Analog Science Fiction and Fact 04/01/11 Page 5

  Once again, I took my place in the interrogation room. Once again, I watched in silence as Harriman and the Diyamens were brought in, and as they took their habitual positions on the opposite side of the table: Harriman dominating in the center, the two women shrinking, nurturing ghosts at his sides. Once again, Harriman offered a pleasant smile as he took his seat. “Hello, Counselor. If this is going to become a habit, I really wish you’d bring our future link-siblings in with you. I would have liked to meet them.”

  “Don’t worry,” I advised him. “They’re watching.”

  He glanced at the opaque wall behind me. “Really? They should be in here with us, then. You have nothing to gain from such cheap theatrics.”

  I showed teeth. “Don’t I, Mr. Harriman?”

  He shook his head. It was the sad, solemn patience of an adult who has seen a slow child, taught the same lesson multiple times, prove once again her inability to get the point. “I really don’t know how I can be much clearer about this. I’ve confessed to the crime more than once already. I’ll confess to it again now, if that’s convenient to you. I hated al-Afiq. I wanted him dead. I planned to kill him. I waited until he said something so vile that it was beyond redemption, so I could feel no compunction over pounding on al-Afiq’s skull until everything above his neck was a thick, crunchy soup. I’d do it again. I’m proud of doing it. I’ll plead guilty, if you want, and accept any punishment you’re willing to give me.”

  “And that,” I said, “is exactly what I find so interesting about this. It all comes down to the charges we can file against all three of you, while retaining a clear conscience.”

  Mi and Zi Diyamen curled a little closer toward Harriman, as if trying to fold their slight forms into his more expansive outline. Their expressions were dead enough to mimic catatonia; it was as if they’d become appendixes or extra limbs. I wondered what they had been like before linking with Harriman and what they had been like as individuals before linking with each other, before arranging their new lives as neuters. I almost wondered what they were like now until common sense prevailed, and I reminded myself: You already know. You’ve been talking to them all along.

  I leaned back in my chair. “I’d like to go over it again.”

  He sighed. “What would you like to know about?”

  “The beginning. The first time anybody brought up killing al-Afiq.”

  Were they surprised by this? Did Harriman straighten up a little bit and regard me through new eyes? Did the Diyamens? “All right, I’ll admit that much. It was . . . a frequent subject of conversation very early on, and by that I mean within the first month.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Whenever the work shift was done and the torments of the day were over, Harriman and the Diyamens used to retreat to some private place and commiserate about how much they hated the prick. Sometimes it was just him blowing off steam, grim flights of fancy about how much fun it would be to throttle him, or poison him, or throw him into the airlock and pump enough air in to slowly compress him to the size of a meal pack. At first, it was just a bitter joke. I’m sure you’ve had conversations like that yourself, whenever you’ve had to work with somebody who irritated you that much.”

  “Never,” I said, pleasantly enough. “But I have inspired more than my share.”

  “Really?”

  “Some entire alien civilizations, actually. You have absolutely no idea.”

  That threw them. They had no idea whether to believe me or not. I could have offered him specific citations, but then he shrugged it off and went on. “Other times, bad days, Harriman stormed around in circles yelling that he was going to kill that bastard and the Diyamens were left doing whatever they could to calm him down. It often ended with him weeping, almost suicidal. He had never been that strong a personality, you understand: A born victim of those stronger than himself, he had almost no natural defenses against predators like al-Afiq, and the feelings of helplessness, of rage, threatened to destroy him. Before very long . . . when he told the Diyamens that he was going to kill al-Afiq someday, it wasn’t so much of a joke anymore.”

  “And how did the Diyamens react to this?”

  “With more concern for Harriman than for al-Afiq. The bastard had, of course, not treated them any better, but they were better equipped to shrug it off. And their own empathy for Harriman didn’t mitigate their own moral duty to try for a resolution. More than once, Zi stayed with the raging Harriman while Mi went to confront al-Afiq on his behavior. More than once, they begged al-Afiq to lighten up on the abuse before something awful happened, and more than once the son of a bitch just laughed at them. It was like they’d asked him to stop breathing.”

  I leaned in close. “So tell me again about the day Harriman killed him.”

  “I told you about that day just a few minutes ago.”

  “Describe the precipitating event.”

  “It was one of those terrible shifts when Harriman and al-Afiq could not indulge their separate specialties in separate labs but instead had to operate in close proximity. Their work had reached a bit of an impasse, and al-Afiq had been keeping up a steady rain of filth all afternoon, accusing Harriman of incompetence and worse. At last he descended to insults so vile, so much more an indictment of himself for speaking them than Harriman for hearing them, that I still refuse to sully my own lips by repeating them now.”

  “I don’t need to know the exact words,” I said. “They translate as some version of ‘I hate you,’ anyway.”

  “Very much so.”

  “But whatever they were, you could have laughed him off. You could have reminded yourself that he was just following his own sick compulsions and that nothing he said could he taken at face value.”

  “I could have,” he agreed. “But I didn’t want to. I’d long since decided that this would end with me killing him, and found a terrible dark peace in that fact. Someday, I knew, he’d work with other unfortunates, people who would be destroyed by him in the same way he claimed to have destroyed so many others. It was just a matter of waiting for him to say one thing too many, something that finally made me angry enough to cross that threshold from wanting to doing.”

  “And the Diyamens?”

  “The Diyamens were performing necessary extravehicular maintenance at the time. They were not present in the chamber during the killing but arrived soon afterward, taking Harriman’s confession and placing him under formal arrest. I can show you the holos to confirm that.”

  “That’s not necessary,” I said.

  I turned around and faced the blankness of the phased wall, willing myself to see beyond it, to the room where Bengid and the Porrinyards would be watching. Bengid must have seen the triumph in my posture and not understood it; the Porrinyards would understand it and likely be appalled by it. They don’t particularly like the perverse thrill I take in quantifying evil.

  Facing Harriman again, I said, “Summarizing. This was not a crime of passion. You had been prepared to kill him for some time, and were just waiting until you were angry enough.”

  “That’s all true,” he said. “And it’s been true for as long as I’ve been saying it.”

  “Then say it again. Say you made a conscious decision to kill him.”

  “I made a conscious decision to kill him.”

  “You were prepared to kill him.”

  “I was prepared to kill him,” Harriman said, with only a brief pause before he added, “And I did kill him.”

  “You struck him over a hundred times.”

  “I didn’t realize how angry I was. It consumed me, destroyed every civilized thought I ever had. I hated him so much that there was nothing in me, no rationality, no conscience, no mercy, nothing but the need to keep bludgeoning that hated face again and again. I think I thought that if I obliterated him from the Universe I’d not only be free of all the things he might have said to me in the future but also everything he’d ever said to me in the past. I didn’t just want to destroy him
. I wanted him expunged.”

  “And later? How did you feel later?”

  “When later?”

  “Let’s say, when the Diyamens came in.”

  I had no reason to disbelieve the tears in his eyes. “You mean, when they saw Harriman looking down at the monster he had beaten to death.”

  “Yes. Then.”

  “That felt even worse. It was like I had ripped out my soul. I knew that it was the end of me. I wanted to die.”

  “One last question. Your decision to link?”

  He regarded the two silent figures at his sides, as if reveling in his love for them; the imitation of a being capable of loving them as separate beings, and not as manifestations of his own personality, was so perfect that I felt an unavoidable pang, that I could only hope failed to show on my face. “The Diyamens,” he said, with an expansiveness that seemed like a father’s pride in talented daughters, “offered to join everything they were with a traumatized man on the edge of total breakdown. During the months of treatments, it was the only thing that offered him hope and stopped him from destroying himself . . . and in the end, his last thought as a single-mind was wonder that the Universe contained at least one person capable of that much compassion.”

  My eyes burned. I nodded, pressed both palms against the table, and stood, only to spend the next few moments staring down at him from a position of relative height. He just blinked back at me. I was able to isolate the precise moment when it dawned that I’d won. The illusory passivity of the Diyamens vanished as well, replaced by a deep and desolate contempt.

  I felt a dark fury. “Your confession is not going to save you.”

  For the first time, the Diyamens answered me themselves, while the bear of a man between them remained silent. Unlike the shared voice of the Porrinyards, which embodies both genders at once, theirs was an empty, sexless thing, more like a virtual personality than a real one. They said, “I suspect that I am no longer worth saving.”

  It had not been a long session, not for a woman who had interviewed suspects for ten hours or more. But I emerged feeling worse than gut-punched, as if some angry god had just grabbed me by the heart and ripped me inside out. I half walked, half staggered to a nearby shelf where a carafe of water was waiting, and drank three full cups, each cold enough to feel like a spike in my skull.

  Bengid and the Porrinyards were both waiting for me to finish, but in different ways. The Porrinyards had understood everything I’d done in there. They’d figured out everything I’d figured out about the crime and might have even progressed as far as the worst of its implications. But to Bengid’s ears my interview with Harriman had sounded just like all of hers, revealing nothing more than what she thought she knew.

  I didn’t turn around to enlighten her. I just faced the wall, feeling the water turn to acid in my belly as I murmured those words the Porrinyards had spoken to me, during the case where we first met, words that had then referred to nothing more than friendship, but which meant even more when discussing their acquired condition. “Carrying the weight too great to be borne by one.”

  The seconds stretched until Bengid said, “I don’t see it.”

  “No,” I said, without turning around. “I don’t suppose you would. But then you’ve never lived with linked people or contemplated becoming one. The phenomenon isn’t a daily part of your life, but just a strange, frightening, alien procedure, one you don’t even want to consider, let alone understand.”

  “So?”

  “So you let Harriman give you a full confession that tells you everything while revealing nothing, and it never once occurred to you that the absolute truth being told in there might be hiding another one, a bigger one, right there in plain sight.”

  I turned. Bengid was wide-eyed, uncomprehending, aware that I’d figured out something terrible but unable to discern its nature.

  “You’re crying.”

  I hadn’t noticed. I brushed my burning tears into a pair of identical smears alongside my cheeks, and said, “I’m not surprised.”

  “For God’s sake, Andrea, what’s wrong with you?”

  I took a deep breath, gulped, wiped my face again, and said, “Essentially? The difference between what they knew they couldn’t hide and what they hoped they could.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t—”

  “I know you don’t,” I snapped, my cracking voice providing the lightest hint of the hysteria I held at bay. “Nor will you until I demonstrate.”

  I turned to the Porrinyards, both of whom were standing in the back of the room, facing me with identical expressions of wariness and concern. They knew something was wrong, all right. They just didn’t know how wrong.

  I took a deep breath. “Forgive me for turning you into performers, but I need to show Lyra how it works. Skye, get down on the floor for a second and then stand up. Oscin, step out into the corridor for a second and then come back. When you’re back together, link hands. Then I’ll ask you some questions.”

  They nodded at me and, with Bengid looking on in complete bafflement, complied to the letter. Skye knelt, Oscin exited the room, Skye stood up, and Oscin came back.

  By the time they linked hands and faced me again, Bengid must have thought I’d gone completely insane. But then I turned my back on them—knowing that they were behind me, but taking as much comfort as I could in not having to look at their faces. “Oscin? Who knelt on the floor?”

  Behind me, Oscin spoke alone. “Skye did.”

  “Skye, who went out into the hallway?”

  Skye took that one. “Oscin did.”

  “Just a couple more. Oscin, who went out into the hallway?”

  He said, “Oscin did.”

  “Skye? Who knelt on the floor?”

  She said, “Skye did.”

  “Now, finally, once you were done, who clasped hands?”

  They answered in their familiar shared voice. “I did.”

  I tried to grin at Bengid, but it likely came out looking more like a joyless grimace.

  She was at sea. “What the hell was all that supposed to prove?”

  “You fell afoul of it yourself, more than once, didn’t you, Lyra? Hell, you ran into it more than once just during our first briefing, alone.”

  “So help me, Andrea, if you don’t start making sense right now . . . ”

  “Will you just listen?”

  She folded her arms and waited.

  I closed my eyes, concentrated on holding myself together for the next few minutes, and gave myself leave to fall apart if I needed to, once those few minutes were done. I could always be a robot, finding refuge in the facts. I had before.

  My voice, when it came, sounded tremulously old, but grew stronger as the ideas began to spill out.

  “Look, it’s very simple. In the short time they’ve been around, cylinked people have made a name for themselves as one of the most aggravating subjects of conversation in human civilization. And it’s not because they’re the most aggravating people in human civilization . . .”

  “Though we can be,” the Porrinyards interjected.

  “. . . but because nothing about them fits syntax that was originally designed to reference individual people occupying individual bodies. Talking about linked pairs, or to linked pairs, you can’t help running into pronoun trouble and ambiguous plurals, and a dozen other causes of the kind of semantic knot that kept you freezing up in mid-sentence, several times during our first briefing.

  “So linked people and those who live alongside them are forced to make the most of the linguistic tools at hand. For instance, Oscin and Skye aren’t really separate people, but they retain their individual names. Why? Because, even though the individual bodies are no more separate individuals than your left and right hands are separate creatures, they do remain capable of individual action and must therefore retain the capacity to describe those actions individually. It doesn’t matter to them which body is talking. The first person singular, ‘I,’ always refers to s
omething they’ve both done, and their proper names always refer to something only one has done.

  “Even then,” I continued, “ambiguities pop up from time to time, but that can’t be helped, nor can you claim that the ambiguity started with linked people. Just think about how many times you’ve used the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘they,’ after neglecting to give sufficient precedent, and then had to waste time backpedaling in order to explain exactly who you meant to include. But if you’re smart, that can be an advantage. There are worlds of wiggle room within those ambiguities, a chance to sow confusion and hide what you really mean.

  “So put all that together with the key anomaly marking the behavior of your prisoners, their refusal to talk in any voice but Harriman’s, and it becomes clear that it was all about giving you fewer chances to notice something very important.

  “Review everything Harriman said in there, and I presume everything Harriman ever said to you in any of your interviews with him, I’m sure you’ll remember that he sometimes referred to himself in the first person and sometimes in the third person.”

  Bengid blinked. “He always seemed to switch back and forth at whim.”

  “Never at whim, Lyra; never when counting on you missing this one critical point was key to getting away with the crime. Examine everything he told me about the murder and you’ll notice something very interesting. Whenever he described the physical act of murder, he referred to ‘Harriman.’ And whenever he described the decision to commit the crime, he said, ‘I.’

  “If you even noticed this at all, you were probably too busy swimming upstream through the special semantics of a physical condition strange to you to make any special sense of it.

  “But that’s what the linked triad in there was counting on. They wanted you confused, because they thought they could make your natural confusion rebound to their benefit—by giving at least part of their collective a chance at freedom and possibly ruining your prosecution of the remainder.

  “It was all just a matter of pronouns.