Worldwired (38 page)

“It's not all that different from what we did with the
Montreal
and her hydroponics farms. These critters might be like
us,
Jeremy—”

Jeremy cleared his throat and looked around, shaking more droplets of water off his gauntlets. “They might be,” he said. “But where
are
they? All this landscape, and no aliens. And no indication of which way we're supposed to go, or who we need to talk to. I could do with a sign that says ‘follow the gray line to customs,' you know?”

“Maybe we're intended to find our own way in?”

And one of the leafy, glossy vines uncoiled itself from the structure of the nearest branch, or stanchion, or support pillar, and laid itself across Charlie's shoulders like a heavy, companionable arm.

0900 hours
Monday October 15, 2063
Canadian Embassy
New York City, New York USA

On Sunday, the Yankees tie it up three to three, so on Monday I'm stuck with the unpalatable choice between watching the final game of the series, or showing up at the UN to watch General Janet Frye take us all apart in person. I mean, all right, I'm still more of a hockey girl. But I did live in Hartford for over a decade, and it's not like we don't have baseball in Canada.

On the other hand, I have a coiling feeling in my gut that tells me I should be at the UN when the shit hits the fan. Besides, Riel and Valens are going, and it's not like those two can be trusted out on their own.

So we wind up making a bit of a funeral festival of it.

Captain Wu finished his testimony on Saturday, after Patty's second half-day. He remains at the embassy, but Min-xue, whose evidence promises to take nearly as long as mine did, is scheduled for after Frye. Both men join Riel, Valens, Patty, and myself in the lobby, all of us nearly unspeaking as we wait for General Frye. Min-xue's hands are clothed in white leather gloves like the ones Patty and I wear. The gloves are a little too small, kidskin strained over his knuckles, even though he has fine hands. The gloves are probably Patty's spare pair, and the look she gives him when she notices confirms it.

Min-xue's eyes are unreadable behind dark glasses, but he's wearing a Chinese military uniform. Captain Wu straightens his collar flash for him before we leave, which makes me wonder what's what. It's odd, being outside all these alliances. I'm too old for Patty and Min-xue, not
patriotic
enough for Valens and Riel. I'm not part of any system at all, I guess. Not anymore.

Fred clears his throat after five minutes, and we all look at him. He glances from Patty to me and back, and folds his hands behind his back. “While we're waiting for Janet, I don't suppose you've heard from Richard about Drs. Forster and Kirkpatrick.”

“Of course we have, Papa Fred. Don't be silly.”

He grins at her. They connect; I can almost hear the click when their eyes make contact, and the cloaks of exhaustion and grief all of us wear fall off them for an instant. Christ, I can't believe how much I miss Leah, just then. And not just Leah. Razorface, too, and Mitch, and Bobbi Yee . . .

Dammit.

I am not losing any more family to this toothy monster that is history. Enough is enough.

I'm thinking so hard about my gritted teeth that I almost miss Patty's precis of the action on the shiptree. It's a pretty simple one, still: Jeremy and Charlie have brought in a tent and oxygen and food and set up a base camp in the jungle they've discovered, from which they have been launching exploratory jaunts. Their samples have been returned to the
Montreal
for analysis, and other than a particularly vicious pollen-analogue that looks guaranteed to produce hay fever bad enough that you'd wish it was terminal, nothing that even remotely qualifies as a pathogen has been discovered. Yet.

Everything in the shiptree is crawling with nanosurgeons, though. According to Charlie, he can
feel
the entire ecosystem working around him, as if it were all one tremendous organism. He compares it to something he calls the Gaia hypothesis, but I haven't had time to look that up yet, and apparently neither has Patty. Of course, I could just ask Richard—

“You could, at that.”

Good morning, Dick.
I straighten my cuff and pick a bit of lint off it.
What's the good word?

A broad smile crinkles his cheeks. “I've been invited to testify before the General Assembly of the United Nations, regarding my knowledge of events leading up to and including December 23, 2062.”

My crow of victory turns the heads of everybody in the room, including General Frye, who has just appeared at the top of the stairs. Patty's recitation breaks off midsentence; she turns to me with a grin for just a second before she glances down at her hands, twisting gloved fingers together.

“What's the occasion?” Frye calls, coming down the stairs like a queen walking to the guillotine. The shadows under her eyes make me wonder for a minute if she's broken her nose, and the eyes themselves are so bloodshot the whites look pink. Gray skin and a gray expression. She looks like she wants to throw up, and only pride and grim determination are keeping her jaw locked.

It's profoundly unsettling to see an expression like that one someone else's face, especially when you've felt it from the inside once or twice.

“Richard can testify,” Patty answers, before I marshal my thoughts. I think I'm the only one who notices the way Frye's hand tightens on the banister, or how she turns her attention very definitely to her feet. Well, Riel probably does, too. It's her job to catch stuff like that, and the shift of Frye's weight is definite enough to make me think of somebody bracing for a fight. Maybe even spoiling for one.

Frye lifts her eyes. She's looking directly at Connie when she does it, but her gaze slides off as she reaches the landing, and settles on Patty. “Did you finish your book?”

I think Patty's going to glance at Fred for strength, but she doesn't. Instead, she looks at me, and when I meet the glance directly, she looks immediately back at Frye. “The one about the dog? I did. It didn't take very long.”

“I saw it was back on the shelf. I thumbed through it.”

“You did? What did you think?” Again Patty sneaks me a look. There's some subtext here, something I'm meant to understand. I remember her testimony, the calm, serious voice in which she'd talked about Leah, Leah's death, our own refusal—hers and mine—to retaliate after the Chinese destroyed Toronto. I remember the way she'd refused to look at me or at Fred while she was doing it. And I remember how pissed off Riel was that she told the assembly that Riel
had
called for retaliation, and the way she'd shrugged afterward and said, “But I was under oath.”

Somehow, the questioning of me never got around to that. I've got a feeling I might be called back to clarify. I think I would have preferred a formal trial, after all. With rules of evidence, and a few against self-incrimination.

Ah, well. You know, some days, going to jail doesn't sound all that bad.

Patty's comment gets that kind of a raised eyebrow and a slight little smile from General Janet Frye. “I still think it's too sentimental,” Frye says, as the doorman brings her overcoat. “I would have preferred a more realistic relationship between the man and the dog. What do you think?”

“I think that I liked what it had to say about loyalty,” Patty says—very unlike Patty, because she doesn't look down when she says it. General Frye, in fact, lowers her eyes first, ostensibly to button her cuffs. But I can see from the way Patty leans forward like a hound on a scent that there's more here, and I'm not getting it. “Even if it was sappy.”

“What book are you talking about?” Fred asks, looking all polite interest, but I notice the way his eyes catch at mine over the top of Patty's head. He doesn't know what's up here either.

“
Lad: A Dog
,” Patty says, taking Min-xue's elbow in her white-gloved hand and turning him toward the door, while he looks at her in shock. “Come on, General Frye. You're running late, and I think the limo is waiting.”

Fred grabs my elbow as I'm about to walk past him, and makes a little show of escorting me toward the door. He leans in close, his breath tickling my ear. “Casey—”

“The answer is no.”

A snort of laughter moves my hair, but his hand tightens over my metal fingers where they tuck into the crook of his arm. “Find out what the hell they were just talking about under our noses, like kids with a secret code.”

“Go piss up a rope, Fred.”

He pats my hand. “I knew you'd see it my way.”

Riel must have caught those last two sentences, or maybe she's just as shocked as Frye is by the sight of a brigadier general squiring a noncom around like his date for the ball.

Dick?

“Patty says she's playing a hunch that the general's unease has to do with her testimony, and whatever parts might not be a little . . . exaggerated. Apparently they had a long conversation the other night, and Patty twigged that something was up.”

Frye was pumping her?

“Yes, and no. She says that Frye seemed troubled and introspective, and flinchy on the subject of the testimony. And very interested in Leah and how Patty felt about Leah, in a . . . thoughtful kind of way.”

What does Alan say?

“Alan says to shut up and give her the rope she needs.” Richard sighs, spreading his hands helplessly wide. “He's very protective of Patty.”

He didn't phrase it quite that way, I bet.

“I don't gamble when I'm only going to lose,” Richard answers. “Look up, Jen. There's the car—” as Fred tugs my arm lightly, to get my attention.

“Well?” he asks, as he hands me in.

“I'll tell you in private,” I say, and duck my head to climb into the limo. Frye's not the only one giving me a funny look when I lean my head back against the cushions, close my eyes, and echo Richard's sigh.

Frye's still staring at Patty when the six of us and a handful of unhappy Mounties pile out of the motorcade on the Lower East Side. Staring at Patty, and chewing on her lip, with a completely transparent
that-kid-knows-more-than-I-think-she-should-know
look plastered all over her face. I've got to admit, Patty's performance would have me apoplectic, too. It's perfect—just a little underplayed, smug, seemingly more interested in the coffee and the scenery and the scraps of torn blue behind a skyful of clouds twisting like gray rags in the wind than in the sidelong glances Frye is shooting her.

It amuses me for the whole of the chilly walk into the UN complex, especially since I quietly let Fred take point and I take tail-end Charlie, the two of us shepherding the rest of them along the ice-scattered sidewalk inside our ring of plainclothes protectors. I never would have thought I'd watch a middle-aged military professional played like a fly-fished trout by a seventeen-year-old girl.

“A seventeen-year-old girl and a nine-month-old artificial intelligence,” Richard reminds. I snort into my coffee.

Frye doesn't have any kids, does she?

“Nary a one. And she's an only child.”

Lucky dogs, the both of you. That wouldn't work for half a second if she did. You don't actually think she's going to break and tell you anything?

“I'm just hoping Alan and Patricia can make her sweat hard enough on the stand that she looks like she's lying.”

The chances are slim.

“The choices look grim,” he answers, with a funny hiccuping rhythm, like he's quoting a song. If he were real and standing in front of me, I'd fix him with my bug-eyed look. “Never mind. Someday my cultural referents will catch up to yours.”

And by then I'll be in my grave, and you'll be confounding Genie's children.

“I'll need new personalities to confound Genie's children. The Feynman persona would leave them a bit too baffled.”

It's a little creepy, hearing the AI talk about what I think of as
himself
as if it were an accessory, a shirt that could go out of fashion. Just another brutal reminder of how inhuman he really is.
I'd miss you, Dick.

“Dick's not going anywhere.”

Except to the stars,
I answer, and we share a pleased interior laugh at that.

There's something of a kerfuffle when we get to the UN; more security personnel than I expected, and a few discreet questions between Riel and our charming guide, the same Mr. Jung (in green and red hanbok, this time), turn up the not-too-surprising information that the Chinese delegation has arrived, and the premier is with them today.

The PanChinese group catches sight of us in the General Assembly lobby, in the shadow of the enormous pendulum. Three of them break away as soon as we enter, attention obviously caught by the three rifle-green uniforms, the darker, richer green of Min-xue's kit, and Patty and Riel in civvies, flanked by the stiff spines of a couple of Mounties in plainclothes. Two Mounties. Not
nearly
enough to keep this crew out of trouble, but all they let us bring inside.