down.
The major plus of this is the way it encourages the talented and the dedicated to work harder. The major minus is that it enables them to leave the service earlier, with full benefits, while preserving the jobs of the dull and apathetic.
The Dip Corp’s middle management is infested with functionaries with all the talent of concrete blocks, who rose to their current positions of power out of sheer longevity but have nothing else to offer.
It’s never affected my own performance, as my contract is permanent and working at any level beneath my absolute best can only make things worse for me. But I’ve also had to deal with any number of human zeroes who stuck around long enough to become number ones. It’s not fun. It’s also a waste of time to argue about. It’s just the way things are.
Group records at Dip Corps installations are usually kept secret from the indentures to avoid conflicts and jealousies and second-guessing, but access is one of my privileges as a representative of the Judge Advocate: a good thing, as the pattern of rewards and penalties is an excellent guide for any outsider who needs to track the currents of power at an installation as remote as the human community on One One One.
I’d already looked up Warmuth and Santiago, the first day. Now I wanted a little closer look at the other people I’d dealt with.
The most recent award called itself to my attention right away. Entered into the system by Peyrin Lastogne, following the arrest of Mr. Gibb, it had provided one Hannah Godel a small consideration, reducing her contract by some forty minutes for restraining Li-Tsan Crin during the fight. This was a bargain, as she hadn’t been involved at all and had assured me she hadn’t seen anything.
A hytex search of all such awards granted last night revealed several averaging thirty minutes apiece to a number of others whose testimony had been equally noncommital. There was nothing all that unusual about this. Middle management has always favored underlings friendly to middle management. It’s corruption, all right, but of a minor and probably unavoidable sort.
A closer look at Godel’s records reflected a steady if not overly impressive stream of such bonuses, establishing a time depletion rate some 7 percent faster than the calendar. A nice, solid, uninspired, but dependable, rating—nothing to engage any particular suspicions. But I might want to spend a little time with her today.
So now I went back a little further. Same day. A month taken off the contracts of Oscin and Skye Porrinyard, for their decisive heroism in saving my life. Also authorized by Mr. Lastogne, at Gibb’s express urging. I was a little disappointed that I was only worth a month, but what the hell. Gibb didn’t like me. Their overall depletion was a steady 20 percent faster than the calendar: a gifted rating.
The next three or four names I checked out also received bonuses at a rate that seemed just about fair; maybe or little bit more or less than equitable, but the differences, plus or minus, were well within the limits of managerial preference. After all, as I have reason to know, you can do an exemplary job and still have an enemy for a boss. You can also be a total fuckup and still get invited to his house on holidays. Those few points, one way or another, were no doubt at least partly attributable to things like willingness to laugh at Mr. Gibb’s jokes.
This wasn’t fair either, but it was well within the realm of the human.
I didn’t find an actual anomaly until I expected to: in the records of poor, height-sensitive Robin Fish.
She’d exceeded the calendar by 35 percent her first year, an odd statistic granted that she’d spent most of that time alone in the hangar. Her exemplary performance doing next to nothing seemed to have fallen down in the second year, leveling off at about 9 percent over calendar, but was still pretty high for an indenture who spent most of her time recovering from the metabolic aftershock of too much manna juice.
The record of her fellow height-sensitive Li-Tsan Crin was even stranger. She’d earned 20 percent over calendar in the Habitat, and continued to earn 20 percent over calendar sitting on her ass in the hangar.
Nils D’Onofrio had earned only 12 percent over calendar in the Habitat, sunken to zero percent over calendar in the first month of his exile, and then rocketed to a consistent 20 percent over calendar afterward.
In short, the three people most useless inside the Habitat, and most vocal about wanting to be transferred off-station, were at the same time the three highest paid.
I didn’t consider Burr and Wells more than bit players in this affair, but on a whim I looked them up anyway. I found two indentures midway through their respective contracts, each earning at a rate 20 percent higher than calendar. ’Twas not always so. Burr and Wells had both been discharged from previous posts for “discipline problems,” with one past superior writing of Burr, “He’s not especially well suited to working on a team, but would be a well-valued member of any out-of-control mob.” Another wrote of Wells, “Tends to look for people weaker than himself, to impress with his superior will.” Wells struck me as a low-level thug, and Burr as something worse. Prior to Burr’s posting here, he’d served his time at 20 percent below calendar due to penalties for small infractions, most of them having to do with intimidation of fellow indentures. And yet, Burr seemed to be earning phenomenal times, versus the calendar, on One One One. And he was the one who’d leered, when Gibb was confronted with the characterization of himself as “Pimp.” It hadn’t been Lastogne’s leer, which always seemed to make Gibb the target of a joke. It was something else. Burr thought something was being put over on me, and it pleased him mightily.
Interesting. Disgusting, but interesting.
I left the berth and found Oscin, this morning’s designated Porrinyard, sitting with his feet up on the command console. He had changed into a baggy set of work tights, and looked as weary as I’d ever seen him, which is to say fully alert with gray half-moons under his eyes. He looked up as the hatch opened and offered me a little half-wave. “Good morning, Counselor.”
I suppressed a yawn. “Is it morning?”
“Early afternoon, by the Habitat clock. But you’ve had a full eight hours.”
More than I usually got outside of Intersleep. “Where’s Li-Tsan?”
He gestured at the sealed hatch next to mine. “Gave her lunch a little while ago. She asked for privacy, so I locked her in. But don’t worry, I’m monitoring her vitals.”
“And your other half?”
He indicated another of the sealed doors. “In there. Sleeping.”
I found that hard to believe. “You can do that? I mean, not at the same time?”
“Why not? Bodies tire at different rates, even when they’re driven by the same engines. And we haven’t always been assigned to simultaneous work shifts; there have been times, here and elsewhere, when my components didn’t lay eyes on our respective other halves for days on end. So I just catch some sleep when I can.”
The more I spoke to this people, this person, the more the implications of their shared condition dizzied me. “What’s it like for you, one being awake when the other one is sleeping?”
“Not very satisfactory, I’m afraid. The waking one doesn’t become a single again, but the gestalt does lose much of its combined cognitive function, making me feel a little stupid until the sleeping half wakes up. And the sleeping one can’t sustain dream-sleep alone, which means that I have to schedule simultaneous sleep sooner or later, or invite serious psychological repercussions. The trade-off is that when I do dream, I’m able to remember that I’m dreaming, and shape the experience any way that amuses me until I have to wake up again. It helps keep me centered.”
I thought of all the nights I’d spent reliving the terror of a little girl on Bocai. “No nightmares, then?”
“They try to get a foothold, from time to time, but intangible monsters can’t frighten me when I retain enough analytical capacity to laugh in their faces. Sometimes I let them come just so I can entertain myself squishing them like bugs. Why? Are you susceptible?”
It would have been nice to turn the memory off, edit it, give it a happy ending, or at least a comprehensible one, and not have to wake up so many mornings with the wounds so refreshed. It might even be worth cylinking with someone, were there any other human beings willing to share a lease on the knee-deep broken glass inside my head. But that was a stupid thought. “Any messages?”
Oscin said, “Just a lot of people dreading whatever you plan to do next.”
“Nothing from New London?”
“Not yet.”
