He wasn’t shocked. “No. But it’s different for me, you see. I make no friends because it’s too time-consuming, and they make no friends because their condition makes the idea superfluous. What about you, Counselor? I gather from your treatment of Mr. Gibb that you don’t make friends either.”
“I don’t.”
“Repugnance, disinterest, or sheer misanthropy?”
“None of your business.”
He took no offense. “I shouldn’t be surprised, considering your background.”
I chilled still further. “What do you know about me?”
“Everything unclassified and much that’s not supposed to be. You’re not exactly obscure, Counselor. The Bocai incident, the Magrison’s Fugue Reparations Trial, the Cort Compromise—they’re all pretty famous to people interested in that kind of thing.”
More chilclass="underline" “And what kind of thing is that?”
“Diplomats being diplomats.”
Given his already established opinion of diplomats, I was not foolish enough to take this as a compliment.
He continued. “It’s fascinating. We have a lot in common, the four of us—you, me, and our linked pair, the Porrinyards—all antisocial by inclination, all obliged by profession to make nice with others.”
I gave my voice all the cold I could muster. “It occurred to me a long time ago, Mr. Lastogne, that diplomacy has very little to do with making friends.”
Lastogne’s expression resembled a warm smile about as much as a heap of blasted rubble resembled a home. “No, Counselor. It doesn’t.”
e then took me to the opposite end of the installation for my first closeup look at a lone Brachiator, clinging to the Uppergrowth five meters from the nearest bridge.
The thing was a collection of four furry, muscle-bound arms, radiating from the edges of a torso streaked and matted with manna juice. The head was a small, neckless bump situated at its center of that torso, bearing facial features reminiscent of the fabled, but extinct, human cousin known as the chimpanzee, except with three eyes and a toothless mouth twisted in what looked like a perpetual grimace. The position of that face atop the torso dictated a life spent facing the Uppergrowth. If any manuever within its range of movement allowed the Brach to face the cloudscape below, it would have included falling as a necessary first step.
The creature was so sluggish that I needed several seconds to be sure it was actually moving. Its edges looked fuzzy until I realized it was surrounded by a halo of insects, scavenging manna drippings from its fur.
“They’re messy eaters,” Lastogne said. “The vines spout sap when punctured, so the average Brach spends its lifetime covered with sticky glop.”
“Which explains the bugs.”
“Yes. We were a little worried about those, at first. An infestation, on Hammocktown, would be seriously unpleasant. But the bugs don’t want anything to do with us, even when we’re covered with juice ourselves. Humans are just, well, naturally repellent.”
I refrained from saying that this was hardly news. “Is it old or disabled in some way?”
“No. That’s as speedy as they get. Makes sense, though, this being an environment where being sure of every move you make bears a definite evolutionary advantage. And with food everywhere and no natural predators supplied by their landlords, they don’t need all that much speed anyway.”
I was reminded of another species I’d encountered, on the case that had given me my secret mission in life. The Catarkhans had been blind, deaf, mute, insensate by all human standards, and so slow-moving that their entire lives had been a ballet of pathetic obliviousness. The dull, inexorable momentum of this Brachiator reminded me of the average Catarkhan. “Is it even aware we’re here?”
“Oh, he can hear us fine. And he’ll be able to see us, too, if we can get within his range of vision. We pretty much have to be next to him, or on top of him, for that to happen. We can even have a chat. They speak Mercantile.”
The dominant language of human trade and diplomacy was a crass and unpoetic tongue, engineered long ago to edit out elements that could be culturally offensive to any of humanity’s thousands of squabbling subcultures. There was not a single beautiful phrase in it. Encountering it among the Brachiators raised my suspicions a notch. “That’s a little too convenient, Mr. Lastogne.”
“Thank the AIsource. They had the whole species fluent by the time our team arrived. A stab at hospitality, I suppose.”
Or a sneaky way of suppressing the real Brachiator language, so Gibb’s team couldn’t comb it for insights into Brachiator thought processes. One One One was aptly named: it seemed to have circles within circles within circles. “So let’s have a talk.”
He scared me silly by grabbing hold of the Uppergrowth and climbing hand-over-hand to the creature’s position. A few seconds of conversation later, he returned, dropping back onto the mesh bridge with such ease that it erased any impression he’d been showing off.
I needed all my self control just to avoid being sick, but kept my face stony as the Brachiator, moving with significantly less grace than Lastogne, obeyed the summons. Unlike Lastogne, who’d managed his feat in seconds, it needed almost a full minute to traverse the distance, greeting us in a scratchy, high-pitched whine. “Peyrin the Half-Ghost asks me to speak to New Ghost. Can New Ghost hear me?”
Lastogne nudged me.
I said, “Yes.”
“I am Friend to Half-Ghosts,” the Brachiator said. “I am not Friend to New Ghosts. I speak to New Ghost only as courtesy to friend Peyrin.”
Lastogne nudged me again.
“I am Counselor Andrea Cort. Friend to,” I hesitated, then felt the correctness of my instinctive response, “the Living.”
The Brachiator needed long seconds to consider that. “Will you stay a New Ghost or become a Half-Ghost like Peyrin?”
Lastogne placed his index finger before his lips.
But I never shut up when told to shut up. “What if I don’t want to be a ghost of any kind? What if I wish Life?”
The Brachiator sniffed, in what may have been its equivalent to the snobbish dismissal humans of self-proclaimed quality reserve for others, below their station, who insist on applying to the same clubs. “Life is not good for ghosts. It exhausts them.”
I ignored Lastogne’s increasingly annoyed gestures. “I breathe air. I eat food. I sleep and wake. These are conditions of Life.”
“You may live, but you are not of Life.”
“And if I become a Half-Ghost?”
“Then you can touch Life.”
“Just touch it?” I asked.
“Yes. And perhaps keep it a little while.”
“I can’t have it?”
“Having it,” the Brachiator said, “is too much for a Half-Ghost to expect.”
Lastogne said, “Thank you, Friend. Now, if you’ll excuse us…”
I bit down hard on the tip of my thumb, found focus in the moment of clarifying pain, and said, “One last question. What do you know about the beings my people call the AIsource?”
Friend to Half-Ghosts said, “We are of the AIsource. We breathe the air of the AIsource. We know the AIsource with every breath. The AIsource know us with every breath. There are no secrets from them.”
“And are they alive or dead by your definition?”
“The AIsource are not Life.”
“Then they’re Ghosts?”
“They are not Ghosts. They are the hands in Ghosts. They are not Life, but the vessel of Life. They.” Friend to Half-Ghosts halted in mid-declaration, like any other sentient searching the air around itself for the phrase best suited for capturing a difficult thought. But the silence went on, and on, and on, stretching so long that the sentence already begun closed itself off like a malignant tumor excised before it could cause irreparable damage to surrounding tissue. Then it twitched its head and said, “I apologize, Peyrin. I have broken the laws of my people. I cannot answer any more of Counselor Andrea Cort’s questions while she remains a New Ghost. Please tell her we can speak if she becomes a Half-Ghost.”