And that’s just if their own deaths were connected. If they were unconnected, then the confusion caused by my also irrelevant passing would be even worse. Imagine anybody trying to float the theory that three different difficult women all died, one after another, from a series of stupid coincidences.
The first person to suggest that unlikely possibility would no doubt find herself marked as a prime suspect.
I preferred not to burden strangers with problems like that.
Not that I’d have the luxury of feeling any guilt if the eventuality came to pass.
The hammock smelled of the previous night’s sweat. I slid down the slope, practicing how to stop midway so I wouldn’t find myself trapped at its lowest point. My progress was minimal. Scrambling back to the circular spine, with somewhat more effort than it would have taken Gibb or the Porrinyards, I tied my bag to one of the restraining hooks, then used one of the cables there to secure myself as well. It wasn’t comfortable, but it felt more secure than coming to rest at the hammock’s lowest point.
Temporarily satisfied, I inhaled the dinner Gibb’s people had packed for me, then activated the hytex and composed a text message to Artis Bringen, confirming that I was on the job but leaving out any of the findings or theories I’d come up with so far. Most Advocates on my level, investigating incidents at remote locations, send obsessively detailed daily updates, documenting every single movement. I’d trained Bringen to tolerate vagueness, on the theory that the less I told him during my investigations, the less I’d have to deal with his second-guessing. I did assure him that while early inquiries seemed to support the theories he’d relayed (unspoken: that the AIsource were as guilty as sin), unforeseen developments suggested a number of other possible interpretations (unspoken: that the search for a scapegoat was proceeding without hitch, thank you). The politician in him would take comfort in that much, and I needed him happy so I could pump him for certain information I wasn’t getting here.
I have had difficulty accessing Confederate files on a Peyrin Lastogne, who is operating as second-in-command under Stuart Gibb.
At this juncture I have no particular basis for suspecting Mr. Lastogne of any involvement in these crimes. His reputation on-site seems to be exemplary. However, I cannot eliminate him from consideration until I am provided his background and diplomatic record. Please forward this information as soon as possible.
I almost sent it, but then thought of something else.
Also, you mentioned that my services were specifically requested by several parties on-site. Neither Gibb nor Lastogne will admit to making this request. As they screen all mail, there seem no other possible sources. Please clarify.
I almost asked him another question, Why would the AIsource say I’m wrong about you? but demurred. That was an issue for a face-to-face meeting, if I even bothered bringing it up at all.
To counter the local protocols that funneled all such messages through Gibb and Lastogne, I scrambled the text and added a subroutine that would reduce the entire message to gibberish if opened by anybody other than Bringen.
A version of that gibberish, forwarded back to me, would provide confirmation, if necessary, that neither Gibb nor Lastogne could be trusted.
I might have done more, but that’s when a fresh wave of exhaustion washed over me.
The delayed-reaction systemic crash that always follows Intersleep by a couple of days is nobody’s idea of fun. I’ve been known to show up at an assignment burning with energy only to later nod off in the middle of a conversation. The supplements I took upon every waking, some of which were prohibited within the Corps, saved me from the worst of it, but I was always hit sooner or later. Between that and the environment on One One One, I was well overdue.
I was not just slow on the uptake right now. I was downright stupid.
Which is one main reason why I failed to be alarmed by the way the gray-green material of my hammock kept wavering in and out of focus.
The effect reminded me of the gray spots I sometimes see in bright light. They’re almost impossible to discern, but they look like little translucent specs of gray receding toward a distant vanishing point. For a few years in my adolescence I thought they were symptoms of the same madness that overcame me on Bocai. Then I mentioned them to one of my doctors and he laughed, assuring me that they were just a common symptom of eye fatigue, experienced by all human beings and not just those guilty of war crimes. They’re maddening, because it’s futile to focus on them: the more you concentrate, the more they remain indistinct blurs, surfing the edge of the eye’s ability to perceive them.
The material of the hammock, lit by the glowing edge of the circular spine, was alive with spots just like those, visible one second, invisible the next. I focused on the effect and found myself drifting, aware of nothing but the sight before me, my thoughts growing duller and more obscured by fog with every instant.
I knew sleep was coming. I could feel the increasing heaviness of my eyelids and the increasing numbness of my limbs. I felt my mouth drop open and my lower jaw brush my chest. I jerked awake, with the sudden jolt of alarm that sometimes interrupts a doze, but recovered, curled my lips into a half-smile, and almost immediately began to relax again.
I think I felt at peace.
A hammock is a nearly perfect bed, after all. It allows the body to seek its own most comfortable position. The give of the material feels comforting, almost womblike. It may be hard for someone afraid of heights to relax on such a thing, when it’s hanging so many kilometers above the nearest solid surface, but once exhaustion takes over, the simpler instincts start to dominate. Oblivion called out to me, in a way it never had in bluegel and rarely did in sleep.
I felt a light breeze on my skin, and stirred in sudden concern. But nothing all that terrible happened, so I fell back asleep.
The dreams that came were not so bad.
I was a little girl of three or four, playing with Mommy and Daddy. For once, I didn’t remember them solely in terms of the tragedy on Bocai. I remembered them sitting together at a table, laughing at some joke I was too young to understand. My father seemed happy, my mother downright merry. For the first time in many years I remembered that she’d been a little taller than my father, who had not been a short man; when they faced each other her eyes addressed his from a height advantage of several centimeters. Her arms had been tanned to a fine leather by a life of working in the sun. Her eyes had been surrounded by a starbust of little crinkles. She’d been stingy with smiles, except when I’d said or done something precocious.
Usually, when I thought of my parents at all, it was not often with anything beyond contempt for the two reckless utopians whose experiment had damned me to spend the rest of my life carrying such a load of insupportable guilt. I almost never thought of them as Mommy and Daddy, and the novelty warmed me for a while, even as I sighed with vague concern over a certain loss of tension in the material that cradled me.
My dreams shifted, passed through a succession of other settings, and turned to the erotic. This was even rarer, as I’d shut off that part of myself, too, after the abuses I’d suffered in isolation. For the first time in longer than I could remember, I imagined being touched by others, without recoiling in revulsion or resentment: hands that emerged from a fog I couldn’t penetrate to caress my face, my thighs, my breasts. I couldn’t tell whose hands they were, or even if they were supposed to belong to any specific person at all. I just knew that they wouldn’t hurt me, and I felt a warmth that rose from my deep, cold center to envelop every frozen part of me. Even in the vagueness of my dream, I felt a little sadness at the thought that, of course, I couldn’t see the face of the unknown lover responsible for making me feel this way, because being the monster I was meant that no such person could ever, possibly, exist. But that regret went away, too, because in a moment I felt everything that had held me back let go all at once.