Emissaries from the Dead

1. HABITAT

I’ve never been a fan of natural ecosystems.

I know they’re romanticized. They’re great for people who like to swat bugs, step on feces, and catch strange diseases, an odd subsection of humanity that has never included myself. I grew up in urban orbital habitats and pretty much know better. But even I must admit that natural places evolve by accident and therefore can’t be blamed for their high level of unpleasantness.

Artificial ecosystems, engineered by sentients who know we’re better than that now, are just plain perverse.

The cylinder world One One One was an eloquent case in point.

It was so wrong, in both concept and execution, that it exalted even the most appalling messes arranged by Nature. Like most constructs of its kind, it rotated at high speeds to provide to the internal environment a simulated gravitational pull away from its axis of rotation. That’s just basic engineering, so old that dumb old Mankind considered it a brilliant idea long before we went into space and put the basic idea into practice. But most cylinder worlds orbit planets, or hang around inside solar systems, and are built by sentients who evolved on planets to support life that likes to walk around on a solid surface, even when that solid surface has a horizon that curves up on both sides. As a result, they house their habitats on the surface that best approximates planetary notions of up and down: that is, the outermost “floor.”

On One One One, the independent software intelligences known as the AIsource had turned that usual model upside down. The station itself was situated in deep interstellar space, a good twenty light-years from the nearest inhabited world, and far from any of the territories claimed by any of the major spacefaring species. We never would have known about it if they hadn’t given us the address. Its habitable interior centered on an Uppergrowth of knotty vegetation clinging to the interior station axis. The crushingly dense lower atmosphere was a poisonous soup of thick toxic gases above a sludgy organic sea. Only in the upper atmosphere, near the central hub, was there a thinner oxygen–nitrogen blend of the sort congenial to the life-forms the AIsource had engineered.

The AIsource determination to get into the God-in-a-bottle business struck me as quixotic at best and insane at worst. And pointlessly grandiose, as well. The average human cylinder world is about ten kilometers long by two kilometers in diameter, which strikes me as a compact, manageable size that shows a little sense of humility in matters of cosmic scale. There are some leviathans, like my base of operations, New London, of up to ten times that size. All right, so we need big cities. But this place, One One One, was approximately a thousand times longer and some fifty times fatter than even New London: pretty excessive for the housing of a few brachiating apes who had to spend their entire lives clinging to bioengineered vines. It defined the concept of inexact fit.

Either way, it was an upside-down hell.

Even as the sleek AIsource transport ferried me into the habitat, I mentally catalogued everything I found disturbing here. The storm clouds far below were like a roiling brown cauldron, flashing with sudden light whenever charged by the violent forces at their heart. The giant winged things who sometimes ventured above those were like dragons out of a bad fairy tale: their wingspans up to two kilometers across, the force of their flight leaving entire storm systems in their wake, their sudden screeching dives into the opaque clouds acts of epic predation on creatures nobody flying at my current altitude had ever seen.

I’d been assured that the dragons never ascended as high as the Uppergrowth latitudes. I’d also been advised not to bother thinking about them, as they had nothing to do with the reason I was here.

It was like that old joke: Don’t think about the elephant.

(But it’s there.)

Don’t think about it and it’ll go away.

(But it’s there.)

You’re still thinking about it.

And so on.

The Uppergrowth, dotted here and there with the sluggish forms of the Brachiators, was a vast gray surface of compact, knotted vines that loomed over this world like a hammer waiting for the best opportunity to fall. The thick black pylons that every hundred kilometers or so descended from that Uppergrowth into the cloudscape were anchored at their apparent midpoints to the glowspheres that served as One One One’s suns, and looked far too flimsy to hold such balls of corruscating fusion. The glowspheres themselves cast a light harsh enough to burn purple afterimages on my retinas, and there were so many of them that my transport cast multiple, competing shadows on the Uppergrowth above me.

I regarded it all with my usual grim reserve, dimly aware that I’d fallen back into a nervous habit that had plagued me for years: one index finger twirling the single lock of long, black hair that dangled from the right side of my head. Since the rest of my hair is cut very short, the many people who hate my guts like to say I keep that lock long to feed the tic and for no other reason. I know the habit drives people to distraction and therefore practice it whenever I can. I’m too uncomfortable in the presence of others to tolerate their comfort in mine.

The flight might have been bearable if the transport had been properly enclosed; but, no, it was a roofless model, protected against precipitation and wind shear by ionic shielding, offering a ride so smooth that had I closed my eyes I wouldn’t have experienced any sense of motion at all. But I knew I was not enclosed. I knew that given just one moment’s suicidal madness, it would have been all too easy to hop over the waist-high bulkhead and plunge to my death. I knew it and I could not ignore it.

Just as I knew that somebody in this Habitat was a murderer.

Excuse me. Somebody else.

I always forget to count myself.

The transport interjected: Andrea Cort: are you suffering distress?

“Yes. How did you know?”

Your blood pressure, heartrate, and respiration all reflect tension levels consistent with the early stages of panic.

“I didn’t know you were paying such close attention.”

You are our guest and your health, when in our care, is paramount. Would you like some medication?

“No.”

Some therapeutic conversation, then?

I’d spent years enduring therapy I didn’t want, receiving medications that didn’t help, having my brain mapped at every scale down to the molecular in search of answers that didn’t exist. If it accomplished anything at all, it was instilling a lifelong aversion to sentients who meant well. “No. Maybe later.”

You would not be the first human being to experience difficulty in this environment. Help is available.

“No, thank you.”

The transport respected my wishes enough to shut up, thus demonstrating one major difference between software intelligences and human beings.

Human beings intrude whether welcome or not.

The facility housing One One One’s human contingent was a network of pendulous canvas shapes, dangling from the Uppergrowth like gourds. Colored as gray as the network of vines that supported them, they seemed so organic a part of the landscape that I didn’t recognize them as human structures until we drew near.

There must have been fifty hammocks, dangling in bunches, with only a few set off in relative isolation. They were linked by bridges of flexible netting, which crawled with the forms of human beings. Some traveled the Uppergrowth itself, brachiating along its roots and vines without safety lines. One lithe young woman with flaming orange hair hurled herself away from even that precarious haven, hung in mid-space for a second, and landed on one of the nets, bouncing up and down in total disregard of the deadly fall that would have awaited her if she’d missed.

The transport slowed, picked an angle of approach, and moved in underneath the hammocks, so close now that it was possible to discern the prone shapes of human beings in the lowest distensions of dangling canvas. Some of the humans traversing the net bridges paused to study me as I arrived. Their clothing styles ranged from skintight jumpsuits to, in a few cases, full nudity. Male, female, and a few identifiable neuters, they were all built like gymnasts at peak physical condition. Most were compact, though I noticed a few long-limbed spidery physiques among them. Their expressions managed odd combinations of hope, terror, resentment, and defiance, sometimes all at once.

I’d seen looks like that before.

They were people under siege.

The skimmer slowed to a stop beneath one of the central hammocks. As it dropped the shields, I felt wind: a light, warm breeze, carrying with it a scent midway between ocean water and the sugar-saturated air outside a candy shop I frequent in New London. Despite the terrifying environment, my mouth watered. Addiction to sweets is one of my few humanizing vices.

The fabric above me shifted and bulged from the weight of human movement. A narrow slit appeared where there had been no visible seam, revealing the face of a man in his late thirties. He had close-cropped shiny brown hair, eyes of a blue so pale they vanished against the whites, thin pink lips, and a lantern jaw that made his tentative smile look like a fissure on the face of an edifice. “Hello there! Welcome to Hammocktown! I gather you’re the J.A. rep?”

I object to such snappy abbreviations on principle, but my complete title was Associate Legal Counsel for the Homo Sapiens Confederacy Diplomatic Corps Judge Advocate, hardly the kind of thing anybody could be reasonably expected to rattle off in a single breath. “Yes, I’m Counselor Andrea Cort. Are you the ambassador?”

His thin lip twisted. “That’s not a title our esteemed landlords allow me to use.”

“The AIsource object to the title Ambassador?”

“They object to it here.”

If the software intelligences were getting pissy about job titles now, it either meant a major shift in the nature of their relationship with our species, or something unprecedented about the rules of life on One One One. But that was largely what I’d been led to expect. “Have they given you a reason?”

His smile faltered. “You couldn’t have gotten much of a briefing on your way here.”

“I’m only seven hours out of Intersleep.” And still awaiting the energy crash that always struck like a club, within twenty-four hours of waking. “You haven’t answered my question.”

“I think I can answer your question inside. In the meantime, if you want to call me something, my name’s Gibb, Stuart Gibb. You can consider me the chief asshole in charge.” The slit opened wider, and he reached down with both arms. “Let’s get you up here so we can get you up to speed. Do you have anything you want to pass up?”

I had a soft cylindrical bag containing three changes of clothes, a few toiletries, and a significant amount of contraband. I’ve never had any qualms about handing it to anybody. The bag was of Tchi manufacture, and as such was designed to satisfy a people who spent their days and nights taking offense at imagined improper liberties. Gibb could have examined every centimeter of the bag for days without finding access to my goods.

Gibb disappeared with the bag and a few seconds later lowered a ladder. Loose as it came down, flapping in the high-altitude breeze, it solidified at full extension. I grabbed hold, testing its ability to hold my weight, wondering what it would be like to slip and tumble into that storm-tossed hell.

A relief. The old death wish, speaking up again.

I took a deep breath, forced calm calm calm into my limbs, muttered my personal mantra, Unseen Demons, and began to climb.

As I pulled myself through the slit, entering warmer air and murkier light, Gibb grabbed my upper arm to steady me. His very touch was immediate annoyance. I let him guide me to a resting place about a meter away from the opening, and was not at all comforted by the way the soft rubbery canvas sagged beneath my added weight.

The interior of the hammock was a large round chamber, sagging at its center. A molded circular spine around its widest point, bearing a variety of tightly bound cloth bundles, allowed it to maintain a shape approximately like that of a teardrop, but the material below that spine was loose, settling into a shallow bowl beneath our weight.

Gibb was not the only man here. The other was a compact, grimacing figure with a shaved head, a prosthetic memory disk clinging to one temple, and eyes that glowered like lasers. Both men were dressed in loose-fitting gray pants and many-pocketed open vests that seemed designed to show off impressive gymnastic physiques. There was no way of telling whether those physiques had been earned the hard way via intensive training or installed by dealers in extreme physical enhancements.

The air inside the hammock was stale, redolent with liquor and body odor. But my relief at no longer needing to contemplate the long drop into One One One’s stormy atmosphere almost made the murk intoxicating.

On the other hand, Gibb was still holding my arm.

I tugged. “Let go.”

“You looked like you were having trouble—”

“I was.”

“There’s nothing to be ashamed of. As you can imagine, I’ve seen height-sensitivity before—”

“I can imagine. Let go.”

Still he didn’t. “I know the signs, Counselor. You’re about ten seconds away from hysterics.”

“You’re about five from losing your hand. Let go.”

An odd little look passed between Gibb and the grimacing man. I didn’t need psi enhancements to note that all the questions seemed to come from Gibb’s side of the hammock.

The self-proclaimed chief asshole in charge didn’t seem to be as much in charge as he liked to claim. That was okay. I was willing to believe the rest of the description accurate. In my personal experience, people who tell you how awful they are, the first time they meet you, are just trying to defang your own inevitable reaction by beating you to the punch.

I know this. It’s something I do myself.

Gibb released me and scrambled back half a meter up the canvas. “Forgive me, Andrea. Some of our newcomers have a major problem with vertigo. They’re so scared of falling that they make it happen. Whenever I see somebody in trouble, I tend to be extra careful until I know we won’t have a problem.”

“As long as you don’t call me Andrea again, we won’t have a problem.”

“Oh,” he said, “we’re generally informal here—”

“I’m not.”

Another shared glance. “There’s really no need to be so upset. We know this place isn’t easy for some people to deal with. Most people just take some time to adjust—”

“Understood. And I’ll appreciate anything you can do to help me adjust. But I’m still not interested in informality.”

“Come on. There’s no reason we shouldn’t at least pretend to be friendly—”

“There is if I’m not looking for friends.” I made this announcement without any special heat and without any special chill. “Counselor’s fine. And if I can’t call you Ambassador—”

Gibb stammered. “A-As I started to tell you, the AIsource don’t recognize this as an official embassy. They’ve promised to evict us if I give myself that title. So you can call me Stuart if you like. Or Stu.”

“No,” I said. “I believe I’ll call you Mr. Gibb.”

The grimacing man rolled his eyes in contempt. It was not contempt for me, which I’m used to. It was contempt for this man he worked with, contempt he wanted to share with me.

Interesting. I’d been here less than two minutes and I was already being made privy to a power struggle.

Gibb’s eyes broadcast waves of warmth and compassion but engaged my sincerity detector not one bit. “Have I done something to offend you, Counselor?”

“Not yet, Mr. Gibb. Are you hoping to?”

Gibb seemed taken aback yet again, displaying a most undiplomatic lack of skill at dealing with unpleasant people like myself. “All right, then, Counselor. If that’s the way you prefer to play it. We’ll keep this on a strictly professional level.” He gestured toward the grimacing man. “This is Mr. Peyrin Lastogne, our special consultant on-site. My second-in-command, if you prefer. He’ll be providing you with any help you need in your investigation.”

Lastogne’s nod was minimal. “Counselor.”

Even that single word was tinged with an anger he contained but made no attempt to hide. He’d been through hell, somewhere, sometime; maybe several hells.

I nodded at Lastogne, then asked Gibb, “So why wouldn’t the AIsource want to recognize your diplomatic status?”

He fluttered a hand. “They classify this entire habitat as a commercial installation rather than sovereign territory. They call everything inside it, including their precious engineered sentients, assets still in the process of being developed. As such, they claim exemption to the usual treaties involving diplomatic exchange.”

“That’s outrageous,” I said. “It doesn’t matter who administers the real estate. It matters who lives on it. The Brachiators have the right to speak for themselves.”

“You know that and I know that. The AIsource contend that the Brachiators are a special case. They’re not indigenous to this environment, after all. They were engineered elsewhere, and transplanted here. They were also all supposedly provided AIsource citizenship at the moment of their creation, which in theory gives the AIsource the right to speak for them.”

That was transparent and familiar nonsense. Subjugated peoples are always subsets of the societies claiming to speak for them. Sometimes they’re even called citizens. It doesn’t mean they’re one iota less subjugated.

Gibb’s shrug prevented me from lecturing him on legal principles he already knew. “You can save your breath, Counselor. I’m just reporting the AIsource line.”

I chewed a thumbnail—another of my many runaway tics that I’d spent years struggling to control. “How did this even have the opportunity to become a diplomatic issue of any kind? This is a sealed station, well hidden from anybody capable of looking for it. The AIsource didn’t have to let anybody in. They didn’t have to show anybody the Habitat. There’s no way anybody from outside could have even known the Brachiators existed, unless the AIsource told them.”

“Which is exactly what happened,” Gibb said. “About three years ago Mercantile, they sent word to all the major governments that they wanted to show us something. Not long after that, a mixed delegation including Riirgaans, Bursteeni, Hom. Saps and Tchi arrived here, and were shown the Brachiators in their, you should only excuse the expression, natural habitat. Once the delegation realized that AIsource had engineered their own sentients, and better still professed to own them, it ignited a diplomatic firestorm.”

“The AIsource must have expected that.”

Gibb rolled his eyes. “Gee, you think?”

I’d been involved in a number of such diplomatic cluster-fucks over the years. They were always nightmares, as you’d expect of sustained arguments between creatures defined not only by their differing cultures but differing psychological models. It’s never erupted into all-out interstellar war, that being such an impractical and expensive prospect that only idiots and madmen see any point in it (and that’s a damned good thing all by itself, since the hundreds of bickering, warring, and self-obsessed governments that make up the Hom. Sap Confederacy have never gotten along well enough to stand up against any concerted war of conquest or annihilation, from a truly determined enemy from outside). But there’s been plenty of petty harassment and high moral dudgeon, plenty of brushfires over small matters of economic sovereignty, and plenty of wrangling over the Interspecies Covenant that allegedly keeps everybody nice to one another.

It’s that very Covenant, with its provisions permitting diplomatic immunity, that both gives me my reputation as war criminal and places me outside the reach of the several races that would like to prosecute me for what I did as a child. And it’s that very Covenant, with its provisions against the breeding of slave races, that the AIsource was so deliberately flouting now. What were they thinking?

My thumbnail clicked against teeth. “So how large is this ‘unofficial’ delegation of yours?”

“About seventy on-site, here under AIsource invitation, at their sufferance and under their designated limitations. We were able to set up this home base about two years ago Mercantile. We can interact with the Brachiators, find out what they’re like, make friends with them, and catalogue their behaviors, but only for the purposes of study. As soon as we cross the line into actual diplomacy, we’re expelled.”

“My own main purpose here,” Lastogne said, “is enforcing those guidelines. Making sure none of our people ever accomplish anything of note.”

I studied the man’s eyes for signs of mockery. “Must be frustrating work.”

His appraisal of me was equally frank. “Diplomats don’t need my help to avoid accomplishing anything.”

Even more interesting. I began to suspect I could actually approve of the man.

But his attitude bothered Gibb. “That’ll be enough of that, Peyrin. You’ll have more than enough time for your facile nihilism. It’s far from a waste, Counselor. We’re here to combat a precedent that would tolerate the use of engineered sentients as slaves. Gathering the ammunition we need may be the most important agenda the Dip Corps ever had.”

“How much longer do you think it’s going to take you?”

“This is a permanent installation,” Gibb said. “Barring a dramatic breakthrough, some of my indentures can expect to stay here for the entire length of their twenty-year contracts.”

I could think of no better definition of hell.

And speaking of hell, Gibb’s knee brushed against mine. Maybe it wasn’t his fault. The soft surface beneath us sagged so much it took vigilance to avoid sliding toward the lowest point of the hammock’s gravity well. On the other hand, Lastogne didn’t seem to have any trouble maintaining his own position higher up the slope. And without being able to point to anything in particular, I could still sense an unwanted sexual charge coming from Gibb.

I attempted a deep breath and tried to focus on the matter at hand: “So what do you make of the Brachiators? Are they slaves?”

“They don’t seem to do any real work, except for whatever niche they fill in One One One’s ecosystem, but they’re still sentient property, with no right of self-determination. There are right now eleven separate spacefaring races, ours included, involved in the legal battle to bring the issues here before an interspecies tribunal.”

Wonderful. With eleven sentient races, from the amicable Riirgaans to the downright unpleasant Tchi, all bringing their special kinds of diplomacy to the fray, the higher math necessary to determine the lifespan of this litigation was beyond me.

Gibb read my expression. “It’ll happen eventually. But the AIsource are tricky. It took a year of heavy negotiation before they even agreed to let one race, which when the dust settled turned out to be us, send a minimal force of observers into this habitat just to make sure the Brachs weren’t in immediate distress.”

That couldn’t have sat well with the other races, considering how many of them have less-than-salutory opinions of humanity. “And nobody complained about that?”

“Oh, they all complained about it. And from what I hear they’re still complaining. We’re fortunate in that we’re locked away in here and don’t have to listen to them. I should mention that one race, the Riirgaans, managed to send along their own rep, in the form of a human being with Riirgaan citizenship, but he’s still, for all intents and purposes, one of us, under my command.”

I grunted. “Which means little without diplomatic status.”

“Right. We have no official standing, no authority, and no immunity.”

“Not the best circumstances for a murder investigation.”

Gibb’s eyes flickered. “No.”

“So tell me about this victim, Christina Santiago. How did she die?”

Gibb excused himself, scrambled up the sloping floor, made his way to a bundle strapped to the hammock spine, and removed a pair of cylinders with built-in straws. Scrambling down was an undignified slide on his rump, which ended only when his knees were once again pressed against mine. “Drink this, please.”

I didn’t often take food or drink in the presence of my fellow human beings, communal meals implying a social connection I preferred to avoid. But I obliged, gasping when the stuff hit my throat.

“Understand this, Counselor: that cloud layer below us is sixteen kilometers straight down; the ocean layer many kilometers below that; the atmosphere is unbreathable for most of that distance and only gets more caustic the farther you fall. There’s nothing between us and a nasty drop but the layer of flexible fabric holding us right now. It’s hard not to spend most of your time here thinking about the dangers of a misstep. I keep intoxicants around for newcomers who need to be pacified while they get used to the idea and while I figure out if they’re going to have a problem with the heights. You’ve been looking dizzy since you got here. So I need to ask you: Are you going to have a problem?”

I felt the canvas sag beneath my weight, and reminded myself that if there were any chance of it tearing, Gibb and his fellow diplomats would have long since tumbled through the clouds. “No.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m not likely to change my answer based on repetition.”

Gibb studied me for longer than I would have liked. “I hope you’re right. Because this is no longer a single murder investigation.”

He hesitated, as if afraid to speak the next words.

Lastogne spared him the trouble. “We had a second killing the day before yesterday.”