Emissaries from the Dead

who’ve heard it before, considered it just more Brachiator dribble. But if we’re Ghosts, and you’re the Hand-in- Ghosts, what does that make you but a puppeteer?”

And then, the AIsource reminded me, there’s the thing that one dying Brachiator said to you.

“I know. It said it couldn’t feel the Hand anymore.”

It was dying. We left early.

“Your ‘Hand,’ as they call it, is always inside them. They can always feel it. They can always feel you inside them.”

Yes.

There was little I could say to that.

The AIsource did not sigh, but their voice cast breath in a manner that simulated a sigh, and went on. These next points are well outside the immediate scope of your investigation, but you will likely desire them resolved before you’re willing to take the one step necessary for the resolution of your business aboard this station. So this is what you want to know. The Brachiators are not the only sentients we’ve bred. We have made a practice of it. We want the unique perspectives their biology requires of them: perspectives that may be right and may be wrong but which are of tremendous help to us in modeling theoretical possibilities for further study. In the specific case of the Brachiators, it has provided their concepts of Life and Death and, in time, other imaginative psychological variations. It is all data, tremendous in its potential to reveal that which we have always desired.

Had I possessed a button capable of destroying One One One in a cataclysm of raging nuclear fire, I would have pressed it, not caring that I floated at its heart. But I didn’t have that. I didn’t even possess any solid objects to hit. “I didn’t consent to that contribution.”

Neither did the Brachiators, the AIsource replied blandly. Few sentients have a choice in deciding just what kind of learning experience they present for others. You, yourself, have had little control over the lessons you’ve taught more sentients than you can name. But it matters little. You can lock yourself in a room and never interact with anything outside it, ever again, and still by example provide data for those who know you’re in there. You could go further by retreating into catatonia, and still teach those obliged to care for you. This is not much different. The Brachiators did not ask to be created, but then no creature does. In the meantime, they live, and find it incidental that we watch and learn.

“They deserve more than living their whole lives as your puppets!”

“Deserve” is a value judgment that varies depending on viewpoint. But the point is moot. If they are puppets—or, the AIsource seemed to hesitate then, the interjection giving the impression of a wry afterthought, if you prefer, Marionettes, they are puppets that are permitted a substantial degree of free will. Because, like human beings, they will not give us the answers we seek unless they’re left free to explore their own natures.

“And those answers are—”

—tangential to the reason you came to this station. You are here, in this chamber, not to confront us about our manipulations, but because you need our assistance to find the entity you call the Heckler.

My heart still thundering in my chest, the implications of what I’d learned looming before me like a landscape too vast to be perceived by merely human eyes, I would not take the cue and change the subject. “Why all the hints? Why all the games? Why not just make me do what you want me to do?”

The AIsource’s response was a perfect fatherly chuckle.

Because then you would be less than useless to us, Andrea Cort. You are a very interesting human being. And, again, what we want of you, in the future, is only useful if provided of your own free will.

“And that’s what you’ve always wanted from me,” I said. “That’s why you went to so much trouble to invite me aboard this madhouse. Why you’ve bribed me with all these ‘gifts.’ Why you’ve manipulated this dispute between yourselves and the ones I call Unseen Demons, and withheld all answers until I asked direct questions. Even why you saved me, twice. You want that concession from me.”

It is what we’ve always wanted, Andrea. But it is necessary now. The murderer you seek is under rogue protection. You will not be able to force a confrontation except as our agent, exercising the laws of our majority. And even then, the rules of engagement will keep the rogues, and us, from engaging each other directly. This will have to be a confrontation between two human beings.

My clothing fluttered from a breeze blowing from somewhere behind me. I felt myself tumbling head over heels in what my vague sense of direction insisted on interpreting as multiple forward somersaults. Without any visual cues identifying up or down or even a fixed point of reference, it was impossible to tell where one rotation ended and the next one began, but I was being directed somewhere I couldn’t see, without any personal input on my part.

I wanted to kick and scream and thrash about and somehow propel myself in a direction directly opposite from the one the AIsource required of me.

But I did not know what direction that was.

We won’t force you, the AIsource said. You could forgo the answers, and return to New London with failure on your hands.

The blue chamber provided no cues identifying up, down, or sideways.

Once again I considered the words Lastogne had spoken to me, the words that had come to define the entire direction my life had taken, upon my arrival on this station.

We’re all owned.

It’s just a matter of deciding who holds the deed.

It wasn’t like I owed the Confederacy, or the Dip Corps, a damned thing.

But humanity?

That was a betrayal of an entirely different order. If a betrayal was what it was.

I had always hated people, always despised crowds. No, scratch “always.” Once upon a time, before the night that formed me, I’d been partial to both. But since then I’d never been at home in any gathering of human beings. I’d always seen the race as a corrupt one, one that though worth despising for its own crimes were nevertheless too high to permit inclusion by a creature who had done the kind of things I’d done. I’d known that I could never be accepted and had hated them for not trying harder to prove me wrong. I’d been proud of that dichotomy, like any other self-serving misanthrope.

But now I found myself thinking about a cafe I’d liked, in New London’s Mercantile district, on a balcony with a view overlooking the three hundred terraces of the Dumas Plaza. I’d always gone there with a hytex link stocked with severe-looking documents, and the fierce mien of a dedicated bureaucrat too busy to be disturbed. It had discouraged the interference of fellow diners who, otherwise, might have taken the empty chair opposite mine as an invitation for the opening of conversational gambits. Alone, in the midst of the friends and lovers chatting at other tables, I’d been able to enjoy the spicy food and my cocoon of silence and sit among them without ever being of them. It had been my choice. But how much time had I spent with my nose in my important work, and how much had I spent watching those terraces across the way, and the people who wandered in and out of those fancy rooms like actors making entrances and exits in three hundred plays written just for me? How much had I hated them, taking comfort in considering them vapid every time I caught a smile or heard a peal of laughter, and how insistently had I assured myself that my emptiness was so much more informed, so much more genuine than whatever joys they’d used to fill themselves?

Why would I do all that, if they were just beneath my notice?

How much more could I have had, if I’d just been able to put the awfulness inside me aside, long enough to try?

I didn’t like being owned by the Dip Corps. I never had. It had been a convenient legal fiction, standing between me and extradition for crimes that had never been my fault. It had protected me. It had given me the opportunity for a life, even if I’d never seen fit to use that opportunity for more than just living out my allotted days. But maybe the Dip Corps was not everything that had a claim to me. Maybe all those strange faces did too. Maybe I