HIDING PLACE

by Adam-Troy Castro

And you thought human relations were complicated now?      The only prisoner in the interrogation room consisted of two women and one man.

* * * *

The women, Mi and Zi Diyamen, appeared to be identical twins of either the natural or cloned variety. White-haired despite their apparent youth, wispier in form and more delicate in appearance than any of the handful of cylinked people I’d met (who, starting with my lovers the Porrinyards and continuing through the various others I’d encountered in the last few years, had always tended toward the physically robust), they seemed to exist only as pale echoes of the man who sat between them. Their skin was so pale that it was possible to follow the thin trace of veins at their temples, and their eyes were a shade of blue transparent enough to disappear against their irises.

            Ernest Harriman, who sat between them, was a bear: round shouldered, ruddy faced, massive without crossing the border into fat, either old enough or sufficiently well-removed from his most recent rejuvenation to look like he could have been father to the two women beside him. His impressive physical presence and the defiant cast of his smile belied the features of an otherwise weak man: watery eyes, flabby cheeks, and a chin that receded from his lower lip as if eager to join the thick curve of his neck.

            The Diyamens bracketed Harriman at the table where all three sat, resting their delicate hands on his thicker wrists.

            It was impossible to behold this cozy triptych without considering the women nothing more than Harriman’s personal accessories, but I knew enough about the nature of the acquired condition the three shared to know that this was no more than an illusion, one that they might well have been cultivating for psychological advantage over their jailers.

            In truth, the three were not only equals but parts of the same person: closer than lovers, closer than siblings, less like separate people than limbs of the same composite organism.

            They were three. And they were one.

* * * *

            Oscin and Skye Porrinyard spoke in unison. “They’re not faking.”

            The pair, who bracketed me the way the wispy women on the other side of the one-way transparent field bracketed the bear-shaped man, were like the three prisoners, a single cylinked mind sharing one combined personality. When the male Oscin and the female Skye spoke together, as they did much of the time, they balanced the tones of their respective individual voices to create a shared one that didn’t seem to originate from either mouth but rather from some compromise location between them.

            This was not something I’d ever gotten used to, years after their entrance into my life. I was no longer thrown by the vocal gymnastics, but they had never lost their delicious ability to jolt.

            Unlike the Diyamens, who seemed to court insubstantiality, the Porrinyards were physical paragons: enhanced athletes who upon our first meeting had been employed as high-altitude workers. Nor were they identical like the Diyamens; Oscin was taller and bulkier than the slim, athletically built Skye, and her facial features were elfin whereas his were blocky, almost square. Even so, they still favored each other in many ways, from their preference for clothing that exposed far more skin than it covered, and the close-shaved silvery stubble of their hair, to the fierce shared intelligence in both sets of eyes.

            I asked them a stupid question. “Are you certain?”

            It was a stupid question because the Porrinyards had never offered me a conclusion unless they were certain.

            They said, “Yes, Andrea. I’ve been watching their respiration, their eye movements, even the pulse rates visible in their respective wrists.”

            I glanced at both Oscin and Skye in turn—redundant, I know, but I still feel I’m neglecting one if the other gets all the eye contact. “Industrious of you.”

            They nodded in unison. “Yes, well. You’ve come to expect it.”

            “And?”

            “As far as I can tell, they’re in perfect synch. This would of course vary in circumstances where one body was more or less healthy than the others, or engaged in more or less physical activity, but the autonomic functions of cylinked component bodies do tend to approach equilibrium when all other factors are rendered equal. I say they’re what they claim to be: a unit. Not just Mi and Zi Diyamen, who look the part, but this Harriman as well.”

            Behind us, Prosecutor Lyra Bengid tapped the tapered green fingernails of her right hand against the bejeweled silver bracelet on her opposite wrist. “That’s pretty much the way we figured it, Andrea, though it took us several days of medical testing to confirm what your friends here were able to discern in minutes.”

            “I’m surprised it took you days,” the Porrinyards remarked. “True cylinkage is an almost impossible condition to fake. Most unrehearsed single-minds attempting to synch actions make a serious mistake of some kind within minutes.”

            Bengid’s brow knit in annoyance. “Is that what your kind call us? Single-minds?”

            They chuckled. “The individual who became Skye and the individual who became Oscin were both single-minds, not so many years ago. The phrase is not intended as a slur, Counselor; just a descriptive.”

            Bengid didn’t roll her eyes, not exactly, but she did hold the moment long enough to convey her healthy skepticism. “Right. In any event, confirming their condition wasn’t quite so easy in their case. They haven’t attempted that chorus-speak of yours. For some reason, they’ll only speak through Harriman.”

            “That’s unusual,” the Porrinyards said. “For the most part, cylinked people don’t favor one body unless the other is incapacitated for some reason.”

            “Nevertheless,” Bengid said. “Any questions asked of any one of them, even if we place them in separate rooms, are answered through Harriman’s mouth, or not at all.”

            I scratched the itchy fuzz on my recently shaved scalp. “Answering questions they’re asked out of earshot seems pretty definitive proof of linkage too.”

            Bengid’s gaze flickered toward the top of my head, as it had every five seconds since my arrival; she was clearly dying to ask, but had so far resisted temptation. “Maybe so, but we saw no other way to proceed before you got here other than doing whatever we could to confirm and document the nature of the unusual problem that faces us. Your—” she hesitated, “—relationship with,” she regarded the Porrinyards and hesitated again, “these two . . . “

            She stopped mid sentence, momentarily at a loss.

            Sentences involving the cylinked often suffer from a paucity of appropriate pronouns.

            The Porrinyards flashed identical tolerant smiles. “Please, Counselor. I’m not sensitive. Use any syntax that makes you comfortable.”

            “Thank you,” Bengid said, before turning her attention back to me. “Anyway, Andrea, your personal history with cylinked people makes you the closest thing we have to a local expert in the pitfalls of prosecuting them for murder.”

* * * *

            We were aboard a Confederate Security vessel called the Negev, which had been dispatched some time ago to take Ernest Harriman into custody.

            From what I’d gathered, Harriman and the Diyamens were the surviving residents of a four-man research facility operating in deep space, at a fixed point two astronomical units outside the New London system.

            The only possible reason to post anybody in that particular spot, as far from the usual shipping routes as it was from centers of population, was an almost pathological concern with isolation. The facility, and the work being done there, just wasn’t supposed to exist.

            Harriman and the Diyamens had shared it with the now-deceased Aman al-Afiq, who Harriman had bludgeoned to death.

            Given his detailed confession, exactly what qualified the crime as a mystery continued to elude me.

            And yet there was something about this situation that the authorities sharing this room with us—which included, in addition to Bengid, a couple of security officers and a small phalanx of assistants—seemed to consider a first-class Gordian Knot.

            Whatever it was had been enough for her to draw upon her at best limited currency with me, in order to summon me here from my home in New London not three days into the medical sabbatical that was supposed to have prevented me from being called to duty for any reason.

            Her frustration and bafflement were so thick that I’d tasted them the moment the Porrinyards and I stepped off our personal transport.

            Thinking about it, I absently ran a hand over the top of my head, wincing again at the two-day stubble there. I was so used to having hair. I’d never worn it long as an adult, except for one brief period as an honored guest on the planet Xana, but the absence of any real weight up there made me feel like my head was about to fly off into space. I could only wonder how bald men can take it. . . .

            “Andrea?”

            There was more appraisal in Bengid’s expression than I liked, more than I had received from my former law school roommate in years. Never a friend, she still knew me better than anybody other than the Porrinyards and one or two others ever had, and had to be sensing something off about me, something deeper than the cosmetic changes to my appearance.

            The only escape from that was the business at hand. “I can understand why you’d think me an expert, Lyra, but I’m really not. To date I haven’t ever prosecuted any cylinked people either.”

            “It isn’t that our kind is unusually law-abiding,” the Porrinyards explained, identical half-smiles imparting identical senses of mischief, “but that there still aren’t all that many of us around.”

            The procedure that linked multiple minds, proprietary tech of that conglomeration of ancient software intelligences known as the AIsource, was illegal throughout much Confederate Space. There had never been enough linked people around to qualify as more than an oddity; and even where it was not against the law, most so-called civilized people considered the practice unnatural, a perversion.

            Still, a discussion of the compensatory benefits wasn’t necessarily relevant to this situation. I said, “I still don’t understand why you think you have a problem. Your three prisoners in there are medically one person. As long as you can get any expert witness to testify to that, you establish that any murder committed by any one of the individual bodies reflects a decision the consensus personality made as a unit. Even if you can’t find a statute that would allow you to prosecute all three for the crime committed by one, there still shouldn’t be any serious impediment to proving that the other two were equal partners in what amounts to a conspiracy.”

            Bengid’s deep weariness did not seem natural on a woman who had always struck me as a tireless dynamo. “You would think so. We have a confession. We have a prisoner—three prisoners, if you prefer—in custody. We even have that surveillance holo of Harriman committing the murder.” She took a deep breath. “The only thing we don’t know how to do is separate the innocent from the guilty.”

            “There’s only one will between them, Lyra. They’re either all innocent or all guilty.”

            “Not in this case.”

            I frowned. “Why not?”

            “They weren’t a linked trio when they were assigned to the project.”

            “The Diyamens—”

            “The Diyamens were only a linked pair. Harriman was an entirely separate individual. From what we can gather, the Diyamens joined with Harriman after he committed the murder, but before they reported the crime.”

            The one being on the other side of the phased transparency of the wall, and the three individuals who now comprised it, seemed to be smiling.

            The Porrinyards said, “Now, this is an interesting moral question.”

            I muttered to myself. “Juje.”

* * * *

            Bengid escorted us from the Negev’s holding facility to its conference room, a space magisterial enough for the space-faring criminal trials it sometimes housed. The bulkheads here weren’t made of dark woods but had been designed to look like they were, and the wall behind the unoccupied judge’s bench projected the traditional, if gratuitous, image of ancient Blind Justice overlaid with both the seal of the farce known as the Confederacy and the shield that represented the even bigger farce of my specific employers, the Dip Corps.

            (And if that strikes you as cynical, you’re right. But the attitude’s not a pose. I came by it honestly, through years of exploitation by those who should have been my protectors.)

            A side table bore carafes of bruj, a beverage that tasted like curdled milk but contained enough pure stimulant to erase any threat of me nodding off at any point this millennium, and slabs of a doughy something that the crew of the Negev must have been obliged to consider pastry. Oscin, who had always found it easier to burn calories, took a pastry, which Skye enjoyed along with him without actually ingesting any herself; the two don’t both need to indulge in order to share the taste. I poured myself some bruj, sans any of the flavoring tablets provided.

            Lyra Bengid sat down at the head of the prosecutor’s table, unbuckled the tight collar button of her gray suit, and removed the jagged filament comb that had pinned her straw-colored hair into a harsh bun on top of her head. As the locks spilled down to her shoulders, looking shaggy, the rest of her seemed to sag. Her prosecutorial bearing, Dip Corps reserve, and deadly seriousness all gave way to the exhaustion that had been visible since the moment of our arrival.

            I could only wonder how long she’d been awake. “Like old times.”

            She frowned. “What?”

            “All-nighters.”

            Her bright blue eyes widened a little at that. I’d never been one for nostalgia or idle conversation or even friendliness, not for as long as she’d known me.

            When I was nineteen years old and just entering law school, my Dip Corps handlers decided to assign Bengid as compassionate and understanding roommate. They’d raised me in what amounted to a prison following my eight-year-old self’s involvement in a notorious massacre on the planet Bocai. Now they saw that they were in danger of winding up with an emotional basketcase unstable enough to be dependent upon them her entire life, rather than the valued asset my test scores indicated I could be instead. Bengid, then just beginning her indentured servitude to the civilian justice system, had tested so high for empathy that the Corps had pulled strings with her own contract holders and gotten them to offer her a choice of career assignments as long as she agreed to be the kind and compassionate roommate that they imagined would make their pet child war criminal more social.

            In this she had failed. I’d suspected a nefarious agenda and frozen her out in all respects but the academic. She’d gone on to a stellar career in the civilian courts while I’d begun my own career at the end of a Dip Corps leash.

            It wasn’t until much later, long after it was too late to do anything about it, that I’d realized the joke was not just on me but on my superiors. Though Bengid had taken the career incentives, her determination to help me had been nothing but genuine.

            As I’ve said, we’d never become friends. But she’d also never treated me with anything but courtesy and respect, not then and not in any of our dozen or so professional encounters since, at a number of Dip Corps embassies throughout Confederate space.

            I’d been through just enough dramatic changes, of late, to show a little belated warmth.

            The only problem was that any conciliatory gesture was such an alien response coming from me that she didn’t know what to make of it. “We never really had any old times, Andrea.”

            “They wouldn’t have been any fun, given what I’ve always been like. It didn’t stop you from trying.”

            She faltered a little. “It wasn’t exactly like you to notice.”

            “I noticed and I should have appreciated it.”

            It affected her so visibly that I was surprised her eyes remained dry. Once again, her gaze flickered toward my shaved head. “You’re almost human today. Is there anything I should know about what the hell’s happening with you?”

            “Maybe later. Right now I’d like to get to the bottom of your problem.”

            “All right,” she said, sharing my palpable relief at being able to return to business. “First: I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything at all about the project these people were working on together. What little I know myself from my own investigation, I’ve been told I’d be charged with capital treason for sharing. Can we just take as given that it was considered of vital importance to the Confederacy, and conducted under conditions of absolute secrecy?”

            Bengid didn’t know that I had committed capital treason more than once in my adult life or that some of my crimes were still ongoing. “Go on.”

            “When they were first assigned to their project, three years ago, Hom.Sap Mercantile, Harriman and al-Afiq were individuals, the Diyamens a completely separate linked pair designated as both maintenance workers and morale officers. Their combined mission directives included an extraordinary extended moratorium on communication with the outside world, except for progress reports sent to their superiors. Their supply drops were automated, any outgoing personal mail to their loved ones was censored to near-incomprehensibility, and they were all subject to severe professional penalties for quitting at any point before their five-year contract was up. Key to our situation, they were even provided an onboard AIsource Medical kiosk, rather than risk any possibility of an emergency that would oblige them to summon any other assistance from off-station.”

            I could only boggle at this latest intelligence. The advanced automated care offered by AIsource Medical was expensive enough to be well outside the reach of some entire planetary civilizations. If whoever bankrolled this particular research project had been willing to underwrite a system that would only be used for the benefit of four people, then the need for secrecy here went beyond profound into the realm of the obsessive.

            Bengid tapped her tapered green nails against the tabletop. “al-Afiq’s murder took place fourteen months into their contracted tour of duty, and for a long time went unreported in any of the station’s communications with the people in charge. His name was still among the appended signatures on every progress report the others sent home until just about one month ago, which was when the Diyamens deigned to inform the authorities that he was dead.” She grimaced. “The bastards actually invited us to come and arrest them. Or, if you prefer, ‘dared.’”

            “Go on.”

            “When we got here, The Diyamens identified themselves, presented us with the holo and other forensic evidence, and stopped talking. Harriman waived counsel and provided us with a full confession confirming that he had with total premeditation and complete malice aforethought flattened his colleague’s skull.” She massaged the bridge of her nose. “If not for his assurances that he went into the lab that day fully prepared to commit the murder, I’d entertain arguments that it was a crime of passion. The holo we have documents over a hundred blows, most of them long after al-Afiq’s skull shattered to pieces.”

            I winced. “That’s not a crime of passion. That’s a total psychotic break.”

            “I’m inclined to agree. And, under the circumstances this should have been an open-and-shut case. But then we have our complication: the Diyamens being sufficiently protective of Harriman to make special arrangements for him to remain beyond our reach.”

            “Something they could do because there just happened to be an AIsource Medical kiosk on board.”

            Bengid saw my fury. “Right.”

            The picture she’d painted was almost a thing of beauty. It buried the simple geometry of the crime beneath a tangle of metaphysical questions about how much guilt could still be ascribed to an individual after that individual no longer continued to exist.

            Bengid brushed a blond lock away from her eye. “I guess it’s no news to you that the procedure takes about five months.”

            “It’s actually a few hundred separate procedures,” the Porrinyards explained, “that must be completed at the rate of one or two a day. But yes, five months is about right.”

            Bengid studied their faces. “It sounds like an ordeal.”

            “The time investment is so negligible that it can be countered by just waking up fifteen minutes earlier every day.”

            Bengid seemed skeptical about this too. “And what happens at the end? Somebody just flicks a switch?”

            “You could look at it that way, Counselor. But it’s not traumatic at all. It feels more like waking up than being born.”

            She nodded. “In any event, they had the time and the privacy they needed to get it done. But when the procedures were completed, there was no Harriman and there were no Diyamens. There was just this new entity bearing their names, an entity who could remember what it had been like to be both Harriman and the Diyamens but who was now a composite of both.”

            “Carrying the weight,” I murmured, “too heavy to be borne by one.”

            It was several seconds before I registered that everybody in the room was staring at me; the Porrinyards because they knew me and Lyra Bengid because she still did not know me quite well enough.

            Bengid looked puzzled again, but soldiered on anyway. “So that’s the problem we’re faced with. If we charge Harriman alone and throw his ass in prison, then it’s no real punishment for him. He could languish in the most subterranean dungeon in existence and still continue to enjoy freedom by proxy, as long as Diyamens are out in the world, living however they want.” She addressed the Porrinyards. “I am right about that, yes? That there’s no way to cut the link and shield him off from their experiences?”

            “No legal way,” the Porrinyards said. “There is only one person in there, even if their separate bodies are doing different things.”

            Oscin spoke alone: “The two of me have been thousands of kilometers apart at times.”

            Now Skye: “Sometimes more than that.”

            Oscin: “My two bodies operate independently all the time.”

            Skye: “If they couldn’t, my enhanced condition would offer no net gain.”

            They concluded as one: “But in real-world terms, it still amounts to a left hand and a right hand, operating under the control of a mind that is equally adept at using both. Unless one of my bodies is sleeping or, as happened a few months back, seriously incapacitated for some reason, I am always aware of what both Oscin and Skye are doing. And you’re right: You could imprison one of me and it would be little prison at all as long as I could still see and hear and enjoy a full life via the experiences of the other.”

            Bengid blinked multiple times. After a second or two, she managed, “That’s a hell of a cabaret act you two have got there.”

            “I think so too,” they said. “Unfortunately, Skye’s the only one with a decent singing voice.”

            Bengid’s smile was polite but false. “So you see what I’m talking about. It makes no sense to prosecute Harriman alone. And neither can we prosecute all three because if we did, we’d be prosecuting the two-thirds of the collective who were not even present at the time of the murder. I don’t know what to do.”

            They asked her, “Are you afraid of being overturned by the appellate court?”

            “No,” Bengid snapped. “I’m afraid of being wrong.”

            The Porrinyards considered that. “You could always charge Harriman with murder and the Diyamens as accessories after the fact, for keeping the crime a secret for so long. They’d all receive equivalent sentences and no individual body’s sensory input would be capable of providing the gestalt with any significant relief from an incarceration they’d all share.”

            Bengid shook her head as she got up to pour herself some of the noxious bruj. “They were well ahead of us there too. The first thing Diyamens showed us was a station log entry, time-stamped only three hours after the murder. In it, they report that they’ve placed Harriman under arrest for murder. They confirm that they’ve collected all pertinent evidence, and placed it in storage for safe-keeping. They also say that while they will let Harriman continue to work on the project, it will only be under very close supervision, to ensure that he doesn’t escape. All of this was entirely above-board—and while it was highly irregular to then not report the crime for months and months, the delay is not out of the question given the ground rules that had been established for them. If they hadn’t done what they also did, arrange to link minds with the murderer, the delay wouldn’t even have been remarked upon, and we wouldn’t be here in this room having this conversation.”

            I’d been listening, silent and heavy lidded, for a while, letting the Porrinyards contribute for me, but I stirred now. “I’m sure you also considered just giving up and declaring Harriman, the original singlet Harriman, dead and beyond your reach . . . in effect solving the problem by abdicating it.”

            Bengid sipped her bruj, made a disgusted face, and sipped again. “That’s been suggested, at levels higher than you even want to think about. After all, that individual committed personality suicide at the moment he linked with the Diyamens. The man he was, the man who bludgeoned al-Afiq, no longer exists. And I’d almost endorse that judgment myself, just to wipe my hands of this impossible situation. But I can’t live with letting that . . . letting those . . .”

            “Freaks?” the Porrinyards suggested.

            She shot them a poisonous look, enraged that they would accuse her of such bigotry. “Please. Murderers. I refuse to let that murderer, those murderers, however the hell you choose to parse the sentence, get away with killing al-Afiq, just because their superiors equipped their workplace with the means to change an I to a we. That would be an obscenity.”

            The Porrinyards glanced at each other, a gesture I’d long since come to recognize as, not a moment of consultation it would be for any two singlets, but rather a moment of deep self-examination. When they spoke again, it was with soft humility. “I’m sorry, Counselor Bengid. I misjudged you. You’re right, of course. But not just for the reasons you think.”

            “What other reason is there?”

            “I don’t know how much you knew about cylinking before this incident,” they told her, “but deciding to join your soul, your self, to another human being’s, and become part of what is in effect an entirely new person, is the ultimate act of faith. In many ways, it is more profound, more life-altering, and to me more sacred, than any known form of matrimony. It requires total sublimation of the prior self, and permanent commitment from every mind contributing to the intended gestalt.”

            “So?”

            “So reducing that sacred communion to a legal trick, to nothing more than a loophole the unscrupulous can seize for expediency, is as much an obscenity to me as your killing. It lessens everything I am, everything the singlet versions of Oscin and Skye made the conscious decision to become. That gestalt personality in there cannot be allowed to get away with it. I will not let them . . . and neither will Andrea, for exactly the same reason.”

            It was the last phrase that clued Bengis in. Until that, she had registered but not quite felt their meaning, as their condition was far too alien to her experience for her to see it as anything but an abstraction.

            Her reaction was the same one I expected to experience from others in a few short months. She blinked, narrowed her eyes, sensed the size of the leap she was being asked to make . . . and then, with stunned shock, made it.

            She struggled to reject the epiphany, as if it were some substance her body had identified as poison. And then she stared at my shaved head, and put it together. “Andrea? Are . . . are you . . . ?”

            I offered her one of my rare smiles. “No. I’m still alone in this skull, if that’s what you’re asking.”

            “B-but you’re . . .”

            “That’s what my sabbatical was for. We were about to start the treatments when you sent for me. We only put it off until we can get back to New London. Within a few months, all three of us will be parts of somebody new. Somebody better.”

            Her mouth hung open. Her expression was a mixture of shock, amazement, horror, sadness . . . even a degree of hurt and loss that surprised me, coming from someone I had never allowed into my life.

            I would likely have to address that before I left here.

            But not now.

            “Now,” I said, standing, “with your permission, I’d like to talk to your prisoners.”

* * * *

            Harriman and the Diyamens had been returned to separate cells for the duration of our briefing. Now, with me already sitting at the questioner’s side of the table, they trudged in again, walking with an exaggerated geriatric gait enforced by the neurological inhibitor collars around their respective necks.

            I normally don’t require prisoners called before me to be restrained, as I have enough weaponry hidden on my person to overcome almost anybody. But I appreciated it in this case. Linked pairs—and, by inexorable extension, triads—are known for their extraordinary grace, and are almost impossible for a singlet of any training to defeat in a fight.

            Without those collars reducing their physical coordination to the level of an unrejuvenated ninety-year-old, these three would have had no trouble killing me in a single moment of anger.

            I allowed myself a moment of grim amusement at the realization that if this trio did manage such a thing, it would at least offer the benefit of solving that pesky prosecution problem.

            Once again, the three positioned themselves in what seemed to be their preferred orientation, with Harriman in the center and the two silent women at his sides.

            He said, “You’re a new one.”

            “Yes, sir, I am. I’m Counselor Andrea Cort. Prosecutor At Large, for the Judge Advocate’s office of the Confederate Diplomatic Corps.”

            He raised an eyebrow. “I’ve never heard of that title, ‘Prosecutor At Large.’”

            “I’m not surprised. It was invented just for me.”

            The infuriating grin tugging at the corners of his lips was not echoed on the pale faces of the Diyamens, who remained impassive beyond their facade of catatonia. “Impressive. But if you’re Dip Corps, you’re also a little out of your jurisdiction, aren’t you? As far as I understand it, there’s nothing about this case that involves any sovereign government other than New London’s.”

            “There isn’t,” I said. “Counselor Bengid just called me in to offer my own take on some of the more troubling points of law here. Once they’re resolved, I’ll likely never see you again.”

            He glanced at my scalp. “I see. And since it doesn’t take legal expertise of any kind to know that premeditated murder is a crime, I assume that you’ve been called in as an expert on linked personalities.”

            “Hardly an expert, sir.”

            “I presume that the rest of the sentence would be, ‘not yet.’ But soon enough, eh, Counselor? I thought I sensed the aura of the pilgrim about you. Have you scheduled your treatments yet?”

            I’d already learned what it was like to live with lovers who had twice the normal human capacity for forging rapid connections, but the Porrinyards had never used it for anything more threatening to me than puncturing my more dishonest emotional pretenses. I’d encountered one other pair with a somewhat deeper and darker agenda, but they hadn’t been interested in using it against me either. This would be the first time I’d ever have to out think and out-maneuver a criminal who amounted to a human being cubed.

            I decided on a strategic retreat. “Yes. We’ll be starting very soon.”

            His smile would have been easy to take for genuine warmth. “I envy you your journey. I promise you, it’s not at all what you expect.”

            “Oh, really. How so?”

            “I can only repeat, not at all. I’m sure that you think you’re just adding yourself to whoever you chose as your partner. But when you forge all those new neural connections, you’re not really adding personalities together; you’re multiplying them. You’re creating the equivalent of a new molecular compound with properties entirely different from those of the individual basic elements that went into it.”

            “Like guilt,” I suggested, in an effort to bring this back around to the crime.

            He chuckled, almost paternally. “I’ve always been more than willing to admit what I’ve done, and that I remain fully subject to any legal penalty the authorities consider appropriate.”

            “You do recognize, of course, that the authorities are having some trouble determining what’s appropriate.”

            “Yes, I do. And I’ll even admit that I expected them to. After all, it was Harriman who wielded that spanner, Harriman whose hands were stained by blood. But I’ll abide by whatever the prosecutorial conclusions might be.”

            Had there been a hint of sarcastic arrogance in that answer? “I hope you recognize that your future is not a question of what you’re willing to accept. It’s a question of how your case is decided.”

            “Still,” he said, “a guilty plea would make that easier for everybody, wouldn’t it?”

            I was sure of it, now. This wasn’t remorse or expiation. The bastard—no, the bastards; the Diyamens were so withdrawn for some reason that it was difficult to remember that he was speaking for all three of them—the bastards were running a game on us. But to what end?

            “Tell me about it, then.”

            He sighed, glanced at the shut-down transparency of the wall behind me, and faced me again. Throughout, the women remained blanks, lost behind their apparent shield of catatonia.

            He said, “What would you like to know, Counselor? Why I loathed the toxic son of a bitch with every fiber of my being?”

            “If you’d like.”

            “Aman al-Afiq was a brilliant man, but he was also a terribly sick one, incapable of relating to other human beings, except to hurt them any way he could. Outside dry shop talk, his sole interest in social interaction seemed to be psychological dissection through verbal cruelty. He reveled in finding the most sensitive exposed nerves and then inserting needles, to maximize any emotional agony he could cause. Within one week of their arrival on this station, the singlet Harriman had already had one screaming match with him; within two, there had already been a fistfight; within three, Harriman was already suffering in silence, struggling to endure long hours of abuse without giving in to the impulse to strangle the unholy prick.”

            I’d been accused of being like al-Afiq more than once, myself. “Go on.”

            “When the Diyamens threatened to report his behavior, or even quit the project in protest, al-Afiq countered with promises to destroy their own reputations with false counter-charges. He bragged that he had done this many times before, on projects before this one, and went so far as naming the names of those whose careers had been destroyed by lies he’d started.”

            “And you didn’t know al-Afiq was like this before you signed on?”

            Harriman shook his head. “Harriman had never heard of him before. Neither had the Diyamens.”

            “How was that even possible, if they were colleagues?”

            “They didn’t initiate the project. It involved a certain cross-fertilization of al-Afiq’s preferred way of looking at a fundamental problem, and Harriman’s take on another. The entire crew consisted of hired guns, previously unknown to each other, and assigned their tasks by a greater mind too busy to participate in the project herself.”

            It hurt so much not to know the purpose of all this that I almost had to physically restrain myself from pursuing that line of questioning any further. “And what were the Diyamens there for?”

            “Their key responsibility was the maintenance of the station. Also,” he shrugged, “given the years of expected isolation, as morale officers. After all, everybody was going to be locked together for a long time: five years, by the most conservative estimate. The powers that be decided that with four people instead of two—even if two of them were really just different vehicles for one personality—there were more chances for friendships, fewer for poisonous stress.”

            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.

            Maybethe 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 no 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.”

            “It just won’t be Andrea Cort.”

            I had trouble believing that she was being so thick. “No, but then there won’t be Porrinyards either. There’ll be—”

            “Somebody bigger and better. Yeah, yeah, I’m not an idiot. I’ve had more than enough of that crap from you already. I think I got more than enough from the prick who used to be Harriman. But you’re forgetting something. I know the individual who thinks of herself as Andrea Cort. I lived with the individual who thinks of herself as Andrea Cort. I tried like hell to get the individual who thinks of herself as Andrea Cort to drop her guard around me. And I finally had to accept that, like it or not, being guarded and angry and suspicious and difficult were all things that made Andrea Cort what she is.”

            I shook my head in disbelief. “You say you’re happy for me, but you don’t want me to change—”

            “Don’t give me that infantile, self-pitying crap.”

            This stunned me.

            She lowered her voice and spoke with even greater urgency. “Of course I want you to change. For two years I sweated blood trying to help you find your own way to change. But I want you to change without giving up who you are, and what you are has always meant being defiant about who you are. The second that you, out of all the people I’ve ever met, start talking about relinquishing your very identity like it’s a suit that no longer fits, I start looking for another agenda—something that may be a little closer to what our defendants are looking for than you may be capable of admitting to yourself.”

            My calm had vanished. My heart pounding harder than it ever had at rest, I put a dangerous chill in my voice and challenged her. “Why don’t you tell me what you think that is.”

            Bengid delivered each of the next three words with excessive precision, clipping the syllables like bombs in danger of exploding if not handled with care. “A hiding place.”

            This was outrageous. I rose from my chair, ready to slam her with the rebuttal that would reduce that ridiculous charge to kindling.

            She didn’t let me utter a syllable. “Yeah, that’s the real truth, isn’t it? All the terrible crimes you were accused of, all the bad memories you’ve spent your life running from, all the bad things you’ve done since then that you’re afraid of anybody else finding out—you’ve always had more than your share of them, haven’t you, Andrea? And now you can be part of this magical new person—just how did you put it, before? Oh, yes—this magical new person ‘carrying the weight too great to be borne by one.’”

            Now standing, I glared at her with something like hatred. “How dare you? What gives you the right—”

            She stood up so abruptly that the chair rolled backward until it slammed against the limits of its inlaid track. “I paid the entrance fee, Andrea!”

            I drew back, speechless.

            She slammed me with the full force of her anger. “For two years I lived with your black moods, your shame, your self-hatred, your rejection of anybody who tried to get close to you, the way you somehow used all that pain to stay strong. When you waltz onto this ship grinning like a vapid young girl in the first throes of puppy love and tell me that you look forward to changing who you are, you know what it reminds me of, more than anything else? It reminds me of something a therapist friend once told me, a long time ago: that when a person who’s been more than half suicidal for as long as you’ve known her suddenly shows up calm and happy and smiling, the explanation might not be that she’s suddenly gotten a handle on all her troubles. The answer might be that she’s made up her mind to go ahead and end them already.”

            The anger hadn’t fled me, not entirely; my chest still hurt from the hammering of my heart, and the sheen of sweat on my forehead still burned, less like perspiration and more like something more primordial. But I felt stricken. “Is that’s what you think? That this is suicide?”

            “No. I think that part of you wants it to be suicide.”

            Knowing how I felt inside but understanding at last why Bengid would see any mere assurances on my part as inadequate, I could only say, “It’s not like that. I swear to you, I’m sure about this. I love them.”

            “I can see that.”

            “And they love me.”

            “And you know, Andrea, honestly, I’ve sensed that too.” She turned her back to me and approached the conference center door. As it slid open, revealing the brighter light of the corridor, she turned around and stood there backlit for several seconds, making up her mind whether to go further. Her last words before she walked out the door were, “But, you know . . . if their version of love really does require you to end the person you are . . . maybe you should consider that they might not be the only ones who give a damn about you. To everybody else but them, putting an end to yourself is a seriously shitty thing to do.”

* * * *

            I found the Porrinyards in the guest quarters the Negev had allocated for us. It was a VIP suite and still as snug as a marsupial’s pouch, dominated by a bed that was big enough for two only if those two were so attuned to each others’ nocturnal movements that they were able to avoid beating the crap out of one another as they slept. Many ardent civilian couples, traveling aboard ships of this class, suffered through a few days of tormented attempts at shared domestic arrangements but then elected to sleep in shifts or beg for separate rooms.

            Our own private transport, still docked in the Negev’s hangar, featured shared quarters modified to fit all three of us in comfort, and would have been much more congenial for us than the one-size-fits-all design of a vessel designed for adult human beings who, by and large, rarely slept together in groups larger than two. But some things, like refusing the hospitality of a vessel where you’ve been summoned to give your expert opinion, just aren’t done—and besides, it had never been necessary, not with the special Porrinyard breed of grace extending to their uncanny unobtrusiveness while asleep. Even tucked between them, in beds small enough to call this one expansive, I never knew they were on either side of me unless they wanted me to.

            When I found them they were lying nude above the covers, Oscin’s larger form curled to mimic Skye’s. His bare rear end may have protruded over the edge of the mattress to such an extent that only the supported parts of his body kept him from falling out of bed, and she may have allowed only a couple of millimeters of clearance between the tip of her button nose and the wall on her side, but they had left room for me: a virtual outline, defined by the negative space between his body and hers. I didn’t have to listen to know that they were breathing in unison; I’d ended many of the nights I woke from traumatic nightmares finding comfort in the shared refrain of their breath, sounding in perfect unison on opposite sides of me.

            They were, together, the best person I’d ever met. They’d saved my life twice within three days of our first meeting, and many uncounted times since then. They’d saved my sanity just as often, and given me more than I’ve ever thought I could have, not least among those many gifts a reason to look forward to waking up in the morning. Their willingness—hell, that wasn’t even the right word—eagerness, to not only tolerate the baggage I’d brought into our relationship but claim it as part of their own, to become for the rest of their lives someone who would remember what it had been like to be Andrea Cort, struck me as breathtaking—more than I’d ever asked for and certainly more than I’d ever deserved.

            There was no doubt about it: With them, I’d finally become a lucky woman.

            But it was also true that I’d only known them as the shared creature they’d become. I’d never met the young man who had become Oscin or the young woman who had become Skye, and in fact knew very little about them. I knew that they’d both hailed from a world where people had settled the upper branches of mile-high trees; that they’d been in love but not very good at being in love; that they’d fought hard and fought often and spent almost as much time fighting as they had loving. I knew that the woman had been braver and more adventurous than the man; that he had prized caution to a degree that infuriated her and prompted more than one of their breakups.

            I knew that they’d gotten into some kind of serious legal trouble on their home world, something that had prompted their decision to indenture themselves to the Dip Corps. I knew that their decision to link had as much to do with their inability to get along as singlets as it did with the hope that, offered as a unit, they would always be posted in the same places. I finally knew that once they were together as a single mind they were as much the solitary prisoner of two skulls as any individual person is in one; that their own lovemaking amounted to athletic self-gratification and that they’d always needed to seek out others, like me, for company.

            Somehow I’d always interpreted their story as a triumph of their commitment to one another. And it could be seen that way, but was it not also the ultimate failure of that commitment? Seen another way, the boy who became Oscin had, in fact, lost the girl who became Skye; she no longer existed, except as an integral part of himself. And she had, in turn, lost him.

            In a sense, so had I. I’d never had the chance to meet that Oscin and Skye. Would I have fallen in love with either that boy or that girl? Would I have even liked them? Would I have been upset to learn of their plans to meld the boy and the girl into a new personality, larger than them both? Would I have mourned?

            In the future we were now planning, the future where there would be no separate composite personality known as Oscin-and-Skye-Porrinyard and no separate individual personality known as Andrea Cort, but instead a new composite personality as yet unknown to us—would that new person miss being three people, and then two people, who had once been loved by others outside themselves? How long would it be before that linked triad found itself seeking out someone new, a fresh soul to fill the void that only grew ever more cavernous the more the souls that defined it were shared?

            Was Bengid right?

            “Andrea?” They had lifted their heads to look at me, each sleepy expression of concern identical to the other. “Are you all right?”

            I dabbed at my eye with a thumb. “Just watching you sleep, love.”

            “Sounds fascinating. It can’t be time to get up yet.”

            “No,” I said. “We still have a few hours.”

            “Then get your clothes off and come to bed, already. You have a busy day tomorrow.”

            I might have hesitated. I was too churned up inside, too unsure of my own feelings. But that would have raised questions I was not ready to answer right now. So I complied, peeling off my severe black suit, placing it folded on the counter by the stateroom entrance, and crawling on hands and knees into the empty space between my lovers. When I was in position and comfortable, the central parenthesis in a set of three, Oscin’s pulled close behind me, and Skye’s slighter one inched backward, between them forming an embrace I could feel on both sides. Oscin kissed me on the ear, and together they said, “It’ll be all right.”

            I’ve already said that when they speak together, they split the tones and phonemes, creating a stereo effect that makes their voice seem to originate from some undefined empty space between them.

            When they were as close to me as they were now that undefined empty space their voice filled was inside me.

            On most other nights, I took comfort in that.

* * * *

            The next morning our wake-up call came with summons to a meeting about unspecified but ominous-sounding new developments.

            We rushed to dress, were last to the gathering in the courtroom, and entered with Bengid and myself the two leads in a tiny small melodrama played out in avoided eye contact. The subtle thaw in a relationship years old had been replaced by something like an open wound, one that neither one of us wanted to acknowledge in front of the half-dozen legal functionaries who comprised her staff and certainly not in front of Oscin and Skye.

            I could tell that the Porrinyards sensed something was wrong. As my assistants, they knew to keep quiet in professional situations when I couldn’t share information right away, but it was almost as impossible to hide the existence of a secret now as it would be in the future, when there would no longer be any such thing as a secret between us.

            Bengid said, “It turns out that we’re down to the wire. I’ve heard from some people very high up. I can’t tell you exactly how high up, but they consider themselves important enough to quash criminal investigations for the convenience of some crony’s pet project.”

            To my eyes, the fresh-faced male staffer who asked the next question seemed young enough to be mistaken for a zygote. “Are they?”

            “They might well be,” Bengid said.

            “That’s ridiculous!”

            “It might well be, but there are some big dogs behind them, people who want Harriman and the Diyamens released into their custody, to resume the work the murder of al-Afiq interrupted. I gather that if that ends up happening, the incentive will amount to a de facto amnesty. It would be an outrage, of course, but they back it with all the talk of national interest I can stand. On our side there are a few old-fashioned people who believe that murder is wrong, and understand that in this case it’s not unreasonable to take a few extra days to fashion a proper prosecution that won’t reduce open-and-shut facts to legalistic travesty. Between them they’re not exactly ordering me to cover up al-Afiq’s murder, but they are saying that if I don’t structure these charges in a manner that takes the special nature of our culprits into account, anything I do will be subject to hostile judicial review, and our killer—killers, if you prefer—will likely end up being released on what amounts to their own recognizance.”

            “They might actually get away with it,” the zygote marveled.

            Bengid’s glare would not have been out of place on one of the mythological gorgons. “Yes. Yes, Marcus, we are in danger of that. And that seems to be what our piece-of-crap criminal seems to have been counting on all along.”

            “What do we do?”

            “Unless we can form a rock-solid precedent that takes all the identity issues into account and still leaves no doubt that we’re charging those three, that one, that however-you-want-to-count-them, in the proper proportion—leaving absolutely no doubt that none of the gestalt’s component personalities are being charged too much or too little—anything we do will go up in a puff of smoke, courtesy of all the parties with a vested interest in making this damn mess go away.”

            Another of Bengid’s people, this one a young redheaded woman who looked all of twelve, raised her tremulous hand. “How much more time do we have?”

            “End of the day to declare our intentions, end of tomorrow to submit the charges.”

            There was an explosion of dismay and anger over this. Somebody said that New London was rewriting its entire Constitution. Somebody else told him he was naive for even believing in the Constitution. A dozen other voices protested only that “they” could not do this, a weak objection on the face of it since “they” clearly were.

            Bengid commanded silence with a raised palm. “I know it stinks, people. But if nobody comes up with an answer in the next eight hours, we’ll have to file an imperfect case and watch from a distance as it falls to pieces at the first strong wind from New London. I need brilliance, people. Go.”

            Her staff filed out, murmuring. I had worked for a prosecutor as high-powered as Bengid, once upon a time, and knew exactly what was passing through their heads: dark, defiant damns of the luck that had decided to position them at the front lines of this particular no-win situation. Wherever they went from here, a humiliating failure on what the future would see as a simple case botched by incompetent prosecution would remain in their records for the rest of their careers, if not destroying their ambitions, then at least slowing their rise.

            As the primary prosecutor, Bengid had even more to lose than the rest of them. She wouldn’t look at me, but still seemed to have aged almost ten years. “Could they have planned this?”

            “It’s possible,” the Porrinyards said. “Improved space for computation means improved calculation of variables. You should try to beat me at a good game of chess, sometime.”

            Bengid emitted a forlorn laugh. “Never learned it.”

            I was sick and tired of waiting for her to look at me. “It’s time for some truth, Lyra.”

            “What truth did you have in mind?”

            “This didn’t just happen to come up out of the blue this morning, and you didn’t just happen to call me in to finesse some fine point of legal ambiguity. The truth is, you were under pressure to drop this case from the very moment it fell in your lap, and you called me because your other options had failed and you no longer had any other choice. It had nothing to do with finding the approach that best served justice and everything to do with not losing. Am I right?”

            She shuddered. “They’re not exactly incompatible, you know.” Then she looked up, a weary resignation lowering her eyelids to half mast. “But that’s a point. You have no official standing here, Andrea. If you have no ideas, there’s no reason you have to swallow any part of this poison pill yourself. You can leave right now if you want to.”

            “Go to hell,” I said. “Just to punish you for getting in my face, I’m going to go interview your person of interest again and solve your silly little problem in record time, while you watch.”

            She stared. She blinked. She looked at the Porrinyards and then at me and something happened to all that hopelessness and frustration on her face; it just dissipated, like a black storm cloud pierced by the rays of the sun. The corners of her lips twitched. “That . . . would be damned cruel of you, Andrea.”

            Beside me, Skye Porrinyard spoke alone. “What else would you expect, Counselor Bengid? She’s always been a vindictive bitch.”

* * * *

            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 something 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.

            “Parse the confession correctly—and you have plenty of time to do that, because it’s on hand and no doubt echoes everything else they’ve ever said to you—and you’ll see what they didn’t want you to see before.

            “Harriman, the singlet, didn’t decide to kill al-Afiq.

            “Harriman, the body, only picked up the weapon.

            “The truth is that they all decided to kill al-Afiq.

            “Because theywere all already one shared personality at the time of the crime.”

            Bengid blinked. Then blinked again. Mentally reviewed everything she’d established in every interview with Harriman. Then went through it a second time and reviewed everything she’d just assumed, everything Harriman had merely permitted her to believe.

            Then she looked dizzy. Then filled with hope.

            And then, she just went to one of the chairs and sat.

            I wondered if she had any idea how much I hated her right now.

* * * *

            I spared a quick look at the Porrinyards. They had seen me like this before, so enraptured with the solution to a problem that it seemed to burn inside me like a fever. They knew that it could be both triumph and torment, depending on how personally I took the question at hand.

            But was that all they saw? Had they been hit with the very worst of it, as I had?

            I didn’t want to think about that.

            Instead I went to the chair next to Bengid’s and slammed her with the rest, not raising my voice at all but still hoping it hurt.

            “And now, we come to why they didn’t report the crime for so long.

            “It’s really nothing more than another canny use of ambiguity. Had they contacted the authorities right away, let’s say with the body only a few hours or days old, and had they ever let anybody know that they’d linked personalities, it would have naturally followed that there hadn’t been enough time to link after the crime, and therefore must have all been equally complicit in the killing.

            “By keeping the crime secret for so long, they stood a chance of supporting the fiction that they’d linked afterward, to protect Harriman from the traumatic aftermath of a murder he’d committed on his own.

            “As it happens, they spoke the absolute truth when they had Harriman claim that that the Diyamens had offered their union to help a weak and traumatized man on the edge of a total emotional breakdown. But that truth,” my voice buckled, “the truth didn’t mean what we were intended to believe it meant. Because he’d just finished describing the guilt and shame that followed the killing, I was supposed to assume a direct chronological progression and assume that they linked to protect him from the emotional consequences. But replay what they actually said to me and you’ll note that at the point they were answering a different question, one that actually amounted to a change of subject. They must have used similar misdirection on you, as it was the key thing they needed you to be wrong about.

            “In actuality, the breakdown they saved Harriman from was the one that loomed many months earlier, the one being brought on by al-Afiq’s abuse.

            “We already know that the situation was already a serious one at that point. The man was weak, almost meek. He had already been relieved from one project for emotional exhaustion; he spent his off-hours in increasing rage and hysteria over al-Afiq; and there was nothing the Diyamens could do to either placate him or end the abuse that was destroying him.

            “Maybe it was only because they were desperate, too, but in the end they offered to help him carry the weight.”

            That phrase felt like poison in my mouth. But I was almost done. I bit my lip and continued. Not long now.

            “I don’t know how much persuasion he required, but as the man was already on the verge of hurting himself or al-Afiq, it may not have taken much. He may have even seen the offer as a godsend. Ultimately, he agreed, and the three commenced treatment.

            “This is, by the way, why Harriman’s stories about the three of them commiserating as separate people reflected events very early in their stay; with al-Afiq riding him daily, it didn’t take Harriman very long to reach the breaking point or the Diyamens very long to see no other alternative.”

            I took a deep breath and tried to make the next thought an academic thing that only existed in theory.

            “The saddest part of all this is that it was likely an attempt on their part to avoid violence. The Diyamens must have thought that the new individual they were becoming would be strong enough to contain all of Harriman’s rage.

            “But they were wrong.” My voice trembled. “Harriman the singlet expelled all his anger with raging tantrums. He might not have given in to his violent urges at all. The new personality containing Harriman and the Diyamens together may have been more centered on an emotional level, but it harbored their considerable resentments as well as his, in addition to their increased personal initiative. On the subject of the toxic al-Afiq, this combination could only be explosive.

            “It was as a unit that they decided that they still hated al-Afiq enough to want him dead.

            “And it was as a unit that they started obsessing on the prospect of killing him.

            “It may not have started as any more to the consensus personality than a nasty but comforting fantasy, but that didn’t help when that personality could no longer resist the impulse. Nor does it really matter that Harriman’s body was the only one physically present during the killing, or that the Diyamens were working outside the station, by accident or design establishing an alibi that nobody would ever have questioned. The crime itself was still driven by their shared will. They all wanted al-Afiq dead. And so they all killed him.

            “After that,” I spread my hands, palms up, “it just became an issue of framing the narrative that could keep them all free. The citizen’s arrest, the months of silence before reporting the crime, and the passivity the Diyamens affected were all part of that.

            “It almost worked.

            “But,” I said, standing up, hearing only the slightest hint of hysteria in my voice, and denying it because I was now almost done, “you have the confessions on hand, and now that you understand the syntax you should have absolutely no trouble finding what you need to lock up all three of them.”

            Bengid grinned. For me, it was like ten years had fallen from her face, and all the freshness of the years when I’d first known her had all come rushing back, all at once. Beauty, the kind of face that made people want to know her, had always been the least of her sins. “You always were better than me at oral arguments, Andrea. I . . .”

            I no longer had the puzzle to occupy me, and so my own voice chose that moment to show her how dead I felt. “Don’t you ever dare to ask for my help again.”

* * * *

            I’d gone from rational assessor of facts to a shattered woman in the interval between one sentence and the next. Even with all she’d gone through, just knowing me, this was extreme. She could only utter a little gasp of surprise as I turned my back on her and made a beeline for the door to the corridor.

            My rush to exit was so sudden, so fierce, that even the Porrinyards were taken by surprise. Though they were between me and the door when I started to walk, they were so startled at my momentum and at the ferocious slash of my mouth that they parted ways even as I advanced upon them, and allowed me to pass.

            Bengid’s cries and the protests of the Porrinyards followed me as I exited the room, turned right to follow the corridor, and started picking up speed. I soon heard them a few steps behind me, calling my name, wondering what the hell could possibly be wrong with the problem solved and nothing but a long-planned happy ending ahead of me.

            By the time I had progressed twenty steps they must have known that I was not headed for our quarters but for the hangar where our transport was waiting. I knew intellectually that I couldn’t get there and board and complete all the pre-departure procedures and leave the Negev without anybody stopping me, and that I certainly couldn’t leave my life partners behind without either explanation or way home. I also knew that if I’d had a chance to plan my escape a little more rationally, I might have asked to stay over one more night and fled as they slept; yes, that might have been the thing to do, that might have spared them my reasons and granted them the consolation of hating me.

            The Porrinyards caught up with me at a T-shaped intersection, just under the graphic of a two-headed arrow pointing left to the hangar and right toward the food stores. I’d had to slow down a little just to make the turn, and so the Porrinyards were able to grab me by one arm apiece, spinning me around and pressing me up against the bulkhead, with not quite enough force to qualify as a slam.

            As with everything they did, the coordination between their two bodies was perfect. Though I tried to shrug them off, they countered with ease and only consolidated their hold.

            Bengid rushed up behind them, her eyes wide, her expression stricken and uncomprehending. In a silly gesture I’d only seen her make once or twice, at times of extreme upset, she covered her mouth with both fists, thumbs against her lips, the knuckles of the fingers fitting together like interlocking puzzles. It had been a little girl’s gesture then and looked like a little girl’s gesture now.

            I raged. “Let me go—”

            “I’m not going to do that,” the Porrinyards said. “Not until you tell me what’s wrong.”

            I struggled again. I win most of the fights I get into, but I’d never won one with Oscin and Skye, never even had one with them. I loved them, but would have broken their arms to get them to let me go, if I could; would have blown my own head off rather than say what they were going to force me to say.

            I couldn’t breathe to tell them. There was nothing inside me but an empty, airless place, and it made me unfit to be with people, especially unfit to be with them.

            But Bengid was there too: Bengid, the silly cow who’d walked me up to the edge of the precipice and pushed me over, not realizing that yesterday’s heart-to-heart had gotten the dangers precisely backward.

            The big worry was not that cylinking would destroy Andrea Cort.

            I hated her for bringing me to this place where I’d had to realize such an awful thing. I tried to lunge at her, but the Porrinyards pulled me back and pressed me up against the wall again.

            They said, “I can keep this up all day, Andrea. It’ll be a great workout.”

            My breath was already coming in ragged gasps, and there was no telling how long speech would even be an option. When I managed to get out a couple of words, they sounded like untamed things, escaped from some internal cage. “They . . . were kind.”

            “What?”

            “They were . . . kind. They . . . tried to help him. Like you . . . they had . . . a damaged . . . broken person . . . and they wanted . . . to help him. I don’t know . . . maybe . . . they even loved him. They thought . . . that by making him . . . part of what they were . . . they could take away his pain . . . dilute the worst . . . of what he was. But . . . they couldn’t. They didn’t . . . make him better. He . . . made them . . . worse!”

            The last words were almost a wail. I tried to break free again, kicking at Skye’s shin, but she pinned my leg with a simple shift of her own and pressed me back against the bulkhead. I closed my eyes and thought about all the bad choices I’d made, all the bad things I’d done, all the anger and bitterness that had filled too many of my years, all the darkness that had been a poison inside me and that would now pollute them, the one person I loved most.

            My eyes were still shut against the awfulness of the prospect when their weight shifted, and two pairs of lips kissed me on the cheeks.

            They said, “You’ve never made us worse, Andrea.”

            My knees lost all strength. I sank to the deck, weeping, not knowing what I was going to do but no longer considering flight one of the options. They followed me all the way down. My arms came free and I wrapped them around Oscin’s shoulders, shaking uncontrollably from the impact of all the doubt that I’d foolishly imagined gone and replaced with a certainty that exists nowhere in this world. Skye came around to hug me from the back, her perfect cheek resting against the corded knot of my back.

            I don’t know how much time it took me to realize that Bengid had stayed.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Andrea Cort made her debut in “Unseen Demons,” from the July/August 2002 Analog; her subsequent adventures include the novels Emissaries From The Dead, The Third Claw of God, and the available-only-in-Germany Fall of The Marionettes. This story takes place after the third book, but doesn’t require knowledge of it.)

            Copyright © 2011 Adam-Troy Castro