Adam-Troy Castro - Emissaries from the Dead

“What’s that?”

“That if I was the killer, I’d be saying the same thing.”

The rest of that day passed in a frustrating blur of interviews with the remaining indentures of Hammocktown. I didn’t want to work in my own assigned quarters, so I requisitioned a long and narrow hammock that served Gibb’s facility as the equivalent of a social hall and communal dining room. I couldn’t imagine being here when it had to bear the weight of dozens. I would have choked on my food, unable to avoid picturing the phenomenon of fraying cables.

I managed to interview maybe half of Gibb’s people before the suns went out. Most of what they had to tell me jibed with what I’d been told: Santiago the misanthrope, Warmuth the determined empath, the three height-sensitives as social outcasts. Opinions of Gibb himself varied from worshipping to resentful. Despite my prior impression that he grated especially hard on women, some of the highest praise came from young female indentures who couldn’t praise him enough. Two or three of those confessed to past, emphasis on past, relationships with him, so anxious to assure me that the breakups had been cordial that my chief question became not whether he’d coached them, but how much.

Nobody had much to add to my skimpy store of intelligence regarding Peyrin Lastogne. As far as they were concerned, he was just a Dip Corps regular, like Gibb—or, as several bothered me by pointing out, me.

Several indentures had witnessed the confrontation between Warmuth and Santiago, which as advertised hadn’t amounted to all that much. The time and place had been a midafternoon gathering in the very hammock where I now sat. Five off-duty indentures had been relaxing with a hytex strategy game one had imported from her homeworld. A few others were sitting around, bitching or chatting or arguing about time off. Santiago wandered in to grab some food and return to her own quarters, intent as always on keeping all social contact to an absolute minimum. Warmuth, who had already been observed trying to talk to her on several occasions, abandoned the game and approached her, speaking at length in a voice not loud enough to carry. Santiago tried to leave without acknowledging her. Warmuth put a hand on her shoulder. Santiago slapped her hand away and cursed her out in some non-Mercantile tongue. Warmuth tried to touch her again, and Santiago gave her a light shove, which left the shaken but uninjured Warmuth bobbing on her back at the hammock’s lowest point.

Nobody knew the meat of the conversation, but everybody had heard Santiago say, “Leave me alone, bitch.”

Despite the subsequent deaths of both participants, nobody thought it had much to do with their eventual fates.

A redheaded medtech named Bill Wilson told me, “This is a small town, Counselor. We’ve had fights before and will have fights again. It doesn’t necessarily lead to murder, and there’s no reason to believe that it led to murder now, just because one followed the other.”

“It’s a place to look,” I said.

“Until,” he said, “you realize there’s nothing there to see.”

And the hell of it was, he was right. The incident had seemed so minor, at the time, that it hadn’t even led to an investigation. There had been no complaint, no follow-up, no disciplinary action, no pattern of subsequent conflict serious enough to merit either official interference or unofficial gossip. As far as I could tell, neither woman had shared her version of the incident with friends or co-workers. Both had determined to put the whole thing behind them, and both had moved on without mentioning it again.

There was no reason to believe it meant anything.

Except that, for all we knew, it might have been the key to everything.

Among the subjects of interest: one Jacques Robinette, a nervous type whose stammer, in my presence, betrayed a deep level of guilt over something, even if that something had nothing to do with the investigation under way; a pudgy fellow by the name of Ierck Kzinscki, who had trained alongside Li-Tsan Crin and seemed to harbor a deep crush on her; a conspiracy theorist named Gilian Brenner, who had a theory pinning both murders on the Tchi that went all the way around the Coal Sack Nebula and back working out a scenario that would have enabled them to stage manage the crimes without ever being allowed on station; and a Curtis Smalls, whose pleas for a transfer off One One One pegged him, in my eyes, as a future full-time member of Gibb’s exiled height-sensitives.

The indentures included several utopian idealists, a few revolutionaries, a couple of crackpots, several brimming with enthusiasm for their mission here, and a number of grim lifers just putting in the hours until they collected their passport and went to the world of their choice. Many found it necessary to recount details of the worlds they had come from. As was all too often the case when indentures swapped life stories, there turned out to be a depressing number of stories about military dictatorships, theocracies, places where one family had seized power and delighted in raping the ecosystem everybody needed to survive, and worlds so screwed up by internal conflicts that volunteering for the Dip Corps emerged as the only way to avoid having your head shot off in some stupid war against civilians.

You want to know why humanity’s never been involved in a serious interspecies conflict? Because it’s like going out to eat when you have a pantry full of food at home. Why bother sampling the buffets elsewhere when we haven’t worked out all the great ways to kill each other yet?

I found, out of all Gibb’s staff, maybe half a dozen people who professed deep affection for Warmuth and many more who had a grim, jaw-grinding respect for Santiago. As could only be expected from a small insular community of indentures, working in a dangerous environment under difficult conditions, the web of sexual relationships was almost as tangled as the substructure of Hammocktown. My interviews rang with excited gossip over who’d been with Warmuth (I counted a dozen assignations, all fleeting, before losing track), Li-Tsan (almost as many, but over a much longer period of time), Gibb (“Guess who the boss is doing!”), Lastogne (“Who isn’t he doing?”), and the Porrinyards (some of these unlikely, envious, or prurient). The precious little gossip I picked up over Christina Santiago had to do with her alleged nasty attitude, and what seemed to have been a long-term love affair with this Cif Negelein I kept hearing about (“You’ll know him when you see him,” said one indenture, with a theatrical roll of her eyes).

Only a few of the interviewees stood out from the crowd.

Oskar Levine was a sad-eyed, thin-faced, sallow-cheeked young man wearing the insignia of the Riirgaan Republic. He didn’t have much new to say about either Warmuth or Santiago, but his own legal status was such a knot it made mine look simple. Once an indenture in our own Dip Corps, he’d been scapegoated for his actions during a major diplomatic incident he said I could look up for myself, and would have been tried and imprisoned for treason had he not defected to the Riirgaans before prosecution.

Now he sat high up the curve of the communal hammock, his hands performing somersaults in a ballet of nervous overemphasis.

“I look human. I feel human. I even smell human, some days more than others. Any medical examination would confirm that I’m human. But I’m legally nonhuman. No government within the Confederacy is permitted to provide me human status. My Riirgaan diplomatic immunity keeps me safe from any genuinely dangerous consequences, but there have been some unpleasant ones.”