“And the others? Li-Tsan? D’Onofrio? Anybody else, hurt in ways that just don’t happen to show yet?”
He emitted a bitter laugh. “Do you honestly feel sorry for Li-Tsan?”
“My own soft spot is for people who have good reason to be angry.”
He nodded, accepting that, and examined his hands again, his demeanor not so much sad or afraid as simply expressively silent.
I leaned in close. “Here’s the thing, Peyrin. I have no sympathy for Gibb at all. Not as a mediocrity, or as anything else. Not after what he’s done. But I can’t afford to continue wasting my time with issues outside the scope of my investigation. I need these less pressing matters out of the way. So if you have any regard for him at all, you’ll stop withholding information. Tell me who you are. Because, otherwise, I will be forced to go through him, which might entail ruining more lives than just his.”
For a heartbeat I thought I’d gotten to him. He lowered his head, opened his mouth, seemed about to give secrets voice, and then slumped, the lines on his forehead mapping more genuine pain than his eyes had ever communicated. “I’m sorry. But I can’t.”
There was no point in further discussion. I stood up, and stared at him for several heartbeats, discerning arrogance, regret, damnation, and a peculiar form of triumph among the ingredients of the emotional stew brewing behind his dark, penetrating eyes.
The bastard was going to let this happen.
I turned to leave, but he stopped me before I could. “He’s not here.”
My spine rippled with a certain undefined dread. “Where is he?”
“He flew back to Hammocktown an hour ago.”
The words might as well have been nonsense syllabification, for all the sense that made. “What?”
Lastogne went back to looking at his hands. “He insisted. He said that people look to him to set an example, and that he wasn’t going to sit around like a symbol of failure when he could go back and in that way show everybody that we’re not defeated yet. He said he knew he was supposed to be under arrest, but that if we left him there without a means of transportation back he would be just as much a prisoner there as he could be here. He said that as long as he was prisoner anywhere he might as well make himself a living reminder that we still have a job to do.” He looked up, his eyes uncharacteristically pained, and his grin uncharacteristically apolgetic. “You should have heard him, Counselor. He was inspiring. As inspiring as a nonentity can be.”
I still couldn’t believe it. “You let him go? Alone?”
“I repeat: he was inspiring.”
“Goddamn you,” I said.
Lastogne moved faster than anybody I’ve ever seen. Faster than the Porrinyards leaping to my rescue, faster than any acrobat or assassin, faster than any unenhanced human being has the right to move. I had just enough time to register the blur of motion, and flinch, certain that all my reconstructions were in error, and that he was the murderer come to finish what the Porrinyards had managed to stop. Then he was before me, his hand on my arm, his eyes still sad, but his lips curled once again into his trademark wry grimace. “Counselor—”
My mouth was dry. “What?”
“Before you do what you have to do to him, I just want you to think about this gesture of his. And remember the one thing worth admiring about mediocrities.”
His eyes were so black with knowledge now that I had to look away. “What?”
“Every once in a while,” he said, “they’re not.”
I was looking at Peyrin Lastogne, but I saw Artis Bringen’s face.
That made up my mind.
I told Lastogne, “There are two documents in my hytex folder, both coded. I need you to free both for transmission. One will go right away, the other is timed to go in twenty-four hours. If either one of them remains locked, you’ll be cited for Obstruction.”
“Which one’s about Gibb and which one’s about me?”
“None of your business,” I said, and turned my back on him.
There was no point in making sure he’d do it…because if he didn’t, I was in even more trouble here than I thought I was.
I found Gibb on one of the net bridges that formed the boulevards of Hammocktown. Like the platform where we’d met before the attempt on my life, it hung close to the Uppergrowth, so near that oppressive ceiling that a tall standing man might have had to slouch.
Gibb lay on his side, stripped to his waist, wearing only a pair of silver briefs; as intoxicated as he seemed, when I climbed the net to his level, he resembled nothing so much as a lonely Bacchus, all dressed up for an orgy where he held the only invitation.
It was as clear a night as One One One ever enjoys. The fruity smell of Uppergrowth was clearer and sharper than it had been, on either of my prior visits; I was almost nauseated by it, until I recognized that nervousness played a hand and did my best to counteract it. The usual storm layer below had thinned, revealing another layer of angry lightning. I glanced down at one of the flashes and, knocked off balance by the inevitable attack of vertigo, immediately scolded myself for doing such a silly thing. Even with the power that lit Hammocktown shut off, my own lights, pulled from the bag I’d left with the Porrinyards and secured to my wrists and forehead, were more than enough to guide me. I didn’t need distant weather to remind me of the altitude.
But Gibb seemed to find the perspective comforting, and the open spaces liberating. He seemed to belong here more than he’d belonged anywhere else, and was able to grin when I finally made it to his level. “You’re getting better at this, Counselor. I’m impressed.”
“Thank you, Ambassador. I wish I could say the same about this stupid gesture of yours.”
He didn’t remind me I wasn’t allowed to call him Ambassador. “It’s not a gesture. Oh, I gave some noble-sounding excuses, but the truth is, I was getting a little claustrophobic in there. At least here, I’m able to look after the place, and pretend I’m accomplishing something. “He rolled over on the bridge, setting off ripples that left me bobbing up and down in seasick rhythms. “At the very least I’m showing those bastards they can’t scare me. Those soulless, game-playing strings of code. Anything that shows those blips I’m not afraid is worth doing.”
“You’re wrong, you know. Risking your life this way doesn’t do anybody any good.”
He closed his eyes, gripped the netting with hands curled into claws, and for just a heartbeat seemed ill. “No, maybe not. But it preserves the illusion.”
I slid the rest of the way toward him, stopping only when we touched, the brief moment of contact as distasteful to me as our first encounter had been.
His smile was the wholly unpersuasive kind that only a professional diplomat could carve. Damned if there wasn’t some pretense of compassion in his voice, some veneer of fatherly understanding that gave every word out of his mouth an extra, oily sheen. “I didn’t like you from minute one, Counselor, even before I knew what you were. The way the air just chilled around you. Nobody can carry that much hostility around with them without a damn good reason.”
It would have been much nicer to have this particular conversation from opposite sides of a conference table. Having it in an abandoned and frequently sabotaged Hammocktown, with nothing but open space awaiting me if he snapped, was far from my own idea of favored conditions. “You should come back to the hangar with me, sir. We’ll be more comfortable there.”
“No, you’ll be more comfortable there. I’m fine where I am.”
That’s when I knew. He needed me scared because he was scared and he didn’t want to be the only one. Strangely enough, I respected that. It meant his diplomatic instincts were still at play, leading him to do whatever he could to ensure a level playing field.