I pointed out, “I don’t even know what you’re talking about yet.”
“I know,” he said, his eyes rich with apology. “Let me put this in perspective, all right? One day when you’re a kid, your people and some Bocaians they live with go crazy and start cutting on each other. You survive that mess and get labeled a war criminal at eight years old. The rest of your surviving neighbors get shipped off to Juje knows where, maybe some kind of institution. I don’t know, maybe they’re out, maybe not. But you, the Dip Corps takes you in, gives you an education, and once you grow up decides that you’re cured of whatever it was that ailed you. They figure it’s safe to let you go out and earn a living, as long as you’re working for them and that way protected by diplomatic immunity, because if you’re not somebody’s gonna snatch you and send you back to the people who want your head on a pike. I mean, no offense, but is that pretty much the situation?”
I still didn’t have the slightest idea where this was heading. “Yes.”
“So you spend the next few years zipping from system to system, as a Dip Corps counsel. And you make a name for yourself in legal circles, but you’re always having to deal with political crap because of all the parties who want you stuffed in a sack and handed over to the Bocaians. That also right?”
“Is there a question at the end of all this?”
That’s when he opened the trap door beneath my feet, left me realizing how much of my life had been based on a lie. “How come anybody even knows you’re a war criminal?”
Several seconds passed before I felt my heart beat again. “Come again?”
“What,” he said, “you think you looked exactly the same at twenty that you did at eight? I mean, the Dip Corps could have changed your name, your skin pigment, your nose, maybe your hair color, and a couple of other cosmetic things about you, given you a new ID file and a false history, and nobody but your bosses would have known that you were the same kid.”
There was a sound building in the room. It was between my ears and it was burning at the pit of my stomach and it was crumbling the bones in my spine to powder. It was the sound of cracks forming in every assumption I’d ever made, and of the entire superstructure of all the further assumptions that followed them beginning to list, and then to sway, and then to fall. I felt the room turn red at the edges, and did not want Pescziuwicz to continue, because now that he’d taken me this far I didn’t need his help to travel the rest of the way.
But he went on, every word out of his mouth a fresh spike driven into the base of my brain. “Instead, they put you to work as Andrea Cort, child war criminal grown up, and willingly ate all the seven hundred flavors of crap they had to swallow because of the propaganda weapon they had just handed all the alien governments who wanted to paint humanity as a bunch of homicidal bastards who let their own get away with murder.”
I closed my eyes, desperate to shut him out, hating the way his voice insisted on making itself heard through the pounding of my heart.
He asked, “Why would they put themselves through that?”
Stop, I thought.
“Why would they put you through that?”
Please stop.
“And why would you let them?”
My eyes rolled into my head, and the darkness flickering at the corners of the room swallowed me whole.
6
FULL STOP
There was a place I had been many times.
It was a place without edges. It glowed with a soft blue light, eliminating any possibility of shadow. Anybody entering this place existed in free fall. But for the presence of an atmosphere, and sufficient heat to maintain life, it might have been the universe itself before the Big Bang arrived to litter everything with dust and debris and the molecular ancestors of stupid people and bureaucrats.
I tumbled in the center of that void, still wearing the black suit I’d worn to dinner on the Bettelhine Royal Carriage, my exposed hands appearing cyanotic from the blue tinge of the only available illumination.
I’d first encountered this place as a genuine physical location, on the space station One One One: a chamber the AIsource had built, with the specific purpose of awing the human beings who came to them with questions and petitions. Any human entering this room had to float in what felt like infinite emptiness while trying to pretend that human concerns had any relevance to the intangible, unimaginably powerful minds who lived here.
By the time I’d left One One One I’d proven the place a sheer exercise in psychological gamesmanship, or public relations if you prefer, much like a similar place of power used by the title character in an ancient novel called The Wizard of Oz, first described to me by Oscin Porrinyard on the day I was invited into the AIsource equivalent.
Since leaving One One One, with a direct line to the software intelligences now a permanent feature of my head, I’d also found myself equipped with a virtual doorway to that place, accessible whenever parleys between us required more than a few terse exchanges.
I had never been comfortable there. I know some people like free fall, and even see it as a fine location for energetic sex, but for me it activates the height sensitivity that, while much improved thanks to my exposure on One One One, will always remain an instinctive part of my personality. It’s also an AIsource place, which lowers it yet another notch on my tally of locations that inspire comfort. And yes, I know that the AIsource are everywhere and that they’re no less present on New London, or Xana, or the average dead asteroid than they are in this simulation they built, but I’ve never required my gut reactions to win trophies for consistency. There was no way I’d ever be able to relax in a place inhabited by sentients who had been pursuing their own agendas long before the first African hominid discovered the entertainment value of a rock thrown at an unpleasant neighbor’s head.
It became even less comfortable when, at some point several months after beginning my regular visits to the place, I’d grown frustrated with conversations consisting of me shouting at a faceless 360-degree sky and demanded the privilege of eye contact. They’d obliged, with the amusement native to any superior being indulging the whims of a half-wit pet, and provided a face for me to talk to.
I often wished I’d left well enough alone.
I wished it again, now, as their avatar appeared, first as a dark spot in the distance, and then, as it approached, resolving into the form of a face designed as a compromise between a generic, asexual, panracial human being, and a number of the other, more humanoid races known to me. The creature had the all-black eyes of a Riirgaan, the high forehead and white-tufted crown of hair that marks a Tchi, the puffy cheeks of the stereotypical Bursteeni, and ears that, while human in shape, possessed the mottled bumps Bocaians have instead of familiar human folds.
Don’t even get me started on the voice and accent. It was a more democratic mix of those and maybe twenty other species I know about, the combination perched on the edge of incurably annoying without ever entering the realm of incomprehensibility. Hello again, Andrea.