“Also hard to justify. One would think they had no reason for it. After all, why are wars fought in the first place? Sometimes out of ideology or fear, but more often because one side covets something the other side wants: territory, natural resources, wealth, what have you. Here, the AIsource made sure all of that was provided in abundance that dwarves the Brachiator population’s ability to consume it—and yet when one tribe encounters another somewhere on the Uppergrowth, without detailed negotiations in advance, one of them has to change course or invite an all-out war that doesn’t stop until one side is eliminated.”
I had the oddest sensation of wanting to do something but didn’t know what it was. “What does it look like?”
“Like a slow-motion slaughter. The two sides engulf each other, ripping and clawing. They use those knife-claws of theirs, both attached and detached, and they rip away at each other in parries and thrusts slow enough for my dear old grandma to evade. Sometimes two fighters clinch for as long as twenty minutes, half an hour, before either one succeeds in drawing blood. Sometimes their two tribes savage each other for days on end, fighting a close-quarters war that ancient human villages the same size would have probably mopped up in a matter of minutes. They move so slowly, throughout, that we have time to hover near them on floaters and watch. Sometimes we even talk to them, try to understand what they’re doing and why. They find the question so stupid they can’t even figure out why we ask it.”
I came close to murmuring that they reminded me of human beings, but that kind of facile cynicism comes so easily to me that speaking it out loud would have been cheap. “And why do you think this explains what happened to Cynthia Warmuth?”
“The Porrinyards handled most of her training, but I took her out a few times, and just two weeks ago I had the opportunity to show her one of these battles in progress. We were hovering just below, on floaters. She saw one of the Brachs start to lose its grip and started shouting that we had to rescue it. I told her there was nothing we could do. And—”
Lassiter wiped her eyes, rubbed her chin, scrambled up the curve of the hammock to a water bottle, and allowed herself a deep gulp before returning to me, looking miserable.
I’d seen that look in so many eyes, over the years, that identifying it wasn’t even hard anymore.
It was the look of somebody who had just made up her mind to confess.
“She pulled her floater between two of them: a big pair of alpha-males who hadn’t even reached each other and probably wouldn’t have drawn blood for another ten minutes. She told them their battle was pointless and would only result in death. She said it had to stop. She said she would stay between them to protect them both, and help them talk to each other, so nobody had to die. She said they had plenty of time to try.”
“And the Brachiators?”
“Both sides involved in the battle stopped what they were doing and shouted her down. They called her a Half-Ghost and said they had no time to listen to the Dead. They said that a Ghost who interferes in the affairs in the living might soon find herself returning to the Dead.”
The words hung in the air between us, resonating even as distant laughter, from some of the other residents of Hammocktown, failed to dilute the tension left by their passage. “Why wasn’t I informed of this before?”
“Because I never reported it,” Lassiter said, looking everywhere but at my eyes. “I didn’t see the need. Cynthia backed off at once. The Brachiators resumed their stupid little war. I took her back home, lectured her about the delicacy of our position here, and didn’t let her go until she admitted that she’d acted without thinking. Later, when the Porrinyards took her for her first solo, they picked a different tribe entirely, one about three hundred kilometers from those she’d offended. It was after what happened to Santiago, but I still didn’t see any reason to worry about Cynthia. Or any reason to believe that she’d get…”
The sentence ended there. Lassiter covered her eyes, hung her head in abject misery, and shuddered, the very portrait of personal guilt. It wasn’t hard to tell that there was still something else coming, so I waited the close to two minutes it took her to provide it.
The words, when they came, seemed too soft and distant to emerge from her mouth.
“They say you’re hunting scapegoats. Will I do?”
12. CRASH
I left the community hammock alone, passing a small mob of hungry indentures carrying ration boxes. I recognized about twenty of them as ones I’d interviewed earlier. The friendlier among them invited me to come in and join them.
I was famished, as I hadn’t eaten either breakfast or lunch. I was also exhausted, as the rush of energy that had powered me since leaving Intersleep had begun to fail, and a break was long overdue. But I was not in the mood, so I took my bag and scrambled up a long mesh bridge to a nested bridge two meters below the Uppergrowth. That spot was advantageous mostly because somebody had been smart enough to protect it with an overhang, which kept the mesh relatively free of the dried sap I’d found covering just about everything else. It was also well out of the normal flow of indenture traffic, which meant that I could sit here, alone, enjoying a few moments of solitude after far too many crowded hours.
I could also watch from a relative height as the indentures went about the routines that ended their working day. From where I sat I observed a dozen human beings scrambling like spiders along the cables that separated one dangling hammock from another, some among them moving with the exaggerated care of those who would never be at home in this place, others zipping back and forth as if they’d never once considered any possible input from gravity.
A hammock near me jostled from the movements of the indentures inside. The material was not quite transparent, but some of the bulges I saw were quite recognizable as the knees and palms of a woman making her way to the lowest point. More bulges followed: a different set of knees and palms. At least two people, in that one.
It struck me that the residents of Hammocktown could always see, from the outside, whether or not a hammock was occupied. They might even be able to identify the inhabitants by the shape of the sag.
I wondered if anybody had recognized the telltale sag that marked the presence of Christina Santiago, in the instants before her hammock fell.
If so, nobody I found complicit in her murder would ever be able to cut their losses by admitting the sabotage but proclaiming themselves innocent of wanting to take human life. It was just impossible to claim they hadn’t known anybody was home.
The crime against her suddenly seemed even more cold-blooded than the crime against Cynthia Warmuth. The Santiago incident had taken place late at night. The suns were off and the only light shone through the material of the hammocks whose inhabitants remained awake. Gibb had told me, just yesterday, that Santiago’s lights had been on at the moment her cables parted. Her hammock would have been as aglow as any lantern. Our unknown saboteur would have been able to see her moving around inside. He would have been able to pick out the one moment when she seemed to have settled in at the hammock’s lowest point and was therefore least likely to reach safety.
It was, of course, possible that he hadn’t been that careful, that he hadn’t waited around for the most advantageous moment, that he’d performed his impossible sabotage the instant he had the opportunity, and simply hoped she’d be taken by surprise.
I couldn’t believe that.
The crime was too perfect. It had been committed without witnesses, using tools that nobody but the AIsource was supposed to have. It showed too much organization to believe that any part of it had been left up to chance. Sitting on my bridge of mesh, watching as silhouettes of two human beings combined to form a larger, deeper bulge in a hammock they shared, I was afraid I knew how coldly our unknown saboteur had watched, plotting for his perfect moment.