Emissaries from the Dead

9. EXILES

The Dip Corps ship, an unlovely bullet bearing the service’s much-parodied trademark of a starscape in the outline of an extended human hand, sat berthed at the far end of One One One’s many hangars, a glowing, blue-walled chamber large enough to hold four ships its size.

The chamber had more than enough room to house my transport as well, but the AIsource had berthed that in another chamber. Why, beyond some sense of courtesy toward visitors who’d arrived at different times, I didn’t know, and didn’t particularly care. A number of inflatable sleepcube tents, perfect for wilderness accommodations, and just odd in this context, sat just outside the ship, each glowing from a soft internal light. There was also a portable table, flanked by a pair of stasis crates pressed into service as chairs. It looked like a place people lived, but nothing at all like home, not even as much of a home as the indentures had made of Hammocktown.

I suppose it was close enough to camping, for people deprived of any outdoors beyond a vast empty room with a spongy floor and luminous blue walls.

The air was warmer than the neutral setting preferred by most space docks, warm and humid in a manner that suggested, without actually providing, the presence of an overhead sun. It was the kind of environment I liked: all straight lines.

“The poor bastards sure make themselves comfortable,” said Lastogne.

“It’s no fun for them,” said the Porrinyards.

The ship’s hatch opened, revealing a tanned, muscular man with shoulder-length black hair. He was stripped to his waist, the planes of his chest shining with enough perspiration to suggest a recent workout. He had a massive nose and tiny gray eyes which seemed to light on Skye before turning, with sad self-knowledge, to me. “You’re from the Judge Advocate.”

“Brilliant deduction,” said Lastogne, dripping more than his usual concentration of scorn. “Counselor Andrea Cort, meet Exophysiologist Third Class Nils D’Onofrio, current status inactive. De facto commander of the three height-sensitives confined to this chamber on Mr. Gibb’s orders.”

D’Onofrio offered me a hand, kept it extended, then let it drop, a grim disappointment already burning in eyes that knew the cruel emotion well. “I see you share Mr. Gibb’s attitude toward us untouchables.”

“Not at all,” said Lastogne. “She just hates everybody.”

D’Onofrio gave me an appraising look. “Really, Peyrin. You must feel like you just found your soul ma—”

I cut him off. “Mr. Lastogne doesn’t speak for me, sir. It’s true that I try to avoid physical contact whenever possible, but the number of people I go to the trouble of actually hating comprise a very small and very select group, who had to earn their places there. Deal with me properly and I promise you we’ll have a pleasant, professional relationship.”

D’Onofrio studied me for signs of mockery. “I’ll take that at face value, Counselor. How do you want to do this? You want to question us together, or one at a time?”

“Together will be fine, for now.”

D’Onofrio acknowledged that with a nod and returned to the ship, a portrait of wounded dignity.

I thought of the many years I’d needed to carry myself with quiet strength, bearing the monstrous reputation I’d earned at Bocai. D’Onofrio’s bearing testified to the same kind of wounds, the ones known only to the scapegoated. I found myself feeling significant empathy for him. Without turning to Lastogne, I murmured, “Don’t speak for me again, sir.”

“My error,” said Lastogne, who didn’t sound sorry at all.

“I mean it. I’ll cite you with interference if you try it.”

“I understand,” he said, without an iota of additional contrition.

“Especially if you implicate me in any attempt to stigmatize these people.”

Lastogne waved his hand. “We don’t stigmatize them, Counselor. Not as bad as they sometimes think we do.”

“No,” said the Porrinyards. “You do worse.” They glanced at Lastogne, as if deciding just how much contradiction he could take, and then resumed, their shared voice pitched toward Skye’s side of the vocal register. “Gibb’s people are all high-altitude specialists. They define themselves by their ability to navigate the Uppergrowth bare-handed, and they demand that level of competence from everybody they work with. They have to, when the reflexes of others are so vital to their own survival. They see anybody who freezes up, who can’t function, who allows himself to be defeated by the same challenges they face every day, as not just weak but dangerous. Cross that line and you’re on their bad side, permanently.”

Wonderful. “You’ve already noted that I’m not too good at heights myself. Where does that leave me?”

The Porrinyards considered it. “I don’t think you should worry about it, Counselor. Most of Gibb’s people understand that you’re an untrained outsider, doing your best in an environment you find frightening and alien. It may lead a few to underestimate you, or show you less respect. But most won’t judge you by that criterion alone.”

I wasn’t sure I bought it, but that assurance would have to do for now. “And you?”

The Porrinyards grinned with something hard to avoid interpreting as affection. Now their voice tipped toward Oscin’s end of the register: “Here’s a shameful personal secret, Counselor: Oscin the single never quite managed the grace and confidence Skye the single demonstrated in high places. She did things that scared the hell out of him. He hid it well, and overcompensated by taking stupid risks to impress her. So I know what it’s like.”

They seemed to be going out of their way to show individuality in my presence. Why, I didn’t know, but I sure wished they’d stop turning it on and off and just decide which way they wanted to act.

A second later D’Onofrio arrived with his fellow exiles, introducing them as Exobiochemist First Class Li-Tsan Crin and Atmospheric Analyst Second Class Robin Fish.

Li-Tsan, lowering her head to get through the hatchway, was one of the tallest unenhanced human beings I’d ever seen; her hypertrophic arms and legs, left exposed by the minimalist white worksuit that covered her from breasts to hips, were so knotted by muscle that they looked too tight to move. She had light brown skin, emerald eyes, and a chin that came to a point. Her hair was a wispy halo of white so thin it seemed like cirrus clouds orbiting the darker skin of her face. She was beautiful, in a dangerous way, with all the coiled menace of a predator seeking a way out of its cage.

Fish, who barely came up to Li-Tsan’s collarbone, was milky-white, to the point of translucence, her finest feature lush red hair she wore in a quartet of tight shoulder-length braids. She wore a loose open vest that accentuated the curve of her breasts and the bottom half of a stained shipboard worksuit that looked baggy and shapeless on her, even though the name stitched into the chest pocket was her own. Nothing about her physique, from the slight bulge of her exposed belly to the soft freckled skin of her limbs, testified to the kind of hyperathleticism that characterized so many of Gibb’s people. Her puffy, bloodshot eyes seemed the footprints of many sleepless nights.

Even before the women spoke a word, they both radiated wariness. They’d both been hurt badly, and at length: the kind of hurt that still bled. Was it just the professional upset of failing in One One One’s upside-down environment? Or something more?

Li-Tsan, looking me up and down, said, “So you’re the grand inquisitor.”

“No inquisition,” I said. “Just a few questions.”

“Oh, certainly,” Li-Tsan said. She had the clipped accent of a woman whose Mercantile was a second tongue learned late in life: all exaggerated vowels and stressed consonants. “And when you’ve asked all your questions, just who will you choose for scapegoat? Not one of Gibb’s infallible supermen, dangling from the Uppergrowth like monkeys. Not somebody Gibb wants to use. Just one of the expendables, fit to be taken out like a spare part the first time his creature Lastogne needs someone to condemn to the Corps—”

Fish barely raised her eyes. “That’s not fair, Li—”

“Nothing’s fair, sweetmeat. Not in the Corps, not on this world, and certainly not in front of this piece of Tchi shit.”

Anger not just between these three and the rest of this station’s human contingent—anger between those two. Their life as internal exiles must have been as interesting as the booming local industry in comparing things to Tchi shit. I asked Li-Tsan, “Would you be more comfortable answering questions without Mr. Lastogne present?”

Li-Tsan snorted. “I’d be happier still with him pushed out an airlock, but yeah, why not, as long as you’re giving me a choice. While you’re at it I’d prefer the unison twins gone too. I don’t trust anybody who works for the lord of that upside-down madhouse.”

“No offense taken,” said the Porrinyards.

“Go fuck yourself some more,” Li-Tsan told them, with special emphasis.

Lastogne’s smile didn’t falter, less the amiability of a man refusing to take offense than the arrogance of one who considered these enemies beneath his contempt. “You first, bondsman.”

The Porrinyards gave me a look which they must have considered eloquent but which I found totally opaque. There was a shared-joke element to it, which seemed more or less inevitable with these two, except that I was somehow supposed to be included in it. Again, I didn’t have the slightest idea what they were getting at, and again my denseness didn’t seem to bother them all that much.

Only after all three of my guides exited the hatch at the far end of the hangar did I address the height-sensitives again. “I don’t know if it means anything to any of you, but I don’t believe it’s accurate to call Lastogne Gibb’s ‘creature.’ It seemed the other way around, to me. Lastogne’s even accused Gibb of incompetence.”

Li-Tsan rolled her eyes. “And you’ve been here how long, all of a cycle or two? Wow, Counselor, I’m impressed how completely you’ve managed to analyze the true nature of their relationship.”

“If I’m being hasty, I’m more than willing to stand corrected.”

She adopted the tone of a frustrated teacher repeating basic lessons for an idiot. “He doesn’t consider Gibb incompetent. He considers Gibb a mediocrity. He thinks Gibb is a nothing, a void, a space-holder. And that’s exactly what he wants Gibb to be. He wants it so much that he’s willing to support all of Gibb’s sordid little corruptions, in exchange for the freedom to be an even bigger ass.”

D’Onofrio raised a hand, cutting Li-Tsan off before she could further elaborate on her distaste for all matters related to Lastogne. “I’m sorry, Counselor. Nobody likes to feel useless for as long as we have. It’s made the three of us a little bitter, I’m afraid. The fact is that we’re not sure how we can help you. None of us have been allowed inside the Habitat for months—in poor Robin’s case, for almost two years Mercantile. We can’t tell you anything about the way those women died.”

I said, “Fair enough. I’ll be satisfied with hearing how the three of you got mustered out.”

Li-Tsan’s silence, provisional at best, failed her. “See, Nils? She doesn’t a give a damn about the truth! She’s just trying to make this about us!”

Whenever I question three or more people at the same time, one of them takes the role of the volatile hothead who serves as the self-appointed keeper of all of their shared paranoia. Only sometimes does it indicate that the hothead’s hiding something. Just as often, the amount of truly relevant data being huffed about equals zero. Either way, the hothead needs to be cuffed down. I heaved a deep breath, took my sweet time sitting down on the one of the crates the three height-sensitives had drafted into use as chairs, and said, “You know, bondsman, I don’t claim any great dedication to the truth. I don’t even have all that much empathy for the problems of the unjustly accused. No, I’m afraid my only real objection to concocting transparently flimsy cases against innocent people has always been that I prefer to look like I have some talent for my job. Picking unlikely suspects at random means looking capricious and incompetent and sloppy. Doing the job right the first time, and finding the actual guilty party, is just a lot less work in the long run.”

The three height-sensitives stared at me.

Li-Tsan spat. “Next you’ll be telling us you don’t bite.”

I’ve long reserved my sweetest smiles for my nastiest moments. “Oh, I bite, all right. And once I clamp down, I’m like a snake. You have to cut my head off to get me to let go. Please don’t test me, Li-Tsan. I promise you, I leave marks.”

The height-sensitives consulted each other in silence, then came to a mutual decision and joined me at the round table. Even then, they pulled their crates together so they could sit elbow to elbow, presenting a united front. D’Onofrio and Li-Tsan wore attitudes of bored defiance, Fish a darker form of beaten resignation. I couldn’t tell whether the other two were supporting Fish or simply bracketing her. I did notice that Fish didn’t seem to want to face either one of them. It wasn’t fear, but something else: A recent argument? An old one? Even an old-fashioned love triangle? “Why would you believe the Corps wants to make this about you?”

“No reason,” Li-Tsan growled. “Except for treating us like Tchi shit for something we can’t help, holding us prisoner in this hole for months on end, and refusing to transfer us out of here to another assignment where we could make ourselves useful instead of going slowly insane from boredom, the Dip Corps has always been scrupulously fair to us. I can’t possibly imagine why we wouldn’t expect more of the same. Not at all.”

“So you don’t think they have any actual evidence against you.”

Li-Tsan’s eyes went small and dangerous. “You’re the investigator. You’d know what they have and don’t have.”

I was really beginning to hate her. “I arrived yesterday, Li-Tsan. Assume I know nothing.”

“They have worse than nothing. They have actual, genuine impossibility. They may think we’re lower than Tchi shit, but they also know we’re stuck here and never have anything to do with anything that’s going on. But they’ll make this about us. They’ll do it just to see the looks on our faces.”

The other woman’s intensity was a little bit like being jacked into a pleasure node at full voltage. I rubbed my temples. “Gibb says he considers the AIsource responsible, and never gave me any other impression.”

She made a rude noise. “You know he can’t let the AIsource take the blame for this. It would mean a major diplomatic incident, even war. Better to strut around looking tough and then come up with some solution that inconveniences nobody but the trio of likely suspects you keep preserved in cold storage.”

I remembered Bringen’s briefing, with its unsubtle agenda. Whatever the evidence, whatever your senses tell you…find the AIsource innocent. Even if they’re guilty, find them innocent. We need a guilty party we can cage.

Did he already have these three in mind?

It was possible. He must have read Gibb’s reports from on-site and found references to three people whose fates would not be mourned, if a case could be made against them.

But I didn’t want any part of it. I’d already done more than enough to merit the Monster label, thank you. I was in no hurry to add any additional interest to that account. So I treated Li-Tsan to my most unpleasant grin. “Well, before I officially make up my mind to accuse you of multiple murders and have you shipped off for trial, I should at least go through the motions. Maybe we should just start with how you developed your respective problems with high places.”

She studied me with resentful, half-lidded eyes. “Why would that make a difference?”

“It got you where you are. You were chosen for this assignment because the Corps thought you could function under local conditions. Now, for whatever reason, you can’t. That makes it an interesting subject. So tell me. What made you such good recruits? And what changed you?”

The three height-sensitives stewed in silence: D’Onofrio slumping in disgust, Fish staring at her hands, Li-Tsan stewing at the edge of another explosion.

There was no questioning which of the three had the most volatile temper, but that meant nothing, not when the murders would have required too much cold planning to be believable as crimes of sudden passion.

I pointed at D’Onofrio, who seemed the most even-tempered. “You first.”

He relaxed. “Yeah, might as well. You can read my records and find out the same thing, right? I come from a planet called Agali Vespocci. You know it?”

“Sorry. No.”

“Not surprised. It’s only borderline habitable, and nothing of any importance ever happened there. The thing is, it resembles this nasty hellhole. One One One, I mean. The lower atmosphere is hot as hell and contaminated with caustics that make the surface next to unlivable, but the temperatures drop and the poisons thin to traces as you get to the higher latitudes, so we do most of our living on the mountaintops.”

It did sound a lot like One One One. “I don’t see why you had a problem.”

“It’s not exactly what you’d expect, is it? But even on Vespocci we had solid ground to walk on, when we needed it. There were terraces, cliff dwellings. You could turn your back on the heights whenever you needed to. There were times of year, brief times, when the weather was almost pleasant. Here, there’s nothing. I was fine here for more than a year, but after a while I started thinking of all the things that could go wrong. Then one day, on the Growth, I froze up, started crying, and couldn’t stop. Gibb pulled me in, called me every possible name for coward, and sent me out here to stay with Robin and Li-Tsan.”

“They were already here, then?”

“Yes. This was only about six months ago Mercantile.”

“Was there anything in your past, at any point, to indicate that such a breakdown was possible?”

“No.” He spread his hands. “But I guess we don’t know our limits until we reach them.”

It had been a while since I’d seen anybody quite as defeated, and in this chamber I didn’t have to look far to see another one. “Who was the first to arrive here? Robin or Li-Tsan?”

“Robin.”

“All right,” I said. “Li-Tsan, you’re next.”

She started. “Not Robin?”

“No, I’ll work my way back. What’s your story?”

“Like Nils just told you, you can get all this from our records—”

“I want to hear it from you. Go on.”

Li-Tsan rolled her eyes again, just to stress that she still considered this all a tremendous waste of her time, but warmed up as she began to talk. “I worked in orbital construction for a Bursteeni company producing wheelworlds for the Tchi holdings. It’s tough going. Everything’s free fall to start with, of course, but the silly ass-backwards way the Bursteeni do it, the rotation starts up before the project’s half finished, and you have to work in and out of the skeleton while the spin’s trying to fling you against the outer walls. The third time a friend of mine got reduced to a fine red paste I contacted the Dip Corps to have them buy out my contract. They figured my background made me a perfect match. They didn’t know I sold out because I was losing my nerve already. I made it all of three months before I made a mistake serious enough to get me banished to this gulag, and I still don’t know what the hell this has to do with anything.”

“How long have you been confined to the hangar?”

“Almost nine months Mercantile. Could have had a grotting baby by now, come to think of it.”

I turned to Robin. “Now, you.”

Fish made even the moment of eye contact look like a backbreaking effort. “Do you really need to hear this from me, Counselor? I’m not feeling well today. I really need to go inside and lie down for a while.”

She did look awful, more a physical shell of what she must have once been than either Li-Tsan or D’Onofrio. I took another look at the bagginess of her clothes and, for the first time, registered the muscular atrophy. Confinement here was killing her. Confinement, or something else.

I said, “The faster you answer me the faster you see me leave.”

Fish held the silence for so long that I had to restrain myself from prodding her. That’s never a good idea. Sometimes people hesitate because they don’t have the courage to come out with whatever needs to be said; other times they desperately want to speak but can’t find the words. Jabbing them prematurely tends to shut them up. Outwaiting them gives them the time to say more than they intend. When she finally spoke, it was without any noticeable energy. “I wasn’t ever much. Just a clerical worker on New Kansas. No special skills or education, just crushing boredom and a thirst to get the hell out.”

“So you joined the Corps.”

“Which assigned me to the same kind of work I’d done back home. I met Mr. Gibb for the first time when I was at a records center on Hylanis. He was the big name doing administrative work as he waited for his next posting, and I was the frustrated kid begging him to remember me if he got sent somewhere with a possibility of advancement. Not long after he left I was pulled into special training for this project. I did thirty days of height-desensitization, before they shipped me in.”

“And you mustered out.”

“Almost as soon as I got here,” she said.

“How did it happen?”

“Everybody except Gibb knew how useless I was from day one, but he kept insisting I’d adjust. Then one day during remedial training, one of the Uppergrowth vines snapped and left me screaming my stupid head off at the tail end of a dangling ten-meter cable.” Her hand spasmed at the thought. She examined it without much surprise, then placed it flat on the table. “I couldn’t blame anybody for not wanting to work with me after that.”

“And that was two years ago Mercantile.”

“Not quite two years. We’re still a few weeks away from my anniversary.”

She used the celebratory word without any apparent irony.

I said, “You’ve received supply shipments. New indentures, now and then. In two years Gibb never talked about sending you home? Or transferring you out, to someplace where you could still do some good? There had to be opportunities.”

Li-Tsan, who fronted many of her statements with rude noises, made another one. “Mr. Gibb thinks failures among his staff reflect poorly on his leadership. So it’s safer to just tuck us out of the way and let us rot.”

“Have you tried complaining to his superiors on New London?”

“Sure,” Li-Tsan said. “We all have. We’ve inundated them. I’ve sent two complaints a day. But guess what. It all goes through Gibb, and he still has the authority to declare us essential to the effort here. And besides, New London isn’t eager to ask its projects elsewhere to trust people who’ve already proven themselves incompetent at previous assignments. The way they figure it, Gibb’s justified in keeping us in limbo, and we can sit out the remaining years of our contracts getting as irate about the injustice as we like.” She rolled her eyes. “Of course, it’s different now that he needs a scapegoat.”

“Would this be why you show your hatred for Mr. Lastogne?”

“He supports what Gibb’s doing to us, which makes him a piece of shit.”

Normal shit, this time. I turned my attention back to Fish. “So you were confined here, alone, for more than a year before Li-Tsan showed up. That sounds cruel.”

Fish didn’t look up. “It wasn’t exactly solitary confinement. I received visits.”

“From anybody in particular?”

“Anybody who felt sorry for me, or wanted a break.”

“How many would that include?”

“Everybody took breaks. Not everybody made the trip just to visit me.” Fish allowed herself the kind of smile that reeks with intense self-loathing. “I wasn’t in-habitat long enough to make friends.”

“Except for Mr. Gibb.”

“I wouldn’t call him a friend, exactly,” Fish said.

“He got you the job. What would you call him?”

“Had it worked out, a mentor.”

“Did he ever visit you, after your exile?”

“I saw him whenever he took leave.”

“Did you ever talk about your situation, on those occasions?”

“I begged him to transfer me.”

“And?”

“He said we’d talk about it if I met him at Hammocktown.”

Mr. Gibb, I decided, was a bastard. “Even with Gibb’s people taking regular leaves, you must have been alone most of the time.”

“Yes.”

“Doing what?”

“Not much. I helped edit the reports our people sent to New London.”

“You had access to hytex transmission?”

“Yes. For more than a year I handled all the mail back and forth.”

“Send anything unauthorized?”

Fish’s eyes flared. “Like what?”

“There have been some unusual messages recently.” My hate mails.

She showed no interest in the details. “Oh, recently. Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, Counselor, but recently—as in the last year or so—all of our transmissions go through Gibb and Lastogne. He took that job away from me when he banished Li-Tsan.”

I had trouble believing either Gibb or Lastogne responsible for the messages I’d received. I had no problem believing them capable of malice, but that particular kind seemed contrary to their style. “Did he have any problems with the job you were doing?”

“No. He made sure I knew he thought I’d done all right. But he still insisted on handling all the correspondence from then on. I think he just wanted to make sure we wouldn’t say anything he wouldn’t be able to deny.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” Fish said.

“Neither do I,” said Li-Tsan.

Something was being hidden, here. “What would you think if you had to speculate?”

D’Onofrio jumped in. “One One One’s a very precarious situation, Counselor. We’re dealing with issues of tremendous sensitivity, in the face of an alien government that has permitted us no diplomatic status at all. The wrong word, spoken at the wrong time, can jeopardize everything we’re trying to do. Maybe we had a close call, and New London told Mr. Gibb he had to take on greater personal responsibility.”

Or maybe they’d had prior incidents with hate mail, and sending everything through the boss was the only way to make sure it didn’t happen again. “But you’re the one who said Mr. Gibb’s afraid of having to deny something. What would he have to deny?”

“I don’t know,” Fish said. “Honestly.”

I let it pass. “All right. So he took away your job as correspondence officer, and left you playing innkeeper to personnel on leave.”

“And inventory officer. It wasn’t that bad. We needed somebody here to keep track anyway.”

“And that couldn’t be done by onboard systems?”

“Onboard systems can be hacked.”

“Gibb said that. So what was he frightened of, exactly? Weaponry?”

“Luxury items. Stimulants. Personal belongings. High-tech not allowed in the habit under our contract with the AIsource.”

“Anything capable of sabotaging the lines of Santiago’s hammock?”

“We have some plasma knives,” Fish said, “but nothing that’s gone missing. That was the first thing we checked.”

“We being your little group?”

“Not just us. The Porrinyards supervised, and Mr. Lastogne double-checked. They found no irregularities.”

“I’ll check on that.” I would, too, but doubted I’d find anything pivotal. Anybody capable of hacking the inventory would have covered himself too well to leave evidence vulnerable to a cursory inspection from the likes of me. Thinking furiously, rejecting half a dozen possible lines of further inquiry, I settled on the one that had proven best at enflaming the emotions of everybody I’d met so far. “What can you tell me about Warmuth and Santiago?”

The three height-sensitives greeted this little inquiry with the same enthusiasm they would have reserved for an unexploded bomb. They glanced at each other, came to the shared conclusion that this looked suspicious, glanced back at me, came to the shared conclusion that this looked furtive, and looked away, coming to the shared conclusion that avoiding eye contact was just as bad as all their other options. All this happened in about two seconds, and left the three of them with no safe place to focus.

It was Li-Tsan who decided that frankness was the best of a long list of bad options. “Santiago was a bitch and a half.”

“She wasn’t unpleasant,” Fish said, “not in the way that some of the others were…but she was anything but friendly.”

“She was a bitch and a half,” Li-Tsan repeated. “Yeah, she never actually mocked us, and she never did anything we could nail her for…but as far as attitude went, she was the worst. The times she spent here, she just spent inside one of those sleepcubes, refusing to say a word to us, coming out only to eat. Everything she said, everything she did, let us know she thought we were worse than garbage.”

“I didn’t like her, either,” D’Onofrio said. “But I didn’t think the way she treated us had anything to do with us being height-sensitives. I asked around, whenever I saw any of the others, and they all said pretty much the same thing: that she treated everybody that way. She said what she had to say and she did what she had to do, and she turned her back as soon as she decently could.”

“And Warmuth?” I asked.

Li-Tsan spat. “She was worse. She kept visiting us to see if we were all right.”

There was the anger again. Deep, poisonous, and undiluted, making Warmuth the central focus in everything that had gone wrong in her own term of service. “And you resented this?”

“You must have heard by now. She was an empathy addict. There was nothing special about being befriended by her. She only sought out vulnerable people because it gave her a charge.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that. But wouldn’t that be hard to distinguish from genuine compassion?”

“Genuine compassion,” Li-Tsan said, “doesn’t leave you feeling like you’re being used. It doesn’t leave a bad taste in your mouth. It doesn’t make you feel worse than you would if you had to go without it.”

“Again,” I said, “tell me how you knew the difference.”

Li-Tsan just shook her head, showing herself and all the world her incredulity at my failure to get something so transparently obvious.

It wasn’t that I thought she was wrong. I’d been an outcast for most of my life, and I’d learned the hard way that some of the people who wanted to befriend me, and understand me, often acted that way only because it made them feel kind and giving and charitable and special. I’d grown so suspicious of anybody who wanted me to open up that I now assumed ulterior motives long before confirming that there actually were any. But the near unanimity on the subject of Cynthia Warmuth was unusual even by my standards. Either One One One housed the most selective group of misanthropes in the known universe, or she faked sincere concern worse than any other human being ever born, or…

…or what?

There was something else here, something I was still failing to see.

D’Onofrio looked too tired to jump in and help me. “Come on, Counselor. I don’t know anything about you, but sometime in your life you must have known what it was like to have somebody feel sorry for you. Not just a little bit; not just for a few minutes on end. I mean deep, compassionate, ostentatious pity, hauled out at every opportunity, stressed again and again as if you were too stupid to get it the first time, then offered anew even after you recognized it for what it was.” He took a deep breath and stood up, stepping away from the table to face the ship that had become his home, his prison, and the symbol of his greatest failure. “Sometimes that hurts even more than just being left alone.”

And for a moment I still didn’t get it. I knew that it had more to do with D’Onofrio than with the others, but had no idea what.

But then the universe shifted, and one small piece of the puzzle slipped into place with such finality that I came damn close to hearing the click.

D’Onofrio saw the light dawn. He looked away from me, more disgusted with himself than at any other point during the conversation.

Li-Tsan just laughed her nastiest little laugh. The sound that bubbled up from somewhere deep inside, bringing with it the palpable taste of poison. “Pity sex. Ever had any, Counselor? Done right, it hurts even more than any other kind….”