Somebody was scrambling up the mesh to my position. I summoned the expression most likely to support the pretense of everything being all right and called down: “Hello?”
“Hello!” It was Stuart Gibb. “You up there, Counselor?”
I’ve never understood the character flaw, common to so many human beings, of asking questions that establish preexisting knowledge of the answer. “Yes, I’m up here.”
Gibb’s head appeared over the edge of the mesh. The light of the nearest occupied hammock, as cast through the netting, separated his face into a stark black-and-white grid, with distorted squares exaggerating the size of the jaw. “I’m not happy to see you up here by yourself, Counselor. You’re not used to local conditions and shouldn’t be wandering around unescorted.”
“I’m not wandering. I’m taking a break.”
Gibb looked past me, as if suspecting the presence of a very short and narrow person using me for cover. “But unescorted.”
“That is the very definition of a break.”
His only answer to that was a pout. “Peyrin was supposed to watch out for you.”
“Your people are more candid when he’s not around.”
He sighed, pulled himself up onto the netting, slid a little bit toward me, and came to rest still a comfortable distance away. The sag of the material here was much less than in any of the hammocks I’d seen, so it must have been significantly harder for him to justify the constant accidental body contact he’d been so helpless to avoid in our previous meeting. I wasn’t sure that meant I’d misjudged him yesterday, or whether he thought some lines too obvious to cross. He looked anywhere but at me. “It is a hell of a view, isn’t it?”
I said nothing.
“Ten of our people, ten, work full-time on the engineering problems alone. You’d be surprised how many of them come up, in a world this size, that never bothered us in any of the ones we’ve built. The AIsource have given us a few tours. There’s an air-circulation system driven by turbines the size of small moons. There are heat- dispersal units around the suns, designed to keep anything too close to them from boiling. The structural stresses those verticals have to endure are enough to give our experts the screaming shakes. We keep getting moving radiation sources from that toxic sludge down below; we don’t even want to know what’s alive at the lowest levels. It’s all so bloody arbitrary, and at the same time so bloody perfect. Sometimes, when I come out here, and wonder if there was ever a point to all this, I wonder if it’s just something like the Taj Mahal or the Striding Colossus of Parnajan, just something the blips put together to prove that they could: ‘Look On My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair!’ That kind of thing.”
“It’s one theory,” I said.
“No, it’s not. It’s bullshit. It’s just an old Dip Corps hack doing the best he can, with what little he has. I’m more concerned about you. You don’t strike me as the kind of person who goes out of her way for a scenic view.”
I could have pointed out that the darkness that consumed the Habitat at night was the precise opposite of scenic, as it utterly eliminated any view. Instead, I shook my head. “Nothing as frivolous as that, sir. I needed to feel the rhythms of life here. The way your people move when there’s no place they particularly have to be, the way they carry themselves when there’s nothing they particularly have to do. Even the sounds they make when most of them have gone inside for the night. It needed to get a taste of what it was like the night Santiago died.”
He nodded. “Have you arrived at any conclusions?”
“None I’m prepared to share.”
“Fair enough.” He glanced at his lap, seemed to remember the bundle’s presence, and tossed it over. “Nobody seems to remember seeing you eat today. So I had them put together a little package for you. Nothing special: just the usual slop that passes for food locally. It’ll keep you alive, at least.”
The bundle was still warm, and rich with the scents of foods I must have tasted and liked, at some point in the distant past. My stomach growled. I put the bundle aside without opening it. “Thank you. That was considerate.”
He waited for me to attack my dinner and saw that I wouldn’t. “Alternatively, you could save it for later and join me. I haven’t had dinner, either.”
“Thank you,” I said, “but no. I prefer to eat alone.”
Somewhere in Hammocktown, an intoxicated woman exploded in a helpless, delighted peal of laughter. A man said something arch and she laughed again. Love, or at least passion, seemed in the air. Somebody else, a little farther away, argued a deeply felt point. Somebody muttered an obscenity. The wind changed, the network of nets and cables shifted, and the story behind all those random sound fragments vanished, lost behind other atmospheric static.
Gibb, trapped with me when he could have visited any of these other more interesting places, could only look forlorn. “I really wish you’d loosen up, Counselor.”
“You wouldn’t be the first.”
“Ah.” He cast about for something else to say, and settled on being the voice of authority. “Well, if you’re determined to eat alone, maybe you should go back to your quarters. I am responsible for your safety, after all, and I wouldn’t want you to have an accident or something—”
“I understand. But if you don’t mind clearing up some things, first—”
The shift to official business, however grim, freed him from any further need to figure out just what the hell else to do with me. “Go ahead.”
“First,” I said, ticking off three names on my fingers, “Robin Fish, Nils D’Onofrio, and Li-Tsan Crin.”
“Yes.”
“Why haven’t they been transferred?”
He became a martyr, unjustly accused. “Have they been complaining?”
“Answer the question.”
“I’ve answered it many times before,” he said, which was giving away more than he intended, since none of those occasions had involved me. “There’s no reason to transfer them. Confinement to the hangar may not be pleasant for their respective egos, but we do need a full-time staff to maintain those shipboard facilities, and those free do an excellent job providing support for those of us who have proved we can perform the job out here.”
“Yes,” I said, “I’ve heard that. But none of the busywork you assign them actually requires three people—not when Fish, who was stuck there alone for almost a full year, was able to handle those responsibilities, and others you’ve since taken from her, all by herself before Crin or D’Onofrio were ever sent there to help her.”
“Yes, she was,” Gibb said, with the kind of heat that came from repeating an old and familiar argument. “But only just. Her morale has never been exactly high. I didn’t curtail her duties because of overwork, but because she wasn’t performing satisfactorily at the few jobs she had. Her performance has deteriorated even further since Nils and Li-Tsan showed up; from what I gather, even they consider her worse than useless.”
“So you don’t need her.”
“We could survive without her, but we do the best we can with the people we have.”
“You arranged her assignment here in the first place,” I said.
“That’s right. I met a young, ambitious, and determined indenture, trapped in what she considered assignments without a future, who begged, at length, for my help getting her a posting more in line with her self- proclaimed talents. I was impressed with her and remembered her when I needed people to staff my facility here. It turned out that she was much better at self-promotion than she was at delivering on her promises, but what could I do? She was already
I’d just been fed about fourteen different flavors of self-contradictory bullshit and told it was all the same shade of vanilla. “So are they necessary, or not? Do you need all three of them, or not? Do they do an excellent job, or are they worse than useless, or what?”
Gibb was getting fed up with this line of questioning. “Let’s just say we might be a little overstaffed in that area, though not entirely by choice.”
More bullshit. In the absence of any other agenda, refusing to transfer them was vindictive, wasteful, and stupid. But only in the absence of any other agenda.
“Second question. Peyrin Lastogne. The man has no Dip Corps file. He has no Confederate file. He’s not even an official member of your delegation. But his authority, here, seems second only to your own. Who the hell is
