Torrence shouted, “Steinfeld, what the hell are you—?” Hobbling up behind him, trying to give him supporting fire, but moving slowly on his wounded leg.
Jæger went down, and another fascist too—and then the bulls opened fire on Steinfeld and Torrence. Steinfeld staggered as a dozen rounds tore into him. He spun and fell, still firing. Torrence blowing away the guy who’d shot Steinfeld.
Torrence got it then. Feeling a punch in the chest, another in the right hip. Going down.
Steinfeld, what the hell did you do that for? It was pointless. We had them. We had them. There was no reason…
“There was a reason,” Roseland said.
Roseland was sitting beside Torrence’s hospital bed in an overburdened government hospital run by the new French Republic. Four other beds were crammed into the room. Torrence didn’t respond aloud, because of the tube going down his throat, into his right lung—the lung the bullet had gone through—but he looked at Roseland in a way that meant, What the fuck are you talking about?
“He kept a personal journal, written in Hebrew,” Roseland said. Roseland looked as ill as Torrence, though he hadn’t been wounded. He looked as if he was having trouble sitting up straight. Hadn’t slept in a few days, Torrence guessed. “I found the journal in his stuff when I was getting it together to send to the Mossad. I couldn’t help it. I read it. Most of it wasn’t anything the enemy could’ve used for intelligence if they’d found it—all that part was real elliptical and general. It was mostly personal thoughts, ideas, feelings. And he talked about Pasolini at the end. Turns out he had been having Pasolini followed.
“Steinfeld knew she was in touch with some of Witcher’s operatives. He found out about the virus—had one of Witcher’s contacts picked up and extracted. He wrestled with himself about it. He knew she was the only one left with the non-racially-selective virus. Thinking that if she went ahead and did it, released it in Berlin with the fake manifesto recording, it would hurt the enemy bad, and in the long run that’d save lives. Then he decided he was being as bad as they were—that there was no excuse for allowing tens of thousands of civilians to die as part of some damn political strategy. He came to this, see, he really did. But by the time he’d made up his mind, it was too late. She was on her way to Berlin. He tried to find her, tried to stop her…” He shook his head. “I saw his face when we got the news about Berlin. I never saw such open emotion in the guy before…”
Torrence nodded, very slightly. But he thought: Steinfeld could have stopped it. He let hate for the SA get in the way of saving two hundred thousand lives.
Steinfeld knew that, of course. Which is why the charge on the rooftop.
He had joined those he had failed. The guilty dead had joined the innocent dead.
“What are we going to do today?” Alouette said, kicking spray into the air with her bare feet. She ran from the lapping fringe of ocean, chased it back to the surf, ran from it again.
“Anything you want,” Smoke said.
“How about tomorrow?”
“Anything you want.”
“You’re going to stay in Merino?”
“This is my home now. That’s why we came back here. It’s my home, with you. I have a grant, and I’m going to stay here and write a book just to have something to do, but mostly I’m going to go swimming with you, and tell you to do your homework, and tell you: no, you can’t watch satellite TV.”
“Can too watch TV.”
“Cannot either.”
“Can too. Sometimes a little.”
“Maybe sometimes a little.”
She danced happily around him. He smiled sadly, looked at the sunwashed beach, the palms along the beachside road, the high shaggy trees nodding in the easy breeze. Here and there were stumps of palms left by the shelling—but most of the trees had made it. And so had most of the islanders.
“Alouette,” he said, “did the crow really die at that moment?”
“When we sent out the message into that entelechy thing? That Leng field thing?”
“Yes. Did you make that up?”
“No. That’s when he died. He flew down onto my shoulder and then fell in my lap. I didn’t really notice it much, I was in chip communion, see, but afterward it made me cry when I found him. But part of me notices things around me, those times. That’s when he died. When we sent that message.”
“Huh. Be damned.”
“Daddy Jack?”
“What?”
“Mr. Kessler says that entelechy thing is ‘hooey.’ He says it does not work. Do you think it worked? It seemed like it worked. Everybody saw what was happening and they did something.”
“But maybe that was just the media, the timing. I don’t know if it worked. With those things, it’s hard to tell if they’re real or not. And if they are real—whoever made them, whoever put the world together, must want it this way. I mean, they must want it, so we can’t be sure if it’s real or not: The things people call spiritual…”
“Can we get some ice cream?”
“You’re too fat for ice cream.”
She wasn’t even remotely fat, but she pretended outrage. “I am not! My metabolism rate likes ice cream!”
“Your metabolism rate. Oh. Well, in that case. Yes. Let’s get some ice cream.”
“And can we get another bird?”
“Another crow?”
“No. A cockatoo. A yellow cockatoo. I know a man who is selling one.”
“Yeah. Ice cream and a cockatoo. Why not.”
He took her hand, and they walked back to the hotel.
Claire was pruning roses.
She was working on a patch of red roses at the new technicki housing project. It was her way of taking a day off. The sunlight was coming strongly despite the filters, and the air was sweet with rose scent, and the protestation of her muscles felt good. Maybe afterward she’d go for a swim.
“Can I help?”
She looked up at the stranger and smiled politely. An Oriental, maybe Japanese. But tall for a Japanese. He was probably half American, judging by his size and accent. Rather thin and tired. Vaguely familiar. She’d probably seen him around the Colony somewhere.
“You can help if you like,” she said. “I don’t have any extra clippers, though. Do you know about gardening?”
“Not a damn thing.”
His voice…
He smiled. And that smile was familiar. She found herself staring at one of his ears. It was slightly off-color. There was a faint scar around the base of it.
“My sister,” he was saying, “used to try to get me to help her in Mom’s garden when we were kids. I’d tell her, ‘Kitty—I’ll garden when I haven’t got anything else to do. Which’ll probably be never.’” He shrugged. “I guess it’s never now.”
“Your sister’s name is Kitty?”
“Yes.”
“Danny?”
“Yes.”
“Danny?”
“Uh-huh. I—”
He didn’t get the rest out. She nearly knocked him over when she threw her arms around him. “Danny…”
A while later, maybe an hour and maybe three—neither of them could have told you how long they had been talking—they were strolling through the little woods, next to the old monument to space techs who’d died building the Colony. She looked up at it, and real pain flared in her eyes. “Dan—when I was… while we were separated, I had a relationship with someone.”
“Did you? So did I.” He touched his new ear.
“He died, though. In space.”