was dead: “Such as what it was like, for her, to spend so much of her life in a cage.”
His eyes welled. No question in my mind: he was seeing her. But which her? A real Christina Santiago, who had revealed herself to him? An imagined version of her he’d projected upon a woman he’d barely known at all? A woman he’d loved, or one he’d pitied? I had no doubt that his grief was genuine, but that meant nothing; some people grieve as easily as other people breathe, and the grief-stricken include some of the very same people who brought on the grief by killing.
After a moment, I asked him, “Who do you think killed her, bondsman?”
He dabbed at his eyes. “Mr. Gibb says the AIsource did, but that doesn’t exactly make sense to me. I can’t see the AIsource doing something that pointless. Maybe something I did contributed. Wouldn’t that be a special trip through hell.”
I could see him turning the wheels in his mind, concocting scenarios, working out various ways his relationship with Santiago could have led to her death. Guilty or not, he had a conscience; guilty or not, it could very well destroy him; guilty or not, he may have wanted it to.
What followed was a calculated risk, based on my own sudden, irrational certainty that he was guilty of nothing except following his own heart. “Mr. Negelein, I’m going to have to ask you to keep this next question to yourself, and not mention it to anybody, not even Mr. Gibb.”
Negelein seemed to notice me again. “All right.”
“One of the lesser pieces of evidence in this case involves threatening hytex messages, containing animated simulations of violence happening to somebody currently aboard One One One. Not Santiago or Warmuth, but a possible future victim. These animations are very realistic, very detailed, and very disturbing. I suppose they qualify as art.”
He sniffed. “They would certainly be
“Yes, well, either way, is there anybody here to your knowledge that is capable of producing such work?”
He studied me through slitted eyes. “I’d have to see these messages to know.”
“You can’t.”
“Would that be because they’re classified, or because they no longer exist?”
In both cases, I hadn’t been able to access the signal following the initial delivery. But he didn’t have to know that. “Classified.”
“I see.” He rubbed his chin, looked very tired, and said, “I’m not the final judge of what people can and can’t do, and I can’t give you any answers about those images unless I can study them to figure out how they were made. But though a non-artist with access to source materials could use advanced AI routines to help draft that kind of thing on command, the actual quality of those pictures would depend entirely on the kind of obsession we’re talking about.”
“Assume extreme obsession.”
He thought about it. “That would make anything possible.”
Which happened to be as true for murder as it was for art.
My final interview that day was with somebody who, like Negelein, had also been mentioned several times: Exosociologist Second Class Mo Lassiter. She was one of the most solidly built women I’d ever met, muscular even by the exaggerated standards of One One One, with arms that bunched like knots beneath form-fitting black mesh sleeves. She had an olive complexion, centimeter-deep black hair that resembled fuzz, a jaw like a boulder, and brown eyes so tiny that it was next to impossible to see the whites.
Had she met me with a grimace, she would have been the very picture of a frightening thug. Instead, she offered an unforced smile. It made the difference between a face that might have bordered on grotesque and one that possessed its own, eccentric kind of integrity.
When it came to talking about people, Lassiter offered little in the way of in-depth analysis, summing up everybody I asked about in content-free, carefully nonjudgmental sentence fragments. She didn’t become helpful until we began discussing the death of Cynthia Warmuth. “I’ve never had any doubt, Counselor. It had to be a Brachiator.”
I tried to imagine the slow-moving creatures I’d seen surprising and overpowering an athletic human being. “Why?”
“Because it fits their natures. They’re vicious.”
The dull, barely mobile Brachiators hadn’t struck me as capable of savagery. “How would that work?”
“All the usual ways. Assault, murder, open warfare, even genocide, when it suits them.” She saw my blank look, and commiserated. “I know it’s hard to believe. They move so slowly that it’s easy to think of them as passive. But they’re anything else. The truth is that they’re as warlike as any other pre-tech sentients I’ve ever seen. They have tribes and they have territory, and they go after each other whenever it suits them.”
“It’s hard to imagine.”
“Also hard to justify. One would think they had no reason for it. After all, why are wars fought in the first place? Sometimes out of ideology or fear, but more often because one side covets something the other side wants: territory, natural resources, wealth, what have you. Here, the AIsource made sure all of that was provided in abundance that dwarves the Brachiator population’s ability to consume it—and yet when one tribe encounters another somewhere on the Uppergrowth, without detailed negotiations in advance, one of them has to change course or invite an all-out war that doesn’t stop until one side is eliminated.”
I had the oddest sensation of wanting to do something but didn’t know what it was. “What does it look like?”
“Like a slow-motion slaughter. The two sides engulf each other, ripping and clawing. They use those knife- claws of theirs, both attached and detached, and they rip away at each other in parries and thrusts slow enough for my dear old grandma to evade. Sometimes two fighters clinch for as long as twenty minutes, half an hour, before either one succeeds in drawing blood. Sometimes their two tribes savage each other for days on end, fighting a close-quarters war that ancient human villages the same size would have probably mopped up in a matter of minutes. They move so slowly, throughout, that we have time to hover near them on floaters and watch. Sometimes we even talk to them, try to understand what they’re doing and why. They find the question so stupid they can’t even figure out why we ask it.”
I came close to murmuring that they reminded me of human beings, but that kind of facile cynicism comes so easily to me that speaking it out loud would have been cheap. “And why do you think this explains what happened to Cynthia Warmuth?”
“The Porrinyards handled most of her training, but I took her out a few times, and just two weeks ago I had the opportunity to show her one of these battles in progress. We were hovering just below, on floaters. She saw one of the Brachs start to lose its grip and started shouting that we had to rescue it. I told her there was nothing we could do. And—”
Lassiter wiped her eyes, rubbed her chin, scrambled up the curve of the hammock to a water bottle, and allowed herself a deep gulp before returning to me, looking miserable.
I’d seen that look in so many eyes, over the years, that identifying it wasn’t even hard anymore.
It was the look of somebody who had just made up her mind to confess.
“She pulled her floater between two of them: a big pair of alpha-males who hadn’t even reached each other and probably wouldn’t have drawn blood for another ten minutes. She told them their battle was pointless and would only result in death. She said it had to stop. She said she would stay between them to protect them both, and help them talk to each other, so nobody had to die. She said they had plenty of time to try.”
“And the Brachiators?”
“Both sides involved in the battle stopped what they were doing and shouted her down. They called her a Half-Ghost and said they had no time to listen to the Dead. They said that a Ghost who interferes in the affairs in the living might soon find herself returning to the Dead.”
The words hung in the air between us, resonating even as distant laughter, from some of the other residents of Hammocktown, failed to dilute the tension left by their passage. “Why wasn’t I informed of this before?”
“Because I never reported it,” Lassiter said, looking everywhere but at my eyes. “I didn’t see the need. Cynthia backed off at once. The Brachiators resumed their stupid little war. I took her back home, lectured her about the delicacy of our position here, and didn’t let her go until she admitted that she’d acted without thinking.
