"We don't want the money," Major Sorensen said. "We don't need it."
"No, you don't need it, Major," Sellars told him gently. "But you're going to get it. If you're worrying that the money is tainted somehow, I promise you there was no theft involved. I made many investments over the years, all of them quite legitimate—I had decades of all the world's information at my fingertips, and I am not a foolish man. I used most of that money upgrading myself and investigating the Grail Brotherhood. Surely you will not balk at using the small amount I have left to help protect your family, after all you've done for me."
"Small amount! Forty-six million credits!"
Sellars smiled. "You won't be forced to take all of it. It will be split among several . . . volunteers."
"It's tiny compared to what we're going to get when we drag Telemorphix and some of these others into court," Ramsey said. "But most of that will go to, the parents of the Tandagore kids, the ones put into comas by the Grail network's operating system. Oh, and to one other thing, which I might as well tell you about now. We're planning to build a hospital—the Olga Pirofsky Memorial Children's Hospital."
Sellars nodded slowly. "I did not know Ms. Pirofsky as well as you did, Mr. Ramsey, but may I make a suggestion? I suspect she would have preferred to call it the Daniel Pirofsky Children's Hospital."
It took him a moment to understand. "Of . . . of course. Yes, I think you're right."
"But why do we have to take these people to court?" asked Kaylene Sorensen. "After all we've been through?"
"You don't," Ramsey said carefully. "I have no qualms about filing a class-action suit. But when General Yacoubian's role in this comes out, I think it will be difficult to keep you folks out of it entirely. This is going to be the biggest story since the Antarctica War. Hell, it's going to be bigger than that—we've got a cloud of smoke over most of southeastern Louisiana, the J Corporation island is a melted slab at the middle of a federal disaster zone, and that's just a tiny piece of the goddamned puzzle." He saw Mrs. Sorensen's look and couldn't help smiling. Things were returning to normal, even if she didn't recognize it yet. "Sorry for the language. But there may be a court-martial ahead for your husband, too, I'm sure with Captain Parkins' testimony we won't have any trouble winning. . . ."
"We?" asked Christabel's father.
Ramsey paused, nodded. "Actually, I may be . . . a bit busy in the months to come. But I'm sure any decent military lawyer will be able to get it handled. We'll find one if you don't know one already."
"Please, take the money, Mrs. Sorensen," said Sellars. "Buy yourself a house off the base. Insulate yourself a little. This will go on for a long time. I'm sure you will have to struggle to keep your privacy."
"I don't want to move off the base," she replied angrily.
"As you choose. But take the money. Use it to give Christabel some freedom."
"What about the boy?" Ramsey asked. "I can make some arrangements if you'd like—before things get too hectic. Find him a good foster home. . . ."
"I don't know what you're talking about." Kaylene Sorensen was not going to be jollied or led. Ramsey suspected she was going to be a very good trial witness. "That boy's not going anywhere. I haven't spent all that time washing and feeding him just to hand him off to someone who wouldn't care. He's staying with us, the poor little thing." She looked at her husband. "Isn't that right, Michael?"
Major Sorensen had the good grace to smile. "Uh . . . yeah. Sure. The more the merrier."
"Christabel," her mother said, "go get. . . ." She frowned and turned to Sellars. "What's his name? His real name?"
"Carlos, I believe." Sellars was smiling, too. "But I don't think he likes it much."
"Then we'll think of something else. I'm not going to have a foster son named Cho-Cho. It sounds like a train or something." She waved at her daughter. "Go on, honey—go get him."
Christabel looked at her strangely. "He's going to live with us?"
"Yes, he is. He doesn't have anywhere else to go."
The little girl thought this over for a moment. "Okay," she said, then trotted into the bedroom. She emerged a moment later pulling the protesting boy by the arm. He had taken off his suit, but as if he had been uncertain of what to do next, wore only his T-shirt and underwear.
"You're going to come live with us," Kaylene Sorensen said. "Is that all right?"
He looked at her as though peering up out of a hole. Ramsey thought he might actually try to run away. "Live with you?" he asked. "Like, su casa? In your house?"
"Yes." She nodded emphatically. "Tell him, Mike."
"We want you to live with us," the major said. To his credit, he definitely sounded like he meant it now. "We want you . . . to be part of our family."
The boy stared from one to the other. "Not going to school," he said.
"You most certainly are," Kaylene Sorensen told him. "And you will take regular baths, too. And we'll get those teeth fixed."
"Teeth. . . ?" He looked a little stunned. One hand crept up to finger his mouth. Then his expression changed. "Gonna live with the weenit?"
"If you mean Christabel, yes. She'll be . . . your sister, I guess."
He stared at them again, calculating, still suspicious, but also glimpsing the outlines of something about which Ramsey could only guess.
"Okay," he said.
"If you don't say bad words, I'll let you play with Prince Pikapik," Christabel promised.
He rolled his eyes, then the two of them wandered off to the other room—lawsuits, court-martials, even a dead man talking on the wallscreen not enough to keep them around while grown-ups were doing boring grown-up things.
"Good," said Sellars. "This is all good. Now we have a few more matters to discuss."
This truly is the story of the century, Ramsey marveled. I wonder if someday, half a millennium from now, people will be studying what we're saying here today. He looked at the bedroom doorway. The other wallscreen was on. Christabel was lying on the floor talking to a stuffed toy. Cho-Cho was watching cars explode.
No, he thought, and turned his attention back to what Sellars was saying. People never remember this stuff, no matter how important it is.
"I'm sorry I'm late. I've only been back a day and I still feel . . . pretty strange. And you know how slow the buses are downtown." Renie looked around. "The office isn't quite what I expected."
Del Ray laughed and waved his good hand dismissively at the windowless space, the small screen on the unadorned white wall. His other arm was pulled tightly against his chest in a sling, the damaged hand invisible under a knot of bandages. "It's only temporary—I've got my eye on a much nicer one at the main UN building on Farewell Square." He settled back in his chair. "Bureaucracies are a funny thing. Three months ago you would have thought I had a communicable disease. Now I am suddenly everyone's best friend again because the smell of a wrongful-termination suit is on the wind and my face is on the newsnets." He looked at her. "But not your face. It's too bad—it's a nice face, Renie."
"I don't want it—the attention, anything. I'm tired. I just want some quiet." She lowered herself into the chair facing the desk. "It's a miracle I'm up and walking around, but those old-fashioned tanks were actually better than what some of the other people in the network went through. Let us move our limbs so the muscles didn't atrophy, things like that. And, of course, we didn't get bedsores."
"You'll have to tell me one day about the others. I still don't entirely understand."
"It will be a long conversation," she said. "But yes, I'll tell you. It's quite a story."