Worldwired (39 page)

The good news is, the PanChinese also get only two.

From the way the dark-suited individuals who look to be the security team are hustling to keep up, the slender-shouldered man in the lead has to be Premier Xiong. I'm more sure of it because he looks familiar, if bigger than he does on the feed, and I've gone from somebody who wouldn't recognize Minister Shijie if he fell at my feet to being able to pick his sad-bulldog face out of a crowd at two hundred paces. A thousand, if you gave me a sniper scope.

That shark in the mahogany suit is still right alongside him, and there's another attaché of some sort bringing up the rear of the pack.

I step back, getting myself between Min-xue and Patty and the Chinese, and let Riel and Frye deal with the guests. Min-xue's indrawn breath is audible from where I'm standing.

Oh, this is going to be fun.

Except Premier Xiong stops in front of Riel as if there were a microphone stand marking the spot, nods his head—a quick birdlike dip of the chin that acknowledges the petite woman in front of him and brings him momentarily down to her level without making a production of it—and thrusts out his right hand with the aplomb of the father of the groom sorting out the groom's guests from the bride's. A hush falls like snow.

“Prime Minister,” he says, a very white, slightly predatory smile illuminating his homely face, “it is a pleasure to finally meet you in person.”

The swing of the Foucault pendulum might be the arrested pulse of a giant heart. The whole room feels like an in-held breath, and I can
feel
the pressure of all those eyes.

And then Connie Riel takes two broad steps forward, and reaches out, and grabs Xiong's hand in both her own just as if she always meant to, and the collective heart of everybody in the room thumps once, hard, and begins to beat again. “Premier Xiong.” Her flat Albertan accent rings harsh against his musical tones. “I look forward to a new era of cooperation between our governments. Once we have set these differences behind us.”

I don't think either she or Premier Xiong notice the way General Shijie's brow smooths, and a slight smile turns up the corners of his mouth, but I'm suddenly certain why I had that premonition that I ought to make sure I showed up today.

Xiong steps back and offers Riel a short crisp bow, which she returns without the heel-click. He turns toward me when he pivots away, and I catch the devilish glitter in the coffee-dark eyes under his thinning brows and almost swear out loud.

They set that up. Son of a bitch. And from the stricken look on Frye's face, I'd have to say it was worth it. Even though I
really
don't like the way the minister of war is smiling.

“Right,” Riel says, as Xiong strides away, and glances up at me with a sly, sidelong smile. Some days, I really don't mind having taken three bullets for her. “Let's go in there and make the world safe for parliamentary democracy with pronounced socialist leanings, shall we?”

I'm not surprised when Fred is the only one who laughs.

Patty Valens's knowing smirks might almost have been enough to shake Janet's resolve, if she hadn't already made up her mind. The kid didn't know anything; the kid
couldn't
know anything. She held that thought cleanly in her mind, hard and fast, as she mounted the steps to the podium. Because if Patty knew something, then Fred would know it, and if Fred knew it, Janet Frye had no illusions that she would have lived long enough to take that stage and look up to meet the expectant eyes of the world.

Frederick Valens was not one of the good guys, and he never had been. And he would have very quietly, very thoughtfully seen that she was out of the way if he'd known what Toby gave her.

If he had known what she had agreed to do.

The funny thing was, she hadn't decided until this morning. She didn't think she'd slept in four days, and she'd had far more to drink than anybody in her position ought to. And it hadn't been Patty Valens's transparent manipulations that had made her mind up, once Patty had realized there was a hook in Janet's lip that could be worked. It hadn't been the simple dignity of Casey's testimony, or the way Captain Wu had broken down on the stand. No. That wasn't what made her hand shake when she shook the secretary general's hand.

It was the memory of Constance Riel looking her dead in the eye and snapping,
And then if you want to hand PanChina the keys to the castle, you can do it on your own watch.

Damn you to hell, Connie,
she thought, as she stated her name. Her oath was ashes in her mouth. She raised her right hand anyway and thought of Canada and the good of the commonwealth.

She took one deep breath and found Connie's chair at Canada's table, and made damn sure that Constance Riel was looking into her eyes when she opened her mouth and said, “Before I make any other statements regarding my knowledge of circumstances leading up to the tragic events of last Christmas, I need to reveal a few very important facts that have not yet entered the record.”

She needed another breath. Two, maybe. She needed a drink of water, so she took one, and let the ice click against her teeth.
Look pretty for the cameras, Connie,
she thought.
They're going to be closing in for the reaction shot.

“On the morning of October eleventh of this year,” Janet said, “I was introduced by Unitek executive Tobias Hardy to a gentleman whose name I was not given, but who was identified to me as an agent of the United States of America . . .”

The pandemonium as she continued was even grander than she'd anticipated. She wasn't surprised when Shijie Shu got up from the Chinese table, made his excuses to the premier, and headed for the door. She did notice that none of his security or the PanChinese attachés went with him, and thought that was a little odd, but she wanted to get what she had to say into the record before her nerve broke once and for all.

She kept talking. It wasn't like she'd be the first politician to wind up in jail.

The Benefactors were still singing. And Leslie was still trying to overlay his map-in-song of local space with their map-in-curved-space time. It was interesting, because not even the relative significance of objects was the same; for Leslie, a bright object was of more significance than a dark object. For the birdcages, the emphasis lay on
heavy
objects, although their scale of reference was fine enough that objects no more massive than Leslie's fist registered at a distance, and up close they could sense on a fine enough scale to read the text on his space suit by the different specific gravity of the letters compared to unmarked portions.

It was promising. If they could only be made to understand the concept of symbology, and of words, he might be able to start establishing a pidgin. If the boredom didn't kill him first.

It wouldn't have been so bad if Leslie actually had nothing to do. He could have sat back, played long-distance draughts with Charlie, and dreamed of good lager. Unfortunately, the interior of the shiptree was exactly where he needed to be right now, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it except ride resolutely behind Charlie's eyes and swear quietly in his ear.

This was what he had come for. Charlie and Jeremy had discovered an environment—an entire
ecosystem
—populated by dozens of never-before-seen species, all of them seemingly communicating in some matter that was neither intuitively obvious nor easily dismissable. Leslie's dream, his obsession, his life's work, spread out for him like a banquet on the other side of a wall of shatterproof glass. He could see through Charlie's eyes, hear through his ears, lay his hands on something as if Leslie ran his own hands over the surface. Charlie's body became, for Leslie, a sort of almost-perfect remote drone or probe.

But it wasn't the same as being there. And it got in the way of Charlie doing his own work, too.

Richard helped out as best he could, keeping Leslie supplied with live images of Earth, of Piper Orbital Platform, of a 3NN anchor providing analysis of Frye's “explosive” testimony, and of the birdcage and the shiptree hanging calmly in the void, of the
Gordon Lightfoot
bright with reflected sunlight, a single sharp-edged dot like the morning star, still synchronized with the vaster, darker shape of the shiptree. He also let Leslie watch his own view of the
Montreal
's bridge—full of people, unusually so for a ship not under way. Genie was on her way through with her HCD in her hand, headed for the pilot's ready room that was now her exclusive domain. Wainwright was in her chair, sipping coffee and going over reports.

Leslie's fingers itched, and he suddenly wished he'd screamed for rescue, twisted the captain's arm until she yelped.
Third time's the charm.
He wanted to be where Charlie and Jeremy were, doing what they were doing, not somewhere bodiless, cold and eyeless in the dark.

Greedy,
he reprimanded. He might not be able to see, or feel, or even feel his body—Richard assured him the suit was still intact, that the Benefactors were still keeping him breathing in there somehow, as bizarre and unsustainable as that seemed—but he could sense things no human had ever sensed before: The weight of the
Montreal
and the shiptree curving space time. The gravity well of the sun, like a mountain looming on the horizon, the foothills that were the Earth and the moon, the local flickers and fluctuations of the birdcage aliens surrounding him, manipulating epic forces on a scale as precise as the stroke of a surgical scalpel, in patterns modulated and refined to echo themes he gave them.

Playing him the music of the spheres.

He wouldn't permit himself to remember that the odds were a thousand to one that he was going to die out here.

You're where you belong. And you'll get home somehow.

Eventually.

In the meantime, he kept himself busy talking to Charlie, and to Jeremy—through Charlie—and writing exhaustive reports on the data he could collect in between Charlie's xenobiological pursuits. Although, right this instant, both of them were too focused on Dick's feed-via-Casey of what was going on in New York for either one of them to be accomplishing a lot.

There's something to be said for hive minds,
Leslie thought.

Charlie didn't have to look up from his perusal of a recovered feather—
feather-analogue
—to engage the conversation.
Ours, or the shiptree's?

Don't you think two hive minds would be a bit coincidental?

There is that.
Charlie hooked a toe under a projecting root to keep from drifting, curling his legs to hunch himself closer to the tree-analogue he was examining. Leslie's kinetic sense wanted to echo the movement, wanted to feel his muscles stretch and play as Charlie's did. Bad enough he found himself imagining breathing hard when Charlie clambered around the chambered arboretum that seemed to comprise the majority of the shiptree's interior.
And frankly, I'm not sure what we have here is a hive mind, so much as a Gaia-type intelligence. The whole ecosystem, including the ship, seems to function as one beastie; not a threaded intelligence, like Dick, and not separated intelligences, like humans, and not a single big unified brain split into however many bodies it happens to need at a given moment, as I suspect the birdcages are, but something more like the internal structure of the human mind, where various sections handle various functions autonomously, irrespective of whether the consciousness knows what's going on at all.

So you're suggesting this thing's reptile brain is—

Actually housed in a reptile. More or less. Yeah.
Charlie's knees ground as he straightened his legs, letting himself drift. Leslie winced in sympathy.
Or maybe a shrubbery. The plants are awfully friendly around here.
He brushed away a vine that tried to twine around his waist.

And how do they communicate, then?

Leslie felt the shrug as Charlie continued.
Chemically? Electrically? Same way your brain does, I guess. Jeremy's done a little poking around here and there; not only is the air we're not breathing a soup of pheromones, but there's nanosurgeons through all this plant life and the whole thing is threaded with conductive material. Heck, if I'm right, the buckytubes that give the thing's hull its tensile strength are also its brain. Based on Richard's theory that all you need for consciousness is the right kind of piezoelectric activity in any sort of substrate that will support it, buckytubes are ideal, as long as they have neurons and synapses. More or less.

“I'm not defining consciousness this week,” Richard said.

Good. Then I won't have to wrestle you for my Nobel Prize.
Charlie reached out and caught the branches of a tree-analogue in his gauntleted fist, wiping beads of condensation off his face plate.
Dammit. I've had it with this suit. Still nothing doing with the culture plates?

“Charlie,” Richard said, “I'd prefer you waited the full eleven days. I don't like you risking yourself unnecessarily.”

I don't like risking myself at all,
Charlie replied.
But we've established there's nothing toxic to earthling life in here. The proteins and sugars even twist the right way. And I've got a belly full of alien nanosurgeons that should be able to handle anything I might get myself into. If I wasn't thinking hard about Persephone and Eve, I'd even consider taking a bite out of one of those things that look like azure figs.