesn’t. But this was never just one mystery, with one solution. It was several, all mixed up and getting in the way of a comprehensive explanation. I had to clear away all the smaller issues, like Gibb and like Warmuth, just to get at the bigger picture. And that’s the one last thing I still have left to do.” I took a deep breath. “Who are you, Peyrin Lastogne?”

  He stared at me as if unsure whether to give me a medal or punch me in the mouth. Then he glanced at the Porrinyards, first one and then the other, to determine just how much they’d been infected by my madness. When they just nodded, he threw up his arms and stomped back to the same corner he’d retreated to before, turning a number of different colors.

  He’d said all he was going to say.

  The assembled indentures watched as the Porrinyards and I marched back to the skimmer dock, their eyes either accusatory or imploring. I had thought them people under siege before, the day I’d arrived here, but I’d been wrong. This was what being at siege was like. How many of these people were trying to persuade themselves they
had a chance of surviving the rest of the day? How many had already decided they wouldn’t?

  I could have given them a little reassuring speech, like Gibb had tried to do after the evacuation of Hammocktown, but I’d never been the reassuring speech sort. Maybe that was another area I could work on, in the future. If I had a future.

  Oskar Levine was the only one who rushed up to us, just before we left the hangar; he’d been working on the bluegel crypts not long beforehand, and was so stained by the stuff it was hard to find much of his skin’s original color. I confess being relieved when he didn’t obey what looked like his initial impulse to hug me. “Is it true?” he demanded. “Is Hammocktown gone?”

  “It’s true,” I told him.

  “And Gibb? He was there when it went?”

  He seemed more concerned than I would have expected of a man who Gibb had treated like a traitor. I wanted to see if he would fake grief. It hardly seemed in character for him, but people contradict their own natures in times of crisis. So I said, “Yes,” and waited.

  It took him several heartbeats to work up his next question, but he ultimately let it out, all in one breath. “Do you think he’s dead, or just in hiding?”

  It was a fair question.

  I said, “I don’t know,” and left him.

  23

  IN THE CONFESSIONAL

  Between sleeplessness, physical exhaustion and the lingering aftereffects of several near brushes with death, I was as wrung out as a buzzpop addict in the last stages of withdrawal. Part of me argued in favor of a break. If the hangar was indeed safe, as I suspected, I could have taken days, even hours, to rest up and gird myself for the next step, without fear of my extended period of inaction dooming others to join the growing list of casualties.

  It would have been nice. It even would have been wise.

  But waiting was not an option.

  I just couldn’t take being played with any more.

  The Porrinyards didn’t say much on the way to the Interface. They knew, with the certainty born of consensus, that no words could stall me, stop me, or comfort me. But Skye did grab my wrist, as I knelt to enter the portal, to ask: “Do you know about us, too? Everything?”

  I couldn’t smile. “Yes. I do.”

  “How long?”

  “For a while now.”

  They both looked like they were going to cry. “Are you going to be all right with that?”

  “I don’t know. It depends on what I can confirm in there.”

  They nodded, with a complete lack of surprise, and acting as one, stepped forward to wrap me in an embrace. Oscin had to stoop, a little, to get in. Both trembled.

  “You had better live.”

  It wasn’t fear that made me so reluctant to let go, but the sheer novelty of connection: feeling myself a part of somebody else’s life, and feeling them as part of mine. I wasn’t sure it was something I could afford. But that was also part of what I had to find out in there.

  The Porrinyards released me and stepped back, dry-eyed, providing me with a matched set of brave little smiles.

  I could only nod at them and pull myself through the hatch.

  It was not difficult to notice subtle changes in the chamber of indistinct blue skies. A new element had been added, one that clashed with the ambience of infinite space: a certain claustrophobic oppressiveness that made the walls, wherever they were, loom like a prison. I don’t know whether that came from changes in me or from subliminal cues activated by the AIsource. Nor do I know whether I imagined, or merely projected, the impression of hoarded breath. I only know what I believed. And I believed that, insofar as it was even possible for beings like the AIsource to feel apprehension, in the presence of a creature so much smaller and shorter-lived than themselves, it was what they felt now.

  As I floated there, waiting for be acknowledged, I found myself understanding them on the most visceral of levels. As intelligences, they were beyond my comprehension. As creatures of power, they were gods who reduced me to the significance of dust. But as souls, they were downright ordinary. They had ambitions, and feelings, as base as those belonging to any of us. They were, in the final analysis, as corrupt as we were. And in that, they were kindred.

  In my time I’d been fascinated by them, afraid of them, suspicious of them, and enraged by them.

  Now, for the first time ever, I could feel, rather than feign, contempt for them.

  It was liberating.

  When they spoke, they used the voice of a male: deep and resonant, with just enough of an echo to make the unseen walls seem even farther away.

  Congratulations, Counselor. We have heard that you came up with an explanation for the death of Cynthia Warmuth.

  “You heard by listening. You were with us, following our every word.”

  If we sometimes behave as if we acquire information at the same rate that you organics do, then that’s simply because it’s polite to modulate our conversations with you to your own capacities.

  “Polite,” I said. “Or necessary to preserve our illusions.”

  Don’t they amount to more or less the same thing?

  “No, they don’t. Not when it renders communication less convenient, not more. Not when it complicates every conversation we have. When you do that, the pretense itself becomes the very point—and it leaves me with no choice but to consider just why you find it so important.”

  Another pause, this one long enough to make me worry about being ejected for my effrontery.

  Then, as if grudgingly: Go on.

  “Everybody here sees the absurdity of it. You see and hear everything aboard this station. But in order to actually converse with you in return, Gibb’s people need to hop a skimmer and travel all the way back to this one place. This one room. Why would you make everybody do this? What advantage would you find in it?”

  It’s our station. We can make any arbitrary rules we like.

  They sounded like the words of a spoiled child, caught trying to dominate a playground.

  “It is your station, and the ecosystem you’ve set up here has any number of arbitrary rules, but none of them seem pointless. None of them seem designed to cause inconvenience for its own sake. This chamber does. For a while there I assumed you use it just because you wanted to remind us who ran the place, but now that I’ve been around here for a while I think the true explanation’s a little more devious than that. I think you use it to keep us from thinking about all the things you would prefer us not to think about.”

  This pause was the longest so far. We’re not certain what you’re referencing there, Counselor.

  “Oh,” I said, my anger with them growing, “I’m sure you know exactly what I’m referencing, but since you insist on going through the motions, we can afford to put this issue aside for a moment or two. After I say a little bit more about Cynthia Warmuth…whose murder, whatever I said to Mr. Lastogne today, remains not quite solved.”

  A new tone entered the voice of the AIsource: awed fascination. We thought you were under the impression you were finished with that.

  “Not for a heartbeat. Not with the explanation I gave Mr. Lastogne. That was just about getting him off my back, so I could finish my business with you. No, my night on the Uppergrowth wasn’t about confirming my theory: it was about proving my theory wrong.”

  As before, we are very interested in hearing your reasoning.

  “I shouldn’t have to go through this. I should just tell you I know everything, and move on. But, very well. We can play games if you prefer. Some of what I told Lastogne was true. I did figure out the human place in Brachiator cosmology. I even figured out how they’d likely react to a human being who wanted more of a connection to Life. But I’ve also seen how slow they are…and I know it wouldn’t make any sense for them to be able to overwhelm a human being with the agility of one of Gibb’s people. Were Warmuth awake and aware of everything going on around her, she wouldn’t have needed lightning reflexes to escape the same way I did. Hell, I�
��m downright clumsy, and a simple tether line placed me beyond Brachiator reach long enough for help to reach me, even when that help was itself under attack. Why would Warmuth have any more trouble than I did?”

  You had the advantage of knowing recent history. Perhaps Warmuth didn’t know what they had planned until they took her by surprise.

  “That might have made sense if they’d merely mauled her. A mass attack of that kind, coming from all sides, from sentients who approach at the rate of Brachiators, might have been easy to mistake for any other kind of social activity, including ceremonial grooming or even—Juje help me—a group hug. But the Brachiators approached me with claws in hand, giving me the opportunity to fathom their violent intent long minutes before they actually reached me. I even closed my eyes a few times to simulate a distraction capable of preventing me from paying proper attention. But even when I gave them every possible advantage, it was impossible to believe in Warmuth being taken by surprise. Their group assault was interminable, inexorable, even frightening…and obvious. Warmuth would have had more than enough time to see that something was wrong, and summon help.”

  She could have been asleep.

  The AIsource was now behaving like a human suspect throwing out one idiot evasion after another, in the hopes of derailing the one true path to a solution. But a human suspect did that kind of thing out of panic and self-preservation. The AIsource seemed to be playing a game of catch with logic: pointing out all the holes still remaining in my argument, so I could fill them in as I went. It infuriated me, but I obliged. “Also not a realistic possibility. The Brachiators came after me as soon as I spoke the words that set them off. Warmuth wouldn’t have begged them for Life, watch them unsheathe claws and begin converging on her position, then conveniently fall asleep before they were close enough to act. That’s beyond ridiculous. No, I’m afraid that there are only two real possibilities here. Either she met up with someone who moved faster than she could, or she was already immobilized and helpless when that unknown party gave the Brachiators a very bad idea. Either way, that means another culprit.”