Worldwired (35 page)

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 eyes 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?”

“Yes,” Patty said. “All right.”

Wainwright was becoming more comfortable than she had ever intended to be with having a ship that gave her backtalk, but she wasn't about to admit it. Especially not to the ship. “Dick.”

“Captain?”

“Is Charlie making any progress on the nanites?”

Richard didn't take over a monitor to present her with a visual image, but she almost heard him shrug. “They've stopped going blank on us. Whether that was because the recode was successful, or because whatever was blocking them decided to give it a rest, I'm not yet ready to hypothesize.”

“It's your ass on the line, too, Dick.”

“Trust me, Captain. I'm intimately aware.”

Wainwright
really
didn't like not having any translight pilots on board at all. Of course, Casey's testimony was finished. Wainwright could recall her now, if she wanted, and have one pilot on board the
Montreal
within twenty-four hours in case of emergency, counting travel time and time up the beanstalk. Not that the unwired, sublight pilots couldn't handle the ship perfectly well anywhere in normal space. Not that Richard wasn't perfectly capable of keeping the
Montreal
in tiptop shape. But it might be prudent to recall Casey.

On the other hand, Wainwright didn't really want Casey back until the trip to the shiptree that Riel had ordered had taken place. Because Casey would push to be allowed to go, and Wainwright didn't want that. And Riel obviously hadn't told her it was happening, because Wainwright hadn't gotten any annoyed messages. Which was good: Wainwright wanted a tidy, cautious little team—Charlie Forster, she thought, and Jeremy Kirkpatrick, and the
Montreal
's safety officer, Lieutenant Amanda Peterson, who had her shuttle cert and more hours pushing vacuum than any other two crew members put together. She could shift the EVA up to Sunday, send them with extra oxygen, let them take the
Gordon Lightfoot
and synch it in orbit with the shiptree and they could just
stay
there for a week, or until they figured it out or got killed, whichever came first. And
she'd
hang on to Elspeth and Gabe, thank you; they could do their work by remote, along with Leslie, and complain all they liked about it, too.

Wainwright pushed the thought of Leslie Tjakamarra away firmly and steepled her hands over her interface plate. No. She wouldn't recall Casey. Casey could stay safely on Earth for a while, out of the way. Patty Valens hero-worshipped Casey, whether Casey saw it or not, and could probably use the moral support—as Xie Min-Xue could use Patty's.

Wainwright grinned. And if she did say so herself, Jenny needed the vacation. Likely more so now than she had before. And it was good to have her out from underfoot for a while. “How's Miss Valens's testimony going?”

“You've been watching the news feeds, Captain.”

“Of course I have. But I prefer to hear it from the horse's mouth, so to speak.”

“Patty says she is fine,” the AI answered, a slight formality tingeing his voice as a hint of Alan's personality overlaid Richard's. “She thanks you for asking.”

And isn't it weird that Patty talks to Alan rather than Richard, when they're the same . . . person?
Which reminded Wainwright of something else she needed to attend to. “And has the UN decided to accept your offer to testify yet?”

“They are discussing. The legal implications are daunting.”

“And if they declare you a person? What changes?” He didn't answer. She reached up manually, when she could have blinked a command or issued one verbally, and changed the image on the second largest monitor to a shot of Mars from the Arean Orbital Platform. She stared at the dusty red globe, the glitter of its icy poles, and fiddled her fingertips against her trousers.