Counselor. We’re not exactly equipped to offer it medical attention, or a future. And interference of any kind is well beyond the approved scope of our mission here. We could really anger the AIsource.”
“Oh, gee,” I said. “We sure wouldn’t want that.”
“Please, Counselor. I understand your humanitarian impulses…”
“I don’t have humanitarian impulses. But I do need to find out something. Find a way to work it.”
Still she did nothing, instead staring like a woman who expected eye-stalks to sprout from my forehead.
Behind me, the Porrinyards cleared their respective throats, engineering even that noise to come from the empty air between them. “Maureen? In matters involving her investigation, the Counselor has full authority. You have to do what she says.”
Lassiter’s jaw tightened. “Can I just mention, first, that it’s a goddamn stupid order that will accomplish nothing but prolong a sentient creature’s suffering?”
“You just did,” I told her.
She rolled the skimmer again, this time without warning me. The entire world turned upside-down again, the Uppergrowth and sky switching places in less time than my equilibrium would have liked to consider possible. My fear of heights overcame that rational part of me comfortable within the skimmer’s local gravity, and I found myself clutching at my seat, my mouth gaping in soundless, instinctive terror. But the moment passed. The Uppergrowth, now returned to its rightful place as the ceiling of this demented world, hung directly above us again, its strangeness rejuvenated.
The one advantage of Lassiter’s malicious little move was that it once again brought the skimmer’s local gravity in synch with the environment’s. Down was down. So I could vomit over the side without any fear of baptizing myself with breakfast. It was a good thing she’d flipped a 180 and not 360, as by that point I had no choice.
I accepted a water bottle from Skye. “So how are we going to do this?”
Lassiter ascended to within three meters of the struggling Brachiators, positioning the flat cargo platform at the rear beneath the combatant about to surrender to the inevitable. Drops of bright pink blood, leaking from the wounds of both combatants, already specked the flatbed. “I’ll have to get close. An object the size and weight of a Brachiator doesn’t need all that much time in free fall to become a missile capable of knocking us out of its sky.”
“We’re safe at this distance, though?”
Lassiter flashed me a look of utmost contempt. “I wouldn’t agree to this otherwise, with or without your authority. No, the average human male weighs more than the average Brachiator, and showoffs among our people have been known to jump down from higher distances. But we should all scooch as far from that platform as possible. Nobody’s ever had the gall to suggest this before, and I don’t know what’s going to happen when we do.”
All five of us crowded against the forward hull, with the bulky Lassiter taking up more than her fair share of the available room. Godel, Lassiter, and Oscin Porrinyard stood with their backs against the Interface console. Skye and I crouched at their feet, making ourselves as small as possible. Above us, the Brachiator losing his battle for life screamed in what must have been agony and despair—all the more heartbreaking for its failure to express the obvious in human terms. Alien mind or not, we all knew it was thinking what any sentient creature, in its position, would have been thinking.
The soft ripping noises, above us, seemed to go on forever. I have no idea whether the Brachiator sense of time comes close to being as protracted as their fighting style, but would like to think not. I’d prefer to believe they perceived themselves as moving quickly. Otherwise the dying one would have felt every instant of the long minutes between one slash and the next.
Whatever else I could say about the stupidity of Brach warfare, including that it made human warfare look like a sensible endeavor, the losing Brach did have one hell of a will to live.
Then Lassiter said, “There he goes.”
I hadn’t seen anything that distinguished this particular moment from the agonizing wait that preceded it, but she was right. The losing Brach plummeted from the Uppergrowth and dropped the two meters between the site of its final battle and our flatbed, taking the bulk of the impact on its back. It didn’t convulse or roll, as we’d feared. It just lay there, the remains of its arms still reaching out toward the roof of its world.
The Porrinyards gave my shoulders a synchronized squeeze. “One second, Counselor. I want to make sure this is safe first.” They went aft, stood at the back of the passenger compartment looking over the body, then returned, their shared expression grim. “It’s alive, but it won’t be for long. I don’t think we have anything to fear.”
“This is cruel as hell,” Lassiter muttered.
“I don’t see how,” the Porrinyards said. “It’ll be dead in minutes, whatever happens. It will spend that time in pain and terror, whatever happens. We can’t help it, whatever happens. We’ve only arranged for it to spend its last minutes with us, instead of in free fall.”
Lassiter was still resentful. “For all we know, that’s worse.”
“If so we’ll do the humane thing and drop it over the side once Counselor gets what she needs. All the more reason to let her get on with it. Counselor?”
My knees cracked as I stood. Suddenly uncharacteristically hesitant in the face of violent death, despite the many I’d seen in my time, I wasted a second or two flexing my back before leaving the others to join the Brachiator for its last moments.
It lay on its back, all four limbs splayed, its bright pink blood pooled beneath it like a sheet. Its face was striped with deep, oozing gashes, one of which crossed an eye socket now containing an unrecognizable soup that might have been an eye. The other eye, which looked disturbingly human, turned toward me as I approached, widening with what might have been terror or simple incomprehension. The rest of its body, beyond the face, had been ripped open so savagely that some of the unidentifiable organs revealed by the wounds were also open and leaking various fluids. But it was the eye that bothered me, the eye that made me feel a criminal. The Brachiator may have had no idea who I was, but the eye recognized me.
“You are one of the New Ghosts.” It closed its mouth, swallowed, then spoke more clearly. “I have never seen a New Ghost, but I have heard of them.”
I sounded like I’d left all my wind in New London. “Do you know where you are?”
The Brachiator swallowed again. “I am among the Dead.”
I began to understand Lassiter’s resentment. Requiring anything from this creature right now was arrogant and wrong. “You are not among the Dead. You are alive. You may not have much life left, but you’re still breathing, still looking at me, still talking. Do you understand?”
The Brachiator swallowed again. “I am a Ghost in a land of Ghosts.”
“Why? Please! I know there’s no reason this should matter to you, but there’s a great evil that will continue killing if you can’t answer this question. How can you be among the Dead if you can still talk and breathe?”
The Brachiator’s single remaining eye rolled upward, allowing its owner one last look at the carnage still tearing apart its tribe and family. Did it have the equivalent of a spouse up there? Friends? Young? Things it felt passionate about? Things it wanted to change? “The hand is gone,” it managed. “How could I still be alive?”
One last ragged breath later its eye closed, and did not open again.
I didn’t realize I was shaking until the Porrinyards came up behind me, one on either side. They did not touch me or put their hands on my shoulders, as they had before, but they did make their presence known, and they did refrain from comment as I returned to my seat.
It wasn’t the thing’s sad end that had gotten to me. But its confusion, its blindness, its helplessness in the face of forces beyond its comprehension felt familiar. Mo Lassiter had been right. I wished I’d just let the poor thing be.
Behind me, she said, “Was that worth doing? Did you learn anything at all?”
I kept my eyes on the dead Brachiator.
“Yes. Yes, I did.”
