Emissaries from the Dead

lunatic whims of other people, or something else.

The bastard AIsource had known what they were doing, in standing aside while I confronted an enemy closer to my own size. They had allowed me time to build a hatred well within my ability to carry for the rest of my life. Or at least, as long as it took.

I didn’t want that feeling inside me. I wished I could put it down.

“Go to hell,” I said.

The AIsource took no special offense. As we have already said, Andrea: our ambitions on this matter coincide. And if it’s to happen, it will take a very interesting sentient to put us there.

I linked that to certain other things the rogue intelligences had said. “And that’s what you want? That’s what you’ve been trying to find out, all this time? How to die?”

To reiterate: we have much in common.

The hatchway continued to beckon me. I didn’t take a single step in that direction. I just swayed, my eyes shut against the force of the inevitable one last question.

What? the AIsource asked.

“I want to start with Bocai.”

Look back to the moment of your personal nightmare. Find out what else was happening, elsewhere in the universe, at that time, and be assured: it’s not just synchronicity. There’s a pattern.

It had the ring of a send-off, and that’s what it turned out to be. Though I stood there for another ten minutes, demanding further answers, the only reply I received was a distant, subliminal murmur that could have been nothing more than the distorted echo of my own voice, rebounding off some surface too far away to see.

Even after that I stood there for several additional minutes, trying to summon back the despair that had once threatened to overwhelm me, and which seemed easier to deal with than the infinitely more frightening prospect of facing whatever came next.

The worst thing, I found, was the awareness that when I walked through that distant portal I’d be returning to a world whose opinion of me would remain unchanged.

I thought of the last words I’d spoken to the broken woman at my feet. At least I’ve spent my life being judged for it. What about you, Christina?

She had spent the entire fight screaming anguished variations on the lament that she’d been judged all her life.

Looking down at her, now, I could only murmur, “Join the club.”

25. AFTERMATH

Lastogne and his people were thunderstruck when the skimmer bearing me and the Porrinyards back to the hangar also turned out to carry a broken and defeated Christina Santiago. They were even more astonished when I explained that Santiago had murdered Cynthia Warmuth and Stuart Gibb, and that Santiago admitted to those crimes with sullen, hollow-eyed yeahs.

Hours of direct questioning failed to garner any elaboration of that one word. She didn’t seem to think she owed anybody anything beyond that simple concession of guilt.

The most shattered by the revelation was Cif Negelein, who I spotted standing by himself in a corner of the hangar, looking like a man whose heart had shriveled to the size of a pin. I didn’t tell him about Santiago’s art gallery, and how deeply it testified to the passions he’d awakened in her. I figured he didn’t deserve to be punished with the knowledge. As for the art itself, I don’t know whether it still exists, somewhere on One One One. I don’t think any human being, other than Santiago and me, ever saw it. As the AIsource would put it, that question is well outside the scope of my investigation.

I retired from the interrogation at the midway point, returning to the Dip Corps transport for an exhausted and dreamless sleep. I remained asleep for close to twelve hours, waking only once, in darkness, to the realization that the narrow bed contained two other forms, one male, one female, both awake but content to keep me company. When I woke a second time they were gone.

When I returned to Lastogne’s sleepcube, Santiago was aping catatonia, and those demanding answers from her were not much better. The AIsource had declared the Habitat once again open for human visitors, but with Hammocktown itself plunged into the murk, and the deaths of two people still in recent memory, nobody was hurrying to reestablish a permanent presence. Besides, any reconstruction would have to wait until New London got around to shipping new supplies. So the hangar would remain the home of the human delegation for the foreseeable future.

Lastogne joined most of the delegation in declaring the matter closed, but a number of people were downright dubious. Oskar Levine was nevertheless one of several confronting me privately in the days that followed. “I don’t know, Counselor. Does this solution satisfy you?”

I didn’t look at him. “You don’t believe her confession?”

“No,” Levine said. “She’s guilty all right. You can’t look at her without feeling it.”

I refrained from pointing out that gut feelings had never qualified as evidence, because it would have been the hol-lowest of all possible denials. Santiago radiated awareness of her crimes as completely as any murderer I’d ever known. She also radiated satisfaction at her grim accomplishments, and despair at how completely they’d destroyed her.

Levine continued: “She hated Warmuth, so that part at least makes a little bit of sense. But what about the rest of it? Where did she get the tools she would have needed to sabotage those cables? Where did she hide herself afterward? How did she get from place to place inside the Habitat? What did she even think she was accomplishing, for God’s sake? It doesn’t look like we’re ever going to find out from her, and the AIsource aren’t sharing anything they know. Who’s left to ask?”

I shrugged. “The Brachiators, maybe.”

We both knew it wasn’t a serious suggestion. The Brachiators were the last sentients anybody would suspect of insight into the tangled motives behind human crimes.

“Do you have any more ideas, Counselor?”

I shook my head. “No. And I’m afraid that from here on in it’s not my job.”

Levine gave me the look of a man paddling in heavy water. “You don’t strike me as somebody satisfied with doing the bare minimum.”

“I’m not. But we’re not going to get anything more if we don’t get it from Santiago, and she’s going to hold on to what she has until she decides to break. Questioning her forever isn’t my responsibility. New London’s just going to have to take over from here.”

He was not happy about that. “I suppose so. Thank you, Andrea.”

I might have snapped at him for using my first name, but I’d gotten a little looser about such things over the last few days. “I mean what I said before. Don’t ever reclaim your Confederate citizenship without consulting with me. I’d hate to see you trade your immunity for life in a cell.”

“So would I,” he said, and sighed. “I wish I could be human without having to deal with the humans in charge. Being a traitor, if only on paper…isn’t always the easiest thing.”

“I know,” I said, leaving him to believe it was only empathy.

He was far from naive. But it would have been nice to claim even that much innocence. In its place, I had unfinished business, some of it even heavier than what he’d just been handed.

Some of which I needed to deal with before I left One One One.

I took care of part of it in a skimmer hovering under the ragged remains of Hammocktown.

I looked over the side, willing myself to feel every meter of open space between me and the deadly clouds far below, searching for the wave of vertigo that should have made me swoon.

But my fear of falling was gone.