Riel's shoulders dropped from around her ears, and Valens recognized it for relief. “Swear them to secrecy, too. And I mean secret; I'll do something drastic if I have to. And I need that written report — please — via Richard. As soon as possible.”
“Ma'am. Anything else?”
“Yes,” she said. “Find out what the hell is causing it, and if it's going to completely derail our attempts to buffer Earth's ecosystem, would you?”
“We're on it.” And that was Richard's voice, Richard's image stepping in as Charlie pixilated and vanished. “Prime Minister—”
The AI was interrupted by a different chime. Riel's secretary's tone; Richard put himself on hold, his image hanging motionless as Riel answered the other call. “Yes, Anne?”
“Ma'am, I have a Mr. Tobias Hardy from Unitek here to see you. And General Frye.”
Riel rolled her eyes at Valens. Janet Frye. “Do they have an appointment, Anne?”
“No, ma'am. I checked twice.”
Sometimes, when the prime minister smiled like that, Fred Valens could almost like her. Even knowing that she was a sly old snake, a consummate manipulator, and a gameswoman to match even him. “I'm in a conference right now, Anne. See if you can squeeze them in tomorrow, please? Or perhaps on Monday?”
“I'll do my best, ma'am,” Anne answered, and the link clicked off.
Richard unfroze himself, steepling his long hands in front of his breast. “Toby Hardy I know—”
“Janet Frye,” Valens said, rubbing his eyes with his forefinger and thumb, “is a retired general and part of the opposition leadership, heading up the Home party.”
“Isolationists,” Riel supplied. “The more radical even want us out of the commonwealth. What do you want to bet they want us to play appeasement with the Chinese? The damned Americans are on my back again, too…” She rolled her neck from side to side. “You could have looked that up, Richard; you don't fool me.”
“Sometimes it's more revealing to ask questions.”
Valens crossed to the window himself. “Why do you think they're contacting you now?”
“Oh, that's easy,” Riel said. She went to her desk, thumb locked open a drawer, and drew something small and flat out and laid it on the desk beside the interface panel. “I got some interesting intelligence last night.”
Valens came to get a better look. “An HCD?”
“The HCD,” Riel said, and looked at him. “The red telephone, so to speak.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
The prime minister left the communications device lying on her desk, and went to draw the curtains open again. This time, Valens didn't protest. “I was briefed last night,” Riel called back to him, reaching over her head to fiddle with the cords. “It seems General Frye got a sealed, couriered letter from the PanChinese consulate in the United States yesterday. I'm not privy to the details of what's in that letter.”
“Of course not,” Valens murmured dryly. “That would be espionage, after all.”
“Hah. In any case, I think Richard's guess might be correct, and our primary problem in the PanChinese government is not the premier, but the minister of war, Shijie Shu, who seems about ready to go after his boss's job himself. And I happen to know that he's been in contact with certain members of the U.S. Congress. Through this same embassy official whose return mail code is on the couriered letter.”
“You do have friends in low places.”
“We do our best.” She stepped away from the open curtains, smart enough, at least, not to silhouette herself for long.
“You know,” he said, “I have a few friends of my own. And I happen to know that the secretary general's decision to hold hearings rather than a full war-crimes tribunal — even with all the retractions and reschedulings that entailed — was influenced by a personal call from the office of the PanChinese premier.”
“Did it now?” Riel's eyebrows rose when she was thinking, and right now they furrowed parallel ridges all the way up to her short, dark hair. “That's fascinating, Fred.”
In the silence that followed, Richard cleared his throat. “Am I excused, Prime Minister?”
She nodded. “Yes — no. Wait. Tomorrow. Tonight. Before the delightful Mr. Hardy and his lapdog can reschedule. I'm sending you Xie Min-xue.”
Silence. And then, “Thank you, Prime Minister.”
“There's nothing to thank me for,” she answered. “He and Casey and Fred's granddaughter are all going to be called on to testify, along with you, Richard, if I have my way. Barring a ballistic missile, Montreal is the safest place around right now. I don't think even PanChina is going to risk a second unprovoked attack in front of the world camera. Not this week, in any case. It would put paid to their claim that the attack on Toronto was the result of fringe elements, for one thing—”
Valens nodded, more to himself than to Riel. “What are you going to do about it?”
She lifted her chin and looked at Richard, hovering over her desk. “You can go now, Dick. Thank you.”
“Thank you,” he replied, and derezzed.
Riel stared into the middle distance, her mouth twisting.
“Connie? What are you going to do?”
“I'm going to call Premier Xiong and find out exactly what the hell he thinks is going on.”
11:15 AM
29 September 2063
HMCSS Montreal
Since leaving Sydney, Leslie had developed the abysmally bad habit of humming to himself while he worked, as if he were trying to draw his country and his road around his shoulders, especially in its absence. Restlessness was in his bones, his blood, an itch under his skin like ingrained dirt. He couldn't think unless he walked, and he couldn't walk unless he sang, even if the singing was under his breath.
Now, he set out along the Montreal's toroidal corridors at a good clip, light on his feet, pushing himself a little in the big ship's partial gravity.
Leslie didn't really understand how the Benefactor tech worked, and he knew — in uncomfortable self-honesty — that he did not understand the implications of the discovery that he, Charlie, and Jeremy had made that morning. But he wasn't blind, and he did know that both the xenobiologist and the AI had been frightened—no, had been scared—when they swore him to secrecy on the issue. And so he hummed to himself, big hands swinging loose-fingered on the ends of his arms, eyes just about focused enough to keep him from walking into other pedestrians, ground-eating strides chewing up one lap after another of the Montreal.
On the third lap, pacing footsteps alerted him to company. He didn't glance over, nor did he freeze his uninvited companion out. Instead, he kept walking, still singing under his breath, trusting her to start talking when she had something to say.
Half a lap later, Casey cleared her throat. “We do have treadmills on this tub.”
“Buggered if I'll walk on a treadmill,” Leslie answered amicably. “I like to feel like I'm getting somewhere.”
“And walking in circles does that for you?”
He snorted laughter. “At least the walls move. And I don't have to watch the holos the guy on the next machine is distracting himself with. When I walk, I like to walk.”
“Being in the moment,” she said, surprising him. She had a good, long stride, with a hitch of a limp that he thought was more habit than pain. He stepped up his pace to test her. “What were you singing, Les?”
He grunted and shrugged. “Singing up the country, kind of.”
“Singing up the country?”
“The land must first exist as a concept. It must be sung before it can exist. It must be perceived before it can be walked on. It must be dreamed. You should know something about dreamings, shouldn't you? Or do your folks call them by a different name?”
She was still looking at him, a little quirk twisting her lips out of shape. “You know what an ‘apple' is, Les?”
“A kind of fruit?”
“A kind of Indian,” she said dryly. “Red on the
outside. White on the inside. They never taught us any of that shit in Catholic school.”
He laughed and finally returned her glance. “Sweetheart, you'd never believe how familiar you sound. Come with me.”
“Where are we going, Les?”
“To the observation lounge,” he said, and started walking that way. There was one advantage to wandering ways and a trained spatial memory; he'd been aboard the Montreal less than forty-eight hours, and he already knew his way around.
The lounge was crowded, for once. There was a poker game in progress by the beverage dispensers and one or two people sitting in chairs near the porthole and monitors. Leslie paused beside those, off to one side so he wouldn't block anyone's view, and gestured Casey in beside him. She came without a word and stood there silently, looking where Leslie was looking. He heard the shallow catch in her breathing and smiled, knowing the deep, spinning view still tightened her chest as well as his own.
The long fall gave him vertigo, but he waited until the silence got heavy before he said anything more. He waited until she cleared her throat, in fact, and cut her off as smoothly as if he'd been about to start speaking anyway. “You know, in my own country, you could point to any rock, and hill, and gully, and I could tell you who it was.”
“Who?”
“They're all ancestors, in the Dreaming. Everything is, in my own—”
“Do you have a country, Les?”
Oh, she was good at those sidelong glances, and sharp as a tack. He gave it the silence its weight deserved, and nodded. “Sometimes. I think everybody has a nation… sometimes.” And now it was his turn for the sly look across his nose, and she was already looking away when he did it. “Do you?”
She rubbed her arrogant nose with a gleaming steel forefinger. “Have a nation?”
He nodded.
“Sometimes,” she answered, and he laughed. And then she turned to face him full-on, and lowered her voice until they were the only ones in the room. “So tell me about this Dreaming.”
He gestured out the window, at the stars and the sun-catcher shape of the birdcage, small enough with distance that he could have covered it with his palm. He sorted out a child's explanation, and floated it in simple words. Beginner stories. Truth, but not very much of it, suitable for paddling your toes in. “The Dreaming is what came before, even though it persists to today. And everything that is or will be was already sung, predestined. It's all waiting under the ground to happen.”
“Everything?”
“You, me. Piper and Forward. The Montreal. Everything. We just haven't found it all yet. And the roads between the stars. Those were sung. That's what the songlines are, roads in music and verse. When you get to the end of your songline, when you don't know the verses anymore, you enter someone else's territory, but the melody continues. And if you know the melody, even if you don't know the language, you can find the way, because the landmarks are in the melody. It's just the stories that are in the words.”
“By that logic, the Benefactors were already sung, too.”
“How do you know they weren't?”
She stared at him. He turned and gave her a grin and she shook her head slowly, ruefully, as if in complex understanding. “Do your songlines go to the stars?”
He grinned, and nudged her shoulder with his own. “Now you're catching on. The road is the song. The song is the road.”
Her expression hardened, a fish that spots the hook. “What do you want, Leslie?”
“I get to suit up and come EVA with you tomorrow, right?”
She sighed and turned back to the window, staring out it, past it. Down the long parallel lines of the starlight, the expression in her eyes distant enough to have a chance of looking farther even than that. She shook her head, but she muttered, “You know how to operate a space suit, son?”
“I've checked out ground side. Never in zero G. Or vacuum.”
“Well,” she said, scrubbing her flesh hand and her steel hand against the thighs of her fatigues, “I guess we'd better get down to a cargo bay and get you some practice, then.”
Fairy tales don't teach children that monsters exist. Children already know that monsters exist. Fairy tales teach children that monsters can be killed.
— G. K. Chesterton
11:00 PM
Saturday September 29, 2063
HMCSS Montreal
Earth orbit
Sometimes Geniveve Castaign liked to pretend she was invisible. She'd slip out of bed barefoot, midwatch and in the middle of the night. She'd tug her coveralls on over her pajamas, undog the hatchway, and ease her way into the corridor when she was supposed to be in bed asleep.
No one ever said anything, or did more than nod to her in passing. She shared her quarters only with Boris, Jenny's cat who had gotten to be the whole ship's cat by now, and she got special quarters in the civilian corridor because nobody on the ship's crew wanted a twelve-year-old roommate — even Patty, who was seventeen and who had a private room because she was a pilot.
She could wander all night, and as long as she dodged Elspeth and Jenny, nobody ever said anything. Nobody ever said anything, that is, as long as she stayed in the unrestricted-access parts of the ship, because they all felt bad about Leah. And because it wasn't as if Genie had to be up for school. And because the Montreal wasn't set up for kids, not yet, and wouldn't be until the first batch of colonists came on board.
And because they knew Richard and Alan were in her head, and Richard and Alan wouldn't let her get into any trouble.
In any case, it was 11 PM, and Genie had been trying to sleep since nine. She gave up, climbed out of her bunk, and went looking for Patty. Patty was up, of course. Patty was nearly a grown-up, and she was a pilot. And either she or Jenny always had to be awake and able to get to the bridge. Just in case. Although Patty's on-duty time was supposed to be spent studying.
Which meant she'd probably be in the ready room by the bridge, because Captain Wainwright had made sure there was a state-of-the-art interface in there, and that was also where Genie did her schoolwork, usually while her dad was on duty.
Genie wasn't supposed to be on the bridge unless she was invited. But the ready room also had a door to the corridor, and there was nothing to keep her from climbing in wheel, and nothing to keep her out of the ready room once she got there. Except—
“Where are you off to, young lady?”
Richard's voice always had a certain humorous tint to it when he called her that. She kept climbing up the access ladder, eschewing the lifts. I couldn't sleep, she answered. I'm going to go do some homework.
Which wasn't exactly a lie, and Richard would probably know if she lied, but he didn't always catch on to truths that weren't… complete. He was too polite to just read her mind, or at least he pretended to be.
Richard coughed inside her head, a polite cough into the palm of his knobby, elegant hand, the white of his cuff extending past the sleeve of his jacket, a steel-banded watch glittering against his skin. How come you wear a watch, Richard?
“It gives me something to fiddle with,” he answered, and demonstrated.
But you have a clock in your head.
“I find it helps me relate to meat-type people better if I keep myself reminded of what it's like to be meat. And you don't have a clock in your head, kiddo.” Affectionately, and said with the tone that would have gone with a hair-ruffle that Genie was much too old for, if Richard had been able to manage it.
No, she answered, following the gray-carpeted corridor toward the bridge. She no longer even noticed how strange it was that it rose in front of and behind her, disappearing in back of the ceiling. Scuff, scuff, scuff went her feet. She amused herself by scuffing in patterns when she walked; short-long, long-short. But I have you.
She felt the weight of his contemplation, the flow of ideas and the texture of his emotion, because he permitted her to feel them. A little bit wonder, a little bit pride, a little bit fear. “The ease with which you say tha
t is going to worry people, Genie,” he said, quietly. “They won't understand it. They won't understand why having me in your head, why relying on me to know what time it is, doesn't worry you.”
Then they're pretty silly. You never bother me when I want to be left alone, and you're always there when I need you. Unlike Leah. Unlike Jenny, who had always come and gone with very little rhyme or reason. Unlike Papa, who had always been worried about Genie because she was sick, and now that she wasn't sick, wasn't worried anymore.
Genie's mouth twitched. She didn't miss the cystic fibrosis. Really, truly. Not at all.
Even if she did miss not being invisible sometimes.
“Still,” he said. “You might want to keep it to yourself. Until there are more people like you. People can be mean when they don't understand things.”
Richard, she answered dryly, as she reached her destination. I know that. Do you think you're talking to a child? He didn't answer. She grinned to herself and held her left hand up to the ready room door sensor so that it could read the control chip implanted under her skin. The door chirped softly and slid open. Genie went inside, and Richard “stayed behind.”
He'd be there if she wanted him. But for now, he did her the courtesy of letting her walk away.
Patty didn't look up when she stepped into the pilots' lounge-slash-ready room. As Genie had guessed, the older girl was bent over an interface plate, her fingers twisted through brunette hair, holding it out of her face like a heavy curtain. “Shouldn't you be in bed?”
“I'm always in bed,” Genie said. “I've spent more of my life in bed than anybody needs to. Whatcha working on?”
“Differentials,” Patty answered, and tucked her hair behind her ear. A few strands snagged on a silver earring shaped like a leaping dolphin; she disentangled them with a bitten fingernail, wincing. “You want something to drink?”
Genie shook her head and hunched down on a stool, tapping at another interface panel on the desktop without any haste, with one finger only. She leafed through her homework files and sighed. She was ten months ahead of the curriculum, and still bored. Leah would have offered to show her how the differentials worked; Leah always did most of her homework with Genie, and bragged to Papa that Genie was smart enough to handle it.
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