Worldwired

by Elizabeth Bear

  The heavy cherrywood door is barely shut behind us when Riel rounds on me. She's drawn like a wire, plucked vibrating, thinner and hollower, and the strands of steel in her bobbed dark hair are maturing into racing stripes. The gray might even look good on her, but her olive skin's faded to sallow, and she's curiously . . . displaced against the rich leather furniture and patterned carpets and wallpaper. As if she were a hologram, or half a step into another dimension.

  She looks at me, and her mouth works, and she sets her cup down on the sideboard without looking. She shakes her head and says, “You could have warned me, Jen.”

  “It's not the sort of thing that usually comes up in casual conversation.” Most people don't ask if you have a criminal record as part of the standard litany that goes with ascertaining your pigeonhole in society—job, marital status, kids. It might be funny if they did. Nah, I got picked up for possession and soliciting when I was a teenager, but I never did any time. Counseling. Suspended sentence. You know how it goes. So how do you like your job at the auto mall? “Besides, if the Chinese can find out, how could I have been expected to know you wouldn't?”

  Fred's leaned back against the wall a few feet away from me, watching with his head cocked to one side. If he were ten years younger I bet he'd have his ankles crossed and an insouciant smirk on his lips. His shoes gleam with polish and he's picking at the edge of his finger with his thumbnail, as if absentmindedly. Meanwhile, Riel paces, coyote in a cage, wearing a path between the window and the barrister's bookcases ranged along the back wall. She stops and pulls the curtain aside, staring out on spotlit bricks. “The Chinese shouldn't have found out. Those are sealed records.” It pains her to admit that. “Nobody should have been able to get at those.”

  Oh, fuck me raw. “Nobody had to.”

  “What?”

  I have to shake my head and close both hands very tight to remember not to put the left one through the wall. I'm sure that paneling's expensive. “Barb knew.”

  Fred looks up from his intensive survey of his fingernails. His eyes widen, and then narrow. “Your sister never said anything to me about it, Casey.”

  “That's because she wasn't working for you, Fred. No matter what you thought when you signed her paychecks. She was working for Alberta Holmes.”

  “Touché,” he says. “And if Alberta knew about your record—”

  “Then Tobias Hardy sure as hell knows about it now.” Riel nods, a gesture like a gavel coming down. I've seen that decisiveness before. It worries me. “I'll patch up what I can in my testimony. It . . . well, you did well today, Jen.” It's grudging, and she can't look me in the eye when she says it. “Have you ever thought of going into politics?”

  “And now you know why not.”

  She snorts, a choked-off laugh that lifts her shoulders and sets her back a fraction of a step. “It doesn't matter. The cat and the bag and the horse we rode in on and all that other stuff. We'll deal with it the only way we can: by taking it on the chin. You were right not to lie.”

  “Thank you.” A funny little twist that I hadn't even known was there unwinds in my belly.

  “And anyway, we have other problems.”

  Exasperation may be my least favorite emotion in the world. “Merci à Dieu. What now?”

  Riel has a lot of personality flaws, but taking joy in keeping people guessing isn't one of them. “Janet Frye has had some documents registered as evidence, but I haven't been able to find out what was on them. Yet. I'm working on it.”

  “Don't they have to provide you with copies?”

  “It's not a trial,” Riel said, disgustedly. “It's a ‘discovery hearing.' The fiction is that we're not adversaries, but all trying to get at the truth.”

  “Ostie de tabernac—”

  “My sentiments exactly.”

  Fred straightens up and steps away from the wall, looking like he grew an inch—and all of it composed of pure cold mean. “She didn't . . . she wasn't involved until after the attack, and then she more or less took credit for Canada having the capability to respond. Now that I think about it, what would she have to testify about?”

  I shake my head. My years in America left me a little behind on commonwealth politics, even the strictly Canadian ones. “Have a little mercy, Fred.”

  Riel shrugs and casts as if trying to remember where she left her coffee cup. I move to one side so she can see it on the sideboard; she beelines for it and drinks before she speaks, making a face at finding it cold. “The Home party likes to bill itself as the defense party, Jen. They supported the space program—including the black budget—when I was still fighting tooth and nail to get that money for health care and famine relief.” She shrugs again, a very Gallic one this time. “Sometimes you guess wrong.”

  Yeah, I know. And sometimes there's just not enough paint to cover the whole house, so you do the sides that show. Money is not infinitely elastic, and that's as true for governments as it is for single moms. “So if she doesn't have anything to testify, what the hell does she plan to testify to?”

  The look Fred shoots me is unalloyed pity. He raises one hand, wincing, and rubs at the back of his neck. I try not to feel sympathy. “Whatever the hell she and Hardy have cooked up to discredit us completely, of course. Hardy hands her the keys to Canada, she hands him the keys to the Huang Di, the Vancouver, and the Montreal, and everybody goes home happy. Except us, and Richard. And China—assuming Hardy and the opposition aren't in cahoots with some PanChinese faction or another.”

  “Shijie Shu?” Riel says. They're both looking at me, but they're talking across me.

  “That's what I was thinking.”

  Cup clatters on saucer again. She almost drops them on the sideboard in her haste, and Fred winces. I bet that china set is older than all three of us put together. “It's tomorrow in China, isn't it? I need to call Premier Xiong. Now.”

  “Connie—”

  She turns back to me with her hand already on the softly gleaming brass doorknob, brows beetled over her unnaturally green eyes. “Make it quick.”

  “What are they planning?”

  “I don't know,” she says. The latch clicks as she turns the knob, but the hinges are too well oiled to creak. “But I'm thinking today was king's pawn to king four.”

  Patty hesitated at the top of the stairs, but didn't stop. The murmur of voices followed her. She scraped her tongue against her teeth, wishing she'd drunk more ice water, trying to work loose the tannic residue from the wine. Papa Fred was trying to be polite and include her in with the grown-ups, and she wouldn't embarrass him, but she would rather have had a seltzer.

  She let her fingertips skip across the whorled ball of the finial as she turned the corner, wood smooth-waxed and evenly ridged to the touch, and took three steps before she hesitated. She tucked her hair behind her ears with a jerky, violent motion, turned around, and turned toward the library instead. Papa Georges had loved two things: his spoiled, noisy parrots and his collection of antique books, and she was so homesick for the smell of paper and leather that she gulped a mouthful of spit and blinked stinging eyes.

  There was somebody in the library before her. The door stood slightly ajar, and a dim light gleamed through the crack, illuminating a knife-blade width of patterned green and wheat-gold carpeting, catching a soft highlight on the scarred wood of the threshold. Patty cocked her head, listening, her fingertips resting lightly against the dark wood of the door as if it could conduct sound directly into her bones.

  She heard pages turning. Quickly, as if the turner were glancing at pictures or scanning the paragraphs for some remembered turn of phrase, rather than reading to savor. Slick, heavy paper rattled softly when it was moved, paused, was followed by the clink of glass on a coaster. Patricia held her breath, began to step back, her arm extending as if her fingers were reluctant to leave the smooth warm wood.

  Alan?

  “I'm listening, Patricia.”

  Who's in there?

  “I don't know,
” he said. “There's nothing in that room that's on the Net or the worldwire.”

  Another page turned. The rustling paused, as if the reader had lifted his head from the book, one page still held vertical between his fingers, and hesitated in thought. And then, very clearly, Patty heard the rattle of paper one more time.

  She had as much right to be here as anybody else did, didn't she? She let the held breath go and stepped forward. Her elbow bent. She pushed into the room, the door swinging aside on hinges so smoothly oiled and hung that she felt no more resistance than she would have brushing aside a drapery.

  General Frye sat in a leather-upholstered armchair by the ceramic fire, staring out the dark window at branches moving against the snow. Her left hand cradled the spine of a book atop her crossed legs, holding it open. Her right hand fretted at the brass heads of the tacks holding navy leather to the scrolled wooden arm of her chair; a fat crystal glass sat on the marble-topped table beside her. She didn't turn toward the door as Patty slipped inside, but she tilted her head slightly, and Patty knew she'd been heard.

  Unacknowledged, she didn't speak. She crossed the hardwood floor and edged behind a loveseat, crouching down to run her hands over the surface of the hardbound books. The textures surprised her: slick, slightly sticky leather, broadcloth rough as a cat's tongue, patterned gilt cool in the evening air. She jerked her hand away and hissed.

  It was the wiring, of course. She hadn't touched a book in almost a year, and the last time she had, she'd been a normal girl with a normal girl's reflexes and senses, not the tuned, hyperaware animal she'd become. Except for the omnipresent strobe of the fluorescent lights, the Montreal was a place of cool metal surfaces and soothing glass, soft grays and blues and the white-noise hum of its systems. It smoothed over the rough edges of interacting with the daily world very well.

  Earth was full of things. People, textures, sudden noises. Nine months in a controlled climate had taught Patty one way of dealing with her augmentation.

  She cradled her hand close to her chest, as if she had scorched her fingertips, and forced herself to breathe slowly, evenly, through her nose. Panic helped no one. She could hear her mother saying it now.

  And I'm still better off than poor Min-xue. Cautiously, she reached out again, and touched a volume bound in green leather, with little humped ridges sewn across the spine every few centimeters. It wasn't bad when she was expecting it. She just hadn't known the books would feel so . . . real. She hooked her fingernail over the edge and pulled. It slid into her hand with a gentle rasp of coverboards against its neighbors. She didn't look at the title; she didn't care. It smelled right.

  She rose from her crouch and turned to go back to her room, and found herself looking into General Frye's alert, tired eyes. She couldn't make out their color in the angled light, but the slant of the reading lamp spilling across the book still open on her lap made her features look harsh and sad. The general nodded toward her hand. “What are you reading?”

  Patty's lips thinned. She glanced down at the book pressed against her chest. “I don't know,” she admitted, and looked back up. She couldn't keep the rueful little smile from twisting her lips, but she made herself not step away. She's the enemy. She's what we're here to stop. Still, that wasn't any reason not to be polite. It was always better to be polite. Especially if you didn't like someone. “What are you reading, General?”

  Except Frye didn't look like an enemy. She looked like somebody who had lost a friend, and Patty's breath twisted in her chest as Frye looked down at the book she was holding. The slick pages with their crisp 2-D images dented slightly between her fingertips and she coughed, except it might have been a chuckle. And she said, “I don't know either,” and stuck her forefinger in as a placeholder as she flipped to the front. “It's the sesquicentennial celebration of National Geographic magazine. One hundred and fifty years of unforgettable photographs. They're quite stunning.” Grudgingly said, that last, as if Frye had not wanted them to be “stunning.” Or as if they had affected her in some manner she found unacceptable.

  Patty balanced her book against her belly and cracked it open. “Albert Payson Terhune,” she said. “Lad: A Dog. That's a silly title.”

  “It's a pretty silly book, too, as I recall.” Frye flipped her book back open, glanced at the page number, and set it aside on the end table, well away from her glass. “Very sentimental.” She closed her eyes briefly, as if something hurt her.

  Enemy, Patty said to the twinge of pity that answered that gesture. Patty reached for Alan, but Alan was silent, observing. She felt his presence, however, the cool swirl of blue and purple solidifying her resolve. Maybe I can draw her out, find out something interesting. Would you help me do that?

  “Richard is more suited for those tasks than I am,” Alan replied. He must have felt her flush of quick panic at the idea of inviting Richard into her head, because he pitched his tone soothing and said, “But I will try.”

  Thank you, Alan. Whatever fragile courage she had was reinforced by the sensation of leaning up against his wise, cool intellect. On a whim, she pictured herself as the golden robot girl, and felt that much braver. There was nothing Frye could say to her that could hurt her, after all. Nothing that would not slide off her impenetrable golden hide.

  “Is sentiment necessarily bad?” Patty squared her shoulders and walked toward Frye. She set her novel on top of the photo book and sank into a matching blue leather chair. Her loafers dropped off her feet easily; she kicked her legs up and sat on her heels, leaning against the side of the chair.

  Frye regarded her with surprise, and—Patty thought—perhaps an unexpected touch of relief. I'm not the only one who doesn't want to be alone with my thoughts tonight.

  “No,” Frye said. She picked up her drink and cupped it in her hands. Her fingers were square, a little blocky, the nails clipped short as a man's and painted a demure rose pink. She laced them together, pressing the tumbler between her palms, and leaned forward. “Sometimes it's all that makes us human.”

  Patty smiled. “I have to testify tomorrow,” she said, and the smile didn't last through it. Leather squeaked as she drew her knees up and rested her chin on them. “Do you know what I'm going to have to say?”

  “I don't think,” Frye said, and paused, and looked out the window again. The snow had picked up, feathers tumbling through the spotlights' glow. Her tone was level when she resumed. “I don't think we're supposed to compare notes.”

  She's tired, Patty thought.

  “And a little drunk,” Alan supplied. “Vulnerable.”

  Good. “I promise not to tell you any details if you promise not to tell me any.”

  Frye paused, and smiled around her glass. “That sounds fair. So what's on your mind, Patty?”

  It was too warm by the ceramic fire. “I'm going to have to talk about Leah dying,” she said. “And they're going to do the same thing to me that they did to Jenny. They're going to pick apart everything. And I've never told anybody about Leah.”

  “Then why do it?” Dry, interested. “Or is Riel making you?”

  Patty bit her own tongue, not hard but hard enough to sting. She shook her head. “I can't not. Leah would have, if it was me.” Leah was seventeen times braver and prettier and better spoken.

  “Yes,” Alan said. “Perhaps she was. But she wasn't any smarter, was she?”

  No. Because that was true. There wasn't much of anybody smarter than Patty.

  “You cared about her.” Patty blinked, found Frye eyeing her like a hiker unexpectedly confronted with a panicked doe.

  “She was my . . . my friend.” The word only almost got away from her. Just as well it didn't, because the clutch in her throat told her that it would have stuck there, jabbing her until tears spilled hot down her cheeks. She bit her lip. She wasn't going to cry in front of the enemy. “People need to know why she died. Why she thought she had to die—” She was losing it. She gulped, shook her head, and scrubbed angrily at the burning in her eye
s while Frye stared down into her glass, respectful of Patty's grief. Surprisingly. “She was just fourteen,” Patty finished, and put her hand across her mouth in surprise. If she'd spoken to her mother in that tone of naked resentment—

  But Frye just looked up, her lips as thin as if she were chewing them ragged on the inside of her mouth, and stared at Patty for a long, hard second. And then she shoved her glass aside and folded her hands together and frowned. “Look,” she said. “It's going to be hard enough on you tomorrow without this. You haven't talked to anybody?”

  “Just the lawyers. And they wanted to know about the crash and what happened on the bridge of the ship, and . . .”

  “They didn't ask you about Leah Castaign.”

  “They did. They just didn't—”

  Frye nodded and unfolded her hands, and Patty could see why people would follow her. Just her presence, her attention, eased the pain enough that Patty could keep talking. She clutched her golden robot-girl tight around her, and would not let her go.

  “You're afraid of the questions.”

  “I'm afraid they'll try to make her look stupid. And I'll be making too much of a mess of myself to stop them.”

  “All right,” Frye said. She glanced out the window one last time and resolutely turned her back on it, squaring herself, pressing her head against the back of the blue leather chair. “Look. Do you want to practice?”

  “Practice?” Alan? He didn't answer in words, but she felt his agreement, his observation. There was something he wasn't telling her, she thought. Alan? Is this safe?

  “Well,” he said slowly, “you testify before she does anyway. And we still might learn something. I'm sure she knows more than she's showing you; she has the air of keeping secrets.”

  Doesn't she just? All right. I'll have the breakdown. You keep an eye on General Frye. Her false bravado rang like tin.

  “Practice,” Frye said, and spread her hands. “You talk about Leah. I'll ask you obnoxious questions. And we'll work on making sure you stay angry and smart, not sad and scared. All right?”