Worldwired jc-3

by Elizabeth Bear

  Everything in the shiptree is crawling with nanosurgeons, though. According to Charlie, he can feel the entire ecosystem working around him, as if it were all one tremendous organism. He compares it to something he calls the Gaia hypothesis, but I haven't had time to look that up yet, and apparently neither has Patty. Of course, I could just ask Richard—

  “You could, at that.”

  Good morning, Dick. I straighten my cuff and pick a bit of lint off it. What's the good word?

  A broad smile crinkles his cheeks. “I've been invited to testify before the General Assembly of the United Nations, regarding my knowledge of events leading up to and including December 23, 2062.”

  My crow of victory turns the heads of everybody in the room, including General Frye, who has just appeared at the top of the stairs. Patty's recitation breaks off midsentence; she turns to me with a grin for just a second before she glances down at her hands, twisting gloved fingers together.

  “What's the occasion?” Frye calls, coming down the stairs like a queen walking to the guillotine. The shadows under her eyes make me wonder for a minute if she's broken her nose, and the eyes themselves are so bloodshot the whites look pink. Gray skin and a gray expression. She looks like she wants to throw up, and only pride and grim determination are keeping her jaw locked.

  It's profoundly unsettling to see an expression like that one someone else's face, especially when you've felt it from the inside once or twice.

  “Richard can testify,” Patty answers, before I marshal my thoughts. I think I'm the only one who notices the way Frye's hand tightens on the banister, or how she turns her attention very definitely to her feet. Well, Riel probably does, too. It's her job to catch stuff like that, and the shift of Frye's weight is definite enough to make me think of somebody bracing for a fight. Maybe even spoiling for one.

  Frye lifts her eyes. She's looking directly at Connie when she does it, but her gaze slides off as she reaches the landing, and settles on Patty. “Did you finish your book?”

  I think Patty's going to glance at Fred for strength, but she doesn't. Instead, she looks at me, and when I meet the glance directly, she looks immediately back at Frye. “The one about the dog? I did. It didn't take very long.”

  “I saw it was back on the shelf. I thumbed through it.”

  “You did? What did you think?” Again Patty sneaks me a look. There's some subtext here, something I'm meant to understand. I remember her testimony, the calm, serious voice in which she'd talked about Leah, Leah's death, our own refusal — hers and mine — to retaliate after the Chinese destroyed Toronto. I remember the way she'd refused to look at me or at Fred while she was doing it. And I remember how pissed off Riel was that she told the assembly that Riel had called for retaliation, and the way she'd shrugged afterward and said, “But I was under oath.”

  Somehow, the questioning of me never got around to that. I've got a feeling I might be called back to clarify. I think I would have preferred a formal trial, after all. With rules of evidence, and a few against self-incrimination.

  Ah, well. You know, some days, going to jail doesn't sound all that bad.

  Patty's comment gets that kind of a raised eyebrow and a slight little smile from General Janet Frye. “I still think it's too sentimental,” Frye says, as the doorman brings her overcoat. “I would have preferred a more realistic relationship between the man and the dog. What do you think?”

  “I think that I liked what it had to say about loyalty,” Patty says — very unlike Patty, because she doesn't look down when she says it. General Frye, in fact, lowers her eyes first, ostensibly to button her cuffs. But I can see from the way Patty leans forward like a hound on a scent that there's more here, and I'm not getting it. “Even if it was sappy.”

  “What book are you talking about?” Fred asks, looking all polite interest, but I notice the way his eyes catch at mine over the top of Patty's head. He doesn't know what's up here either.

  “Lad: A Dog,” Patty says, taking Min-xue's elbow in her white-gloved hand and turning him toward the door, while he looks at her in shock. “Come on, General Frye. You're running late, and I think the limo is waiting.”

  Fred grabs my elbow as I'm about to walk past him, and makes a little show of escorting me toward the door. He leans in close, his breath tickling my ear. “Casey—”

  “The answer is no.”

  A snort of laughter moves my hair, but his hand tightens over my metal fingers where they tuck into the crook of his arm. “Find out what the hell they were just talking about under our noses, like kids with a secret code.”

  “Go piss up a rope, Fred.”

  He pats my hand. “I knew you'd see it my way.”

  Riel must have caught those last two sentences, or maybe she's just as shocked as Frye is by the sight of a brigadier general squiring a noncom around like his date for the ball.

  Dick?

  “Patty says she's playing a hunch that the general's unease has to do with her testimony, and whatever parts might not be a little… exaggerated. Apparently they had a long conversation the other night, and Patty twigged that something was up.”

  Frye was pumping her?

  “Yes, and no. She says that Frye seemed troubled and introspective, and flinchy on the subject of the testimony. And very interested in Leah and how Patty felt about Leah, in a… thoughtful kind of way.”

  What does Alan say?

  “Alan says to shut up and give her the rope she needs.” Richard sighs, spreading his hands helplessly wide. “He's very protective of Patty.”

  He didn't phrase it quite that way, I bet.

  “I don't gamble when I'm only going to lose,” Richard answers. “Look up, Jen. There's the car—” as Fred tugs my arm lightly, to get my attention.

  “Well?” he asks, as he hands me in.

  “I'll tell you in private,” I say, and duck my head to climb into the limo. Frye's not the only one giving me a funny look when I lean my head back against the cushions, close my eyes, and echo Richard's sigh.

  Frye's still staring at Patty when the six of us and a handful of unhappy Mounties pile out of the motorcade on the Lower East Side. Staring at Patty, and chewing on her lip, with a completely transparent that-kid-knows-more-than-I-think-she-should-know look plastered all over her face. I've got to admit, Patty's performance would have me apoplectic, too. It's perfect — just a little underplayed, smug, seemingly more interested in the coffee and the scenery and the scraps of torn blue behind a skyful of clouds twisting like gray rags in the wind than in the sidelong glances Frye is shooting her.

  It amuses me for the whole of the chilly walk into the UN complex, especially since I quietly let Fred take point and I take tail-end Charlie, the two of us shepherding the rest of them along the ice-scattered sidewalk inside our ring of plainclothes protectors. I never would have thought I'd watch a middle-aged military professional played like a fly-fished trout by a seventeen-year-old girl.

  “A seventeen-year-old girl and a nine-month-old artificial intelligence,” Richard reminds. I snort into my coffee.

  Frye doesn't have any kids, does she?

  “Nary a one. And she's an only child.”

  Lucky dogs, the both of you. That wouldn't work for half a second if she did. You don't actually think she's going to break and tell you anything?

  “I'm just hoping Alan and Patricia can make her sweat hard enough on the stand that she looks like she's lying.”

  The chances are slim.

  “The choices look grim,” he answers, with a funny hiccuping rhythm, like he's quoting a song. If he were real and standing in front of me, I'd fix him with my bug-eyed look. “Never mind. Someday my cultural referents will catch up to yours.”

  And by then I'll be in my grave, and you'll be confounding Genie's children.

  “I'll need new personalities to confound Genie's children. The Feynman persona would leave them a bit too baffled.”

  It's a little creepy, hearing the AI talk about wha
t I think of as himself as if it were an accessory, a shirt that could go out of fashion. Just another brutal reminder of how inhuman he really is. I'd miss you, Dick.

  “Dick's not going anywhere.”

  Except to the stars, I answer, and we share a pleased interior laugh at that.

  There's something of a kerfuffle when we get to the UN; more security personnel than I expected, and a few discreet questions between Riel and our charming guide, the same Mr. Jung (in green and red hanbok, this time), turn up the not-too-surprising information that the Chinese delegation has arrived, and the premier is with them today.

  The PanChinese group catches sight of us in the General Assembly lobby, in the shadow of the enormous pendulum. Three of them break away as soon as we enter, attention obviously caught by the three rifle-green uniforms, the darker, richer green of Min-xue's kit, and Patty and Riel in civvies, flanked by the stiff spines of a couple of Mounties in plainclothes. Two Mounties. Not nearly enough to keep this crew out of trouble, but all they let us bring inside.

  The good news is, the PanChinese also get only two.

  From the way the dark-suited individuals who look to be the security team are hustling to keep up, the slender-shouldered man in the lead has to be Premier Xiong. I'm more sure of it because he looks familiar, if bigger than he does on the feed, and I've gone from somebody who wouldn't recognize Minister Shijie if he fell at my feet to being able to pick his sad-bulldog face out of a crowd at two hundred paces. A thousand, if you gave me a sniper scope.

  That shark in the mahogany suit is still right alongside him, and there's another attaché of some sort bringing up the rear of the pack.

  I step back, getting myself between Min-xue and Patty and the Chinese, and let Riel and Frye deal with the guests. Min-xue's indrawn breath is audible from where I'm standing.

  Oh, this is going to be fun.

  Except Premier Xiong stops in front of Riel as if there were a microphone stand marking the spot, nods his head — a quick birdlike dip of the chin that acknowledges the petite woman in front of him and brings him momentarily down to her level without making a production of it — and thrusts out his right hand with the aplomb of the father of the groom sorting out the groom's guests from the bride's. A hush falls like snow.

  “Prime Minister,” he says, a very white, slightly predatory smile illuminating his homely face, “it is a pleasure to finally meet you in person.”

  The swing of the Foucault pendulum might be the arrested pulse of a giant heart. The whole room feels like an in-held breath, and I can feel the pressure of all those eyes.

  And then Connie Riel takes two broad steps forward, and reaches out, and grabs Xiong's hand in both her own just as if she always meant to, and the collective heart of everybody in the room thumps once, hard, and begins to beat again. “Premier Xiong.” Her flat Albertan accent rings harsh against his musical tones. “I look forward to a new era of cooperation between our governments. Once we have set these differences behind us.”

  I don't think either she or Premier Xiong notice the way General Shijie's brow smooths, and a slight smile turns up the corners of his mouth, but I'm suddenly certain why I had that premonition that I ought to make sure I showed up today.

  Xiong steps back and offers Riel a short crisp bow, which she returns without the heel-click. He turns toward me when he pivots away, and I catch the devilish glitter in the coffee-dark eyes under his thinning brows and almost swear out loud.

  They set that up. Son of a bitch. And from the stricken look on Frye's face, I'd have to say it was worth it. Even though I really don't like the way the minister of war is smiling.

  “Right,” Riel says, as Xiong strides away, and glances up at me with a sly, sidelong smile. Some days, I really don't mind having taken three bullets for her. “Let's go in there and make the world safe for parliamentary democracy with pronounced socialist leanings, shall we?”

  I'm not surprised when Fred is the only one who laughs.

  Patty Valens's knowing smirks might almost have been enough to shake Janet's resolve, if she hadn't already made up her mind. The kid didn't know anything; the kid couldn't know anything. She held that thought cleanly in her mind, hard and fast, as she mounted the steps to the podium. Because if Patty knew something, then Fred would know it, and if Fred knew it, Janet Frye had no illusions that she would have lived long enough to take that stage and look up to meet the expectant eyes of the world.

  Frederick Valens was not one of the good guys, and he never had been. And he would have very quietly, very thoughtfully seen that she was out of the way if he'd known what Toby gave her.

  If he had known what she had agreed to do.

  The funny thing was, she hadn't decided until this morning. She didn't think she'd slept in four days, and she'd had far more to drink than anybody in her position ought to. And it hadn't been Patty Valens's transparent manipulations that had made her mind up, once Patty had realized there was a hook in Janet's lip that could be worked. It hadn't been the simple dignity of Casey's testimony, or the way Captain Wu had broken down on the stand. No. That wasn't what made her hand shake when she shook the secretary general's hand.

  It was the memory of Constance Riel looking her dead in the eye and snapping, And then if you want to hand PanChina the keys to the castle, you can do it on your own watch.

  Damn you to hell, Connie, she thought, as she stated her name. Her oath was ashes in her mouth. She raised her right hand anyway and thought of Canada and the good of the commonwealth.

  She took one deep breath and found Connie's chair at Canada's table, and made damn sure that Constance Riel was looking into her eyes when she opened her mouth and said, “Before I make any other statements regarding my knowledge of circumstances leading up to the tragic events of last Christmas, I need to reveal a few very important facts that have not yet entered the record.”

  She needed another breath. Two, maybe. She needed a drink of water, so she took one, and let the ice click against her teeth. Look pretty for the cameras, Connie, she thought. They're going to be closing in for the reaction shot.

  “On the morning of October eleventh of this year,” Janet said, “I was introduced by Unitek executive Tobias Hardy to a gentleman whose name I was not given, but who was identified to me as an agent of the United States of America…”

  The pandemonium as she continued was even grander than she'd anticipated. She wasn't surprised when Shijie Shu got up from the Chinese table, made his excuses to the premier, and headed for the door. She did notice that none of his security or the PanChinese attachés went with him, and thought that was a little odd, but she wanted to get what she had to say into the record before her nerve broke once and for all.

  She kept talking. It wasn't like she'd be the first politician to wind up in jail.

  The Benefactors were still singing. And Leslie was still trying to overlay his map-in-song of local space with their map-in-curved-space time. It was interesting, because not even the relative significance of objects was the same; for Leslie, a bright object was of more significance than a dark object. For the birdcages, the emphasis lay on heavy objects, although their scale of reference was fine enough that objects no more massive than Leslie's fist registered at a distance, and up close they could sense on a fine enough scale to read the text on his space suit by the different specific gravity of the letters compared to unmarked portions.

  It was promising. If they could only be made to understand the concept of symbology, and of words, he might be able to start establishing a pidgin. If the boredom didn't kill him first.

  It wouldn't have been so bad if Leslie actually had nothing to do. He could have sat back, played long-distance draughts with Charlie, and dreamed of good lager. Unfortunately, the interior of the shiptree was exactly where he needed to be right now, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it except ride resolutely behind Charlie's eyes and swear quietly in his ear.

  This was what he had come for. Charlie a
nd Jeremy had discovered an environment — an entire ecosystem—populated by dozens of never-before-seen species, all of them seemingly communicating in some matter that was neither intuitively obvious nor easily dismissable. Leslie's dream, his obsession, his life's work, spread out for him like a banquet on the other side of a wall of shatterproof glass. He could see through Charlie's eyes, hear through his ears, lay his hands on something as if Leslie ran his own hands over the surface. Charlie's body became, for Leslie, a sort of almost-perfect remote drone or probe.

  But it wasn't the same as being there. And it got in the way of Charlie doing his own work, too.

  Richard helped out as best he could, keeping Leslie supplied with live images of Earth, of Piper Orbital Platform, of a 3NN anchor providing analysis of Frye's “explosive” testimony, and of the birdcage and the shiptree hanging calmly in the void, of the Gordon Lightfoot bright with reflected sunlight, a single sharp-edged dot like the morning star, still synchronized with the vaster, darker shape of the shiptree. He also let Leslie watch his own view of the Montreal's bridge — full of people, unusually so for a ship not under way. Genie was on her way through with her HCD in her hand, headed for the pilot's ready room that was now her exclusive domain. Wainwright was in her chair, sipping coffee and going over reports.

  Leslie's fingers itched, and he suddenly wished he'd screamed for rescue, twisted the captain's arm until she yelped. Third time's the charm. He wanted to be where Charlie and Jeremy were, doing what they were doing, not somewhere bodiless, cold and eyeless in the dark.

  Greedy, he reprimanded. He might not be able to see, or feel, or even feel his body — Richard assured him the suit was still intact, that the Benefactors were still keeping him breathing in there somehow, as bizarre and unsustainable as that seemed — but he could sense things no human had ever sensed before: The weight of the Montreal and the shiptree curving space time. The gravity well of the sun, like a mountain looming on the horizon, the foothills that were the Earth and the moon, the local flickers and fluctuations of the birdcage aliens surrounding him, manipulating epic forces on a scale as precise as the stroke of a surgical scalpel, in patterns modulated and refined to echo themes he gave them.