We did it, Richard? We really did it?
“Just like Leah would've,” he said. She thought his voice broke, but that was impossible, because he was a machine. “You saved the world, kid. Don't let it go to your head.”
“Wow,” she said, and heard her own voice like it belonged to somebody else. “Wow, this is really neat.”
“Genie?”
She opened her eyes. The infirmary was too bright, painfully bright and uncomfortably warm. She shaded her eyes with her hand; the IV tugged when she moved. “Papa?”
“Right here,” he said, and bent over to kiss her on the forehead, and she was crying, and it didn't even scare her when he started to cry as well.
1330 hours
Saturday 3 November 2063
Vancouver, Offices of the Provisional Capital
British Columbia, Canada
Connie stands up when I walk into her office, and comes around the desk to shake my hand. She smiles gingerly, but I think it's sincere. Her eye sockets are more green than purple, and the bandage over her nose is shaped like a nose again.
They got the reconstructive done fast. On the other hand, she's had to be on the feeds a lot. I squeeze her hand, layering the metal one over the meat ones carefully. She steps back after a moment, but she doesn't let go of me until another second passes. Then she looks down and clears her throat, and rubs the corner of her bandage with the side of her forefinger.
“I didn't see you at Janet's funeral, Jen.”
“That's because I didn't go.” So how come Janet Frye gets a funeral, and Leah doesn't? Riddle me that. “I take it the identity of her mysterious American died with her?”
She shrugs. “We might pry it out of Toby yet. Although I'd almost rather he clams up. We can send him to jail longer if he doesn't get all cooperative. How soon can you pilots have the Montreal and the Huang Di ready for their maiden voyage?”
I'm not usually stunned speechless. Call it a character flaw. Still, I have to swallow three times before I get anything intelligent out. “What . . . I'm sorry, Prime Minister. I thought we'd be here for a while, facilitating the communication between the birdcages and the shiptrees—”
“The wheels are in motion, but I don't think you'll be taking Drs. Dunsany, Tjakamarra, and Kirkpatrick with you. We need them. You can have Forster, though.”
“Ellie comes with Gabe and Genie and me. Not negotiable.”
Her smile says she knew that already. She shrugs. “I've just gotten off the line with Premier Xiong. We'll be returning the Huang Di to Chinese control, in return for Chinese aid in mitigating the ecological damage around the Toronto Impact. Richard assures me that repairs can start there soon, although . . .”
Breath held, I will her to speak without making me ask for it, but Riel plays this game better than I do. “Although?”
“He says it will take centuries. If he doesn't break something fixing it. The worldwire going down was a setback.” She turns to the window. She takes three steps toward it and stops, one hand on the wall. The light makes her look old. All this—all that—and like Wainwright, Riel will never trust me. “Has he told you what he got from the Chinese AI when he took it apart?”
“No.” No, but he's not quite what he used to be either. “You've figured out what happened, then?”
“We have a theory, Dick and me. Care to guess what it is?”
Not really, but it beats poker. “I can guess what the official story will be. General Shijie took advantage of the proceedings to try to execute a coup against Premier Xiong, take control of the worldwire—which the Chinese hate passionately—and put an end to the Canadian colonization effort. Close?”
“Close,” Riel says without looking at me. “The unofficial story is that Janet Frye was involved as well, and there was a back-door deal to unify the Chinese and Canadian colonization efforts. After Xiong and myself were gotten out of the way—the plan was to maneuver us into political and legal disgrace, but apparently Janet wasn't as duped or as greedy as they thought, so they defaulted to plan B and hoped they could blame it all on Premier Xiong and me once we were too dead to protest. That's our theory, anyway, and we're sticking to it.”
It makes sense. As much as these things ever do. “Was the general behind the Impact?”
“We'll never know for sure, but that's the polite fiction. There was an assassination attempt on Xiong two days ago.”
“Shijie's people?”
“Why them?”
“Revenge for the minister of war's ‘accidental' death.”
She snickers through closed lips and pushes a lock of hair out of eyes that still want to know What did you have to do with this, Casey? “Shijie Shu is not the first inconvenient member of the Chinese government to die in a convenient plane crash.”
I wait. She fusses with the knickknacks on her desk. Finally, she straightens again, comes around the desk, and pours me a drink without offering first. “Don't stand there like I'm going to dress you down, Casey. It's disconcerting.”
“It's meant to be.”
She's still pouring her own Scotch, so she doesn't snort it, but she does laugh like a fox for a good thirty seconds. When she stops, she toasts me crookedly and lowers the glass to her lips, her eyes dark and serious. “You really don't know.”
“I'm on tenterhooks, Madam Prime Minister.”
“Captain Wu and Pilot Xie were introduced to the premier upon his return to PanChina, a special invitation to dine with him, to celebrate their homecoming. It appears that the captain managed to conceal a weapon on his person, a hollow needle containing a perforated platinum pellet loaded with less than a thousand micrograms of a poison, possibly ricin. The premier only survived because of emergency intervention, and the application of Benefactor nanotech he'd received after his scalp wound at the UN.” Her tone is cold, level. It's a report she's memorized. “After due consideration, Captain Wu apparently did not feel that General Shijie was the only one to blame for the Impact.”
“Calisse de chrisse—”
“As you say, Casey. Drink your Scotch before it gets cold.”
It's not cold at all. It burns. I limit myself to one slow, shallow sip before I answer. “What does this mean for Min-xue?”
She's already finished her drink. “He'll command the Huang Di when she goes out.”
“Did Wu have proof, Connie?”
She shrugged, one shoulder only. “He would have shared it if he did, I'm sure. Now ask what we're going to do about Xiong.”
The gleam in her eyes tells it all. “We'll make a deal with him. We're going to split that planet with him, aren't we?”
“Well,” she says, folding her hands around each other, “he does already have ships under way. And he's proven tractable . . . of late.”
“Where's Wu now?”
“‘Awaiting trial.'” Her fingers describe quotes in the air.
“Christ.” All right. The man's a mass-murderer. But I kind of liked him, in a quiet sort of way. Dick, you listening? Is there anything we can do for Captain Wu?
I feel him hesitate, feel him think. And then feel him decide to answer with the kind of sick joke anybody else would find reprehensible, but which serves as a sort of comfort to me. “I'm sorry, Jen. I can't let you do that.”
Don't be an asshole, Dick. Bitch-ass computer. “Christ.”
“You keep saying that.”
“I keep meaning it, too.” I want coffee more than I want whiskey. Fortunately, there's a carafe of that, too. “You know Xiong set you up, Constance. He meant to use you to get rid of Shijie, and Shijie to get rid of you. And the order to attack Toronto didn't originate with anybody's minister of war.”
“You have a nasty, suspicious mind, Casey.”
“Anything for détente, Constance?”
“Anything for peace,” she says, and looks me dead in the eye. Her eyes look weird for a minute, and then I realize they're light brown, sherry-colored. She's not wearing those artificial green contacts. It makes her
look softer.
I almost believe she means it.
The coffee's good, dark, redolent. The surface is clotted with broken rainbows. I raise it to my mouth, pause, breathing in the steam. Just the smell of it is energy. “Pity justice wasn't served, though—although there's an irony I don't like in it coming from Captain Wu's hand.”
“Justice might have complicated negotiations. No cream?” Dryly. She arranges a cup to her own liking. If I were polite, I suppose I would have asked.
“What's this going to mean for your plans for world domination?”
“World cooperation. That other was the PanChinese.”
“Hegemony is as hegemony does—”
“Ooo,” she says, and drinks half a cup of scalding fluid in one swallow. “She knows big words for a dropout.”
“Bitch.” I can't get any heat into it, though. “Some of us read more than mash letters from our contributors.”
“Touché.” She grins like she means it, swills the rest of the coffee, and pours herself more. I'd hate to be the guy whose job it is to keep that carafe full. “It's not going to happen. It's too big a goal, and there's too damned much us and them. At least the Russians are cheerful—although they'd rather we gave the Huang Di to them, I think.”
“I can't blame them. The Russians are cheerful about the PanChinese?”
“Officially, they're cheerful about the PanChinese withdrawal from the same stretch of Siberia they've been fighting the Russians over since the dawn of recorded history, and the UN's decision to send observers in, and the fact that we're soaking PanChina for enough reparations that they'll barely be able to afford an army for the next twenty years. Although why anybody would want a few thousand miles of permafrost is too complex a question for me.” She stops, tilts her head to one side, looks me in the eye, and shrugs, her hands knotting on her coffee mug. I've seen that look before, and I know what she's gonna say before she says it. “I think I'm done, Jen.”
“Done?”
It even looks like an honest smile, this time. “Yeah. I think I'm going to call an election and let the voters throw me out. I bet the Conservatives and the Home party can swing a coalition, and I'm ready to pack my socks and undies and go home to Calgary. I'm just too proud to say I quit.”
You know, I don't really want to kick her in the teeth, for once. But on the other hand, she so very obviously needs it. “Oh, for Christ's sake, Connie. Get off the pity wagon already, would you? The seat's full enough with me up here.”
Riel blinks at me. The bruises under her eyes are dark enough for Min-xue to dip his brush in and write poetry. I stop midrant and try again, softer. “You're ready to walk away from your dream on the eve of success, you realize.”
“I considered it more saving enough face so it didn't look like I was slinking home with my tail clamped over my groin.”
The image is too much. I'm laughing hard enough that I have to set my coffee cup down. I expect any minute now a concerned Mountie is going to bust down the door. “Mary Mother of God, woman. The expansionist Chinese government has wiped itself out, the EU, the commonwealth, and PanMalaysia are going to sign your cogovernance agreement so they have a crack at the Montreal and her sisters, and the Latin American states aren't far behind. You've got your treaty organization. And we walked out of the whole damn thing with our hands clean—”
She looks down at hers, holds one out palm-up. “Our hands aren't even remotely clean. Just because the blood doesn't show doesn't mean it's gone.”
Yeah. Well, you know what I mean. “They look clean. And that's all the world cares about. And we need you. Because if it's not you, it's people like Shijie. And Hardy. And Fred.”
I turn my back on her, which is more effort than I like. Dammit. Much as I'd like to feed her her own superior smile sometimes, I still want the woman to like me. And I want her to like herself enough to keep doing what we need her for. Because, God knows, I haven't got it in me to try.
I make it three steps toward the door before she raps out my name. “Casey!”
“What?”
“I'm going to have a plaque made for the front door of this place, you know that? ‘The men who love war are mostly the ones who have never been in it.'”
“Send a wreath to Minister Shijie's funeral, won't you? From the both of us?”
She catches my gaze when I would have turned away. “I'm sending Fred. And you. Lay the damned wreath yourself.”
It stops me short. I haven't been to see Fred in the hospital. I had no intention of going. “Valens is on his feet? Did he take the nanosurgeons?”
“He's on his feet,” she says, with a smile that narrows her eyes. “But he refused the Benefactor tech. Categorically.”
“Huh.”
She doesn't say anything, just gives me a second to chew on my lip and think. I snort. “He always was kind of a pussy. Always willing to stand back and let somebody else step up.”
“Not like you.”
“No.” It hurts to say it. It hurts to think it. “I'd rather it was me, all things considered.”
“Jenny,” she says, and she puts her coffee cup down, and she comes across the rug, and she tilts her head back to look at me. “You ever think about a career in politics?”
It isn't so much that my mouth goes dry as that it is dry, suddenly and completely, like there was never any moisture in the world.
“You get to stay here, Gabe and Elspeth stay with the contact program, Genie gets to finish out school and go to college.” She sparkles at me a little, certain of her own powers.
Bernard Xu once told me to save the world. Good Christ.
I'm a madwoman. I stop, and swallow, and I think about it for ten long, hard, aching seconds, while Riel stares at me, and I swear I can hear the world creak slightly as it spins a little slower than it usually does.
Peacock told me to save the world for him. But you know something? I did that. And I really want to see what's on the other side of all those rocks up there, and all that empty space.
“I'd be wasted anywhere but the Montreal, Madam Prime Minister,” I say, and stick out my right hand.
It's another good ten seconds before she manages to put out her own, and take it.
Nine months later
8:30 AM
28 July 2064
Clarke Orbital Platform
Leslie leaned both hands against the chill crystal of Clarke's observation deck as the Montreal's fretted golden sails bore her away, the Huang Di trailing her on a parallel line of ascent, chemical engines smearing the sky behind with light. He didn't bother to magnify the image as the two ships shrank to pinpoints, rising out of the plane of the elliptic. Leslie didn't need to see them go. He could feel their weight like an indenting finger dragged across the infinitely elastic substance of space.
Looking good, Charlie.
I'm going to miss you, Les. What if we find even weirder aliens where we're going?
Don't be daft. And I've got enough aliens to talk to right here. And it's not like we'll be out of touch.
They were both very quiet for a little while. Leslie dusted his palms on each other and turned away from the glass, past the reporters and the dignitaries and the trays of canapés. Past Prime Minister Riel and Premier Hsiung and General Valens, who were clustered with other VIPs near the screen.
Leslie kept walking. Funny sort of leave-taking, this.
Is it really? Leave-taking, I mean?
Now that you mention it— There was coffee to be had, self-heating vacuum mugs being handed out by caterers. Leslie availed himself of one and staked out an inexplicably empty chair. Well, whatever you run into out there, I hope it's as easy to get along with as the Benefactors.
Charlie laughed inside his head. Through Charlie's eyes, Leslie could see the Montreal's familiar hydroponics lab, the receding image of Earth on a wall screen, the changing angle of the sunlight through the big windows. Why should what they want be so different from what we want?
They're
aliens?
Yes, but look at it this way. We're not species in competition; there's nothing a birdcage needs that competes with or conflicts with anything we need. We don't use the same resources. And there's a lot of room up here.
That doesn't explain why they came running to see what was up when we started playing with the tech they left on Mars. Or why they left it there in the first place.
Charlie rubbed the bridge of his nose. Leslie caught himself mirroring the gesture and smiled.
Charlie shrugged. Why does a kid poke anthills with a stick?
To see what the ants are going to do. To see what the inside of the nest looks like. Leslie paused. Oh, bugger it, Charlie. You want to know what I think? I think Elspeth's right. I think they wanted us to teach them how to talk to each other. I think they needed somebody to translate. And they got it. And I feel like an idiot just saying it, because that implies they've been wandering around out there for umpteen million years, unable to talk to each other except by grunts and pointing, and a bunch of chimpanzees stagger in and accomplish it in nine months. And that's just ridiculous.
Why is it ridiculous? Leslie could feel Charlie's encouragement, his agreement. We've been walking around in gravity for the last umpteen million years, and they showed us how to manipulate it in brand-new ways in a couple of months. They never had to learn to talk.
Leslie didn't have an argument for that. Or not a good one, anyway. They're critters that manipulate gravity, and we're critters that manipulate symbols.
That's what I said.
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