all of three months before I made a mistake serious enough to get me banished to this gulag, and I still don’t know what the hell this has to do with anything.”
“How long have you been confined to the hangar?”
“Almost nine months Mercantile. Could have had a grotting baby by now, come to think of it.”
I turned to Robin. “Now, you.”
Fish made even the moment of eye contact look like a backbreaking effort. “Do you really need to hear this from me, Counselor? I’m not feeling well today. I really need to go inside and lie down for a while.”
She did look awful, more a physical shell of what she must have once been than either Li-Tsan or D’Onofrio. I took another look at the bagginess of her clothes and, for the first time, registered the muscular atrophy. Confinement here was killing her. Confinement, or something else.
I said, “The faster you answer me the faster you see me leave.”
Fish held the silence for so long that I had to restrain myself from prodding her. That’s never a good idea. Sometimes people hesitate because they don’t have the courage to come out with whatever needs to be said; other times they desperately want to speak but can’t find the words. Jabbing them prematurely tends to shut them up. Outwaiting them gives them the time to say more than they intend. When she finally spoke, it was without any noticeable energy. “I wasn’t ever much. Just a clerical worker on New Kansas. No special skills or education, just crushing boredom and a thirst to get the hell out.”
“So you joined the Corps.”
“Which assigned me to the same kind of work I’d done back home. I met Mr. Gibb for the first time when I was at a records center on Hylanis. He was the big name doing administrative work as he waited for his next posting, and I was the frustrated kid begging him to remember me if he got sent somewhere with a possibility of advancement. Not long after he left I was pulled into special training for this project. I did thirty days of height- desensitization, before they shipped me in.”
“And you mustered out.”
“Almost as soon as I got here,” she said.
“How did it happen?”
“Everybody except Gibb knew how useless I was from day one, but he kept insisting I’d adjust. Then one day during remedial training, one of the Uppergrowth vines snapped and left me screaming my stupid head off at the tail end of a dangling ten-meter cable.” Her hand spasmed at the thought. She examined it without much surprise, then placed it flat on the table. “I couldn’t blame anybody for not wanting to work with me after that.”
“And that was two years ago Mercantile.”
“Not quite two years. We’re still a few weeks away from my anniversary.”
She used the celebratory word without any apparent irony.
I said, “You’ve received supply shipments. New indentures, now and then. In two years Gibb never talked about sending you home? Or transferring you out, to someplace where you could still do some good? There had to be opportunities.”
Li-Tsan, who fronted many of her statements with rude noises, made another one. “Mr. Gibb thinks failures among his staff reflect poorly on his leadership. So it’s safer to just tuck us out of the way and let us rot.”
“Have you tried complaining to his superiors on New London?”
“Sure,” Li-Tsan said. “We all have. We’ve inundated them. I’ve sent two complaints a day. But guess what. It all goes through Gibb, and he still has the authority to declare us essential to the effort here. And besides, New London isn’t eager to ask its projects elsewhere to trust people who’ve already proven themselves incompetent at previous assignments. The way they figure it, Gibb’s justified in keeping us in limbo, and we can sit out the remaining years of our contracts getting as irate about the injustice as we like.” She rolled her eyes. “Of course, it’s different now that he needs a scapegoat.”
“Would this be why you show your hatred for Mr. Lastogne?”
“He supports what Gibb’s doing to us, which makes him a piece of shit.”
Normal shit, this time. I turned my attention back to Fish. “So you were confined here, alone, for more than a year before Li-Tsan showed up. That sounds cruel.”
Fish didn’t look up. “It wasn’t exactly solitary confinement. I received visits.”
“From anybody in particular?”
“Anybody who felt sorry for me, or wanted a break.”
“How many would that include?”
“Everybody took breaks. Not everybody made the trip just to visit me.” Fish allowed herself the kind of smile that reeks with intense self-loathing. “I wasn’t in-habitat long enough to make friends.”
“Except for Mr. Gibb.”
“I wouldn’t call him a friend, exactly,” Fish said.
“He got you the job. What would you call him?”
“Had it worked out, a mentor.”
“Did he ever visit you, after your exile?”
“I saw him whenever he took leave.”
“Did you ever talk about your situation, on those occasions?”
“I begged him to transfer me.”
“And?”
“He said we’d talk about it if I met him at Hammocktown.”
Mr. Gibb, I decided, was a bastard. “Even with Gibb’s people taking regular leaves, you must have been alone most of the time.”
“Yes.”
“Doing what?”
“Not much. I helped edit the reports our people sent to New London.”
“You had access to hytex transmission?”
“Yes. For more than a year I handled all the mail back and forth.”
“Send anything unauthorized?”
Fish’s eyes flared. “Like what?”
“There have been some unusual messages recently.” My hate mails.
She showed no interest in the details. “Oh, recently. Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, Counselor, but recently—as in the last year or so—all of our transmissions go through Gibb and Lastogne. He took that job away from me when he banished Li-Tsan.”
I had trouble believing either Gibb or Lastogne responsible for the messages I’d received. I had no problem believing them capable of malice, but that particular kind seemed contrary to their style. “Did he have any problems with the job you were doing?”
“No. He made sure I knew he thought I’d done all right. But he still insisted on handling all the correspondence from then on. I think he just wanted to make sure we wouldn’t say anything he wouldn’t be able to deny.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” Fish said.
“Neither do I,” said Li-Tsan.
Something was being hidden, here. “What would you think if you had to speculate?”
D’Onofrio jumped in. “One One One’s a very precarious situation, Counselor. We’re dealing with issues of tremendous sensitivity, in the face of an alien government that has permitted us no diplomatic status at all. The wrong word, spoken at the wrong time, can jeopardize everything we’re trying to do. Maybe we had a close call, and New London told Mr. Gibb he had to take on greater personal responsibility.”
Or maybe they’d had prior incidents with hate mail, and sending everything through the boss was the only way to make sure it didn’t happen again. “But you’re the one who said Mr. Gibb’s afraid of having to deny something. What would he have to deny?”
“I don’t know,” Fish said. “Honestly.”
I let it pass. “All right. So he took away your job as correspondence officer, and left you playing innkeeper to personnel on leave.”
“And inventory officer. It wasn’t that bad. We needed somebody here to keep track anyway.”
