I didn’t know how true that nonsense was in practical circumstances. In the course of my daily work I’d encountered any number of diplomats and exosociologists who claimed to be able to watch over intelligent alien races while themselves possessing only as much observable sentience as doorknobs.
Gibb’s personal evaluations of her were also attached to the file, and marked her for guarded praise. She had potential, he said, but she needed to learn how to curb her somewhat excessive zeal. It seemed to be more a personality thing than any problems with her skill set. On four separate occasions, under his watch alone, she’d scored highly enough, on examinations, to earn some additional time off her contract. It shortened her full hitch by less than a month—not much time at all, when you considered how many years she still had left on her contract. But not bad for an indenture who hadn’t even been cleared for her first direct contact with the locals. Either she’d excelled beyond all reason in training or Gibb was an unusually generous boss.
The first image I found of Santiago was not quite as congenial or as posed as Warmuth’s; it was a candid shot, taken from a distance, of her clinging to the Uppergrowth with all four limbs. There were four Brachiators in the background, looking less at home there than she did. About all I learned from it was that she was up to the physical demands of the work. I requested another image and got it: an awkwardly posed image of Santiago standing in a triangular corridor, arms crossed, one thin eyebrow raised. She had dark eyes, tan skin, a round face framed by tousled caramel hair, and a slight underbite that transformed her lower lip into a pout. There was no hint of a smile.
Santiago’s papers were fewer than Warmuth’s, but tinged with a bitter edge. One passage Lastogne had bookmarked for me was especially interesting. “For most sentients, belonging to their respective species means bearing the influence of the whole. Being a human being often means being outshouted by the whole. It means being a cell with no voice in the function of the organism. It means being owned.”
There it was again.
It could be a coincidence. It was a common concept among the sufficiently cynical, a parade I help to lead. Santiago’s background as a debt-slave even made it reasonable. There were too many worlds like hers, and too many people like her aching to leave those worlds behind. Their need was a large part of what staffed the Dip Corps.
A look at Santiago’s bond put the nature of the contract into sharp relief. The woman had exchanged her own debt for a ten-year contract. By the time the Dip Corps added the costs of transportation, training, and the medical treatment necessary to cleanse her lungs and body chemistry of the homeworld industrial toxins that would have left her dead or incapacitated by age forty, the time-debt on her contract had stretched from ten years to twenty.
Extended, just like Warmuth’s: a coincidence, or a link? Either way, she wouldn’t have minded. The Corps was the best form of debt slavery—the kind that ended in freedom if the job was done.
But it was still slavery. Ownership.
The kind that made people angry.
Santiago had been described as an angry person.
I looked further. Santiago had earned some mild time bonuses in her months on One One One, but had also been fined for antisocial behavior, the worst penalty coming after her confrontation with Warmuth. Once I did the math, she turned out to be earning out her contract at something approaching real time. That was a mediocre score indeed. I wondered how much of her abrasiveness was political, and how much was personality.
I thought of another abrasive personality: Lastogne.
He’d also made a reference to being owned.
He had given the words special emphasis.
He struck me as a man embittered by the deal he had made.
He had gone out of his way to tell me that he’d already heard of me.
Had he been giving me a gentle nudge in the direction he wanted the investigation to go?
Or was he obscuring the trail? Maybe he was just pushing buttons. Or maybe all his talk of Santiago’s attitude problem was a smoke screen for his own.
I directed the hytex to provide me with his file.
Nothing came up.
I went into the Dip Corps Database, and used not only the security codes I had earned but also several my superiors would have been very unhappy to know I possessed.
Nothing came up.
I bit my thumb, wondering if I’d gotten his name right.
No, that was facile. I never got names wrong. I got people wrong, but not their names. He was Peyrin Lastogne, all right.
But why was there no available data?
I was still wondering when the floating white blob the hytex projected instead of a useful answer blinked, like a single cyclopean eye, and exploded, filling the space with a blinding light. When that faded, a new image appeared. It was another generated image of myself, this time captured in the immediate aftermath of a horrific beating. My face was a collection of pain piled upon pain, with every millimeter of exposed skin swollen and glossy with blood. My eyes were puffed shut, the cheekbones staved in, my gaping mouth an assortment of shattered teeth. Any injuries below the neckline were invisible beneath my black suit, but from the way it stood, seeming ready to fall at any moment, favoring its right leg and cradling its midsection with both hands, they must have been just as brutal, and just as ugly. Hiding them just gave the imagination room to imagine the absolute worst, and produce the image of a woman whose entire body was one walking wound.
The animation took a single blind step, stiffened, and as if in terrible, clairvoyant realization, emitted a cry pregnant with the certainty that everything it had endured up until this moment was just empty preamble.
The top of its head disappeared in a burst of blood and smoke.
The brutalized version of myself did not fall but just stood there, dazed, everything above mid-forehead amputated, oozing rivulets of blood from the splintered basin its skull had become.
Then she tumbled forward, disappearing even as she fell out of frame.
I blinked several times.
And murmured another silent response to the unknown sender.
6.
In the morning, the suns of One One One had the common decency to seep into brilliance, avoiding the kind of sudden light burst that would have blinded everyone in the Habitat. Having gone without sleep, I spent that hour watching the earliest stages of that dawn filter through the material of my hammock and bring my own shadow on the tented ceiling into sharp relief.
When it came to evidence that I’d survived yet another night, I’ve known worse.
By the time the hytex warned me that my ride had arrived, I had soniced myself clean, availed myself of the outhouse structure at the center of Hammocktown (in what must have been the most harrowing trip to a bathroom I’d ever known), and thrown on a fresh black suit. Zipping open the port at the base of the hammock, I found Lastogne and the Porrinyards both below me in an AIsource skimmer of a design much sleeker than yesterday’s.
Lastogne waved at me, still looking like a man harboring a secret joke. The Porrinyards were harder to read, their expressions conveying no feeling deeper than amiability. They still dressed identically, with thin strips of shiny silver material over their breasts and waists, but now that I saw them close up I could tell that they were not quite as androgynous as they’d appeared at a distance. The taller and bulkier one’s waist cloth was just tight enough to reveal a telltale bulge in the crotch, and the slighter one’s bound chest bore a pair of tiny breasts distinguishable among all those hypertrophic muscles.
The woman had a soft, nearly transparent down along her jawline, the male a darker complexion and eyes that testified to Asian ancestry. And there was something deep and amused about the way they regarded me—
