by Sean Stewart
Then she went upstairs and began to pack for her trip to the Southside.
Chapter
Five
It was Friday, March 24, 2074; three hours before the great banquet that would celebrate the Eve of the Feast of the Annunciation. Nick Terleski was standing at the rail of the High Level Bridge. It had thawed that morning, but now in the late afternoon it was getting cold again. The lively spring light had leached away, leaving behind the cold colors Nick had never noticed until he saw them through Raining’s eyes. The heavy brown river. The blue shadows. The quiet snow.
Five years before, at the height of their courtship, they walked in the snowy river valley. “So you don’t trust men,” Raining said, laughing, “because most men are fools. And I know you don’t trust women—”
Nick smiled. “Too clever for their own good.”
“Animals?”
“Too dumb.”
“Machines?”
He thought about that. “They break down.”
“So what do you trust?” Laughter in her eyes and utterly desirable.
He thought for a long time. “The cold,” he said.
And watched her smile gutter like a candle and go out. Her breath smoked in the freezing air of his homeland. “That’s not enough, love.”
How could he say, It’s all I know.
Now, five years later, the cold was all he had left. Nick rocked back and forth, rolling his weight across his feet to press the feeling back into them. After a while he changed to kicking at the sidewalk with his numb toes. He should have worn his foil parka. The cold stung his ears, and his thick fingers had begun to stiffen, like wet snow hardening. Tightness was creeping over his face like a skin of ice forming on a pond.
Raining was back on the Southside. She had come with a delegation from Chinatown. He would see her at the banquet tonight.
The news had slipped like a key into Nick’s back that morning and wound him up, tightening all the springs in his chest and limbs, driving him out to pace through a world of puddled melt-water and pale March sunshine. He had thought of volunteering for the platoon sent to Chinatown, just to be near Raining and Lark, but had pushed the thought away. Now they had come here.
A toy soldier. She had called him that, once.
—Called you a lot worse things than that, too, Magpie remarked.
Magpie was Nick’s familiar. A familiar was a cross between a computer program, a notebook, and a servant. Most Southsiders wore them. Early work in artificial intelligence had focused on making expert systems, programs which were designed to make the knowledge of accomplished individuals widely available. Two early examples were the development of computer programs that could play chess, or diagnose illnesses. As neural-net modelling evolved and computer systems became more responsive to their environment, a lab at the University of Alberta worked out a design for a personal expert system, an expert at being you. It paid attention where you paid attention, and remembered the things you needed to remember. If you were a salesman, your familiar would memorize street directions, remember the names of your clients and their children, their past ordering history, their cocktail preferences.
After 2004, familiars became more powerful and more subtle. Some never amounted to more than dumb subroutines in the computer gel-pak most Southsiders wore around their waists. But some familiars developed genuine personalities. Magpie, besides being chock full of salvage lore, site maps, and Merck Index figures on everything from the melting point of potassium to the range of carbon content in stainless steel, had more than just a personality. Though Nick never would have said it out loud, he was perfectly certain Magpie also had a soul.
—Mindless robot. She definitely called you a mindless robot on more than one occasion, Magpie reflected. Raining had a good selection of Chinese names too. I took the liberty of getting them translated. Remember that thing she used to say when you made cabbage rolls for dinner? It turns out—
—Fuck off.
The tiny letters printing out on Nick’s contact lenses dimmed as Magpie paused.
—You can’t run from what you have made, she said.
Down below the Bridge, the ice was breaking up. It had started two days ago, creaking and shuddering, and finally tearing apart so you could see the North Saskatchewan again. Chunks and floes of ice still clogged the channel, crashing and grinding together, jamming up around the bridge foundations or spinning ponderously downstream.
The last six months Nick and Raining had been together had ground him down, had stripped his threads. The fights and reconciliations, the sex and the tears, hammering down one after another, leaving him blank and stupid with exhaustion. His whole body remembered that terrible weariness.
—We can never go back.
—Never is a long time, Magpie said.
—Some things are stones, Nick said. A man’s a fool who doesn’t know that. Some things are broken and can’t be fixed.
—A fool is a man too proud to try, Magpie said. And Raining aside, there is Lark to consider.
—What have I got to give her? What my father gave me?
Nick rocked forward, elbows resting on the bridge rail, chin resting on his fists. White scars on his hands stood out in the cold, reminders of a dozen stupid mistakes: a careless weld, a jammed fan belt, moments of inattention with hacksaws and battery acid and the sapper’s screwjack he wore on his belt. Under his nails, black crescents of oil that never washed clean. They were hard hands. Meaty, heavily muscled, big-knuckled, blunt-fingered. His father’s hands: he knew them well, oh yes.
—She’ll be better off with her mother, Nick said.
—What’s best for her doesn’t matter.
—What?
—You are Lark’s father, Magpie said. It doesn’t matter whether she would be better off without you. Your duty is to be with her. To fail her as a parent, if that’s all you can do.
Nick thought.
—That’s toy soldier talk, you know. Duty. Responsibility. Raining would hate that.
—Who gives a damn what Raining likes? If she only needed what she liked, she would never have married you in the first place.
Nick allowed a smile.
—This is true.
—You didn’t think it was a noble deed not to follow them to Vancouver, did you? Some sort of stoic sacrifice?
—I was trying to do the right thing.
—You were a coward.
“Fuck off!” Nick said out loud. He rocked back and forth, his heels grinding in the hardening snow. His breath smoked in the twilight. Ice-floes crashed together down below. Like spring-addled rams in rut, Nick thought. Brainless head-butting bastards.
He would see Raining tonight. Oh, God, how he loved her still.
The whole south side of Edmonton’s river valley had once been a series of pleasant parks: the Devonian Gardens, Emily Murphy, Mayfair, and so on. Of these, Mayfair Park was the largest and most central to the life of the city. Its greatest attraction was the small lake in its midst. In summer there were paddleboats; in winter, skating.
In the strange and dangerous times after ’04, when outlanders were to be given neither offense nor an opening, Winter’s priorities were to make his guests feel both welcome and vulnerable. A set of four chalets, designed for comfort and appointed with a battery of surveillance equipment, had been built at the edge of Mayfair Lake to house visitors. On the small island in the middle of the lake, he had built the Visitors Pavilion, a gorgeous, welcoming conference building of tall, polished wooden ceilings and enormous triple-paned windows to let the daylight in: charmingly picturesque, and militarily indefensible.
Here, as the Eve of the Feast of the Annunciation turned colder by the hour, the dignitaries of Southside and Vancouver met, and mingled. The splendor of the Annunciation was magnified, but the milk and meatless fast of Lent kept, by a sumptuous smorgasbord loaded with tureens of borscht and potato soup, platters of snow-cured goldeye and pickerel, french fries, boiled wheat and honey for the chil
dren, bowls of sauerkraut and potato salad, loaves of eggless rye flatbread, endless trays of meatless cabbage rolls, perogies, scalloped beets (a Southside delicacy), parsnip fingers, turnips carved into fancy shapes, jars of honey and pots of searing horseradish and heaps of sweets: raspberry crumbles, crispy finger-kuchen sticky with chokecherry syrup, baked-icing figurines, bricks of toffee, and sugar-crackers to be spread with fragrant rhubarb jam. In short, it was a vast, friendly, generous feast—smelling pungently of beets, sauerkraut, and rhubarb—guaranteed to make the esteemed visitors from Chinatown feel not only welcomed, but uncomfortable, and acutely out of place.
Had the food been modelled in clay and left unpainted, Nick could not have wanted it less. His stomach was a knot. His dress uniform was stiff and uncomfortable.
A toy soldier.
He hadn’t worn the dress uniform since finishing his mandatory three years service, but it was one of only two pieces of formal clothing he owned. The other was the suit he had been married in. He hadn’t had the courage to wear that.
—92 In disgust, Magpie was posting his heart rate in huge numbers on his right contact lens. Normally he ran from 68 to 72 beats per minute.
Raining entered the Pavilion.
—115
Meanwhile, at one end of the head table Li Mei, Water Spider’s aide, sat making small talk with Emily Thompson, Southside’s heir. As well as being Water Spider’s eyes and ears here, Li Mei was the daughter of Li Bing, Chinatown’s chief diplomat to the Southside. She had been raised in a cultured environment; to her eyes the Visitors Pavilion was filled with the same tasteless barrack-room utilitarianism that permeated the Snows’ lives, from their graceless homes to their appalling clothes. Their idea of dressing formally here was to pin extra medals on their combat fatigues.
“Have you given any further thought to purchasing the technology we discussed last time?” Emily Thompson said. Which was curious, for on the two previous trips Li Mei had made with her mother to this cold white city, she and Emily Thompson had never had such a conversation, and she was quite sure the Southsider knew it.
Her mother always said, “When in doubt, smile.” Li Mei smiled back at the young woman who stood to inherit this depressing kingdom.
Li Mei had dressed for the banquet in a shawl-cut burgundy jacket over a fitted blouse, its sleeves peeled back and pinned over the jacket cuffs with garnet cuff-pins. A narrow gold belt defined her waist. Below this she wore an ankle-length cross-pleated skirt, and black cloth boots with gold buckles. A mother-of-pearl clasp defined the part in her hair, and she wore that perfume called Sunset On Red Water.
In contrast, Emily Thompson was roughly the shape and color of a peeled potato, almost offensively drab in a white jumpsuit with grey piping. The red scarf she wore around her head made her look as if she were about to sort through a pile of cabbages. Her only piece of jewelry was a hideously clunky crucifix, enamelled and inlaid with garnets and amethysts, which she wore on a gold chain around her neck.
“Not only are our surveillance devices excellent in themselves,” Emily continued deliberately, “but they come with an AI monitor capable of very subtle key-word sensitivity. The sentry-familiar never goes to sleep, never gets bored. Always watching. Always listening.” Emily’s eyes flicked to a guard who stood a few meters away at an easy parade rest.
Tension fluttered in Li Mei’s stomach.
“My governess has been assigned to the garrison in your city,” Emily Thompson remarked. “A couple of my grandfather’s personal guards are watching over me just now.”
Always watching. Always listening.
Li Mei glanced at the guard. “I see.” Emily was being watched by her own people.
She knew at once she should not have spoken. Her mother would not have done that; her mother would have waited, showing no understanding. Withholding commitment. Whereas she had already entered into a kind of collusion with this dumpy Emily Thompson by joining her cloaked conversation. This was what Emily Thompson wanted; but this was not necessarily in Chinatown’s best interest.
Her mother always told Li Mei there were four kinds of dragons. Yellow dragons, whose direction was southeast and whose metal was sulphur, whose aspect was splendor and who attacked through pride. Red dragons, whose direction was southwest and whose metal was mercury, whose aspect was brilliant and who attacked through inconstancy. Black dragons, whose direction was southwest and whose metal was iron, whose aspect was power and who attacked through force. And white dragons, whose direction was northeast and whose metal was silver, whose aspect was death and who attacked through fear.
Li Mei wondered which kind of dragon Emily Thompson was.
“I would very much like to visit the Vancouver Islands,” the Southsider said.
Now? Li Mei worried. Or some other time? No—now, surely. That was the point of drawing attention to the fact that she was under surveillance by her own people.
“We could go together,” Emily suggested.
Oh no! What kind of overture was the dumpling woman making? “That, ah, that would be difficult,” Li Mei said.
How did she find herself in this terrible situation! She should have stayed in her office in the Ministry of Borders, it was small but she could do that job, she understood the rustle of paper. She should have made an excuse to Water Spider and declined to come on this trip.
Li Mei tried to compose herself. “We take our relationship with the Southside very seriously. In these worsening times your troops may be all that stands between Chinatown and destruction. Whatever my own impulses, I could never permit myself to do anything which might endanger the good of my people.”
Emily Thompson sat slowly back in her chair. “Just as I must always put the good of my people first.”
“Exactly.”
The red Orthodox scarf wrapped old baba style around Emily’s head framed her brown eyes. Words and numbers were pouring across them in tiny blue lines. Li Mei looked away. This aspect of dealing with the Snows still disturbed her, and Emily Thompson screened prodigious amounts of information, even by Southside standards. Li Mei did not like to feel the weight of all that calculation focused on her. Data, analysis, background, projection, measurement, measurement, measurement: the fierce relentless rhythms of calculation, projection, evaluation.
Emily said, “‘The Five Strategic Arts are measurements, estimates, analysis, balancing, and triumph.’”
The potato woman was a mind reader.
Li Mei allowed no expression. “You know Sun Tzu.”
Emily said, “We are a soldiering people.”
A new wash of information cascaded across Emily’s contact lenses. Lines of Chinese characters flowed by. Were they from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War? Could Emily Thompson read them? Were they being translated? Were they simply marginalia to an English translation?
Emily appeared to decide on her strategy. She said, “Tactically, I do not like our position in your city.”
Li Mei remembered to hold her silence.
“At first we were merely to guard your borders, but now you have asked us to become the aggressor in your war, securing the no man’s land between yourself and Downtown, where the barbarians live.”
Li Mei said, “Is this problematic? I am afraid my knowledge of strategy is not profound.”
Emily stared over the rim of her cup. Her eyes so rude, yet it was Li Mei who felt guilty, looking away. “Unlike your mother, who is attached to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, your posting is in the Ministry of Borders. Your office is on the third floor of Water Spider’s wing of Government House. Your window faces east. You entered the Ministry eight months and three weeks ago, posting excellent scores on your entrance exams, including first class commendations in geometry, deportment, and brushwork. Your Minister is the man in charge of coordinating the actions of our troops in Chinatown. If your knowledge of the situation is not profound, detailed, and specific, I would be forced to assume that either the Mandarinate is not, as claimed, based on mer
it, and that you got your post through your mother’s influence; or that your Minister is a fool. I do not believe that Water Spider is a foolish man.”
Li Mei covered her face by raising her cup of chicory. “This really is an excellent drink, on a cold day. I believe I will have another.”
Water Spider and her mother had both told her how the Southside familiars could track your pulse rate and the dilation of your pupils to help their masters gauge your mood. She should not have complimented the dreadful chicory beverage. The apology was apparent. She should have demanded tea instead.
Too late.
Emily held her eyes. “On reflection, I believe the situation is tactically unsound. I am afraid I will have to ask Grandfather to recall our troops.”
“Surely he will make that determination by himself!”
“It was my decision to send the troops. A mistake, as I now see. And Grandfather is about to owe me a very great deal,” Emily Thompson said. “He will do this, if I ask it of him.”
Emily Thompson was a black dragon. Li Mei saw that now. She was of the north, and there was iron in her. With delicate fingers Li Mei removed the garnet cuff-pin at her left wrist, adjusted the crease of her blouse sleeve, folded it back, and retacked it. “You are not serious.”
“I have never been more serious in my life.” The ghost of a smile crossed Emily Thompson’s face. “And remember, I have been raised as Southside’s heir. It’s been a serious life.” They looked at one another. “Perhaps if I were to visit your city,” Emily said, “and examine the tactical situation in person…”
And then Li Mei saw the beauty of Emily’s trap.
For some reason, Winter’s granddaughter desperately wanted to leave the Southside. The threat was plain: if Li Mei left her here, Emily would use her influence to withdraw the Southside troops, leaving Chinatown exposed to the advance of the barbarians from Downtown.
Of course, they could try to replace the Southsiders. They could go south, looking to woo fighting strength from the Seattle Clans, but those were constantly busy warring amongst themselves, and the troops they could provide would be nowhere near Southside’s caliber. The Southsiders were the best trained, best equipped, smartest and most honorable mercenaries on the continent, and they were very careful to maintain that standard.
