about Santiago? Did Gibb have any special relationship with Santiago?”
“I doubt it. Santiago didn’t have special relationships.”
“She was a loner?”
“I would say misanthrope. She alienated people as a matter of course.”
“Mr. Lastogne said she wouldn’t shut up about how much she hated the Confederacy.”
The Porrinyards frowned at that. “Is this a political witch hunt, Counselor?”
“Not as far as I’m concerned. People can bad-mouth the Corps and the Confederacy as much as they want. On a good day I’d even join them. But it’s been described as an obsession. I want to know what kinds of things she said.”
They relaxed. “She wasn’t a bastards-up-against-the-wall revolutionary, if that’s what you mean. She had an honest grudge. She always said that if the Confederacy was worth a damn, it would have seized all power for itself and shut down the kind of power structure that made hellholes out of worlds arranged like hers. She wanted one big government, or at the very least a common bill of rights, for everybody. She particularly wanted debt slavery abolished—not just the horrible kind she grew up with, but even the contracts we have in the Corps. None of it was at all new, you understand. Scratch any indenture and you’ll find somebody who feels the same way.”
“I agree. And yet I get the impression that she was a profoundly unpopular person.”
“Christina may have been more bitter about her politics than most of us, but that wasn’t her real problem.”
“What was?”
“She didn’t like being around people and had no problem letting them know it.”
Which only increased my sense of kinship toward her. “Did she get along with anybody at all?”
“Not to my knowledge. She alienated everybody equally.”
“She spent a lot of time with Cif Negelein,” Lastogne said.
The Porrinyards seemed genuinely surprised by that. “Negelein? Really?”
I said, “Who’s Negelein?”
Lastogne’s expression failed to communicate undying affection. “You’ll meet him later.”
Uh-huh. “How would you define their relationship?”
“Can’t answer you there,” Lastogne said. “Whenever two people I don’t like start spending time together, I consider it a personal gift. It saves me the aggravation.”
“Why don’t you like Negelein?”
“He’s a pretentious snot.”
I turned my attention back to the Porrinyards: “So what did Santiago do, when she was not on-duty or spending time with this Negelein? Retire to her hammock and stew in an antisocial funk?”
“Some of that,” they said. “She sometimes went exploring on her own. Sometimes she descended, trying to observe the dragons, though she never got close enough to report anything. A few times she took advantage of all the down-time available to her and went back to relax in the hangar. Nothing out of the ordinary, here; we all take our breaks when we can. I can tell you she had less use for other people than anybody I’ve ever met.”
“Including yourself?”
“Very much including myself,” the Porrinyards said. “I’m no misanthrope.”
Which was exactly the opposite of the way Lastogne had described them. Ifthem,plural, was the right word. I was far from sure that it was. The more I dealt with these Porrinyards, the more pronoun trouble I was likely to have.
The skimmer banked into a course correction, headed for a portal into the station hub; its controlled local gravity prevented me from feeling any change in acceleration, but my stomach lurched anyway. The portal, a well- camouflaged hatch cut into the Uppergrowth itself, bore the same knotted surface as the surrounding vegetation, a touch that seemed anal on the part of the AIsource. After all, who inside this habitat would have been aesthetically offended by an unsightly sliding panel?
Orienting itself toward the hatch meant that the skimmer had to position itself vertically. The skimmer’s local gravity kept me from feeling any change in orientation, but my eyes were another matter, and my mind refused to forget that the vast wall before us had been up only a few seconds before. I tasted stomach acid and closed my eyes to ward off the worst of the vertigo. “You trained Santiago too, correct?”
“That’s correct.”
“Did she and Warmuth ever train together?”
“Yes.”
“Was there any friction?”
“There was some off-duty, I believe. A bit of a shoving match. I wasn’t around for it. On the job it was minimal. You would expect to get more from Santiago, considering her attitude, but she was, if anything, the easier of the two to work with. Focused. No interest in adding a personal element. Far from charming, but right to the point.”
Lastogne broke in: “You can open your eyes, Counselor. We’re in.”
We were traversing an octagonal access tunnel, only twice the diameter of the skimmer, with walls of an indistinct blue that remained bright without any obvious light source. Shiny black panels appeared every few meters, but I couldn’t tell whether this was tech or just a design element. Nor could I tell how we were oriented with respect to the Habitat, but I’d already experienced so much vertigo today I was relieved not to care. “You trained them both for their first contact with the Brachiators?”
“That’s right,” the Porrinyards said. “We have a policy here, requiring escorts during individual first contact.”
“Tell me how it works.”
“Mr. Lastogne has probably already told you that the Brachs have unusual perceptions regarding the difference between life and death. As far as they’re concerned, alien sentients like us are not alive in the sense you and I understand the concept. We’re ‘Dead.’ Introducing a stranger involves a ceremony that boils down to telling the Brachiators something along the lines of ‘This is (insert name), an Emissary from the Dead, who wishes to be with you in Life.’”
Just ahead another portal irised open. Not much time left for follow-up questions. I bit the tip of my thumb, cursing a little when I realized I’d drawn blood. On a bad day, my fingertips were a mass of scabs. “And if they’re amenable to that, Insert Name has to cling to the Uppergrowth for several hours, while the Brachiators around her decide she’s sufficiently Alive to merit their company.”
The Porrinyards nodded. “Alive enough to be declared a Half-Ghost anyway.”
“Is this something only required for offworlder visitors? Not with strangers of their own kind?”
“Only with offworlders,” the Porrinyards said. “We don’t know if they’d react this way to any species other than human beings, but they think we’re dead. We haven’t figured out what gives them that impression, but as long as we observe the proper etiquette in their environment, they’re more than happy to declare us Half-Ghosts for the purposes of getting along.”
“Until,” Lastogne said, “like Warmuth and Santiago, you die for real.”
I digested that as the skimmer slid into its bay, in a well-lit chamber with a platform bearing tubes curving away to what must have been other Hub locations. Given the convenient scale, it all seemed too much like the rapid transit system on New London to suit a cylinder world, which had never been intended for the convenience of human visitors, but then, the AIsource were great at building things and might have built all this within a day of inviting Gibb’s inspection team.
That is, assuming they hadn’t expected human visitors all along.
We disembarked and stood on the platform, getting used to the novelty of a solid, if spongy, floor. Local gravity seemed about one-third of what it had been in Hammocktown, but that didn’t matter to me. My legs, which were used to carrying me around in that traditional manner, thanked me with the abject relief only aggravated limbs can express.
The blue lighting made Lastogne’s face look cold. “I’m sorry about this next part, Counselor.”
I said, “What?”
“If you don’t like heights, you may not be all too happy about what’s coming up.”
