Strings (10 page)

Not bad at all! Faced with four possible replies, the lad had instinctively chosen the right one. If Agnes wanted to break this boy, she was going to have to get much rougher. She would, if that was her purpose.

She merely glanced at Willoughby. “Make up something for him, won’t you?” It was a dismissal.

For a moment he seriously considered pulling out. He had never been so vulnerable, and he was starting to have serious doubts about Agnes. Under the cool veneer she was certainly more agitated than he could ever recall seeing her. But then Cedric had sprung to open the door for his supposed grandfather, and the chance had gone.

Someone had taught the kid manners. Not many organages would bother doing that, and if he had picked it up on his own by watching a lot of holo, then he must be brighter than he looked. Limping past, Willoughby felt himself being assessed.

He straightened his stoop. “Two point what?”

The kid stammered, shamefaced at being so obvious. “T-T-Two point oh-five, sir.”

In the anteroom red guards and blue guards rose to their feet. “To the press conference,” Willoughby told his own party chief, who referred the command to the bulky Bagshaw man by means of a silent glower. As the convoy formed up and set off along the corridor, Willoughby turned back to considering his stringy young companion. “You’re taller than I ever was, then.”

That earned a satisfied grin. “A little, maybe, sir.”

Willoughby chuckled to put him at ease. “A fair bit. I claimed six-foot-six when I was your age—that’s a fraction less than two meters—but I never quite was. In the morning I almost made it. A man’s taller in the morning—did you know that?”

Willoughby had never been as tall, and certainly never as gaunt, as this human skeleton. The skintight clothes were no help, of course. He looked grotesque in them.

“No, sir.”

“Slow down!” Willoughby complained. “Your grandmother will certainly keep us all waiting half an hour at least. There’s no hurry. Yes, a man shrinks a little by nightfall. He shrinks as he gets older, too. And I lost a couple of centimeters when I got my tin legs.”

Apparently Cedric now noticed the limp for the first time. He frowned and changed the subject. “What do I have to do at this meeting, sir?”

“Just stand up by the lectern. Give them time to notice you. Then say something like, ‘Honored guests, ladies and gentlemen—Director Hubbard.’ You needn’t shout. System’ll amplify your voice so everyone can hear you.”

The kid’s sigh of relief was quite silent, yet as obvious as a cornet fanfare. “That’s all?”

No. Almost certainly that was not going to be all.

“It’s all I would do.”

Cedric nodded vigorously. “Sir—tell me about my father?”

Tricky! Willoughby was tempted to say, “Tell me what you think you already know.”

What he did say, to gain time, was: “I wish I had known him better.” The convoy had reached an escalator, and the bulls were checking for booby traps. “Your grandmother is a remarkable woman, lad. How well do you know her?”

“I just met her! You saw.” Then Cedric bit his lip and protested loyally, “But she’s called me often on the holo—almost every month. A lot of the kids never hear from their families at all. Not ever. Not even at Christmas!”

Agnes had been working on this one for twenty years or so, and she was putting him into play now. Important cards were only used to take important tricks.

“Yes, a remarkable woman,” Willoughby said. “We really got to know each other back in ’ninety-nine, I suppose it was. It was the year she was nominated for the Nobel.”

What a woman! A truly remarkable mind, better than average looks, and a will of steel. Willoughby had possessed far wider experience than she, and yet she had outwitted him.

Those had been exciting times in global politics. The first generation of truly liberated women had been making its mark, those who had been brought up all their lives to expect equality and who had arrived at the top in large numbers. But in Willoughby’s experience, any political action always produced side effects. Every blow inevitably boomeranged somehow, and that triumphant female invasion had unwittingly reintroduced sex into statecraft on a scale not seen since the days of Antoinette and de Montespan—not that this gangling yokel would have ever heard of such people.

Willoughby had been thirty-two, tall, and—when he cared to bother—suavely sexy. He had been devious and consciously amoral, playing the lover game. He had also used a couple of legal-term pairings to good effect. He had won promotion in bed, establishing himself as an up-and-coming man at the U.N.…marvelous expression, that! And then he had run into Agnes.

Having found neither bomb nor ambush, the bulls waved their clients onto the escalator, standing guard at top and bottom.

Willoughby led the way, chuckling. “We’d spoken a few times at meetings. We met again one evening in an elevator. By the time we reached ground level, she’d told me she wanted a child, she believed in natural insemination, and I looked like her idea of a lover—would I be interested in a breeding contract?”

Young Cedric’s eyes bulged at that story. “What did you say?”

“I suggested we have a drink and discuss terms. Your father was conceived about an hour later.”

Stunned silence.

Or three hours.

Or ten…“By morning it still seemed like a good idea to me.” Willoughby recalled how he had decided that a younger woman would be a form of vacation for him, a well-earned change. “We agreed to set the legal wheels turning, and I left on a trip to France. Neururb, you’d call it now.”

They set off along another long corridor.

“And?” Cedric asked in a fascinated whisper.

“I returned two weeks later. By then your father had been pipetted out and installed in an incubation tank. Your grandmother told me the deal was off.”

“
Off
?”

“She had what she’d wanted. Oh, I squired her many times after that. She was always a fascinating companion. Everyone assumed we were pairing. We weren’t! No one else knows this, lad…but she never did let me into her bed again.”

“Why—Why not?” To be thus taken into the confidence of a world leader was turning the boy an extraordinary shade of red.

Because Agnes gained her thrills from other activities.

“Because she regarded sex as an unnecessary and potentially risky procedure, I suppose. She put her own name first on our son, and she never let me pay any support. She did show me the gene reports. I was his father, no question on that. But I rarely met him until he was an adult—and not much even then.” A Secretary General had very little in common with a rodeo cowboy.

Agnes had gained what she wanted in other ways, too. However promiscuous, a human male usually had some regard for the welfare of his offspring, and she had judged Willoughby correctly. He had fostered her career for the boy’s sake. Together they had formed an unofficial, political pairing, a mutual assistance society. Young Hubbard John Hastings had been unwitting cement for one of history’s most effective partnerships.

“What was he like, sir?” Cedric asked wistfully. “My father?”

Just for a moment Willoughby felt a surge of pity, but he suppressed it quickly. He would really be showing his age if he started letting sentiment interfere with business. This innocent was obviously business, and Agnes’s plans must not be warped from their path.

“Not as tall as you and I, but not short. About average. Gray eyes. Talked a lot.” Willoughby cut off the next question. “Now it’s my turn. I’m a little shocked at running into two meters of grandson that I didn’t know I had. Tell me about yourself. Where have you been doing all this growing up?”

The corridor had reached another anteroom, a much larger one. It was a real bull pen at the moment, with about fifty guards in thirty different uniforms spread all over the furniture, even sitting on the floor. They were already rising menacingly, and Willoughby sighed at the certainty that every one of them would demand the right to search him. He waited for the wrangling to start.

With half his mind he was wondering still what devilry Agnes was planning and how this green kid fitted into it. Why, for example, had she not suggested that he comb his hair?

The rest of him was vaguely listening to that same unexplained possible grandson babbling enthusiastically about his life in some place called Meadowdale. It certainly sounded like an organage, but it must have been an unusually humane example. Some of those places confined their victims from birth to puberty in animal cages and, often, in atrocious squalor. Perhaps that sort of treatment was actually kinder, though, considering the barbaric fate awaiting them.

Nauc, April 7

ALTHOUGH THERE WERE other urban complexes she preferred—Nipurb, for example—Alya was no stranger to Nauc. Quite apart from many brief social visits and shopping trips, she had lived on campus at New Columbia for a course on crisis ecology. She had even been trapped for two weeks in Knoxville, of all places, during the Florida Panic, when every vehicle capable of moving had been enlisted to help with the evacuations.

She had been dreading the usual bureaucratic trip wires that ensnared travelers at every port. She was pleasantly surprised. An army of red-uniformed, gun-bearing Institute guards boarded the super before anyone could leave, shouldering aside all protest. Alya and her companions were escorted out with no delays at all, and zipped away in an armored Honda the size of a small cafe.

The leader of the force was a woman named North Brenda. Remembering to think in English, Alya supposed she must be a female bull, except that English was usually a very logical language about gender. North was solid and foursquare, with a face as expressive as tree stumps. Jathro was being alternately obsequious and officious to her; neither approach seemed to produce any special reaction. He did not introduce Alya, but likely that was standard security procedure.

She sat in a corner with her teeth clenched, trying to straighten out a very muddled and unhappy brain. She was certainly jet-lagged—dizzy and displaced, seeing the world muffled and blurred by reflections as though she were living in a glass box. That was normal; she had felt like that before. Her head throbbed, but it had been doing so for almost three days now. The ancestral mutterings had faded when she left Banzarak, seeming fairly content as long as she concentrated on thoughts of Cainsville. The sight of Jathro’s river list had aroused them again, but only briefly. Now she could feel another
satori
stirring—somehow she did not think it was the same one, although the
buddhi
was never specific. A sense of imminent danger began to grip her.

She was doing something wrong. Ambush? Could it be an ambush?

The Honda had passed three checkpoints and was slowing down again. That felt wrong, very wrong.

She turned to the North woman to insist that they change course. “…knew that the lady would wish to proceed straight to Cainsville,” the bull was saying, “but, if you prefer to remain here when we see her off on the lev—”

That was what was wrong!

“No!” Alya said. “I do not wish to proceed straight to Cainsville!”

Jathro blinked at her in surprise.

“Very well, ma’am,” North Brenda said, frowning. “I should have asked. Driver…the east gate.” The Honda picked up speed again and swept by the entrance to the lev station.

Alya relaxed, feeling better.

Jathro looked puzzled and distrusting.

Alya was surprised. The suite to which she was shown was large, but it was drably functional. Even an average sort of hotel would have seemed cleaner and newer. She had expected something more ostentatious, more in keeping with the riches 4-I should have piled up after thirty years’ monopoly on stellar power. Of course, the Institute’s secret activities must be incredibly costly.

She refused Moala’s offers of help, insisting that she could turn her own taps. She settled herself thankfully into a hot tub, assuming that the others were all doing the same. She lay back, prepared to enjoy long, warm decadence.

For the first time in her experience, hot water failed to soothe away the jangles of travel. Definitely, her
satori
had changed—Cainsville was not the answer. As the minutes ticked away, her sense of urgency rose, and rose very steeply. She found she was fighting down a sense of panic that she had never felt in her life before. What in Heaven’s name could be wrong?

Angry and feeling cheated, she abandoned the bathtub. Bed? No—standing in the middle of her bedroom, still half wet, still toweling, she was seized by a claustrophic need to escape, at once. The walls seemed to lean in and glare at her. She had felt a little like that before a minor earthquake in Djakarta. Hastily wrapping herself in a loose robe, with her hair hanging limp down her back, she went swooping out into the central lounge of the guest suite.

The threat eased. No earthquake, then. Alya stopped, struggling to consider the new problem rationally—not that anyone ever had managed to explain the
buddhi
rationally. There was nothing seriously amiss with the lounge. Flanked by six bedrooms, it would have housed twelve typical Banzaraki families. It was more dowdy and shabby than she had expected, but that barely mattered—she could be perfectly happy in a student hovel for weeks on end. The roof was not going to fall. The need was not that.

Jathro was still chatting with the security woman, leaning close and staring intently into her eyes. North was short, but solid as a wrestler. Her face was grimly dutiful, denying awareness that Jathro possessed any special charm at all.

Alya told herself not to be catty. The man was merely being polite. He probably always spoke to women that way—all women. And if he seemed pompous, he was entitled to. He bore great responsibility. He had a great future. She shivered.

Now, though, he was starting to grow surly. “Then you have no idea at all when the director will see me?”

North shook her head. She looked less movable than a continent. “I was told to offer you any hospitality within the limits of Zone One, Excellency, and ask you to wait until after the conference.”

Alya frowned. Her headache had been there so long that she hardly noticed it anymore—and perhaps it was not a sharp enough pain to qualify as a real headache, just a misery—but now it rapped hard on the inside of her forehead to attract her attention. “What conference?” she asked loudly.

North and Jathro turned surprised faces toward her.

“Director Hubbard has called a press conference, ma’am,” North replied.

“Is that usual?”

North shook her head, her placid face showing just a whisper of a smile. “It has never happened in living memory.”

Quivers ran up Alya’s spine and then down the undersides of her arms…curious sensation! She looked at Jathro, who was frowning uncertainly. “Then what is the occasion?”

“No one knows, ma’am.” If North had her suspicions, she would clearly not reveal them under penalty of flogging.

Could Alya herself be the occasion?

The same idea had occurred to Jathro. His frown darkened to a scowl, then he shook his head. “I cannot believe that it has anything to do with us.” He glanced hesitantly at North, before cautiously telling Alya, “None of the other plantings was ever published.”

Not even a funeral announcement…

“No, it cannot concern us,” he repeated.

But it did, it did!

“I wish to attend,” Alya said. The headache retreated a pace or two in approval.

North Brenda pursed her lips in doubt and looked at Jathro, who shook his head.

“I
must
attend,” Alya said, and felt even better. “I’ll change at once—how long until it starts?” Not long, obviously, or she would not have felt that urgency.

Jathro walked over to intercept her, and for a moment she thought he was going to take hold of her. She stopped, glaring.

“I prefer not to reveal your presence here,” he said.

“Then I am leaving!”

“No. You are wearied by the journey. Take some rest—and don’t worry about the negotiations. I will handle everything.”

Alya attempted a royal manner and aimed it at North, who was being craggily inscrutable. “Please arrange transportation to the port. I am returning to Banzarak.”

“You are not,” Jathro said, and turned away.

At that, Alya no longer had to feign anger. “I certainly am—unless I am permitted to attend that press conference.”

“You can watch it on the holo. I’m sure it’ll be on the holo.”

“No. I must be there.”

“It will be in English. Do you understand English well enough?”

For the first time in her life, Alya discovered that it was truly possible to see red. “Understand…What do you think I am? Yes, I understand English. I have studied many things under many English-speaking teachers.”

Jathro blinked, and suddenly she realized that he had not done his homework—he probably knew nothing about her except her name and rank.

“Political science,” she said, with grim satisfaction, “under Bozeman Charles. Economics with Stavely Wills. Superstring theory in Ankara, under Gutelman—in English and Russian. Genetics in Sydney, mycology in Neururb-U.K.…Yes, I speak English, Dr. Jar. My accent is much better than yours. And I am going to that press conference.”

“Why is that necessary?”

“Why?” Alya echoed, stunned. “
Why
?” Fists clenched, she roared at him. “You have the audacity to ask me
why
? To ask
me
why?”

Jathro fell back before her fury. She followed him, screaming at him, wanting to pound on him. Her headache had dissolved and an icy joy surged through her. Here was action! Here was something she could
do
at last! “
You
ask me why, you dockside fart, you bastard son of an alcoholic fish gutter, you sleazy, sermonizing, rabble-scratching eel shitter? Me?”

The urgency and the agony of her
buddhi
had not gone, but they had faded before this immediate task. She had no doubt whatsoever that her duty—her need, her destiny—was to go to that press conference. It was essential, and that slimy tub-thumping turd was not going to stand in her way. And she told him so, in three languages at the top of her voice. She repeated it in two others.

Jathro was backed into a corner, and Alya could barely keep her nails from his eyes. “My ancestors for a hundred generations have seen their children die for this.
You
dare doubt the verdict of two thousand years?
You
will question
me
?”

A century of democracy collapsed before millennia of autocracy. The peasant cowered before the princess. Jathro gasped and shook his head. “No, Your Highness!”

“Oh?” Taken aback by his sudden surrender, Alya awoke to the horror of crooked fingers she was waving in his face. She lowered them quickly and turned away. Moala, enormous in a pink bathrobe and wearing a towel around her hair, was peering out to see what was wrong.

North was not quite suppressing a grim smile. “You have ten minutes before it is scheduled to start, ma’am. But I doubt that Director Hubbard will be on time.”

Alya clasped her hands in her armpits to hide their shaking. “Five should be plenty.” She headed for her room without another glance at Jathro.

Fingernails? She had threatened him with fingernails?

After all those karate lessons?

With Moala’s well-meaning help, Alya was ready in nine minutes, feeling suave in the gold silk jump suit she had acquired on her last trip to Nipurb, in January. Had that been foresight, perhaps? It was so tight that a bad attack of goose bumps would split it in shreds, and it did astonishing things to men’s eyeballs. Silver sandals, silver belt, a slender silver band around her head, her hair hanging loose over Moala’s entreaties, and Alya strode out into the lounge, feeling ready to take on the whole of Nauc.

Jathro had changed also and was ready, damn him, and his smile seemed to go right through her outfit and find satisfaction. He was wearing tan corduroy and looking good in it. For his age. Damn him.

North threw open the door and went out to inspect the corridor. Then she beckoned. Just for a moment Alya was amused—guarding her was like waterproofing a fish.

Jathro was close at her side as they set off along the hallway. “Dr. North, would it be possible to preserve our anonymity at this gathering? Can you provide false identities? I am reluctant—”

Never! Alya knew at once that he was wrong.

“I could, Mr. Minister, but it would be an error.” North was marching a little in front of her two charges, speaking over her shoulder. “They will run ID checks on you. If either of you has ever been identified in a media holo, even if it was never shown, then you will be memoed in minutes. Deception merely attracts suspicion, believe me.”

Jathro scowled. Honesty would be foreign to his nature. “Then how do we explain our presence here?”

My
presence, Alya thought. “I met Devlin Grant a couple of years ago,” she said on impulse. “We are here as his guests.”

North glanced around at her. “That will be adequate, and I can advise him of the story you are using. Between ourselves, though, ma’am, it will do your reputation no good.”

“My reputation will not matter very long,” Alya said bitterly. “I will use my own name.”

Jathro glared. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“I certainly do not.”

That would worry him, and of course it was perfectly true. But she knew that her arrogant assumption of authority was wearing thin. This second surrender would be his last.

She had only one bargaining chip left. Of course, she could again threaten to return to Banzarak, but that thought was so nauseating that she was sure her face would betray her. No, her strength lay in that list Jathro had shown her—seven names in pencil and another writ in fire. Only she could see the difference.

There was her value. They needed her
buddhi
to find the silken string among the seven cobras.

The media representatives had brought their own armies. Honored guests or not, Alya and Jathro were searched a dozen times before being allowed to pass through the anteroom. The male guards seemed especially distrustful of Alya, enjoying the journey as they ran their scanners over her golden silk. Eventually North Brenda lost patience. Roaring like a rock crusher, she forced a way through by sheer power of personality and then stood aside and glowered defiance as her charges entered the auditorium.

After all the functional dullness that Alya had seen so far, the splendor of the auditorium was a pleasant surprise. It was a salon, large and bright, vaguely reminiscent of Florence, or what Venice must have been. It glowed with the brazen opulence she had anticipated in 4-I’s HQ.