“Nothing about your investigation.”
“About Lastogne?”
“There are any number of things I can say about Peyrin,” Oscin said. It wasn’t hard to read undercurrents of resentment in the calm but chilly way he spoke the other man’s name. “But no, not him either.”
This was still a prime opportunity to follow up on one of this station’s many contradictions. “I’d like to ask you about him anyway—or at least, something he said about you yesterday.”
“Oh?’
“He’d said, ‘They’re cylinked. They don’t make friends in the usual sense.’”
He seemed darkly amused. “Peyrin said that? Why, the backstabbing son of a bitch.”
There were depths here I wasn’t getting. “I’ve never met any cylinked pairs before, so I had no reason to disbelieve him. But between the way you’re acting, and some of the things you’ve said, makes me wonder if he’s…”
Oscin finished the sentence for me. “…full of Tchi shit.”
“Exactly.”
He walked away, cocked his head as if listening to the advice of an observer I couldn’t see or hear, then came back. “Nobody’s a closed system without wanting to be, Counselor. Not even me. It wouldn’t be any more fun for me being trapped in two heads, with nobody else to talk to, than it is for an unlinked individual like you to be trapped in only one. So, yes, I do make friends in the usual sense. I care for some people. I get angry with others. I even fall in love from time to time, though it’s a little harder to manage, given that it has to be a person capable of pleasing my shared, and therefore somewhat more demanding, perspective.”
“And that’s where Cynthia Warmuth fell short?”
A little angry now: “Cynthia Warmuth was kind, generous, eager, compassionate, and, as I’ve already said, needy, pushy and grating. It’s a matter of taste, not misanthropy.”
“And yet,” I noted, “Lastogne said what he said. Why?”
“Didn’t I tell you on the way over that we made love once? I mean, Lastogne and I?”
“Yes.”
“The operative word is
It was an interesting fresh take on Peyrin Lastogne, who had tried so hard to paint himself as a distant, cynical observer of humanity. I wondered whether he’d taken on that persona for my benefit. It was possible. One thing I’d learned, from being such a sincere bitch for so many years, is that some people wear misanthropy only as a fashion statement.
Lastogne could be one of those.
But maybe not. Oscin’s revelation established only that the man was not, entirely, the island he claimed to be. He was just a deluded, vindictive ex-lover. So what? He could still be a son of a bitch. Or even a murderer.
I said, “So if you didn’t want to talk about him, what did you want to talk about?”
Oscin switched gears with no visible difficulty. “I don’t know how to say this, Counselor. Considering where this conversation was a few minutes ago, it’s a risky thing to say. But, you know, the individuals Oscin and Skye were once very angry people. They both felt trapped in a place they did not want to be, in a life they did not want to live, and they made themselves miserable sharing their resentment with anybody else who could have been allowed into a world that, as far as they were concerned, allowed room for only the two of them. After a while they had so much anger between them that they started to direct it at each other. They began to fight. To leave scars.” For a moment his face seemed to shift, and became no longer his own but a reflection of how Skye might have looked were her body the one telling the story. “They didn’t link just so they could be indentured together. They linked because they were a few harsh words from breaking up forever. They linked because joining together as this new creation greater than the sum of its parts was their only alternative to walking out of each other’s lives and feeling incomplete for as long as they lived.”
I pushed myself away from the wall, tested my ability to stand alone without help, and found that I was now as steady on my feet as I ever managed to be. “Why tell me?”
He cocked his head again, and flashed a secret smile at himself. “I don’t have much time, Counselor. Skye and Lastogne are coming back. They’re not far away. I don’t think Skye will be able to delay him for more than another minute or so.
“So here’s the little I have time for. I’m an expert at angry people. I know that they come in many different flavors and I’ve learned to recognize what they are. Like Gibb and Lastogne. Like Warmuth and Santiago. Like some of the exiles you’re about to meet.” He had not faced me at all since beginning this speech, focusing instead on some distant point somewhere beyond me, beyond the blue walls, perhaps even beyond the territories encompassed by One One One. “Like yourself. I don’t know all the details yet, but I really don’t need AIsource help to feel like I already know you.”
Lastogne had said something much like that yesterday, and I’d reacted with little more than wry acknowledgment that he was right. Others in my life had confronted me with words to the same effect and I’d displayed boredom, defiance, even pride.
Oscin Porrinyard made me want to hit him.
But before I could go through with it, Skye and Lastogne turned the corner, at a junction some fifty meters up-corridor. Lastogne still wore his grimace-as-smile, and Skye walked with a sprightly bounce to her step that from this vantage point seemed deliberate mockery of whatever he’d had to say to her.
When I caught her eye, she winked.
It had to be meant for me. She wouldn’t have needed gestures to communicate with her other half.
When I glanced at Oscin, for confirmation, he was winking too.
My moment of anger faded, replaced by open confusion.
What the hell was all
9. EXILES
The Dip Corps ship, an unlovely bullet bearing the service’s much-parodied trademark of a starscape in the outline of an extended human hand, sat berthed at the far end of One One One’s many hangars, a glowing, blue-walled chamber large enough to hold four ships its size.
The chamber had more than enough room to house my transport as well, but the AIsource had berthed that in another chamber. Why, beyond some sense of courtesy toward visitors who’d arrived at different times, I didn’t know, and didn’t particularly care. A number of inflatable sleepcube tents, perfect for wilderness accommodations, and just odd in this context, sat just outside the ship, each glowing from a soft internal light. There was also a portable table, flanked by a pair of stasis crates pressed into service as chairs. It looked like a place people lived, but nothing at all like home, not even as much of a home as the indentures had made of Hammocktown.
I suppose it was close enough to camping, for people deprived of any outdoors beyond a vast empty room with a spongy floor and luminous blue walls.
The air was warmer than the neutral setting preferred by most space docks, warm and humid in a manner that suggested, without actually providing, the presence of an overhead sun. It was the kind of environment I liked: all straight lines.
“The poor bastards sure make themselves comfortable,” said Lastogne.
“It’s no fun for them,” said the Porrinyards.
The ship’s hatch opened, revealing a tanned, muscular man with shoulder-length black hair. He was stripped to his waist, the planes of his chest shining with enough perspiration to suggest a recent workout. He had a
