Dammit.
I am not losing any more family to this toothy monster that is history. Enough is enough.
I'm thinking so hard about my gritted teeth that I almost miss Patty's precis of the action on the shiptree. It's a pretty simple one, stilclass="underline" Jeremy and Charlie have brought in a tent and oxygen and food and set up a base camp in the jungle they've discovered, from which they have been launching exploratory jaunts. Their samples have been returned to the Montreal for analysis, and other than a particularly vicious pollen-analogue that looks guaranteed to produce hay fever bad enough that you'd wish it was terminal, nothing that even remotely qualifies as a pathogen has been discovered. Yet.
Everything in the shiptree is crawling with nanosurgeons, though. According to Charlie, he can feel the entire ecosystem working around him, as if it were all one tremendous organism. He compares it to something he calls the Gaia hypothesis, but I haven't had time to look that up yet, and apparently neither has Patty. Of course, I could just ask Richard—
“You could, at that.”
Good morning, Dick. I straighten my cuff and pick a bit of lint off it. What's the good word?
A broad smile crinkles his cheeks. “I've been invited to testify before the General Assembly of the United Nations, regarding my knowledge of events leading up to and including December 23, 2062.”
My crow of victory turns the heads of everybody in the room, including General Frye, who has just appeared at the top of the stairs. Patty's recitation breaks off midsentence; she turns to me with a grin for just a second before she glances down at her hands, twisting gloved fingers together.
“What's the occasion?” Frye calls, coming down the stairs like a queen walking to the guillotine. The shadows under her eyes make me wonder for a minute if she's broken her nose, and the eyes themselves are so bloodshot the whites look pink. Gray skin and a gray expression. She looks like she wants to throw up, and only pride and grim determination are keeping her jaw locked.
It's profoundly unsettling to see an expression like that one someone else's face, especially when you've felt it from the inside once or twice.
“Richard can testify,” Patty answers, before I marshal my thoughts. I think I'm the only one who notices the way Frye's hand tightens on the banister, or how she turns her attention very definitely to her feet. Well, Riel probably does, too. It's her job to catch stuff like that, and the shift of Frye's weight is definite enough to make me think of somebody bracing for a fight. Maybe even spoiling for one.
Frye lifts her eyes. She's looking directly at Connie when she does it, but her gaze slides off as she reaches the landing, and settles on Patty. “Did you finish your book?”
I think Patty's going to glance at Fred for strength, but she doesn't. Instead, she looks at me, and when I meet the glance directly, she looks immediately back at Frye. “The one about the dog? I did. It didn't take very long.”
“I saw it was back on the shelf. I thumbed through it.”
“You did? What did you think?” Again Patty sneaks me a look. There's some subtext here, something I'm meant to understand. I remember her testimony, the calm, serious voice in which she'd talked about Leah, Leah's death, our own refusal — hers and mine — to retaliate after the Chinese destroyed Toronto. I remember the way she'd refused to look at me or at Fred while she was doing it. And I remember how pissed off Riel was that she told the assembly that Riel had called for retaliation, and the way she'd shrugged afterward and said, “But I was under oath.”
Somehow, the questioning of me never got around to that. I've got a feeling I might be called back to clarify. I think I would have preferred a formal trial, after all. With rules of evidence, and a few against self-incrimination.
Ah, well. You know, some days, going to jail doesn't sound all that bad.
Patty's comment gets that kind of a raised eyebrow and a slight little smile from General Janet Frye. “I still think it's too sentimental,” Frye says, as the doorman brings her overcoat. “I would have preferred a more realistic relationship between the man and the dog. What do you think?”
“I think that I liked what it had to say about loyalty,” Patty says — very unlike Patty, because she doesn't look down when she says it. General Frye, in fact, lowers her eyes first, ostensibly to button her cuffs. But I can see from the way Patty leans forward like a hound on a scent that there's more here, and I'm not getting it. “Even if it was sappy.”
“What book are you talking about?” Fred asks, looking all polite interest, but I notice the way his eyes catch at mine over the top of Patty's head. He doesn't know what's up here either.
“Lad: A Dog,” Patty says, taking Min-xue's elbow in her white-gloved hand and turning him toward the door, while he looks at her in shock. “Come on, General Frye. You're running late, and I think the limo is waiting.”
Fred grabs my elbow as I'm about to walk past him, and makes a little show of escorting me toward the door. He leans in close, his breath tickling my ear. “Casey—”
“The answer is no.”
A snort of laughter moves my hair, but his hand tightens over my metal fingers where they tuck into the crook of his arm. “Find out what the hell they were just talking about under our noses, like kids with a secret code.”
“Go piss up a rope, Fred.”
He pats my hand. “I knew you'd see it my way.”
Riel must have caught those last two sentences, or maybe she's just as shocked as Frye is by the sight of a brigadier general squiring a noncom around like his date for the ball.
Dick?
“Patty says she's playing a hunch that the general's unease has to do with her testimony, and whatever parts might not be a little… exaggerated. Apparently they had a long conversation the other night, and Patty twigged that something was up.”
Frye was pumping her?
“Yes, and no. She says that Frye seemed troubled and introspective, and flinchy on the subject of the testimony. And very interested in Leah and how Patty felt about Leah, in a… thoughtful kind of way.”
What does Alan say?
“Alan says to shut up and give her the rope she needs.” Richard sighs, spreading his hands helplessly wide. “He's very protective of Patty.”
He didn't phrase it quite that way, I bet.
“I don't gamble when I'm only going to lose,” Richard answers. “Look up, Jen. There's the car—” as Fred tugs my arm lightly, to get my attention.
“Well?” he asks, as he hands me in.
“I'll tell you in private,” I say, and duck my head to climb into the limo. Frye's not the only one giving me a funny look when I lean my head back against the cushions, close my eyes, and echo Richard's sigh.
Frye's still staring at Patty when the six of us and a handful of unhappy Mounties pile out of the motorcade on the Lower East Side. Staring at Patty, and chewing on her lip, with a completely transparent that-kid-knows-more-than-I-think-she-should-know look plastered all over her face. I've got to admit, Patty's performance would have me apoplectic, too. It's perfect — just a little underplayed, smug, seemingly more interested in the coffee and the scenery and the scraps of torn blue behind a skyful of clouds twisting like gray rags in the wind than in the sidelong glances Frye is shooting her.
It amuses me for the whole of the chilly walk into the UN complex, especially since I quietly let Fred take point and I take tail-end Charlie, the two of us shepherding the rest of them along the ice-scattered sidewalk inside our ring of plainclothes protectors. I never would have thought I'd watch a middle-aged military professional played like a fly-fished trout by a seventeen-year-old girl.