Adam-Troy Castro - Emissaries from the Dead

“These things take time, Counselor. It’s an entire alien psychology.”

“Nonsense,” I said, my voice rising. “The Brachiators may be alien in ways we haven’t come close to exploring yet, but their understanding of these matters are as simple as basic arithmetic.”

“That New Ghost, Half-Ghost nonsense—”

“—is not nonsense. It’s completely sensible. Too bad it’s also a viewpoint that Gibb’s people, as good as you are, have always been woefully ill-equipped to understand. I’m perfectly willing to admit you’re good people. You just happen to be the wrong people for this particular job. It’s, all in all, one of the worst staffing errors I’ve ever seen.”

He shook his head in automatic denial. “I can’t wait to hear you defend this one.”

“It was a simple mistake, sir. When staffing an outpost in an environment whose inhabitants cling to the very sky, it only made sense to seek out people with a special affinity for heights: mountain climbers, acrobats, orbital construction workers, and other people used to working at high altitudes every day. People like that could thrive in the conditions here. But they were also the people least likely to grasp what the Brachiators go on about.”

“I don’t—”

I didn’t let him finish. “People like that, like you, have a three-dimensional mindset. They know the gulf between themselves and the surfaces far below them, and are able to perceive the distance as one that can be traveled, even if only by falling. The unspoken assumption here has always been that the Brachiators share that perception… which is silly, since you only have to look at the way they’re built to notice that they’re designed to spend their entire lives staring at a surface right above their faces. That’s not the perspective of a species destined to understand the panorama. That’s the perspective of a species with limited understanding of up and down, and a perspective your outpost filled with mountain climbers and professional aerialists was not about to grasp. I, on the other hand, have always been afraid of heights, and I know in my gut what the Brachiators know from birth: that the Uppergrowth is Life, and everything below it is Death.”

Lastogne’s mouth fell open. “I’ll be damned.”

“Consider a Brachiator falling. Imagine its prognosis for survival if it falls, let’s say, so much as one meter. I think you’ll agree, that’s not even enough to pick up appreciable speed. Maybe it hasn’t even vanished from peripheral vision yet. We already know that the AIsource won’t rescue it. Does it stand any chance of survival? Whatsoever?”

What followed was the well-known phenomenon of a group, asked a simple question with an obvious answer, that nevertheless remains silent as everybody waits for somebody else to trigger a suspected rhetorical trap.

The Porrinyards were the first to build up enough confidence to say the obvious. “No, Counselor. It doesn’t.”

“Exactly,” I said. “In that instant, it is still breathing, it is still feeling, it is still thinking, but by all standards reasonable to its species, it is as dead as the Brachiator who took a tumble a week ago, or one that fell last year.”

Lastogne rubbed his eyes. “Yeah.”

“Think about it,” I said. “From their perspective, we rise from the place that nothing can survive. We are solid, we are friendly, we speak to them, we are clearly entities with substance, but we are also visitors from the land of the Dead. By all reasonable calculations, we are Ghosts. It is no wonder they resist speaking to anybody who hasn’t spent a night on the Uppergrowth. Doing that gives us a certain link to Life. Not quite the same thing as life, since we still keep coming in and out of existence—”

Lastogne now seemed thoroughly disgusted with himself. “Like Half-Ghosts.”

“Exactly. A natural classification for somebody sometimes alive and sometimes dead: a concept they find strange, but which is evidently within their ability to accept. Unfortunately for her, Cynthia Warmuth didn’t see things that way. She had something else, which several people, including you, have described as a downright compulsive empathy.”

Was that a flicker of pain in Lastogne’s eyes? “Yes.”

“She wanted, too much, to be inside the skin of anybody she spoke to. She made herself a pest about it. So much a pest that people hated her for it. But she would have survived unpopularity if she hadn’t taken it a step too far: the same step I took when I spent a night on the Uppergrowth. She told the Brachiators she wanted to be Alive like them, without ever once considering what they’d think that meant.”

Lastogne now looked downright stricken. “And so…?”

“And so,” I said, “bearing her no malice whatsoever, they nailed her into place.”

Lastogne stood up, turned his back on us, and strode to the cube’s far wall, his arms crossed before him, his head bowed in an attitude of unbearable sorrow. Neither the Porrinyards nor I said anything to disturb him. After several long minutes, he returned to his seat, his grimace now a wan, mournful scowl.

I went on as if there had been no interruption at all. “It wouldn’t have occurred to them that they could hurt her. They didn’t think she was completely Alive in the first place. To their eyes, she was already just a Ghost, with an unnatural half-existence; nothing as linked to everyday existence as a wound should have had any effect on her. No. With the best possible intentions, she asked for their help holding on to Life, and with the best possible intentions, they gave her what she wanted. The negative effect on her came as a complete surprise to them. They told me this themselves. Life is not healthy for Ghosts. It uses them up too fast . Being nailed to Life was no good for Warmuth. She bled to death. It used her up too fast. This was news to the Brachiators, but once it was revealed to them they took it as a cautionary lesson. Which is why they didn’t want to give me the same thing, until I begged them.”

Lastogne eyed the Porrinyards, soliciting silent feedback, finding in their expressions of wide-eyed understanding acceptance of a truth everybody here had failed to see. After a moment he turned toward me once again, but his eyes were not focused on me so much as past me, to some memory only his eyes could see. “I always told her it would hurt her someday.”

Nothing he had ever said to me sounded less like him.

The Porrinyards, who knew him better than I did, turned toward him, their profiles matching studies in incredulity.

I wasn’t surprised at all. “What?”

“Caring, as much as she did.” His voice broke. He heard it, gathered himself together, and shrugged, apologizing for the moment of weakness. “It’s not typical, Counselor. You know how I feel about the system. It cements mediocrity in place. Most of the indentures are just trying to do their time and get out. Most of the careerists are just trying to rise to their own level of incompetence. And when you find an occasional person who really cares, the irritant like poor Cynthia, they turn out to be worse than either. They go and screw everything up by behaving like what they do matters.”

The Porrinyards were alternating aghast glances at me with disbelieving glances at Lastogne.

I couldn’t blame them. Not after everything they’d said about his selfishness as a lover.

But this was still territory I’d expected. “You loved her, didn’t you?”

“I wasn’t drawn to her, at first. It’s like I told you the first day: I don’t look to make friends. The last thing I could ever want was understanding from someone so arrogant she actually believed other people could be understood.” He shook his head, not just once but several times, perhaps even too many times, before raising his eyes back to me. “I always told her it would hurt her someday. I even warned her to be careful it didn’t get her killed. Shows how goddamned perceptive I am, doesn’t it?”