“Whatcha gonna do?”
I think back twenty years, twenty-five years. To a girl I used to know and the things she thought she had to do. She didn't have a clue how hard things could get. “I'm going to call Fred Valens,” I say, amazed I can get the words out so smooth. I swill coffee, stand up, snatch my scarred black jacket off the back of the booth. “I'm going to turn Indigo and Farley in. You have a way to get Indigo a message that Farley won't see?”
“Indigo? I got an e-mail box, but she ain't been answering.”
“Face, let her know what I'm doing. Tell her to get out of Canada.” It's not a plan. It's not even close to a plan. But when you don't have a plan, sometimes the controlled application of chaos will shift things enough that you can find a plan. “You tell her Genevieve Casey says her Uncle Bernard would have had more sense, and she doesn't have to trust me but if she's smart she'll do what I say. You tell her Farley works for Alberta, and you tell her I don't. Clear on that?”
Slow sharklike unveiling of his knife-tip smile, and Razorface shakes his head admiringly. “You kicking over the board again, Maker?”
“Fuck,” I say, fastening my buckles against the cold. “Fuck, yeah.”
I hope Gabe doesn't worry too much when he wakes up to find me gone. Probably not; I get these moods every so often. He knows that by now.
An individual woman can't do a damned thing to change the world. It's a tremendous machine, a monstrous automaton that will grind you up to grease the wheels and pound you into cookies. I know that. I know it better than you might think.
I've got an eagle feather in my pocket and — not too long ago, standing on the deck of a space station, watching the Earth spin like a roulette wheel under my feet — I promised the ghost of Bernard Xu I'd try to change the universe for him. Because I felt like I owed him something, and maybe he would have wanted that. Or maybe he would have wanted me to fuck off and die, considering I testified against him at his trial.
But Bernard — Peacock — doesn't get a vote anymore.
One of the drawbacks of being dead.
I walk for a long time. I like walking; it clears the head. Fred Valens is already at work when I get there, although it's before sunup. Or possibly the man is a robot who never goes home. Except he's got a grandkid he seems to like. Fucking people won't stop being human even when you want them to.
I take that back.
Alberta Holmes is a goddamned machine.
I rap on Valens's open office door and go in. He's in shirtsleeves, and for the first time I notice the circles under his eyes and the fact that his hair needs washing.
“Casey.” He stands, not bothering to power down his interface. Dancing images hover in the air over his desktop. It looks like a thermal map of the Atlantic Ocean, at a glance, and I wonder what he's working on. “An unexpected pleasure this early in the day.”
“I'm buying you breakfast,” I say. “We need to talk.”
He glances at his desktop, taps it off without a word, and gets his coat. We walk — all the way down to Larry's West-Side restaurant, steaming like a pair of old-fashioned locomotives in the brutal cold. “Snow tonight,” Valens says.
“I hadn't heard.” I crane my head back, the sky overhead limpid with the first glow of morning, a soft periwinkle shade like baby blankets. “Fred, what's troubling you?”
“I could ask you the same.” He's got a swinging, confident stride. I keep up without effort. “Or is this just a friendly fence-mending?”
Wry irony in his voice. I stop and look at him hard; he takes four more steps and turns back to me, sidelit by a streetlamp dimming in the gray light of dawn. “Jesus, Fred. Who told you that you could go get human on me, you son of a bitch?”
“On the Montreal, when I gave you that gun, I half expected you to shoot me in the back.”
“I still might.” I start walking again, and he falls into step. “Fred, I hate your guts. Don't get me wrong. You're a slick, callous son of a bitch with an agenda that bends for nobody.” He doesn't argue, just lets the sound of footsteps fill the next five seconds. “But I think you're one of the good guys. Damn you to hell.”
He coughs. I look over, but he's turning to follow a passing car with his eyes. One of his broad-fingered hands slips into his pocket, and then he reaches up as if scratching his ear. As casually as I can, I switch my hip on, glancing at it as if checking for messages. One blinks: a request to open an encoded transmission channel.
I enter an authorization and slip the plastic oblong back into my pocket. A moment later, Valens's subvocalized tones fill my ear. “You have some information for me, Casey?”
And it is down to us. You and me, Fred. The way it started, all those years ago. The palm of my steel hand itches. “Holmes is planning on having the prime minister killed.” Okay, I don't know that for a fact. But you never got a bunny to jump by walking up to it quiet like.
Valens, give him credit, doesn't stop. Doesn't look up from the sidewalk, glance at me, or pull his hands out of the pockets of his insulated coat. “You're sure.”
Not a question, and he doesn't glance at me.
“Sure enough.” I cough lightly, cover my mouth with my meat hand. “Bernard Xu's niece is involved. You remember Bernard, I trust? She's working with somebody who reports directly to Holmes. I saw him at Unitek, but I only know his first name. Farley.”
He shoots me a look. “Riel is trying to shut us down. How do you know the assassination plot isn't my doing, Casey?”
“I—” Damn. “Fred, I just know.” And that's when all the puzzle pieces start dropping into place. Richard's concerns. The colony ships. Unitek spending money like water on something with, at best, a very speculative rate of return. Not that that's conclusive. The city we're walking through wouldn't be here if somebody sometime hadn't taken a gamble without knowing what was on the other side, and my own ancestors wouldn't have been here to get their asses handed to them if their ancestors hadn't taken a similar gamble ten, fifteen thousand years before that. All circumstantial as shit, but generally there's a reason people make that kind of a leap of faith. And a reason why I wound up with some white girl's name, as well.
And then there's Valens's desperation, when Fred Valens desperate is a thing that stretches my credibility. And a thermal map of the Atlantic ocean, hanging in the air over his desktop, early enough in the morning that nobody else should have been in the office.
“Fred?”
“Yes?”
I close my eyes, the words slipping one by one past the constriction in my throat. “How long have we got?”
Ice crunches under his shoes, and another car glides past, whisper-silent on a turbine engine. He doesn't raise his head to look at this one. “A century,” he answers quietly. “Maybe two.”
Richard? Are you hearing this?
“I am now,” Richard says in my ear. I feel his hesitation. “I'm going to need data I can't get on the Montreal, dammit, and that's going to take time. Ellie and Gabe have schematics for the control chips. Can you help them build some?”
What, you want me to piggyback into the Unitek system or something?
“A regular library computer would be less likely to get us caught.”
Yeah, I can do that. Richard, did you know how high the stakes were?
A sensation like a shrug. “I had a scientific wild-ass guess. But no, I didn't know. What are you going to do?”
I think about the war I was in nearly thirty years ago; World War Three, for all they don't call it that. They call it the PanMalaysian Conflict, the South African Conflict, the Panama Action — which was mostly in Brazil, in another crystalline demonstration of the accuracy of history, and stretched as far south as Argentina. A war provoked by then-rising oceans, crop failures, erratic and burgeoning storms, the odd brushfire holy war run out of control. I steal a glance at Valens, who seems to assume my silence is contemplation. “Fred.”