“It’s called Icarus at Night,” Ilich said. “The painter was a man named Kingston Xu. He was the first great artist of Mars. When this painting came out, he was almost deported back to Earth. Can anyone tell me why?”
Teresa felt the others glance at each other and at her. She didn’t know and she didn’t care. Her mind felt like it had been sandblasted. There wasn’t anything there.
“The sheet?” Shan Ellison said, tentatively.
“Yes,” Ilich said. “That’s what old medical graft material used to look like. And the man, you’ll notice, is dark skinned. The early history of Mars had a great deal of proxy conflict between the nations that had founded different colonies. This model that Xu used was from a place called Pakistan. The artist was from a place called China that was its enemy at the time. The two were at war. Showing an enemy in an explicitly healing and erotic context was very dangerous, politically speaking. Xu’s work could have put him in jail. Or in forced labor.”
Or the pens, Teresa thought, but that wasn’t right. They didn’t have pens before the protomolecule.
“Then why did he do it?” Teresa was almost surprised to hear her voice.
“He thought it was important,” Ilich said. “Xu felt that all humanity was part of a single family, and that the differences that divide us are trivial compared to the deep uniting factors that bring us together. That’s why your father brought this painting here. The unity of the human project is a Laconian ideal.”
It was a strange thought. They were torturing Holden right now over political differences. They’d killed Timothy, and maybe Timothy had come to Laconia to kill them. And now here they were, all pretending that a long-dead man’s barely concealed penis was a symbol of how much they were all in it together. This was stupid.
It was worse than stupid. It was dishonest.
Ilich, maybe sensing her mood growing dark, started moving the seminar on to a collection of sculptural abstracts that had only recently arrived from Bara Gaon. Teresa was just starting to walk toward them when Dr. Cortázar appeared, smiling, around a corner.
“Colonel!” the older man said. “Here you are. I was wondering if I could borrow Teresa for a few minutes. Routine medical scan.”
It caught Ilich off balance. His carefully built demeanor shifted, and she saw the flash of annoyance in his eyes. Even anger. It made her want to side with Cortázar.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I can review on my own later.”
Ilich’s smile slid back into place. “I don’t know that—”
Cortázar took her hand. “It won’t be long. Right back. Everything fine.”
As she let herself be led away, she felt something like joy or anger. A little ember of rebellion still red and hot in the ashes of her world. She tried to hold on to it. Cortázar was humming to himself. He seemed so pleased, he was almost skipping. She waited until they were safely out of earshot before she spoke.
“Is everything okay?”
“Perfect. Lovely. I have some ideas about what happened. You know. With the high consul. There are some tests I want to run.”
“Baselines?”
Cortázar’s smile widened. “Something like that, yes.”
They walked together through the State Building and to the private medical wing. The guards all knew them. There was nothing that would raise an alarm with anyone. Teresa had to trot to keep up with Cortázar’s long strides.
Nothing felt at all off until they walked into the medical suite—the same one she’d been going to for her annual checkups and occasional maladies for longer than she could remember—and Elvi Okoye was sitting at the doctor’s station. Even then, Teresa didn’t know what was wrong except that Cortázar’s mood soured instantly.
“Dr. Okoye. I’m afraid this isn’t a good time.”
“I found some notes I need to clarify with you,” she said.
“This isn’t a good time,” Cortázar said again, his tone of voice growing harder. The rebelliousness and warmth in Teresa’s chest shifted into something more like dread. She didn’t understand it, but she trusted it. You should keep an eye on me, Holden said sometime back in her memory. It was connected to Cortázar’s voice. Nature eats babies all the time.
“If there’s something critical going on with Teresa,” Elvi Okoye said, “maybe we should let Admiral Trejo know about it.”
The moment stretched. For a moment, Teresa was back in the cave. Timothy told her to put her hands over her ears. She was breathing too fast. The world started to sparkle at the edges, so bright it was just like darkness.
Cortázar looked at her. “You can go,” he said. “We’ll do this another time.”
Teresa nodded, turned, and began the walk back toward the museum and her peer class with a sense that something important had just happened. Something dangerous. And she wasn’t sure what it was.
Chapter Thirty-Two: Bobbie
Copy copy, White Crow. Flight path amended. You good to go, sa sa?”
“Heard and acknowledged,” Bobbie said. “Thank you, Control.”
The tightbeam to Callisto’s traffic control center dropped, and Bobbie shifted the little skiff, feeling the gentle pressure as the thrusters fired. It wasn’t even enough to move her crash couch, but it bent the trajectory of her ship just enough. The display had a hard lockout that let her overlay the path of the whole plan without fear of anything leaking back. Where the Tempest was, where the Storm would appear, and where she needed to be.
She stretched her hands, and the powered gloves of the Laconian armor shifted with her. Blue showed through gaps in the black paint job. Blue and black were the wrong colors, and always would be for her. Her armor was supposed to be red. She opened an encrypted tightbeam and waited the seconds as it was confirmed. Everything was happening so close in, there was hardly any light delay. This wouldn’t be either strategic or close quarters, but the messy part in between.
“Captain,” Jillian Houston said.
“We have approval from traffic control. Monitor our position and stand by for go.”
“Copy that,” Jillian said, and dropped the line. It was good discipline, not leaving the connection up longer than required. Not that it would have made much difference now. By the time the Laconian forces tracked the signal, it would all be over. Or at least too far along to stop.
The White Crow was a terrible little ship. Even if Bobbie hadn’t been taking it into combat, she’d have wanted a vac suit buttoned up tight. The cloth covering the bulkheads was pale, with lines of white showing where age and radiation had degraded it. The crash couches were lumpy and stiff, and slow to react to changes in the ship’s vector. The handholds on the walls had all been polished by generations of touching, the way stone steps were supposed to be worn away in medieval cathedrals back on Earth. It was a ship that had outlasted its time, but its drive still worked, and Bobbie didn’t need much more than that out of it.
She waited through minutes that felt long as they passed and sudden when they were gone. The outward-pushing, inward-pulling dilation of time before battle. It felt good.
“How are we down there, Rini?” she asked. The response delay from the airlock wasn’t much less than when she’d been talking to Callisto.