“Shijie Shu?” Riel says. They're both looking at me, but they're talking across me.
“That's what I was thinking.”
Cup clatters on saucer again. She almost drops them on the sideboard in her haste, and Fred winces. I bet that china set is older than all three of us put together. “It's tomorrow in China, isn't it? I need to call Premier Xiong. Now.”
“Connie—”
She turns back to me with her hand already on the softly gleaming brass doorknob, brows beetled over her unnaturally green eyes. “Make it quick.”
“What are they planning?”
“I don't know,” she says. The latch clicks as she turns the knob, but the hinges are too well oiled to creak. “But I'm thinking today was king's pawn to king four.”
Patty hesitated at the top of the stairs, but didn't stop. The murmur of voices followed her. She scraped her tongue against her teeth, wishing she'd drunk more ice water, trying to work loose the tannic residue from the wine. Papa Fred was trying to be polite and include her in with the grown-ups, and she wouldn't embarrass him, but she would rather have had a seltzer.
She let her fingertips skip across the whorled ball of the finial as she turned the corner, wood smooth-waxed and evenly ridged to the touch, and took three steps before she hesitated. She tucked her hair behind her ears with a jerky, violent motion, turned around, and turned toward the library instead. Papa Georges had loved two things: his spoiled, noisy parrots and his collection of antique books, and she was so homesick for the smell of paper and leather that she gulped a mouthful of spit and blinked stinging eyes.
There was somebody in the library before her. The door stood slightly ajar, and a dim light gleamed through the crack, illuminating a knife-blade width of patterned green and wheat-gold carpeting, catching a soft highlight on the scarred wood of the threshold. Patty cocked her head, listening, her fingertips resting lightly against the dark wood of the door as if it could conduct sound directly into her bones.
She heard pages turning. Quickly, as if the turner were glancing at pictures or scanning the paragraphs for some remembered turn of phrase, rather than reading to savor. Slick, heavy paper rattled softly when it was moved, paused, was followed by the clink of glass on a coaster. Patricia held her breath, began to step back, her arm extending as if her fingers were reluctant to leave the smooth warm wood.
Alan?
“I'm listening, Patricia.”
Who's in there?
“I don't know,” he said. “There's nothing in that room that's on the Net or the worldwire.”
Another page turned. The rustling paused, as if the reader had lifted his head from the book, one page still held vertical between his fingers, and hesitated in thought. And then, very clearly, Patty heard the rattle of paper one more time.
She had as much right to be here as anybody else did, didn't she? She let the held breath go and stepped forward. Her elbow bent. She pushed into the room, the door swinging aside on hinges so smoothly oiled and hung that she felt no more resistance than she would have brushing aside a drapery.
General Frye sat in a leather-upholstered armchair by the ceramic fire, staring out the dark window at branches moving against the snow. Her left hand cradled the spine of a book atop her crossed legs, holding it open. Her right hand fretted at the brass heads of the tacks holding navy leather to the scrolled wooden arm of her chair; a fat crystal glass sat on the marble-topped table beside her. She didn't turn toward the door as Patty slipped inside, but she tilted her head slightly, and Patty knew she'd been heard.
Unacknowledged, she didn't speak. She crossed the hardwood floor and edged behind a loveseat, crouching down to run her hands over the surface of the hardbound books. The textures surprised her: slick, slightly sticky leather, broadcloth rough as a cat's tongue, patterned gilt cool in the evening air. She jerked her hand away and hissed.
It was the wiring, of course. She hadn't touched a book in almost a year, and the last time she had, she'd been a normal girl with a normal girl's reflexes and senses, not the tuned, hyperaware animal she'd become. Except for the omnipresent strobe of the fluorescent lights, the Montreal was a place of cool metal surfaces and soothing glass, soft grays and blues and the white-noise hum of its systems. It smoothed over the rough edges of interacting with the daily world very well.
Earth was full of things. People, textures, sudden noises. Nine months in a controlled climate had taught Patty one way of dealing with her augmentation.
She cradled her hand close to her chest, as if she had scorched her fingertips, and forced herself to breathe slowly, evenly, through her nose. Panic helped no one. She could hear her mother saying it now.
And I'm still better off than poor Min-xue. Cautiously, she reached out again, and touched a volume bound in green leather, with little humped ridges sewn across the spine every few centimeters. It wasn't bad when she was expecting it. She just hadn't known the books would feel so… real. She hooked her fingernail over the edge and pulled. It slid into her hand with a gentle rasp of coverboards against its neighbors. She didn't look at the title; she didn't care. It smelled right.
She rose from her crouch and turned to go back to her room, and found herself looking into General Frye's alert, tired eyes. She couldn't make out their color in the angled light, but the slant of the reading lamp spilling across the book still open on her lap made her features look harsh and sad. The general nodded toward her hand. “What are you reading?”
Patty's lips thinned. She glanced down at the book pressed against her chest. “I don't know,” she admitted, and looked back up. She couldn't keep the rueful little smile from twisting her lips, but she made herself not step away. She's the enemy. She's what we're here to stop. Still, that wasn't any reason not to be polite. It was always better to be polite. Especially if you didn't like someone. “What are you reading, General?”
Except Frye didn't look like an enemy. She looked like somebody who had lost a friend, and Patty's breath twisted in her chest as Frye looked down at the book she was holding. The slick pages with their crisp 2-D images dented slightly between her fingertips and she coughed, except it might have been a chuckle. And she said, “I don't know either,” and stuck her forefinger in as a placeholder as she flipped to the front. “It's the sesquicentennial celebration of National Geographic magazine. One hundred and fifty years of unforgettable photographs. They're quite stunning.” Grudgingly said, that last, as if Frye had not wanted them to be “stunning.” Or as if they had affected her in some manner she found unacceptable.
Patty balanced her book against her belly and cracked it open. “Albert Payson Terhune,” she said. “Lad: A Dog. That's a silly title.”
“It's a pretty silly book, too, as I recall.” Frye flipped her book back open, glanced at the page number, and set it aside on the end table, well away from her glass. “Very sentimental.” She closed her eyes briefly, as if something hurt her.
Enemy, Patty said to the twinge of pity that answered that gesture. Patty reached for Alan, but Alan was silent, observing. She felt his presence, however, the cool swirl of blue and purple solidifying her resolve. Maybe I can draw her out, find out something interesting. Would you help me do that?