You're so sweet.
“I try.”
She sensed his smile, a ghostly affection like the memory of somebody stroking her hair. The squid — and Genie, and Richard — must be swimming closer to the surface. She could make out cloudy green rays of light filtered through moving water now, and feel the currents on her skin a way she never could have in her own body. Why is the squid hurt, Dick?
“It had skin lesions. From exposure to fallout from the Impact. They're healing.”
It's infected.
“It's on the worldwire. We wouldn't be here if it wasn't.”
Genie reached out to the fishy presence she half-sensed, becoming aware of a calm, alien sentience, a canny cephalopodic awareness that she barely even recognized as a mind. Incurious and hungry, the squid slipped through the water. She drew back, unsettled, and then she realized that she could feel other minds out there in the darkness, even stranger and more alien ones, minds experiencing sensations she had no words for and senses she couldn't describe: the multidimensional mind-song-maps of cetacean sonar, the sense like pressure but not like pressure from a fish's lateral lines, the unfailing knowledge of goal and direction that Richard showed her was a sea turtle, guided on migration by lines of magnetic force.
And then there were the Benefactors. The shiptree, sensing light and nutrients like a flavor on its hull, and its birdcage companion, the alien creature in a multiplicity of bodies that felt space as the twisted, tessered outline of a Klein bottle groped by hand in a pitch-black room. And she felt their awareness on her as well; their curiosity, their alienness matched by the alienness of herself, and Richard and the worldwire binding the whole thing together. Richard, who wasn't — quite — Richard anymore. Whose presence in her mind reflected all those things, all at once, as if on a long-distance conversation she heard the noise of other people talking in the background, a world at the other end of the wire.
We did it, Richard? We really did it?
“Just like Leah would've,” he said. She thought his voice broke, but that was impossible, because he was a machine. “You saved the world, kid. Don't let it go to your head.”
“Wow,” she said, and heard her own voice like it belonged to somebody else. “Wow, this is really neat.”
“Genie?”
She opened her eyes. The infirmary was too bright, painfully bright and uncomfortably warm. She shaded her eyes with her hand; the IV tugged when she moved. “Papa?”
“Right here,” he said, and bent over to kiss her on the forehead, and she was crying, and it didn't even scare her when he started to cry as well.
1330 hours
Saturday 3 November 2063
Vancouver, Offices of the Provisional Capital
British Columbia, Canada
Connie stands up when I walk into her office, and comes around the desk to shake my hand. She smiles gingerly, but I think it's sincere. Her eye sockets are more green than purple, and the bandage over her nose is shaped like a nose again.
They got the reconstructive done fast. On the other hand, she's had to be on the feeds a lot. I squeeze her hand, layering the metal one over the meat ones carefully. She steps back after a moment, but she doesn't let go of me until another second passes. Then she looks down and clears her throat, and rubs the corner of her bandage with the side of her forefinger.
“I didn't see you at Janet's funeral, Jen.”
“That's because I didn't go.” So how come Janet Frye gets a funeral, and Leah doesn't? Riddle me that. “I take it the identity of her mysterious American died with her?”
She shrugs. “We might pry it out of Toby yet. Although I'd almost rather he clams up. We can send him to jail longer if he doesn't get all cooperative. How soon can you pilots have the Montreal and the Huang Di ready for their maiden voyage?”
I'm not usually stunned speechless. Call it a character flaw. Still, I have to swallow three times before I get anything intelligent out. “What… I'm sorry, Prime Minister. I thought we'd be here for a while, facilitating the communication between the birdcages and the shiptrees—”
“The wheels are in motion, but I don't think you'll be taking Drs. Dunsany, Tjakamarra, and Kirkpatrick with you. We need them. You can have Forster, though.”
“Ellie comes with Gabe and Genie and me. Not negotiable.”
Her smile says she knew that already. She shrugs. “I've just gotten off the line with Premier Xiong. We'll be returning the Huang Di to Chinese control, in return for Chinese aid in mitigating the ecological damage around the Toronto Impact. Richard assures me that repairs can start there soon, although…”
Breath held, I will her to speak without making me ask for it, but Riel plays this game better than I do. “Although?”
“He says it will take centuries. If he doesn't break something fixing it. The worldwire going down was a setback.” She turns to the window. She takes three steps toward it and stops, one hand on the wall. The light makes her look old. All this — all that—and like Wainwright, Riel will never trust me. “Has he told you what he got from the Chinese AI when he took it apart?”
“No.” No, but he's not quite what he used to be either. “You've figured out what happened, then?”
“We have a theory, Dick and me. Care to guess what it is?”
Not really, but it beats poker. “I can guess what the official story will be. General Shijie took advantage of the proceedings to try to execute a coup against Premier Xiong, take control of the worldwire — which the Chinese hate passionately — and put an end to the Canadian colonization effort. Close?”
“Close,” Riel says without looking at me. “The unofficial story is that Janet Frye was involved as well, and there was a back-door deal to unify the Chinese and Canadian colonization efforts. After Xiong and myself were gotten out of the way — the plan was to maneuver us into political and legal disgrace, but apparently Janet wasn't as duped or as greedy as they thought, so they defaulted to plan B and hoped they could blame it all on Premier Xiong and me once we were too dead to protest. That's our theory, anyway, and we're sticking to it.”
It makes sense. As much as these things ever do. “Was the general behind the Impact?”
“We'll never know for sure, but that's the polite fiction. There was an assassination attempt on Xiong two days ago.”
“Shijie's people?”
“Why them?”
“Revenge for the minister of war's ‘accidental' death.”
She snickers through closed lips and pushes a lock of hair out of eyes that still want to know What did you have to do with this, Casey? “Shijie Shu is not the first inconvenient member of the Chinese government to die in a convenient plane crash.”
I wait. She fusses with the knickknacks on her desk. Finally, she straightens again, comes around the desk, and pours me a drink without offering first. “Don't stand there like I'm going to dress you down, Casey. It's disconcerting.”
“It's meant to be.”
She's still pouring her own Scotch, so she doesn't snort it, but she does laugh like a fox for a good thirty seconds. When she stops, she toasts me crookedly and lowers the glass to her lips, her eyes dark and serious. “You really don't know.”
“I'm on tenterhooks, Madam Prime Minister.”
“Captain Wu and Pilot Xie were introduced to the premier upon his return to PanChina, a special invitation to dine with him, to celebrate their homecoming. It appears that the captain managed to conceal a weapon on his person, a hollow needle containing a perforated platinum pellet loaded with less than a thousand micrograms of a poison, possibly ricin. The premier only survived because of emergency intervention, and the application of Benefactor nanotech he'd received after his scalp wound at the UN.” Her tone is cold, level. It's a report she's memorized. “After due consideration, Captain Wu apparently did not feel that General Shijie was the only one to blame for the Impact.”