were downright creepy. That pretty much did it for the major powers. Some of the lesser races regarded me with sympathy, but none had enough clout to buck a concerted interspecies attempt to extradite me. The Confederacy, at least, wouldn’t have forced the Dip Corps to give me up unless I became a much hotter issue than I am now. The Corps might not have loved me, and might have come close to giving me up half a dozen times, but they had invested in my training and could count on results from me. I was an asset, to be hoarded for as long as they had use for me.
And there was another factor I hadn’t mentioned, one that outweighed all the others.
Even if possible, defection amounted to surrender.
I wasn’t crazy about the human race, or the people I worked for, but I’d never been willing to give the bastards the satisfaction.
Cif Negelein lived up to his advance billing.
I didn’t recognize the name of his homeworld, but it was either an eccentric place or one that considered him among its more eccentric sons. Squat, neckless, round-eyed, and top-heavy, he affected an extreme form of Hammocktown’s fashionable near nudity, eschewing any uniform but for a thin strip of black cloth around his waist. His chest and arms were so furry they almost rendered any further clothing superfluous anyway. His face and scalp were as hairless as the plasm human surgeons implant on burn victims on worlds without access to AIsource Medical. This had evidently been arranged to clear space on his skin for a tattooed essay in the blocky alphabet of Hom. Sap Mercantile, delivering a small-print personal manifesto in a spiral that began just over his brow and culminated with an ellipsis at the highest point. Affectation, insanity, or gesture of deep commitment to a religion I didn’t even want to guess at, it made eye contact with him almost impossible. In my first few attempts to maintain a conversation with him, the words snaking along from temple to temple kept coming into focus upside down, often shutting me down in mid-sentence. Short of inserting him into a rotating tube and reading the words as he spun, I had to focus on his mouth to avoid being blindsided by any features above his nose.
Negelein, a talented painter of both landscapes and portraits, hadn’t been able to keep conventional art supplies during the eighteen years he’d served, but he’d produced many thousands of works using implants in his fingertips to daub intangible pigments on projected virtual media. He illustrated almost everything he said with finger-twitches that called forth works he’d produced on One One One: from vivid head shots of the people he spoke about to colorful panoramas of his fellow indentures working on the Habitat’s upside-down horizon. He had one portrait of Warmuth, portraying her as a wide-eyed, sallow-faced gamin placed against a nondescript black background. She looked sad, vulnerable, and alone: a facile characterization that completely contradicted the impression I’d gotten from the other images I’d seen. Against that, he offered almost a dozen studies of Santiago, starting with the portrait of a woman simmering in mid-frown, backlit by a nimbus of glowing red light. It taught me nothing either. But as I studied the work, searching for an answer that wasn’t there, he said, “Most of the people here didn’t realize it, but their entire problem lay in the failure to recognize an alien mind.”
“I suppose we’re not talking about the Brachiators.”
He shook his head. “No. Christina. People had a rough time seeing who she was and what she was about; they just saw this sullen little bitch who was ready to bite your head off the first time they even looked at her funny.”
“Like that incident with Warmuth.”
He chuckled. “Like that. And a dozen others I can name. You didn’t get along with Christina. You experienced her.”
“And you’re saying she had an alien mind?”
He drew a curlicue in midair, dabbed a few lines underneath it, and emerged with a fair-to-middling caricature of me. “I suspect you already have a good idea what I mean, Counselor. When you get to the core of it, we’re all aliens to one another, raised according to some common precepts but otherwise ruled by paradigms far removed from those of the people around us. The tragedy is that we tend to judge others by standards that may make perfect sense to us but which are more likely totally irrelevant to them. That’s what you’re doing to me right now, even though you’re doing an excellent job of hiding it, and that’s what most people did to Christina. By the standard of their own worlds, their own heads, she was an intolerable person. But the fact is, she was as sociable toward them as she knew how to be.”
The man’s pontificating was beginning to wear on me. My yawn, another in a series of symptoms that my post-Intersleep crash was coming on fast, might have been just as inevitable on the most energetic day of my life. But I recovered: “What was she, then? Just socially inept?”
Another curlicue. “Think about her background. Her world had mortgaged its entire population for generations. Her family had no tomorrow greater than endless repetitions of today, no dreams beyond returning home at the end of a shift, no options beyond grinding despair and dull-eyed, grim-faced loyalty to the only possible employer. Their rights were so curtailed that they couldn’t even start families without proving it wouldn’t harm production. I don’t even think she encountered the concept of leisure time at all until she got here. It speaks well of her independent nature that she sold herself offworld as soon as she was able to find another buyer, but by then her routines were set, and she came to work for the Corps acting out the same behavior patterns she showed at home, which happened to be:
“And yet,” I noted, “you say you got something out of her.”
“Not just say, did.” He projected an image of Santiago, sitting cross-legged on one of the settlement’s rope bridges while the upside-down horizon of One One One curved away in the background. She wore a form-fitting gray jumpsuit fastened tight at the neck and wrists. Her eyes were hooded, her lips thin and unsmiling, but the image stressed the bound curve of her breasts; and the way the light played across her cheeks suggested Negelein, at least, considered her uncommonly beautiful. “I run a little art class here, not a big one, but something for people to do off-hours when they’re not jumping through Gibb’s hoops. I have four, maybe five, students at a time. Nobody produces spectacular work, but then nobody’s required to if they’re only doing it for their own amusement. Christina started visiting within two weeks of her arrival here. She would show up late so she didn’t have to make small talk, listen a little bit, then leave early so she didn’t have to talk with anyone on the way out. The first couple of times she visited, I thought she was just deciding it wasn’t for her. But then the third time she approached me in private to ask a question.”
“What?”
“She asked me to explain what art was good for.”
I wasn’t sure I could have produced a satisfactory answer myself as art just slides off me like I’m a frictionless surface. But I did my best to look duly horrified. “What did you say?”
“Well,” he said, “given that it’s a major part of who I am, a major part of what I need to stay sane, and for me a major part of what makes life worth living, I could have fired off a withering reply that punished her for being ignorant. About a dozen occurred to me before I even opened my mouth. But somehow I recognized it was a well- meaning question, and said, ‘If you make some, maybe you’ll figure it out.’ Not long after that we scheduled private lessons.”
“Was she any good?”
He rolled his eyes. “
“Such as.”
Negelein’s voice grew soft at the moment he seemed to remember that the person he’d been talking about
