allowed music, or hytex connections, or more than minimal education. They might not even have been permitted to know that other worlds existed if the Confederacy hadn’t considered the dissemination of such basic information the bare minimum expected from any world hoping to engage in mutual trade. It was not an educational requirement the people in charge pursued with any special vigor, and though Warmuth had grown up perfectly aware that there was a greater universe, she had assumed it to be comprised of a hundred worlds or less, all of which she supposed to be pretty much a direct copy of her own. She had still been among the one-third of that world’s young people who indentured themselves offworld as soon as possible, her educational background so deficient at the start that she’d needed to sign up for an additional ten years just so five could be dedicated to remedial training.
“She turned out to be a prodigy,” Gibb said. “Very gifted. Handled her remedials in less than half the assigned time. Scored top marks on all of her qualifiers. Excellent physical conditioning as well; a gymnast. Uppergrowth navigation was downright easy for her. I put three separate notes in her file recommending her for the leadership track.”
Once certified, Warmuth had enjoyed an uneventful year as Dip Corps liaison to the dance pilgrims on Vlhan, achieving marks for efficiency if not for unusual level of achievement. Some unspecified conflict with her fellow indentures had led to an official request for a transfer.
“Whatever it was,” Gibb said, “it wasn’t serious enough to be written up in her Corps files. Personal chemistry, most likely. Warmuth got on people’s nerves. But indentures come from so many cultures that you have to expect some of that kind of thing.”
“Did she request the transfer or was it requested for her?”
“As far as I know, it was her idea. I once heard her claim to have been the only Dip Corps indenture on Vlhan with any real interest in the indigenes, but that was just her. She liked the mantle of sainthood.”
Whatever the explanation, Warmuth had been sent to One One One. At the time of her death she had been on-station for six months Mercantile, working in a support capacity before being cleared for direct contact. Until the day of her death, she’d never ventured any distance from the hammocks without an escort.
Gibb said, “She had minimal contact with the Brachs, I assure you; just a few introductory sessions. And a few with our exosociologist Mo Lassiter and a cylinked couple called Oscin and Skye Porrinyard. She was on her first overnight when what happened…happened.”
I noted the man’s shudder, found no reason to doubt it now, but tucked it away in case further developments gave me reason to consider it feigned. “I’ll still want to speak with Lassiter, these Porrinyards, and any Brachiators she encountered.”
“The Porrinyards will be glad to help. If you get anything useful out of the Brachiators, you’re better than me.”
Still studying the non-ambassador’s eyes, I found more sadness, more regret, a level of grief that verged on the personal…and something else, something reticent, something hiding away secrets the man would have preferred me not to see. “Did you like her, Mr. Gibb?”
Gibb averted his gaze. “I really do prefer people to call me by my first name, Counselor. But, dammit, yes, I liked her. She was one of the sunnier people around here: compassionate, friendly, dedicated, and, above all, giving to a fault, the kind of person who becomes the emotional center of an outpost like this.”
Lastogne’s eyes burned with mockery. “A born idealist.”
I picked up the insult, as I was meant to. As far as I could tell, Gibb did not. Lastogne seemed to enjoy firing verbal missiles under his superior’s radar.
I said, “You just made her an angel. You also said that she had a way of getting on people’s nerves. Which is true?”
“Both,” Gibb said. “She tried too hard.”
“Was her hammock sabotaged too?”
“No.” Gibb’s pale eyes seemed to turn obsidian with despair. “Like I said, she was out on her first overnight. We found her hanging from the Uppergrowth.”
“Tell her how, Stu,” Lastogne said.
Gibb held back the words, as if the mere act of speaking them brought the terrible facts into being. But he managed: “There were Brachiator claws driven through her wrists and ankles. Another, the killing blow through the heart.”
“Brachiator what?”
“Claws.” His voice broke. “The Brachiators have very sharp curved claws. They’re constantly growing, and break loose when they get too long. Usually they just freefall into the murk and are never seen again. But many Brachiators keep a few cuttings tangled in their fur as subsidiary tools. These claws looked like they’d been carried around for months.”
Silence fell, with nobody in the hammock willing to say the next part.
Lastogne’s words arrived in a bitter explosion. “She was crucified.”
4.
At times it was necessary to pass through the hammocks themselves, some of which were occupied by off- duty personnel. I was introduced to close to two dozen people, none of them long enough for register as individuals. I noticed a few places where indentures, in various states of undress, lay huddled together in low-lying hammocks, in gatherings that had more to do with the leveling effects of gravity than with the erotic possibilities so much closeness suggested. I wondered if I’d misjudged Gibb. In this place, you’d lose your sense of personal boundaries very quickly.
One sleeping man, curled in a ball at his tent’s lowest point, didn’t even stir when we made our way past him, even though our very passage through his domain made his body slide across the canvas like a stone in a sack.
“Cartsac,” Lastogne sniffed. “Has something like a twelve-hour sleep cycle. Makes him useless, most of the time.”
“And the rest of the time?” I asked.
“Marginal.”
Interesting. Yet another complaint about this outpost’s standards of competency.
At the higher latitudes, the Uppergrowth itself hung close enough to touch. The vines were dotted here and there with bunches of engorged fruits, hanging from buds like candy. Parts of the outpost’s support structure were so streaked with juice that I had trouble seeing how anybody who worked here stayed clean.
Lastogne plucked a fruit. “Taste one if you want. It’s good.”
“No, thank you. What is it?”
Lastogne took a bite, made a face, and gave the barely touched fruit an underhanded toss into the clouds. “We call them manna pears. The AIsource engineered them as a staple of the Brachiator diet, but humans can metabolize them too. Our generous bosses in the Dip Corps tried to take advantage of that fact to cut down on our food drops, until we rebelled and said we wouldn’t subsist on an exclusive diet of the crap.”
The speed with which Lastogne had disposed of the uneaten portion gave me the nasty suspicion the flavor would have appalled me. “What’s wrong with them?”
