Emissaries from the Dead

by Adam-Troy Castro

  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.

  Be seeing you.

  6

  PORRINYARDS

  In the morning, the suns of One One One had the common decency to seep into brilliance, avoiding the kind of sudden light burst that would have blinded everyone in the Habitat. Having gone without sleep, I spent that hour watching the earliest stages of that dawn filter through the material of my hammock and bring my own shadow on the tented ceiling into sharp relief.

  When it came to evidence that I’d survived yet another night, I’ve known worse.

  By the time the hytex warned me that my ride had arrived, I had soniced myself clean, availed myself of the outhouse structure at the center of Hammocktown (in what must have been the most harrowing trip to a bathroom I’d ever known), and thrown on a fresh black suit. Zipping open the port at the base of the hammock, I found Lastogne and the Porrinyards both below me in an AIsource skimmer of a design much sleeker than yesterday’s.

  Lastogne waved at me, still looking like a man harboring a secret joke. The Porrinyards were harder to read, their expressions conveying no feeling deeper than amiability. They still dressed identically, with thin strips of shiny silver material over their breasts and waists, but now that I saw them close up I could tell that they were not quite as androgynous as they’d appeared at a distance. The taller and bulkier one’s waist cloth was just tight enough to reveal a telltale bulge in the crotch, and the slighter one’s bound chest bore a pair of tiny breasts distinguishable among all those hypertrophic muscles.

  The woman had a soft, nearly transparent down along her jawline, the male a darker complexion and eyes that testified to Asian ancestry. And there was something deep and amused about the way they regarded me—almost as if somebody had been telling them stories, and they approved.

  Lastogne saluted me. “Good morning.”

  The Porrinyards acknowledged me with a shared, “Counselor.”

  I blinked away a wave of vertigo. “Good morning. Are we all going to the hub?”

  “Mr. Lastogne said you wanted to interview me.” This, the Porrinyards also spoke together. It wasn’t so much simultaneous as stereo, with each member of the pair linking phonemes and word fragments and vowel tones with complementary sounds voiced by the other. The collaboration created the uncanny illusion of a shared voice emanating from some indeterminate space between them.

  Nobody offered to help me descend the hammock’s ladder into the vehicle. Aware that this was a form of respect and simultaneously a test to determine if I deserved respect, I slid down, feeling a definite sense of relief once I entered the skimmer’s specific gravity. Standing on the solid deck was even more of a pleasure, after too many hours on the softer surfaces of Hammocktown.

  Either way, I seemed to have passed a test.

  Lastogne grinned. “Nobody would ever guess you had only been on-station a day.”

  “Whatever.” But I wasn’t above feeling a little touch of pride.

  As the skimmer pulled away from Hammocktown and picked up speed, its shadow, cast by the multiple glowsphere suns, raced along the Uppergrowth above us and was distorted by the gnarled texture of that knotted surface. The flight speed of this vessel seemed faster than that of the chatty skimmer that had ferried me yesterday, leaving me uncertain over whether to be pleased at today’s added convenience or annoyed over yesterday’s unnecessary delays. I contemplated the matter until the racing shadow blurred, then forced my attention back to the patient Lastogne. “We’re not going back on the same route I traveled yesterday.”

  Lastogne said, “Right you are. Your personal transport’s docked at a bay well on the far end of the Hub. The best route to the Interface is through a portal much closer to us. It’ll be a much shorter flight today.”

  Which was good news when it came to my flight aversion, bad news when it came to my hopes of gathering some information on the way. Rather than waste any more time, I got down to questioning the Porrinyards. “Which one of you is Oscin and which one of you is Skye?”

  The woman spoke by herself. “I was born just Skye. He was born just Oscin.” They spoke together again, in that musical, but unnerving, shared voice. “We were linked at fifteen, and took the surname Porrinyards.”

  “It saves them a lot of money buying each other monogrammed jewelry,” Lastogne said.

  I ignored him. “Did you do this to yourselves voluntarily?”

  The pair flashed identical smiles. “That’s an offensive question, Counselor, but I’ll take it as an innocent one.”

  “I’d appreciate that.”

  “Yes, it was voluntary. It was the only way the individuals Oscin and Skye could indenture themselves offworld and know that they’d always be posted together. They thought they were close then. I am integrally linked now.”

  Cylinking, an illegal operation on most human worlds, was one of the queasier services AIsource Medical offered other sentient races. In exchange for a percentage of future earnings, the AIsource could wire the personalities of two separate individuals together, via an intangible broadcast matrix. The process replaced the two individuals with a larger gestalt that experienced life as one combined person. In theory, this added to their shared intelligence by decreasing the need to devote precious skull space with redundant information that no longer needed to be known by both.

  Cylinking had been attacked as dehumanizing. Its defenders said it was nothing of the kind. It wasn’t destroying individuality, they said, but redefining it, making new people by combining those who considered themselves incomplete when apart. Those who’d been through the process said it had improved their lives tremendously. Regardless, it took a rare couple to even want to be cylinked, a rarer couple still to meet the AIsource’s arcane requirements for the procedure. There were, as far as I knew, fewer than three thousand pairs in existence. I’d heard that the Dip Corps had a few among its indentures, but this was the first time I’d encountered any.

  I clicked a fingernail against my teeth. “Mr. Lastogne tells me that the two of you handled much of Cynthia Warmuth’s training on-station.”

  “I did,” the Porrinyards said, emphasizing the singular, “though Mo Lassiter also contributed.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard that name before. Is Mo a man or a woman?”

  “A woman. Mo’s short for Maureen.”

  I’d have to meet this Mo Lassiter and question her later. “But you spent substantial time with Warmuth. What did you think of her?”

  “She was young and hungry. So intent on understanding others that she entered the point of obnoxious intrusiveness.”

  “Yes, I heard that Santiago disliked her for that. How was she intrusive?”

  “In my case,” the Porrinyards said, “she asked rudely intimate questions.”

  “Like mine?”

  “No. You were just trying to understand a condition unfamiliar to you. Her curiosity was quite different.”

  “How, then?”

  Lastogne made a rude noise. “Really, Counselor. I thought you were supposed to be some kind of prodigy.”

  I didn’t catch what was supposed to be so obvious, but Oscin and Skye saved me the trouble of asking: “She was most interested in the sexual aspects of my enhancement. She specifically wanted to know what it was like when my two component bodies made love.”

  Now that they mentioned it…“A number of people must
wonder that.”

  “Which is only natural,” the Porrinyards said. “But Warmuth was aggressive enough to expect vivid descriptions on demand.”

  “If you don’t mind me asking, what did you tell her?”

  They bristled. “Are you like her, Counselor? Do you want descriptions on demand?”

  “No,” I said. “I want to know what kind of answer you gave her.”

  The Porrinyards considered that and saw the distinction. “I told her that it’s exactly twice as pleasurable for me as it is for a pair of isolated single-minds who can only interpret the physical act from one viewpoint apiece. This only enflamed her prurient interest, of course. More than once she offered herself to me.”

  “To both of you?”

  “To me,” the Porrinyards corrected.

  “And you declined?”

  “Yes. I didn’t like the way she asked.”

  “If you had liked the way she asked, would you have said yes?”

  “I say yes all the time,” the Porrinyards said. “I remain only one person, and a steady diet of sex with myself is as depressing as any other confinement to masturbation. So I’m always interested in finding another partner. Peyrin, here, was once open enough to accept such an invitation—”

  “Hello,” Lastogne sang.

  “—and even Santiago turned her down with only mild offensiveness. But I’m only attracted to people capable of understanding that they’re making love to only one person, not two, regardless of the number of bodies involved. Cynthia Warmuth never struck me as being able to make that kind of cognitive leap. She was interested only in adding to her personal library of deep enriching experiences. The last I knew, Warmuth had sought out less demanding partners, and enjoyed at least one assignation with Mr. Gibb.”

  I had already noted Gibb’s possessive response to women who entered his personal orbit. “Was that an ongoing relationship?”

  “No. I think Mr. Gibb’s usual level of charm had its usual prophylactic effect before long.”

  “Did you notice any tension between them afterward?”

  “Mr. Gibb is too big an oaf to feel any tension toward anybody.” Oscin and Skye gave a single, unified sniff of disdain. “I have no way of knowing how Warmuth felt.”

  Gibb’s failure to mention his relationship with Warmuth was interesting, but not necessarily damning. “What about Santiago? Did Gibb have any special relationship with Santiago?”

  “I doubt it. Santiago didn’t have special relationships.”

  “She was a loner?”

  “I would say misanthrope. She alienated people as a matter of course.”

  “Mr. Lastogne said she wouldn’t shut up about how much she hated the Confederacy.”

  The Porrinyards frowned at that. “Is this a political witch hunt, Counselor?”

  “Not as far as I’m concerned. People can bad-mouth the Corps and the Confederacy as much as they want. On a good day I’d even join them. But it’s been described as an obsession. I want to know what kinds of things she said.”

  They relaxed. “She wasn’t a bastards-up-against-the-wall revolutionary, if that’s what you mean. She had an honest grudge. She always said that if the Confederacy was worth a damn, it would have seized all power for itself and shut down the kind of power structure that made hellholes out of worlds arranged like hers. She wanted one big government, or at the very least a common bill of rights, for everybody. She particularly wanted debt slavery abolished—not just the horrible kind she grew up with, but even the contracts we have in the Corps. None of it was at all new, you understand. Scratch any indenture and you’ll find somebody who feels the same way.”

  “I agree. And yet I get the impression that she was a profoundly unpopular person.”

  “Christina may have been more bitter about her politics than most of us, but that wasn’t her real problem.”

  “What was?”

  “She didn’t like being around people and had no problem letting them know it.”

  Which only increased my sense of kinship toward her. “Did she get along with anybody at all?”

  “Not to my knowledge. She alienated everybody equally.”

  “She spent a lot of time with Cif Negelein,” Lastogne said.

  The Porrinyards seemed genuinely surprised by that. “Negelein? Really?”

  I said, “Who’s Negelein?”

  Lastogne’s expression failed to communicate undying affection. “You’ll meet him later.”

  Uh-huh. “How would you define their relationship?”

  “Can’t answer you there,” Lastogne said. “Whenever two people I don’t like start spending time together, I consider it a personal gift. It saves me the aggravation.”

  “Why don’t you like Negelein?”

  “He’s a pretentious snot.”

  I turned my attention back to the Porrinyards: “So what did Santiago do, when she was not on-duty or spending time with this Negelein? Retire to her hammock and stew in an antisocial funk?”

  “Some of that,” they said. “She sometimes went exploring on her own. Sometimes she descended, trying to observe the dragons, though she never got close enough to report anything. A few times she took advantage of all the down-time available to her and went back to relax in the hangar. Nothing out of the ordinary, here; we all take our breaks when we can. I can tell you she had less use for other people than anybody I’ve ever met.”

  “Including yourself?”

  “Very much including myself,” the Porrinyards said. “I’m no misanthrope.”

  Which was exactly the opposite of the way Lastogne had described them. If them, plural, was the right word. I was far from sure that it was. The more I dealt with these Porrinyards, the more pronoun trouble I was likely to have.

  The skimmer banked into a course correction, headed for a portal into the station hub; its controlled local gravity prevented me from feeling any change in acceleration, but my stomach lurched anyway. The portal, a well-camouflaged hatch cut into the Uppergrowth itself, bore the same knotted surface as the surrounding vegetation, a touch that seemed anal on the part of the AIsource. After all, who inside this habitat would have been aesthetically offended by an unsightly sliding panel?

  Orienting itself toward the hatch meant that the skimmer had to position itself vertically. The skimmer’s local gravity kept me from feeling any change in orientation, but my eyes were another matter, and my mind refused to forget that the vast wall before us had been up only a few seconds before. I tasted stomach acid and closed my eyes to ward off the worst of the vertigo. “You trained Santiago too, correct?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Did she and Warmuth ever train together?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was there any friction?”

  “There was some off-duty, I believe. A bit of a shoving match. I wasn’t around for it. On the job it was minimal. You would expect to get more from Santiago, considering her attitude, but she was, if anything, the easier of the two to work with. Focused. No interest in adding a personal element. Far from charming, but right to the point.”

  Lastogne broke in: “You can open your eyes, Counselor. We’re in.”

  We were traversing an octagonal access tunnel, only twice the diameter of the skimmer, with walls of an indistinct blue that remained bright without any obvious light source. Shiny black panels appeared every few meters, but I couldn’t tell whether this was tech or just a design element. Nor could I tell how we were oriented with respect to the Habitat, but I’d already experienced so much vertigo today I was relieved not to care. “You trained them both for their first contact with the Brachiators?”

  “That’s right,” the Porrinyards said. “We have a policy here, requiring escorts during individual first contact.”

  “Tell me how it works.”

  “Mr. Lastogne has probably already told you that the Brachs have unusual perceptions regarding the difference between life and death. As far as they’re concerned, alien sentients
like us are not alive in the sense you and I understand the concept. We’re ‘Dead.’ Introducing a stranger involves a ceremony that boils down to telling the Brachiators something along the lines of ‘This is (insert name), an Emissary from the Dead, who wishes to be with you in Life.’”

  Just ahead another portal irised open. Not much time left for follow-up questions. I bit the tip of my thumb, cursing a little when I realized I’d drawn blood. On a bad day, my fingertips were a mass of scabs. “And if they’re amenable to that, Insert Name has to cling to the Uppergrowth for several hours, while the Brachiators around her decide she’s sufficiently Alive to merit their company.”

  The Porrinyards nodded. “Alive enough to be declared a Half-Ghost anyway.”

  “Is this something only required for offworlder visitors? Not with strangers of their own kind?”

  “Only with offworlders,” the Porrinyards said. “We don’t know if they’d react this way to any species other than human beings, but they think we’re dead. We haven’t figured out what gives them that impression, but as long as we observe the proper etiquette in their environment, they’re more than happy to declare us Half-Ghosts for the purposes of getting along.”

  “Until,” Lastogne said, “like Warmuth and Santiago, you die for real.”

  I digested that as the skimmer slid into its bay, in a well-lit chamber with a platform bearing tubes curving away to what must have been other Hub locations. Given the convenient scale, it all seemed too much like the rapid transit system on New London to suit a cylinder world, which had never been intended for the convenience of human visitors, but then, the AIsource were great at building things and might have built all this within a day of inviting Gibb’s inspection team.

  That is, assuming they hadn’t expected human visitors all along.

  We disembarked and stood on the platform, getting used to the novelty of a solid, if spongy, floor. Local gravity seemed about one-third of what it had been in Hammocktown, but that didn’t matter to me. My legs, which were used to carrying me around in that traditional manner, thanked me with the abject relief only aggravated limbs can express.