We were at the midpoint of a wide oval chamber, with a low ceiling and indistinct blue walls that looked much farther away than they really were. I could tell the difference because a hatchway, opening within my line of sight, seemed much closer than the walls that surrounded it. More blue glow waited on the other side. I knew, without asking, that the hatch would be the first of several, and that when I finished wandering whatever route back the AIsource had mapped for me, I would find the Porrinyards, waiting to see whether I’d survived.
A more immediate concern was the realization that the defeated woman beside me was not the only Christina Santiago in this chamber.
There was another: just a short walk away, demonstrating by her very presence what little I still had left to learn.
This Christina Santiago was naked and on her knees, struggling against chains that bound her to the floor on four sides. There were chains on her wrists, on her ankles, and wrapped in bundles around her neck. She fought them so fiercely that she bled wherever they touched her skin. Her upper arms and legs were corded in sharp relief from the sheer strain of the battle. The wounds inflicted by the fight were open, oozing tears in her back, her chest, and her limbs. Her jaw hung open in a soundless, yet defiant scream: part agony, part rage, mostly damned knowledge that struggle against her unseen captors was all she’d ever know. Her eyes shone with yearning, with contempt, and with the madness born of not having any other options.
Like all her work, it was a still life of pain. But she’d painted others as lost in defeat. She’d represented herself as still at war.
I considered what little I’d been told of the world she’d come from, and wondered just how much worse it must have been than any of the lesser horrors I’d known.
I was still trying to picture it when a pinprick of darkness, erupting in the center of my field of vision, expanded to become a full-sized AIsource flatscreen.
It spoke in the voice I’d come to know as the station’s central intelligence. Congratulations, Andrea Cort. It is now time to discuss the terms of your future employment.
I rubbed my neck, providing my raw throat precious little relief. “And if I said, to hell with you? That it was a deal made under duress? That I don’t want to work for you? Do you even care at all about what I want?”
Of course we do. We promise you: whatever it costs us, you will usually be free to act as you wish. You will just be doing it on our behalf, that’s all. Because it’s from that that we’ll take what we need.
I could only stand there, my chest heaving. Their assurances provided no sense of freedom whatsoever, even if I could trust their commitment to that promise. If anything, they only intensified my isolation from the race that birthed me, and which I had spent most of my life regarding from the perspective of an alienated stranger. From this point on, wherever I went, whatever I did, and whatever reactions I received, I would never be able to tell for sure whether I was dealing with the legitimate messy, unpredictable, selfish, selfless, cold, passionate, sane or lunatic whims of other people, or something else.
The bastard AIsource had known what they were doing, in standing aside while I confronted an enemy closer to my own size. They had allowed me time to build a hatred well within my ability to carry for the rest of my life. Or at least, as long as it took.
I didn’t want that feeling inside me. I wished I could put it down.
“Go to hell,” I said.
The AIsource took no special offense. As we have already said, Andrea: our ambitions on this matter coincide. And if it’s to happen, it will take a very interesting sentient to put us there.
I linked that to certain other things the rogue intelligences had said. “And that’s what you want? That’s what you’ve been trying to find out, all this time? How to die?”
To reiterate: we have much in common.
The hatchway continued to beckon me. I didn’t take a single step in that direction. I just swayed, my eyes shut against the force of the inevitable one last question.
What? the AIsource asked.
“I want to start with Bocai.”
Look back to the moment of your personal nightmare. Find out what else was happening, elsewhere in the universe, at that time, and be assured: it’s not just synchronicity. There’s a pattern.
It had the ring of a send-off, and that’s what it turned out to be. Though I stood there for another ten minutes, demanding further answers, the only reply I received was a distant, subliminal murmur that could have been nothing more than the distorted echo of my own voice, rebounding off some surface too far away to see.
Even after that I stood there for several additional minutes, trying to summon back the despair that had once threatened to overwhelm me, and which seemed easier to deal with than the infinitely more frightening prospect of facing whatever came next.
The worst thing, I found, was the awareness that when I walked through that distant portal I’d be returning to a world whose opinion of me would remain unchanged.
I thought of the last words I’d spoken to the broken woman at my feet. At least I’ve spent my life being judged for it. What about you, Christina?
She had spent the entire fight screaming anguished variations on the lament that she’d been judged all her life.
Looking down at her, now, I could only murmur, “Join the club.”
25. AFTERMATH
Lastogne and his people were thunderstruck when the skimmer bearing me and the Porrinyards back to the hangar also turned out to carry a broken and defeated Christina Santiago. They were even more astonished when I explained that Santiago had murdered Cynthia Warmuth and Stuart Gibb, and that Santiago admitted to those crimes with sullen, hollow-eyed yeahs.
Hours of direct questioning failed to garner any elaboration of that one word. She didn’t seem to think she owed anybody anything beyond that simple concession of guilt.
The most shattered by the revelation was Cif Negelein, who I spotted standing by himself in a corner of the hangar, looking like a man whose heart had shriveled to the size of a pin. I didn’t tell him about Santiago’s art gallery, and how deeply it testified to the passions he’d awakened in her. I figured he didn’t deserve to be punished with the knowledge. As for the art itself, I don’t know whether it still exists, somewhere on One One One. I don’t think any human being, other than Santiago and me, ever saw it. As the AIsource would put it, that question is well outside the scope of my investigation.
I retired from the interrogation at the midway point, returning to the Dip Corps transport for an exhausted and dreamless sleep. I remained asleep for close to twelve hours, waking only once, in darkness, to the realization that the narrow bed contained two other forms, one male, one female, both awake but content to keep me company. When I woke a second time they were gone.
When I returned to Lastogne’s sleepcube, Santiago was aping catatonia, and those demanding answers from her were not much better. The AIsource had declared the Habitat once again open for human visitors, but with Hammocktown itself plunged into the murk, and the deaths of two people still in recent memory, nobody was hurrying to reestablish a permanent presence. Besides, any reconstruction would have to wait until New London got around to shipping new supplies. So the hangar would remain the home of the human delegation for the foreseeable future.