Valens's amusement is palpable when the young man stops in front of me, rather than him, and makes a little formal gesture. “Master Warrant Officer Genevieve Casey?”
He has an accent smooth as the silk of his jacket, and I could listen to him say my name all day. “I am. And this is Brigadier General Frederick Valens.”
He offers Fred his hand and Fred takes it, giving me a look over our guide's head that's both charmed and bemused. I half get the feeling he's enjoying being snubbed. “I am Dongsik Jung. I will be your escort—”
“I'm pleased to meet you, Mr. Dongsik—”
“Mr. Jung,” he says, and winks at my transparent blush. “Master Warrant Officer, it's an honor to make your acquaintance. And you, Brigadier General, a very great honor as well.” He steps back, looking from one of us to the other, and lifts an eyebrow at each. “Have you been to the United Nations before?”
“Never,” Fred says, shrugging out of his overcoat.
“Wonderful,” Mr. Jung says, turning neatly on the ball of his foot and falling into step between and a few steps in front of us. Even if he fell back, I could still see Valens over the top of his head. “We just have time for a little tour before you're due in the General Assembly chamber. Would you like to see the Peace Bell or the famous Chinese ivory carving first?”
The two security guards following us are so seamlessly professional I hardly even know they're there unless I catch their reflections in some polished surface. “The Peace Bell,” I say, at the same second Fred says, “The carving, please.”
“We have time for both,” Mr. Jung tells us, his stride fast enough that Fred and I both have to hustle to keep up. “And we will pass the Foucault Pendulum when we enter the lobby of the General Assembly. You wouldn't want to miss that.”
Fred catches my eye when I glance toward him and mouths a few words I don't catch. I shake my head. He smiles, stretching the papery skin on either side of his mouth into lines that show his exhaustion more than anything else about him. “I hope you polished up your medals for your big hero fan club, old girl,” he murmurs, leaning close enough that I feel his breath on my ear.
“I only brought the salad bars, actually,” I answer. “All that pewter doesn't mix well with my osteoporosis. Old man.”
I'm reasonably sure a couple of ancient warhorses aren't supposed to bray like donkeys when they laugh in public places, but what can you do? A disgrace to the uniform. Both of us.
The Foucault Pendulum — Mr. Jung is very explicit that it's Foucault and not Foucault's—is definitely worth the pause to collect ourselves before we enter the General Assembly. It's a huge coppery sphere swaying at the end of a nearly invisible wire, something like a waltzing cannonball, and it's downright hypnotic. The way it moves reminds me of the giant game of crack-the-whip going on overhead, the orbital platforms slung out at the ends of their beanstalks, the whole thing whirling in space. For a second, I fantasize I can feel the whole universe moving around me like the works of a giant clock. It makes me want to run right out and build an orrery.
Maybe when I retire. If they ever let me.
Mr. Jung gives us a few moments to ooh and aah over the pendulum before he abandons us in a ready room, both security types planted solidly outside the door. From there, we'll proceed to the General Assembly chamber. I wonder what machinations Riel and the PanChinese and the UN itself wrangled through to arrive at this solution — open hearings, and open testimony, in front of the entire body. I can't remember ever hearing of anything being handled exactly this way before.
On the other hand, nobody's ever obliterated a city and triggered a global climate change with a nickel-iron meteorite before. Or unleashed a tailored nanotech infection on the entire planet. I guess it's not really the sort of thing the UN was designed to deal with, was it?
“Nuclear proliferation,” Richard supplies inside my head. “That, and the idea that an avenue of public discourse would prevent World War III.”
So we skipped straight to number four and five, is what you're telling me? It's an old joke; I fought in World War III, but nobody calls it that. Richard gives me a look. I sigh out loud, and Valens gives me a look as well.
“Casey? Are you going to handle this?”
“I'm good, Fred.”
His hazel eyes are doubtful, turned down at the corners like a sad old hound's, but he nods and turns away from me, pacing from one wall to another with his hand clenched around his opposite wrist in the small of his back. It's sort of restful watching him go back and forth. Like the pendulum. “Give them hell,” he says, so quietly I almost don't hear him.
His tone makes my intestines knot. “You want them to pay.”
Just a sideways look, arresting, glitter of cold eyes over the bridge of his handsome nose. “Tell me you don't.”
I can't. I mean, I drew the line at bloody vengeance once. But let them go unpunished? No. That isn't an option either.
“I want justice.”
His lips twitch into the semblance of a smile. It flickers on his mouth for a moment, then flutters away just as fast. “I never ask for justice anymore,” he says. His fists unknot from behind his back and fall to his sides. “I just ask to win.”
I'm not quite sure what I'm going to say in answer. I knew that about him. Knew it in my bones, I mean, down to the roots of my hair; Fred and I go way, way back. But for some reason, twenty-six goddamned years later, it just, finally, really sank in. Fred's the sort of guy who does what it takes and counts the cost well lost against whatever it was he gambled to win. If he's not prepared to pay, he doesn't put his money on the table.
“Damn.” It's written all over his face. And he's letting me see it, because he knows I just figured it out anyway. “That e-mail wasn't from Razorface, was it, Fred?”
“The encoding on something like that would be impossible to fabricate, Casey. We've validated the packet history in every manner known to man, and all the records will be turned over with the evidence. It's the only way to establish provenance.”
Of course they have. Of course they are. I could ask Richard. Richard might even tell me the truth.
Valens is still staring at me, the picture of quiet relaxation. I ask Richard something else instead, something I won't have to lie under oath about. Why? — no, wait. Don't answer that. Just answer this: Are those documents real?
“They're real. I'm not Fred Valens, Jen.”
Dick—
“With any luck, they won't ask the right questions.” It's not quite a smile, what crosses Richard's face, but a strange, tender expression I can't put a name to. It's the sort of look you expect to see before somebody messes up your hair, but of course he hasn't got the fingers to do it with, so he just looks at me for a second, and then looks down.
I hadn't known you were such a patriot, Richard.
“There's an old catchphrase. My country is the whole world.”
I've heard it.
“In my case”—he grins—“it's quite absolutely true.”
Fred still hasn't blinked. Come to think of it, neither have I. I breathe out slowly, over my tongue, through my teeth, and look down at the spit-shined tips of my shoes. Before I get the breath back in, somebody knocks on the door and the handle starts to turn. I don't look over; I just tug my jacket straight one last time. “Lucky for us Razorface thought to mail that off before he died.”
“Yes,” Fred says, as the door opens and Mr. Jung slips inside, one hand crooked to summon us. Or to summon me, it seems, although Fred will follow along and sit in the observer seats.
We follow Mr. Jung into a room only about twice the size of a hockey amphitheater. It reminds me of being inside a gigantic nautilus shell. The ranked chairs have long desks attached to the back of each row, for the use of the row behind them, and except for the miniaturized interface plates obviously retrofitted to each place, they're exactly like the hundred-year-old student desks in the parochial school I suffered through until I ran away from home. The high ceili
ng is sculptured in acoustic ripples, pierced by a curving aperture of sorts lined with windows, dark observation booths behind. There's a screen over the podium we're walking toward. It's pearl white, and black letters float in it:
Items of Business:
Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Canada and the British Commonwealth People's PanChinese Alliance)em>
Armed Activities on the Territory of Canada (Canada and the British Commonwealth People's PanChinese Alliance)em>
Armed Activities on the Territory of China (People's PanChinese Alliance Canada)em>
I try not to look at them as we walk down the long green-carpeted aisle. They make everything far too concrete, far too real. I feel insanely like a bride at a cathedral wedding, Fred and Mr. Jung playing the role of my attendants now, flanking me. I wonder if this would feel less freakish if I had a veil and a long white train in place of my sharp-creased rifle green.
My place is on the stage. Behind the podium, below a gorgeous curved red-gold wall of mahogany, with my back to the long table where the secretary general and some other people who I don't recognize sit.
Mr. Jung and Fred step off to the side as I climb the steps, aware of thousands of eyes on my back, holovision and Net feeds, the whole world watching. It's a short flight. I don't stumble. Agné Zilinskiene, the secretary general of the United Nations, rises and comes around the table to meet me. She's a Lithuanian lady in her sixties, perfectly powdered skin as lustrous as her pearl earrings. Unlike Constance Riel, she's let her bobbed hair go a rich flat pewter. It moves naturally when she cocks her head back to smile up at me.
“It's an honor, ma'am,” I say, as she reaches out.
“It's a pleasure to meet somebody with a little common sense,” she says, very softly, so the microphones won't pick it up. She clasps my right hand in both of hers. Not thinking, I add my own left hand to the mix. She glances down at the touch of cool metal, and looks up, smile widening. “I like a woman who doesn't believe in prettying up the truth.”
Which is when it sinks in that she, too, knows more than she's supposed. That she knows about the order I disobeyed, which is the reason Beijing isn't a smoking ruin like Toronto now.
The realization almost makes me grip her hand too tightly. I have to uncurl my metal fingers carefully, consciously, and let the steel hand fall to my side. This isn't Bernard's trial. I am not a victim, here. Riel, Richard, Valens — they have nothing to hold over me. Nothing but my own conscience, and its ghosts. They need me far more than I need them.
I've never held this much power in my life, in my own two hands. It stuns me with primeval awe. It's a dark god, that kind of power, a black rock idol crouched before the rising sun.
“Thank you, ma'am.” I smile, and she lets my hand go, and I turn away to take my oath and think about the ways in which I will shade the truth so that I will not have to lie.
It was 6 AM in Vancouver when the testimony started in New York, and Riel didn't have the luxury of time to curl up on the sofa in her slippers, a mug cupped between her hands, and watch.
She didn't have time for it, but she was doing it anyway. Even if the Americans — and she had no illusions about that: she knew American ignorance and American arrogance well, and this was unquestionably the latter — had gone out of their way to arrange for the hearings to start on the Canadian day of thanks, it was still a national holiday. And Riel had sacrificed the privilege of sleeping in in favor of her perch on the big temperature-controlled memory-foam sofa, the never-ending stream of coffee cups, and the image of Genevieve Casey hovering in midair before her, limned in the not-quite-real glow of holography.
She sipped from her mug, the steam warming her face while lacy feathers of frost melted off the windows. Frost, in Vancouver, Canada's answer to the tropics. On Thanksgiving.
She wondered what it would be like in two or three years, when the dust settled and the temperature started to rise, if Richard couldn't prevent it. She'd always lived with climate change, grown up in the era of wild weather. It had always been an accepted consideration rather than a crisis, something one adapted to, mitigated, planned for. Harsh winters, harsh summers, melting ice, erratic crops, evolving storm models, and altered ocean currents. The acceptance that whatever the situation was now, it was subject to immediate and irrevocable change.
She tried not to hang too much on the hope that, now that they had Richard, they might be able to control that change. She tried not to hang too much hope on anything, really, but this one was particularly tempting. A magic bullet. A miracle cure. Like penicillin—
Except, like penicillin, like any magic bullet, there was the chance… no, the likelihood… of unforeseen side effects and long-term consequences. Best not to hope, not even cautiously. Because hope could cloud one's sense of risks and benefits, and make one gamble more than one could afford to lose. Better to plan for the worst, to find some common ground with the Chinese and evacuate as many people from the planet as possible. A colony was a huge risk, and also a tremendous fallback position: as fragile as a basket of eggs… but nevertheless, a second basket.
Riel blinked a command interface up in her contact and raised the level of the sound on the live feed from the UN. A crow called outside, a harsh, throaty caw. She didn't glance up, fascinated by Casey's easy charm on camera, her effortless charisma. Traditionally, she might have had a chair, a table to sit behind, legal advisers at her side rather than Valens and one Canadian lawyer seated against the curtain wall, but this was theater, not justice, and those concessions to comfort had been sacrificed in the negotiation process, leaving her up there naked except for a podium and the microphone tacked to her throat.
She held that podium well, fielding questions with dignity, seemingly comfortable on her feet as the testimony headed into its second hour.
Riel had known Casey had that, that aura of command. Now, she found herself wondering if she herself would do as well, when her time came. What a politician she would have made, Riel thought. And then, watching Casey, she had another thought, building on that first one, and smiled.
“Put me through to Richard, please,” she said. The smart system in her living room recognized the tone of command, and a chime announced the connection.
“Good morning, Prime Minister. You're up early.”
“Have you thought about my offer of citizenship, Dick?”
“I have—”
“You prefer to remain a free agent.”
“I feel morally constrained,” he answered. “I trust you will understand my quandary.”
“Understanding and acceptance are not the same thing, Dick.”
“That's true—”
She turned back to the 3-D. “How do you think our girl is doing?” She gestured with her mug, coffee slopping over and splashing her fingers. It wasn't quite hot enough to make her swear. She wiped her hand on the blanket.
“Beautifully,” he said. “I hope it all goes this well.”
“Don't count your chickens, Dick,” she said. “And don't tempt the gods.”
“They never listen to me under other circumstances. Why should this be any different?”
“The perversity of the universe?”
“Oh,” he said, and she almost imagined she could hear the crackle of the connection in the silence that followed. “That.”
1130 hours
Thursday October 11, 2063
Empire State Building Historical Preserve
New York City, New York USA
The American looked cold. He leaned against the railing next to a row of chit-operated viewfinders trained in the general direction of the New York Dike, looking like any of the other single men and women scattered across the observation deck. A holotour of Lower Manhattan droned from a kiosk, abandoned by some tourist who hadn't counted on the wind eighty-six stories up, but he didn't appear to be listening to it. His fists were stuffed in the pockets of his expensive fish-scale corduroy coat as he
looked down at the butterfly netting winged out from the monolithic building, giant hands cradled to discourage suicides.
Janet didn't know his name. She didn't want to know his name. She didn't want to be here at all, in fact, shivering on this blocky engineered outcrop of gray stone and glass, her arms folded tight across her overcoat. Kurt and Amanda and the rest of her security detail had been abandoned at the embassy through a bit of skullduggery worthy of a high school girl sneaking out in the middle of the night to meet the captain of the hockey team, and she wanted nothing quite so much as to be sitting in the bar at the hotel down the street, drinking an Irish coffee and watching Casey's testimony on the smallest of four projectors.
The other three would be showing American sports hype. Some things never changed, and in New York City, acts of war still gave pride of place to Game Four of a 2–1 World Series when the Yankees were one game behind and the Havana Red Sox looked fit to win it all. Which was ironic, because Havana was under water and despite having kept the name, the Red Sox were based out of Argentina these days.
In any case, the Irish coffee sounded good.
She shot a sidelong look at Toby. His lips thinned against the cold. He dabbed his nose with a linen handkerchief as an icy wind lifted his hair. There ought to be a law against haircuts that good; pewter-colored strands feathered in the cold air and fell into place more perfectly than Janet could have managed with a blow dryer and a comb. Janet stomped her feet in her boots and walked forward, leaving the Unitek executive behind.
The man in the corduroy overcoat turned as she slipped between the scattered tourists and came up to him. Wan winter light sparkled on transparent spangles as his shoulders hunched under tan cloth; the greatcoat might be trendy, and heated, but it wasn't doing anything about the wind. He dragged a hand out of his pocket and offered it to Janet. She took it without removing her glove, offering enough of a squeeze to let him know she came as an ally rather than a supplicant.
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