Then he had done—what? Pressed a button? Signaled confederates to act? Climbed hand-over-hand to the hammock mooring and taken care of it right then and there?
No; even assuming he had the tools in his possession, the perfect conditions he would have needed could have changed at a moment’s notice, the first time some sleepy Hammocktown denizen made an unscheduled trip to the latrine. He had to do what he did at the instant nobody was watching. He would have had to arrange some kind of remote control to cut Santiago’s cables the instant he thought best.
But even that would have required time-consuming, intense advance preparation, for a single human being working without allies.
And all the logical objections to him doing the job the night Santiago fell also applied to him making preparations at any point beforehand. When would he have had the opportunity to sabotage Santiago’s cables with absolute assurance that he wouldn’t be spotted?
Never, that’s when.
He would have needed machine precision.
That brought me back to the AIsource.
The AIsource could have provided him the tools. The AIsource could have assured him the opportunity.
Hell, the AIsource were so integral to any explanation that made the crime possible at all that they rendered our mysterious, hypothetical saboteur superfluous.
Which brought me all the way back to the solution favored by Gibb and Lastogne, the one Bringen had forbidden. That the AIsource had used their tech to murder Santiago and their engineered sentients to murder Warmuth.
It was the only possible solution.
But against that, I had their fervent denial.
And my own absolute, unwavering certainty that they had been telling me some version of the truth.
I sat and thought, lulled by a wafting scent that reminded me of perfume: a flowering section of the Uppergrowth, summoning the insects that swarmed from place to place. In the rigging below, various indentures spotted me, waved, called up to see if I wanted any help, even climbed up to me to see if I wanted any company. I sent them all away, begging the need for privacy.
One One One’s array of internal suns, sizzling away on the vertical shafts that supported them, dimmed, became pale ghosts difficult to distinguish from retinal afterimages, and then switched off completely, returning the world to night. The “sky” below us turned as black as any other sealed room, with but an occasional flash of light from the storms that churned in the clouds. Any AIsource mechanisms that continued flying after the onset of darkness passed by without sound and without light, confident in vision that had nothing to do with the spectrum used by human beings.
As the Habitat disappeared behind that black curtain, the drop below us seemed to stretch from profound to nearly infinite. Some of the hammocks lit up as their occupants finished their day’s activities. I watched the shadows of their movements, and had no trouble picking out some people talking, others sonicing a layer of sweat from their bodies, still others gathering together in twos and threes and fours, for their off-time.
They were all islands in the darkness; and it was all too easy to imagine what this place would be like if they were gone and I had nothing but the darkness and the Brachiators for company. I tried to imagine enduring the solo overnight stay that to Brachiator eyes elevated their status from New Ghosts to Half-Ghosts: hours and hours and hours, in perfect darkness, feeling all that empty space. Some personalities might enjoy that kind of thing. I could only count myself, firmly, in the camp of those who would have been destroyed by it.
It would be so much easier to jump.
Somebody was scrambling up the mesh to my position. I summoned the expression most likely to support the pretense of everything being all right and called down: “Hello?”
“Hello!” It was Stuart Gibb. “You up there, Counselor?”
I’ve never understood the character flaw, common to so many human beings, of asking questions that establish preexisting knowledge of the answer. “Yes, I’m up here.”
Gibb’s head appeared over the edge of the mesh. The light of the nearest occupied hammock, as cast through the netting, separated his face into a stark black-and-white grid, with distorted squares exaggerating the size of the jaw. “I’m not happy to see you up here by yourself, Counselor. You’re not used to local conditions and shouldn’t be wandering around unescorted.”
“I’m not wandering. I’m taking a break.”
Gibb looked past me, as if suspecting the presence of a very short and narrow person using me for cover. “But unescorted.”
“That is the very definition of a break.”
His only answer to that was a pout. “Peyrin was supposed to watch out for you.”
“Your people are more candid when he’s not around.”
He sighed, pulled himself up onto the netting, slid a little bit toward me, and came to rest still a comfortable distance away. The sag of the material here was much less than in any of the hammocks I’d seen, so it must have been significantly harder for him to justify the constant accidental body contact he’d been so helpless to avoid in our previous meeting. I wasn’t sure that meant I’d misjudged him yesterday, or whether he thought some lines too obvious to cross. He looked anywhere but at me. “It is a hell of a view, isn’t it?”
I said nothing.
“Ten of our people, ten, work full-time on the engineering problems alone. You’d be surprised how many of them come up, in a world this size, that never bothered us in any of the ones we’ve built. The AIsource have given us a few tours. There’s an air-circulation system driven by turbines the size of small moons. There are heat-dispersal units around the suns, designed to keep anything too close to them from boiling. The structural stresses those verticals have to endure are enough to give our experts the screaming shakes. We keep getting moving radiation sources from that toxic sludge down below; we don’t even want to know what’s alive at the lowest levels. It’s all so bloody arbitrary, and at the same time so bloody perfect. Sometimes, when I come out here, and wonder if there was ever a point to all this, I wonder if it’s just something like the Taj Mahal or the Striding Colossus of Parnajan, just something the blips put together to prove that they could: ‘Look On My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair!’ That kind of thing.”
“It’s one theory,” I said.
“No, it’s not. It’s bullshit. It’s just an old Dip Corps hack doing the best he can, with what little he has. I’m more concerned about you. You don’t strike me as the kind of person who goes out of her way for a scenic view.”
I could have pointed out that the darkness that consumed the Habitat at night was the precise opposite of scenic, as it utterly eliminated any view. Instead, I shook my head. “Nothing as frivolous as that, sir. I needed to feel the rhythms of life here. The way your people move when there’s no place they particularly have to be, the way they carry themselves when there’s nothing they particularly have to do. Even the sounds they make when most of them have gone inside for the night. It needed to get a taste of what it was like the night Santiago died.”
He nodded. “Have you arrived at any conclusions?”
“None I’m prepared to share.”
“Fair enough.” He glanced at his lap, seemed to remember the bundle’s presence, and tossed it over. “Nobody seems to remember seeing you eat today. So I had them put together a little package for you. Nothing speciaclass="underline" just the usual slop that passes for food locally. It’ll keep you alive, at least.”