Adam-Troy Castro - Emissaries from the Dead

“Are you implying he’s responsible for these deaths?”

“Not at all. But he’s a Dip Corps lifer. You know what that means.”

“Tell me what you think it means.”

“As far as I’m concerned,” Lastogne said, with weary contempt, “the Dip Corps is a meritocracy in reverse. By its very design, nobody who sticks around is any good. The genuinely talented work off their bonds quickly thanks to incentives and bonuses. The incompetent get fined with extra time and find themselves shunted to more and more irrelevant assignments. Everybody in the great big mediocre middle, and everybody insane enough to fall off the scale entirely, winds up assigned to Management—and Management’s never been interested in really doing the job, not at any point in human history. Management’s true agenda has always been making things more pleasant for Management.”

It was a harsh but defensible portrait of the way things worked. “And Mr. Gibb?”

“Mr. Gibb considers himself a dedicated public servant.”

“And is he?”

“As a public servant,” Lastogne said, “the man is Management in its purest form. Let’s just say I don’t consider him exceptionally talented.”

“You’re wearing your resentment out front, Mr. Lastogne. How’s your own career going?”

“More than fine,” he said.

“Nothing else to tell me? No disciplinary actions in your past? I warn you, it is something I’ll check.”

“Feel free. My record is the very definition of clean.”

I didn’t trust that secretive half-smile of his, the kind that not only harbored a private joke but teased me about his refusal to share it. I backtracked to another subject he’d already shown eagerness to cover. “Both the victims are women. Gibb seems a little grabby around women. What’s your take on that?”

“No take. I’ve heard some of our female indentures call him smarmy, and I’ve noticed it myself, but that’s not a crime. Neither is his ambition to fuck any indenture who will have him. We’re all going to be here a long time, and life would be pretty damn unbearable if we had to live like celibates. I don’t think he killed Santiago or Warmuth, if that’s what you think. I just think he’s out for himself.”

“What about you, Mr. Lastogne? What are you out for?”

He made a noise. “The big picture.”

This was profound noncommunication, but I noted it and moved on. “Who do you think killed them?”

He didn’t look at me. “Some faction among the AIsource.”

“But they told us about the Brachiators. They arranged our presence here.”

“Some of them may disapprove.”

“To the point of committing murder?”

He looked disgusted. “Why not? Assassination’s just diplomacy by other means.”

“So’s war, sir.”

“Exactly.”

I waited for a clarification and received none. After a few seconds I decided he didn’t know what was going on any more than I did. It was just more of what Gibb had called his facile nihilism. So I altered course. “What do you think about their position? Do you think it’s right for sentient creatures to be owned?”

He emitted a short, cynical laugh, driven by the kind of anger that drives entire lives. “We’re all owned, Counselor. It’s just a matter of choosing who holds the deed.”

A fter Lastogne left, I wished the designers of Gibb’s facility had put more effort into constructing solid platforms where restless human beings could stand and pace. Crawling, climbing, and clinging, the only means of locomotion possible in Hammocktown, may have been effective ways of getting from place to place, but they couldn’t burn my nervous energy, or facilitate analytical thought, the way pacing did. Being deprived of that option was going to throw me off as long as I remained here.

So would Lastogne. With a few offhand words, he’d shown a knack for echoing suspicions I’d rarely spoken out loud.

We’re all owned.

It might have been mere political cynicism, coming from him.

For much of the past year I’d considered it literally true.

Owned.

T he things that happened one night on Bocai had caused such a diplomatic firestorm that the authorities, including the Confederacy and the Bocaians themselves, had declared the survivors better off permanently disappeared.

I still don’t know what happened to most of the others. I suspect they’re dead, or still imprisoned somewhere. But I’d been shipped to someplace I don’t like thinking about, there to be caged and prodded and analyzed in the hope of determining just what environmental cause had turned so many previously peaceful sentients into vicious monsters.

My keepers spent ten years watching for my madness to reoccur. It had been ten years of reminders that I was an embarrassment to my very species, ten years of being escorted from room to room under guard, ten years of being asked if I wanted to kill anything else. The people who studied me during these years were not all inhuman. Some even tried to show me affection, though to my eyes their love had all the persuasive realism of lines in a script being read by miscast actors. Even the best of them knew I was a bomb that could go off again, at any time; if sometimes moved to give me hugs, they never attempted it without a guard in the room. Others, the worst among them, figured that whatever lay behind my eyes had been tainted beyond all repair, and no longer qualified as strictly human—and being less than strictly human themselves, treated themselves to any cruel pleasures they cared to claim from a creature awful enough to deserve anything they did to her.

Even freedom, when it came, came in a form of a slightly longer leash.

We’ve gotten your latest test scores, Andrea. They’re quite remarkable. You deserve every educational opportunity we can provide for you. But we can’t quite justify letting you go. There are just too many races out there that don’t believe in pleas of temporary insanity, and unless we come up with some solution that stays their hand, they’ll do whatever they can to extradite you. But if you want, you can walk out of here and enjoy Immunity. All you have to do is allow us to remain your legal guardians, for the rest of your natural life.

Most indentures, like Warmuth and Santiago, have contracts of limited duration: five, ten, twenty, or thirty years; the terms varied. They could work off that time in the allotted period or they could earn the time bonuses that permitted early release. They all knew they could look forward to a generous pension and an unlimited passport, someday. They all understood that one day they’d own themselves again.

I didn’t have that luxury. The Dip Corps had promised me lifetime protection, or as close to lifetime protection as I could expect given the certain knowledge that they’d give me up the instant they decided I was useful currency. But they were the ones capable of tearing up the contract. I had no means of severance.

I was owned and expected to be owned for the foreseeable future.

I’d gotten used to the idea.

I’d only imagined I knew what it was like.

Less than a year ago, on Catarkhus, it had come to mean something else.

I activated the hytex and called up the service records of the two dead women.

I started with the most recent victim, Cynthia Warmuth, opening with a hytex image taken since her arrival at One One One. She turned out to have been a pretty young thing, lithe, fresh-faced and blue-eyed, with a tentative smile and short dyed hair determined to make a stop at every color in the rainbow. The image caught her in the act of climbing one of the hammock farm’s mesh ladders, one foot already resting one rung up. Being lit from below, like just about everything else illuminated only by One One One’s suns, gave her an odd exotic quality that she seemed to take as a reason for pride.