Worldwired

by Elizabeth Bear

  On the other hand, nobody's ever obliterated a city and triggered a global climate change with a nickel-iron meteorite before. Or unleashed a tailored nanotech infection on the entire planet. I guess it's not really the sort of thing the UN was designed to deal with, was it?

  “Nuclear proliferation,” Richard supplies inside my head. “That, and the idea that an avenue of public discourse would prevent World War III.”

  So we skipped straight to number four and five, is what you're telling me? It's an old joke; I fought in World War III, but nobody calls it that. Richard gives me a look. I sigh out loud, and Valens gives me a look as well.

  “Casey? Are you going to handle this?”

  “I'm good, Fred.”

  His hazel eyes are doubtful, turned down at the corners like a sad old hound's, but he nods and turns away from me, pacing from one wall to another with his hand clenched around his opposite wrist in the small of his back. It's sort of restful watching him go back and forth. Like the pendulum. “Give them hell,” he says, so quietly I almost don't hear him.

  His tone makes my intestines knot. “You want them to pay.”

  Just a sideways look, arresting, glitter of cold eyes over the bridge of his handsome nose. “Tell me you don't.”

  I can't. I mean, I drew the line at bloody vengeance once. But let them go unpunished? No. That isn't an option either.

  “I want justice.”

  His lips twitch into the semblance of a smile. It flickers on his mouth for a moment, then flutters away just as fast. “I never ask for justice anymore,” he says. His fists unknot from behind his back and fall to his sides. “I just ask to win.”

  I'm not quite sure what I'm going to say in answer. I knew that about him. Knew it in my bones, I mean, down to the roots of my hair; Fred and I go way, way back. But for some reason, twenty-six goddamned years later, it just, finally, really sank in. Fred's the sort of guy who does what it takes and counts the cost well lost against whatever it was he gambled to win. If he's not prepared to pay, he doesn't put his money on the table.

  “Damn.” It's written all over his face. And he's letting me see it, because he knows I just figured it out anyway. “That e-mail wasn't from Razorface, was it, Fred?”

  “The encoding on something like that would be impossible to fabricate, Casey. We've validated the packet history in every manner known to man, and all the records will be turned over with the evidence. It's the only way to establish provenance.”

  Of course they have. Of course they are. I could ask Richard. Richard might even tell me the truth.

  Valens is still staring at me, the picture of quiet relaxation. I ask Richard something else instead, something I won't have to lie under oath about. Why?—no, wait. Don't answer that. Just answer this: Are those documents real?

  “They're real. I'm not Fred Valens, Jen.”

  Dick—

  “With any luck, they won't ask the right questions.” It's not quite a smile, what crosses Richard's face, but a strange, tender expression I can't put a name to. It's the sort of look you expect to see before somebody messes up your hair, but of course he hasn't got the fingers to do it with, so he just looks at me for a second, and then looks down.

  I hadn't known you were such a patriot, Richard.

  “There's an old catchphrase. My country is the whole world.”

  I've heard it.

  “In my case”—he grins—“it's quite absolutely true.”

  Fred still hasn't blinked. Come to think of it, neither have I. I breathe out slowly, over my tongue, through my teeth, and look down at the spit-shined tips of my shoes. Before I get the breath back in, somebody knocks on the door and the handle starts to turn. I don't look over; I just tug my jacket straight one last time. “Lucky for us Razorface thought to mail that off before he died.”

  “Yes,” Fred says, as the door opens and Mr. Jung slips inside, one hand crooked to summon us. Or to summon me, it seems, although Fred will follow along and sit in the observer seats.

  We follow Mr. Jung into a room only about twice the size of a hockey amphitheater. It reminds me of being inside a gigantic nautilus shell. The ranked chairs have long desks attached to the back of each row, for the use of the row behind them, and except for the miniaturized interface plates obviously retrofitted to each place, they're exactly like the hundred-year-old student desks in the parochial school I suffered through until I ran away from home. The high ceiling is sculptured in acoustic ripples, pierced by a curving aperture of sorts lined with windows, dark observation booths behind. There's a screen over the podium we're walking toward. It's pearl white, and black letters float in it:

  Items of Business:

  Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Canada and the British Commonwealth / People's PanChinese Alliance)

  Armed Activities on the Territory of Canada (Canada and the British Commonwealth / People's PanChinese Alliance)

  Armed Activities on the Territory of China (People's PanChinese Alliance / Canada)

  I try not to look at them as we walk down the long green-carpeted aisle. They make everything far too concrete, far too real. I feel insanely like a bride at a cathedral wedding, Fred and Mr. Jung playing the role of my attendants now, flanking me. I wonder if this would feel less freakish if I had a veil and a long white train in place of my sharp-creased rifle green.

  My place is on the stage. Behind the podium, below a gorgeous curved red-gold wall of mahogany, with my back to the long table where the secretary general and some other people who I don't recognize sit.

  Mr. Jung and Fred step off to the side as I climb the steps, aware of thousands of eyes on my back, holovision and Net feeds, the whole world watching. It's a short flight. I don't stumble. Agné Zilinskiene, the secretary general of the United Nations, rises and comes around the table to meet me. She's a Lithuanian lady in her sixties, perfectly powdered skin as lustrous as her pearl earrings. Unlike Constance Riel, she's let her bobbed hair go a rich flat pewter. It moves naturally when she cocks her head back to smile up at me.

  “It's an honor, ma'am,” I say, as she reaches out.

  “It's a pleasure to meet somebody with a little common sense,” she says, very softly, so the microphones won't pick it up. She clasps my right hand in both of hers. Not thinking, I add my own left hand to the mix. She glances down at the touch of cool metal, and looks up, smile widening. “I like a woman who doesn't believe in prettying up the truth.”

  Which is when it sinks in that she, too, knows more than she's supposed. That she knows about the order I disobeyed, which is the reason Beijing isn't a smoking ruin like Toronto now.

  The realization almost makes me grip her hand too tightly. I have to uncurl my metal fingers carefully, consciously, and let the steel hand fall to my side. This isn't Bernard's trial. I am not a victim, here. Riel, Richard, Valens—they have nothing to hold over me. Nothing but my own conscience, and its ghosts. They need me far more than I need them.

  I've never held this much power in my life, in my own two hands. It stuns me with primeval awe. It's a dark god, that kind of power, a black rock idol crouched before the rising sun.

  “Thank you, ma'am.” I smile, and she lets my hand go, and I turn away to take my oath and think about the ways in which I will shade the truth so that I will not have to lie.

  It was 6 AM in Vancouver when the testimony started in New York, and Riel didn't have the luxury of time to curl up on the sofa in her slippers, a mug cupped between her hands, and watch.

  She didn't have time for it, but she was doing it anyway. Even if the Americans—and she had no illusions about that: she knew American ignorance and American arrogance well, and this was unquestionably the latter—had gone out of their way to arrange for the hearings to start on the Canadian day of thanks, it was still a national holiday. And Riel had sacrificed the privilege of sleeping in in favor of her perch on the big temperature-controlled memory-foam sofa, the never-ending str
eam of coffee cups, and the image of Genevieve Casey hovering in midair before her, limned in the not-quite-real glow of holography.

  She sipped from her mug, the steam warming her face while lacy feathers of frost melted off the windows. Frost, in Vancouver, Canada's answer to the tropics. On Thanksgiving.

  She wondered what it would be like in two or three years, when the dust settled and the temperature started to rise, if Richard couldn't prevent it. She'd always lived with climate change, grown up in the era of wild weather. It had always been an accepted consideration rather than a crisis, something one adapted to, mitigated, planned for. Harsh winters, harsh summers, melting ice, erratic crops, evolving storm models, and altered ocean currents. The acceptance that whatever the situation was now, it was subject to immediate and irrevocable change.

  She tried not to hang too much on the hope that, now that they had Richard, they might be able to control that change. She tried not to hang too much hope on anything, really, but this one was particularly tempting. A magic bullet. A miracle cure. Like penicillin—

  Except, like penicillin, like any magic bullet, there was the chance . . . no, the likelihood . . . of unforeseen side effects and long-term consequences. Best not to hope, not even cautiously. Because hope could cloud one's sense of risks and benefits, and make one gamble more than one could afford to lose. Better to plan for the worst, to find some common ground with the Chinese and evacuate as many people from the planet as possible. A colony was a huge risk, and also a tremendous fallback position: as fragile as a basket of eggs . . . but nevertheless, a second basket.

  Riel blinked a command interface up in her contact and raised the level of the sound on the live feed from the UN. A crow called outside, a harsh, throaty caw. She didn't glance up, fascinated by Casey's easy charm on camera, her effortless charisma. Traditionally, she might have had a chair, a table to sit behind, legal advisers at her side rather than Valens and one Canadian lawyer seated against the curtain wall, but this was theater, not justice, and those concessions to comfort had been sacrificed in the negotiation process, leaving her up there naked except for a podium and the microphone tacked to her throat.

  She held that podium well, fielding questions with dignity, seemingly comfortable on her feet as the testimony headed into its second hour.

  Riel had known Casey had that, that aura of command. Now, she found herself wondering if she herself would do as well, when her time came. What a politician she would have made, Riel thought. And then, watching Casey, she had another thought, building on that first one, and smiled.

  “Put me through to Richard, please,” she said. The smart system in her living room recognized the tone of command, and a chime announced the connection.

  “Good morning, Prime Minister. You're up early.”

  “Have you thought about my offer of citizenship, Dick?”

  “I have—”

  “You prefer to remain a free agent.”

  “I feel morally constrained,” he answered. “I trust you will understand my quandary.”

  “Understanding and acceptance are not the same thing, Dick.”

  “That's true—”

  She turned back to the 3-D. “How do you think our girl is doing?” She gestured with her mug, coffee slopping over and splashing her fingers. It wasn't quite hot enough to make her swear. She wiped her hand on the blanket.

  “Beautifully,” he said. “I hope it all goes this well.”

  “Don't count your chickens, Dick,” she said. “And don't tempt the gods.”

  “They never listen to me under other circumstances. Why should this be any different?”

  “The perversity of the universe?”

  “Oh,” he said, and she almost imagined she could hear the crackle of the connection in the silence that followed. “That.”

  1130 hours

  Thursday October 11, 2063

  Empire State Building Historical Preserve

  New York City, New York USA

  The American looked cold. He leaned against the railing next to a row of chit-operated viewfinders trained in the general direction of the New York Dike, looking like any of the other single men and women scattered across the observation deck. A holotour of Lower Manhattan droned from a kiosk, abandoned by some tourist who hadn't counted on the wind eighty-six stories up, but he didn't appear to be listening to it. His fists were stuffed in the pockets of his expensive fish-scale corduroy coat as he looked down at the butterfly netting winged out from the monolithic building, giant hands cradled to discourage suicides.

  Janet didn't know his name. She didn't want to know his name. She didn't want to be here at all, in fact, shivering on this blocky engineered outcrop of gray stone and glass, her arms folded tight across her overcoat. Kurt and Amanda and the rest of her security detail had been abandoned at the embassy through a bit of skullduggery worthy of a high school girl sneaking out in the middle of the night to meet the captain of the hockey team, and she wanted nothing quite so much as to be sitting in the bar at the hotel down the street, drinking an Irish coffee and watching Casey's testimony on the smallest of four projectors.

  The other three would be showing American sports hype. Some things never changed, and in New York City, acts of war still gave pride of place to Game Four of a 2–1 World Series when the Yankees were one game behind and the Havana Red Sox looked fit to win it all. Which was ironic, because Havana was under water and despite having kept the name, the Red Sox were based out of Argentina these days.

  In any case, the Irish coffee sounded good.

  She shot a sidelong look at Toby. His lips thinned against the cold. He dabbed his nose with a linen handkerchief as an icy wind lifted his hair. There ought to be a law against haircuts that good; pewter-colored strands feathered in the cold air and fell into place more perfectly than Janet could have managed with a blow dryer and a comb. Janet stomped her feet in her boots and walked forward, leaving the Unitek executive behind.

  The man in the corduroy overcoat turned as she slipped between the scattered tourists and came up to him. Wan winter light sparkled on transparent spangles as his shoulders hunched under tan cloth; the greatcoat might be trendy, and heated, but it wasn't doing anything about the wind. He dragged a hand out of his pocket and offered it to Janet. She took it without removing her glove, offering enough of a squeeze to let him know she came as an ally rather than a supplicant.

  America's population drift had gone the opposite way of Canada's: there were just more men in Janet's age group in America. Unfortunately, a lot of them had been raised during the Christian Fascist era, and had somewhat distasteful ideas about the role of women, in and outside the home. She read those ideas in the sloppiness of his handclasp, in the condescending glossiness of his gaze. She was unimpressed.

  “Dr. Allman sent you,” she said, extracting her hand from his fishy grip, glad of her fur-lined leather gloves.

  “Sent me?” The smile was as patronizing as the rest of his expressions. “That makes me sound like an errand-boy, General.”

  Aren't you? Her lips didn't move, but it came out in the lift of her eyebrows and her chin. He cleared his throat as she brushed past him, on her way to the wall. She could make out a dark blue-green wedge of the UN Secretariat on the Lower East Side, a slight glimpse of color between taller, newer buildings. The view was breathtaking. Literally: the wind ripped her words from her lips as soon as she said them, hurling them into the gray, airy gulf spread out below. It wasn't as windy as the CN Tower observation platform had been; she never quite had the feeling that invisible hands were about to drag her off her feet and loft her into space, but the cold burned her cheeks and peeled her lips and she was grateful for the warmth of her heated coat and gloves. “Do you have something for me?”

  He had to lean forward and strain to hear her. She didn't turn her head to make it any easier. He nodded and swallowed, ducking his chin behind the collar of his coat.

  Janet turned her hand palm up without raising it
above the level of her waist, and he handed her a gray plastic data carrier that felt like it had a couple of modules clipped inside. “Dr. Allman says you'll know what to do with those. He also says the first one is only viewable once, and will only play on an encoded HCD. The second one is the supplemental documents.”

  “Mmm.” She slipped the carrier into her pocket and leaned harder on the wall. The stone pressed a heating element in her coat against her belly, warming her uncomfortably. She shifted back, straight-armed, leaning hard, and cleared her throat. Her nose was starting to drip with the cold. And it's only October. What's it going to be like in January? “Please do return my regards to the vice president.”

  “General Shijie also sends his regards, and looks forward to an increased spirit of cooperation between our three countries—”

  “Our three countries.” She tried to laugh; it came out a harsh, chuffing cough. “What benefits Vancouver benefits New Washington, I take it? And vice versa?”

  “We used to think so. Wouldn't you like to see the border unguarded again?”

  “I'm barely old enough to remember when it was unguarded the last time,” she said. “Those fortifications have been there since the turn of the century, to greater or lesser degrees. I'm not inclined to believe that the U.S. is scurrying around under the table, brokering peace between PanChina and the commonwealth, without a certain degree of self-interest involved.”

  “It advances us on the world stage,” the man in the corduroy coat said with a shrug. He rubbed his hands together. “General Shijie is a reasonable man, and he's horrified by the actions of his government with regard to yours. He wishes to see a spirit of international cooperation reborn, and the United States stands to benefit from détente—in both economic and political spheres.”