I said, “Yes?”
I glanced at the Porrinyards, who for once reacted as individuals: Oscin with an encouraging smile, Skye with a charming little shrug. Levine, sitting behind them, just shook his head. Nobody else seemed available for comment.
Might as well. “Don’t you know?”
Levine muttered, “Sounds like a true brother under the skin.”
Lastogne murmured something about finally, at long last, meeting an AIsource program he could get along with.
The suns were still out, but the skimmer was equipped with lights for the convenience of its organic passengers, and provided a moving spotlight on the Uppergrowth a few meters above us. Our poky rate afforded us clear views of any Brachiators we passed; most were moving at a pace so deliberate that human eyes interpreted it as the next best thing to complete immobility. I couldn’t tell whether they noticed us or not, and after a moment decided that I preferred not. They were like many pre-technological races we’d encountered, in that they had been perfectly comfortable without us.
Once we left, they’d forget us in a generation. Maybe earlier. We were “Ghosts,” after all. Some of us more than others.
The skimmer persisted in its delusions of helpfulness.
I said, “Can you get a message to the entities in charge?”
“Fine,” I said. “Tell them that I want another private audience, at their earliest convenience. And while you’re at it, tell them I’m tired of their fucking games.”
The hangar may have been a vast open space, dwarfing the Dip Corps transport, but human frenzy is large enough to fill any empty room known to sentient life, and the overwhelming impression Gibb’s evacuees inflicted on their surroundings was indeed frenzy. Indentures ran in and out of the hangar, using flats and freight drivers to ferry salvaged supplies to a makeshift storage area between the ship and the hangar bulkhead. Robin Fish and Nils D’Onofrio occupied themselves inflating an array of emergency sleepcubes along the opposite wall. D’Onofrio worked at twice Fish’s speed, moving with a swift, confident efficiency that spoke well of his willingness to work when work was provided. Fish just seemed to drag herself from place to place, expending minimal effort to minimal effect. It didn’t strike me as laziness so much as adherence to a different time scale: she didn’t seem to feel the passage of minutes at the same rate the rest of us did, instead adopting a rate the Brachiators might have appreciated. I wondered again just what drugs might have been coursing through her veins, in addition to any blood she still had room for.
Some of the indentures wobbled as they walked, reflecting what may have been a long interval since their last walk on solid ground. Others bore the shell-shocked, disbelieving expression common to all refugees. Still others seemed defiant or even amused. I saw tears, hugs, jokes, more than a few stolen kisses, and a couple of minor shoving matches. When Cif Negelein ambled unseen in the midst of it all, fluttering his hands like doves, I thought him in the midst of a major emotional breakdown until I glimpsed the light in his eyes and realized that he was virtually sketching the scene, filtering the unbearable through the lens of his own beloved art.
A few minutes into the general chaos Gibb called out for attention, his voice a lost thin note that went unnoticed until Lastogne provided his own sharp “All right, people! Listen up!”
Everybody stopped.
Gibb winced, shot Lastogne a look, and cleared his throat in an unsuccessful attempt to pretend that hoarseness was the only reason he hadn’t been heard. “Right. I just want to say that, as far as I’m concerned, this situation here, this…retreat…is just temporary. We’re not leaving One One One, nor are we abandoning our duties here. We’ll use skimmers to continue our observations inside the Habitat, and with any luck return to Hammocktown upon the conclusion of this investigation.” He licked his lips, cast about for something else to say, found nothing, and looked to me. “Counselor? Do you have anything to add to that?”
I shook my head. “That covers it.”
He seemed dismayed by my failure to provide a dramatic closer. “Well, uh, all right, then. Everybody, go back to setting up.”
The only notable reaction was a gradual return to the previous noise level.
Gibb stood at the center of it, wearing the look you’d expect from a man who had just blown the most important speech of his life.
Oskar Levine, his arms fully laden with material I failed to recognize, stopped by my side. “Not exactly the most inspiring of leaders, eh?”
I found myself casting about for something to do with my hands. “That may be his greatest advantage right now.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I honestly can’t wait to hear how you figure that.”
“An inspiring leader would have amped their emotions. He’d have blistered the air with rhetoric and shown enough courage, defiance, and self-confidence to make them eager to follow wherever he led. And, just like Gibb right now, he’d then have absolutely nowhere to go from there: not a game plan, not an exit strategy, nothing; not even the vaguest of ideas. He’d have set them on fire and then given them nothing to do with it. But treating this like just another bureaucratic inconvenience that we all just have to buckle down and muddle through, the way he just did, accomplishes something more.”
“What?”
I looked him in the eye. “It makes the crisis boring.”
“And that’s good?”
“It is if it makes them look forward to whatever happens next.”
Levine shifted his packages under one arm so he could scratch his head with the other. “You’ve got a great way of thinking, Counselor.”
I spotted Skye in the entrance to the transport. She’d changed into a full-body jumpsuit, too loose and all- concealing to have been one of her own. Her face was flushed and her bristled hair shiny with sweat.
Excusing myself to Levine, I avoided three or four collisions with other bustling indentures just rushing to her side. “What’s wrong?”
She wiped her forehead with the back of one hand. “Beyond the obvious?”
“Please.”
“Some of the Intersleep crypts need cleaning. Nothing serious, but there’s one in the back that looks like it hasn’t been flushed since the trip in.”
I remembered Gibb telling me that the ship only had waking accommodations for four. “I thought D’Onofrio and the others were supposed to be in charge of that.”
“They were, but this one’s caked with dry bluegel.”
I revised my previous complimentary estimate of D’Onofrio’s work ethic. “Is that going to be a problem?”
“As long as we’re not in a hurry to get out.”
I’d done the grim math. The current complement of human beings on One One One included not only those who’d arrived on this vessel, but also a substantial number who had arrived on subsequent supply ships. The total population exceeded this ship’s entire capacity by about twenty. If a full evacuation became necessary, I could squeeze in another couple of people in my own transport, but that still left a tragic number of people behind.
Of course, if it came to that, we’d all be dead anyway.
Because the only possible reason for us to leave here in such a hurry would be confirmation that the AIsource
