“They’re an acquired taste. I like them, in moderation. They’re easy to ferment, by the way, but I warn you away from any invitation to partake.”
“That bad?”
“That strong. The intoxicant stays in your system for close to forty-eight hours. It’s an excellent drunk if you don’t mind being impaired for up to two days Mercantile…a bad idea if you’re still getting used to the conditions here.”
Substance abuse is an endemic problem in the Dip Corps, where so many indentures are, like Warmuth and Santiago, driven more by economic need than any passion for the work. But the risks that such a form of escape carried here seemed greater than in most places. I thought of all the daredevil indentures navigating Hammocktown, and focused on one young woman who was now traveling hand-over-hand across a slack line strung between hammocks, unmindful of the many kilometers of empty space that yawned below her.
I shuddered and, to distract myself from the image of a drunken indenture taking a one-way slip into the lower atmosphere, asked, “What about those giant flying things I saw on the way here? The dragons?”
“What about them?”
“Well, what do they eat?”
“There’s a whole complex food chain going on down there. The clouds contain heavy organic compounds, an insect form which metabolizes them, a birdlike thing that eats the insects, and the dragons, which eat some combination of the above I’ve never bothered to ask about. I think there are only about four or five of them, all told, and that they function as living air purifiers, sweeping that level of atmosphere for compounds the AIsource want to get rid of it, and happily shitting whatever they want. Like vacuum cleaners with a mythological edge.”
“Have you ever gotten a close look at one of the dragons?”
“Enough to satisfy my curiosity. They’re not sentient, you see, so they’re outside the scope of our mission here.”
“Are we sure about that? Them not being sentient?”
“The AIsource say they’re not.”
“AIsource honesty has already been called into question once today.”
“Maybe so,” Lastogne admitted, “but it seems silly for them to call attention to one bunch of unlikely sentients we never would have known about and then deny the sentience of another bunch who would have been just as easy to keep a secret.”
“We could, Counselor, but we only have a handful of people here, and this world brings an entirely new meaning to the phrase ‘bottomless pit.’ There are more different atmospheric environments the lower you descend, and they all have their own life-forms, increasingly alien as you go down, and there’s no point in wondering just how many of those creatures down there might be sentient when the AIsource won’t allow us to import the equipment we’d need to map those lower altitudes properly. The only vehicles we’re allowed have trouble surviving the intense conditions below that cloud cover. Maybe we’ll get down there someday. If we do I’d love to be part of it. But right now it’s enough to worry about the Brachiators. They’re our assignment, just as Warmuth and Santiago are yours.”
Farther on, he pointed out another pair of young indentures, making their way across the outpost. One man and one woman, they were clearly a couple, maybe siblings and maybe lovers. Both had stubbly silver hair and square faces, and both were clad only in shiny silver briefs and another thin strip of the same material across their chests. Their arms were as well developed as any I’d ever seen, and their abdominal muscles as rock-hard, which must have aided them as they traveled hand-over-hand on the Uppergrowth itself, using its many protruding roots like the rungs of an overhanging ladder. They moved with the practiced speed of people who traveled that way on a daily basis, and their dangling legs, kicking back and forth as they went, gave them the look of people running across a floor tangible only to themselves.
My personal aesthetic left little room for appreciation of beauty, but they qualified. I felt an undeniable awe, which I quickly repressed. “Who are they?”
“The Porrinyards.”
Oscin and Skye. “What can you tell me about them?”
“They hail from some world where the settlements are built on the branches of mile-high trees. They were scrambling branch-to-branch from infancy, so they were natural choices for assignment here.”
“How would you assess their relationship with the victims?”
“Helpful,” Lastogne said.
“Just helpful?” I pressed.
“Just that. They’re professionals at what they do.”
“And nothing more?”
“They’re cylinked. They don’t make friends in the usual sense.”
I’d heard that said about other cylinked pairs, but I’d never encountered anybody with that particular enhancement, so I didn’t know whether to consider Lastogne’s claim accurate. “Do you?”
He wasn’t shocked. “No. But it’s different for me, you see. I make no friends because it’s too time-consuming, and they make no friends because their condition makes the idea superfluous. What about you, Counselor? I gather from your treatment of Mr. Gibb that you don’t make friends either.”
“I don’t.”
“Repugnance, disinterest, or sheer misanthropy?”
“None of your business.”
He took no offense. “I shouldn’t be surprised, considering your background.”
I chilled still further. “What do you know about me?”
“Everything unclassified and much that’s not supposed to be. You’re not exactly obscure, Counselor. The Bocai incident, the Magrison’s Fugue Reparations Trial, the Cort Compromise—they’re all pretty famous to people interested in that kind of thing.”
More chill: “And what kind of thing is that?”
“Diplomats being diplomats.”
Given his already established opinion of diplomats, I was not foolish enough to take this as a compliment.
He continued. “It’s fascinating. We have a lot in common, the four of us—you, me, and our linked pair, the Porrinyards—all antisocial by inclination, all obliged by profession to make nice with others.”
I gave my voice all the cold I could muster. “It occurred to me a long time ago, Mr. Lastogne, that diplomacy has very little to do with making friends.”
Lastogne’s expression resembled a warm smile about as much as a heap of blasted rubble resembled a home. “No, Counselor. It doesn’t.”
The thing was a collection of four furry, muscle-bound arms, radiating from the edges of a torso streaked and matted with manna juice. The head was a small, neckless bump situated at its center of that torso, bearing facial features reminiscent of the fabled, but extinct, human cousin known as the chimpanzee, except with three eyes and a toothless mouth twisted in what looked like a perpetual grimace. The position of that face atop the torso dictated a life spent facing the Uppergrowth. If any manuever within its range of movement allowed the Brach to face the cloudscape below, it would have included falling as a necessary first step.
The creature was so sluggish that I needed several seconds to be sure it was actually moving. Its edges looked fuzzy until I realized it was surrounded by a halo of insects, scavenging manna drippings from its fur.
“They’re messy eaters,” Lastogne said. “The vines spout sap when punctured, so the average Brach spends its lifetime covered with sticky glop.”
“Which explains the bugs.”
