“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
fter 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.
It might have been mere political cynicism, coming from him.
For much of the past year I’d considered it literally true.
he things that happened one night on Bocai had caused such a diplomatic firestorm that the authorities, including the Confederacy and the Bocaians 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.