Adam-Troy Castro - Emissaries from the Dead

The thought was enough to give me cottonmouth. I took the canteen, put it to my lips, and threw my head back so far that rivulets ran down my chin.

When I gave it back, Oscin took another gulp before sealing the vessel tight. “Well, there goes that theory.”

“What?”

“Some cultures disapprove of arrangements like mine. They call them criminal, or even perverse. On some of my past postings, there’s been so much discrimination that Oscin and Skye have had to pretend to be a pair of separate individuals just for personal safety. For a moment there, I was afraid I had to watch myself around you.”

“How do you know you don’t?”

He almost laughed. “You drank from my water, Counselor. Most of the people I’m talking about wouldn’t.”

“That’s stupid,” I said. “What would drinking your water have to do with it?”

“They give my condition the status of a disease and can’t help acting like it’s contagious. I agree, it’s stupid. But I’m happy you don’t feel that way.”

I wondered why the likes of the Porrinyards would even care, since I was nothing to them; decided it was one of those strange people-behaviors I didn’t need to know about, then forced myself to my feet. Oscin saw what I was about to do and jumped up, intent on hovering nearby until I could stand without assistance. I resented the hell out of that even after I almost swooned. “So what else did you want to tell me?”

“Pardon?”

“I’m not stupid, sir. You hustled Lastogne out of the room. Is there some information the two of you needed to share with me that you didn’t want him hearing?”

“There’s only one of us,” Oscin said.

“Forgive me. Whenever you two act independently, you strain the limits of my syntax. What did you want to tell me?”

“Nothing about your investigation.”

“About Lastogne?”

“There are any number of things I can say about Peyrin,” Oscin said. It wasn’t hard to read undercurrents of resentment in the calm but chilly way he spoke the other man’s name. “But no, not him either.”

This was still a prime opportunity to follow up on one of this station’s many contradictions. “I’d like to ask you about him anyway—or at least, something he said about you yesterday.”

“Oh?’

“He’d said, ‘They’re cylinked. They don’t make friends in the usual sense.’”

He seemed darkly amused. “Peyrin said that? Why, the backstabbing son of a bitch.”

There were depths here I wasn’t getting. “I’ve never met any cylinked pairs before, so I had no reason to disbelieve him. But between the way you’re acting, and some of the things you’ve said, makes me wonder if he’s…”

Oscin finished the sentence for me. “…full of Tchi shit.”

“Exactly.”

He walked away, cocked his head as if listening to the advice of an observer I couldn’t see or hear, then came back. “Nobody’s a closed system without wanting to be, Counselor. Not even me. It wouldn’t be any more fun for me being trapped in two heads, with nobody else to talk to, than it is for an unlinked individual like you to be trapped in only one. So, yes, I do make friends in the usual sense. I care for some people. I get angry with others. I even fall in love from time to time, though it’s a little harder to manage, given that it has to be a person capable of pleasing my shared, and therefore somewhat more demanding, perspective.”

“And that’s where Cynthia Warmuth fell short?”

A little angry now: “Cynthia Warmuth was kind, generous, eager, compassionate, and, as I’ve already said, needy, pushy and grating. It’s a matter of taste, not misanthropy.”

“And yet,” I noted, “Lastogne said what he said. Why?”

“Didn’t I tell you on the way over that we made love once? I mean, Lastogne and I?”

“Yes.”

“The operative word is once, Counselor. Once and only once. Even then, it was cookie-cutter heterosexuality, which didn’t go anywhere substantial until this body”—Oscin gestured at himself—“left him alone with Skye in what his limited imagination was able to consider privacy. It wasn’t, of course; our gestalt was still involved even if this male body could not be. But from what you’re saying, Lastogne now rationalizes what happened between us as his own skillful seduction of Skye behind Oscin’s back, which is of course an absolute impossibility and a ridiculous insult. And now, to make matters worse, he seems to be blaming what I am as the handiest excuse for Skye’s lack of interest in a sequel. Please. Take what he said as the self-serving garbage it is. I’m not an exclusive club. I just don’t want him as a member.”

It was an interesting fresh take on Peyrin Lastogne, who had tried so hard to paint himself as a distant, cynical observer of humanity. I wondered whether he’d taken on that persona for my benefit. It was possible. One thing I’d learned, from being such a sincere bitch for so many years, is that some people wear misanthropy only as a fashion statement.

Lastogne could be one of those.

But maybe not. Oscin’s revelation established only that the man was not, entirely, the island he claimed to be. He was just a deluded, vindictive ex-lover. So what? He could still be a son of a bitch. Or even a murderer.

I said, “So if you didn’t want to talk about him, what did you want to talk about?”

Oscin switched gears with no visible difficulty. “I don’t know how to say this, Counselor. Considering where this conversation was a few minutes ago, it’s a risky thing to say. But, you know, the individuals Oscin and Skye were once very angry people. They both felt trapped in a place they did not want to be, in a life they did not want to live, and they made themselves miserable sharing their resentment with anybody else who could have been allowed into a world that, as far as they were concerned, allowed room for only the two of them. After a while they had so much anger between them that they started to direct it at each other. They began to fight. To leave scars.” For a moment his face seemed to shift, and became no longer his own but a reflection of how Skye might have looked were her body the one telling the story. “They didn’t link just so they could be indentured together. They linked because they were a few harsh words from breaking up forever. They linked because joining together as this new creation greater than the sum of its parts was their only alternative to walking out of each other’s lives and feeling incomplete for as long as they lived.”

I pushed myself away from the wall, tested my ability to stand alone without help, and found that I was now as steady on my feet as I ever managed to be. “Why tell me?”

He cocked his head again, and flashed a secret smile at himself. “I don’t have much time, Counselor. Skye and Lastogne are coming back. They’re not far away. I don’t think Skye will be able to delay him for more than another minute or so.

“So here’s the little I have time for. I’m an expert at angry people. I know that they come in many different flavors and I’ve learned to recognize what they are. Like Gibb and Lastogne. Like Warmuth and Santiago. Like some of the exiles you’re about to meet.” He had not faced me at all since beginning this speech, focusing instead on some distant point somewhere beyond me, beyond the blue walls, perhaps even beyond the territories encompassed by One One One. “Like yourself. I don’t know all the details yet, but I really don’t need AIsource help to feel like I already know you.”

Lastogne had said something much like that yesterday, and I’d reacted with little more than wry acknowledgment that he was right. Others in my life had confronted me with words to the same effect and I’d displayed boredom, defiance, even pride.