Bringen had told me I’d been specifically requested. “Did the message pass through any hands other than Gibb’s, or your own?”
“No. We currently approve all out-station traffic. Why?”
Somebody here was lying, though I didn’t have enough information to determine whether that liar was here or back home. “You called Warmuth an idealist.”
“She was.”
“You also make it pretty clear that you did not consider that a compliment.”
“I didn’t and I don’t.”
“You didn’t like her?”
He hesitated. “It wasn’t a matter of personal like or dislike.”
“Did you or didn’t you?”
“I enjoyed her company.”
“But you don’t think she was as wonderful as Gibb says?”
He hesitated a second time, just long enough to establish that he didn’t want to speak ill of the dead. “I suppose you could say she had an excessive hunger for novelty. She kept saying that she left her homeworld because she wanted exotic experiences, and that being open to such things was part of being alive, but there was a self-serving element to the way she went about it. It gave the impression she saw people and strange places as entertainments the universe programmed for her specific amusement. Talk to the Porrinyards; they’ll tell you.”
“And the other victim? Santiago?”
“She was even more unpleasant, but straightforwardly so. Had a bitter streak, in part because of the kind of place she came from. Wanted everybody to know she’d suffered more than the rest of us. Had the distinctively subversive edge of somebody who would have razed all human society to the ground if she could. She liked to tell everybody how corrupt and useless she found the Confederacy. I’m sympathetic to such talk, so I tried to engage her in personal conversation a couple of times, but ideological ranting was all she was set up for. Professional enough, but determined to just do her job and earn out her contract. She hated Warmuth, by the way.”
“Why?”
“Warmuth kept trying to understand her.”
“And that’s a problem?”
“Some people resent being treated as research projects.”
Having lived much of my childhood under a magnifying glass, I empathized. “Were there any confrontations between them?”
“Just Warmuth being invasive and Santiago freezing her out. If they weren’t both dead, I would mark them as perfect suspects to finish each other off.”
“Was it really that bad?”
“Santiago was like us,” he said. “You and me, I mean. She did not want friends. Warmuth was of the opinion that everybody needs friends even if they believe otherwise. She declared Santiago a personal project and kept pushing. Santiago finally got mad and pushed her around a little, at which point Warmuth declared Santiago persona non grata.”
“I’ll want the report on the incident. As well as the names of any witnesses.”
“Expected. I don’t see it as all that relevant anyway. We investigated Warmuth’s recent activities when we lost Santiago, and I can assure you she had neither the means nor opportunity to do that kind of damage to Santiago’s hammock.”
I nodded. “And Gibb? What’s your personal take on Gibb?”
“You’re talking about my immediate superior, Counselor.”
“Answer the question.”
“I will,” he said. “But I’d be interested in hearing your own take first.”
I considered telling him it was none of his business, but supposed the question harmless enough. “He gave the impression he tries too hard.”
“He does. And he’s somewhat more dangerous than he initially seems.”
“Are you implying he’s responsible for these deaths?”
“Not at all. But he’s a Dip Corps lifer. You know what that means.”
“Tell me what you think it means.”
“As far as I’m concerned,” Lastogne said, with weary contempt, “the Dip Corps is a meritocracy in reverse. By its very design, nobody who sticks around is any good. The genuinely talented work off their bonds quickly thanks to incentives and bonuses. The incompetent get fined with extra time and find themselves shunted to more and more irrelevant assignments. Everybody in the great big mediocre middle, and everybody insane enough to fall off the scale entirely, winds up assigned to Management—and Management’s never been interested in really doing the job, not at any point in human history. Management’s true agenda has always been making things more pleasant for Management.”
It was a harsh but defensible portrait of the way things worked. “And Mr. Gibb?”
“Mr. Gibb considers himself a dedicated public servant.”
“And is he?”
“As a public servant,” Lastogne said, “the man is Management in its purest form. Let’s just say I don’t consider him exceptionally talented.”
“You’re wearing your resentment out front, Mr. Lastogne. How’s your own career going?”
“More than fine,” he said.
“Nothing else to tell me? No disciplinary actions in your past? I warn you, it is something I’ll check.”
“Feel free. My record is the very definition of clean.”
I didn’t trust that secretive half-smile of his, the kind that not only harbored a private joke but teased me about his refusal to share it. I backtracked to another subject he’d already shown eagerness to cover. “Both the victims are women. Gibb seems a little grabby around women. What’s your take on that?”
“No take. I’ve heard some of our female indentures call him smarmy, and I’ve noticed it myself, but that’s not a crime. Neither is his ambition to fuck any indenture who will have him. We’re all going to be here a long time, and life would be pretty damn unbearable if we had to live like celibates. I don’t think he killed Santiago or Warmuth, if that’s what you think. I just think he’s out for himself.”
“What about you, Mr. Lastogne? What are you out for?”
He made a noise. “The big picture.”
This was profound noncommunication, but I noted it and moved on. “Who do you think killed them?”
He didn’t look at me. “Some faction among the AIsource.”
“But they told us about the Brachiators. They arranged our presence here.”
“Some of them may disapprove.”
“To the point of committing murder?”
He looked disgusted. “Why not? Assassination’s just diplomacy by other means.”
“So’s war, sir.”
“Exactly.”
I waited for a clarification and received none. After a few seconds I decided he didn’t know what was going on any more than I did. It was just more of what Gibb had called his facile nihilism. So I altered course. “What do you think about their position? Do you think it’s right for sentient creatures to be owned?”
He emitted a short, cynical laugh, driven by the kind of anger that drives entire lives. “We’re all owned, Counselor. It’s just a matter of choosing who holds the deed.”
5. OWNED
After Lastogne left, I wished the designers of Gibb’s facility had put more effort into constructing solid platforms where restless human beings could stand and pace. Crawling, climbing, and clinging, the only means of locomotion possible in Hammocktown, may have been effective ways of getting from place to place, but they couldn’t burn my nervous energy, or facilitate analytical thought, the way pacing did. Being deprived of that option was going to throw me off as long as I remained here.
So would Lastogne. With a few offhand words, he’d shown a knack for echoing suspicions I’d rarely spoken out loud.
We’re all owned.
It might have been mere political cynicism, coming from him.
For much of the past year I’d considered it literally true.
Owned.
***
The things that happened one night on Bocai had caused such a diplomatic firestorm that the authorities, including the Confederacy and the Boca
ians themselves, had declared the survivors better off permanently disappeared.
I still don’t know what happened to most of the others. I suspect they’re dead, or still imprisoned somewhere. But I’d been shipped to someplace I don’t like thinking about, there to be caged and prodded and analyzed in the hope of determining just what environmental cause had turned so many previously peaceful sentients into vicious monsters.
My keepers spent ten years watching for my madness to reoccur. It had been ten years of reminders that I was an embarrassment to my very species, ten years of being escorted from room to room under guard, ten years of being asked if I wanted to kill anything else. The people who studied me during these years were not all inhuman. Some even tried to show me affection, though to my eyes their love had all the persuasive realism of lines in a script being read by miscast actors. Even the best of them knew I was a bomb that could go off again, at any time; if sometimes moved to give me hugs, they never attempted it without a guard in the room. Others, the worst among them, figured that whatever lay behind my eyes had been tainted beyond all repair, and no longer qualified as strictly human—and being less than strictly human themselves, treated themselves to any cruel pleasures they cared to claim from a creature awful enough to deserve anything they did to her.
Even freedom, when it came, came in a form of a slightly longer leash.
We’ve gotten your latest test scores, Andrea. They’re quite remarkable. You deserve every educational opportunity we can provide for you. But we can’t quite justify letting you go. There are just too many races out there that don’t believe in pleas of temporary insanity, and unless we come up with some solution that stays their hand, they’ll do whatever they can to extradite you. But if you want, you can walk out of here and enjoy Immunity. All you have to do is allow us to remain your legal guardians, for the rest of your natural life.
Most indentures, like Warmuth and Santiago, have contracts of limited duration: five, ten, twenty, or thirty years; the terms varied. They could work off that time in the allotted period or they could earn the time bonuses that permitted early release. They all knew they could look forward to a generous pension and an unlimited passport, someday. They all understood that one day they’d own themselves again.
I didn’t have that luxury. The Dip Corps had promised me lifetime protection, or as close to lifetime protection as I could expect given the certain knowledge that they’d give me up the instant they decided I was useful currency. But they were the ones capable of tearing up the contract. I had no means of severance.
I was owned and expected to be owned for the foreseeable future.
I’d gotten used to the idea.
I’d only imagined I knew what it was like.
Less than a year ago, on Catarkhus, it had come to mean something else.
***
I activated the hytex and called up the service records of the two dead women.
I started with the most recent victim, Cynthia Warmuth, opening with a hytex image taken since her arrival at One One One. She turned out to have been a pretty young thing, lithe, fresh-faced and blue-eyed, with a tentative smile and short dyed hair determined to make a stop at every color in the rainbow. The image caught her in the act of climbing one of the hammock farm’s mesh ladders, one foot already resting one rung up. Being lit from below, like just about everything else illuminated only by One One One’s suns, gave her an odd exotic quality that she seemed to take as a reason for pride.
Of her background, there wasn’t much more than Gibb had already provided. The only notable addition was a thesis she’d written, discussing what she believed to be the impossibility of proper objectivity in the study of sentient races. New indentures in training wrote theses like this all time, most of them showing little originality and promise. Warmuth’s parroted the Dip Corps line: Sentients can only be studied by sentients, and sentients by their very nature bring their own prejudices to anything they study.
I didn’t know how true that nonsense was in practical circumstances. In the course of my daily work I’d encountered any number of diplomats and exosociologists who claimed to be able to watch over intelligent alien races while themselves possessing only as much observable sentience as doorknobs.
Gibb’s personal evaluations of her were also attached to the file, and marked her for guarded praise. She had potential, he said, but she needed to learn how to curb her somewhat excessive zeal. It seemed to be more a personality thing than any problems with her skill set. On four separate occasions, under his watch alone, she’d scored highly enough, on examinations, to earn some additional time off her contract. It shortened her full hitch by less than a month—not much time at all, when you considered how many years she still had left on her contract. But not bad for an indenture who hadn’t even been cleared for her first direct contact with the locals. Either she’d excelled beyond all reason in training or Gibb was an unusually generous boss.
The first image I found of Santiago was not quite as congenial or as posed as Warmuth’s; it was a candid shot, taken from a distance, of her clinging to the Uppergrowth with all four limbs. There were four Brachiators in the background, looking less at home there than she did. About all I learned from it was that she was up to the physical demands of the work. I requested another image and got it: an awkwardly posed image of Santiago standing in a triangular corridor, arms crossed, one thin eyebrow raised. She had dark eyes, tan skin, a round face framed by tousled caramel hair, and a slight underbite that transformed her lower lip into a pout. There was no hint of a smile.
Santiago’s papers were fewer than Warmuth’s, but tinged with a bitter edge. One passage Lastogne had bookmarked for me was especially interesting. “For most sentients, belonging to their respective species means bearing the influence of the whole. Being a human being often means being outshouted by the whole. It means being a cell with no voice in the function of the organism. It means being owned.”
There it was again. Owned.
It could be a coincidence. It was a common concept among the sufficiently cynical, a parade I help to lead. Santiago’s background as a debt-slave even made it reasonable. There were too many worlds like hers, and too many people like her aching to leave those worlds behind. Their need was a large part of what staffed the Dip Corps.
A look at Santiago’s bond put the nature of the contract into sharp relief. The woman had exchanged her own debt for a ten-year contract. By the time the Dip Corps added the costs of transportation, training, and the medical treatment necessary to cleanse her lungs and body chemistry of the homeworld industrial toxins that would have left her dead or incapacitated by age forty, the time-debt on her contract had stretched from ten years to twenty.
Extended, just like Warmuth’s: a coincidence, or a link? Either way, she wouldn’t have minded. The Corps was the best form of debt slavery—the kind that ended in freedom if the job was done.
But it was still slavery. Ownership.
The kind that made people angry.
Santiago had been described as an angry person.
We’re all owned.
I looked further. Santiago had earned some mild time bonuses in her months on One One One, but had also been fined for antisocial behavior, the worst penalty coming after her confrontation with Warmuth. Once I did the math, she turned out to be earning out her contract at something approaching real time. That was a mediocre score indeed. I wondered how much of her abrasiveness was political, and how much was personality.
I thought of another abrasive personality: Lastogne.
He’d also made a reference to being owned.
He had given the words special emphasis.
He struck me as a man embittered by the deal he had made.
He had gone out of his way to tell me that he’d already heard of me.
Had he been giving me a gentle nudge in the direction he wanted the investigation to go?
Or was he obscuring the trail? Maybe he was just pushing buttons. Or
maybe all his talk of Santiago’s attitude problem was a smoke screen for his own.
I directed the hytex to provide me with his file.
Nothing came up.
I went into the Dip Corps Database, and used not only the security codes I had earned but also several my superiors would have been very unhappy to know I possessed.
Nothing came up.
I bit my thumb, wondering if I’d gotten his name right.
No, that was facile. I never got names wrong. I got people wrong, but not their names. He was Peyrin Lastogne, all right.
But why was there no available data?
I was still wondering when the floating white blob the hytex projected instead of a useful answer blinked, like a single cyclopean eye, and exploded, filling the space with a blinding light. When that faded, a new image appeared. It was another generated image of myself, this time captured in the immediate aftermath of a horrific beating. My face was a collection of pain piled upon pain, with every millimeter of exposed skin swollen and glossy with blood. My eyes were puffed shut, the cheekbones staved in, my gaping mouth an assortment of shattered teeth. Any injuries below the neckline were invisible beneath my black suit, but from the way it stood, seeming ready to fall at any moment, favoring its right leg and cradling its midsection with both hands, they must have been just as brutal, and just as ugly. Hiding them just gave the imagination room to imagine the absolute worst, and produce the image of a woman whose entire body was one walking wound.
The animation took a single blind step, stiffened, and as if in terrible, clairvoyant realization, emitted a cry pregnant with the certainty that everything it had endured up until this moment was just empty preamble.
The top of its head disappeared in a burst of blood and smoke.
The brutalized version of myself did not fall but just stood there, dazed, everything above mid-forehead amputated, oozing rivulets of blood from the splintered basin its skull had become.
Then she tumbled forward, disappearing even as she fell out of frame.
I blinked several times.
And murmured another silent response to the unknown sender.
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