“But that’s the whole point. I’m still contaminated. That’s why they still call me a war criminal. Why they locked me away. Why they made me their property. Why they keep saying I’ll never be forgiven.”
My field of vision was now dominated by two faces, his and hers.
“Politics.”
Damn it, I wasn’t going to let this happen. It was one thing to weep coming out of Intersleep or alone in my quarters on New London, another thing entirely to weep where other people could see it. Other people weren’t something I could go to for comfort. They were part of the puzzle I’d been left alive to solve.
But I didn’t have enough voice to stop them. “I’m a monster.”
Oscin leaned in closer, while Skye held me tight.
“You’re beautiful,” they said together.
First one at a time, and then together, they kissed me.
For the first time in longer than I could remember, I felt myself coming close to putting down the burdens I’d been carrying my entire life. None of it seemed important: not what I’d seen, not what I’d done, not what people thought of me and would always think of me, not the Unseen Demons and everything they had come to mean to me. All of that remained part of the broken but sharp-edged thing I had become—and for a moment none of it mattered, because it was only noise. None of it had anything to do with the realization, surprised and comical but no less delighted, as I overcame my paralysis:
For just a moment I responded. I pulled Oscin close, not out of preference but because he was easier to reach. Skye, murmuring, kissed the back of my neck. A hand, that could have belonged to either one of them, that I now had to remind myself belonged to both, fluttered along my spine, the touch so light I might have imagined it, or just hoped for it.
But then something happened.
There’s a certain disquieting moment everybody’s experienced at least once. It happens when you’re lying in bed, hovering on the very edge of sleep, your eyes closed and your thoughts sludgy, your consciousness and all the crap that goes with it about to sink into the welcoming darkness.
Sometimes, just before you surrender to sleep, you feel a sudden, terrifying sensation very much like free fall, and jerk yourself awake, your previous feeling of well-being lost.
I wasn’t approaching sleep, but I was losing control, in a way I hadn’t permitted myself in years, so the sudden alarm was the same. I stiffened, sat up, and scrambled away, a fresh tightness seizing my throat. The Porrinyards made no attempt to come after me, instead choosing to remain where they knelt, watching as I curled into a ball and hugged myself with both arms.
“It’s not you,” I said. It was a sentence I’d spoken before, after other failed experiments with intimacy. It had felt just as stupid and inadequate then as it felt now.
“It’s all right,” the Porrinyards told me. “I didn’t take it personally. We have time.”
I didn’t turn to face them. “No. No, I’m sorry, but we don’t.” I straightened my collar, used the back of my hand to wipe the stray tears from my eyes, and stood, taking a moment to regard the chamber’s plain luminescent walls.
The space didn’t feel as empty as it had felt not too long ago. But nothing that inhabited it now was any kind of improvement. The things that inhabited it now were angry.
I turned back to the Porrinyards and found a pair of identical stricken expressions.
They said, “Do you mean we don’t have time now, or we won’t have time ever?”
“Please understand. I can’t get involved in…anything…until my job here is done.” More tired, physically and emotionally, than I’d been at any point since my arrival, I fought off another manifestation of the vague sense that I’d left something undone, and murmured: “The thing is, this is not just one case, but several. At least two. Maybe three or four. All unrelated, all happening to take place in the same place at the same time. The irrelevancies have gotten so jumbled up that I don’t even know what end is up anymore.”
The Porrinyards grinned. “Confusion between up and down being a pretty common complaint, on this station.”
I matched their grin, despite myself. “Well, yes.”
“So what are you going to do?”
I took my bag from Oscin, and slung it over my shoulder. “I’m going to start cutting the knots.”
19. KNOTS
We returned to the skimmer, where Godel and Lassiter were stewing in resentful silence, and from there flew back to the hangar, where I spent the rest of the day in the transport, conducting more interviews with the indentures of Hammocktown.
I didn’t need to know much, just confirm what I already suspected. Most of what I found out confirmed information already given, as always amazing me with how insistent truth can become, once uncovered. A couple of the younger indentures even laughed at me for not figuring it out before. They’d been certain I already knew.
Interviewing Li-Tsan again didn’t take any longer than expected; the woman was still paranoid and abusive and wrapped up in her victimhood. She didn’t answer any questions. But her reactions, when I told her what I knew, proved interesting indeed. As did Nils D’Onofrio’s, when I spoke to him. He was just as embittered and almost as defensive.
Robin Fish was lost, distant, and filled with a sadness that might have overwhelmed me had I been any more receptive to pity. She actually wept. But I expected that. She’d already established herself as maudlin and sloppy. She was also relieved to get the truth out in the open. She gave me more names, some of whom gave up the truth at once, some of whom I had to threaten, and some of whom I just didn’t bother speaking to at all, because by then the picture was clear and I was able to infer the continuation of the pattern from their individual files.
It all comprised one hell of a large domino.
Now all I had to do was topple it onto the next one.
Before I went I composed another coded message to Artis Bringen. It could have been the longest; part of me wanted to start with an essay, explaining why I wanted to know or conceding that I might have been wrong. But everything I added to the question kept distorting its intent. Eventually I just went with what I needed to know, and fired off the shortest dispatch I’d ever sent him. It was a question that could translate as,
I did not know whether I’d have the guts to send it.
When I emerged from the transport into the brighter but no more cheerful light of the hangar, I found that the mood among Gibb’s delegation had degenerated further since the events of the previous night. The same people who had shown determination and defiance during the evacuation had now enjoyed a full day of inactivity and gathering tension. Many sat around outside the sleepcubes, lost in conversations ranging from grim to ribald.
Some glanced at me and muttered comments to friends: no doubt the fortieth or fiftieth distorted conversation about my insane, suicidal behavior on the skimmer. A snatch of laughter attracted my attention and turned out to be a number of indentures indulging in buzzpops. I saw a deeply inebriated Cif Negelein, looking like he’d rubbed himself in every patch of organic matter between here and New London, pulling the woman with purple hair into a sloppy kiss. But the numbers were off. Whenever I passed an open sleepcube, there were indentures lying asleep, indentures sitting on the edge of cots with their heads in their hands, indentures who looked as if they expected the very deck beneath their feet to open up and swallow them at any moment.
Peyrin Lastogne sat with two men and one woman beside a storage crate drafted into service as a table, playing a game involving little silver spheres, golden pyramids, and a tiny holographic hoop that revolved around the center of the table, flashing red whenever it faced one of the players. I didn’t know the rules, but the body language of the players was enough to establish Lastogne himself as the runaway winner.
His mood rose a notch the instant he saw me. “Counselor. You’ve had quite an adventurous day, haven’t you?”
