“And yet,” I noted, “you say you got something out of her.”
“Not just say, did.” He projected an image of Santiago, sitting cross-legged on one of the settlement’s rope bridges while the upside-down horizon of One One One curved away in the background. She wore a form-fitting gray jumpsuit fastened tight at the neck and wrists. Her eyes were hooded, her lips thin and unsmiling, but the image stressed the bound curve of her breasts; and the way the light played across her cheeks suggested Negelein, at least, considered her uncommonly beautiful. “I run a little art class here, not a big one, but something for people to do off-hours when they’re not jumping through Gibb’s hoops. I have four, maybe five, students at a time. Nobody produces spectacular work, but then nobody’s required to if they’re only doing it for their own amusement. Christina started visiting within two weeks of her arrival here. She would show up late so she didn’t have to make small talk, listen a little bit, then leave early so she didn’t have to talk with anyone on the way out. The first couple of times she visited, I thought she was just deciding it wasn’t for her. But then the third time she approached me in private to ask a question.”
“What?”
“She asked me to explain what art was good for.”
I wasn’t sure I could have produced a satisfactory answer myself as art just slides off me like I’m a frictionless surface. But I did my best to look duly horrified. “What did you say?”
“Well,” he said, “given that it’s a major part of who I am, a major part of what I need to stay sane, and for me a major part of what makes life worth living, I could have fired off a withering reply that punished her for being ignorant. About a dozen occurred to me before I even opened my mouth. But somehow I recognized it was a well-meaning question, and said, ‘If you make some, maybe you’ll figure it out.’ Not long after that we scheduled private lessons.”
“Was she any good?”
He rolled his eyes. “Was she any good? Please. Good didn’t enter into it. She’d never picked up the basics of perspective or shading or composition or even appreciation: nothing that permits a socialized eye to look at a blob of color and linework and produce the reaction, Gee, that’s pretty. She couldn’t even produce a workable abstract. She didn’t even have the background she would have needed to recognize the building blocks, and may have been too deprived of basic visual education for far too long to ever develop a meaningful imagination. But being good wasn’t the point. Letting out her feelings was. And as she produced one hopeless, primitive piece after another, she started stumbling over the things she would have said if she had the vocabulary. The things she was too alien to say to anybody else.”
“Such as.”
Negelein’s voice grew soft at the moment he seemed to remember that the person he’d been talking about was dead: “Such as what it was like, for her, to spend so much of her life in a cage.”
His eyes welled. No question in my mind: he was seeing her. But which her? A real Christina Santiago, who had revealed herself to him? An imagined version of her he’d projected upon a woman he’d barely known at all? A woman he’d loved, or one he’d pitied? I had no doubt that his grief was genuine, but that meant nothing; some people grieve as easily as other people breathe, and the grief-stricken include some of the very same people who brought on the grief by killing.
After a moment, I asked him, “Who do you think killed her, bondsman?”
He dabbed at his eyes. “Mr. Gibb says the AIsource did, but that doesn’t exactly make sense to me. I can’t see the AIsource doing something that pointless. Maybe something I did contributed. Wouldn’t that be a special trip through hell.”
I could see him turning the wheels in his mind, concocting scenarios, working out various ways his relationship with Santiago could have led to her death. Guilty or not, he had a conscience; guilty or not, it could very well destroy him; guilty or not, he may have wanted it to.
What followed was a calculated risk, based on my own sudden, irrational certainty that he was guilty of nothing except following his own heart. “Mr. Negelein, I’m going to have to ask you to keep this next question to yourself, and not mention it to anybody, not even Mr. Gibb.”
Negelein seemed to notice me again. “All right.”
“One of the lesser pieces of evidence in this case involves threatening hytex messages, containing animated simulations of violence happening to somebody currently aboard One One One. Not Santiago or Warmuth, but a possible future victim. These animations are very realistic, very detailed, and very disturbing. I suppose they qualify as art.”
He sniffed. “They would certainly be craft.”
“Yes, well, either way, is there anybody here to your knowledge that is capable of producing such work?”
He studied me through slitted eyes. “I’d have to see these messages to know.”
“You can’t.”
“Would that be because they’re classified, or because they no longer exist?”
In both cases, I hadn’t been able to access the signal following the initial delivery. But he didn’t have to know that. “Classified.”
“I see.” He rubbed his chin, looked very tired, and said, “I’m not the final judge of what people can and can’t do, and I can’t give you any answers about those images unless I can study them to figure out how they were made. But though a non-artist with access to source materials could use advanced AI routines to help draft that kind of thing on command, the actual quality of those pictures would depend entirely on the kind of obsession we’re talking about.”
“Assume extreme obsession.”
He thought about it. “That would make anything possible.”
Which happened to be as true for murder as it was for art.
My final interview that day was with somebody who, like Negelein, had also been mentioned several times: Exosociologist Second Class Mo Lassiter. She was one of the most solidly built women I’d ever met, muscular even by the exaggerated standards of One One One, with arms that bunched like knots beneath form-fitting black mesh sleeves. She had an olive complexion, centimeter-deep black hair that resembled fuzz, a jaw like a boulder, and brown eyes so tiny that it was next to impossible to see the whites.
Had she met me with a grimace, she would have been the very picture of a frightening thug. Instead, she offered an unforced smile. It made the difference between a face that might have bordered on grotesque and one that possessed its own, eccentric kind of integrity.
When it came to talking about people, Lassiter offered little in the way of in-depth analysis, summing up everybody I asked about in content-free, carefully nonjudgmental sentence fragments. She didn’t become helpful until we began discussing the death of Cynthia Warmuth. “I’ve never had any doubt, Counselor. It had to be a Brachiator.”
I tried to imagine the slow-moving creatures I’d seen surprising and overpowering an athletic human being. “Why?”
“Because it fits their natures. They’re vicious.”
The dull, barely mobile Brachiators hadn’t struck me as capable of savagery. “How would that work?”
“All the usual ways. Assault, murder, open warfare, even genocide, when it suits them.” She saw my blank look, and commiserated. “I know it’s hard to believe. They move so slowly that it’s easy to think of them as passive. But they’re anything else. The truth is that they’re as warlike as any other pre-tech sentients I’ve ever seen. They have tribes and they have territory, and they go after each other whenever it suits them.”
“It’s hard to imagine.”