“Yes. We were a little worried about those, at first. An infestation, on Hammocktown, would be seriously unpleasant. But the bugs don’t want anything to do with us, even when we’re covered with juice ourselves. Humans are just, well, naturally repellent.”
I refrained from saying that this was hardly news. “Is it old or disabled in some way?”
“No. That’s as speedy as they get. Makes sense, though, this being an environment where being sure of every move you make bears a definite evolutionary advantage. And with food everywhere and no natural predators supplied by their landlords, they don’t need all that much speed anyway.”
I was reminded of another species I’d encountered, on the case that had given me my secret mission in life. The Catarkhans had been blind, deaf, mute, insensate by all human standards, and so slow-moving that their entire lives had been a ballet of pathetic obliviousness. The dull, inexorable momentum of this Brachiator reminded me of the average Catarkhan. “Is it even aware we’re here?”
“Oh, he can hear us fine. And he’ll be able to see us, too, if we can get within his range of vision. We pretty much have to be next to him, or on top of him, for that to happen. We can even have a chat. They speak Mercantile.”
The dominant language of human trade and diplomacy was a crass and unpoetic tongue, engineered long ago to edit out elements that could be culturally offensive to any of humanity’s thousands of squabbling subcultures. There was not a single beautiful phrase in it. Encountering it among the Brachiators raised my suspicions a notch. “That’s a little too convenient, Mr. Lastogne.”
“Thank the AIsource. They had the whole species fluent by the time our team arrived. A stab at hospitality, I suppose.”
Or a sneaky way of suppressing the real Brachiator language, so Gibb’s team couldn’t comb it for insights into Brachiator thought processes. One One One was aptly named: it seemed to have circles within circles within circles. “So let’s have a talk.”
He scared me silly by grabbing hold of the Uppergrowth and climbing hand-over-hand to the creature’s position. A few seconds of conversation later, he returned, dropping back onto the mesh bridge with such ease that it erased any impression he’d been showing off.
I needed all my self control just to avoid being sick, but kept my face stony as the Brachiator, moving with significantly less grace than Lastogne, obeyed the summons. Unlike Lastogne, who’d managed his feat in seconds, it needed almost a full minute to traverse the distance, greeting us in a scratchy, high-pitched whine. “Peyrin the Half-Ghost asks me to speak to New Ghost. Can New Ghost hear me?”
Lastogne nudged me.
I said, “Yes.”
“I am Friend to Half-Ghosts,” the Brachiator said. “I am not Friend to New Ghosts. I speak to New Ghost only as courtesy to friend Peyrin.”
Lastogne nudged me again.
“I am Counselor Andrea Cort. Friend to,” I hesitated, then felt the correctness of my instinctive response, “the Living.”
The Brachiator needed long seconds to consider that. “Will you stay a New Ghost or become a Half-Ghost like Peyrin?”
Lastogne placed his index finger before his lips.
But I never shut up when told to shut up. “What if I don’t want to be a ghost of any kind? What if I wish Life?”
The Brachiator sniffed, in what may have been its equivalent to the snobbish dismissal humans of self- proclaimed quality reserve for others, below their station, who insist on applying to the same clubs. “Life is not good for ghosts. It exhausts them.”
I ignored Lastogne’s increasingly annoyed gestures. “I breathe air. I eat food. I sleep and wake. These are conditions of Life.”
“You may live, but you are not of Life.”
“And if I become a Half-Ghost?”
“Then you can touch Life.”
“Just touch it?” I asked.
“Yes. And perhaps keep it a little while.”
“I can’t have it?”
“Having it,” the Brachiator said, “is too much for a Half-Ghost to expect.”
Lastogne said, “Thank you, Friend. Now, if you’ll excuse us…”
I bit down hard on the tip of my thumb, found focus in the moment of clarifying pain, and said, “One last question. What do you know about the beings my people call the AIsource?”
Friend to Half-Ghosts said, “We are of the AIsource. We breathe the air of the AIsource. We know the AIsource with every breath. The AIsource know us with every breath. There are no secrets from them.”
“And are they alive or dead by your definition?”
“The AIsource are not Life.”
“Then they’re Ghosts?”
“They are not Ghosts. They are the hands in Ghosts. They are not Life, but the vessel of Life. They.” Friend to Half-Ghosts halted in mid-declaration, like any other sentient searching the air around itself for the phrase best suited for capturing a difficult thought. But the silence went on, and on, and on, stretching so long that the sentence already begun closed itself off like a malignant tumor excised before it could cause irreparable damage to surrounding tissue. Then it twitched its head and said, “I apologize, Peyrin. I have broken the laws of my people. I cannot answer any more of Counselor Andrea Cort’s questions while she remains a New Ghost. Please tell her we can speak if she becomes a Half-Ghost.”
“She understands,” Lastogne said.
The Brachiator turned and embarked upon its long and laborious journey back to its previous feeding place. At the rate it traveled, the trip would cost it many minutes, but the Brachiator seemed undisturbed by the inconvenience, a genetic aversion to haste being a clear evolutionary advantage in any species that could do nothing in a hurry.
Not that evolution, as it usually worked, had been a factor on One One One.
Why would the AIsource, a species with a computation speed that qualified as instantaneous by human standards, create a species this slow of thought and deed? The Brachs could have been acrobats. Instead, they were sloths.
I looked at Lastogne. “That’s some hierarchy they have. New Ghosts. Half-Ghosts. Life. What do you make of it?”
“Pretty much what I see you’ve started to get already. They refuse to believe in human beings as actual living creatures. The New Ghost designation they gave you is simple enough to figure. It’s what they call people like yourself who are newly arrived and have not yet been initiated into their circle. We have yet to figure out why we’re dead to them, unless it’s pure, garden-variety species chauvinism, but they’re pretty serious about it. They won’t talk to any of us for long unless they first declare us Half-Ghost, with one foot in the living world. And that requires us to prove we can spend hours hanging from the Uppergrowth as they do. Cynthia Warmuth was undergoing that very rite of passage, with a tribe about an hour’s flight from here, the night we lost her.”
“Is there any reason a Brachiator couldn’t have killed her?”
“They might have. They had the opportunity, and of course the means. They even have the temperment, to some extent; you can talk to Mo Lassiter about that. But every human being at this outpost, you excepted, has undergone the same rite, and Warmuth was our first bad experience. If a Brach killed her, it was a behavior we haven’t encountered before, and it’s difficult to separate it from what happened to Santiago.”
“Which doesn’t mean it was linked in fact. They could be unrelated incidents.”
“True,” Lastogne said. “That’s another thing you’re here to figure out.”
