I didn’t often take food or drink in the presence of my fellow human beings, communal meals implying a social connection I preferred to avoid. But I obliged, gasping when the stuff hit my throat.
“Understand this, Counselor: that cloud layer below us is sixteen kilometers straight down; the ocean layer many kilometers below that; the atmosphere is unbreathable for most of that distance and only gets more caustic the farther you fall. There’s nothing between us and a nasty drop but the layer of flexible fabric holding us right now. It’s hard not to spend most of your time here thinking about the dangers of a misstep. I keep intoxicants around for newcomers who need to be pacified while they get used to the idea and while I figure out if they’re going to have a problem with the heights. You’ve been looking dizzy since you got here. So I need to ask you: Are you going to have a problem?”
I felt the canvas sag beneath my weight, and reminded myself that if there were any chance of it tearing, Gibb and his fellow diplomats would have long since tumbled through the clouds. “No.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m not likely to change my answer based on repetition.”
Gibb studied me for longer than I would have liked. “I hope you’re right. Because this is no longer a single murder investigation.”
He hesitated, as if afraid to speak the next words.
Lastogne spared him the trouble. “We had a second killing the day before yesterday.”
2.
wish I could say that the news surprised me, but even before I arrived I’d suspected that the single murder was likely to become a multiple.
I’d received fair warning just out of Intersleep, when I was least primed to process it. It’s a lot like being wakened from a coma with a tap from a hammer: a moment of crystal shock, so unpleasant in and of itself it made me want to sink back into the murk.
I don’t even like waking from normal sleep. There’s always a first, terrible moment when I remember who and what I am; and every morning, my heart convulses tight around the knowledge, like a blister forming around a wound.
.
No, regular sleep is bad enough, if like me you shun the implants that allow controlled dreaming.
Intersleep is worse.
In Intersleep, the conscious mind is shut down for weeks or months, Mercantile reckoning, defying actual flatline with a few rebellious bursts of mental static. It’s not so much thought or memory as the lint thought and memory left behind.
This may be an enjoyable thing for people predisposed to dream of pleasant memories or erotic interludes.
I’ve never been.
So I sat upright in the translucent bluegel, my eyelids still sticky with it, my knees curled tight against my chest, my eyes burning as acid tears carved paths through the caked goo on both cheeks.
I felt loss, shame, self-hatred, rage, and the need to make something bleed.
I shuddered. Sobbed.
Wanted to die.
Closed my eyes and cursed myself for not being able to rise above it.
Held my breath, felt the heart pound in my chest, and willed it to quiet down before it burst like a bomb inside me.
.
anity, or as close as I ever came to it, returned in pieces. I remembered where I had been and where I was supposed to be now.
I’d been on a world called Grastius, working a case that had been one of the most colossal wastes of time in a long career spent investigating colossal wastes of time.
I was supposed to be heading back to New London. I should have found myself on a Dip Corps loading dock, being fussed over by the sleeptechs whose most substantial contributions to my well-being would have been a few comforting words and an offer of something sweet to drink. I didn’t exactly miss having them flutter about, but their absence meant that something had gone wrong. “Shit.”
Once upon a time, before I fed it a personality capable of getting along with me, the wakeup monitor would have advised me in the most syrupy tones imaginable that everything was all right. “Yeah. Shit.”
I prized the irritation value of that craggy, long-suffering voice. “Why aren’t we home? We’re not about to crash into anything big, are we?”
The monitor replied with an audible grimace. “We wouldn’t be that lucky.”
“Then what?”
“New London had us diverted.”
“What do you mean, diverted?”
“Diverted,” it repeated, with a level of annoyance that matched my own. “Detoured. Shanghaied. Assigned a different destination. Ordered to pursue the wild gooses. You know. Diverted.”
My head throbbed. “Shit.”
“That,” the monitor said, “would be yet another synonym.”
“Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.”
“Don’t milk it, honey.”
“I was due for a sabbatical.” Which I’d intended to spend mapping a private investigation into a certain matter involving Unseen Demons.
“I know. So did they. Evidently they didn‘t care.”
“Why couldn’t they divert somebody else?”
“They must have supposed it would be too cruel to do it with somebody who actually had a life to inconvenience.”
“Fuck you.”
“What makes you think I’d be interested, babe?”
Then again, a little irritation value went a long way. “Where are we?”
“Seven hours from arrival at a cylinder habitat designated One One One, AIsource registration, ranking Dip Corps representative a Mr. Stuart Gibb.”
The AIsource registration was the first sign this was serious.
It was impossible to travel extensively in civilized space without dealing with that community of independent software intelligences, but they were bodiless, untouchable entities who wandered among us offering advice and selling high-tech services without ever offering us enough access to be touched in return. The little we knew about them was vague in the extreme. We knew that they’d all originated as proprietary software of various early-developing organic sentients whose respective technologies had advanced enough to create computer programs capable of guiding their own evolution. We knew that the proto-AIs had achieved true sentience and, sometime after that, independence long before mankind emerged from the primordial muck, that they’d contacted each other at some point during their explorations of the universe, and that they’d formed a community of sorts, which was there to greet us poor flesh-and-blood things when we finally dragged our asses free of our respective gravity wells, life-support equipment and all.
We did know where they kept their hardware, though the current conventional wisdom was that it was nowhere in conventional space and certainly no place paranoid organic creatures were capable of bombing. We did know what benefits they derived from maintaining trade and diplomatic relations with the rest of us, unless it was just to rack up high scores (a computer game playing ). We did know just how smart and how powerful they were, and how easily they could wipe the more conventional sentients from their sky if it ever occurred to them to want to, though I’ve been to more than one Dip Corps gathering where idle contemplation of the subject led to uncomfortable silences at best and white-knuckled drinking at worst.