Solstice

'You don't like small talk, do you?'

'Not in situations like this.'

'Good. I can approve of that. Helen?'

She closed the door on the adjoining office and picked nervously at her hair.

'You ought to congratulate her,' Clarke said. 'You've got the next director of the CIA standing next to you. Fired the present incumbent today and I'm ashamed to say I enjoyed it. Time to ring some changes around here. Sundog told me that at least. Subject to approval, of course, not that it will be a problem — I'm popular in Washington right now for some strange reason. A woman running the CIA, a black man in the White House. This is turning out to be an interesting century, don't you think?'

Lieberman's head was reeling. 'Hey, I'm a scientist. Don't expect me to understand this stuff. Helen here is the boss?'

'Sure,' she said. 'And Barnside — the bulldog, as you saw fit to describe him — is going to be my deputy.'

'Wow. Nice cop, tough cop act, huh? You've convinced me already.'

'If you like.' She nodded. 'And you're wrong on one point. You do understand what's going on very well. Without you, we'd have been lost. You were fast, you were incisive, and you had a good broad spread of the issues and the subjects we had to face.'

'Yeah. I'm a repository of half-baked information.'

'More than that,' the President objected. 'You're straight too, Michael. And that matters. That we can use.'

He wondered about that drink and then rejected the idea. 'I've been used enough for one lifetime, thanks. I don't want to sound ungrateful but I'd like to take Annie home now. It's getting late.'

Clarke put a huge hand on his shoulder. 'Hell, she's helping Benny zap aliens. And boy, does that kid need help. A little while longer, huh?'

'Right. So, Mr President, again: What do you really want?'

'You. I don't care where you put your office, In Langley. Next to me. You can be attached to my staff or Helen's. We got in this mess because we're inventing stuff without even stopping to think where it leads, and you can make sure that doesn't happen again.'

Helen put down the empty glass. It now looked like a prop in some play he was only just beginning to fathom. 'You said it yourself, Michael. How could Sundog have got that far without someone realizing the implications? Why didn't we see the syzygy issue earlier?'

'Yeah. But that's me. I criticize everything.'

'Fine,' Clarke said. 'Play the devil's advocate for us. Come to Washington. We'll fix up accommodation, schooling for Annie. The pay's good too.'

'This is my city. I love it here.'

'Sometimes you have to move on,' she said. 'I think this would be a good time. For both of you.'

He wished she weren't looking at him like this. As if it mattered in more ways than one. She could turn on the vulnerability in a flash, and he didn't know whether to believe it or not.

Clarke was not ready to let go. 'We need to learn. Science is great. Science is good for us. But all of a sudden it's just so big, and no one tries to get the whole picture. Why the hell didn't we build your solar satellite? I don't know. Maybe there were good reasons. Maybe not. But if we don't start learning along the way, one day all this clever stuff will bite us. Almost did this time. These things we invent right now are so huge we can't afford to screw up. We don't have anywhere else to go. Good or bad, this is the one planet we have.'

'I think,' Lieberman said slowly, 'the Children would have agreed with you there.'

'Sure. And why not? I don't mind saying it. In some ways they were right. Not in the solution they proposed, naturally. But the analysis, parts of that are just plain common sense. It's a delicate balance and we've been managing it badly.'

'No, no, no.' Lieberman shook his head and wished he were out of the room. 'This isn't me.'

Helen opened her briefcase, took out a pile of neatly stacked reports, and pushed them over the table. 'Sundog isn't the only case we have on our hands that is a little, shall I say, problematic. Read the files, Michael. Just do that for me. Then think about it. Talk to Annie. We have the President's plane leaving in the morning. You could be on it. Both of you.'

He looked at the documents, saw the seal, the red classified warning. 'If I read these, I don't have a choice, now, do I?'

'Yes,' Clarke said immediately. 'You can pull out and you'll never hear from us again.'

He stared at the papers and tried to wash away his curiosity. 'Thanks.'

'No,' Tim Clarke said, extending his arm. 'Thank you.'

It was like shaking hands with a bear. Then the President got up, headed back for the adjoining suite, Helen following him.

'Michael,' he said at the door.

'Mr President?'

'If you read that stuff, then just go home to bed and shrug it off, we really have got nothing to talk about. Understand me?'

CHAPTER 59 Decisions

'He beat you, huh?'

Annie's eyebrows popped up her wrinkling forehead. That look of indignation and outrage could have come straight from her mother. 'He didn't beat me,' she said, loudly enough to attract the attention of the three diners in the Fog City cafe, watching the clock pass through midnight, toying with their food. 'I let him win. There is a difference.'

'Well, the kid does live at the White House. I guess you've got to cut him some slack.'

She looked at him — fondly, he thought. They never spoke about what had happened, never even talked about the future. Maybe it was for fear of destroying this small piece of calm and sanity that sat in their lives like a fragile toy, ready to break if it got too much attention.

And yet… time was ticking away between them already, and the toy never became any less fragile. Annie didn't worry, not on the surface anyway. He had come to understand that. Instead she replaced anxiety with some still, mute form of acceptance. As if she were made for the world to mess around with as it liked.

'I think they offered me a job,' he said, and marvelled at the way the contents of those damn files kept reeling through his head. Helen certainly knew how to get his attention. Annie shrugged as if she knew this already. Her mother again. Always seeing through things.

Are you going to take it?'

A little circumspection wouldn't go amiss in the Sinclair family genes, he thought. 'It's not a simple decision, Annie.'

'No?'

This was crazy. There was some central tenet inside his life, he guessed, that made him want to treat everyone he met as an adult. It was a matter of courtesy, and it was ridiculous too. Annie was a kid, and much as he hated the idea, kids didn't prosper in a democracy. You needed to teach them. You needed to show them the way.

'Annie, we have to talk about this sometime. We've been running from what happened, and that was right then. But not now. We've got to think about the future. You're a kid. You need things I know nothing about. Like a school. A home. A family.'

Her face lost years, became defenceless, impossibly young. Back to a child again, right away. And it was just the idea of thinking things through that did this. 'It'll be fine. In the end.'

Annie flashed her eyes at him, Mo in there somewhere. 'And besides. I never really knew a family.'

Except the Children, he nearly added for her. And no one would be putting them forward for the good parenting award.

'I can go to school, can't I?'

He sighed. 'That's not the point, Annie. It's a question of suitability. What kind of a parent would I make? And your mom still has her parents in Scotland. Maybe — ' 'Scotland!'

Here comes the tears he thought. He could see the heads turning in the restaurant, out there at the periphery of his vision. But she wasn't crying. She was just pale and stone-faced. She got used to rejection after a while and he recognized the process. After a while it all became just a low, familiar pain, like a toothache.