Elizabeth Bear - Worldwired

He doesn't take his coffee cup and I don't take mine. I might just have a glass of brandy later. “You're welcome, Fred.” I don't return his smile, and his doesn't fade at all.

Yeah, we understand each other.

The heavy cherrywood door is barely shut behind us when Riel rounds on me. She's drawn like a wire, plucked vibrating, thinner and hollower, and the strands of steel in her bobbed dark hair are maturing into racing stripes. The gray might even look good on her, but her olive skin's faded to sallow, and she's curiously… displaced against the rich leather furniture and patterned carpets and wallpaper. As if she were a hologram, or half a step into another dimension.

She looks at me, and her mouth works, and she sets her cup down on the sideboard without looking. She shakes her head and says, “You could have warned me, Jen.”

“It's not the sort of thing that usually comes up in casual conversation.” Most people don't ask if you have a criminal record as part of the standard litany that goes with ascertaining your pigeonhole in society — job, marital status, kids. It might be funny if they did. Nah, I got picked up for possession and soliciting when I was a teenager, but I never did any time. Counseling. Suspended sentence. You know how it goes. So how do you like your job at the auto mall? “Besides, if the Chinese can find out, how could I have been expected to know you wouldn't ?”

Fred's leaned back against the wall a few feet away from me, watching with his head cocked to one side. If he were ten years younger I bet he'd have his ankles crossed and an insouciant smirk on his lips. His shoes gleam with polish and he's picking at the edge of his finger with his thumbnail, as if absentmindedly. Meanwhile, Riel paces, coyote in a cage, wearing a path between the window and the barrister's bookcases ranged along the back wall. She stops and pulls the curtain aside, staring out on spotlit bricks. “The Chinese shouldn't have found out. Those are sealed records.” It pains her to admit that. “Nobody should have been able to get at those.”

Oh, fuck me raw. “Nobody had to.”

“What?”

I have to shake my head and close both hands very tight to remember not to put the left one through the wall. I'm sure that paneling's expensive. “Barb knew.”

Fred looks up from his intensive survey of his fingernails. His eyes widen, and then narrow. “Your sister never said anything to me about it, Casey.”

“That's because she wasn't working for you, Fred. No matter what you thought when you signed her paychecks. She was working for Alberta Holmes.”

“Touché,” he says. “And if Alberta knew about your record—”

“Then Tobias Hardy sure as hell knows about it now.” Riel nods, a gesture like a gavel coming down. I've seen that decisiveness before. It worries me. “I'll patch up what I can in my testimony. It… well, you did well today, Jen.” It's grudging, and she can't look me in the eye when she says it. “Have you ever thought of going into politics?”

“And now you know why not.”

She snorts, a choked-off laugh that lifts her shoulders and sets her back a fraction of a step. “It doesn't matter. The cat and the bag and the horse we rode in on and all that other stuff. We'll deal with it the only way we can: by taking it on the chin. You were right not to lie.”

“Thank you.” A funny little twist that I hadn't even known was there unwinds in my belly.

“And anyway, we have other problems.”

Exasperation may be my least favorite emotion in the world. “Merci à Dieu. What now?”

Riel has a lot of personality flaws, but taking joy in keeping people guessing isn't one of them. “Janet Frye has had some documents registered as evidence, but I haven't been able to find out what was on them. Yet. I'm working on it.”

“Don't they have to provide you with copies?”

“It's not a trial,” Riel said, disgustedly. “It's a ‘discovery hearing.' The fiction is that we're not adversaries, but all trying to get at the truth.”

“Ostie de tabernac—”

“My sentiments exactly.”

Fred straightens up and steps away from the wall, looking like he grew an inch — and all of it composed of pure cold mean. “She didn't… she wasn't involved until after the attack, and then she more or less took credit for Canada having the capability to respond. Now that I think about it, what would she have to testify about?”

I shake my head. My years in America left me a little behind on commonwealth politics, even the strictly Canadian ones. “Have a little mercy, Fred.”

Riel shrugs and casts as if trying to remember where she left her coffee cup. I move to one side so she can see it on the sideboard; she beelines for it and drinks before she speaks, making a face at finding it cold. “The Home party likes to bill itself as the defense party, Jen. They supported the space program — including the black budget — when I was still fighting tooth and nail to get that money for health care and famine relief.” She shrugs again, a very Gallic one this time. “Sometimes you guess wrong.”

Yeah, I know. And sometimes there's just not enough paint to cover the whole house, so you do the sides that show. Money is not infinitely elastic, and that's as true for governments as it is for single moms. “So if she doesn't have anything to testify, what the hell does she plan to testify to?”

The look Fred shoots me is unalloyed pity. He raises one hand, wincing, and rubs at the back of his neck. I try not to feel sympathy. “Whatever the hell she and Hardy have cooked up to discredit us completely, of course. Hardy hands her the keys to Canada, she hands him the keys to the Huang Di, the Vancouver, and the Montreal, and everybody goes home happy. Except us, and Richard. And China — assuming Hardy and the opposition aren't in cahoots with some PanChinese faction or another.”

“Shijie Shu?” Riel says. They're both looking at me, but they're talking across me.

“That's what I was thinking.”

Cup clatters on saucer again. She almost drops them on the sideboard in her haste, and Fred winces. I bet that china set is older than all three of us put together. “It's tomorrow in China, isn't it? I need to call Premier Xiong. Now.”

“Connie—”

She turns back to me with her hand already on the softly gleaming brass doorknob, brows beetled over her unnaturally green eyes. “Make it quick.”

“What are they planning?”

“I don't know,” she says. The latch clicks as she turns the knob, but the hinges are too well oiled to creak. “But I'm thinking today was king's pawn to king four.”

Patty hesitated at the top of the stairs, but didn't stop. The murmur of voices followed her. She scraped her tongue against her teeth, wishing she'd drunk more ice water, trying to work loose the tannic residue from the wine. Papa Fred was trying to be polite and include her in with the grown-ups, and she wouldn't embarrass him, but she would rather have had a seltzer.

She let her fingertips skip across the whorled ball of the finial as she turned the corner, wood smooth-waxed and evenly ridged to the touch, and took three steps before she hesitated. She tucked her hair behind her ears with a jerky, violent motion, turned around, and turned toward the library instead. Papa Georges had loved two things: his spoiled, noisy parrots and his collection of antique books, and she was so homesick for the smell of paper and leather that she gulped a mouthful of spit and blinked stinging eyes.

There was somebody in the library before her. The door stood slightly ajar, and a dim light gleamed through the crack, illuminating a knife-blade width of patterned green and wheat-gold carpeting, catching a soft highlight on the scarred wood of the threshold. Patty cocked her head, listening, her fingertips resting lightly against the dark wood of the door as if it could conduct sound directly into her bones.