“Did you kill Warmuth or Santiago?”
“No,” he said. “I did not. But you have to keep something in mind.”
“What’s that?”
“That if I was the killer, I’d be saying the same thing.”
It’s a locked-room mystery on a grand scale: two deliberate murders on an enormous artificial habitat so dangerous that you can die just by tripping on the way to the bathroom. The deaths would have been easy to disguise as accidents, and yet in at least one case the methods used would only have been available to the primary suspect: the Artificial Intelligence who designed and built the habitat in the first place. The investigator is under strict orders to find somebody, anybody, to pin the murders on, because the one thing she absolutely can’t do is confront an AI powerful enough to kill every human in the habitat, maybe even in the rest of the universe, and officially charge it with murder.
Welcome to the cylinder world One One One. Don’t look down.
I first ran across Adam-Troy Castro from one of my favorite short stories, “The Tangled Strings of the Marionettes”. That story featured a character trapped in a personal hell that in some ways was his own choosing, which is exactly what the situation is for the main character in Emissaries From The Dead. Andrea Cort experienced something early in her childhood that branded her a monster to most of the known universe. The only way to keep various governments from having her tried and executed for crimes she already knows she’s guilty of, was to agree to indentured servitude to the Diplomatic Corps. Most people who sign up for the Dip Corps can work off their service in, oh, ten or twenty years. For Andrea it’s a lifetime sentence. By the time the story starts she’s built up an impressive personality: smart, talented, capable, beautiful, and about as pissed-off a person as you can imagine. She’s a hell of lot of fun to read, since she’ll steam-roll over every attempt at politeness. And she absolutely can’t be intimidated, since there’s not much people can offer in the way of threats or rudeness that can stand up to everything she’s gone through since she was eight years old.
The setting for the story is also fun to read, if about as far from fun to live in as you can imagine. Most artificial worlds with a similar shape (cylinder, spun for gravity) would have the inhabitants live inside the rim of the cylinder. In One One One the rim is filled with a toxic atmosphere and an ocean of acid, plus lots of mostly unknown creatures who can actually survive there. The only livable areas are in the knotted mass of vines growing from the central hub. The natives live out their entire lives clinging to the Uppergrowth, and the humans trying to study them have to live in hammocks and rope bridges anchored to the vines, with just one rope or thin layer of fabric between them and the abyss below. The world is, as one character describes it, “…dull indeed, if not for the fact that it was upside down and likely to kill you if you let go.”
Did I forget to mention that Andrea Cort has a phobia about heights?
But it’s the larger universe that the author created for this that’s the real draw for me. It’s the same universe as “Tangled Strings”, which is to say it’s a different world, different characters, completely new cast of aliens, and set from an entirely new viewpoint. (There’s one brief mention of the dance-pilgrims on Vlhan, which made me happy.) It’s also a writing style I love; Adam-Troy Castro is one of those authors who will throw terms at the reader without any explanation, and then let you discover through the course of the story what the heck everyone is talking about. So you’ll get tantalizing mentions of things like the Tchi, the Riirgaans, the Cid, and the K’cenhowten, plus cy-linked pairs (my personal favorite) and buzzpatches, with a few of those still unexplained by the end of the book. Castro also created the bizarre social structures that can come from so many different alien species interacting with each other, such as the fact that a human can defect to an alien race to avoid prosecution (it makes them legally a non-human, which means a human who voluntarily has sex with them can legally be prosecuted for bestiality).
Like most mysteries, I tend to feel that the final whodunnit isn’t nearly as interesting as the investigation itself. And the initial mystery ended up being several mysteries, and mini-mysteries, and sub-stories, so there were several reveals, and not all of them came as a total surprise. A main player in the story are the godlike Artificial Intelligences, and when you have beings that are capable of pulling all the strings and controlling every step of the outcome, the story ends up having to focus on why they…don’t. I was still more or less happy with the ending, most especially since it left the story open for a sequel or two. Andrea Cort’s way too fascinating a character to let go after just one book.