“You’re saying you’ve never been socialized.” Bonnie leans her head toward him. “You just hatched, like, fully formed from a tank—”
“Yeah,” Sam says, and waits.
“That’s so sad,” Bonnie says. “Did your dad mistreat you?”
“Oh mercy, no! He just ignores ... Well, he’s Dad. He never pays much attention to me, he’s too busy looking for the alien space bats and trying not to get the Bishop mad at him.”
“Is that why you were taking Huw into town?” asks Bonnie.
“Huh, yeah, I guess so.” Sam chuckles. “Anything comes down in the swamp, you betcha they see it on radar. You came down in Dad’s patch, pretty soon they’ll come by and ask why he hasn’t turned you in. So you can’t really blame him, putting on the Holy Roller head and riding into town to hand over the geek.”
“That’s okay,” Bonnie says as Sam’s shoulders tense, “I understand.”
“It’s just a regular game-theoretical transaction, y’see?” Sam asks, his voice rising in a near whine: “He has to do it! He has to tit-for-tat with the Church or they’ll roll him over. ’Sides, the geek doesn’t know anything. The shipment—”
“Hush.” Bonnie winks at the big guy. “Actually, your dad was wrong—the ambassad—the shipment requires a living host.”
“Oh!” Sam’s eyebrows rise. “Then it’s a good thing you rescued him, I guess.” He looks wistful. “If’n I trust you. I don’t know much about people.”
“That’s all right,” Bonnie says. “I’m not your enemy. I don’t hate you for picking us up. You don’t need to shut us up.” She looks up at where her wrists are trussed to the grab rail. “Let my hands free?”
Sam listens to some kind of internal voice, then he raises the knife and slices away at Bonnie’s bonds. Huw tenses as she slumps down and then drapes herself across Sam’s muscular shoulder. “What do you want?” Sam asks.
Bonnie cups his chin tenderly. “We all want the same thing,” she says. Sam shrinks back from her touch.
“Sha,” she says. “You’re very handsome, Sam.” He squirms.
Huw squirms too. “Bonnie,” he says, a warning.
Sam twists to stare at him, and Huw sees that there’s something wild breaking loose behind his eyes. “Come on,” Bonnie says, “over here.” She takes his hand and leads him toward the driver’s cab of the APC. “Come with me.”
Huw swallows his revulsion as the big guy slides past him, nimble on his big dinner-plate feet, hand enfolding Bonnie’s. He keeps his eyes down. He feels a stab of jealousy: but Bonnie’s sidelong glance silences him. He’s old enough to know the nature of this game.
After the hatch thumps shut, Huw strains to overhear the murmured converation from behind it, but all he can make out is thumps and grunts, and then, weirdly, a loud sob. “Oh, Daddy, why?” It’s Sam, and there are more sobs now, and more thumps, and Huw realizes they’re not sex noises—more like seizure noises.
His ribs and shoulders are on fire, and he shifts from foot to foot, trying to find relief from the agony of hanging by his wrists. He steps on their pathetic pillowcase of possessions, and the lamp rolls free, Ade popping up.
“My, you are a sight, old son,” the little hologram says. “Nice hat.”
“It helps me think,” Huw says around the copper mesh of the balaclava. “It wouldn’t have hurt to have a couple of these on the zep, Ade.”
“Live and learn,” the hologram says. “Next time.” It cocks its head and listens to the sobbing. “What’s all that about, then?”
Huw shrugs as best as he can, then gasps at the chorous of muscle spasms this evinces from his upper body. “I thought Bonnie might be having a shag, but now I’m not sure. I think she might be conducting a therapy session.”
“Saving the world as per usual,” Ade says. “So many virtues that boygirl has. Doctrinaire ideologues like her are the backbone of the movement, I tell you. Who’s she converting to pervtopic disestablishmentarianist personal politics, then?”
“One of your trading partners,” Huw says. “Sam. Turns out he’s the doc’s son. Clone. I ’spect you knew that, though.”
“Sam? Brick shithouse Sam?” There’s a distant, roaring sob and another crash. “Who’d have thought he had it in him?”
“Whose side are you on, Ade? What have you been selling these bastards? I expect I’ll be dead by dusk, so you can tell me.”
“I told you, but you didn’t listen. There is no conspiracy. The movement is an emergent phenomenon. It’s complexity theory, not ideology. The cloud wants to instantiate an ambassador, and events conspire to find a suitable host and get some godvomit down his throat.” Ade nods at him. “Now the cloud wants the ambassador to commune with something on the American continent, and there you are. How do I know the cloud wants this? Because you are there, on the American continent. QED. Maybe it wants to buy Manhattan for some beads. Maybe it wants to say hello to the ants. Maybe it wants to be sure that meatsuits are really as banal and horrible as it remembers.”
“No ideology?” Huw says as another sob rattles the walls. “I think Bonnie might disagree with you.”
“Oh, she might,” Ade says. “But in the end, she knows it as well as I do: Our mission is to be where events take us. Buying and selling a little on the side, it’s not counterrevolutionary. It’s not revolutionary. It’s just more complexity. More energy to pump into the dynamic system from whence the conspiracy may emerge.”
“That’s all conveniently fatalist,” Huw says.
“Imagine,” Ade says , “a technophobe lecturing me about fatalism.” The sobs have stopped, and now they hear the thunder of approaching footfalls. Bonnie comes through the door, trailing Sam behind her, as Ade disappears,.
She takes both of his hands and stands on tiptoe to kiss him on the tip of his squashed nose. “You’re very beautiful, Sam,” she says. “And your feelings are completely normal. You tell the Bishop I told you to go see her. Him. It. They’ll help you out.”
Sam’s eyes are red and his chin is slick with gob. He wipes his face on his checkered flannel shirttails. “I love you, Bonnie,” he says, his voice thick with tears.
“I love you too, Sam,” she says. She reaches into his pocket and takes out his knife, opens it and cuts Huw down. “We’re going now, but I’ll never forget you. If you ever decide to come to Europe, you know how to find me.”
Huw nearly keels over as his arms flap bloodlessly down to slap at his sides, but manages to stay upright as Sam thuds over to the ramp controls and sets the gangway to lowering.
“Come on, Huw,” she says, picking up their pillowcase. “We’ve got to get to the coast.”
“Court is in session,” screams a familiar voice as the ramp scrapes the rubberized tarmac. Three court golems—so big, they dwarf Sam—come up the ramp with alarming swiftness and grab all three of them before Huw has time to register anything more than a dim impression of an alleyway that’s lit like a soundstage for the cameras, and, in the middle of it, Judge Rosa
Giuliani: encased in a dalekoid peppermill of a personal vehicle, draped in her robes of office, and scowling like she’s just discovered piss in her coffee cup.
“You are charged with violating WorldGov biohazard regulations, with wanton epidemiological disregard, with threatening the fragile peace of our world’s orderly acquisition and adoption of technology, and with being a fugitive from justice.”
“You’re out of your tiny little jurisdiction,” Bonnie says.
“I’ll get to you,” the judge says. “I never execute a criminal without offering her last words, so you just sit tight until I call on you.”