they’re designed to spend their entire lives staring at a surface right above their faces. That’s not the perspective of a species destined to understand the panorama. That’s the perspective of a species with limited understanding of up and down, and a perspective your outpost filled with mountain climbers and professional aerialists was not about to grasp. I, on the other hand, have always been afraid of heights, and I know in my gut what the Brachiators know from birth: that the Uppergrowth is Life, and everything below it is Death.”
Lastogne’s mouth fell open. “I’ll be damned.”
“Consider a Brachiator falling. Imagine its prognosis for survival if it falls, let’s say, so much as one meter. I think you’ll agree, that’s not even enough to pick up appreciable speed. Maybe it hasn’t even vanished from peripheral vision yet. We already know that the AIsource won’t rescue it. Does it stand any chance of survival? Whatsoever?”
What followed was the well-known phenomenon of a group, asked a simple question with an obvious answer, that nevertheless remains silent as everybody waits for somebody else to trigger a suspected rhetorical trap.
The Porrinyards were the first to build up enough confidence to say the obvious. “No, Counselor. It doesn’t.”
“Exactly,” I said. “In that instant, it is still breathing, it is still feeling, it is still thinking, but by all standards reasonable to its species, it is as dead as the Brachiator who took a tumble a week ago, or one that fell last year.”
Lastogne rubbed his eyes. “Yeah.”
“Think about it,” I said. “From their perspective, we rise from the place that nothing can survive. We are solid, we are friendly, we speak to them, we are clearly entities with substance, but we are also visitors from the land of the Dead. By all reasonable calculations, we are Ghosts. It is no wonder they resist speaking to anybody who hasn’t spent a night on the Uppergrowth. Doing that gives us a certain link to Life. Not quite the same thing as life, since we still keep coming in and out of existence—”
Lastogne now seemed thoroughly disgusted with himself. “Like Half-Ghosts.”
“Exactly. A natural classification for somebody sometimes alive and sometimes dead: a concept they find strange, but which is evidently within their ability to accept. Unfortunately for her, Cynthia Warmuth didn’t see things that way. She had something else, which several people, including you, have described as a downright compulsive empathy.”
Was that a flicker of pain in Lastogne’s eyes? “Yes.”
“She wanted, too much, to be inside the skin of anybody she spoke to. She made herself a pest about it. So much a pest that people hated her for it. But she would have survived unpopularity if she hadn’t taken it a step too far: the same step I took when I spent a night on the Uppergrowth. She told the Brachiators she wanted to be Alive like them, without ever once considering what they’d think that meant.”
Lastogne now looked downright stricken. “And so…?”
“And so,” I said, “bearing her no malice whatsoever, they nailed her into place.”
Lastogne stood up, turned his back on us, and strode to the cube’s far wall, his arms crossed before him, his head bowed in an attitude of unbearable sorrow. Neither the Porrinyards nor I said anything to disturb him. After several long minutes, he returned to his seat, his grimace now a wan, mournful scowl.
I went on as if there had been no interruption at all. “It wouldn’t have occurred to them that they could hurt her. They didn’t think she was completely Alive in the first place. To their eyes, she was already just a Ghost, with an unnatural half-existence; nothing as linked to everyday existence as a wound should have had any effect on her. No. With the best possible intentions, she asked for their help holding on to Life, and with the best possible intentions, they gave her what she wanted. The negative effect on her came as a complete surprise to them. They told me this themselves.
Lastogne eyed the Porrinyards, soliciting silent feedback, finding in their expressions of wide-eyed understanding acceptance of a truth everybody here had failed to see. After a moment he turned toward me once again, but his eyes were not focused on me so much as past me, to some memory only his eyes could see. “I always told her it would hurt her someday.”
Nothing he had ever said to me sounded less like him.
The Porrinyards, who knew him better than I did, turned toward him, their profiles matching studies in incredulity.
I wasn’t surprised at all. “What?”
“Caring, as much as she did.” His voice broke. He heard it, gathered himself together, and shrugged, apologizing for the moment of weakness. “It’s not typical, Counselor. You know how I feel about the system. It cements mediocrity in place. Most of the indentures are just trying to do their time and get out. Most of the careerists are just trying to rise to their own level of incompetence. And when you find an occasional person who really cares, the irritant like poor Cynthia, they turn out to be worse than either. They go and screw everything up by behaving like what they do matters.”
The Porrinyards were alternating aghast glances at me with disbelieving glances at Lastogne.
I couldn’t blame them. Not after everything they’d said about his selfishness as a lover.
But this was still territory I’d expected. “You loved her, didn’t you?”
“I wasn’t drawn to her, at first. It’s like I told you the first day: I don’t look to make friends. The last thing I could ever want was understanding from someone so arrogant she actually believed other people could be understood.” He shook his head, not just once but several times, perhaps even too many times, before raising his eyes back to me. “I always told her it would hurt her someday. I even warned her to be careful it didn’t get her killed. Shows how goddamned perceptive I am, doesn’t it?”
There was an odd, hysterical sense of triumph in his voice. The loss of Cynthia Warmuth hadn’t shattered him at all. It had only reinforced his grim sense of cynical amusement, confirming the hard lessons he’d learned from other losses, other tragedies, other people he’d driven away.
The moment lasted just long enough for Skye to extend her hand, almost touch his shoulder, then draw her hand back, deciding the touch a bad idea.
Then he pulled himself together, took a deep breath, and noticed me again, this time with a dark resentment that bordered on bile. “But it’s not sufficient, Counselor. It doesn’t explain Santiago. Or the attempts on your life. Or that attacker who went after Oscin and Skye. Or what’s happened to Hammocktown.”
I looked him right in the eye, and nodded. “You’re right. It doesn’t.”
“What do you expect me to think? That Gibb’s behind all this? That he’s somewhere in the Uppergrowth, waiting for another fresh victim to come along?”
“That remains a possible explanation, sir.”
“But you don’t think so.”
“No, sir. I think what the evidence tells me.”
“And you’re not about to tell me what that is.”
“Not until I’m sure.”
“So how can that even begin to compensate for everything else you’ve done?”
“By itself,” I said, “it doesn’t. But this was never just one mystery, with one solution. It was several, all mixed up and getting in the way of a comprehensive explanation. I had to clear away all the smaller issues, like Gibb and like Warmuth, just to get at the bigger picture. And that’s the one last thing I still have left to do.” I took a deep breath. “Who are you, Peyrin Lastogne?”
He stared at me as if unsure whether to give me a medal or punch me in the mouth. Then he glanced at the Porrinyards, first one and then the other, to determine just how much they’d been infected by my madness. When they just nodded, he threw up his arms and stomped back to the same corner he’d retreated to before, turning a number of different colors.
He’d said all he was going to say.
The assembled indentures watched as the Porrinyards and I marched back to the skimmer dock, their eyes either accusatory or imploring. I had thought them people under siege before, the day I’d
