Analog Science Fiction and Fact 04/01/11 Read online

  I was beginning to see the ugly picture. Assuming there was any truth to Harriman’s version of events—and none of these details offered any particular reason for doubt—the powers behind this project had made the fatal mistake of valuing secrecy over social viability. Had they assigned a crew of fifty, well within the budget of any power capable of paying for AIsource Medical service, a personality as parasitical as al-Afiq’s would have been little more than the common annoyance that united everybody else in their shared resentment. In a crew of four, al-Afiq became unavoidable, a malignant tumor that insisted on burrowing its way into the skulls of anybody forced to be locked up with him.

  After a pause, I focused on the two silent women, who stared back at me with eyes as communicative as buttons sewn on cloth. “How did the Diyamens get on with this al-Afiq?”

  Harriman continued to answer for them. “His verbal abuse of them was less effective, as they were more emotionally grounded and harder to upset.”

  “Did they hate him?”

  “Yes, but they didn’t give al-Afiq the satisfaction of showing it. The real problem for them was dealing with the level of tension aboard the station. They had to work themselves to the point of exhaustion just keeping Harriman and al-Afiq separated as much as possible. It was, for all of them, an impossible situation, and if al-Afiq’s vile threats and the potential damage to their careers hadn’t prevented the others from resigning, the slimy bastard might have been working in the solitude he deserved as soon as they could relay their resignations to home base.”

  I kept my eyes focused on the Diyamens, who continued to project eerie blankness. “The two of them must have had nothing but sympathy for you.”

  “For Harriman,” the man who had been Harriman corrected me, his eyes twinkling with puckish humor at this insistence on precision. “Would you like to hear about the killing now?”

  I considered it, but decided not. The killing itself was, by and large, a known quantity. The tormentor had been alive and was now dead; Harriman had killed him and had been honest about killing him. Knowing exactly what hateful words had proven the final incentive, how many blows had rained down and how long it had taken al-Afiq to die, were all matters for Bengid and her team of prosecutors. My sole duty was finding a legal way to separate the inseparable.

  I stood. “It’s been a long day. I just arrived here, after all. I believe I’ll check some of your assertions and resume tomorrow morning.”

  “Until then,” Harriman said.

  I turned and left the three of them behind. But just as the ionic field at the door discorporated for me, he had one more thing to say. “Counselor?”

  I turned to face him.

  He said, “I can only hope that you’ve chosen the best partner for your joining.”

  I’ve dealt with many sociopaths in my career. Between my past and my ruthless streak I’ve even been accused of the condition myself. I’d long ago learned how to recognize it in others. But it was not what I saw in Harriman. That empathy he projected felt too real to me. I would have bet anything I owned that it was not at all feigned, that the capacity to commit murder had not robbed him, no, them, of the capacity to feel for the concerns of a near-stranger . . . even when, as in this case, that stranger was searching for the means to condemn them to prison.

  It didn’t stop me from considering their willingness to use their gestalt as a hiding place for their own guilt the obscenity the Porrinyards had so correctly called it.

  I didn’t owe his best wishes enough respect to thank him. I just nodded and left the room without another word.

  Three hours later, I sat alone in the conference center, paging through hytex files on the principals. I’d told the Porrinyards, who were randy and wanted to turn in, that I needed to go through the respective backgrounds on my own; just why I didn’t ask them to help, I didn’t know, since they were much faster at sifting raw data than I ever could be and could have found me every relevant datum in a fraction of the time. But they’d experienced my occasional need for solitude before and took it for what it was, wishing me a gentle good night before leaving me to my work.

  They didn’t need my help to act on their randiness right now. They had each other. It might have been masturbation in the psychological sense, but could not be better in the physical. I had no reason to doubt their assurances that it was even better when I participated, but it wasn’t because I was so brilliant, but because lovemaking is always better when another separate person is involved, and they didn’t have that unless I was there.

  Of course, I wouldn’t be “separate” when we were all sharing one mind.

  For the triad we’d become, alone in our multiple heads, the dating pool would certainly provide its own share of challenges . . .

  I gritted my teeth, put the thought away, and dove into the files.

  There was no information on just what fields Harriman and al-Afiq happened to be trained in, but I found plenty on what they were like as human beings.

  I don’t know what I’d expected of someone with the name al-Afiq, but the holo attached to his file depicted a slight, wide-eyed Nordic type, with a high forehead and hair the color of spun gold. His smile was as ingratiating as any I’d ever seen. It made friends with the recording technology and suggested a gentle sense of humor he would use on himself long before he ever thought of targeting anybody else.

  But his file, or at least those portions of it I could access without pulling rank on the system, told a different story. In the last quarter century the man had been married six times, in each case for less than two years. Of the five women involved, one had killed herself after less than six weeks with him, two others had taken transports to distant systems, and a fourth had followed a mental breakdown with a trip to a nanopsychologist, where she completely wiped the memories of the year and a half she’d endured in her nightmare husband’s company. That last one had led to a cute but infuriating sequel where he sought her out and seduced her into marriage a second time, a scheme that following the inevitable second divorce had come within a hair’s breadth of leading to yet another memory wipe and another trip on the merry-go-round before a protective friend found out what was happening and hustled her away for her own protection.

  At least a dozen colleagues who had worked with al-Afiq on past projects had filed preference papers declaring that they’d never work with him again, not for any amount of career compensation. Four others had been fired from their positions either for assaulting him or for charges related to counter-complaints he filed when they tried to report his pattern of escalating mental abuse.

  He sounded like a charming guy.

  To remain in demand despite all this history, he must have been not only brilliant but indispensable.

  Personally, I liked to believe that if I’d ever found himself unfortunate enough to be locked up with the little shit for any extended period of time, I would have broken him long before he found a way to break me. After all, as many people including the Porrinyards had told me, I can be a real bitch when I want to be, and just as frequently when I don’t. It was flattering to believe that the delight this walking slab of vomit took in recreational cruelty might not have been up to my willingness to wield the same skill set upon the deserving. But that was just self-flattery. I was brittle and broke often. As far as I could tell, al-Afiq never had.

  Ernest Harriman’s most serious negative citation was an allegation of emotional instability, from an administrator at one of the several universities he’d taught at. Aside from that, he had nothing but laudatory reports, as both a researcher and a team player. There was one subtle trouble sign: a brief sabbatical he’d taken at the behest of one supervisor. The reason given was “exhaustion,” but none of his other colleagues on that project had taken any unscheduled time off except for one who had needed to return home to attend an ailing daughter and another who had needed medical attention for one of the few cancers that could not be cured on site. In context, the terse explanation of
“exhaustion” was almost certainly a mercy on the part of a boss reluctant to damage Harriman’s career. An emotional breakdown? A mental collapse?

  The reports on him struggled to acknowledge a certain degree of instability without condemning him for it. It was a sign that, whatever his shortcomings, people generally liked the man and wished him well.

  It didn’t speak well of this project’s unknown sponsors that they’d assign one man noted for his emotional frailty to work in close quarters with one known to abuse his colleagues without mercy.

  The background available on the Diyamens provided no similar overtones of impending doom, which isn’t even remotely the same thing as saying that it offered no surprises. It turned out that Mi and Zi were not the siblings or clones I’d presumed them to be, but two people born light-years apart, on two separate colonies at far ends of Confederate Space. Their previous names meant nothing to me and nothing in their previous lives offered me any path to understanding how they’d been chosen for the project. The big surprise was that Mi had been male and Zi female; and that their pre-enhancement holos portrayed two human beings who failed to resemble each other in any way. After a short period working together on a habitat construction project for Dejahcorp, a company I’d encountered a number of times in the past, they’d fallen in love and for some reason that I can only presume must have made sense to them at the time decided that cylinking offered a better shared future than living together as lovers.

  However it was that they’d come to this epiphany, they seemed to be serious about it, as cylinking wasn’t the only change the two had made in themselves. It went beyond altering their appearances to become as identical outside as they now were inside. Apparently, they now weren’t the women I’d taken them for, but surgical neuters, devoid of any sexual equipment either internal or external.

  I blinked at this intelligence and thought, This must have made them fun morale officers.

  Maybe the project really didn’t have to do with anything Harriman and al-Afiq were doing. Maybe, unknown to themselves, they were the subjects being studied, and the Diyamens were there just to observe the inevitable explosion from the perspective of the ultimate control specimens.

  And maybe I’d had too much bruj.

  Another couple of hours passed. It was now past midnight by the ship’s clock. The Negev wasn’t a warship, running on constant adrenaline. Aside from the most skeletal of skeleton crews assigned to make sure the automated systems didn’t do something stupid to us while we slept, everybody else would be in their rooms, locked down.

  I sighed, shut down the files, and sat before the fading holo debating whether to continue pouring my attention down a black hole, or join the Porrinyards in what would (if not immediately, then at least eventually) be sleep.

  I was still rubbing my eyes when the door slid open.

  Lyra Bengid poked her head around the corner, like a blond head on a stick. “Andrea? Am I interrupting?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And you’re just in time. Come in.”

  She entered. She’d had a little sleep, it seemed; her eyes were a little less puffy, her skin a little less drawn. Her hair had been done up in another bun, this one at the back of her head instead of on top of it. But she’d let a couple of locks hang loose, one on either side of her face. She had changed from her suit to a casual tunic, with cutouts at the shoulders. As she grabbed one of the now-stale pastries from the array of refreshments, she asked, “How’s it going?”

  “About as well as I expected. This al-Afiq seems to have been a real piece of work. I might have killed him myself.”

  “You probably would have.” She registered my sudden scowl and added. “Oh, come on, you should know me better than that. That wasn’t a reference to your record.”

  I fought to restrain my reflexive chill. “Only my pathology, right?”

  She didn’t rise to the bait. “Any crimes you committed in childhood were a long, long time ago, and I’ve never once in my entire life given you any shit because of anything you did back then. Or since. Come on, I thought you suddenly wanted to get along. Talk to me like a person for once.”

  She sat down at the same chair as before, but this time leaned back and propped her legs on the tabletop, crossed at the ankles. She was barefoot. I happened to notice that the littlest toe on the right foot failed to line up with the others, the way it might have been if she’d broken it once and never bothered to have it corrected when it healed wrong. When I looked from there to her face I was just in time to see her take a huge messy bite of the pastry, with an excessive twist of the jaw that both implied defiance and made it a deliberate burlesque.

  Bengid had always had a funny streak, and had wasted a lot of effort, in our old days, trying to josh me out of my perpetual bad mood. She’d never managed more than a break in my constant cloud cover, which always closed up again as soon as the new storms could rush in, but it had never stopped her from trying.

  For a long time I’d found that annoying as hell. I’d resented her, maybe even hated her.

  Now my cheeks hurt. The muscles there were not used to grinning.

  She needed several seconds to swallow the mouthful of pastry, but when she was done she used what was left in her hand as a pointer. “You know, I haven’t seen nearly enough of that, over the years. The way you usually act, it’s like you’re afraid your jaw’s going to fall off.”

  “Where the hell are your shoes, anyway?”

  “If I had my way, the ship recycling system. Terrible, hateful things. They pinch my heels. I’ve come to prefer a cold deck on my toesies whenever I’m not being Queen Bitch Prosecutor. You should try it sometime.” She took another, more reasonable, bite of the pastry, chewed contentedly for several seconds, and said, “So, have you come up with any ideas how I’m going to wrap this puppy up?”

  The sudden return to business felt like a delaying action. “Maybe. I’ve noticed something significant that I think I’m going to need to explore a little bit more. But that’s not exactly what you came here to talk about, is it?”

  She considered that. “No.”

  “Go ahead, then. I know you want to ask.”

  She lifted her heels off the edge of the table, returned her feet to the floor, and pulled her chair in close. “Why would you want to do this thing to yourself?”

  I’d almost forgotten her skill as a prosecutor and her willingness to frame questions like daggers. “Because I love them.”

  “I didn’t think you were even capable of the emotion. Surprised the hell out of me, when I heard you’d moved in together.”

  It was a simple statement of fact, uncontaminated by venom. So I remained serene. “It surprised me too.”

  “I’ve also got to admit that once I had time to think about it a little, I was really happy for you. I’d always wanted somebody somewhere to get past that prickly skin of yours, and there’s a certain logic to who you chose, as it probably takes two people just to tolerate you.”

  This was an observation that others who knew me had made; a joke that the three of us had long made among ourselves. Bengid was going to have to do better if she expected to provoke me with such tired iterations of the obvious.

  “And Lord knows,” she said, suddenly back to groping, the point she wanted to make still somewhere in the undiscovered country ahead of her, “with those two, the sex is probably a record breaker.” Something must have flashed across my face because she grimaced from the unwanted image. “Don’t answer that. I’ve been stuck in a personal drought since my last divorce.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. This conversation isn’t about me.”

  I nodded. “All right.”

  She spent several seconds studying the Confederate and Dip Corps symbols on the wall, as if expecting to find some answers there. “You used to be the angriest person I’d ever met. You weren’t willing to be anything more than the sum total of all the bad things you’ve been blamed for. You’re probably still n
o walk at the beach . . . but they’ve calmed you down, a lot. I give them credit for that.”

  “Tell them that.”

  “I would, if it was the same thing as saying I approve. But subsuming everything you are to some composite personality that doesn’t even exist yet? Where the hell does that come from?”

  “I told you. Love.”

  “Oh, bullshit, ‘love,’” she snapped, with a rush of venom darker than any I’d ever expected from her. “My parents broke up when I was six. I’ve had two terrible marriages. I understand that letting a partner into your life means compromising some of your personal autonomy, but I also know that anybody who asks you to give up everything you’ve ever been sure as shit isn’t operating under any reasonable definition of a healthy relationship.”

  I shook my head in knowing pity. “It’s not really giving up anything, Lyra.”

  “Oh?” She leaned back and folded her arms under her breasts. “Then disabuse me.”

  “It’s evolving to the next stage. It’s keeping everything I always was and adding it to everything they always were. It’s seeing everything they see, feeling everything they feel, sharing all my worst secrets with them and welcoming them to do the same with me. It’s remembering every experience they ever lived, and letting them remember all of mine. It’s becoming a new person, who’s not only all of us put together, but all of us transcended.”

  “Wow.” Her arms remained folded, but now she’d raised an eyebrow as well, in the quietly incredulous manner she had always employed whenever she heard crazy talk. “It’s just too bad that when you’re done there won’t be an individual who thinks of herself as Andrea Cort anymore.”

  “That individual will still have everything Andrea Cort was in her. I know it can be hard to understand, because it took me a while to understand it, but it’s like a couple of different rivers, merging at a fork to become a bigger one. All the water that led to that point is still part of the mix; if you cared enough to try, you could examine any individual scrap of flotsam on the surface and see which river deposited it. But the river itself remembers being both.”