Worldwired

BOOK THREE

Genie floated in the darkness, calm and aware. No one touched her there; she couldn't feel Richard or Alan, Patty or Jen, Charlie or Leslie. She couldn't feel herself, or the Benefactors, or even the Montreal.

It was perfectly silent, and perfectly safe, and perfectly warm. And perfectly alone. Carver Mallory, she thought, naming a boy she's heard talked about but had never met. I've wound up like Carver Mallory, crippled and locked in my own head.

She reached out and found nothing. The last sensation she remembered was the pressure on her opened hand as Papa slid the wire into her chip, and then falling, and then the dark.

She wondered if this was what it had been like for Leslie and Charlie, adrift in space. She wondered if she would ever find her way home. At least it was warm, warm and quiet…

But she was bored.

And time went by.

She became aware of sensation. None of the ones she'd been expecting — not the softness of sheets or the smell of antiseptic or the hum of a ventilator, and not the prick of a needle in the crook of her arm. Not even soreness lingering in the back of her hand where Elspeth had ever-so-carefully cut her.

No. This was strangely neutral — but definitely a sensation, the way water has a flavor, even if it doesn't taste like anything, exactly. Water. Yes, actually, that was what it reminded her of. Water the exact temperature of her body, water flowing over her skin effortlessly, darkness and a swell and pulse as if she took deep deep breaths, breaths deep enough to stretch her entire body, and then puffed them out again hard—

There was pain on her skin, but it wasn't significant. Patches like sunburn, a sloughing kind of itch, and she knew they were less than they had been, and growing lesser still. Healing. Which didn't explain why she had too many arms and legs, come to think of it, or why the glimmerings of light that reached her faintly were watery, aquamarine.

Or why she felt the familiar internal pressure of sharing her head with somebody else.

Richard?

“Right here, Genie.” Something… different about his voice.

Oh, good, she thought, and laughed hysterically, except no sound came out. Where are we?

He laughed along with her, but his chuckle didn't have that frantic edge. “You're on a ride-along in a jumbo flying squid. Dosidicus gigas. I thought it would be nicer than waking up in a hospital bed, given how much time you've spent in those.”

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.”

“Calisse de chrisse—”

“As you say, Casey. Drink your Scotch before it gets cold.”

It's not cold at all. It burns. I limit myself to one slow, shallow sip before I answer. “What does this mean for Min-xue?”

She's already finished her drink. “He'll command the Huang Di when she goes out.”

“Did Wu have proof, Connie?”

She shrugged, one shoulder only. “He would have shared it if he did, I'm sure. Now ask what we're going to do about Xiong.”

The gleam in her eyes tells it all. “We'll make a deal with him. We're going to split that planet with him, aren't we?”

“Well,” she says, folding her hands around each other, “he does already have ships under way. And he's proven tractable… of late.”

“Where's Wu now?”

“‘Awaiting trial.'” Her fingers describe quotes in the air.

“Christ.” All right. The man's a mass-murderer. But I kind of liked him, in a quiet sort of way. Dick, you listening? Is there anything we can do for Captain Wu?

I feel him hesitate, feel him think. And then feel him decide to answer with the kind of sick joke anybody else would find reprehensible, but which serves as a sort of comfort to me. “I'm sorry, Jen. I can't let you do that.”

Don't be an asshole, Dick. Bitch-ass computer. “Christ.”

“You keep saying that.”

“I keep meaning it, too.” I want coffee more than I want whiskey. Fortunately, there's a carafe of that, too. “You know Xiong set you up, Constance. He meant to use you to get rid of Shijie, and Shijie to get rid of you. And the order to attack Toronto didn't originate with anybody's minister of war.”

“You have a nasty, suspicious mind, Casey.”

“Anything for détente, Constance?”

“Anything for peace,” she says, and looks me dead in the eye. Her eyes look weird for a minute, and then I realize they're light brown, sherry-colored. She's not wearing those artificial green contacts. It makes her look softer.

I almost believe she means it.

The coffee's good, dark, redolent. The surface is clotted with broken rainbows. I raise it to my mouth, pause, breathing in the steam. Just the smell of it is energy. “Pity justice wasn't served, though — although there's an irony I don't like in it coming from Captain Wu's hand.”

“Justice might have complicated negotiations. No cream?” Dryly. She arranges a cup to her own liking. If I were polite, I suppose I would have asked.

“What's this going to mean for your plans for world domination?”

“World cooperation. That other was the PanChinese.”

“Hegemony is as hegemony does—”

“Ooo,” she says, and drinks half a cup of scalding fluid in one swallow. “She knows big words for a dropout.”

“Bitch.” I can't get any heat into it, though. “Some of us read more than mash letters from our contributors.”

“Touché.” She grins like she means it, swills the rest of the coffee, and pours herself more. I'd hate to be the guy whose job it is to keep that carafe full. “It's not going to happen. It's too big a goal, and there's too damned much us and them. At least the Russians are cheerful — although they'd rather we gave the Huang Di to them, I think.”

“I can't blame them. The Russians are cheerful about the PanChinese?”

“Officially, they're cheerful about the PanChinese withdrawal from the same stretch of Siberia they've been fighting the Russians over since the dawn of recorded history, and the UN's decision to send observers in, and the fact that we're soaking PanChina for enough reparations that they'll barely be able to afford an army for the next twenty years. Although why anybody would want a few thousand miles of permafrost is too complex a question for me.” She stops, tilts her head to one side, looks me in the eye, and shrugs, her hands knotting on her coffee mug. I've seen that look before, and I know what she's gonna say before she says it. “I think I'm done, Jen.”

“Done?”

It even looks like an honest smile, this time. “Yeah. I think I'm going to call an election and let the voters throw me out. I bet the Conservatives and the Home party can swing a coalition, and I'm ready to pack my socks and undies and go home to Calgary. I'm just too proud to say I quit.”

You know, I don't really want to kick her in the teeth, for once. But on the other hand, she so very obviously needs it. “Oh, for Christ's sake, Connie. Get off the pity wagon already, would you? The seat's full enough with me up here.”

Riel blinks at me. The bruises under her eyes are dark enough for Min-xue to dip his brush in and write poetry. I stop midrant and try again, softer. “You're ready to walk away from your dream on the eve of success, you realize.”

“I considered it more saving enough face so it didn't look like I was slinking home with my tail clamped over my groin.”

The image is too much. I'm laughing hard enough that I have to set my coffee cup down. I expect any minute now a concerned Mountie is going to bust down the door. “Mary Mother of God, woman. The expansionist Chinese government has wiped itself out, the EU, the commonwealth, and PanMalaysia are going to sign your cogovernance agreement so they have a crack at the Montreal and her sisters, and the Latin American states aren't far behind. You've got your treaty organization. And we walked out of the whole damn thing with our hands clean—”

She looks down at hers, holds one out palm-up. “Our hands aren't even remotely clean. Just because the blood doesn't show doesn't mean it's gone.”

Yeah. Well, you know what I mean. “They look clean. And that's all the world cares about. And we need you. Because if it's not you, it's people like Shijie. And Hardy. And Fred.”

I turn my back on her, which is more effort than I like. Dammit. Much as I'd like to feed her her own superior smile sometimes, I still want the woman to like me. And I want her to like herself enough to keep doing what we need her for. Because, God knows, I haven't got it in me to try.

I make it three steps toward the door before she raps out my name. “Casey!”

“What?”

“I'm going to have a plaque made for the front door of this place, you know that? ‘The men who love war are mostly the ones who have never been in it.'”

“Send a wreath to Minister Shijie's funeral, won't you? From the both of us?”

She catches my gaze when I would have turned away. “I'm sending Fred. And you. Lay the damned wreath yourself.”

It stops me short. I haven't been to see Fred in the hospital. I had no intention of going. “Valens is on his feet? Did he take the nanosurgeons?”

“He's on his feet,” she says, with a smile that narrows her eyes. “But he refused the Benefactor tech. Categorically.”

“Huh.”

She doesn't say anything, just gives me a second to chew on my lip and think. I snort. “He always was kind of a pussy. Always willing to stand back and let somebody else step up.”

“Not like you.”

“No.” It hurts to say it. It hurts to think it. “I'd rather it was me, all things considered.”

“Jenny,” she says, and she puts her coffee cup down, and she comes across the rug, and she tilts her head back to look at me. “You ever think about a career in politics?”

It isn't so much that my mouth goes dry as that it is dry, suddenly and completely, like there was never any moisture in the world.

“You get to stay here, Gabe and Elspeth stay with the contact program, Genie gets to finish out school and go to college.” She sparkles at me a little, certain of her own powers.

Bernard Xu once told me to save the world. Good Christ.

I'm a madwoman. I stop, and swallow, and I think about it for ten long, hard, aching seconds, while Riel stares at me, and I swear I can hear the world creak slightly as it spins a little slower than it usually does.

Peacock told me to save the world for him. But you know something? I did that. And I really want to see what's on the other side of all those rocks up there, and all that empty space.

“I'd be wasted anywhere but the Montreal, Madam Prime Minister,” I say, and stick out my right hand.

It's another good ten seconds before she manages to put out her own, and take it.

Nine months later

8:30 AM

28 July 2064

Clarke Orbital Platform

Leslie leaned both hands against the chill crystal of Clarke's observation deck as the Montreal's fretted golden sails bore her away, the Huang Di trailing her on a parallel line of ascent, chemical engines smearing the sky behind with light. He didn't bother to magnify the image as the two ships shrank to pinpoints, rising out of the plane of the elliptic. Leslie didn't need to see them go. He could feel their weight like an indenting finger dragged across the infinitely elastic substance of space.

Looking good, Charlie.

I'm going to miss you, Les. What if we find even weirder aliens where we're going?

Don't be daft. And I've got enough aliens to talk to right here. And it's not like we'll be out of touch.

They were both very quiet for a little while. Leslie dusted his palms on each other and turned away from the glass, past the reporters and the dignitaries and the trays of canapés. Past Prime Minister Riel and Premier Hsiung and General Valens, who were clustered with other VIPs near the screen.

Leslie kept walking. Funny sort of leave-taking, this.

Is it really? Leave-taking, I mean?

Now that you mention it— There was coffee to be had, self-heating vacuum mugs being handed out by caterers. Leslie availed himself of one and staked out an inexplicably empty chair. Well, whatever you run into out there, I hope it's as easy to get along with as the Benefactors.

Charlie laughed inside his head. Through Charlie's eyes, Leslie could see the Montreal's familiar hydroponics lab, the receding image of Earth on a wall screen, the changing angle of the sunlight through the big windows. Why should what they want be so different from what we want?

They're aliens?

Yes, but look at it this way. We're not species in competition; there's nothing a birdcage needs that competes with or conflicts with anything we need. We don't use the same resources. And there's a lot of room up here.

That doesn't explain why they came running to see what was up when we started playing with the tech they left on Mars. Or why they left it there in the first place.

Charlie rubbed the bridge of his nose. Leslie caught himself mirroring the gesture and smiled.

Charlie shrugged. Why does a kid poke anthills with a stick?

To see what the ants are going to do. To see what the inside of the nest looks like. Leslie paused. Oh, bugger it, Charlie. You want to know what I think? I think Elspeth's right. I think they wanted us to teach them how to talk to each other. I think they needed somebody to translate. And they got it. And I feel like an idiot just saying it, because that implies they've been wandering around out there for umpteen million years, unable to talk to each other except by grunts and pointing, and a bunch of chimpanzees stagger in and accomplish it in nine months. And that's just ridiculous.

Why is it ridiculous? Leslie could feel Charlie's encouragement, his agreement. We've been walking around in gravity for the last umpteen million years, and they showed us how to manipulate it in brand-new ways in a couple of months. They never had to learn to talk.

Leslie didn't have an argument for that. Or not a good one, anyway. They're critters that manipulate gravity, and we're critters that manipulate symbols.

That's what I said.

It doesn't make you nervous?

It doesn't make you nervous, and you're the Jonah who spent his time in the belly of the whale.

Because I feel like it ought to scare somebody.

The Montreal kept climbing. Charlie stood and glanced out the port; Leslie shared the view. They could just catch the red flare of the Huang Di's engines reflected against the Montreal's vanes, although they couldn't see the Chinese ship herself. You're the one who keeps talking about beginner stories, Les. You just don't like being on the beginner side of the damned things any more than anyone else does.

“Bloody hell,” Leslie said out loud. “Charlie, I hate it when you're right.”

“Leslie?”

He didn't jump as Jeremy laid a hand on his shoulder, leaning down a little. He'd felt the linguist coming up behind him. “Yes, Jer?”

“Come on,” he said, letting his hand fall away. “These guys are going to be here all night. Let's get something to eat, and flicker our flashlights at the shiptree for a couple of hours. Maybe we can teach it some nursery rhymes.”

Leslie grinned and got up. Beginner stories.

Sure.

Three years later

1746 hours

Wednesday 15 December 2066

HMCSS Montreal

LaGrange Point, near Valentine

Elspeth has stationed herself by the far wall of the room, where she can see everybody. She keeps looking back and forth between Wainwright, Charlie, Gabe, Patty, Genie, and me. It's a measuring look, as if she's trying to figure out which sand castle is likely to crumble first, so she can shove some more mud up against it. Her irises gleam like polished agate, excitement thrumming through her, giving a lie to the new gray in her hair, coarse wiry strands that go this-way and that-way, oblivious to the direction of her long coiling ringlets. You'd think it would be Gabe who would hold this mad little family together.

You'd be wrong.

She's looking at him when I wander over to her and slouch against the wall, my upper arm against her shoulder. She sighs and leans into the touch, warmth pressing my jumpsuit into my skin. She pushes a little harder, leaning in to me. Neither one of us looks down from the planet on the monitor. “Ugly fucker,” I say, while the whole bridge holds its breath in quiet awe.

The dusty brown planet spins like a flicked bottle top, the ringed, sky-killing bulk of its gray-green motherworld hanging in crescent behind it. The light of the star that warms them isn't quite right either, and from what I understand the bigger planet's orbit is so erratic that the little Earth-like world we plan in our infinite arrogance to colonize will have summers like Phoenix, Arizona, and winters like Thompson, Manitoba. What's not scorched desert is frozen desert.

And based on the first long-range surveys, there's some kind of life down there smart enough to build cities. Still, we learned to talk to the birdcages and the shiptree, and we'll learn to talk to these guys, too. And Manitoba may be cold, but hey, people been living there a hell of a long time now. And like the Benefactors before us, we're a tougher species than we were.

“Bet it will look okay to the crews of those generation ships, when the Huang Di starts retrieving them.”

“When does Min-xue… pardon me, Captain Xie… leave?”

It's become seamless. I don't have to ask Richard; the information is just there, waiting for me, as if I always knew it. “Oh five hundred.” Thank you, Dick. He feels different now, bigger: talking to him is like talking to a reflection in a still pool. It's right there, close enough to touch, but you can feel how deep the water is underneath it.

And how long before we start taking him for granted, too?

“Genie already has.” A rueful acknowledgment, and he dissolves in a shiver of pixels. He'll be back if I need him. Or hell, even if I don't.

I snicker. Elspeth tilts her head against my arm.

Somewhere down there, there's a mountain or a sea that's going to be named after Leah Castaign. Once we pick it out. Koske gets one, too, and the crews of the Quebec and the Li Bo and the Lao Tzu. And after them, the crews of Soyuzes and Apollos that Richard could tell me numbers for, if I bothered to ask him, and some American space shuttles destroyed around the turn of the century, and a Brazilian tug crew killed capturing the rock that anchors the far end of the Clarke beanstalk, and the crew of the first Chinese Mars lander, and then there's twenty years of in-system accidents to get through…

They've already decided the little planet is going to be called Valentine, and the big one Bondarenko.

I just hope we won't run out of planets before we run out of names. On the other hand, chances are good there are going to be more planets, aren't there?

And also that there are going to be more names.

It's quiet a long time. Beep and hum of workstations, rustle of fabric, and not a word spoken as we all stand there and gape like a bunch of fools. I don't miss the fact that Patty reaches out and slings a casual arm around Genie's shoulders as they stand together. Nor do I miss the way Genie leans into the embrace. That jealous pang in my gut can just go to hell.

“Jen?”

I must have got even quieter than the rest of the crew. And Elspeth never needed technology to read anybody's mind. “Doc?”

She stands up straight and gives me another little nudge before she steps half an inch away. “When are you going to forgive Patty for not being Leah?”

I look down at the top of her head for six long seconds before I blink. “Why you always gotta ask the hard questions?”

“It's my job.”

“Uh-huh.” It's a good question, though, even if I hate it. And I know the answer, and I hate that, too: I'm not. It's a crappy answer, and it's not the Hollywood one. But it's true.

On the other hand, that's my problem and not hers, and I don't have to make it hers, do I? Because if I were a grown-up — which I'm not, not by a long shot, and I know that — but if I were a grown-up, I'd walk over there and drop an arm around her shoulders, and I'd pick Genie up, although Genie's big enough that she'd probably smack me for it, and I'd hug both of them until they squeak.

Oh, right. What the hell am I waiting for, again? I mean, really—

What's the worst that could happen?

“Hah,” Richard says in my ear, as I start forward. “Jenny, if you have to ask—”

Many men afterwards become country, in that place, Ancestors.

—Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines

Epilogue: eleven years later

1300 hours

Saturday 15 May 2077

Toronto Impact Memorial

Toronto, Ontario

It's been awhile since I felt soil under my feet: it presses my soles strangely, Earth's gravity harsh after so long aboard the Montreal. And yet I wander through the crowds on a fine May morning: the fifteenth. Leah's twenty-eighth birthday would have been next week. Taurus, the bull, and the year of the rooster. The moon of greening grass and false prophets.

The tourists and dignitaries and mourners don't step aside for me. I keep my head down and my chin hidden behind my collar, and if anyone notices me, it's to wonder why I'm wearing gloves and a trenchcoat on a warm spring day.

What is it that moves us to build gardens where people die?

Not that it's wrong. Something should grow out of this.

Hell. Something did.

I won't find Leah's name anywhere on the black stone paving the bottom of the shallow reflecting pool. Won't find it carved in the dolomite inlaid with stars of steel that surrounds the rippling water, or on the pale green-veined marble obelisk that commemorates the uncounted dead. I won't find Indigo's name or Face's name either, because here there are no names.

Only the water silver over black stone, and the splashing of quiet fountains, and the obelisk yearning skyward like a pillar of light. Like a pillar of desire, rising from an island at the center of the pool. An island the faithful have littered with offerings and farewell gifts.

The smell of lavender and rosemary wafts from the hedges, and early bees and butterflies service the blooms. The drone of their wings is the only sound on the air except for the whispers. Dick's done brilliantly — the ice caps are growing, the oceans receding, although they're still not at anything like historic levels. I hope he's able to stabilize the climate before it flips the other way, into an ice age.

But I guess we'll blow up that bridge when we come to it.

I pass a retired soldier on a park bench, stop, and turn back as his profile catches my eye. He climbs to his feet: still in uniform. “The jacket's gotten a little big for you, Fred. Did Patty tell you I was coming?”

She's doing grad work, now, at Oxford. They've rebuilt; Jeremy was invited to teach, and he recruited her as a student. Not that she would have had any trouble getting in, although Fred threw a fit when she decided to leave the service. It's good to see the kid getting what she wants for a change, instead of what her family's told her to want.

He shakes his head, his cover in his hand. Reddened cheeks pouchy, hair gone white but only slightly thinning, eyebrows that probably seem threatening when he glowers. “The Vancouver's just left on an exploratory mission, and the Toronto is about ready to fly. They're going to give her to Genie as primary pilot, although I don't think Genie's heard that yet, and she's not going to hear it from you.”

“Done at twenty-three. Damn.”

“Kid's special.” He shrugs. “And I wouldn't call it done. You have some finished apprentices for us, I hope?”

“Some.” I shoo a curious honeybee away. “So how'd you know I'd be here? Dick rat me out? Did Doc?” Elspeth would, too. If she thought I needed closure.

“Elspeth doesn't talk to me. No, I heard the Montreal was home. I guessed.” He sticks his hand out and I take it, glad of my gloves. Brief contact, as if we're in a contest to see who can be the first to let it drop. I turn and keep walking. He falls into step. “Gabe's not here? Elspeth?”

“Couldn't stand to come.”

“Did you ever get married?”

All three of us, Fred, or any two in combination? Be funny if Elspeth and I did it, and kept Gabe around as a houseboy. Hell, I bet he'd be amused by that. Gabe, I mean. Well, Valens, too. “Why mess with what works?”

No answer to my sarcasm but the splashing of water as he strolls along beside me, supple and spry. Mideighties aren't what they used to be.

I scratch the back of my right hand. “You ever try again?”

“Georges raised parrots. He would have wanted me to pine.” He waves to the tall white stone, with the back of his hand as if his shoulder pained him. “I hear the colony is doing well.”

I shrug. There's a funny story about that, but it's not for today. “They're doing all right, I guess. I see those Benefactor ships are still in orbit.”

“Different two,” he says. “They change off. They still playing music at you?”

“And us at them. Jer, Richard, Elspeth, and Les have a pidgin worked out with the birdcages. And good chunks of a chemical — a pheromone — and a light grammar, I guess you'd call it with the shiptree. It's nice not having to leave Elspeth here, thanks to Dick and the wire. Gabe would drive me nuts without her.” I lower my head; he offers a handkerchief. I blow my nose. I'm not the only one. “They did a nice job on the memorial, Fred.”

“They did.”

The tide of pedestrians carries us to the edge of the reflecting pool at a shuffle and hesitates. Nobody pushes. We all take our time. Around me, people are unlacing shoes, rolling up pant legs, sliding stockings off. I do the same, a tidy little pile of socks and spitshined leather by the lip of the pool. People start staring when I peel the gloves off; I hear the murmurs. I hear my name once, twice, and then a ripple of excitement when I shrug off the black trenchcoat and stand there in the sunlight, barefoot in a fifteen-year-old uniform.

I don't look at them, but I can feel them looking at me, and the ones wading out to the island pause, each of them, as if a giant hand stopped and turned them in their tracks. Genie and Patty and Gabe came to the dedication, ten years back.

I couldn't. “Hold my coat for me, Fred.”

He doesn't answer. But he folds the coat over his arm.

The water's sun-warm against my ankles, the black stones slippery and smooth, bumpy with treasures. People stand aside as I stride forward, stinging eyes fixed on the blur of the obelisk, footsteps quick enough to scatter droplets of water like diamonds into the sun. I find the feather in my pocket by touch and draw it out — a little the worse for wear, but safe in its chamois. Like rubies, the beads catch the light when I uncover it.

There are words on the obelisk my eyes are too blurred to make out, even when I step onto the island and pick carefully between the scattered offerings — photos and flags, trinkets and caskets and a full bottle of 18-year-old Scotch — the airworthy ones weighted with the heavier.

I can't quite read the words, but they're graven deep and I trace them with a fingertip:

10:59 PM

December 21, 2062

I tug a bit of sinew from my pocket, because it's traditional, and I wind it around the obelisk — which is slender enough to span with my arms, like the waist of a teenage girl — and then I tie Nell's feather to it. Tight, just above the writing. So the veins I smooth with my fingertips flutter in the breeze and the glass jewels sparkle in the sun.

The stone's warm where I lean my forehead on it. When I straighten up and wipe my nose on the back of my hand, the crowd is so silent I hear my sniffle echo. Every single one of them stares at me, and they don't glance down when I stop at the edge of the island and glare, putting all the eagle in the look I can.

The moment is stillness, utter and heartless, and that stillness continues when I step into the water again and wade back to shore, sodden trouser cuffs clinging to my ankles.

Walking through the water. Trying to get across.

Just like everybody else.