while the AIsource provide us all the taxi service we want, they express zero interest in playing lifeguard. As far as they’re concerned, any attempt at a rescue would compromise the stark integrity of this place.”
“Have they actually said that?”
“They said it when they agreed to allow a human presence here. They said, Brachiators stay alive by holding on, and any human beings intent on studying them need to learn the same skill.”
This added yet another wrinkle to the game. A longstanding Interspecies Covenant, to which both humanity and the software intelligences were charter signatories, required all participating races to offer reasonable protection to alien diplomatic personnel within their territories. The AIsource’s evident refusal to honor that treaty would have been seen as a massive breach of interstellar law…were it not for their prior refusal to grant our outpost diplomatic status.
Their failure to recognize Hammocktown as an embassy made it a lot easier for human beings to die here.
Which led to the most troubling issue so far, at least as far as Lastogne was concerned.
“Point four. Peyrin Lastogne, who the hell are you?”
If that offended him at all, he did not show it. Instead, he simply flashed a sideways grin, much warmer than his usual grimace, and squeezed me once on my upper arm. It was a different kind of intrusive touch than I’d endured from Gibb. That one had felt sexual. This one? More like affection, for sharing a secret joke. “I was wondering how long it would take you to just come out and ask.”
“You have no Dip Corps listing. You have no bio on the hytex.”
The grin remained. “It could be that my background is nobody’s business. Look at yourself, Counselor. Your own life would be a hell of a lot easier if it wasn’t accessible to anybody with sufficient curiosity. Somebody like myself wouldn’t be able to look you up and find all those voices yowling for your extradition. The Tchi really want you, don’t they? And the Bocaians—”
The Tchi just wanted me because they wanted anything that would embarrass the Confederacy; it had rendered them predictable in a manner that ended up saving me once or twice. And the Bocaians, who rarely ventured off their own world, were no real threat to me either. “This is not about me. It’s about you. Why are your records a closed book? What is it we’re not supposed to know?”
“If I told you,” he said, “you would know it.”
“Have you been sending me any messages?”
“No more than the usual, Counselor.”
“Meaning?”
“Nonverbal messages,” he said, batting his eyes. “Some involuntary, but all defensible.”
“Nothing by hytex?”
“Why would I do that? I can talk to you any time I want.”
His answers were driving me crazy. “Did you kill Warmuth or Santiago?”
And instead of a yes or no, he laughed—not with hysterical glee, or superiority, or even with malice, but with a level of bemused affection I found a hundred times more infuriating. “Oh, really. Counselor. What answer could I possibly give, aside from a full confession, that you would ever be willing to believe?”
Now I knew it for a fact. The son of a bitch was teasing me. “Tell me anyway. Did you kill Warmuth or Santiago?”
“No,” he said. “I did not. But you have to keep something in mind.”
“What’s that?”
“That if I was the killer, I’d be saying the same thing.”
11. LEVINE, NEGELEIN, LASSITER
The rest of that day passed in a frustrating blur of interviews with the remaining indentures of Hammocktown. I didn’t want to work in my own assigned quarters, so I requisitioned a long and narrow hammock that served Gibb’s facility as the equivalent of a social hall and communal dining room. I couldn’t imagine being here when it had to bear the weight of dozens. I would have choked on my food, unable to avoid picturing the phenomenon of fraying cables.
I managed to interview maybe half of Gibb’s people before the suns went out. Most of what they had to tell me jibed with what I’d been told: Santiago the misanthrope, Warmuth the determined empath, the three height- sensitives as social outcasts. Opinions of Gibb himself varied from worshipping to resentful. Despite my prior impression that he grated especially hard on women, some of the highest praise came from young female indentures who couldn’t praise him enough. Two or three of those confessed to past, emphasis on past, relationships with him, so anxious to assure me that the breakups had been cordial that my chief question became not whether he’d coached them, but how much.
Nobody had much to add to my skimpy store of intelligence regarding Peyrin Lastogne. As far as they were concerned, he was just a Dip Corps regular, like Gibb—or, as several bothered me by pointing out, me.
Several indentures had witnessed the confrontation between Warmuth and Santiago, which as advertised hadn’t amounted to all that much. The time and place had been a midafternoon gathering in the very hammock where I now sat. Five off-duty indentures had been relaxing with a hytex strategy game one had imported from her homeworld. A few others were sitting around, bitching or chatting or arguing about time off. Santiago wandered in to grab some food and return to her own quarters, intent as always on keeping all social contact to an absolute minimum. Warmuth, who had already been observed trying to talk to her on several occasions, abandoned the game and approached her, speaking at length in a voice not loud enough to carry. Santiago tried to leave without acknowledging her. Warmuth put a hand on her shoulder. Santiago slapped her hand away and cursed her out in some non-Mercantile tongue. Warmuth tried to touch her again, and Santiago gave her a light shove, which left the shaken but uninjured Warmuth bobbing on her back at the hammock’s lowest point.
Nobody knew the meat of the conversation, but everybody had heard Santiago say, “Leave me alone, bitch.”
Despite the subsequent deaths of both participants, nobody thought it had much to do with their eventual fates.
A redheaded medtech named Bill Wilson told me, “This is a small town, Counselor. We’ve had fights before and will have fights again. It doesn’t necessarily lead to murder, and there’s no reason to believe that it led to murder now, just because one followed the other.”
“It’s a place to look,” I said.
“Until,” he said, “you realize there’s nothing there to see.”
And the hell of it was, he was right. The incident had seemed so minor, at the time, that it hadn’t even led to an investigation. There had been no complaint, no follow-up, no disciplinary action, no pattern of subsequent conflict serious enough to merit either official interference or unofficial gossip. As far as I could tell, neither woman had shared her version of the incident with friends or co-workers. Both had determined to put the whole thing behind them, and both had moved on without mentioning it again.
There was no reason to believe it meant anything.
Except that, for all we knew, it might have been the key to everything.
Among the subjects of interest: one Jacques Robinette, a nervous type whose stammer, in my presence, betrayed a deep level of guilt over something, even if that something had nothing to do with the investigation under way; a pudgy fellow by the name of Ierck Kzinscki, who had trained alongside Li-Tsan Crin and seemed to harbor a deep crush on her; a conspiracy theorist named Gilian Brenner, who had a theory pinning both murders on the Tchi that went all the way around the Coal Sack Nebula and back working out a scenario that would have enabled them to stage manage the crimes without ever being allowed on station; and a Curtis Smalls, whose pleas for a transfer off One One One pegged him, in my eyes, as a future full-time member of Gibb’s exiled height- sensitives.
The indentures included several utopian idealists, a few revolutionaries, a couple of crackpots, several brimming with enthusiasm for their mission here, and a number of grim lifers just putting in the hours until they
