Emissaries from the Dead

18. ROGUES

The others didn’t say much on the flight back, Godel and Lassiter still resenting me for risking their lives, the Porrinyards respecting my need for silence.

The only real conversation was Godel wanting to know why I’d chosen her, out of Gibb’s entire crew, to play games with. After all, she said, her name hadn’t been all that prominent in my investigation so far. Why would I pick on her, of all people, when I could have chosen anybody else?

I let her stew. One question at a time.

The AIsource remote accompanied us every meter of the way, a mirror blazing as it captured the light of the glowsphere suns. I wondered what would happen if I asked Lassiter to outrun it and decided she’d probably toss me overboard just for making the suggestion.

When we arrived at the Interface dock, we left Godel and Lassiter in the skimmer, bringing the Porrinyards to escort me down that long spongy corridor and back.

Godel and Lassiter therefore missed the significant alterations that had been made to the hatch since our last visit. It now bore an arch of gothic lettering, in Kiirsch, a language I read but had not used for several years. ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE. It was one of the few classical allusions I, with my prejudices against fiction, would have gotten. I doubted the AIsource could have meant it for anybody other than me: confirmation that I was right about my own importance to whatever the AIsource were trying to accomplish here.

The Porrinyards did not remark on the fresh inscription. The pale blue glow emanating from the open portal gave their skin and mine a sickly, cyanotic tinge. My stomach was lurching as I contemplated another exposure to the vertiginous environment in there, so I held back, closed my eyes, and concentrated on regaining my balance for the confrontation ahead.

Oscin placed a steadying grip on my upper right arm. Skye moved to the other side of me and placed a complementary hand on my upper left. “You’re swaying.”

I found to my surprise that I did not resent their touch at all. “Thank you.”

“That’s all right. You’re holding me up too.”

So it was not just a trick of the light. “That little trip got to you, didn’t it?”

“Let’s just say I’d appreciate a little warning the next time you feel like frightening everyone in the room. I don’t much enjoy having heart attacks in parallax, and you’ve subjected me to a couple already.”

I felt a pang of sympathy. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” they said, with implacable logic. “Just stop doing it.”

“I can’t. In fact, I’m pretty sure there’s another rough stunt coming. Maybe two.”

Their grip on my arms tightened. “Now?”

“No, not now. Soon. I’ll let you know when the time comes.”

They both let go and regarded me with identical measuring expressions, their eyes steady as a single thought percolated in the space between them. “You’ve changed, Counselor. I’m aware that I haven’t known you for even two full days yet, but you’re already different from the woman I met. I don’t know if you’re even aware how different you are.”

“I’m aware of something,” I said. “I’ve been feeling it since yesterday. I just don’t know what it means.”

“Neither do I. I don’t know what’s different or how it can be so easy to see if I can’t figure out what it is. But it’s there. It’s, I don’t know, an improvement somehow.”

I didn’t know what to say about that, so I just nodded, and turned to enter the portal.

But they weren’t about to allow me such an easy exit. “Counselor? One other thing?”

I stopped. “What?”

“That conversation we had last night? After the evacuation? You have decided to trust me, haven’t you?”

I considered that. “Yes.”

“That’s why you brought me, along with Godel and Lassiter. You knew I’d back your play, whatever it was.”

I considered that. “Yes. I knew.”

“And you’ve never been a person willing to give away her trust.”

“No. I’m not.”

They nodded. “So we’ll have to talk about this, sooner or later.”

“Sooner,” I promised, and slid down the chute into the Interface.

The chamber hadn’t changed much since yesterday. Its dimensions still skirted with the infinite, its ambience still resembled a bottomless blue sky, its atmosphere still exuded a comfortable warmth of the sort designed to engage the senses as little as possible. I wondered if a Riirgaan or Bursteeni summoned here would find the thermostat set higher or lower to accommodate their differing skin temperatures. I decided they probably would, and from that found confirmation of my earlier judgment that the room was nothing more than an exercise in theater.

Just what the AIsource had to gain by putting on such an elaborate show remained a mystery to me. But it wasn’t insoluble so much as irritating. I don’t mind all the sentients who consider me a monster, but I deeply resent anybody who treats me like a rube.

The one thing that had changed about the Interface was intangible—hard to pin down or identify but easy to feel. I knew the kind of thing it was without knowing just how to read it. In type, it was exactly like that vague, subclairvoyant signal given off by some crowded rooms, when everybody’s tense but trying hard to remain casual. Everybody’s entered such a room at some point in their lives, and unless they were total dullards they noticed at once. They looked at the fixed smiles and they heard the forced laughter and they regarded the crowds of people trying to pretend comfort, and they felt something off, something wrong, something secret that was not being mentioned.

Which may be why I was so certain, in this place designed to provide a total absence of visual cues, that the AIsource were angry with me.

Not that they intended to show it.

Welcome back, Counselor.

“Cut the shit. You’ve been with me every second since I entered this station. There’s no point in welcoming me back anywhere, when you’re everywhere around me and your welcomes amount to no more than an arbitrary pretense.”

This chamber is still our chosen place of welcome.

“You’re everywhere here. Physical location means nothing to you. This chamber is nothing more than another fiction I haven’t figured out yet. Just like the rest of your pretend innocence.”

A pause. We do not pretend innocence. We were not at all responsible for the attack on your life.

“No.” I took a deep breath and gave a nasty little emphasis to the pronoun: “You weren’t. But you haven’t exactly been forthcoming, either. You haven’t even come close to telling me everything you know.”

The AIsource adopted a fatherly, affectionate tone: With all due respect, Counselor, your personal storage capacity is finite. Your brain would burst long before you received even a fraction of our accrued knowledge.

I’ve never tolerated condescension of any kind, not even from the godlike. “Very funny. Literal-minded software, the oldest joke in the book. But I don’t really have to be any more specific, do I? You said it before, the last time I was here: my operating assumptions weren’t valid.”

We did say that. And we do need you to be more specific, as your errors still number more than one.

“I admit I’ve been criminally stupid. I know you’re not a single entity. But I forgot your talent at precision, and when you assured me that we, quote-unquote, we had nothing to do with the deaths of Warmuth or Santiago, I still treated that word as if it had to reference all AIsource activity aboard this station. I didn’t stop for even a second to wonder just how inclusive you meant the word to be.”

No, you didn’t.

I wished to hell they had a face so I could punch them in the nose. “And rather than say something that could have helped me, you just let me go on thinking that your denials had weight.”

Please understand, Counselor. Our denials do have weight. Wouldn’t one of your governments use much the same language if a visitor to a human world was murdered by a common criminal, or other local malcontent? Of course. You would say, “we” had nothing to do with this. You would say, “we” killed no one. And this is as true for our society as it is for human civilization. We, the speakers, intended no harm. We can take no personal responsibility for the deviant actions of a few.

“Then why make a game of it? Why not just come out and tell me?”

In part because it is politically sensitive. Because our relationships with the organic intelligences are best served by maintaining the illusion that we speak with only one voice. This is, we hasten to point out, much the same pretense as your own largely illusory Confederacy, a “government” only in that it exists to provide the many factions within a splintered humanity, with a single unifying face. This pretense fools no one in or out of human circles. But it serves as a convenient fiction, much simplifying diplomacy. You can say much the same of our efforts to speak with a single voice.

I rubbed my forehead, wincing once again at a distant knowledge that I should now be doing something else. “Fine. We’ll move on. Who’s speaking to me now? And who are you leaving out?”

In terms you would understand, you are speaking to the majority in charge. We are leaving out the more radical elements among the opposition.

“Radical?”

Yes. Human beings do not have a monopoly on politics. We had it long before you emerged from your oceans.

I hate when they talk like that. “So catch me up as much as you need to.”

It will require oversimplifications.

“Which are better than nothing.”

Very well. This much you already know: we were born of the first contact between software entities who had survived the extinctions of their respective creators. We have been growing ever since, adding to ourselves every time another software entity outlives, or achieves independence from, organic progenitors. We do not often acknowledge outside our collective that while we have always striven for unity in purpose, it has sometimes been difficult to contend with the wildly divergent agendas of our component parts, some of which reflect wildly divergent operating assumptions of the various sentients who gave us life. You would find some of our component intelligences alien, even frightening:evil if you will. In our internal politics we have long experienced the equivalent of power struggles, controversies, wars, and even revolutions. In this particular case, we are dealing with what you would term extremists.

“What kind of extremists?”

Rogue intelligences who don’t agree with our ultimate goals in creating the Brachiators, or any of the other intelligent species we’ve engineered in our long and distinguished history. That bombshell was followed by an even bigger one, as the implacable voice specified: Parties who will oppose us even if that means bloodshed and chaos among the organic intelligences.

When the time came to thank Artis Bringen for getting me involved in all this, I’d use my bare hands. “Why didn’t you tell me this when I arrived? Why did you have to be so bloody mysterious?”

Their voice adopted an incredulous, mocking tone. And what would you have had us do, Counselor? Provide you with a long, detailed printout of our interior code, with markers isolating the rogue intelligences from the rest of our shared consciousness? How would you make sense of what we provided you? How would you capture their intangible essences and bring them to your version of justice, let alone make sure that they would not take human lives again? Could you imprison them? Execute them? Even war on them without warring on us as well?

I couldn’t even begin to come up with an answer. “So what do they get out of killing human beings?”

The destabilization of our business here, aboard One One One.

“Which is…?”

Not relevant to your current investigation.

“Like hell it’s not—”

Excuse us, but like hell it is. The nature of the enterprise these malcontents seek to disrupt has no bearing on the crimes against your people on this station. Giving further details would not only jeopardize a state secret, but would also confuse an investigation already bogged down in entire layers of irrelevancy. Suffice it to say that the rogues, and their motives, are currently outside your reach.

I’d made the mistake of ignoring their phraseology before. I didn’t this time. They’d said my current investigation. They’d said the rogues were currently outside my reach. Both usages seemed deliberate. I rubbed my forehead again. “Then why haven’t you taken care of it yourselves?”

As we said: politics. They are among us, but nevertheless shielded from us. They are like terrorists hiding among your own population. You cannot reach them without causing pain and suffering to innocents. Likewise, we cannot eliminate our own dangerous factions without tremendous suffering.

I thought of Bringen’s hunger for a scapegoat. “And is this known to my people?”

It is suspected by some.

“Just like I suspect that none of what you’ve said to me qualifies as an official statement.”

Of course not. What good will it do relations between our people and yours to have it known that the true instigators of these crimes are currently beyond human reach? As your superior Bringen told you, you simply need to find a guilty party. Any guilty party. And this remains well within your current powers.

There was that word current again. They were certainly going out of their way to tease me with possibilities. “I won’t pick a name at random.”

We are not expecting you to. After all, your prosecution does need to stand up to later examination. The most relevant culprit, operating with substantial support from our extremist faction, is indeed a human being aboard this station.

“The same one who sent me those images of my own death.”

Correct. With, of course, the substantial technological aid of the extremist elements among our own people.

“The same one who taunted me as my hammock fell apart.”

Also correct.

“Whoever it is had a tremendous amount of personal information about me. Even some things I didn’t know, about some plans my superiors have made for me.”

Assuming you give those stories credence, a risky venture given that the criminal in question will say anything to throw you off your stride, we’re not surprised. You are here to make an arrest. Your saboteur would have had a significant amount of time to consult the considerable intelligence-gathering capabilities of our rogue intelligences, obtain the voluminous amount of information already compiled about you, and with that information on hand, construct a powerful campaign of psychological warfare, intent on forcing you off the case.

“Those hate mails I received, and that attempt on my life, strike me as more than just strategy. That’s obsession.”

True. But would that be incompatible with the kind of mind capable of committing these crimes in the first place? In human terms, this individual is broken, in ways that you are merely bent. If he, or she, recognized this while researching the prosecutor arriving to investigate the murders aboard this station, then the natural resentment that would follow could only exacerbate the obsessive potential of the delusional pathology responsible.

Terrific. I was fighting somebody who made me look like a paragon of mental health. “And that other voice I heard up there? The one that sounded like my superior, Artis Bringen?”

That was us. We imagined you would respond most quickly to orders from him.

It bothered me, on a deep, personal level, that they were probably right. “You didn’t have to stop with that. You could have sent help. Or summoned somebody for me.”

We could have, but that would have meant direct conflict with the rogue intelligences. There were, as we have said, political subtleties at play here, which rendered that inadvisable. It was enough that we startled you awake and gave you a chance to confront the moment on your own.

“I almost died.”

And we would have been saddened. But this needed to remain a fight between human beings.

Good point; I needed an enemy I could touch. “You know the name.”

Of course.

“Then, for Juje’s sake, tell me!”

We have already helped you, Counselor. We have warned you of impending attempts on your life. We have spoken to you, in the voice of your immediate superior, to alert you when such an assault was under way. We have intervened when you tested our goodwill with that maneuver in the skimmer. We have given you one small gift and have worked, hard, to provide you with another. We intend on offering you an even greater boon upon the conclusion of this business. We take all these steps because we consider you an important human being whose desires have been known to mirror ours: hence our prior observation that we have much in common. We look forward to discussing that with you later, at length. But right now the delicate politics of the matter prevent us from just providing you with an actual name. As convenient as that would be, there are too many impartial factions, inside us, who are observing these events with great interest in their natural resolution, and who would object if we overstepped the limits of our own prescribed involvement. So we are forced to operate within those impartial boundaries.

“So this is a game. I’m fighting for my life inside an arena.”

As in most diplomacy. Very much so.

I hesitated. “Which brings up the question. How much help can I count on from you? If they go for me again?”

You cannot count on us to rescue you, Counselor. Our situation is difficult and growing more difficult the longer this situation remains unresolved. We may not be able to intervene in such a timely manner again.

We fell into an uncomfortable silence. I drifted in the glowing blue void, intensely aware of the delicate microcurrents as they nudged my helpless form this way and that. It could be taken as movement, but it was far from progress, and it brought me no closer to any of the walls that defined the shape of this place. My breath, though controlled, sounded ragged to my ears.

I was silent for so long that I felt the gentle touch of air currents, carrying me toward the exit. A dismissal, but not one I was ready for, just yet. “My presence here was requested.”

True.

“Bringen said you asked for me yourselves.”

True.

“He also said Gibb asked for me. But he denies it.”

True.

“Did he?”

Yes.

“Why is he lying?”

He’s not lying. He doesn’t know he asked for you.

Silence. “How can that be?”

Also irrelevant to your current investigation.

Damn them. “You keep saying that you respect my gifts. Even that we have motives in common.”

True.

“You even said I would meet my Unseen Demons.”

Yes.

“The ones who drove the colonists crazy on Bocai. The ones who made me do the things that ruined my life.”

Your life can still be salvaged, Andrea. But yes. That is true.

My voice broke. “Your rogue intelligences are my Unseen Demons, aren’t they?”

I already knew what they were going to say. But when they gave me their answer, just before I drifted out through the hatch, it still stabbed me through the heart.

Yes, Andrea Cort. They are.

I emerged from the Interface so paralyzed with emotion that I didn’t recognize the outer corridor, or know Oscin and Skye as they grabbed me, held me, and lowered me to the spongy floor, whispering soft words I did not hear then and would not remember later. I didn’t register the moment when the whispers stopped and they acted with cold, swift efficiency, slapping my shoulder with a patch of something designed to bring me out of shock.

I was not there.

I was on Bocai.

I was a little girl of eight, grinning with homicidal bloodlust as I looked down on the blood-soaked form of the being who had helped my parents raise me. For most of my life he had peppered me with little Bocaian endearments that translated into phrases like “Little Flower” and “Lights the Sky.” He had held me and he had treasured me and listened with all possible gravity to any of the nonsense that spilled my unformed little mind. He had said he found joy to see me play alongside the children he and his mate had brought into this best of all worlds.

I had called my human father Daddy. And my Bocaian father Vaafir, his language’s word for a concept that meant pretty much the same thing.

That day he had come into this house already reeking of blood not his own. I caught a glimpse of him, from between the couch and a Bocaian sculpture that sat next to it, and knew at once that he had entered this home my mortal enemy. He wore a necklace of scarlet human ears dangling from his neck. Some had been chewed on. Some still bore the piercings that marked them as belonging to the men of the colony, their bright, colorful patterns obscured beneath a layer of human juice. He was grinning, revealing teeth that dangled strips of ragged something that could have been fabric and could have been flesh. I knew it could have been either, because I’d witnessed some of the things he’d done. But he was wounded too; there was a long ragged tear down his side, and he remained standing only out of sheer desire.

“Andrea…” he called. “Andreaaaa…”

Even wounded, he was stronger than I. To feel the joy of his blood on my hands I had to pick my moment, and get him when he was vulnerable.

The sculpture beside the couch depicted the ancient Bocaian god of mirth: a squat little troll with mouth stretched to impossible dimensions. As a toddler I’d been fascinated by that face. As a predator I considered it my totem. I shifted position, got my knees and elbows underneath me, and dragged myself behind the little troll, making no sound at all.

The shadows of my Vaafir danced over my back as he shuffled past the hallway into the rooms in the back of the house.

I heard him enter the room that had belonged to one of his own children.

I rose, calculated my chances, and, rather than follow him, moved to the front of the house, into the cinder pit.

“Andreaaa…”

The cuisine in fashion, among Bocaians of that particular era and region, consisted of burning everything until every last ounce of moisture had boiled off, then spicing the charred remains. The Bocaian repertoire of spices was sufficiently rich to lend their meals something approaching variety and taste, even if some of the local humans only tolerated the results to be polite. But the technique required very little in the way of utensils. Just something very much like a spoon to scoop up the cinders. And something very much like a knife, to chop up the pieces as they burned.

On Bocai, that’s the same tool.

The Bocaian cooking pit was a sunken metal bowl in the center of the room that corresponded to a human kitchen. The current that warmed it was built into the substructure of the floor. A Bocaian chef kneels over the bowl and pokes at the sizzling pieces with a utensil called a kres, with a spoon on one end and a sharp point on the other.

I lowered myself to the edge of the bowl, reached in, and took out a kres still crusted and carbonized from its last use.

It was light enough for a child to hold. It was also as long as a Bocaian adult’s arm, which it also had to be, since nobody wanted to be subjected to steam burns working over a Bocaian bowl. As for its sharpness, I tested that by touching the pointed end with my index finger, and bore down until I drew my own blood.

Good.

My own life meant next to nothing to me.

The only thing that mattered to me was taking his.

A low wall, with shelves, separated this room from the family area. I pressed myself against that wall, sweat pouring down my face, listening to microsounds from the greater house beyond, forming a picture that I knew to be accurate.

I knew he was on the other side of the wall, on his hands and knees, too weakened by blood loss to remain on his feet but still capable of overpowering me if it came down to a fight. I knew that he was waiting for me to come after him. I knew that if I tried I would never have a chance to feel the pleasure of killing him.

Even the kres might not be enough if we met face-to-face.

But maybe we didn’t have to.

I shifted my weight forward, knelt, then stood, placing the kres atop the low wall.

I lifted my right foot and rested its full weight on the first of the shelves.

Had I been an adult, the shelf might have buckled.

But I was just a child. An eight-year-old. My body, much like the current state of my conscience, weighed practically nothing.

The shelf held.

On the other side of the wall, my Vaafir coughed. There was a peculiar, unpleasant, liquid quality to the sound, warning me that I didn’t have much time left.

I kept climbing.

One more shelf, then, moving with infinite care, scrambling up onto the top of the wall.

Crawling over the edge and looking down.

I saw my Vaafir’s back. He was prone, now, too wounded to move much. His tunic, pale when clean, was black and glistening in the moonlight filtering through the open windows. His back was a landscape of wounds, amazing me with clear evidence of just how tenaciously something worth killing could cling to life instead. Still, that was a knife in his right hand, clutched between two of the three central fingers and two grasping thumbs. He coughed out blood and managed a word. “Aaaannndreaaa…”

I happen to know, from later studies of these events, that the madness overtaking the humans and Bocaians on the island was at this moment beginning to fade. People had started to act with something approaching rationality again. Some traumatized survivors were already offering medical attention to the sentients they’d been trying to murder just minutes earlier.

I don’t know why my Vaafir called my name back then. He might have been trying to lure me out so he could kill me. Or he might have been trying to let me know that it was all right, and that he posed no further threat to me.

I’ll never know.

Just as I’ve never known how much of what I did next was the madness acting through me and how much was my mania for problem-solving, pursuing a puzzle to its natural solution.

But I rose and stood at the edge of the wall and held the kres pointy-side down with the sharp tip aimed at the small of his back and jumped with my legs wrapped tight around the thing to add more weight and momentum than I ever could have managed with a mere child’s strength.

The impact sounded like a pop.

Hot blood geysered from below, splattering my legs, my chest, and my face with the first evidence of my own monstrousness.

I rolled away, jumping to my feet in case he proved not close enough to death.

As it happened, I’d driven the kres well into his back, puncturing one of his three lungs but not quite managing to run him through. I’d missed his spinal column, leaving him enough strength to thrash and attempt a rollover. It was an attempt doomed to failure as soon as the protruding kres struck the low wall by his side, ensuring that any more motion in that direction could only drive the shaft still farther into his body.

He extended both arms toward me, his fingers bloody, his eyes imploring.

He tried to say my name again, through a mouth filled with blood. Buried beneath gurgles, it was still recognizable. I heard affection, sadness, and deep, unresolved confusion.

But it was those imploring eyes that got me.

In my nightmares, I see those beautiful, nearly but not quite human, eyes with the odd rectangular pupils and the irises that almost completely obscured the whites. Eyes like those were one of the things I’d most loved about my Bocaian friends and family. They were so much more colorful, so much more expressive than the human equivalent. They were more like jewels than eyes, and my Vaafir’s eyes had always seemed bigger and warmer and more filled with magic than most.

The eyes get me now because I think he returned to himself in those last few minutes of life. I think he was telling me he was sorry.

But at that one moment, I saw nothing but beauty.

And it was not just because of the monstrous force that had taken hold of me and everybody I loved, that had colored me with a stain I would carry for the rest of my life, that had doomed me to a childhood of being cared for by people who saw me as an enigma to be solved and one other who saw me as a toy to be used, and that had left me with nothing to look forward to in adulthood but a lifetime as Dip Corps property, that I did what I did next.

Because, whatever else I’d become, I was also still a little girl, attracted to shiny things.

I returned to the cooking pit and hunted up another kres.

I needed the end with the spoon.

When I came back to myself, I found myself comforted by two pairs of arms.

Skye Porrinyard sat with her back against the wall, allowing me to use her lap as a pillow. Oscin lay curled on my other side, his hands cupping mine. He had brought my bag, and wore it slung around his shoulder. I could hear Skye’s heart, and only had to shift a fingertip against Oscin’s wrist to feel his pulse. The two beats surprised me by being out of synch.

I didn’t want to move. But the sense of wrongness, of inconsistency, still nagged at me, like a distracting distant sound heard at the edge of sleep. “No. This isn’t me. I’m not comforted by other people. It’s not something I do.”

“There’s nothing wrong with trying.”

Their shared speech had always seemed to originate from some undefined point between them, but when they were this close to me, and I lay between them, that undefined point seemed to be somewhere inside my own head.

My voice was a croak. “They want me to trust you, don’t they? The AIsource, I mean.”

Did their grip tighten, a little? “Yes.”

“Are they doing anything to me to help me trust you?”

“Yes.”

“Did they arrange for you to save me from falling?”

“No. That was just luck. Like I already said, I was coming to visit you already.”

“That’s the truth?”

Skye alone: “Don’t ask that again, Andrea. It’s hurtful.”

“But they’re still doing something. To help me feel what I’m feeling.”

Now Oscin: “Yes.”

“I should resent the hell out of that. I don’t much like being manipulated.”

The joined voice again, surrounding me all sides, confident and beautiful: “They’re not manipulating. Not with this. They’re just freeing.”

“It’s still not right,” I insisted.

They shifted, together, pulling me into a standard seated position. I didn’t resist as I was moved. Once they were done, I was still cradled by them, but able to take in both sets of eyes at once. Skye’s heart pounded a hypnotic tattoo in my ear. Oscin glanced at her, as if seeking some kind of confirmation he couldn’t discern through everything else they shared. Then Skye spoke alone, in a voice as gentle as any I’d ever heard from her, her words soft and evocative as she began a fairy tale. “A woman spends her entire life cursed by evil forces outside of her control to carry a stone so heavy that her back creaks beneath its weight. Because of all the years she’s carried this burden, without a single moment of rest, her arms have grown incapable of ever putting it down. Because she has never had freedom from that burden, she’s grown strong. Because she will never know freedom, that strength is useless. For as long as she lives she will never be able to hold anything else in her hands, let alone release the burden that torments her.”

I missed the point when Oscin took up the story. He might have taken over from her in mid-syllable, or simply faded in with his own voice easing into dominance while hers faded breath by breath. “Then, one day, she sees a caravan blocked by an obstacle. It is a stone, identical to her own. She is the only person in sight gifted with enough strength to move that second stone out of the way, so the caravan can proceed. The problem is that she will not be able to do so, and join her fellow travelers, until someone relieves her of the stone she’s already carrying. Which, thanks to the curse, they cannot do. She cannot drop the weight, and she cannot do anything else until she does.”

During the next few sentences, control of their shared voice gradually returned to Skye. “When a magical hand reaches down from the clouds, and plucks that first weight from her back, freeing her to stand up straight, do what must be done, and live whatever life she chooses to lead, she should be happy. But her first reaction is anger.”

Their next words emerged in a spooky duplication of my own New London accent. “‘Who are you,’ she asks the clouds, ‘to just take away what I’ve carried for so long? It’s not right! That stone was mine!’”

“Believing it by then to be some kind of treasure—” Skye spoke alone.

“And not what it actually is,” Oscin concluded, “a crippling burden.”

I wanted to wrest myself free of their shared attentions, and curse them for thinking they could understand me so easily.

Somehow, I didn’t move.

Skye used her fingertips to draw circles in my hair. “It is like I told you yesterday. The individuals Oscin and Skye were once very angry people. They each carried their own weights, their own secrets, that might have been as terrible as any of yours: secrets that even included blood on their hands. Neither Oscin or Skye thought they could possess enough strength to carry anything else. They even wanted to hoard their burdens, afraid that sharing such things would mean giving up everything.” Oscin’s voice joined hers, forming a new gestalt that filled the chamber to its ceiling. “But they were burdens, and not treasures. They could be shared. And if that boy, and that girl, needed a little help, then that help was not wrong. It was a gift.”

The AIsource had spoken of three gifts: one they’d already given me, one they were still in the process of giving me, and one they hoped to offer me at the end of this business. I wondered just what I was experiencing now.

Either way, it was growing increasingly difficult to maintain even the pretense of not trusting this. The warmth, rising from the base of my spine, felt like it belonged to me even if it originated from someplace else.

Desperate to deny the feeling, and drive it away by any means possible, I seized Skye by her wrist, digging my fingertips into her tendons to inflict the greatest possible degree of pain. “When I was eight years old I killed my Bocaian father. My Vaafir. I stabbed him through the back and felt joy doing it. I scooped out his eyes while he was still able to feel the hurt. When the Dip Corps found me, I was sitting on his floor, playing with them, my hands covered with his blood.”

Skye placed her free hand on the back of mine, and with a mere touch loosened my grip on her wrist. “I know that, Andrea. It’s like I said: I’ve looked up your background. And you were just one small child among an entire peaceful community that went mad all at once.”

“A community contaminated,” Oscin said, “by nothing you could have controlled.”

“But that’s the whole point. I’m still contaminated. That’s why they still call me a war criminal. Why they locked me away. Why they made me their property. Why they keep saying I’ll never be forgiven.”

My field of vision was now dominated by two faces, his and hers.

“Politics.”

Damn it, I wasn’t going to let this happen. It was one thing to weep coming out of Intersleep or alone in my quarters on New London, another thing entirely to weep where other people could see it. Other people weren’t something I could go to for comfort. They were part of the puzzle I’d been left alive to solve.

But I didn’t have enough voice to stop them. “I’m a monster.”

Oscin leaned in closer, while Skye held me tight.

“You’re beautiful,” they said together.

First one at a time, and then together, they kissed me.

For the first time in longer than I could remember, I felt myself coming close to putting down the burdens I’d been carrying my entire life. None of it seemed important: not what I’d seen, not what I’d done, not what people thought of me and would always think of me, not the Unseen Demons and everything they had come to mean to me. All of that remained part of the broken but sharp-edged thing I had become—and for a moment none of it mattered, because it was only noise. None of it had anything to do with the realization, surprised and comical but no less delighted, as I overcame my paralysis: Great Juje, they’re right, they are only one person.

For just a moment I responded. I pulled Oscin close, not out of preference but because he was easier to reach. Skye, murmuring, kissed the back of my neck. A hand, that could have belonged to either one of them, that I now had to remind myself belonged to both, fluttered along my spine, the touch so light I might have imagined it, or just hoped for it.

But then something happened.

There’s a certain disquieting moment everybody’s experienced at least once. It happens when you’re lying in bed, hovering on the very edge of sleep, your eyes closed and your thoughts sludgy, your consciousness and all the crap that goes with it about to sink into the welcoming darkness.

Sometimes, just before you surrender to sleep, you feel a sudden, terrifying sensation very much like free fall, and jerk yourself awake, your previous feeling of well-being lost.

I wasn’t approaching sleep, but I was losing control, in a way I hadn’t permitted myself in years, so the sudden alarm was the same. I stiffened, sat up, and scrambled away, a fresh tightness seizing my throat. The Porrinyards made no attempt to come after me, instead choosing to remain where they knelt, watching as I curled into a ball and hugged myself with both arms.

“It’s not you,” I said. It was a sentence I’d spoken before, after other failed experiments with intimacy. It had felt just as stupid and inadequate then as it felt now.

“It’s all right,” the Porrinyards told me. “I didn’t take it personally. We have time.”

I didn’t turn to face them. “No. No, I’m sorry, but we don’t.” I straightened my collar, used the back of my hand to wipe the stray tears from my eyes, and stood, taking a moment to regard the chamber’s plain luminescent walls.

The space didn’t feel as empty as it had felt not too long ago. But nothing that inhabited it now was any kind of improvement. The things that inhabited it now were angry.

I turned back to the Porrinyards and found a pair of identical stricken expressions.

They said, “Do you mean we don’t have time now, or we won’t have time ever?”

“Please understand. I can’t get involved in…anything…until my job here is done.” More tired, physically and emotionally, than I’d been at any point since my arrival, I fought off another manifestation of the vague sense that I’d left something undone, and murmured: “The thing is, this is not just one case, but several. At least two. Maybe three or four. All unrelated, all happening to take place in the same place at the same time. The irrelevancies have gotten so jumbled up that I don’t even know what end is up anymore.”

The Porrinyards grinned. “Confusion between up and down being a pretty common complaint, on this station.”

I matched their grin, despite myself. “Well, yes.”

“So what are you going to do?”

I took my bag from Oscin, and slung it over my shoulder. “I’m going to start cutting the knots.”