by Tony Daniel
The woman was sobbing now. Andre patted her shoulder, not letting her look away.
“I’m sure he knows,” he said. “Sometimes these things are communicated without anybody having to speak the words. It really sounds like you and your husband have a relationship like that. There’s nothing wrong with it. The feeling is still there, and both people know it.”
“Do you think so?” said the woman. “Do you really think so?”
There was no other answer.
“Yes,” Andre said.
“I’m being silly.”
“Not at all.”
“We really do know each other pretty well, Juan and I.”
“Yes.”
“I’m just so worried.”
“Yes.”
“Thank you so much, Father.”
“Of course,” Andre said. “Any time.” He wished he could ask the woman her name, so that he could refer to her by it if he should speak with her again, but he couldn’t think of any good way to work the question in.
“I’m signed up to help out with the dinner cleanup tonight. I’d better get going.”
“Take care of yourself,” Andre said.
“It’s the best thing we can do, eh, Father?”
“Exactly,” Andre said.
“Have you got somebody to take care of you?”
This was the question he got from many of the women he counseled. The men would wish him well in a vague way. But the women wanted to check on the details.
The polite answer was also the real and true one.
“I do have somebody,” he said, surprising himself at the joy he felt inside at the words. There certainly are other consolations besides philosophy, he thought. Wish I’d stumbled onto that little fact a few years before now.
“That’s great, Father,” the woman said. She waved as she left. “And thank you so much for talking to me. It really helped.”
“No problem,” Andre said. Once again, he hadn’t really done a thing. I only have to be , Andre thought. That’s all the people want from me.
Plus, I get to be silly in love in the middle of a war zone.
He lived in the best of times, and the worst of times. Against all probability, he’d found a way to do his job with a clear conscience.
[So once we turn our back, the rocks balance themselves,] said Andre’s convert portion. [Pretty fucking Zen, Father Shaman.]
[Shut up and play us a hymn or something, will you?]
[How about “Ponder Nothing”?]
[Jeez. Again?]
[Okay, then,] his convert answered, sounding a bit miffed. [How about “I Like My Baby’s Pudding”?]
[There you go,] Andre replied.
[There you go. Over the edge and into the abyss,] said the convert. [She dumped you before, you know.]
[In the long ago before time,] Andre replied. [Back when we were young and everything was absolutely certain. Now we’re old and crazy.]
[And in love.]
[And I’m in love,] Andre replied. [With Molly Index.]
More rumbles and tremors in the subsurface. Another nearby strike above.
[I hope to God that she’s okay.]
[You and me both. You and me both.]
Twenty-nine
MERCURY
LATE APRIL 3017
MONTSOMBRA
The man people called C made his way through the grand arch of San Souci, the Interlocking Directorate headquarters on Mercury. It was the long noon of the Mercurian “day.” C didn’t dislike the light, but he preferred darkness. Night was the natural element for his work.
C was the definition of nondescript. Gray clothes. Dark shoes. The only unusual feature he possessed was a set of startlingly green eyes.
He made his way through the gardens in the enormous pressurized atrium and boarded the cable lift that would carry him up the small mountain that was at the heart of the complex. The mountain was called Montsombra, and, despite appearances, it wasn’t a natural mountain at all. It was a gigantic mound of grist, through and through. On the apex of Montsombra sat the palace of La Mola.
That was where Director Amés dwelled.
He kept his physical aspect in La Mola. But the true, whole Amés was in the mountain itself. Every bit of grist in the mountain was dedicated to sustaining his thousands of personas and the billions of simultaneous interconnecting data flows among them. As the cable car rose, C could feel Amés underneath and all around him. The mountain seethed with the shifting flow of thought and feeling within the Director’s consciousness. C felt as if he were ascending a volcano—quiet for the moment, but not dormant.
He hoped that the news he brought Amés would not lead to an eruption.
C exited the cable car and went through the series of security checks that all who came to La Mola must undergo. The palace was hung with gaudy trappings collected from throughout the Met. It was tastefully done, but still managed to create an aura of vast wealth and power, one that emanated from the walls, floor, and ceiling—from the very air itself. This was the nexus of Amés’s demesne, the hub of will from which he spun his political domination of the Met.
At the final check, C left his weapon—an ancient nine-millimeter Parabellum that was in perfect working condition. C then turned left, making his way down a hall with three unmarked doors. He opened the fourth door without knocking. There was no need. Amés knew exactly where everyone in La Mola was at every moment.
The Director was sitting at his enormous mahogany desk. Amés was brooding.
“I’ve lost Pluto,” Amés said. “Do you want to tell me why?”
There was a chair for visitors in the room, but Amés did not motion for C to take a seat. C walked to the front of the desk and remained standing there, facing Amés.
“Our cloudship friends didn’t know the fremden Navy was ready to be deployed. When the vote came in the Council, they didn’t have time to marshal support to stop it.”
“And why didn’t they know?”
“Intelligence breakdown,” C replied steadily. “My fault.”
“I might have expected this of Grimsly,” Amés said, referring to the LAP who was in charge of the Cryptology Division in the Department of Immunity. “I’m going to be co-opting him soon, in any case.”
Good-bye to old Milton Grimsly, C thought. He’d been a colleague of C’s for many years, although never a friend. C didn’t have any friends. So Grimsly would become another drop absorbed into the manifold sea of Amés’s personality. C by no means wanted to experience the same fate—although he knew that Amés would have a great deal more difficulty “co-opting” him than he would Grimsly. Amés knew much of who and what C was—his secret and secretive history.
But not everything.
“I have an agent at the Naval Academy,” C said. “She’s the daughter of one of our friends on the Council. She’s no friend of ours, but I’ve been false-flagging her. She believes she’s working for the partisans.”
Amés smiled a thin smile. “Indeed.”
“She was as surprised as the rest of the ensign cadets when they were rushed into battle. Apparently, only old Lebedev knew of the operation beforehand. It was Cloud-ship Tacitus who argued before the Council that the Navy was ready. It was a rousing speech, by all accounts. And then, while the scrubs were on alleged practice maneuvers, Lebedev just kept them going—all the way to Pluto.”
And now C had to deliver news that would only exacerbate the Director’s pique. “I’ve just been in contact with my young agent. She reports that Lebedev intends to continue onward to Neptune with fifteen ships.” C let this sink in, then continued with even more unpleasant tidings. “We’ve also got a problem at Uranus. This new grist they’ve deployed is quite tenacious. Most of my assets there have been killed—or rather, they’ve killed themselves. Two of them have escaped, however, and with samples of the new grist in isolation chambers. They’re on their way to our complex on Earth. It may take us some time to analyze and reverse-engineer this stuff. It�
��s nasty.”
“So we’ve lost Uranus.”
“We’ve lost the moons, but the fremden don’t have them. Until they can militarily occupy the system, deactivating the surface on Oberon and the other moons would make no sense.”
“Not acceptable.”
“I understand,” said C. There was no arguing the point. Defeat did not fit into Amés’s conception of the universe. “There’s better news from Jupiter, however.”
“Redux?”
“She’s taken the bait.”
“Excellent,” said Amés. “And she has no idea she’s working for you?”
“Redux has a remarkable ability to convince herself that what she wishes to be true actually is true,” C replied. “I have only one worry—Redux’s director of security. Antinomian is her name. I trained the woman myself.”
“You will have to see to her elimination yourself, then,” Amés said.
C frowned slightly. It was the only expression his face had displayed the entire time he’d been in Amés’s office. “That is in process,” he said. “But she’s an excellent operative. She was the one who was responsible for the escape route for the Noctis Labyrinthus facility break. She communicated to the partisans the exact coordinates where the fugitives should be flashed, and she arranged for the grist matrix that received them on Europa.”
“Then she really has to die.”
“Yes,” said C. “She does. But she has a backup plan in place in case of her disappearance. Someone in the Jovian press has gotten a hint that something’s amiss. I’m tracking down who that might be.”
“The outer-system press is a joke,” Amés said. “I’ve been spoon-feeding them for years.”
“I believe there won’t be a problem, but I don’t want to take any chances.”
“Absolutely not,” Amés said. “Find out who knows, kill them, and wipe the information from existence.”
“That’s my intention,” C said.
Amés sat back in his chair. The man—the aspect, at least—was not big enough to fill it, and he looked like a still-growing boy trying to fill a grown-up’s chair. C estimated–quite accurately, of course—that Amés was around five feet four inches.
He could make himself taller, C thought, but he’d rather make the universe stoop to his eye level.
And Amés might very well succeed in doing so.
C glanced at the wooden box that sat on the left corner of the Director’s desk. Amés immediately caught the intent of his gaze.
“Don’t worry. She’s still there,” Amés said, “waiting for the lover who will never arrive.”
C did not reply. He stood very still. He reminded himself to blink, consciously, twice. Blinking was no longer necessary for C, and sometimes, in moments of intense emotion, he forgot to do it.
“This will be your last trip inside the box until the business with Redux is complete.”
“I understand,” C said softly.
“Well, then,” said Amés. “Go ahead.”
C touched the box, and instantly he was inside.
An old wooden house, designed in a style long lost to the physical world. There was a parlor. Yellow sunlight through a window. Shadows and dust. The creak of a rocking chair. In the rocking chair was Lace Criur.
It was all a dream, here in the memory box—an algorithmic representation of Earth a thousand years before. C had never considered such distinctions important.
What was true was what was useful to one’s sanity.
This was true. Lace was real.
She wore her calico dress, her single string of pearls about her neck. She gazed out the window, as always, toward the horizon. Her green eyes burnt with a desire that could not be fulfilled.
“He won’t come,” said the woman. “He never comes.”
C shuddered as familiar emotions coursed through him. The abiding love. The intense sadness. Lace, reduced to this shadow of a shadow. Yet still, somehow, alive here in the memory box.
“Who are you?” Lace said.
“I’m a friend of his,” said C. “He sent me to tell you that he’s on his way.”
“Oh,” the woman gasped. She put her hands to her mouth and ceased rocking. “He’s truly coming?
“He said for me to tell you that he would be a while. Maybe a long while.”
Lace began to rock again. “You don’t know him,” she mumbled. “You never met him.”
C crossed the room to stand beside her. “Your name is Lace,” he said. “Lace Criur.”
The woman considered, then nodded. “Yes. I suppose it is, now that you mention it,” she replied. “I had forgotten it.” She rocked on. “He won’t come. He never comes,” she said.
“He asked me to see if you still wore the hair clasp. The dragonfly that he gave you.”
Lace again stopped her rocking. “It’s in the parlor desk,” she whispered. “I keep it in the second drawer on the right, next to the broken clock.”
C crossed the room. He opened the drawer and took the clasp into his hand. It had the heft of good silver. The dragonfly eyes sparkled red and blue when he turned his hand and held the clasp in the sunlight from the window. He had bought it for her in Dineh Barrel, the Navajo tribal lands out on the Diaphany. In here, in this memory, it would never tarnish.
He put the clasp back into the drawer, next to the clock, and gently slid the drawer shut.
“He broke the clock before he left so that you would always remember the time,” said C in a low, thick voice.
“It’s ten-seventeen,” said Lace. “In the morning. July 6.”
“He’ll return after the winter,” said C. “Like he promised.”
Lace pulled the brown shawl tight about her shoulders. “It’s always summer here,” she said. “Winter never comes.”
“Winter will come,” said C.
“Do you want something,” Lace said, as if she hadn’t heard him. “I have ice tea and sweet crackers.”
“No,” said C. He remembered his last visit there—the ice tray with the single cube missing, drained through a crack in the plastic. The impossible regret that discovery had brought upon him. “Not this time.”
Lace nodded. It was all the same to her. “When will he come?” she said.
“After the winter.”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Clare,” C replied.
“Do I know you?”
“Yes,” C said. He touched her hand softly. She pulled the shawl more tightly about her.
“He won’t come,” she said. “He never comes. When will he come?”
“I have to be going now,” said C after a moment. “But I’ll be back.”
“Who are you?”
“A friend of his,” said C.
“You know him?” She gazed up at him eagerly. Her eyelashes were extraordinary. He’d forgotten. Like mothwing silk.
“Good-bye, Lace,” he said. “Winter is coming. Be sure to wear your coat when the winds start blowing. The sheepskin coat.”
“He gave it to me,” Lace said. “But I can’t remember his name.”
“It will come to you, Lace,” said C. “Give it time.”
C left the way he had entered.
Thirty
THE VAS
E-STANDARD 15:36, THURSDAY, APRIL 17, 3017
BATTLE DAY
Elvis Douri couldn’t wait to surf the merci after school adjourned for the day. Now he could play Battle Day. Usually, he’d immediately disconnect himself from the virtuality after classes and go out and play for a couple of hours. He and his friends had built a fort in the swamp outside their residence block, and there were several additions in the planning stages, including a lookout and a booby-trapped moat (provided Samantha Nooks ever got hold of that poisonous medicinal grist she swore she could swipe from her father, who was a pharmacist). But he hadn’t been out to the fort in days.
Instead, most afternoons found Elvis sitting like a statue in the “full-pellicle rip-chair” he’d gotten for
his birthday—the one that encased your body and gave grist- to-grist contact for a virtual experience that the advertisements called “Reality to the Nth Plus 1 Degree.” Elvis didn’t know what that meant exactly, but he did know that, in his rip-chair, he could enjoy his favorite merci show with absolutely no distractions from the outside world.
And his favorite show, without any doubt, was Battle Day.
Battle Day was the special kids’ feed of the Glory Channel. It took you straight into the action, and many times, into the actual sensations of the participants—soldiers and civilians alike. You knew what it was like to be part of the attacking paratroopers, screaming out of the sky down upon Triton. And you also could get excerpts from the merci feeds of the fremden. Some of them had carelessly left their personal blocking off, and some of them had no blocking innerware installed to begin with. Anybody who interacted with the Met-based merci channels—which was most of the outer system residents, still—was susceptible to becoming a Battle Day “host.”
There was nothing as rip as being inside the skin of an enemy when he or she died.
Even better, you could search the network for different kinds of kills: most popular overall, most physically involved (this was where Elvis always found the sick and gruesome stuff he was sometimes in the mood for), most heroic, most cowardly—and lots more categories. Elvis had his filters set to medium, and so he never visited a kill that had fewer than a hundred hits by previous viewers. He knew he missed some decent stuff that way, but it also kept a lot of boring material out of his sensorium.
Today was the high point of the Triton invasion. It was going to be so rip!
The first thing Elvis did before tuning into the current action was to get a recap of what he’d missed during school hours. He paged through various thumbnail 3-Ds of the battle, and activated one that looked promising. He was rewarded by getting to experience the agonizing death of a fremden soldier plunging into Neptune’s atmosphere after being abandoned by his deceitful fremden commanders. Although Elvis couldn’t read the guy’s mind, he could feel the man’s heart pounding, he could experience the soldier’s body shaking with fear, and he could even eavesdrop on the last communication the man had with his mother.
