What finally brought Helen down was a stroke. Not a little arterial pinprick, a pool of blood on the cerebral cortex, and an inscribed circle of brain death, such as Wells had experienced sixty—no, seventy now—years ago. Instead, Helen’s stroke had been the hammer of God, clubbing her down, dead before she hit the floor. One minute she had been telling Angela to change her shoes because one of the pair she was wearing had a scuff on its leather heel. Then she dropped in a heap, arms and legs going this way and that, like a marionette with its strings cut. If there ever could be such a thing as a good death, Wells decided, that was it—out of the blue and no time for regrets.
Helen had liked to look out at San Francisco Bay from their condo. She would comment on the color of the water, the state of the tide, the passing ships. She had never said where she wanted to be buried, but the currents from two great rivers draining inland California would take her out through the Golden Gate, into the Pacific, and off around the world. Helen always did like the thought of traveling. And already the gray murk just below the water’s surface was on its way toward Alcatraz.
“Good-bye, Sis,” Wells whispered now.
“Amen,” said Angela at her side.
* * *
Knock, knock, came the thought in Instant Memory. And that was odd, because the IM function was where you put things you wanted to remember on a specified time delay—not a place in your cortical array that originated new thoughts and ideas. But Anastasia Praxis smiled, because she knew just one other person who had found a way to bypass the IM program’s cul-de-sac and turn it into a private messaging system.
The smile came at an awkward time, however, because Anastasia—who generally preferred her nickname, “Stacy”—was talking real-time and face-space with the Supreme Leader of the Greater Jamestown City Council. The council wanted to renegotiate the Praxis Family Association’s access to the Tuolumne River, which took part of its drainage from Cherry Creek on Praxis land. Traditionally, the PFA claimed 2,200 miner’s inches. That was the old Gold Rush unit of flow, based on a one-inch hole in a flume or conduit. In those terms, the family’s share of the river worked out to about twenty thousand gallons per minute for the Association’s use in downstream irrigation. The Supreme Leader wanted to clean up his bookkeeping by rounding the traditional measure of 9.34325332319 gallons to the inch down to a much simpler “nine,” and thereby deprive the family of some 6,865.0064 gallons per minute. And Stacy, as the family’s primary negotiator of such treaties and agreements, was having none of it.
She made a small, circular motion with her fingertip on the stud under the skin behind her left ear. That broke her wide-field reception through the family’s network of high-altitude Floaters and silenced the knock-knock joke that was to follow. It also reverted her cortical array to internal resources and limited her to short-range communication for the moment. But short-range was all she needed for what she had to do here.
Stacy glanced over her shoulder at the two skeletal Rovers standing at half-power but full-sensory mode against the walnut-paneled back wall of the Council Chamber. She then pointedly glanced at the two human enforcers flanking the Supreme Leader. The Rovers resembled an unarmed, stripped-down chassis, standing splay-footed and knock-kneed. Their ruby eyes glowed softly in their steel skulls—cartoon bogeymen from an old horror movie, which was by design. The Supreme Leader’s beefy human guards wore military fatigues, old-style ALICE belts lumpy with canvas pouches, serrated combat knives, and canteens. Each man carried an antique M4 carbine with what had to be, in their two magazines together, the last sixty rounds of 5.56x45mm NATO ammunition left in the county. Pathetic.
“I’m thirsty,” she said aloud, and gave the appropriate internal commands.
The Rover on her left danced silently across the room, without even the click of metal on metal. The machine lifted the canteen from the belt of the man to the Supreme Leader’s right, uncapped it with a flick of steel fingers, pivoted, and handed it to her. Except the Rover did all this in half a second, just a blur of silvery light. Stacy was barely able to get her hand out in time to receive the canteen, even though she was expecting it. The whole sequence made for quite a show.
She tipped its mouth toward the Supreme Leader and took a sip.
“Hey, that’s my—” the man on the right started to say.
“Hmm—whiskey!” Stacy finished for him.
The Supreme Leader winced visibly.
“We make those, you know,” Stacy said, glancing back at the Rover, which once again stood by the wall. “To order. As many as we need.”
“You’re trying to impress me,” the Supreme Leader said sourly.
“And I’m doing a good job of it, ain’t I?” Stacy said with a smile. “The Praxis family is prepared to be a good friend—or a bad enemy. Your choice. But since you guard the western perimeter of our forest lands, we’d prefer it be the friendly thing. So why don’t we leave that point-three-four-three-something of a gallon in the agreement and let the computers do the accounting, hey? In the friendly way?”
The Supreme Leader nodded unhappily.
“It’s always fun coming up here,” Stacy said, rising from her chair. “Clean air. Nice trees. You people sure are lucky.”
As she walked out of the Council Chamber, the two Rovers dropped to all fours and followed her like steel dogs. Once she reached the street and her parked HUMV-IX, she clicked on her Floater feed. The IM function pinged a moment later with its persistent thought, Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Little old lady …
Little old lady who?
I didn’t know you could yodel! And the funny thing was, the old joke worked even in the echo chamber of her mind.
You used up that one when we were six, Jay-Jay! she replied.
Her cousin, John Junior, was the only other person who could access the array’s internal memory function on a secure link and speak directly into her mind, and he always initiated the connection with a knock-knock joke like those they had told each other as grade-schoolers. At least, she hoped he was the only other person, and that their communications weren’t leaving a trail of digital bread crumbs through the interconnected intelligences and null ports of the family network. Because the main topic of conversation between the two, anymore, was treason and sedition.
After her mother and father had died in the Yellowstone Eruption, Anastasia and her brother Kenneth were sent to live with their Uncle Paul and his family. Stacy and his youngest boy John Junior had been almost the same age—she was just two months older—and had finished school together. Or rather, they had finished their coursework for the traditional high school curriculum and college classes under a variety of tutors, arranged by the family, after the formal educational system and the communities that supported it had broken down in the Hunger Winter.
She and Jay-Jay had formed an immediate bond. It had been made stronger than anyone in the family intended by the stories that Uncle Paul, perhaps unintentionally, had told the children about his own childhood. About how their grandfather Leonard had succeeded John Praxis in the family’s engineering empire. And then, when the old United States started to go downhill economically, how John Praxis and his daughter Callie had maneuvered to take back the company and crashed it around Leonard’s and his brother Richard’s heads. The cousins also heard stories about how devious and deadly Paul’s Aunt Callie could be, learned at the knee of a famous Italian Mafioso who had been uncle to her late husband. And how Paul and his brother—Stacy’s own father—had done terrible things on Aunt Callie’s orders. Things the brothers would never have considered doing as soldiers in the worst days of the Civil War. Ambush. Murder. Poison … until Stacy’s soft-hearted Aunt Connie, Jay-Jay’s mother, would whisper, “Stop it, Paul,” and her uncle would grin and change the subject.
Those stories had left their mark. Instead of the august and revered Patriarch, head of the family for five generations now, everyone’s anchor in the civil and economic storm
s that had followed the Yellowstone Eruption, John Praxis had become, for Stacy and Jay-Jay, something entirely different. They saw him as just a mean old man, a devious and selfish usurper, a fossil, a relic of the twentieth century, someone who had outlived his time and usefulness and was holding back the younger generations. And Aunt Callie was his evil genius and hatchet woman. Stacy and Jay-Jay had risen far in the Praxis Family Association, so that at the age of forty-five she was now chief diplomat, and he was second in command of the Defense Force under his father. But they had never shaken their distaste for the Patriarch and their distrust and fear of his daughter. That sense of foreboding had only increased when Stacy was forced to carry out the family’s sometimes nefarious and underhanded policies—like the power play today in Jamestown—and when Jay-Jay was required to enforce those policies with direct and sometimes brutal oppression. And then there was the Greek tragedy that Callie was playing out with Stacy’s older brother. …
To perform in their high-level positions, both of the cousins had been “cut.” That meant their cerebral cortexes had been mirrored with a hard-wired electrode array which gave them real-time access to the family intelligences and their communications network. The array gave Stacy online access to treaty documents, financial and economic data, political polling, and instant translation of any language in aural or written form—which was useful in dealing with the Chinese, who variously spoke and wrote in Mandarin and Cantonese. It gave Jay-Jay access to the smart brains on all vehicles and weapons, communion with the intelligences that coordinated military intelligence and networking, as well as running teams of ’bots in the field, and instant communication with every other member of the Defense Force.
The cut wasn’t exactly a voluntary operation, and afterward her mind had never been quite her own. Stacy often thought of herself as a node in the Praxis Family Association’s extended mechanical consciousness. A valuable node, yes. A powerful node, yes. But still, something less than a person. And she blamed John and Callie for that, too.
The land mine trick failed, Jay-Jay whispered silently inside her mind now. The Patriarch and his bitch of a guard dog both survived.
The plan had always been that John Praxis and his bodyguard Pamela—who would pursue any attacker relentlessly—both had to go. Once the power of the Patriarch was broken, Callie’s influence would be easy to subvert, and that would put the Praxis Family Association on a more democratic and equitable footing.
I already knew we’d failed, Stacy replied. She had told Jay-Jay beforehand that any package of plastic explosive small enough for one of his ’bots to attach to the underside of the Patriarch’s HUMV-IX, and to escape Pamela’s watchful and suspicious eye, would be too small to breach its bottom armor. As to the fact of their failure, that the Patriarch had gone in for some unscheduled dental work—a news item now two days old on the family comm channels—had told Stacy all she needed to know.
What do we do now? Jay-Jay asked. What can we do?
We think of something else. Maybe not so simple.
Maybe we need help from outside the family?
Yes, she agreed. But who could that be?
I’m sure you’ll think of someone.
2. Running on Empty
Callie Praxis looked down at the young man lying beside her in bed. She knew he had a chronological age of forty-seven years, and that like everyone else, he had the option of appearing younger through diet, exercise, and cosmetic surgery. But Kenneth wisely chose to look his age, for now, letting his face go slightly craggy, with squint lines around his eyes and laugh lines around his mouth. He had let his dark hair show just a hint of gray at the sides. That sense of maturity was attractive in a man. She also knew that when he opened those eyes, they would be a sober brown and hold his father’s level gaze. And those lips would curl slightly with his mother’s ready sense of humor.
At her own advanced age—although no one could ever guess it by looking at her—Callie had found love again. It would be hard to find a man who was her equal for experience, knowledge, and power, because she was in the forefront of a cohort of extended-lifers. Perhaps in years to come, when the rest of the world caught up, people at her age would have more selection among the generations of ever-young antiquarians that followed. But Callie and her father—and Antigone Wells, now that her sister had died—were the last of the elder generation, at least among the people she knew personally. They would always lead the wave. Which meant that Callie would always be searching for companionship among men she had once known as babies and then as boys.
And that was the problem.
She had watched her grand-nephew Kenneth grow up in Brandon’s house, and Brandon was the nephew she had barely known before he demobilized from his ten-year hitch in the service and came looking for a job at Praxis Engineering & Construction. Kenny had still been a boy when Brandon died and she and the Patriarch had sent him to live with his uncle, Leonard’s other son Paul. She had watched him grow up there, developing an interest in politics and debate at the Praxis Family Association meetings, occasionally opposing her decisions and those of her father, and sometimes swaying other family members toward new and untried directions.
Kenny had shown an early interest in the law, and Antigone Wells had pulled him into her own orbit. She had guided his studies in statecraft and political science at the University of California, where he attended private lectures at the cloistered, almost medieval, walled campus in Berkeley. After he took his baccalaureate degree, Antigone entered him into the select apprenticeship at Boalt Hall. Later, she made him at first a clerk and then an associate in the freelance law firm she still ran, fielding online questions and reporting judicial precedents from around the country—or what was left of it.
Callie hadn’t always understood why the world still needed lawyers. In the fragmentation of social, economic, and national interests that had followed the Hunger Winter and Chinese Incursion, it seemed to her that power mattered more. And power came from management of private resources, maintenance of alliances, and combat readiness. But Callie was also a creature of the old times, with a latent belief in the greater good and the rule of law, if it could be found. The City of San Francisco, the State of California, and the Federated Republic—although on the West Coast people were starting to call it the “United States” again—still existed on paper if not always in actual projections of the law and its mysterious power. Their jurisdictions could still be found on maps and in old documents, and some sense of organization had been building over the years as politicians turned had the war bands first into militia and then into police forces.
The Praxis Family Association had always tried to be a good citizen and obey the law, wherever it was written down and made public. They tried to work through the courts, wherever their reach and influence were growing and becoming accepted by more than one party in any dispute. Then armed force was not always necessary, Callie knew. And the PFA Defense Force had standing orders not to shoot when challenged by properly badged police who could show allegiance to some local authority.
Callie had first become aware of Kenneth Praxis as a mature man, and then as a sexual object, when he had helped his sister Anastasia draft a trade agreement with Greater China for the family. The three of them made a formal visit to the cantonments around Seattle, and Callie had been captivated by Kenneth’s dry wit and easy confidence. He had seemed older than his years. They had their first physical encounter on that trip, and he proved to be experienced in more ways than one. The two had continued seeing each other, on and off, for most of the past year.
Their affair had to be kept a secret, of course. For one thing, it was bad for family politics, because it would place her leadership in doubt and reduce her authority with the younger generations. For another, it would shock her father John, who still held to traditional, twentieth-century values. And it would outrage her daughter Rafaella, whom Callie had chided over the years for her casual affairs and her choices in men.
&nb
sp; And now, sadly but predictably, it was coming to an end. Callie knew of no nice way to explain to him what was coming. She might opt just to disappear from his life, refuse to answer his messages, make herself unavailable at the meetings he might attend, retreat into her office when he came around. But that seemed like cowardice, like weakness. And Callie Praxis had always believed in facing threats and dealing with them. So disposing of the sulks and threats from a little boy and his wounded pride ought to be a snap.
* * *
Kenny Praxis came awake with the feeling of someone staring at him. It was a gentle psychic pressure, like the beam of morning sunlight from a badly drawn curtain. He opened his eyes and found Aunt Callie sitting up in bed, leaning against pillows propped against the headboard. The shoulder strap of her black satin negligee, which she hadn’t been wearing the night before, fell casually over her left arm. She was staring down at him with a deep frown.
He lifted his head, rubbed his eyes, rubbed his mouth, and asked, “What?”
Then he realized his cortical array was pulsing gently inside his skull. The cut had been optional in his case—unlike the military cuts that Uncle Paul and Cousin John Junior had taken, or the language cut of his sister Stacy—and Antigone Wells had spoken out against him taking it. She had managed just fine dealing with the court system and the legal databases without having her brains “stir fried,” as she put it. But Kenny valued the efficiency of working without paper or hardware, just pure thought. He closed his eyes briefly in the reflex that brought up his messages, blinked through them with a flutter of his eyelids, and determined that none was new or urgent. Which still left Callie staring at him. “What?” he asked again, giving her his full attention this time.
“Do you use that little tic to clear your brain?” she asked.
Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict Page 24
