She just looks into her sister's face. Genie's eyes are closed; the shadows around them look like bruises. And then I see that Leah has their wrists tied together with a bandanna, cheesy blood brother scene from an old 2-D movie or a kid's holoshow. “Leah?”
“It's okay,” she says. “I made her better.” And smiles through the smears of red crusting across her mouth and in her long wheat-golden hair, where she must have carelessly rubbed her hand.
Richard. Did you?…
“No,” he says. “Genie's not infected. I can keep the nanites from propagating into her bloodstream. But I think she needs to go to a hospital now.”
2030 Hours
Tuesday 19 December, 2062
National Defence Medical Center
Toronto, Ontario
Goddamnit to hell, I am sick of hospitals. And Valens still insists we leave tonight. We need to be on the Montreal when he drops his bombshell in Hartford. I stand at Gabe's shoulder, Ellie on the other side, and Leah sulks in a chair by the waiting room door. “I wouldn't have hurt her,” she says, picking at the healing scab on her wrist.
Gabe and I look at each other, but it's Dr. Ellie, her lips pressed thin, who crosses the tile floor and crouches down beside Leah. “She needed six stitches, Leah.”
“She told me to do it.”
“You told her it would fix her lungs.”
I rest my steel hand on Gabe's shoulder. He feels like a rock, a granite statue. Unmovable. Richard. What are we doing here? Is there any way this plan of Valens's can work?
“I've been reviewing the climate change data,” he says, and it's Richard's voice, clean and plain, without a trace of Alan.
What's the word?
My right hand slips into my pants pocket, fretting the folding knife Leah used to open her wrist, and Genie's. Damned if I know why I picked it up. Old habit not to leave weapons lying around. Programming.
With my inner vision, I see his beaked nose angle to one side, following the twist of his mouth. “It's a very complicated system. A chaotic one, in fact.”
You're stalling. I squeeze the side of Gabe's neck where it runs into his broad back. He notices me, pulls his stare in from the middle distance, gives me a look that says it all until I slide my arm around his waist and make it look like I'm leaning on him. His heart rattles inside his chest.
“Well, the good news is that we probably won't have to worry about rising oceans for too much longer. The plankton die-off is the least of our problems. If the Atlantic continues to get colder at the poles, and the severity of the winters increases—” He shakes his head. “We're currently in an interglacial period. That will end.”
Interglacial period? You mean — between ice ages? Gabe's heart rate seems to drop slightly. I slow my breathing, hoping he'll unconsciously pace to it. His arm around my shoulders tightens slightly as Elspeth says something low to Leah and Leah kicks her heel against the molded burnt-orange leg of the chair.
“No.” A pause, as if the AI collected his thoughts, but I know it's a courtesy to us meat intelligences to let us keep up with him. “This is an ice age. Just a break between glaciations. There's two ways it can go from here: either a complete global warming, with shallow seas and tropical climates across the temperate zone — or a glacial period. One that might be severe enough to provoke a ‘snowball Earth' scenario.”
That's a vivid enough mental image that I don't really need to ask for a definition. Oh. How soon?
“On a geological scale… yesterday.”
I can't take this hospital for one more second. Not one. Richard. Could the nanites stop that? Could we build a control chip big enough — or a control AI, what about that? I squeeze Gabe one last time and slide away. “I'll meet you at the airport,” I tell him. “Give Genie my love before you go, okay?”
He nods. I clasp Ellie's shoulder before I tug her away from Leah and Leah to her feet. I should say something. Explain. Tell her I love her, but my voice won't work around the cold, slick stone blocking my throat. “You have a thought, Jenny?” Richard asks, almost sounding like himself again.
What Leah did, I whisper back. We could do that — only bigger and better. Why not?
“Because there's time to come up with a better solution,” he says.
I'm running out of time. If they ship everybody with the nanotech off planet, Richard—
“We'll think of something,” he answers, soothing. I shiver and fist my hands in my pockets, turning to look for Leah.
“Aunt Jenny?” She looks up at me, her mother Geniveve's gray-green gaze and Gabe's golden hair, and I close my eyes so the burn in their corners doesn't get away from me. I know what I wish I could do, with a kind of queasy finality I've only felt once before in my life. I would die for her, Richard. I lean down and put my lips against her ear. “Leah, mon coeur. Fais ce que tu dois. Toujours.” She startles in my arms, pulling back, and I catch her eye and smile. You do as you think you must. “Je suis fière de toi.”
“I'm proud of you, too,” she begins, reaching for me, but I slip out of her arms and away from Gabe before he realizes what's going on, and out the door. Melodrama, sure, but I don't feel I can leave without saying good-bye. When I see her again we will be soldiers, and once that happens I don't quite know if we can ever not be soldiers again.
Lake Ontario borders Toronto on the south, and I walk that way, fingering the pocketknife I took away from Leah with my right hand. You didn't answer my question, Dick. Could the nanotech handle this ecological crisis?
“Probably,” he answers. Reluctantly. “And remain as vulnerable to a cracker as you, and Koske, and the Montreal have proved—”
Vulnerable unless somebody like you is in charge.
“And vulnerable to me if I were in charge,” he argues, but I have the answer to that. “Do you really want a computer program standing in loco parentis over the entire human race? A cybernetic fairy godfather?”
Richard, if you wanted to rule the planet not a one of us could stop you.
“What would I want with a planet?”
My point exactly, sir— I suppose, thinking about it — I suppose it wouldn't actually have to be the lake. But the symbolism seems very important all of a sudden, and I'm still arguing with Richard when I come down ice-rimed, streetlit Queen's Quay, scale an angle of the fence around a waterfront museum — closed for the winter — and duck down under the pier where it's dark, skidding on my butt among trash and ice and litter. The ice feels like steel under my feet when I climb back up on them, more solid than the deck plates on the Montreal.
This is going to take some walking.
“I won't do this for you, Jenny.”
“Richard,” I say out loud, watching my breath coil and twine. I head south, balance hard to find on the windswept ice. The sun's barely down, but the wind cuts my skin like the knife in my pocket. “It's not for me. And I haven't decided yet what I'm doing, have I?”
“Gabe is coming,” Richard says, a tinge of Alan — a tinge of alien — creeping into his voice. “Leah, too. You scared them.”
I glance back over my shoulder, don't see anything moving, and press my elbow against my side so the bulge of the glass beads on Nell's feather — still in my pocket — dents my breast. “If I did it, it would be for them,” I answer, realizing how insane my one-sided conversation would look if anyone were watching. “Scientific detachment is all well and good, Richard. But Alberta's going to take a few thousand — maybe a few hundred thousand — people off the planet and leave the rest to rot here.”