Tiamat's Wrath

Chapter Twenty-Two: Teresa

I’ve never seen anyone that angry before,” she said. She was telling the story of little Monster Singh and her mother. “I mean, I’ve probably been mad, but this was different. This girl was …”

“Seriously? You’re one of the angriest people I know, Tiny,” Timothy said.

His food recycler was in pieces laid out on a blanket, everything carefully in place like an exploded drawing of itself. Only the built-in power supply was still inside the frame. Timothy was going through the components now, cleaning and polishing each one. Looking for the signs of wear. Teresa sat on his cot with her back against the cave wall, her legs pulled up in front of her and Muskrat snoring contentedly at her side. A repair drone lurked at the edge of the light, its bulbous black eyes looking vaguely hurt that Timothy wasn’t letting it take care of the equipment.

“I’m not an angry person,” she said. Then, a moment later, “I don’t think I’m angry.”

Timothy tossed her a pair of dark goggles and motioned for her to put them on. She did, and put a hand over Muskrat’s eyes so that she wouldn’t be blinded. After a few seconds, the light of a welding torch burst in her vision like a tiny green star. The smoke was acrid and metallic and she liked it.

“Thing is,” Timothy said, loud over the roar of the torch, “there’s only a couple kinds of anger. You get angry because you’re afraid of something or you get angry because you’re frustrated.” The torch turned off with a pop.

“Safe?” Teresa asked.

“Sure, you can take ’em off.” When she did, the cave seemed brighter than when she’d put them on before. Even with the intensity of the light, her eyes had adapted to darkness. She scratched Muskrat’s ears as Timothy went on. “If you’re … I don’t know. If you’re scared maybe your dad isn’t the kind of guy you thought he was, you might get angry. Or you’re afraid no one’s got your back. Like Nutless.”

“His name’s Connor,” Teresa said, but she smiled when she said it.

“Yeah, him,” Timothy agreed. “Or maybe you’re afraid he made you look stupid in front of your crew. So you get angry. If you didn’t give a shit whether your old man lived or died? If Nutless and your crew didn’t matter to you? Then you’re not angry. Or the other way? You’re trying to get something to work. A conduit to fit. Been working at it for hours, and just when it’s looking about right, the metal bends on you and you gotta start over. That’s angry too, but it ain’t scared-angry. It’s the other one.”

“So you look at me,” Teresa said, derision in her voice, “and you think I’m scared and frustrated?”

“Yep.”

Teresa’s mockery died, and she hugged her knees. It didn’t fit at all with who and what she thought she was, but something in her leaped toward his word. It felt like recognizing someone. Like catching a glimpse of herself from an angle she’d never seen before. It was fascinating.

“How do you deal with it?”

“Fucked if I know, Tiny. I don’t do those.”

“You don’t get angry?”

“Not out of fear, anyway. I don’t remember the last time I was afraid of something. Frustration was more my thing. But I had this friend, and I watched her die slow. I couldn’t do anything about it. That was frustrating, and I got angry. Started looking for a fight. But I had another friend who straightened me out.”

“How?”

“She beat the living shit out of me,” Timothy said. “That helped. And ever since then, nothing has seemed like it was worth getting too bent out of shape over.”

He rolled a bright silver cone about the size of a thumb in his palm and scowled.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Injector’s getting a little ragged at the mouth is all,” Timothy said. “I can touch it up. Just means I’ll be drinking my yeast patties more than eating them.”

“You spend a lot of time with that thing.”

“You take care of your tools, your tools take care of you.”

Teresa leaned against the wall. The stone was cool against her back. Deep cave temperatures were the measure of the underlying climate average. Mass and depth smoothed out the daily highs and lows—even the annual fluctuations of summer and winter. She knew it intellectually, but she hadn’t understood it until Timothy’s cave. The way it always felt cool in the heat and warm in the chill.

“You know, the wise man living alone on the mountain is really cliché,” she said, smiling when she said it so he wouldn’t think she was being mean. “Anyway, I don’t have anything to be scared of.”

“Assassins with pocket nukes for one,” Timothy said, slotting the injector back into its housing.

Teresa laughed, and after a second, Timothy smiled too.

“If anyone’s going to kill me, it’ll probably be Dr. Cortázar,” she said.

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

“It’s just a joke. I was watching Holden, like we talked about? And I heard this conversation he and Dr. Cortázar were having.”

“What about?” Timothy asked, idly.

Teresa thought back. What had they been talking about exactly? Mostly she remembered Cortázar talking about how nature ate babies and Holden looking into the camera. But it had been about her father too.

She took in a breath, ready to speak, and the air rattled against the back of her throat and down into her lungs like a billion little molecule-sized marbles banging against the soft tissue. Her respiration system was a cave inside Timothy’s cave, and she was acutely aware of the complexity of her own body and the answering complexity of the caverns around her. Veins and chips in the wall before her fragmented and smoothed together. Gravity trying to tug her down into the floor, and the astonishingly complex dance of the electrons in the stone and her flesh pushing back. She managed to wonder if she’d been drugged before her awareness was overwhelmed by the immediacy and complexity of the air and her body and the increasingly invisible boundary that failed to really divide her from the world …

Muskrat barked anxiously. She’d slumped down on the cot at some point without knowing she was doing it. Timothy stood up, his expression perfectly focused and his recycler forgotten. The repair drone made a weird yipping sound as it tried to stand up, staggering drunkenly.

“That wasn’t just me, right?” Timothy said.

“I don’t think so,” Teresa said.

“Yeah, all right. It’s been fun, Tiny, but you need to head home now.”

“What was that? Is there something wrong with the air in here? Are there fumes?”

“Nope,” Timothy said, taking her by the arm and lifting her to her feet. “Air’s fine. That was something else. And it probably happened to a lot of people, so they’re gonna be scared, and they’re going to want to find where everyone important to them is, and that’s you. So you need to be not here.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, but Timothy was pulling her forward, toward the mouth of the cave. His grip on her arm was like a vise. His expression was blank. It made him frightening. Muskrat followed behind, barking like she was trying to warn them of something.

In the open air, the world was normal. The strange sensations she’d had before already seemed like a bad dream or an accident. Timothy’s reaction was the only thing that made it frightening. He looked up, scanning the sky, then nodded to himself.

“Okay, Tiny. You and the furball head back home.”

“I’ll come back as soon as I can,” she said. She didn’t know why she wanted to reassure him.

“Okay.”

It was the way he said it. Like his mind was already someplace else. She’d had adults treat her like that before—polite and agreeable, but elsewhere. Never Timothy, though. He was different. He was supposed to be different.

“Will you be here when I do?”

“I’ll have to, I guess. I’m not done yet, so—”

She hugged him. It was like hugging a tree. He pulled back, and when he looked at her, she thought there was something like regret in his expression. It couldn’t have been pity.

“Good luck, Tiny,” he said, then turned back toward his cave and was gone. Muskrat barked once and looked after him, as worried as Teresa was.

“Come on,” she said, and started for her secret passage back into the State Building and home. The afternoon was cool. The leaves were starting to retreat back into their winter sheaths, leaving the trees looking stubbly. A sunbird hanging on a low branch opened its leathery wings at her and hissed, but she ignored it. At the horizon, wide clouds bunched and trailed gray veils of storm. If they came this way, the drainage tunnel would be impassable and she’d be stuck outside the walls. She picked up her pace …

The sound of the flier started as a high and distant whine, but it grew louder quickly. Less than a minute after she first noticed it, the sound was a roar. The black laminate body and three cold thrusters appeared over the treetops and fell into a thin meadow, hardly more than a break between trees. When the door popped open, she expected to see the light-blue uniforms of security. She prepared to identify herself and explain that she’d decided to go for a hike. It was only partly a lie.

But while there were two armed guards, the first person out of the flier was Colonel Ilich. He trotted toward her, and his face was dark. The thrusters didn’t cycle all the way down, so when he reached her, he had to shout.

“Get in the flier.”

“What?”

“You need to get in the flier now. You have to get back to the State Building.”

“I don’t understand.”

Ilich’s jaw clenched and he pointed at the open door. “You. There. Now. This isn’t difficult.”

Teresa stepped back like she’d been slapped. In all the years Ilich had been her tutor, he had never been mean to her. Never been anything but patient and supportive and amused. Even when she didn’t do her work or did something inappropriate, the punishment was just a long talk about why she’d made the choices she did and what the goals of her education were. It was like seeing a different man in an Ilich suit. She felt tears welling up in her eyes. She saw Oh, for fuck’s sake on his lips, but she couldn’t hear it.

He made a little bow and gestured her forward like a servant making way for his master, but she felt the impatience in it. The contempt. The anger.

Oh, she thought as she walked to the flier. He’s frightened.

At the flier, Muskrat balked, and before Teresa could coax her in, Ilich assigned one of the guards to go back on foot with the dog. The flier’s door closed with a deep clank, and they lurched up over the trees. Even though the body of the flier had looked opaque from the outside, it was no darker than tinted glass from her seat. She could see the State Building clearly as soon as they cleared the top branches.

“How did you know where I was?” Teresa asked.

Ilich shook his head, and for a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer. When he did, his voice had more like its usual tone: patient and gentle. The difference was that now she knew it was a mask.

“You had a locator implanted in your jawbone when you were born. There is never a moment when security doesn’t know how to find you, and your safety is part of my sacred duty.”

It was like hearing a language she almost understood. She could pick out the meaning of each word, but she couldn’t quite make sense of the whole. The idea was too foreign. Too wrong.

“Your father felt it was important for you to have some experience of rebellion and autonomy, so he permitted your excursions so long as they didn’t take you too far from the State Building. He said he was solo free-climbing on the surface of Mars at your age, and that he learned things about himself that way. He hoped you would find use in the same independence and solitude.”

Solitude. He didn’t know about Timothy, then. There was nothing on any world that would make her tell him either. She felt the buzz of outrage in her throat. “So you just let me think …”

The flier passed over the outer wall of the State Building and curved around to the east. They weren’t heading for the landing pad but the lawn outside the residence. A single figure stood in the gardens, watching them pass. She thought it was Holden.

“I respected your autonomy and your privacy to the extent that security protocols permitted,” Ilich said. “But I needed to be able to find you in case there was an emergency.”

“There’s an emergency?”

“Yes,” he said. “There is.”

Her father smiled at her, the wrinkles at the edges of his eyes deeper than she remembered them. The opalescence in his iris was more pronounced, and something seemed to glow from under his skin. His study had been a bedroom, back when he’d still slept. That hadn’t been for years. Now it had a desk hand carved from Laconian wood with a grain like sedimentary rock, a wide table, a shelf with half a dozen physical books, and the divan where he was sitting. Where he had been sitting when the change came.

“Father?” Teresa said. “Can you hear me?”

His mouth changed into a little o, like he was a child seeing something marvelous. He reached out, patting at the air beside her head. She took his hand, and it was hot.

“Has he said anything?” she asked.

Kelly, her father’s personal valet, shook his head. “A few things, but none of it made sense. After it happened, I came to see him, and he was like this. Just like this.” He nodded to Cortázar, sitting on the edge of the table. “I got Dr. Cortázar as quickly as I could.”

“Your opinion?” Ilich asked. His voice was cool, and her father didn’t react to it at all. “What’s wrong with him?”

Cortázar spread his hands. “I could only speculate.”

“Then do,” Ilich said.

“The … event. The lost consciousness? It seems to match what Admiral Trejo reported from Sol system. The theory I always heard was that it’s the weapon that killed the protomolecule engineers. However their minds were organized, this … effect broke it. Well, the high consul has been making himself more and more like the builders for years now. It might—might—leave him more vulnerable to the attack than the rest of us.”

Teresa’s chest hurt like someone had punched her sternum. She sank to her knees at her father’s side, but he was frowning at something behind her. Or nothing.

“How long before he gets better?” Kelly asked.

“If I had been permitted to have more than one test subject, I might be able to guess,” Cortázar said. It was the same tone of voice he’d used to say Nature eats babies all the time. It made Teresa’s skin crawl. “As things are? He could come back to himself in a moment. He could be like this for the rest of his life, which in his case could be a very long time indeed. If I can take him to the lab and run some tests, I might get more insight into the question.”

“No,” Kelly said, and it was clear from his tone it wasn’t the first time he’d said it. “The high consul stays in his rooms until …”

“Until what?” Cortázar said.

“Until we have this situation under control,” Ilich said, firmly. “Does anyone outside this room know about his condition?”

The high consul’s terminal chimed, a high-priority connection request. The three men looked at each other in alarm. Her father scowled, then farted like the blare of a trumpet. The perversity and indignity of it cut Teresa like a blade. This was her father. The man who ruled all humanity through his vision and audacity. Who knew how everything was and was supposed to be. The body in front of her was only a crippled man, too broken to be embarrassed. The chime came again, and Kelly grabbed it with his hand terminal.

“I’m afraid the high consul can’t be disturbed,” he said as he walked out of the room. “I can accept a message for him.”

The door closed behind him.

“I can bring some equipment here,” Cortázar said. “It won’t be as good as having him in the pens where the real equipment is, but I could do … something.”

Ilich ran a hand over his scalp, his gaze flickering from her father to Cortázar to the window that looked out over a bamboo garden in some different universe where the sun still shone and life wasn’t broken. Teresa shifted, and Ilich looked at her. For a long moment, their eyes were locked on each other’s.

She felt a wave of panic. “Am I supposed to be in charge now?”

“No,” Ilich said, as if her fear had resolved something. “No, High Consul Winston Duarte is in charge. He is deep in consultation with Dr. Cortázar on matters critical to the state of the empire, and cannot be disturbed under any circumstances. It’s easy to remember, because it’s true. He specifically ordered Kelly to keep anyone but the doctor here and you, because you’re his daughter, away from the residences until further notice. Do you remember him saying that?”

“I don’t—” Teresa began.

“You need to remember him saying it. He was sitting right here. It was just after the event. We all came back to ourselves, and he told Kelly in front of you that he needed Dr. Cortázar, and that he couldn’t be disturbed. Do you remember?”

Teresa pictured it. Her father’s voice, calm and sturdy as stone.

“I remember,” she said.

Kelly came back in the room. “Something happened at the ring. The Falcon made an unscheduled transit. Now it’s putting out a distress call. A relief ship is on the way, but it won’t be there for hours. Maybe as much as a day.”

“All right,” Ilich said. “We need a secure channel to Governor Song and Admiral Trejo. Someone will have to take over coordinating the military. Apart from them, no one can know anything.

“Until we get the high consul back to himself, our little conspiracy here is the empire.”