Andrea Cort 03: War of the Marionettes

by Castro, Adam-Troy

  so do you Fox was neither surprised nor affected by my rage I know does this have anything to do with why you became what you are yes I could not function with the knowledge I became an abusive angry self-destructive shrew much like yourself I twice tried and failed to kill myself I thought becoming what I am the only option that permitted survival Ocean could only stare at her with sick fascination does it help not inside everything I ever felt I still feel everything that tortured me still tortures me I deserved that pain and accept it as long as I’m prevented from ever acting out of emotional considerations again that’s not nearly enough I said of course not you may do what you have to do once Marin is safe I glanced at Ocean he was as pale and diminished as he’d been for a while but there was something else there a mixture of pity for Fox and concern for me he was right even while still capable of being moved by her conscience this woman had committed crimes beyond redemption this creature she’d become was if anything more dangerous swathe by a sort of artificially induced sociopathy unconstrained by compassion or shame or worries about being able to sleep at night she’d just do whatever logic told her she had to do in order to obtain whatever logic told her she needed I could believe nothing she told me including this confession I was supposed to take as an act of contrition what could possibly lead a woman who hated her employer whose soul had been destroyed by her association with him who was now incapable of taking human considerations into account to then put her fate in a stranger’s hands surely not concerned for a lost girl I bit my lip wood shifts death put Maren first in line to inherit his company yes that is unless she died herself or signed away her interests yes under the circumstances the incentive to prove her death or her willful abandonment of her holdings would override all other considerations that’s what this is all about isn’t it not concerned for the safety of some poor girl who ran away to join some alien cult but money it took Fox a moment to respond once shifts crimes come to light his holdings are wiped out anyway and yet I somehow find it hard to believe that you’d put them at risk unless you had some contingency plan to protect them maybe I have it completely reversed after all Marin’s an innocent a child it would be easy to prove that she had

  nothing to do with what her father did if you get her to acknowledge ownership of the company you can argue that the guilty party has died and thus already received as much punishment as the law could possibly require some of those assets might yet be protected is that what you have in mind counselor is that all this madness means to you as always Fox looked untouched an empty facade concealing an empty interior whatever anger or hatred or despair or grief scoured her from the inside was as inaccessible as light trapped inside a black hole then she stirred stiffened seemed to find some source of strength that made her stand a little taller and said no I looked to Ocean again his unwilling fascination had if anything deepened I had the impression that he sensed what I did another layer of truth hiding behind the only one Fox would allow me to reach I told her if there’s more to this it’s time to share it I have answered your questions bullshit you’ve answered my questions you’re the one who told me there was more you wanted me to believe you tell me the part that made this personal if it wasn’t the crime you committed together tell me what else you really had against Derrick Schiff she shuddered grew stiffer by increments then turned her back on me and retreated to the rear of the skimmer where she took a seat and smoothed over like a lake surface after a storm there was no point in pressing her further not now I’d seen too many moments like this before in too many previous interrogations the stony retreat of the witness who had already been forced to reveal too much and who now needed time to form scabs over her bleeding wounds a new part of it part she didn’t even know she had revealed something that made her even more dangerous than I’d estimate her to be just a few short minutes ago something that made me pity her with a ferocity that threatened to overwhelm my disgust at her deeds that made me sick to my stomach safe behind the his screen I wiped a tear from the corner of one eye and told the Ocean she is me isn’t she

  he squeezed my hand I do see the resemblance Andrea but it’s only slight oh really really when the two of you were faced with the same dark hole in the ground Fox jumped in and pulled the dirt in over herself you fell in but started to climb out as soon as you recognize that some of the scary people guarding the way back up were friends willing to offer you a lift the difference between the two of you Andrea is the difference between somebody who’s given up and somebody who can’t don’t insult my love for you by telling me that the difference is a small one you’ve already tested my patience too much this trip

  Pawel Ania who the his screen had excluded from our conversation with Tara Fox but who could not have missed the turbulence of the emotions involved interrupted to tell us that we were near our next destination it was a region similar to the one the rear Gaulle had chosen for their embassy one lined with rolling wooded hills the trees here were just as tall but narrower of limb than the ones we’d seen there the relatively sparse growth prevented the leaf cover from combining to form a concealing forest canopy as we flew as close to the ground as we dared it was not difficult to see a floor spotty with fallen leaves and colorful with multiple shades of smaller plants nestled at the base of their larger cousins I saw a gray thick packed animal about the size of the one and only elephant I’d ever seen lumbering about on some mission of its own but no vani despite several minutes of fretful searching we passed a glistening lake with a small off-center Island flew low over another Ridge then came upon the place we traveled so far to see a small square clearing occupied by four small buildings and a fenced-in area that looked like some kind of corral the largest of the buildings was l-shaped and had fallen into disrepair at it’s shorter wing another was in ruins reduced to a blackened skeleton by some past fire greenery had started to sprout from the ruins there was a crater in the roof of a third the progress the surrounding woods had already made in reclaiming their lost land seemed fair assurance that the worst of the disaster whatever it was had been over a couple of years ago still we circled the installation half a dozen times just to be sure that there weren’t any Lani in the surrounding woods by the time we judged the site free of any hostile indigenes just waiting for their opportunity to leap up and knock us out of the air the lengthening shadows of the trees had striped the earth like the bars of some old-fashioned prison just to be sure I asked Pikeville Ania what do you think is it safe it was not all that long ago she

  reminded me that I would have said that this entire planet was safe good point we descended to just over a metre from the ground in the open area behind the blackened building hovering there for several minutes just in case something leapt from the woods and went for us no immediate attack materialized so we set the skimmer down and prepared to perform the rest of our search on foot just before we disembarked Pavel Ania said one word of warning the people who lived here experienced some problems this time of day with local blood drinking insects they called the damned bugs they are no worse than an annoyance most of the time and for some reason bothers some people more than others but some human beings have been known to experience a painful allergic reaction do not hesitate to tell us if you feel them biting I told the audience of trees I just fucking love planets we disembarked and found ourselves standing on spongy earth in air that smelled more like wild flowers than the acrid burning scent I’d expected no swarm of ravenous insects attacked me and no homicidal 30-meter leviathans sprang forth from the woods to tear me to pieces but the sense that something terrible had happened here something that had turned this from a place where people lived and worked and hoped to accomplish great things into a hollow shell with broken walls and burned debris was palpable this wasn’t dip core Ocean said no Paco Fellini I told him as she led us toward the building with the broken Corral this installation was corporate anybody we know I’m afraid I was not raised in your mercantile system and therefore possess little interest in or aptitude for as I’ve heard it said fol
lowing the money but it had something to do with beating everybody else to a full translation of the Villani language the researchers who worked here in the years immediately following Isadora’s dance had their own take on the problem and imagined that they could succeed where the diplomatic community had failed their sponsors would have had to believe that enough to flout the Confederacy’s ban on civilian travel here and risk the establishment of sanctions against their other enterprises which either meant that the corporation in question was so large it could operate like an empire onto itself like the baitul Heinz or so influential that it could afford to pressure the Confederacy into letting it break the law I couldn’t think of more than a couple that fit those criteria and I didn’t think the specifics mattered though I did pause long enough to ask Fox if it was shifts she shook her head as we made our way to the l-shaped building with the fenced-in area our footsteps began to crunch and I saw that the dirt was speckled with debris that included shards of stone the shattered building and fragments of chitin from Villani shell dr. Linea said I’m afraid I don’t understand much of their work either it’s far outside my own poor education but I do know that until Chad Epoque got involved they were putting together prosthetics of some kind machines more advanced than our whip harnesses not just translators but surgical implants designed to organically bridge the gap between what normal human beings were built to understand and what Vlade were built to tell them beside me Ocean said you’re telling me they were EXO lingua prosthetists it took me a few seconds to recover then more to catch up and to absorb the end of Parkville aniyah’s admission that yes she’d heard the word once or twice and thought that it must have been something like that I asked Ocean you’re telling me you know about this EXO whatever we’re not exactly talking about a state secret nobody in human space has ever made the technology work but it’s been a focus of research for decades and a key element of the mysteries surrounding the dance pilgrims since Isadora’s day I made another valiant attempt at the word EXO lingua damn it EXO lingua prosthetics I tried again

  EXO lingual prosthetics that’s it he said fine but I still don’t know what that is under most circumstances the Porrinyard s would have prefaced their explanation with an affectionate chuckle today Ocean just looked tired the theory is pretty simple Andrea the greatest barrier to communication between sentient of differing species has never been politics but biology our brains are designed to run certain messaging systems and can adapt to unfamiliar systems only insofar as those systems are compatible with our operating software which is why all human beings fluent in mercantile can all become if they’re willing to do the work

  fluent in other human tongues like Chinese or Hebrew or gouache or even dead tongues like German or Aramaic or English but we’re less successful when it comes to decoding or coding in the messaging systems written for brains that evolved under dramatically different circumstances I protested that hasn’t been my experience in fact Andrea it has we’re fortunate that the evolutionary pathways followed by most of the major spacefaring races were similar if not fully congruent and that the operating systems are reasonably compatible but the compatibility has been far from total human beings and reorg all have a lot in common but no human being even those raised by the species can achieve what I’d call rhetorical eloquence in any rear Gong tongue even Villa Nia here though fluent enough to have achieved the requirements of higher education among them will never be known by them as one of their great wordsmiths similarly that she have a critical language called the analytical lash which is accessible to fewer than one human being in 000000 but have absolutely no comprehension of the secondary human language known as music for the entire human art form known as narrative fiction the number of sentient have just as much difficulty with the human practice known as the pun some folks are just not equipped to comprehend the humor in a turn of phrase having more than one meaning and some entire species experience that failure on the genetic level the SID and the Kison Houghton find it so impossible to understand each other even when discussing simple points of fact that they conduct most of their negotiations using the rear golf or human beings as intermediaries the list goes on at substantial length they all possess language but they’re all subject to the limitations of their own operating systems and EXO lingua prosthetics our neurological patch capable of bringing those systems closer into alignment bridging the gap between what we’re built to understand and what we need machines to understand for us something we already know has been made to work between human beings and Vlade since it’s their enhancements that makes the entire dance pilgrim movement possible so what you’re saying is that they were trying to duplicate the technology the dance pilgrims come here already equipped with except I presume under their own proprietary patent even discounting its applications to the Villani problem the potential profit would be staggering I wasn’t sure I saw that as a necessary given we already understood the other spacefaring races enough to engage in trade squabble over the fine points of interspecies law and get on each other’s nerves I didn’t see any vast profit-making potential in allowing human authors to understand the nasty things she critics wrote about them or permitting human jokesters to bless the happily word play impaired races with the racial curse we know as the lowly pond above all I wasn’t sure anybody would want to know some of our rivals among the stars better than we already did I’ve learned a little about cussing out in history in the last couple of years and it’s pretty safe to say that they probably exceed the QI as the last people anybody human would ever want as roommates either way I didn’t see the point in getting into it now fine

  so somebody thought it was worth money take that as a given and it was still time to move on to whatever had then gone wrong our shoes crunched on grit and mud as we approached the l-shaped building which was gray and weather-beaten and looked like it’s intact section remained standing out of obstinacy and nothing else the fenced-in corral bordered in part by the two ruined wings was similarly wrecked the posts knocked over the wooden boards connecting them rotten and speckled with white fossilized shit they had a little boy pocketful Ania said Cory I believe his name was he kept a number of stupid birds as pets stupid birds are regional species not among lawns more charming creatures potion said damn bugs stupid birds it sounds like somebody around here needed to exercise a little more imagination when it came to coming up with species names I don’t know Paco Linnaeus said with a little annoyed slap of her forearm is added emphasis I’ve encountered both species and find those names as descriptive as anyone could possibly ask you said a little boy so this was a family a married couple to researchers Ricard and Liezel Thane and their son Cory the other buildings were their living quarters she pointed toward a door shaped hole in the intact wing of the building the door itself as gone as this places erstwhile inhabitants seemed to be that was their workplace in there did you ever meet them yourself Alinea no this all happened before my assignment here I only know about them because they disappeared about a year after chit Tupac brought them the egg and their whereabouts have always been a much discussed local mystery but I’ve explored the place a number of us have the four of us clustered around the doorway to the shattered work place and peered into the gloom inside it was a shadowy windowless abandoned a ruin licked by shafts of murky daylight shining through the holes in the ceiling it smelled of ammonia and decay the miasma of animals who had either used this place for an outhouse or wandered into its corners and died the work benches were brown with years of collected organic detritus and piled high with wreckage either fallen from what was left of the ceiling or ripped off the walls and what seemed to have been a violent thrashing rage a pile of fallen leaves beneath one Island Workstation the center of the room hid what turned out to be a shiny coiled length of what I initially took to be a severed Villani whip I picked it up half expecting it to come to life in my hands it felt about the same as the whips of the Villani that had handled me but the texture was off less like a tentacle of chitin and more like one c
onstructed of ceramic or glass its surface was not as smooth as the ones I’d felt as I ran my hands over its surface I detected ridges that marked the things flexible joints Oshin who had followed me to the bench took one coil in his hands and manipulated it for a couple of seconds and echoed my own diagnosis it’s a prosthetic I’d gotten that the thing was finer and I figured stronger than the flexible ribbons and Hammer Smith’s whip harness which were meant for communication only and wouldn’t have been strong enough to bear any weight felony ax would you happen to know what happens when a flaw knee loses limbs nothing she said what do you mean nothing does it die fellini ax scratched the side of her nose the older Villani get the more whips they grow

  it never stops there must be an upper limit but as long as they have enough to still communicate and move around a severed whip or two wouldn’t be much more than an inconvenience I don’t even know if it would hurt and the whip harness is built by your people in mind correct me if I’m wrong but even if they’re not practical weight-bearing limbs they’re still perfectly functional when it comes to expressing ideas at least insofar as the limited vocabulary the diplomatic community knows right then just who I asked picking up the ruined lengths of coil and releasing it so it raised a cloud of dust as it hit the counter again or what was this built for Pavel Ania could only shrug I don’t know I’ve never seen that before we’re all told about this place and about what chibok did but I don’t see how it connects to that neither did I and that was the hell of it because while I could see no connection I could certainly feel one it was as much a part of the atmosphere around us as the smell of rot and the taste of dust this wasn’t just a place that had been abandoned and left to rot as all man-made installations do when abandoned to the ravages of nature this was some place that had been rendered a ruin by some malignancy it had either fostered or allowed in this was a place that had seen no danger and shown nothing but good intentions and then found itself home to something capable of destroying it I still had no evidence that whatever it was had gone on to wreak more destruction beyond these cratered walls but knew it to be true as surely as I knew that something here was still alive and watching us it all fit what I knew and had confirmed of chitta pox foolish idealistic well-meaning and ultimately catastrophic crime.