“They were already here, then?”
“Yes. This was only about six months ago Mercantile.”
“Was there anything in your past, at any point, to indicate that such a breakdown was possible?”
“No.” He spread his hands. “But I guess we don’t know our limits until we reach them.”
It had been a while since I’d seen anybody quite as defeated, and in this chamber I didn’t have to look far to see another one. “Who was the first to arrive here? Robin or Li-Tsan?”
“Robin.”
“All right,” I said. “Li-Tsan, you’re next.”
She started. “Not Robin?”
“No, I’ll work my way back. What’s your story?”
“Like Nils just told you, you can get all this from our records—”
“I want to hear it from you. Go on.”
Li-Tsan rolled her eyes again, just to stress that she still considered this all a tremendous waste of her time, but warmed up as she began to talk. “I worked in orbital construction for a Bursteeni company producing wheelworlds for the Tchi holdings. It’s tough going. Everything’s free fall to start with, of course, but the silly ass-backwards way the Bursteeni do it, the rotation starts up before the project’s half finished, and you have to work in and out of the skeleton while the spin’s trying to fling you against the outer walls. The third time a friend of mine got reduced to a fine red paste I contacted the Dip Corps to have them buy out my contract. They figured my background made me a perfect match. They didn’t know I sold out because I was losing my nerve already. I made it all of three months before I made a mistake serious enough to get me banished to this gulag, and I still don’t know what the hell this has to do with anything.”
“How long have you been confined to the hangar?”
“Almost nine months Mercantile. Could have had a grotting baby by now, come to think of it.”
I turned to Robin. “Now, you.”
Fish made even the moment of eye contact look like a backbreaking effort. “Do you really need to hear this from me, Counselor? I’m not feeling well today. I really need to go inside and lie down for a while.”
She did look awful, more a physical shell of what she must have once been than either Li-Tsan or D’Onofrio. I took another look at the bagginess of her clothes and, for the first time, registered the muscular atrophy. Confinement here was killing her. Confinement, or something else.
I said, “The faster you answer me the faster you see me leave.”
Fish held the silence for so long that I had to restrain myself from prodding her. That’s never a good idea. Sometimes people hesitate because they don’t have the courage to come out with whatever needs to be said; other times they desperately want to speak but can’t find the words. Jabbing them prematurely tends to shut them up. Outwaiting them gives them the time to say more than they intend. When she finally spoke, it was without any noticeable energy. “I wasn’t ever much. Just a clerical worker on New Kansas. No special skills or education, just crushing boredom and a thirst to get the hell out.”
“So you joined the Corps.”
“Which assigned me to the same kind of work I’d done back home. I met Mr. Gibb for the first time when I was at a records center on Hylanis. He was the big name doing administrative work as he waited for his next posting, and I was the frustrated kid begging him to remember me if he got sent somewhere with a possibility of advancement. Not long after he left I was pulled into special training for this project. I did thirty days of height-desensitization, before they shipped me in.”
“And you mustered out.”
“Almost as soon as I got here,” she said.
“How did it happen?”
“Everybody except Gibb knew how useless I was from day one, but he kept insisting I’d adjust. Then one day during remedial training, one of the Uppergrowth vines snapped and left me screaming my stupid head off at the tail end of a dangling ten-meter cable.” Her hand spasmed at the thought. She examined it without much surprise, then placed it flat on the table. “I couldn’t blame anybody for not wanting to work with me after that.”
“And that was two years ago Mercantile.”
“Not quite two years. We’re still a few weeks away from my anniversary.”
She used the celebratory word without any apparent irony.
I said, “You’ve received supply shipments. New indentures, now and then. In two years Gibb never talked about sending you home? Or transferring you out, to someplace where you could still do some good? There had to be opportunities.”
Li-Tsan, who fronted many of her statements with rude noises, made another one. “Mr. Gibb thinks failures among his staff reflect poorly on his leadership. So it’s safer to just tuck us out of the way and let us rot.”
“Have you tried complaining to his superiors on New London?”
“Sure,” Li-Tsan said. “We all have. We’ve inundated them. I’ve sent two complaints a day. But guess what. It all goes through Gibb, and he still has the authority to declare us essential to the effort here. And besides, New London isn’t eager to ask its projects elsewhere to trust people who’ve already proven themselves incompetent at previous assignments. The way they figure it, Gibb’s justified in keeping us in limbo, and we can sit out the remaining years of our contracts getting as irate about the injustice as we like.” She rolled her eyes. “Of course, it’s different now that he needs a scapegoat.”
“Would this be why you show your hatred for Mr. Lastogne?”
“He supports what Gibb’s doing to us, which makes him a piece of shit.”
Normal shit, this time. I turned my attention back to Fish. “So you were confined here, alone, for more than a year before Li-Tsan showed up. That sounds cruel.”
Fish didn’t look up. “It wasn’t exactly solitary confinement. I received visits.”
“From anybody in particular?”
“Anybody who felt sorry for me, or wanted a break.”
“How many would that include?”
“Everybody took breaks. Not everybody made the trip just to visit me.” Fish allowed herself the kind of smile that reeks with intense self-loathing. “I wasn’t in-habitat long enough to make friends.”
“Except for Mr. Gibb.”
“I wouldn’t call him a friend, exactly,” Fish said.
“He got you the job. What would you call him?”
“Had it worked out, a mentor.”
“Did he ever visit you, after your exile?”
“I saw him whenever he took leave.”
“Did you ever talk about your situation, on those occasions?”
“I begged him to transfer me.”
“And?”
“He said we’d talk about it if I met him at Hammocktown.”
Mr. Gibb, I decided, was a bastard. “Even with Gibb’s people taking regular leaves, you must have been alone most of the time.”
“Yes.”
“Doing what?”
“Not much. I helped edit the reports our people sent to New London.”
“You had access to hytex transmission?”
“Yes. For more than a year I handled all the mail back and forth.”
“Send anything unauthorized?”
Fish’s eyes flared. “Like what?”
“There have been some unusual messages recently.” My hate mails.
She showed no interest in the details. “Oh, recently. Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, Counselor, but recently—as in the last year or so—all of our transmissions go through Gibb and Lastogne. He took that job away from me when he banished Li-Tsan.”
I had trouble believing either Gibb or Lastogne responsible for the messages I’d received. I had no problem believing them capable of malice, but that particular kind seemed contrary to their style. “Did he have any problems with the job you were doing?”
“No. He made sure I knew he thought I’d done all right. But he still insisted on handling all the correspondence from then on.
I think he just wanted to make sure we wouldn’t say anything he wouldn’t be able to deny.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” Fish said.
“Neither do I,” said Li-Tsan.
Something was being hidden, here. “What would you think if you had to speculate?”
D’Onofrio jumped in. “One One One’s a very precarious situation, Counselor. We’re dealing with issues of tremendous sensitivity, in the face of an alien government that has permitted us no diplomatic status at all. The wrong word, spoken at the wrong time, can jeopardize everything we’re trying to do. Maybe we had a close call, and New London told Mr. Gibb he had to take on greater personal responsibility.”
Or maybe they’d had prior incidents with hate mail, and sending everything through the boss was the only way to make sure it didn’t happen again. “But you’re the one who said Mr. Gibb’s afraid of having to deny something. What would he have to deny?”
“I don’t know,” Fish said. “Honestly.”
I let it pass. “All right. So he took away your job as correspondence officer, and left you playing innkeeper to personnel on leave.”
“And inventory officer. It wasn’t that bad. We needed somebody here to keep track anyway.”
“And that couldn’t be done by onboard systems?”
“Onboard systems can be hacked.”
“Gibb said that. So what was he frightened of, exactly? Weaponry?”
“Luxury items. Stimulants. Personal belongings. High-tech not allowed in the habit under our contract with the AIsource.”
“Anything capable of sabotaging the lines of Santiago’s hammock?”
“We have some plasma knives,” Fish said, “but nothing that’s gone missing. That was the first thing we checked.”
“We being your little group?”
“Not just us. The Porrinyards supervised, and Mr. Lastogne double-checked. They found no irregularities.”
“I’ll check on that.” I would, too, but doubted I’d find anything pivotal. Anybody capable of hacking the inventory would have covered himself too well to leave evidence vulnerable to a cursory inspection from the likes of me. Thinking furiously, rejecting half a dozen possible lines of further inquiry, I settled on the one that had proven best at enflaming the emotions of everybody I’d met so far. “What can you tell me about Warmuth and Santiago?”
The three height-sensitives greeted this little inquiry with the same enthusiasm they would have reserved for an unexploded bomb. They glanced at each other, came to the shared conclusion that this looked suspicious, glanced back at me, came to the shared conclusion that this looked furtive, and looked away, coming to the shared conclusion that avoiding eye contact was just as bad as all their other options. All this happened in about two seconds, and left the three of them with no safe place to focus.
It was Li-Tsan who decided that frankness was the best of a long list of bad options. “Santiago was a bitch and a half.”
“She wasn’t unpleasant,” Fish said, “not in the way that some of the others were…but she was anything but friendly.”
“She was a bitch and a half,” Li-Tsan repeated. “Yeah, she never actually mocked us, and she never did anything we could nail her for…but as far as attitude went, she was the worst. The times she spent here, she just spent inside one of those sleepcubes, refusing to say a word to us, coming out only to eat. Everything she said, everything she did, let us know she thought we were worse than garbage.”
“I didn’t like her, either,” D’Onofrio said. “But I didn’t think the way she treated us had anything to do with us being height-sensitives. I asked around, whenever I saw any of the others, and they all said pretty much the same thing: that she treated everybody that way. She said what she had to say and she did what she had to do, and she turned her back as soon as she decently could.”
“And Warmuth?” I asked.
Li-Tsan spat. “She was worse. She kept visiting us to see if we were all right.”
There was the anger again. Deep, poisonous, and undiluted, making Warmuth the central focus in everything that had gone wrong in her own term of service. “And you resented this?”
“You must have heard by now. She was an empathy addict. There was nothing special about being befriended by her. She only sought out vulnerable people because it gave her a charge.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that. But wouldn’t that be hard to distinguish from genuine compassion?”
“Genuine compassion,” Li-Tsan said, “doesn’t leave you feeling like you’re being used. It doesn’t leave a bad taste in your mouth. It doesn’t make you feel worse than you would if you had to go without it.”
“Again,” I said, “tell me how you knew the difference.”
Li-Tsan just shook her head, showing herself and all the world her incredulity at my failure to get something so transparently obvious.
It wasn’t that I thought she was wrong. I’d been an outcast for most of my life, and I’d learned the hard way that some of the people who wanted to befriend me, and understand me, often acted that way only because it made them feel kind and giving and charitable and special. I’d grown so suspicious of anybody who wanted me to open up that I now assumed ulterior motives long before confirming that there actually were any. But the near unanimity on the subject of Cynthia Warmuth was unusual even by my standards. Either One One One housed the most selective group of misanthropes in the known universe, or she faked sincere concern worse than any other human being ever born, or…
…or what?
There was something else here, something I was still failing to see.
D’Onofrio looked too tired to jump in and help me. “Come on, Counselor. I don’t know anything about you, but sometime in your life you must have known what it was like to have somebody feel sorry for you. Not just a little bit; not just for a few minutes on end. I mean deep, compassionate, ostentatious pity, hauled out at every opportunity, stressed again and again as if you were too stupid to get it the first time, then offered anew even after you recognized it for what it was.” He took a deep breath and stood up, stepping away from the table to face the ship that had become his home, his prison, and the symbol of his greatest failure. “Sometimes that hurts even more than just being left alone.”
And for a moment I still didn’t get it. I knew that it had more to do with D’Onofrio than with the others, but had no idea what.
But then the universe shifted, and one small piece of the puzzle slipped into place with such finality that I came damn close to hearing the click.
D’Onofrio saw the light dawn. He looked away from me, more disgusted with himself than at any other point during the conversation.
Li-Tsan just laughed her nastiest little laugh. The sound that bubbled up from somewhere deep inside, bringing with it the palpable taste of poison. “Pity sex. Ever had any, Counselor? Done right, it hurts even more than any other kind….”
10. LASTOGNE
As our transport reentered the Habitat, the first fresh view of that great empty space was enough to reintroduce me to the digestive effects of soul-searing vertigo. That and the sheer organic smell of the biosphere almost got the better of me. I would have vomited over the side, but the ionic shields would have repelled it back at me. So I just closed my eyes, counted to one hundred by primes, and entertained myself with yet another inner recitation of all the reasons I hated ecosystems.
The Porrinyards had enough decency not to mention my discomfort, but Lastogne called attention to it. “You’re turning colors, Counselor. Would you like some medication?”
I hadn’t heard so many people intent on medicating me since my days as a guest of the state. “No. But I would appreciate it if you wiped that amused grin off your face.”
“Not an option,” Lastogne said, with friendly malice. “Nausea may not be all that fun to experience, but among unaffected travelers it bears a long and honorable history as a spectator sport.”
I tasted stomach aci
d. “I’m beginning to understand your attitude about making friends.”
“Oh?”
“It’s self-preservation. Whenever you say something like that, a stranger just considers you an asshole. A true friend would be obliged to kill you.”
“You’re right. It must be why I’ve always avoided making true friends.” He hesitated, weighed the moment, and plunged in: “So how have you found your interviews so far?”
This exemplified the truism that local liaisons exist to funnel information in both directions, not just one. Lastogne wasn’t here just to help me. He was here to make sure my investigation didn’t go anywhere embarrassing. I urped. “Incomplete.”
“Nothing helpful at all?”
“Nobody confessed to a massive conspiracy, if that’s what you mean. I found more interest in the things people left unsaid.”
“Oh?”
I called the Porrinyards. “Oscin, Skye.”
Skye was too occupied on the freight deck, tending to one of the packages we were ferrying from the hangar, to look up. But both Porrinyards answered, their shared voice once again a neutral compromise between them. “Yes?”
“I’m about to have a screened conversation with Mr. Lastogne. Please don’t disturb us.”
“Understood,” the Porrinyards said.
I unclipped my hiss screen from my belt, setting it for a radius that included Lastogne and myself. A pleasant murmur filled the air around us. I waited for the murmur to reach full volume and said, “Point one. Robin Fish.”
Lastogne seemed surprised. “What about her?”
“The other two came from high-altitude environments. They were trained and experienced and excellent prospects for One One One. When they failed, it was against all reasonable expectations. But Fish was assigned here despite minimal qualifications, given brief and inadequate training in what seems a transparent attempt to justify her posting to this facility, removed from the environment at the first sign of trouble and condemned to literally years of performing busywork in virtual isolation. Her very presence is an anomaly. Why is she here?”
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