almost as if somebody had been telling them stories, and they approved.
Lastogne saluted me. “Good morning.”
The Porrinyards acknowledged me with a shared, “Counselor.”
I blinked away a wave of vertigo. “Good morning. Are we all going to the hub?”
“Mr. Lastogne said you wanted to interview me.” This, the Porrinyards also spoke together. It wasn’t so much simultaneous as stereo, with each member of the pair linking phonemes and word fragments and vowel tones with complementary sounds voiced by the other. The collaboration created the uncanny illusion of a shared voice emanating from some indeterminate space between them.
Nobody offered to help me descend the hammock’s ladder into the vehicle. Aware that this was a form of respect and simultaneously a test to determine if I deserved respect, I slid down, feeling a definite sense of relief once I entered the skimmer’s specific gravity. Standing on the solid deck was even more of a pleasure, after too many hours on the softer surfaces of Hammocktown.
Either way, I seemed to have passed a test.
Lastogne grinned. “Nobody would ever guess you had only been on-station a day.”
“Whatever.” But I wasn’t above feeling a little touch of pride.
As the skimmer pulled away from Hammocktown and picked up speed, its shadow, cast by the multiple glowsphere suns, raced along the Uppergrowth above us and was distorted by the gnarled texture of that knotted surface. The flight speed of this vessel seemed faster than that of the chatty skimmer that had ferried me yesterday, leaving me uncertain over whether to be pleased at today’s added convenience or annoyed over yesterday’s unnecessary delays. I contemplated the matter until the racing shadow blurred, then forced my attention back to the patient Lastogne. “We’re not going back on the same route I traveled yesterday.”
Lastogne said, “Right you are. Your personal transport’s docked at a bay well on the far end of the Hub. The best route to the Interface is through a portal much closer to us. It’ll be a much shorter flight today.”
Which was good news when it came to my flight aversion, bad news when it came to my hopes of gathering some information on the way. Rather than waste any more time, I got down to questioning the Porrinyards. “Which one of you is Oscin and which one of you is Skye?”
The woman spoke by herself. “I was born just Skye. He was born just Oscin.” They spoke together again, in that musical, but unnerving, shared voice. “We were linked at fifteen, and took the surname Porrinyards.”
“It saves them a lot of money buying each other monogrammed jewelry,” Lastogne said.
I ignored him. “Did you do this to yourselves voluntarily?”
The pair flashed identical smiles. “That’s an offensive question, Counselor, but I’ll take it as an innocent one.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
“Yes, it was voluntary. It was the only way the individuals Oscin and Skye could indenture themselves offworld and know that they’d always be posted together. They thought they were close then. I am integrally linked now.”
Cylinking, an illegal operation on most human worlds, was one of the queasier services AIsource Medical offered other sentient races. In exchange for a percentage of future earnings, the AIsource could wire the personalities of two separate individuals together, via an intangible broadcast matrix. The process replaced the two individuals with a larger gestalt that experienced life as one combined person. In theory, this added to their shared intelligence by decreasing the need to devote precious skull space with redundant information that no longer needed to be known by both.
Cylinking had been attacked as dehumanizing. Its defenders said it was nothing of the kind. It wasn’t destroying individuality, they said, but redefining it, making new people by combining those who considered themselves incomplete when apart. Those who’d been through the process said it had improved their lives tremendously. Regardless, it took a rare couple to even want to be cylinked, a rarer couple still to meet the AIsource’s arcane requirements for the procedure. There were, as far as I knew, fewer than three thousand pairs in existence. I’d heard that the Dip Corps had a few among its indentures, but this was the first time I’d encountered any.
I clicked a fingernail against my teeth. “Mr. Lastogne tells me that the two of you handled much of Cynthia Warmuth’s training on-station.”
“
“Yes, I’ve heard that name before. Is Mo a man or a woman?”
“A woman. Mo’s short for Maureen.”
I’d have to meet this Mo Lassiter and question her later. “But you spent substantial time with Warmuth. What did you think of her?”
“She was young and hungry. So intent on understanding others that she entered the point of obnoxious intrusiveness.”
“Yes, I heard that Santiago disliked her for that. How was she intrusive?”
“In my case,” the Porrinyards said, “she asked rudely intimate questions.”
“Like mine?”
“No. You were just trying to understand a condition unfamiliar to you. Her curiosity was quite different.”
“How, then?”
Lastogne made a rude noise. “Really, Counselor. I thought you were supposed to be some kind of prodigy.”
I didn’t catch what was supposed to be so obvious, but Oscin and Skye saved me the trouble of asking: “She was most interested in the sexual aspects of my enhancement. She specifically wanted to know what it was like when my two component bodies made love.”
Now that they mentioned it… “A number of people must wonder that.”
“Which is only natural,” the Porrinyards said. “But Warmuth was aggressive enough to expect vivid descriptions on demand.”
“If you don’t mind me asking, what did you tell her?”
They bristled. “Are you like her, Counselor? Do you want descriptions on demand?”
“No,” I said. “I want to know what kind of answer you gave
The Porrinyards considered that and saw the distinction. “I told her that it’s exactly twice as pleasurable for me as it is for a pair of isolated single-minds who can only interpret the physical act from one viewpoint apiece. This only enflamed her prurient interest, of course. More than once she offered herself to me.”
“To both of you?”
“To
“And you declined?”
“Yes. I didn’t like the way she asked.”
“If you had liked the way she asked, would you have said yes?”
“I say yes all the time,” the Porrinyards said. “I remain only one person, and a steady diet of sex with myself is as depressing as any other confinement to masturbation. So I’m always interested in finding another partner. Peyrin, here, was once open enough to accept such an invitation—”
“Hello,” Lastogne sang.
“—and even Santiago turned her down with only mild offensiveness. But I’m only attracted to people capable of understanding that they’re making love to only one person, not two, regardless of the number of bodies involved. Cynthia Warmuth never struck me as being able to make that kind of cognitive leap. She was interested only in adding to her personal library of deep enriching experiences. The last I knew, Warmuth had sought out less demanding partners, and enjoyed at least one assignation with Mr. Gibb.”
I had already noted Gibb’s possessive response to women who entered his personal orbit. “Was that an ongoing relationship?”
“No. I think Mr. Gibb’s usual level of charm had its usual prophylactic effect before long.”
“Did you notice any tension between them afterward?”
“Mr. Gibb is too big an oaf to feel any tension toward anybody.” Oscin and Skye gave a single, unified sniff of disdain. “I have no way of knowing how Warmuth felt.”
Gibb’s failure to mention his relationship with Warmuth was interesting, but not necessarily damning. “What
