I didn’t like personal questions in general, but I’d opened the door. And, besides, Levine gave me a feeling I rarely had for my fellow human beings: the sense that he could have been a friend, had I been in the market for friends. “Go ahead.”
“It’s a bad one. I don’t mean any offense.”
“I said go ahead.”
“I’ve known your name for a couple of years now. I know your background, and I know your legal status. It comes up a lot when researching my own. Don’t worry, I haven’t mentioned it to anybody here, but—”
My ears burned. “Just ask your question.”
“I was wondering…if I could defect to get out of a bad legal situation, why can’t you? I mean, I’m not advocating it, or saying that you should. But it’s not like the Dip Corps is an ideal place for you. You’re practically their slave. Haven’t you ever thought of getting some alien government, like mine, to give you sanctuary on its own soil?”
The question’s rudeness was not nearly as breathtaking as its honesty. I decided against going off on him and gave him an answer, even if I could only afford a less than candid one. “I don’t know of any alien governments who wouldn’t hand me over to the Bocaians.”
“Oh,” he said, deflating. “Just a thought.”
And a good one. But his adopted people, the Riirgaans, had been among the loudest raising challenges to my immunity. There were voices among the Tchi who hate me more than you can imagine. The Bursteeni agreed that I was functioning under diminished capacity, but thought that I should establish it once and for all in a Bocaian court, a course of action I considered tantamount to suicide. The K’cenhowten didn’t offer refugees sanctuary. The Cid were downright creepy. That pretty much did it for the major powers. Some of the lesser races regarded me with sympathy, but none had enough clout to buck a concerted interspecies attempt to extradite me. The Confederacy, at least, wouldn’t have forced the Dip Corps to give me up unless I became a much hotter issue than I am now. The Corps might not have loved me, and might have come close to giving me up half a dozen times, but they had invested in my training and could count on results from me. I was an asset, to be hoarded for as long as they had use for me.
And there was another factor I hadn’t mentioned, one that outweighed all the others.
Even if possible, defection amounted to surrender.
I wasn’t crazy about the human race, or the people I worked for, but I’d never been willing to give the bastards the satisfaction.
Cif Negelein lived up to his advance billing.
I didn’t recognize the name of his homeworld, but it was either an eccentric place or one that considered him among its more eccentric sons. Squat, neckless, round-eyed, and top-heavy, he affected an extreme form of Hammocktown’s fashionable near nudity, eschewing any uniform but for a thin strip of black cloth around his waist. His chest and arms were so furry they almost rendered any further clothing superfluous anyway. His face and scalp were as hairless as the plasm human surgeons implant on burn victims on worlds without access to AIsource Medical. This had evidently been arranged to clear space on his skin for a tattooed essay in the blocky alphabet of Hom. Sap Mercantile, delivering a small-print personal manifesto in a spiral that began just over his brow and culminated with an ellipsis at the highest point. Affectation, insanity, or gesture of deep commitment to a religion I didn’t even want to guess at, it made eye contact with him almost impossible. In my first few attempts to maintain a conversation with him, the words snaking along from temple to temple kept coming into focus upside down, often shutting me down in mid-sentence. Short of inserting him into a rotating tube and reading the words as he spun, I had to focus on his mouth to avoid being blindsided by any features above his nose.
Negelein, a talented painter of both landscapes and portraits, hadn’t been able to keep conventional art supplies during the eighteen years he’d served, but he’d produced many thousands of works using implants in his fingertips to daub intangible pigments on projected virtual media. He illustrated almost everything he said with finger-twitches that called forth works he’d produced on One One One: from vivid head shots of the people he spoke about to colorful panoramas of his fellow indentures working on the Habitat’s upside-down horizon. He had one portrait of Warmuth, portraying her as a wide-eyed, sallow-faced gamin placed against a nondescript black background. She looked sad, vulnerable, and alone: a facile characterization that completely contradicted the impression I’d gotten from the other images I’d seen. Against that, he offered almost a dozen studies of Santiago, starting with the portrait of a woman simmering in mid-frown, backlit by a nimbus of glowing red light. It taught me nothing either. But as I studied the work, searching for an answer that wasn’t there, he said, “Most of the people here didn’t realize it, but their entire problem lay in the failure to recognize an alien mind.”
“I suppose we’re not talking about the Brachiators.”
He shook his head. “No. Christina. People had a rough time seeing who she was and what she was about; they just saw this sullen little bitch who was ready to bite your head off the first time they even looked at her funny.”
“Like that incident with Warmuth.”
He chuckled. “Like that. And a dozen others I can name. You didn’t get along with Christina. You experienced her.”
“And you’re saying she had an alien mind?”
He drew a curlicue in midair, dabbed a few lines underneath it, and emerged with a fair-to-middling caricature of me. “I suspect you already have a good idea what I mean, Counselor. When you get to the core of it, we’re all aliens to one another, raised according to some common precepts but otherwise ruled by paradigms far removed from those of the people around us. The tragedy is that we tend to judge others by standards that may make perfect sense to us but which are more likely totally irrelevant to them. That’s what you’re doing to me right now, even though you’re doing an excellent job of hiding it, and that’s what most people did to Christina. By the standard of their own worlds, their own heads, she was an intolerable person. But the fact is, she was as sociable toward them as she knew how to be.”
The man’s pontificating was beginning to wear on me. My yawn, another in a series of symptoms that my post-Intersleep crash was coming on fast, might have been just as inevitable on the most energetic day of my life. But I recovered: “What was she, then? Just socially inept?”
Another curlicue. “Think about her background. Her world had mortgaged its entire population for generations. Her family had no tomorrow greater than endless repetitions of today, no dreams beyond returning home at the end of a shift, no options beyond grinding despair and dull-eyed, grim-faced loyalty to the only possible employer. Their rights were so curtailed that they couldn’t even start families without proving it wouldn’t harm production. I don’t even think she encountered the concept of leisure time at all until she got here. It speaks well of her independent nature that she sold herself offworld as soon as she was able to find another buyer, but by then her routines were set, and she came to work for the Corps acting out the same behavior patterns she showed at home, which happened to be: Keep your head down. Don’t make friends. Don’t share confidences. Don’t question orders. Submerge every personal feeling you have: just concentrate on the work and nothing but the work. From everything she’d been taught, this was appropriate behavior. From the viewpoint of everybody else, it made her a pill and a half. Both viewpoints were accurate as long as you bought their starting positions.”