intense stages of their conflict sometime today. I’m taking you to the closest of those two.”
“I don’t see what it has to do with anything,” Godel said. “They don’t have the capacity to engage in high- tech sabotage.”
“Which eliminates what happened to Santiago,” I agreed. “And what happened to me. But Warmuth was attacked with Brachiator weaponry.”
“You haven’t seen Brachiators fighting yet.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Take a look,” Godel said, “and
The Porrinyards seemed pinker about the cheeks, which could be either a trick of the light or the beginnings of a shared blush. They were also holding hands, a gesture that might have been easy to mistake as mutual affection but which in their case probably possessed as much real intimacy as an individual choosing to cross his legs while he sat.
I turned back to Godel. “Bondsman Lassiter doesn’t think it’s ridiculous.”
Godel shrugged. “Mo doesn’t think Cynthia had enough sense to defend herself.”
“And you think she did?”
Godel rubbed the bridge of her nose between two index finger and thumb. “How do I put this…! Look. My homeworld has one of those fairy-tale figures adults use to frighten naughty children. He’s a reanimated corpse called the Shadow Man who crawls from the grave to munch on the living. But in every version of the story I’ve ever seen, the Shadow Man can barely move. He shuffles along at two kilometers an hour, waving his arms, somehow catching up to people who should be able to outrun him at a relaxed walk.”
The Porrinyards shared a fond chuckle. “My world has a monster like that too. King Grave. He shuffled along like a man whose toes weighed fifty kilos apiece, but he scared the daylights out of Skye as a child.”
“Not Oscin?” I asked. (I’d almost said
“No, not Oscin,” Skye said alone. “He was never the kind to be scared of stories.”
“In any event,” Godel said, with the air of somebody struggling to get a conversation back on track, “the one thing that makes characters like that so frightening, in stories at least, is that their victims are always too paralyzed to run. They just stand wherever they are and watch this clumsy, fanged thing approaching, and somehow never once work up the nerve to take a step. But if you analyze the model, you realize that anybody who stands still and allows such a crippled, barely mobile predator to catch up with him is too stupid to live anyway. Now think of the Brachiators as predators and Cynthia as the idiot who just hung there and watched while they went after her with their claws. I’m telling you. I refuse to believe it unless you can show me why.”
I’d noted her use of Warmuth’s first name. “Were you close to her?”
She grimaced. “I was wondering why you brought me along.”
“Not because of that. But were you?”
“We worked together. We got along. We were friendly, not friends.”
“What kept you from being friends?”
“Nothing in particular. I liked her. Didn’t love her.”
“Again: why not?”
“Friendship is hard enough without dealing with somebody who insists on immediately being your best one. But that doesn’t mean I’d consider her so incompetent that anything as physically useless as a Brach could sneak up on her. I mean, really, Counselor. Watch and see.”
The battlefield was a patch of Uppergrowth indistinguishable from any other, marked only by the thirty nearly immobile figures wrapped in what their species must have considered to be frenetic combat. There were two groups, whose paths prior to this moment in their respective histories were easy to track by the vines they’d shredded in their wake. They hadn’t collided head-on, but rather at an angle, joining in battle as soon as both tribes realized that they’d now be competing for the same patch of their world’s ceiling.
The fresh, juicy manna pears hanging in bunches from every vine in sight revealed the conflict as ridiculous, as even Brachiators forced into a course change could have found more food than they could possibly eat within an hour’s travel, but that didn’t matter to them; their armies had met, and their war had to be fought.
I’ve been on a battlefield or two in my time. I’m told some people find it glorious, or thrilling. I’ve never seen the sense of either claim. But if I could concede that some wars are glorious, I would also have to admit the natural corollary, that somewhere in the universe wars are just mind-numbingly tedious.
The Brachiator battlefield looked like an orgy where everybody had fallen asleep in mid-hump. The combatants fought with two limbs apiece, as they needed the others to hold fast to the Uppergrowth, their fighting limbs not much more mobile as they raked at their opponents, clawing slow-motion furrows across flesh. I saw two Brachs who had sunken fangs into one another’s skin, but neither seemed to be chewing or pursuing the battle further; it was as if that first jolt of mutual pain had frozen them both, and rendered them incapable of either retreat or further assault. I saw two others going after one another with claw-knives of the sort that had been used on Cynthia Warmuth. Both Brachiators were already bleeding, and both were winding up for another slash, but they moved more like men afraid of breaking something than soldiers in a battle for their lives.
I’ve seen wells dug more quickly, by people bearing no tools more advanced than shovels.
Some of the Brachs were screaming in pain or rage. Their wordless cries were the same violin-pitch as those coming from the infants clinging to parental backs.
“See?” Godel said. “Even assuming that they had some reason to attack her, and further imagining that she slept through their approach and was surprised by their attack, she would have had more than enough time to do whatever she had to do to protect herself.”
“I always pictured them restraining her first,” Lassiter argued. “Holding her so she couldn’t fight, even as the claws were driven in, in slow motion.”
“I thought of that. But moving as slowly as these beasties do, they would have had to coordinate their movements with machine precision, pinning all four of her limbs at the same instant. Otherwise, if a Brach grabbed one wrist, and even a few seconds passed before another Brach got hold of the other, she would have more than fair warning that something nasty was going on. She could have thrashed around, hollered bloody murder, fought them off, even sent out a distress signal. She wouldn’t just hang there and do nothing. But I can’t see the Brachs executing a smooth four-way assault, either.”
I’d assumed, up until now, that the Warmuth killing had been a low-tech crime, in extreme contrast to what had happened to Santiago. But precision required another solution, possibly one implicating the AIsource. After all, they were precision incarnate, and wouldn’t have had much difficulty directing their creations in a coordinated assault.
The only problem, really, was that the crime still didn’t make any sense.
Lassiter said, “Look over there. Something’s happening.”
Our upside-down orientation had lent the Brachiators a deceptive buoyancy. No longer dead weights, clinging to the Uppergrowth as their only defense against a fatal plunge, they now resembled balloons afraid of floating away. The wounded ones bled upward in drips and streams, the larger drops separating into drizzles as they ascended. The two Lassiter had pointed out, and which she now maneuvered us closer to, were well into their fatal combat. Each was marked by a dozen slashing wounds, with the smaller of the pair clinging to a frayed vine with a single arm that was already more wound than intact limb. The big one had jabbed a claw-blade into his enemy’s sole intact shoulder and was sawing it, slowly, ever so slowly, across what remained of the tissue connecting muscle and bone.
It was as close to a hurry as the Brachiators ever got, and my human eyes still insisted on perceiving it as dull, lazy, and drugged.
Lassiter said, “The little one’s going to fall within a few minutes. Poor thing.”
I considered vomiting. The realization that our upside-down orientation would fling it all back in my face made the need more urgent, not less. “Can we save him?”
Lassiter regarded the claws and teeth gouging furrows into flesh. “Getting between those two doesn’t strike me as a good idea.”
“I mean after he falls. Can we hover and give him something to land on?”
Lassiter gave that suggestion the kind of look people reserve for the openly delusional. “Also not a good idea,
