“Kenneth is not for you.”
“Then who is?”
She expected her aunt to say no one, to insist that Angela live as a nun, a solitary, member of a secret order dedicated to a sterile celibacy. Instead, she said, “Anyone else.”
“Why do you hate Ken so? I thought you liked him. You brought him into your home, sponsored him, helped educate him, worked with him. He’s a good lawyer. He’s smart and capable. And he comes from a family you’ve long known and is headed by the man who—from everything I can understand—you once, long ago, loved. So why do you turn on Kenneth now?”
In reply, Antigone stared at her. The woman’s face, usually so stiff and immobile, now worked against itself slowly, like heavy clay or thick putty taking shape in uncertain hands. The ghosts of smiles and grimaces, sneers and frowns, passed over her features. Her lips twisted, briefly exposing her teeth, but nothing came.
Finally, the face cleared, the eyes relaxed. “I don’t hate him,” Antigone said. “I’m … disappointed in that he came to you behind my back. I should have suspected something, knowing his reputation.”
“I’ve heard the stories,” Angela said. “He’s different with me.”
“That’s yet to be proved, isn’t it?” her aunt asked gently.
“I know already. But if he strays, I’ll still love him.”
“I just don’t want to see your heart broken.”
“You’ve made me tougher than that.”
“Then I’ve nothing more to say.”
That seemed to settle the matter. Angela had never expected to get Antigone’s blessing, and she didn’t give it. There was no date for the wedding yet, and so Angela did not issue an invitation, which she expected to be refused anyway. There was, indeed, nothing more to say this morning.
“One thing,” Antigone said. “Your necklace. I want it.”
“My neck—?” She touched the heart pendant.
“It was originally mine,” Antigone said.
“I know, but you did give it to me.”
“You won’t need it anymore.”
“No matter. I’ll keep it.”
Her aunt grimaced.
“For a while.”
* * *
“I think we’ve been duped,” Callie told her father and her nephew Paul at a meeting she called in the Patriarch’s private study. She had already instructed them to close the doors and windows, turn off their electronics, and speak in lowered voices.
“What do you mean?” John asked.
“First,” she said, “did you ask Stacy to obtain a nuke? Anytime? Ever?”
“Of course not,” he said. “That would be a stupid thing to do.”
“How about you, Paul? Any lust for Armageddon?”
“Not me. I’ve got enough on my plate.”
“So that’s lie number one,” Callie said. “Or maybe number two, if I’ve got the chronology right. … Remember that family council meeting where Stacy said the Chinese were planning to bring in a weapon?”
“Of course,” John said. “The thought of it troubled me.”
“But from a low-level analytic,” Paul observed.
“Yes, very low,” she agreed. “So I just asked Machiavelli about the report. He knew nothing about it. Stacy’s right hand had no record of important information that she was presenting at a council of senior family members. He did not say the report was false, simply unknown. So I asked for his recorded transactions with Stacy and sent them down to Jacquie Wildmon for analysis. She says his memory has been wiped, and that Stacy is the only one who could do it so thoroughly.”
“Are you saying the report was a lie?” Paul asked.
“Yes! I don’t think she had any evidence at all.”
“So why would she wipe the intelligence’s memory? What does that prove?”
“I don’t know. The traces are gone. Maybe she was hiding his true assessment of Chinese actions and motives, which might have contradicted the bogus report. Maybe Machiavelli had heard about the report and challenged her on it. We have no way of knowing. The point is, she was lying to us and lying to him. We know that because of our meeting with the tong leaders.”
“If you take their reaction at face value,” Paul said. “Me? I’m not so sure.”
“You identified that report as the first lie, I think,” her father prompted. “So what was the second?”
“Stacy asked Susannah, in confidence—because you were supposedly acting on your own, in secret—to obtain a bomb, or the fissionable materials for making one. This was supposed to be at your request, Dad. I only know about it because Susannah didn’t know where to begin. She asked my advice because of an old story in the family.”
“What story?” Paul asked.
“A minor indiscretion,” she replied. “Years ago—”
“It’s been handled,” John said heavily. “The matter’s closed. Proceed, Daughter.”
“Stacy must have thought Susannah would be able to track down such a thing without being detected. But as we saw, the tong was always two steps ahead of her—of us. Putting the blame on John was her first lie.”
“Why would Stacy want the bomb?” Paul asked.
“To start a war? I don’t know!” But Callie paused. She could feel her eyes going wide and the hair at the back of her neck stirring.
“What?” her father asked.
“Any rumor of this would pit the Chinese against us. And—now that I think about it—why would the Chinese have connected anything Susannah was doing with you and me, personally? Our names were on that red paper, not hers. So … if the Chinese had heard about the search, how would they have responded? Through diplomatic channels, right? And maybe that’s what she wiped from Machiavelli’s memory—their inquiry and her response.”
“Are you suggesting Stacy fingered us?” John said. “Made us the targets?”
“That’s …” Callie was still putting the whole plot together in her mind. “It’s one interpretation. But it covers more of the facts than any other.”
Her father looked troubled. “I won’t judge until I hear from her.”
“We will need to bring in an expert witness,” Callie said.
“Who?” John asked. “Her machine intelligence?”
“It doesn’t know anything,” she replied.
“You want Jacquie Wildmon!”
“And her box of tricks.”
* * *
Jacquie Wildmon attended the trial—for that was what it amounted to—at the family compound in Fremont. She had made the trip up from Texas in her physical person, rather than electronically, out of courtesy to Aunt Callie and Grandfather John, who had no cerebral connections. At Callie’s request, she had put Vernier on her shoulder with a fast link through the Praxis Family Association’s communications trunk. The intelligence had a special role in the proceedings known only to one other person.
Sitting in judgment were John and Cousin Paul, with Callie taking the lead as prosecutor. Brought in to face them, under guard by two Defense Force retainers, was her niece once removed, Brandon’s daughter, Anastasia. If the woman had reserved any kind of counsel for the defense, it was not apparent—but then, this was not a court but a hearing. Jacquie had the complete case file from Callie and already knew what to expect.
At first, Stacy seemed calm enough, smiling, ready to answer questions. Then Callie presented her evidence: the questionable nature of her first report about Chinese intentions, the lie about being approached by the Patriarch to obtain a bomb, the lapses in her intelligence’s memory. At that point, Stacy had turned a hard glare on Jacquie, which meant she must have guessed where the hole in her plan had come unraveled.
Anything to report? Jacquie asked Vernier.
Nothing coming or going, the intelligence said. But her biometrics are shooting off the scale.
Keep watching …
“What has all this got to do with me?” Stacy asked finally.
“That’s what we’re here to ask you,”
Callie replied. “You’ve obviously tried to sow distrust in both directions, between the Chinese and us. You’re either trying to obtain a nuclear weapon for yourself, or make the Chinese think we’re violating the Treaty of Kitsap. This is very strange activity for a diplomat. I’m hoping you have a rational explanation.”
“Who are my accusers?” Stacy asked.
“Myself for one,” Callie said. “Susannah, if we have to call her as a witness. Father here, if you need to hear from his own mouth that he never asked you for a weapon.”
“What about her?” Stacy asked, pointing at Jacquie.
“She is here for the witness we can’t call,” Callie replied. “Jacquie exonerates by exception your own intelligence, Machiavelli.”
“He had nothing to do with this.”
“So Jacquie has determined.”
At that moment, Vernier sent into her brain: Now, why would she want fast memory access to the phrase “Knock, knock”? That is a strange use of the Instant Memory resource. And after a moment’s pause: Ah! The resource somehow answers, “Who’s there?”
Follow it! Jacquie commanded, her mouth dropping open as if to speak, but she managed to keep it all inside her head. It’s a code word. She is using it as some kind of secret communication. Very clever. Then she watched Stacy for reaction.
Anastasia sends, “Help me!” Vernier recited. The resource replies, “That’s no kind of joke.” Someday you’ll have to explain jokes to me, Vernier commented as an aside to Jacquie. Ah, more. “They are on to me. They know everything.” And the response is, “I told you it would only work if the old man died.”
Who is it that’s responding? Jacquie demanded.
Not a clear trace, going through the memory function like this, Vernier sent. Ah, routed through their Defense Force databases, an intelligence named Stratego, suitably filtered. Her respondent is one John Praxis Second—a nephew of yours, I believe.
Thank you, Jacquie sent. Prepare all this as a transcript, please. Then she raised her hand. “May it please the court,” she said out loud. “Um, Grandfather. I think we have the proof you need.” Then she turned to Cousin Paul. “I am so sorry.”
* * *
An hour after the hearing began, Callie had her resolution. It was based on the testimony of Jacquie Wildmon’s intelligence Vernier—who presented himself on the comm wall as an abstract painting, a face in pink and yellow squares with twisted red eyes. When John querulously asked what that was supposed to represent, Jacquie said it was a portrait by the painter Paul Klee. And Callie heard him mutter, “Machine humor.”
From the internal memory signals Vernier had intercepted, Stacy had incriminated both herself and Paul’s son John Junior, also known as Jay-Jay in the family. He was quickly brought into the hearing. All that remained was to determine their punishment. Callie would leave that to her father, as the person most hurt in the affair and the one who would have to put everything back together when they were done.
From behind his desk, he stared hard at his two great-grandchildren. “I’m going to put aside,” he said, “the fact that you worked to encompass my death. Death comes to us all, and I’ve cheated the hangman by a whole lifetime now.
“But you’ve also endangered the family,” he went on. “You’ve made enemies where you should have tried to make friends. In time, you might have brought down fire on everything we’ve worked for—including your own best efforts in times past. I can only think of one suitable punishment.”
Callie braced herself for the death penalty. She could see the two youngsters stiffen with the same thought in mind.
“I am banishing you,” John said. “Your privileges are suspended, your shares revoked. You no longer have a place with us, either of you. By six o’clock this evening, I want you outside the main gate in the clothes you are wearing. It’s a couple of miles to the nearest transit stop, so you can walk that. I’ll grant you fare money to take you as far as the airport. From there, you’re on your own.”
Stacy glared at him. “Fine!” she said. “There are plenty of others who will pay for the kind of work we do. Isn’t that right, Jay-Jay?”
John Junior did not look so confident. He probably knew what came next.
“Before you go,” John continued, “we will take out what we so generously gave you. Your cortical arrays will be locked down and surgically removed. Your access will be severed.”
Even Callie drew a sharp breath. Jacquie covered her face with a hand.
Anastasia and her cousin would be left to wander the world as deadheads, penniless, lost, their brains isolated from the data stream. They were officially unpersons.
6. Last Bite of the Apple
In the tearoom attached to the New World Community Association in Seattle, three men happened to arrive at the same time of the morning and took a table together. They also happened to be the same three leaders who had recently traveled to California to meet with members of the renegade Praxis family. The most senior leader, Zhang Fuhua, felt an obscure discomfort about the decisions that had been made there.
“Do we trust this man Praxis and his eldest daughter?” he asked.
“Not particularly,” said Dong Geming. “We still have hard evidence of his intended treachery. And it was Praxis and his infernal machines who beat back the Chinese Expeditionary Force, all those years ago. He remains a potential enemy.”
“Do we have to trust him?” asked Li Guiren suddenly. “I mean, did we make promises? Is the Xin Dalu’s honor at stake?”
“An implied promise,” Zhang said. “We reached understanding.”
“Did we?” Li replied. “I do not remember it that way.”
“And what do you want to do?” Zhang asked.
“Give the assignment to someone reliable this time,” Dong said, showing where his heart lay. “Someone who will use modern methods.”
“Someone who will not betray our hand, either,” Li added.
“That would be the safest course, I suppose.”
* * *
The Greek Orthodox wedding service—which the Praxis family still followed, at least in form, if not through absolute belief—had no tradition of “giving away the bride.” In the Greek view, the woman was not property, and her family was not transferring her ownership and protection to the groom and his family. So, standing at the doorway to the chapel inside the Fort Apache, John Praxis reflected that for once the church’s teachings worked in his favor. Because Antigone had pointedly refused to attend the ceremony, it would have fallen to him to approach the altar with Angela in a Catholic or Protestant service while Kenneth waited patiently to receive her. That act might have suggested too much that he was not willing for the world to know.
Instead, the Praxis family waited as a group at the entrance to the chapel, with Kenny holding a bouquet of flowers. Angela arrived by armored car from Oakland—which everyone pretended not to know was where Kenny had a private apartment, and there he and the girl had been hiding out for the past three weeks—and descended in a white dress with veil. Kenny handed her the flowers, took her right hand, walked her through the door, and across the open floor toward Father Cephalos.
The small choir began singing. “Glory to You, O our God … Glory to you that walks in His ways …”
Father Cephalos began the ceremony with prayers, “For the peace from above … For the peace of the whole world …” He then entered the service that John Praxis could remember hearing as he once stood beside Adele, more than one lifetime ago. “For the servants of God, Kenneth and Angela, who are now being joined to one another in the community of marriage, and for their salvation, let us pray to the Lord.”
After the couple’s hands were formally joined, the priest blessed their wedding crowns made of silver bands while holding them over the Gospel. Then Callie and Connie placed them on Kenneth’s and Angela’s heads in turn as Father Cephalos recited, “The servant of God Kenneth is crowned to the servant of God Angela … The servant of God Angela is crowned to
the servant of God Kenneth … O Lord our God, crown them with glory and honor.”
After the ceremony, everyone walked over to the community hall for the reception, with champagne toasts, the cutting of a three-layer cake made from wheat flour and cane sugar, not surrogates, and the traditional first dances of the young couple with all their relatives. During the latter part of the festivities, their obligations satisfied, the bride and groom slipped away to change out of their wedding finery and into traveling clothes.
Praxis had offered his personal ariflect to fly them up to Cherry Lake, where the top-floor apartments in the castle had been finished off early on his orders. He also had the kitchen installed in the basement and a small staff of retainers assigned to run it. That was his gift to the couple: two weeks of care-free days in a fairytale castle high in the mountains.
Towards four in the afternoon, a whining and a clattering signaled the arrival of his AFR-III in the square outside the hall. Everyone rushed out with the happy couple. Someone at the hanger had posted a white sign saying “Just Married” over the ’flect’s side door, with colored ribbons that streamed frantically in the down blast from the wing nacelles. The piloting intelligence opened the door, and Kenny and Angela climbed aboard.
It was the perfect end to a beautiful day, and Praxis hoped there would be many more days and weddings like it in the future as his family grew.
* * *
Colonel Deng Honghui of the People’s Liberation Army sat in a small powerboat—actually, more of a rowboat with a tiny outboard motor—among the reeds at the southern end of the San Francisco Bay. To all appearances, he was fishing, and he even had a rod and tackle box with him to support the story.
At the moment, however, Deng was holding up a smartphone and facing east. Two miles away across the marsh was the walled compound of the Praxis Family Association. From a distance, one might think that the man in humble clothing with a straw hat on his head was taking a picture of the South Bay landmark with his phone. But that was not what he was doing.
This was a special phone that read a different frequency of radio signals—specifically, those from aircraft transponders that announced themselves to the world at large, so that traffic controllers could monitor and track the planes in their area. Like the controllers’ systems, this adaptation also measured the target’s distances and directions by tapping into the craft’s global positioning system. At the moment, Deng was looking for a specific transponder signal, one that had been sampled some weeks ago in Eureka, California.
Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict Page 33