Emissaries from the Dead

arrived here, but I’d been wrong. This was what being at siege was like. How many of these people were trying to persuade themselves they had a chance of surviving the rest of the day? How many had already decided they wouldn’t?

I could have given them a little reassuring speech, like Gibb had tried to do after the evacuation of Hammocktown, but I’d never been the reassuring speech sort. Maybe that was another area I could work on, in the future. If I had a future.

Oskar Levine was the only one who rushed up to us, just before we left the hangar; he’d been working on the bluegel crypts not long beforehand, and was so stained by the stuff it was hard to find much of his skin’s original color. I confess being relieved when he didn’t obey what looked like his initial impulse to hug me. “Is it true?” he demanded. “Is Hammocktown gone?”

“It’s true,” I told him.

“And Gibb? He was there when it went?”

He seemed more concerned than I would have expected of a man who Gibb had treated like a traitor. I wanted to see if he would fake grief. It hardly seemed in character for him, but people contradict their own natures in times of crisis. So I said, “Yes,” and waited.

It took him several heartbeats to work up his next question, but he ultimately let it out, all in one breath. “Do you think he’s dead, or just in hiding?”

It was a fair question.

I said, “I don’t know,” and left him.

23. IN THE CONFESSIONAL

Between sleeplessness, physical exhaustion and the lingering aftereffects of several near brushes with death, I was as wrung out as a buzzpop addict in the last stages of withdrawal. Part of me argued in favor of a break. If the hangar was indeed safe, as I suspected, I could have taken days, even hours, to rest up and gird myself for the next step, without fear of my extended period of inaction dooming others to join the growing list of casualties.

It would have been nice. It even would have been wise.

But waiting was not an option.

I just couldn’t take being played with any more.

The Porrinyards didn’t say much on the way to the Interface. They knew, with the certainty born of consensus, that no words could stall me, stop me, or comfort me. But Skye did grab my wrist, as I knelt to enter the portal, to ask: “Do you know about us, too? Everything?”

I couldn’t smile. “Yes. I do.”

“How long?”

“For a while now.”

They both looked like they were going to cry. “Are you going to be all right with that?”

“I don’t know. It depends on what I can confirm in there.”

They nodded, with a complete lack of surprise, and acting as one, stepped forward to wrap me in an embrace. Oscin had to stoop, a little, to get in. Both trembled.

“You had better live.”

It wasn’t fear that made me so reluctant to let go, but the sheer novelty of connection: feeling myself a part of somebody else’s life, and feeling them as part of mine. I wasn’t sure it was something I could afford. But that was also part of what I had to find out in there.

The Porrinyards released me and stepped back, dry-eyed, providing me with a matched set of brave little smiles.

I could only nod at them and pull myself through the hatch.

It was not difficult to notice subtle changes in the chamber of indistinct blue skies. A new element had been added, one that clashed with the ambience of infinite space: a certain claustrophobic oppressiveness that made the walls, wherever they were, loom like a prison. I don’t know whether that came from changes in me or from subliminal cues activated by the AIsource. Nor do I know whether I imagined, or merely projected, the impression of hoarded breath. I only know what I believed. And I believed that, insofar as it was even possible for beings like the AIsource to feel apprehension, in the presence of a creature so much smaller and shorter-lived than themselves, it was what they felt now.

As I floated there, waiting for be acknowledged, I found myself understanding them on the most visceral of levels. As intelligences, they were beyond my comprehension. As creatures of power, they were gods who reduced me to the significance of dust. But as souls, they were downright ordinary. They had ambitions, and feelings, as base as those belonging to any of us. They were, in the final analysis, as corrupt as we were. And in that, they were kindred.

In my time I’d been fascinated by them, afraid of them, suspicious of them, and enraged by them.

Now, for the first time ever, I could feel, rather than feign, contempt for them.

It was liberating.

When they spoke, they used the voice of a male: deep and resonant, with just enough of an echo to make the unseen walls seem even farther away.

Congratulations, Counselor. We have heard that you came up with an explanation for the death of Cynthia Warmuth.

“You heard by listening. You were with us, following our every word.”

If we sometimes behave as if we acquire information at the same rate that you organics do, then that’s simply because it’s polite to modulate our conversations with you to your own capacities.

“Polite,” I said. “Or necessary to preserve our illusions.”

Don’t they amount to more or less the same thing?

“No, they don’t. Not when it renders communication less convenient, not more. Not when it complicates every conversation we have. When you do that, the pretense itself becomes the very point—and it leaves me with no choice but to consider just why you find it so important.”

Another pause, this one long enough to make me worry about being ejected for my effrontery.

Then, as if grudgingly: Go on.

“Everybody here sees the absurdity of it. You see and hear everything aboard this station. But in order to actually converse with you in return, Gibb’s people need to hop a skimmer and travel all the way back to this one place. This one room. Why would you make everybody do this? What advantage would you find in it?”

It’s our station. We can make any arbitrary rules we like.

They sounded like the words of a spoiled child, caught trying to dominate a playground.

“It is your station, and the ecosystem you’ve set up here has any number of arbitrary rules, but none of them seem pointless. None of them seem designed to cause inconvenience for its own sake. This chamber does. For a while there I assumed you use it just because you wanted to remind us who ran the place, but now that I’ve been around here for a while I think the true explanation’s a little more devious than that. I think you use it to keep us from thinking about all the things you would prefer us not to think about.”

This pause was the longest so far. We’re not certain what you’re referencing there, Counselor.

“Oh,” I said, my anger with them growing, “I’m sure you know exactly what I’m referencing, but since you insist on going through the motions, we can afford to put this issue aside for a moment or two. After I say a little bit more about Cynthia Warmuth…whose murder, whatever I said to Mr. Lastogne today, remains not quite solved.”

***

A new tone entered the voice of the AIsource: awed fascination. We thought you were under the impression you were finished with that.