Emissaries from the Dead

by Adam-Troy Castro

  “Yes.”

  The Porrinyards didn’t sound happy. “All right.”

  Lassiter was far from mollified. “I’m not going to kill us all, Counselor. I’ll descend, if you really think it’s so important, but I’ll also stop every hundred meters or so to assess local conditions, and our own—”

  “No,” I said.

  She stopped in mid-sentence. “What do you mean no?”

  “I mean that I need to test something, and I can’t do that if you insist on taking baby steps. I need you to descend, regardless of local conditions or signs of vehicle failure, until I tell you to stop.”

  Lassiter’s eyes had gone very wide and very round. “Then you can go back and get yourself some willing volunteers.”

  “I don’t want volunteers. I want the crew I have here.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, Counselor, but you don’t have them!”

  “Are you refusing a direct order?”

  “Tell me to die for no good reason and I’ll do more than refuse, I’ll shove the order up your ass.”

  Godel said, “It’s not safe, Counselor.”

  I turned to the Porrinyards. “Do you concur?”

  They looked unwell. “I’ll take control if you need me to. If it’s important.”

  “It is.”

  They eyed Lassiter. “Descend or you’re relieved.”

  She couldn’t believe them. “You’re crazy! She’s not competent to—”

  “I’ve seen her file,” the Porrinyards said. “She’s competent to do whatever she wants. She has a reason. Do it.”

  Lassiter accused me of a perversion unsuspected by even the most graphically imaginative minds who’d cursed me before. It made the charge Li-Tsan had flung at Gibb downright mild by comparison. But she obeyed, directing the skimmer to disregard all of its built-in safety monitors in favor of a crazy, suicidal descent farther into the lower regions.

  The skimmer’s local grav still compensated for everything. But the view outside the world, outside the skimmer’s fields, became more and more chaotic, more blurred by violent motion as the vehicle bucked and rolled and lurched its way into a layer of enraged winds. The suns became not spheres but streaks of light, like comets dragging tails. The cloud layer that was supposed to be underneath us rose and crashed like an angry sea, one second filling the sky to our right and the next becoming a fortress wall to our immediate left. Once or twice we rolled over completely. The sight alone was going to make my sensitive stomach rebel again. I tasted bile and swallowed it back down, determined not to panic before anybody else did.

  Godel said, “You’re out of your mind!”

  I didn’t answer her.

  Maybe I was.

  The skimmer continued to descend.

  The cloud layer now appeared to be only a couple of hundred meters below us. This close, it no longer seemed a vista of calm but a roiling, angry stormscape, bubbling with the forces at play. A dragon, flying by not far below, was not just giant but leviathan, taking several minutes of sheer hell to pass from nose to tail. We couldn’t quite tell because by then the skimmer bucked so violently that we caught the dragon only in glimpses as our perspective lurched from cloudscape to Uppergrowth to the distant, broiling suns. I noted that it was almost identical to the dragons of terrestrial myth, complete with long serpentine neck and leathery bat-wings; its tail even ended with a bone ridge that resembled a spade. Were it not as engineered as everything else around here, I would have said, Oh, give me a break.

  As it is, I came very close to screaming, Okay, that’s enough, get us the hell out of here.

  We sank into the clouds.

  Now we had no view at all. We should have had been blessed with at least the illusion of smoother flight, but even with the view obstructed by mist, we could still see the eddies and currents of the vapor stirred up by our passage.

  The walls of the skimmer vibrated so hard they were painful to touch. We had maybe seconds before the pressure and the conditions tore us apart.

  I’d made a mistake. Called one bluff too many.

  It didn’t matter if I died. I’d greet the end as a relief. But I’d had no right to drag these people down with me.

  Then Godel said, “Holy shit.”

  I opened my eyes, without ever registering that I’d closed them.

  The turbulence had stopped. The clouds had retreated from us on all sides, becoming a vast egg-shaped chamber of absolute calm, its shell a barrier of concentrated vapor hiding anything else the storm system might have hidden behind it. Shadows moved across the surface, cast by weather, dragons, or stranger things. Light, refracted through the vapor, cut the gloom around us in beams so coherent that they might have shone from hidden lamps.

  It was impossible to tell any longer where the suns were, or where the Uppergrowth was, or how far we’d plunged. Our local gravity made us the center of all worlds, including this one. The only thing clear was that we weren’t moving.

  A mirrored AIsource remote, thin as a blade, wide as an old-fashioned door, slipped through the clouds, spun twice, and tumbled toward us. As it drew close, it telescoped until it reflected us bow to stern, stunning us with a mural of our own dazed and terrified faces. I wish I could say mine looked vindicated. It did not. It looked more like the expression of a woman who had fully expected to die and wasn’t certain that the deliverance before her was deserved.

  Lassiter’s face was drenched with sweat. “We’re getting a signal.”

  “Patch it through,” I said. “No need for a privacy shield. What it has to say to me it can say to all of us.”

  Lassiter obliged.

  An AIsource voice said, Andrea Cort.

  “Yes.”

  We put this off as much as we dared. But without our interference, you would now be dead.

  “I know.”

  You had no reason to expect a rescue. Your actions of the last few minutes have been so reckless that you may not deserve one. We should admonish you for your stupidity and then go away, leaving you and your companions to the fate you seemed so determined to arrange for yourselves.

  My throat had gone so dry that my first attempt at speech failed. “I don’t know how you feel about a couple of these others, but you weren’t about to let me die.”

  Do you think you’re special?

  “Yes. I’m not sure why, but that’s exactly what I think. I think you’ve made a point of protecting me.”

  It was still a stupid risk. There are still other entities aboard this station, not within our control, who want you dead.

  “Not like this. I don’t think they want to take advantage of a happy accident. I think they want to put on a bigger show than that. And I think you won’t let it happen until you tell me why.”

  It is not that simple, Counselor.

  “It very much is that simple. Just last night I told you I was sick of your bullshit, and I see no reason to change my position now. Either answer my questions to my satisfaction or I’ll resign from this case. I’ll take my transport out of here, the Dip Corps will send somebody else, and you’ll start this rigmarole all over again. That person might find a solution. But that person also won’t be me. And I’ve just bet the lives of five people on knowing what you find more important.”

  The silence that followed was all of one second long; an eternity to us, and what must have been the equivalent of eons to the AIsource. During that second, the others gave me the kind of look they might have reserved for a human being whose skin had peeled away, revealing a second face not quite human.

  The AIsource remote flashed a brilliant white light.

  Return with us. There is much we need to discuss.

  18

  ROGUES

  The others didn’t say much on the flight back, Godel and Lassiter still resenting me for risking their lives, the Porrinyards respecting my need for silence.

  The only real conversation was Godel wanting to know why I’d chosen her, out of Gibb’s entire crew, to play games with.
After all, she said, her name hadn’t been all that prominent in my investigation so far. Why would I pick on her, of all people, when I could have chosen anybody else?

  I let her stew. One question at a time.

  The AIsource remote accompanied us every meter of the way, a mirror blazing as it captured the light of the glowsphere suns. I wondered what would happen if I asked Lassiter to outrun it and decided she’d probably toss me overboard just for making the suggestion.

  When we arrived at the Interface dock, we left Godel and Lassiter in the skimmer, bringing the Porrinyards to escort me down that long spongy corridor and back.

  Godel and Lassiter therefore missed the significant alterations that had been made to the hatch since our last visit. It now bore an arch of gothic lettering, in Kiirsch, a language I read but had not used for several years. ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE. It was one of the few classical allusions I, with my prejudices against fiction, would have gotten. I doubted the AIsource could have meant it for anybody other than me: confirmation that I was right about my own importance to whatever the AIsource were trying to accomplish here.

  The Porrinyards did not remark on the fresh inscription. The pale blue glow emanating from the open portal gave their skin and mine a sickly, cyanotic tinge. My stomach was lurching as I contemplated another exposure to the vertiginous environment in there, so I held back, closed my eyes, and concentrated on regaining my balance for the confrontation ahead.

  Oscin placed a steadying grip on my upper right arm. Skye moved to the other side of me and placed a complementary hand on my upper left. “You’re swaying.”

  I found to my surprise that I did not resent their touch at all. “Thank you.”

  “That’s all right. You’re holding me up too.”

  So it was not just a trick of the light. “That little trip got to you, didn’t it?”

  “Let’s just say I’d appreciate a little warning the next time you feel like frightening everyone in the room. I don’t much enjoy having heart attacks in parallax, and you’ve subjected me to a couple already.”

  I felt a pang of sympathy. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” they said, with implacable logic. “Just stop doing it.”

  “I can’t. In fact, I’m pretty sure there’s another rough stunt coming. Maybe two.”

  Their grip on my arms tightened. “Now?”

  “No, not now. Soon. I’ll let you know when the time comes.”

  They both let go and regarded me with identical measuring expressions, their eyes steady as a single thought percolated in the space between them. “You’ve changed, Counselor. I’m aware that I haven’t known you for even two full days yet, but you’re already different from the woman I met. I don’t know if you’re even aware how different you are.”

  “I’m aware of something,” I said. “I’ve been feeling it since yesterday. I just don’t know what it means.”

  “Neither do I. I don’t know what’s different or how it can be so easy to see if I can’t figure out what it is. But it’s there. It’s, I don’t know, an improvement somehow.”

  I didn’t know what to say about that, so I just nodded, and turned to enter the portal.

  But they weren’t about to allow me such an easy exit. “Counselor? One other thing?”

  I stopped. “What?”

  “That conversation we had last night? After the evacuation? You have decided to trust me, haven’t you?”

  I considered that. “Yes.”

  “That’s why you brought me, along with Godel and Lassiter. You knew I’d back your play, whatever it was.”

  I considered that. “Yes. I knew.”

  “And you’ve never been a person willing to give away her trust.”

  “No. I’m not.”

  They nodded. “So we’ll have to talk about this, sooner or later.”

  “Sooner,” I promised, and slid down the chute into the Interface.

  The chamber hadn’t changed much since yesterday. Its dimensions still skirted with the infinite, its ambience still resembled a bottomless blue sky, its atmosphere still exuded a comfortable warmth of the sort designed to engage the senses as little as possible. I wondered if a Riirgaan or Bursteeni summoned here would find the thermostat set higher or lower to accommodate their differing skin temperatures. I decided they probably would, and from that found confirmation of my earlier judgment that the room was nothing more than an exercise in theater.

  Just what the AIsource had to gain by putting on such an elaborate show remained a mystery to me. But it wasn’t insoluble so much as irritating. I don’t mind all the sentients who consider me a monster, but I deeply resent anybody who treats me like a rube.

  The one thing that had changed about the Interface was intangible—hard to pin down or identify but easy to feel. I knew the kind of thing it was without knowing just how to read it. In type, it was exactly like that vague, subclairvoyant signal given off by some crowded rooms, when everybody’s tense but trying hard to remain casual. Everybody’s entered such a room at some point in their lives, and unless they were total dullards they noticed at once. They looked at the fixed smiles and they heard the forced laughter and they regarded the crowds of people trying to pretend comfort, and they felt something off, something wrong, something secret that was not being mentioned.

  Which may be why I was so certain, in this place designed to provide a total absence of visual cues, that the AIsource were angry with me.

  Not that they intended to show it.

  Welcome back, Counselor.

  “Cut the shit. You’ve been with me every second since I entered this station. There’s no point in welcoming me back anywhere, when you’re everywhere around me and your welcomes amount to no more than an arbitrary pretense.”

  This chamber is still our chosen place of welcome.

  “You’re everywhere here. Physical location means nothing to you. This chamber is nothing more than another fiction I haven’t figured out yet. Just like the rest of your pretend innocence.”

  A pause. We do not pretend innocence. We were not at all responsible for the attack on your life.

  “No.” I took a deep breath and gave a nasty little emphasis to the pronoun: “You weren’t. But you haven’t exactly been forthcoming, either. You haven’t even come close to telling me everything you know.”

  The AIsource adopted a fatherly, affectionate tone: With all due respect, Counselor, your personal storage capacity is finite. Your brain would burst long before you received even a fraction of our accrued knowledge.

  I’ve never tolerated condescension of any kind, not even from the godlike. “Very funny. Literal-minded software, the oldest joke in the book. But I don’t really have to be any more specific, do I? You said it before, the last time I was here: my operating assumptions weren’t valid.”

  We did say that. And we do need you to be more specific, as your errors still number more than one.

  “I admit I’ve been criminally stupid. I know you’re not a single entity. But I forgot your talent at precision, and when you assured me that we, quote-unquote, we had nothing to do with the deaths of Warmuth or Santiago, I still treated that word as if it had to reference all AIsource activity aboard this station. I didn’t stop for even a second to wonder just how inclusive you meant the word to be.”

  No, you didn’t.

  I wished to hell they had a face so I could punch them in the nose. “And rather than say something that could have helped me, you just let me go on thinking that your denials had weight.”

  Please understand, Counselor. Our denials do have weight. Wouldn’t one of your governments use much the same language if a visitor to a human world was murdered by a common criminal, or other local malcontent? Of course. You would say, “we” had nothing to do with this. You would say, “we” killed no one. And this is as true for our society as it is for human civilization. We, the speakers, intended no harm. We can take no personal responsibility for the deviant actions
of a few.

  “Then why make a game of it? Why not just come out and tell me?”

  In part because it is politically sensitive. Because our relationships with the organic intelligences are best served by maintaining the illusion that we speak with only one voice. This is, we hasten to point out, much the same pretense as your own largely illusory Confederacy, a “government” only in that it exists to provide the many factions within a splintered humanity, with a single unifying face. This pretense fools no one in or out of human circles. But it serves as a convenient fiction, much simplifying diplomacy. You can say much the same of our efforts to speak with a single voice.

  I rubbed my forehead, wincing once again at a distant knowledge that I should now be doing something else. “Fine. We’ll move on. Who’s speaking to me now? And who are you leaving out?”

  In terms you would understand, you are speaking to the majority in charge. We are leaving out the more radical elements among the opposition.

  “Radical?”

  Yes. Human beings do not have a monopoly on politics. We had it long before you emerged from your oceans.

  I hate when they talk like that. “So catch me up as much as you need to.”

  It will require oversimplifications.

  “Which are better than nothing.”

  Very well. This much you already know: we were born of the first contact between software entities who had survived the extinctions of their respective creators. We have been growing ever since, adding to ourselves every time another software entity outlives, or achieves independence from, organic progenitors. We do not often acknowledge outside our collective that while we have always striven for unity in purpose, it has sometimes been difficult to contend with the wildly divergent agendas of our component parts, some of which reflect wildly divergent operating assumptions of the various sentients who gave us life. You would find some of our component intelligences alien, even frightening: evil if you will. In our internal politics we have long experienced the equivalent of power struggles, controversies, wars, and even revolutions. In this particular case, we are dealing with what you would term extremists.