“Don’t go breaking the habit of a lifetime.”
“I’m sorry about Paula’s birthday. I’ll make it up to her. Tell her that, won’t you? And give my love to Andrew. Don’t let them think I’m a bad mother.”
“You’re not a bad mother,” Peter said. “You’re not even a bad person. It’s just that you’ve let that planet… that city… Paris… take over your life, like some kind of possessive lover. You know, I think I could have handled things better if you’d actually had an affair.”
“If I don’t look after Paris, no one else will.”
“Is that worth a marriage and the love of two children?” Peter held up his hand. “No, don’t answer that. Just think about it. It’s too late for us.”
The flat certainty of this rather surprised her. “You think so?”
“Of course. The fact that we’re even able to have this conversation without throwing things around proves that.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“But do think about your children,” Peter said. “Go into that tribunal prepared to be humble and to tell the truth, and say that you’ve made mistakes and you’re sorry about them. Then I think you may have some hope of walking out of there.”
“And of keeping my job?”
“I didn’t promise miracles.”
She stood up and took his hand, feeling it fit into her own with heartbreaking familiarity, as if they had been carved for each other.
“I’ll do my best,” Auger said. “There’s too much work left for me to do. I’m not going to let those bastards screw me over just to make a political point.”
“That’s the spirit,” Peter said. “But remember what I said about humility?”
“I’ll keep it in mind.”
She waited until he was gone before taking the vase and all its dead flowers into the kitchen, where she tipped the flowers into the waste.
“Verity Auger?”
“Yes.”
“Take the stand, please.”
The preliminary hearing took place in a high vaulted chamber in a part of Antiquities she had never visited before, but which had only involved a short escorted ride from her apartment. All around the room, vast photographic frescos cycled through scenes from pre-Nanocaust Earth.
“Let’s begin,” said the chairwoman, addressing Auger from a raised podium backdropped by the flag of the USNE. “It is the preliminary finding of this special disciplinary committee that your actions in Paris led to the death of the student Sebastian Nerval…”
Auger was the only one who did not turn to look at the boy, cradled in an upright recovery couch with a halo of delicate Slasher-manufactured machines still fussing around his skull, like so many attendant cherubim and seraphim.
“Objection,” said Auger’s Antiquities defence attorney, rustling papers on his desk. “The student is present in the room today.”
“Your point being?” the chairwoman asked.
“My point being that he can hardly be said to have ‘died’ in any meaningful sense.”
“The law makes no distinction between permanent and temporary death,” the chairwoman replied, with the weary tone of someone who had already made this point on numerous occasions. “The boy only survived by virtue of the fact that Polity medicine was on hand. Since this cannot normally be counted upon, it will play no mitigating role in the hearing.”
The defence attorney’s round, molelike face was not in any way enhanced by the round, molelike spectacles he favoured. “But the simple fact of the matter is that he didn’t die.”
“Objection overruled,” the chairwoman said. “And—if I might make a suggestion—you would be wise to familiarise yourself with the basic tenets of United States of Near Earth law before stepping into this room again.”
The attorney rummaged through his papers, as if searching for the one half-forgotten clause that would prove him correct. Auger watched as the papers slid from the desk into his lap, spilling to the floor. He leaned forward to collect them, knocking his spectacles against the side of the desk.
The chairwoman ignored him, turning instead to the woman sitting to Auger’s right. “Cassandra… that’s the name you prefer to be known by, isn’t it?”
“My preferred name is—” and she opened her mouth and emitted a complex, liquid trilling, a rapid sequence of notes and warbles. Genetic engineering had given all Polity citizens a sound-generating organ modelled on the avian syrinx, plus the necessary neural circuitry to generate and decode the sounds produced by that organ. Since it was now part of their genome, the Slashers would retain the capability for rapid communication even if they suffered another Forgetting or technological crash.
Cassandra smiled ruefully. “But I think Cassandra will do for now.”
“Almost certainly,” the chairwoman said, echoing the smile. “First of all, I’d like to thank you on behalf of Antiquities, and the wider authority of the USNE, for taking the time to return to Tanglewood, especially in these difficult circumstances.”
“It’s no hardship,” Cassandra said.
Freed of any need to disguise herself, the woman was now unmistakably a citizen of the Federation of Polities. Her basic appearance was still the same: a small, unassuming girl with a lopsided fringe of dark hair and the pouting expression of someone accustomed to being told off. But now she was attended by a roving cloud of autonomous machines, their ceaseless movement blurring the territory of her body and mind. Like all Slashers, she was infested with countless droves of invisibly small machines: distant relatives of the microscopic furies that still ran amok on the surface of Earth. She wore plain white clothes of an austere cut, but the machines themselves formed a kind of shifting armour around her, a silver-tinged halo that glinted and sparkled at the edges. Doubtless, elements of her entourage had already detached themselves from the main cloud to improve her overview of the room and its occupants. It was entirely possible that some of those machines had even slipped into the bodies of those present, eavesdropping on thoughts.
“At the moment,” the chairwoman said, “you are the only useful witness we have. Perhaps when the boy relearns language—”
“If,” Cassandra corrected. “It’s by no means guaranteed that our techniques will be able to reconstruct that kind of hard-wired neural function.”
“Well, we’ll see,” the chairwoman said. “In the meantime we have you, and we have the film spools recovered from the crawler.”
“And Verity’s testimony,” Cassandra said, fixing Auger with an expressionless stare from within her aura of twinkling machines. “You have that as well.”
“We do. Unfortunately, it rather contradicts your own.”
The girl blinked, then shrugged. “That’s a pity.”
“Yes,” the chairwoman agreed. “Very much so. Auger argues that the Champs-Elysées site appeared to have been secured for human teams. Isn’t that so?”
Auger said, “I believe you’ve read my statement, your honour.”
The chairwoman glanced down at her notes. “Analysis of the processed film reels shows that the excavated site had not been marked as safe for human visitors.”
“The markings are often too faint to read,” Auger said. “The excavators mark them with dye because transponders don’t last, but the dyes don’t last long either.”
“Records confirm that the chamber had never been secured,” the chairwoman repeated.
“Records are often out of date.”
“That’s hardly a good enough reason to go charging underground.”
“With all due respect, no one charged anywhere. It was a cautious investigation that unfortunately ran into trouble.”
“That’s not what Cassandra says.”