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.
.
6.
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.