Adam-Troy Castro - Emissaries from the Dead

There was an odd, hysterical sense of triumph in his voice. The loss of Cynthia Warmuth hadn’t shattered him at all. It had only reinforced his grim sense of cynical amusement, confirming the hard lessons he’d learned from other losses, other tragedies, other people he’d driven away.

The moment lasted just long enough for Skye to extend her hand, almost touch his shoulder, then draw her hand back, deciding the touch a bad idea.

Then he pulled himself together, took a deep breath, and noticed me again, this time with a dark resentment that bordered on bile. “But it’s not sufficient, Counselor. It doesn’t explain Santiago. Or the attempts on your life. Or that attacker who went after Oscin and Skye. Or what’s happened to Hammocktown.”

I looked him right in the eye, and nodded. “You’re right. It doesn’t.”

“What do you expect me to think? That Gibb’s behind all this? That he’s somewhere in the Uppergrowth, waiting for another fresh victim to come along?”

“That remains a possible explanation, sir.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“No, sir. I think what the evidence tells me.”

“And you’re not about to tell me what that is.”

“Not until I’m sure.”

“So how can that even begin to compensate for everything else you’ve done?”

“By itself,” I said, “it doesn’t. But this was never just one mystery, with one solution. It was several, all mixed up and getting in the way of a comprehensive explanation. I had to clear away all the smaller issues, like Gibb and like Warmuth, just to get at the bigger picture. And that’s the one last thing I still have left to do.” I took a deep breath. “Who are you, Peyrin Lastogne?”

He stared at me as if unsure whether to give me a medal or punch me in the mouth. Then he glanced at the Porrinyards, first one and then the other, to determine just how much they’d been infected by my madness. When they just nodded, he threw up his arms and stomped back to the same corner he’d retreated to before, turning a number of different colors.

He’d said all he was going to say.

The assembled indentures watched as the Porrinyards and I marched back to the skimmer dock, their eyes either accusatory or imploring. I had thought them people under siege before, the day I’d arrived here, but I’d been wrong. This was what being at siege was like. How many of these people were trying to persuade themselves they had a chance of surviving the rest of the day? How many had already decided they wouldn’t?

I could have given them a little reassuring speech, like Gibb had tried to do after the evacuation of Hammocktown, but I’d never been the reassuring speech sort. Maybe that was another area I could work on, in the future. If I had a future.

Oskar Levine was the only one who rushed up to us, just before we left the hangar; he’d been working on the bluegel crypts not long beforehand, and was so stained by the stuff it was hard to find much of his skin’s original color. I confess being relieved when he didn’t obey what looked like his initial impulse to hug me. “Is it true?” he demanded. “Is Hammocktown gone?”

“It’s true,” I told him.

“And Gibb? He was there when it went?”

He seemed more concerned than I would have expected of a man who Gibb had treated like a traitor. I wanted to see if he would fake grief. It hardly seemed in character for him, but people contradict their own natures in times of crisis. So I said, “Yes,” and waited.

It took him several heartbeats to work up his next question, but he ultimately let it out, all in one breath. “Do you think he’s dead, or just in hiding?”

It was a fair question.

I said, “I don’t know,” and left him.

Between sleeplessness, physical exhaustion and the lingering aftereffects of several near brushes with death, I was as wrung out as a buzzpop addict in the last stages of withdrawal. Part of me argued in favor of a break. If the hangar was indeed safe, as I suspected, I could have taken days, even hours, to rest up and gird myself for the next step, without fear of my extended period of inaction dooming others to join the growing list of casualties.

It would have been nice. It even would have been wise.

But waiting was not an option.

I just couldn’t take being played with any more.

The Porrinyards didn’t say much on the way to the Interface. They knew, with the certainty born of consensus, that no words could stall me, stop me, or comfort me. But Skye did grab my wrist, as I knelt to enter the portal, to ask: “Do you know about us, too? Everything?”

I couldn’t smile. “Yes. I do.”

“How long?”

“For a while now.”

They both looked like they were going to cry. “Are you going to be all right with that?”

“I don’t know. It depends on what I can confirm in there.”

They nodded, with a complete lack of surprise, and acting as one, stepped forward to wrap me in an embrace. Oscin had to stoop, a little, to get in. Both trembled.

“You had better live.”

It wasn’t fear that made me so reluctant to let go, but the sheer novelty of connection: feeling myself a part of somebody else’s life, and feeling them as part of mine. I wasn’t sure it was something I could afford. But that was also part of what I had to find out in there.

The Porrinyards released me and stepped back, dry-eyed, providing me with a matched set of brave little smiles.

I could only nod at them and pull myself through the hatch.

It was not difficult to notice subtle changes in the chamber of indistinct blue skies. A new element had been added, one that clashed with the ambience of infinite space: a certain claustrophobic oppressiveness that made the walls, wherever they were, loom like a prison. I don’t know whether that came from changes in me or from subliminal cues activated by the AIsource. Nor do I know whether I imagined, or merely projected, the impression of hoarded breath. I only know what I believed. And I believed that, insofar as it was even possible for beings like the AIsource to feel apprehension, in the presence of a creature so much smaller and shorter-lived than themselves, it was what they felt now.

As I floated there, waiting for be acknowledged, I found myself understanding them on the most visceral of levels. As intelligences, they were beyond my comprehension. As creatures of power, they were gods who reduced me to the significance of dust. But as souls, they were downright ordinary. They had ambitions, and feelings, as base as those belonging to any of us. They were, in the final analysis, as corrupt as we were. And in that, they were kindred.

In my time I’d been fascinated by them, afraid of them, suspicious of them, and enraged by them.

Now, for the first time ever, I could feel, rather than feign, contempt for them.

It was liberating.

When they spoke, they used the voice of a male: deep and resonant, with just enough of an echo to make the unseen walls seem even farther away.

Congratulations, Counselor. We have heard that you came up with an explanation for the death of Cynthia Warmuth.

“You heard by listening. You were with us, following our every word.”

If we sometimes behave as if we acquire information at the same rate that you organics do, then that’s simply because it’s polite to modulate our conversations with you to your own capacities.

“Polite,” I said. “Or necessary to preserve our illusions.”

Don’t they amount to more or less the same thing?

“No, they don’t. Not when it renders communication less convenient, not more. Not when it complicates every conversation we have. When you do that, the pretense itself becomes the very point—and it leaves me with no choice but to consider just why you find it so important.”