Emissaries from the Dead

5. OWNED

After Lastogne left, I wished the designers of Gibb’s facility had put more effort into constructing solid platforms where restless human beings could stand and pace. Crawling, climbing, and clinging, the only means of locomotion possible in Hammocktown, may have been effective ways of getting from place to place, but they couldn’t burn my nervous energy, or facilitate analytical thought, the way pacing did. Being deprived of that option was going to throw me off as long as I remained here.

So would Lastogne. With a few offhand words, he’d shown a knack for echoing suspicions I’d rarely spoken out loud.

We’re all owned.

It might have been mere political cynicism, coming from him.

For much of the past year I’d considered it literally true.

Owned.

The things that happened one night on Bocai had caused such a diplomatic firestorm that the authorities, including the Confederacy and the Bocaians themselves, had declared the survivors better off permanently disappeared.

I still don’t know what happened to most of the others. I suspect they’re dead, or still imprisoned somewhere. But I’d been shipped to someplace I don’t like thinking about, there to be caged and prodded and analyzed in the hope of determining just what environmental cause had turned so many previously peaceful sentients into vicious monsters.

My keepers spent ten years watching for my madness to reoccur. It had been ten years of reminders that I was an embarrassment to my very species, ten years of being escorted from room to room under guard, ten years of being asked if I wanted to kill anything else. The people who studied me during these years were not all inhuman. Some even tried to show me affection, though to my eyes their love had all the persuasive realism of lines in a script being read by miscast actors. Even the best of them knew I was a bomb that could go off again, at any time; if sometimes moved to give me hugs, they never attempted it without a guard in the room. Others, the worst among them, figured that whatever lay behind my eyes had been tainted beyond all repair, and no longer qualified as strictly human—and being less than strictly human themselves, treated themselves to any cruel pleasures they cared to claim from a creature awful enough to deserve anything they did to her.

Even freedom, when it came, came in a form of a slightly longer leash.

We’ve gotten your latest test scores, Andrea. They’re quite remarkable. You deserve every educational opportunity we can provide for you. But we can’t quite justify letting you go. There are just too many races out there that don’t believe in pleas of temporary insanity, and unless we come up with some solution that stays their hand, they’ll do whatever they can to extradite you. But if you want, you can walk out of here and enjoy Immunity. All you have to do is allow us to remain your legal guardians, for the rest of your natural life.

Most indentures, like Warmuth and Santiago, have contracts of limited duration: five, ten, twenty, or thirty years; the terms varied. They could work off that time in the allotted period or they could earn the time bonuses that permitted early release. They all knew they could look forward to a generous pension and an unlimited passport, someday. They all understood that one day they’d own themselves again.

I didn’t have that luxury. The Dip Corps had promised me lifetime protection, or as close to lifetime protection as I could expect given the certain knowledge that they’d give me up the instant they decided I was useful currency. But they were the ones capable of tearing up the contract. I had no means of severance.

I was owned and expected to be owned for the foreseeable future.

I’d gotten used to the idea.

I’d only imagined I knew what it was like.

Less than a year ago, on Catarkhus, it had come to mean something else.

I activated the hytex and called up the service records of the two dead women.

I started with the most recent victim, Cynthia Warmuth, opening with a hytex image taken since her arrival at One One One. She turned out to have been a pretty young thing, lithe, fresh-faced and blue-eyed, with a tentative smile and short dyed hair determined to make a stop at every color in the rainbow. The image caught her in the act of climbing one of the hammock farm’s mesh ladders, one foot already resting one rung up. Being lit from below, like just about everything else illuminated only by One One One’s suns, gave her an odd exotic quality that she seemed to take as a reason for pride.

Of her background, there wasn’t much more than Gibb had already provided. The only notable addition was a thesis she’d written, discussing what she believed to be the impossibility of proper objectivity in the study of sentient races. New indentures in training wrote theses like this all time, most of them showing little originality and promise. Warmuth’s parroted the Dip Corps line: Sentients can only be studied by sentients, and sentients by their very nature bring their own prejudices to anything they study.

I didn’t know how true that nonsense was in practical circumstances. In the course of my daily work I’d encountered any number of diplomats and exosociologists who claimed to be able to watch over intelligent alien races while themselves possessing only as much observable sentience as doorknobs.

Gibb’s personal evaluations of her were also attached to the file, and marked her for guarded praise. She had potential, he said, but she needed to learn how to curb her somewhat excessive zeal. It seemed to be more a personality thing than any problems with her skill set. On four separate occasions, under his watch alone, she’d scored highly enough, on examinations, to earn some additional time off her contract. It shortened her full hitch by less than a month—not much time at all, when you considered how many years she still had left on her contract. But not bad for an indenture who hadn’t even been cleared for her first direct contact with the locals. Either she’d excelled beyond all reason in training or Gibb was an unusually generous boss.

The first image I found of Santiago was not quite as congenial or as posed as Warmuth’s; it was a candid shot, taken from a distance, of her clinging to the Uppergrowth with all four limbs. There were four Brachiators in the background, looking less at home there than she did. About all I learned from it was that she was up to the physical demands of the work. I requested another image and got it: an awkwardly posed image of Santiago standing in a triangular corridor, arms crossed, one thin eyebrow raised. She had dark eyes, tan skin, a round face framed by tousled caramel hair, and a slight underbite that transformed her lower lip into a pout. There was no hint of a smile.

Santiago’s papers were fewer than Warmuth’s, but tinged with a bitter edge. One passage Lastogne had bookmarked for me was especially interesting. “For most sentients, belonging to their respective species means bearing the influence of the whole. Being a human being often means being outshouted by the whole. It means being a cell with no voice in the function of the organism. It means being owned.”

There it was again. Owned.

It could be a coincidence. It was a common concept among the sufficiently cynical, a parade I help to lead. Santiago’s background as a debt-slave even made it reasonable. There were too many worlds like hers, and too many people like her aching to leave those worlds behind. Their need was a large part of what staffed the Dip Corps.

A look at Santiago’s bond put the nature of the contract into sharp relief. The woman had exchanged her own debt for a ten-year contract. By the time the Dip Corps added the costs of transportation, training, and the medical treatment necessary to cleanse her lungs and body chemistry of the homeworld industrial toxins that would have left her dead or incapacitated by age forty, the time-debt on her contract had stretched from ten years to twenty.

Extended, just like Warmuth’s: a coincidence, or a link? Either way, she wouldn’t have minded. The Corps was the best form of debt slavery—the kind that ended in freedom if the job was done.

But it was still slavery. Ownership.

The kind that made people angry.

Santiago had been described as an angry person.

We’re all owned.

I looked further. Santiago had earned some mild time bonuses in her months on One One One, but had also been fined for antisocial behavior, the worst penalty coming after her confrontation with Warmuth. Once I did the math, she turned out to be earning out her contract at something approaching real time. That was a mediocre score indeed. I wondered how much of her abrasiveness was political, and how much was personality.

I thought of another abrasive personality: Lastogne.

He’d also made a reference to being owned.

He had given the words special emphasis.

He struck me as a man embittered by the deal he had made.

He had gone out of his way to tell me that he’d already heard of me.

Had he been giving me a gentle nudge in the direction he wanted the investigation to go?

Or was he obscuring the trail? Maybe he was just pushing buttons. Or maybe all his talk of Santiago’s attitude problem was a smoke screen for his own.

I directed the hytex to provide me with his file.

Nothing came up.

I went into the Dip Corps Database, and used not only the security codes I had earned but also several my superiors would have been very unhappy to know I possessed.

Nothing came up.

I bit my thumb, wondering if I’d gotten his name right.

No, that was facile. I never got names wrong. I got people wrong, but not their names. He was Peyrin Lastogne, all right.

But why was there no available data?

I was still wondering when the floating white blob the hytex projected instead of a useful answer blinked, like a single cyclopean eye, and exploded, filling the space with a blinding light. When that faded, a new image appeared. It was another generated image of myself, this time captured in the immediate aftermath of a horrific beating. My face was a collection of pain piled upon pain, with every millimeter of exposed skin swollen and glossy with blood. My eyes were puffed shut, the cheekbones staved in, my gaping mouth an assortment of shattered teeth. Any injuries below the neckline were invisible beneath my black suit, but from the way it stood, seeming ready to fall at any moment, favoring its right leg and cradling its midsection with both hands, they must have been just as brutal, and just as ugly. Hiding them just gave the imagination room to imagine the absolute worst, and produce the image of a woman whose entire body was one walking wound.

The animation took a single blind step, stiffened, and as if in terrible, clairvoyant realization, emitted a cry pregnant with the certainty that everything it had endured up until this moment was just empty preamble.

The top of its head disappeared in a burst of blood and smoke.

The brutalized version of myself did not fall but just stood there, dazed, everything above mid-forehead amputated, oozing rivulets of blood from the splintered basin its skull had become.

Then she tumbled forward, disappearing even as she fell out of frame.

I blinked several times.

And murmured another silent response to the unknown sender.

Be seeing you.