by Sarah Zettel
As Su watched, light sparked behind Dr. Failia’s dark eyes. “Well, thank you for your time, Ms. Yan.” She stood up and held her hand out. “I’ll see you when I have my money.”
Su also rose. “I look forward to it.”
They shook hands. Helen gathered up her screen rolls and left without a backward glance. Su sat back down behind her desk and watched the door swish shut. Her headache, she noticed, had vanished.
“Desk. Sort recording of completed meeting and extract proposal details for the construction of Venera Base,” she said thoughtfully. “Assume acquisition of adequate funding. List applicable regulatory and legislative requirements that must be met for construction of the proposed base.” She paused. “Also extract voting records of C.A.C. members and project probable votes should proposal come to committee as offered in this meeting.”
Helen, after all, was not the only one who had work to do if Venera was to…well…fly.
It had taken five years, but the money had been found; the base had been built, and for forty years after that, Helen kept it running. She scraped, scrounged, begged, borrowed, and worked the stream with a skill Su had seen only in the very best politicians. She had help of course. Sometimes, Su felt that while Helen had raised Venera, Su herself had raised Helen. She’d taught the older woman the finer points of publicity and spin doctoring. She’d steered her toward the more sympathetic funds and trusts. After the Bradbury Rebellion, Su had helped Helen make sure that all their money came from Earth so there could be no tangible connection between Venera and any suspect persons, who, at that point, included everyone who did not live on Mother Earth.
Helen had never married, never had children. Venera and its prosperity had been her entire life.
And she had almost lost it. Su tried to imagine what that felt like and failed. Her own life had been tied to so many different things—her husband, her son, political ambitions, and the colonies. Not just Venera, but Small Step and Giant Leap, Bradbury, Burroughs, Dawn, the L5 archipelagoes, all of them. They deserved their chance to flourish. Mother Earth needed her children, but like any flesh-and-blood parent, she needed to treat them as people, not possessions.
However, since Bradbury, with its deaths and exiles and threats, and since the long-life colonies had become a credit-filled reality, it had not been easy to convince anybody else in power of this.
For the moment, Venera at least was going to be all right Su studied the donations list displayed on her desktop. If even half these promises were fulfilled, Venera was not going to even have to think about money for another five years.
Which is all to the good, Su rubbed her temples. There is nothing bad about this. If we want any colony in the public eye, it’s Venera.
She shook herself. This was not anything she had time for: The Secretaries-General had called a meeting for the afternoon, and Su had to get her candidate files in order. Despite what she’d told Helen, there was still the very real possibility that Edmund might withdraw his backing from one or two of her people, and she might have to make her case to the Sec-Gens without any help at all. Secretary Haight was very much committed to the status quo, but Kent and Sun had a little more leeway in their thinking and saw the political opportunities inherent in loosening the grip on the planets a little. She would have to play to them if she wanted to keep the U.N. from just walking in and taking over the Discovery, and she wanted that very much.
The door chimed and Su looked at the view port. It cleared to reveal Sadiq Hourani and Su ordered it open. He walked in and Su waved him to a chair. Sadiq was on the very short list of people whom she would always see.
Su sat back and regarded him for a moment. “Tell me you have good news.”
“I have good news,” said Sadiq promptly.
“Really? Or are you just saying that?” Sadiq had been assigned to the C.A.C. security and intelligence work group ten years ago. In that time, Su had learned to trust him, despite the fact that he kept more hidden than she would ever learn about. It had not been easy, but it had been worth it.
Sadiq returned a small smile. “Really. We’ve negotiated an end to that potential media standoff in Bombay. They’re to have some unmonitored access time to the investigative team and some of the Veneran scientists so they can ask questions without, and I quote, governmental interference, end quote.”
Su raised both her eyebrows. “And you capitulated with all humbleness?”
“That I did.”
“And you went in there knowing what they really wanted?”
“That I did,” repeated Sadiq. “It’s my job, you know.”
The news of the Discovery had been received with calm just about everywhere. There were a few hardcase places—Bombay, Dublin, Old L.A.—where tempests threatened to start up in the stream. The stream was the systemwide communications network that had evolved out of all the old nets and webs that had spanned the globe since the twentieth century. It was possible for discontent in-stream to spill out into the real world. Part of Sadiq’s job was to make sure it never did.
“So.” Su leaned back and folded her hands in her lap. “Do you know what the Secretaries-General really want to see us about?”
Sadiq shrugged. “To hear about Bombay, for a start, and the other hot spots. They should have reviewed our Comprehensive Coping Strategy by now. They also, of course, need to give their blessing to the investigative team roster so the full committee won’t be able to bicker too much.”
“Have you ascertained whether Edmund’s going to behave?” Su had known from the beginning that Edmund was going to be difficult. Since he had been appointed to the C.A.C., he had been one of the loudest anticolonial voices they had, and that was saying a great deal. His initial idea had been to send out a team that would investigate Venera at least as thoroughly as it would investigate the Discovery.
“I believe he will.” Sadiq studied his neat hands for a moment. “You know, Su, you are going to have to speak to him again, sooner or later.”
“Yes, I know.” After Dr. Hatch and Ms. Cristobal had left, Edmund had started in on one of his canned speeches about the “absolute necessity of choosing members who will not be blinded by propaganda or sentimentality and will be willing to examine every aspect of the Discovery.” Su, suddenly unable to stand it another minute, had stood up and said, “You don’t want an investigation; you want an inquisition,” and stalked out.
The memory made her sigh again. “That is no way for a grown bureaucrat to behave. Especially now,” she added.
“Especially now,” echoed Sadiq. “Especially on one of your pet projects.”
Su eyed him carefully to see if there was anything hidden under that statement, but Sadiq’s face remained placid. “Yes,” she admitted. “This one’s mine and I can’t hide from it.” She was about to add a question about Edmund Waicek, positive that Sadiq had spoken with him before he walked into her office, but Sadiq had stiffened and his eyes darted back and forth. Su closed her mouth. Sadiq wore a phone spot, so he could be reached at any time. This could be anything from a request for authorization on an expense report to notification of an outbreak of public violence.
When Sadiq had focused on her again, Su asked, “Anything wrong?”
“We seem to have a demonstration on the deck.” Sadiq stood. “Peaceful but illegal. Care to come?”
“Not really.” Su waved him away. “I’ll see you at the Sec-Gens this afternoon.”
“Until then.” Sadiq left her there. The door swished shut behind him. Su sat still for a moment, then swiveled her chair toward her working wall. “Window function,” she ordered, “show the political activity identified on main deck.”
A patch of Colorado sky cleared away, replaced by the image of one of the observation towers. Normally, the side of the three story building was a blank, forbidding gun-metal gray. Today, however, someone had managed to hang a gigantic sheet screen from the side and light up a scene of Venus and Earth orbiting around each other in a display that
was as pretty as it was inaccurate. A crowd had gathered at the foot of the tower to watch the show. In front of the casual observers, a set of feeders with briefcases and camera bands had already jacked into the deck and were rapidly dropping the entire experience into the stream.
Venus and Earth faded, replaced by a man of moderate coloring and moderate age, wearing a suit so conservative he might have bought it in the previous century.
“And what are we doing with this wonder, this Discovery?” He swept one hand out. Venus appeared, neatly balanced in his palm. “We are using it as a focus of fear. We are using it to tighten the chains already on the wrists of our brothers and sisters in the colonies. Millions of people whose only crime is not living on Mother Earth.” He closed his fist around the Venus globe. The low moan it gave was gratuitous, Su thought, but it did make its point. “We must, every one of us, ask what is our government so afraid of? Aging men and women who failed in their dream?” The starry background blurred and shifted until the speaker stood in a bare red-ceramic cell filled with people whose eyes were dark and haunted. “The guilty have been punished and punished again. Must we punish their children now?”
Before the speaker could answer his own question, the screen went black. A groan rose from the assembled crowd. Three people in coveralls of U.N. blue appeared on the observation tower’s roof and started rolling up the screen. Still grumbling, the crowd began to disperse. Show’s over.
“Window function off.”
The screen melted back into the meadow scene around her.
Su considered. That wasn’t much as demonstrations went, but it would give her an opening to talk with Edmund. Su rubbed her forehead. Her mind had been shying away from the memory of how she’d left the morning’s interview. What had happened? What had snapped? There was no excuse, none, especially now, as she’d said to Sadiq. If she didn’t find a way to clean up after herself, it would be…bad.
“Desk. Contact Edmund Waicek.” Compose yourself, Su. Don’t let the boy get to you. There is too much going on for that. “Put display on main screen.”
The whole wall cleared until Su saw Edmund’s clean, blank-walled office. Edmund himself was hunched over his desk screen. He did not look up.
“I’m rather busy, Su. We do have a meeting this afternoon.”
“Yes, I am aware of that.” Calm, calm, calm. “Were you aware that we’ve just had a separatist demonstration on the main deck?”
Edmund’s head jerked up. “What?”
Su waved her hands in a gesture both dismissing and soothing. “It was small. Sadiq’s people have already handled it.” She lowered her hands. “But it did draw a crowd. Here. People were listening. The speaker was making sense to them.”
Edmund’s face went cold. Su held up her hand again before he could even open his mouth. “It does matter. This is U.N. City, and our people were listening to the idea that perhaps the restrictions on the colonies have gone too far.” She spread her hands. “There is more than one kind of bias we need to avoid here, Edmund. If it appears that we are sending up a team that has an anticolonial agenda, we run the risk that their conclusions will be discounted by popular opinion. We have both been around the world far too many times to pretend that doesn’t matter.”
She watched Edmund’s expression waver as that thought sank in. “We cannot be seen to encourage irresponsible rhetoric,” he said, resorting to some rhetoric of his own.
Good. He’s running short on arguments. “Of course not. We must be seen to be aiming for a strict neutrality. That is where people like Veronica Hatch can benefit us. People appreciate that she put a human face on a terrible tragedy. On both sides of the tragedy.”
Edmund did not like that idea. She could tell that much by the stony set of his jaw, but he was at least thinking about it. “If we’re taking her and the other one”—he glanced at his desk—“Peachman, I want security on the team.”
“My thinking exactly,” lied Su. “Sadiq can pick the best available, and we can submit their names to the Sec-Gen along with the others.”
“All right,” said Edmund. “You’ve got your team, Su. But it had better not overstep its bounds.”
“It won’t, Edmund. I’ll see you this afternoon.”
Edmund nodded and broke the connection. Su collapsed back into her chair. That was a near thing. If Edmund had been just a little more angry, it would not have worked. But it did, and that was all she needed to care about at this moment.
Still, there was one more call she should make.
“Desk. Contact Yan Quai.”
This time, the sky was replaced by a static scene of a white railed veranda overlooking a misty cityscape.
“I’m sorry,” said a gender-neutral voice. “Yan Quai is unavailable—”
“Quai, it’s your mother.”
The voice hesitated. Then, the veranda cleared away and revealed Quai’s apartment, which hadn’t been cleaned up in a while. Clothes and towels were draped over the arms of chairs. Screen rolls lay heaped on every flat surface, held in place by empty cups and glasses full of something that might have once been either beer or apple juice.
In the middle of it all sat Quai at his battered desk. Su automatically looked him over. He hadn’t shaved. His hair was now black and blond, and the holo-tat on the right side of his throat was a winking blue eye this week.
In short, her son looked just fine.
“Hello, Mother,” he said cheerfully. “Slow day in the corridors of power?”
“Not particularly.” Her lips twitched, trying not to smile. “As you’ve said, saving the worlds is a full-time job.”
Quai’s own smile was tight and knowing and made him look frighteningly like his father. “Especially when you have to kiss up to the C.A.C. to do it.”
Su let that pass. “We’ve just had a little demo on the decks here, Quai.”
“Really?” His face and voice brightened considerably. “Who managed it?”
“I don’t know. I thought you might.”
Quai shook his head, and Su believed him. If he had known, he would have just evaded the question. They did not agree, she and her son. He felt she did not go far enough in her politics, and she felt that by attempting to undermine the system, he was worsening the condition of those he was supposed to be fighting for. Despite that, they had a tacit agreement that each would avoid lying to the other, if at all possible.
“Well, just in case anyone in your acquaintance gets ideas—”
“Us?” Quai laid a hand on his breast. “We operate strictly within the law wherever we are, Mom; you know that.”
“I don’t for sure know any different,” responded Su blandly. “But just in case, you might pass along the word that the C.A.C. is very edgy right now and that that edginess is getting communicated up the legislature. The more unrest there is right at this moment, the bigger the potential backlash.”
They looked at each other, each of them replaying conversations from both the distant and the not-so-distant past in their heads.
“All right, Mom.” Quai nodded. “Not that anybody I deal with would arrange illegal public demos in U.N. City or anywhere else, but I’ll see if I can leak the generalities of this conversation where they’ll do some good.”
“That’s all I ask.” Su bowed her head briefly in a gesture of thanks.
A flicker of worry crossed Quai’s face. “Take care of yourself out there, Mom. Okay? I’d hate to see you lose your footing.”
Su smiled. “I will take care. I love you, my son.”
“Love you, Mom. Good-bye.”
Su said good-bye and shut down the screen. She shook her head and sighed. Quai was good people. How had that happened? Abandoned by a nervous father, left with an obsessive mother, he still managed to make his own way. He went overboard, it was true, but not as badly as some, and at least he really believed in what he did.
So do you, she reminded herself. At least, you’d better, or all your work’s going to fall apart and Hel
en’s going to be left out there on her own.
That thought stiffened Su’s shoulders. No, she would not permit that. She bent over her desk screen and laid her hands on the command board. Time to get back to work.
Chapter Four
T’SHA’S KITE FURLED ITS bright-blue wings as it approached the High Law Meet. Unlike other cities, the High Law Meet’s ligaments ran all the way down to the crust, tethering the complex in place. The symbolism was plain. All the winds, all the world, met here.
“Good luck, Ambassador T’sha,” the Law Meet hailed her through her headset. “You are much anticipated.”
“Is it a pleased anticipation or otherwise?” asked T’sha wryly as the Law Meet took over her kite guidance, bringing it smoothly toward the empty mooring clamps.
“That is not for me to know or tell,” said the Meet primly. Amusement swelled through T’sha.
T’sha had always found the Meet beautiful. Its shell walls were delicately curved, and their colors blended from a pure white to rich purple. Portraits and stories had been painted all across their surfaces in both hot and cold paints. When the Law Meet was in dayside, the hot paints glowed red. On nightside, the cold paints made dark etchings against the shining walls. The coral struts were whorled and carved so that the winds sang as they blew past. More shell and dyed stiff skins tunneled and gentled the winds through the corridors between the chambers. The interior chambers themselves were bubbles of still air where anyone could move freely without being guided or prodded by the world outside.
T’sha sometimes wondered if this was a good idea.
As ever, the High Law Meet was alive with swarms of people. The air around it tasted heavy with life and constant movement. T’sha counted nine separate villages floating past the Meet with their sails furled so the citizens who flew beside their homes could keep up easily. All the noise, all the activity of daily life blew past with them.
Below, the canopy was being tended by the Meet’s own conservators. It was symbolically important, said many senior ambassadors, that the canopy around the High Law Meet remain vital, solid, and productive. But as T’sha watched, a quartet of reapers from one of the villages, identifiable by the straining nets they carried between them, as well as by the zigzagging tattoos on their wings, descended to the canopy. A conservator flew at them, sending them all winging away, back to their village with empty nets, no food, seeds, or clippings to enhance their diet, their gardens, or their engineers’ inventories.
