Valens is still staring at me, the picture of quiet relaxation. I ask Richard something else instead, something I won't have to lie under oath about. Why? — no, wait. Don't answer that. Just answer this: Are those documents real?
“They're real. I'm not Fred Valens, Jen.”
Dick—
“With any luck, they won't ask the right questions.” It's not quite a smile, what crosses Richard's face, but a strange, tender expression I can't put a name to. It's the sort of look you expect to see before somebody messes up your hair, but of course he hasn't got the fingers to do it with, so he just looks at me for a second, and then looks down.
I hadn't known you were such a patriot, Richard.
“There's an old catchphrase. My country is the whole world.”
I've heard it.
“In my case”—he grins—“it's quite absolutely true.”
Fred still hasn't blinked. Come to think of it, neither have I. I breathe out slowly, over my tongue, through my teeth, and look down at the spit-shined tips of my shoes. Before I get the breath back in, somebody knocks on the door and the handle starts to turn. I don't look over; I just tug my jacket straight one last time. “Lucky for us Razorface thought to mail that off before he died.”
“Yes,” Fred says, as the door opens and Mr. Jung slips inside, one hand crooked to summon us. Or to summon me, it seems, although Fred will follow along and sit in the observer seats.
We follow Mr. Jung into a room only about twice the size of a hockey amphitheater. It reminds me of being inside a gigantic nautilus shell. The ranked chairs have long desks attached to the back of each row, for the use of the row behind them, and except for the miniaturized interface plates obviously retrofitted to each place, they're exactly like the hundred-year-old student desks in the parochial school I suffered through until I ran away from home. The high ceiling is sculptured in acoustic ripples, pierced by a curving aperture of sorts lined with windows, dark observation booths behind. There's a screen over the podium we're walking toward. It's pearl white, and black letters float in it:
Items of Business:
Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Canada and the British Commonwealth People's PanChinese Alliance)em>
Armed Activities on the Territory of Canada (Canada and the British Commonwealth People's PanChinese Alliance)em>
Armed Activities on the Territory of China (People's PanChinese Alliance Canada)em>
I try not to look at them as we walk down the long green-carpeted aisle. They make everything far too concrete, far too real. I feel insanely like a bride at a cathedral wedding, Fred and Mr. Jung playing the role of my attendants now, flanking me. I wonder if this would feel less freakish if I had a veil and a long white train in place of my sharp-creased rifle green.
My place is on the stage. Behind the podium, below a gorgeous curved red-gold wall of mahogany, with my back to the long table where the secretary general and some other people who I don't recognize sit.
Mr. Jung and Fred step off to the side as I climb the steps, aware of thousands of eyes on my back, holovision and Net feeds, the whole world watching. It's a short flight. I don't stumble. Agné Zilinskiene, the secretary general of the United Nations, rises and comes around the table to meet me. She's a Lithuanian lady in her sixties, perfectly powdered skin as lustrous as her pearl earrings. Unlike Constance Riel, she's let her bobbed hair go a rich flat pewter. It moves naturally when she cocks her head back to smile up at me.
“It's an honor, ma'am,” I say, as she reaches out.
“It's a pleasure to meet somebody with a little common sense,” she says, very softly, so the microphones won't pick it up. She clasps my right hand in both of hers. Not thinking, I add my own left hand to the mix. She glances down at the touch of cool metal, and looks up, smile widening. “I like a woman who doesn't believe in prettying up the truth.”
Which is when it sinks in that she, too, knows more than she's supposed. That she knows about the order I disobeyed, which is the reason Beijing isn't a smoking ruin like Toronto now.
The realization almost makes me grip her hand too tightly. I have to uncurl my metal fingers carefully, consciously, and let the steel hand fall to my side. This isn't Bernard's trial. I am not a victim, here. Riel, Richard, Valens — they have nothing to hold over me. Nothing but my own conscience, and its ghosts. They need me far more than I need them.
I've never held this much power in my life, in my own two hands. It stuns me with primeval awe. It's a dark god, that kind of power, a black rock idol crouched before the rising sun.
“Thank you, ma'am.” I smile, and she lets my hand go, and I turn away to take my oath and think about the ways in which I will shade the truth so that I will not have to lie.
It was 6 AM in Vancouver when the testimony started in New York, and Riel didn't have the luxury of time to curl up on the sofa in her slippers, a mug cupped between her hands, and watch.
She didn't have time for it, but she was doing it anyway. Even if the Americans — and she had no illusions about that: she knew American ignorance and American arrogance well, and this was unquestionably the latter — had gone out of their way to arrange for the hearings to start on the Canadian day of thanks, it was still a national holiday. And Riel had sacrificed the privilege of sleeping in in favor of her perch on the big temperature-controlled memory-foam sofa, the never-ending stream of coffee cups, and the image of Genevieve Casey hovering in midair before her, limned in the not-quite-real glow of holography.
She sipped from her mug, the steam warming her face while lacy feathers of frost melted off the windows. Frost, in Vancouver, Canada's answer to the tropics. On Thanksgiving.
She wondered what it would be like in two or three years, when the dust settled and the temperature started to rise, if Richard couldn't prevent it. She'd always lived with climate change, grown up in the era of wild weather. It had always been an accepted consideration rather than a crisis, something one adapted to, mitigated, planned for. Harsh winters, harsh summers, melting ice, erratic crops, evolving storm models, and altered ocean currents. The acceptance that whatever the situation was now, it was subject to immediate and irrevocable change.
She tried not to hang too much on the hope that, now that they had Richard, they might be able to control that change. She tried not to hang too much hope on anything, really, but this one was particularly tempting. A magic bullet. A miracle cure. Like penicillin—
Except, like penicillin, like any magic bullet, there was the chance… no, the likelihood… of unforeseen side effects and long-term consequences. Best not to hope, not even cautiously. Because hope could cloud one's sense of risks and benefits, and make one gamble more than one could afford to lose. Better to plan for the worst, to find some common ground with the Chinese and evacuate as many people from the planet as possible. A colony was a huge risk, and also a tremendous fallback position: as fragile as a basket of eggs… but nevertheless, a second basket.
Riel blinked a command interface up in her contact and raised the level of the sound on the live feed from the UN. A crow called outside, a harsh, throaty caw. She didn't glance up, fascinated by Casey's easy charm on camera, her effortless charisma. Traditionally, she might have had a chair, a table to sit behind, legal advisers at her side rather than Valens and one Canadian lawyer seated against the curtain wall, but this was theater, not justice, and those concessions to comfort had been sacrificed in the negotiation process, leaving her up there naked except for a podium and the microphone tacked to her throat.