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. Ifthem,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?