Tad Williams - Sea of Silver Light

"We?" asked Christabel's father.

Ramsey paused, nodded. "Actually, I may be . . . a bit busy in the months to come. But I'm sure any decent military lawyer will be able to get it handled. We'll find one if you don't know one already."

"Please, take the money, Mrs. Sorensen," said Sellars. "Buy yourself a house off the base. Insulate yourself a little. This will go on for a long time. I'm sure you will have to struggle to keep your privacy."

"I don't want to move off the base," she replied angrily.

"As you choose. But take the money. Use it to give Christabel some freedom."

"What about the boy?" Ramsey asked. "I can make some arrangements if you'd like—before things get too hectic. Find him a good foster home. . . ."

"I don't know what you're talking about." Kaylene Sorensen was not going to be jollied or led. Ramsey suspected she was going to be a very good trial witness. "That boy's not going anywhere. I haven't spent all that time washing and feeding him just to hand him off to someone who wouldn't care. He's staying with us, the poor little thing." She looked at her husband. "Isn't that right, Michael?"

Major Sorensen had the good grace to smile. "Uh . . . yeah. Sure. The more the merrier."

"Christabel," her mother said, "go get. . . ." She frowned and turned to Sellars. "What's his name? His real name?"

"Carlos, I believe." Sellars was smiling, too. "But I don't think he likes it much."

"Then we'll think of something else. I'm not going to have a foster son named Cho-Cho. It sounds like a train or something." She waved at her daughter. "Go on, honey—go get him."

Christabel looked at her strangely. "He's going to live with us?"

"Yes, he is. He doesn't have anywhere else to go."

The little girl thought this over for a moment. "Okay," she said, then trotted into the bedroom. She emerged a moment later pulling the protesting boy by the arm. He had taken off his suit, but as if he had been uncertain of what to do next, wore only his T-shirt and underwear.

"You're going to come live with us," Kaylene Sorensen said. "Is that all right?"

He looked at her as though peering up out of a hole. Ramsey thought he might actually try to run away. "Live with you?" he asked. "Like, su casa ? In your house?"

"Yes." She nodded emphatically. "Tell him, Mike."

"We want you to live with us," the major said. To his credit, he definitely sounded like he meant it now. "We want you . . . to be part of our family."

The boy stared from one to the other. "Not going to school," he said.

"You most certainly are," Kaylene Sorensen told him. "And you will take regular baths, too. And we'll get those teeth fixed."

"Teeth. . . ?" He looked a little stunned. One hand crept up to finger his mouth. Then his expression changed. "Gonna live with the weenit?"

"If you mean Christabel, yes. She'll be . . . your sister, I guess."

He stared at them again, calculating, still suspicious, but also glimpsing the outlines of something about which Ramsey could only guess.

"Okay," he said.

"If you don't say bad words, I'll let you play with Prince Pikapik," Christabel promised.

He rolled his eyes, then the two of them wandered off to the other room—lawsuits, court-martials, even a dead man talking on the wallscreen not enough to keep them around while grown-ups were doing boring grown-up things.

"Good," said Sellars. "This is all good. Now we have a few more matters to discuss."

This truly is the story of the century, Ramsey marveled. I wonder if someday, half a millennium from now, people will be studying what we're saying here today. He looked at the bedroom doorway. The other wallscreen was on. Christabel was lying on the floor talking to a stuffed toy. Cho-Cho was watching cars explode.

No, he thought, and turned his attention back to what Sellars was saying. People never remember this stuff, no matter how important it is.

"I'm sorry I'm late. I've only been back a day and I still feel . . . pretty strange. And you know how slow the buses are downtown." Renie looked around. "The office isn't quite what I expected."

Del Ray laughed and waved his good hand dismissively at the windowless space, the small screen on the unadorned white wall. His other arm was pulled tightly against his chest in a sling, the damaged hand invisible under a knot of bandages. "It's only temporary—I've got my eye on a much nicer one at the main UN building on Farewell Square." He settled back in his chair. "Bureaucracies are a funny thing. Three months ago you would have thought I had a communicable disease. Now I am suddenly everyone's best friend again because the smell of a wrongful-termination suit is on the wind and my face is on the newsnets." He looked at her. "But not your face. It's too bad—it's a nice face, Renie."

"I don't want it—the attention, anything. I'm tired. I just want some quiet." She lowered herself into the chair facing the desk. "It's a miracle I'm up and walking around, but those old-fashioned tanks were actually better than what some of the other people in the network went through. Let us move our limbs so the muscles didn't atrophy, things like that. And, of course, we didn't get bedsores."

"You'll have to tell me one day about the others. I still don't entirely understand."

"It will be a long conversation," she said. "But yes, I'll tell you. It's quite a story."

"So was our end. How is your father?"

"Grumpy. But also a bit different, somehow. Actually, I'm on my way to see him."

He hesitated. "And your brother?"

She tried to smile but it wasn't easy. "No change yet. But at least I can touch him now."

Del Ray nodded, then began to look around on his desk and in the drawers. For a moment Renie thought that he was pretending to be busy—that he wanted her to leave. "I don't think there's such a thing as an ashtray in this office," he said at last. "Shall I go find you one?"

It took her a moment. "You know, I haven't started smoking again. I wanted one so bad while I was stuck in that place, the VR network, but once I got out, it just seemed. . . ." She moved nervously in the chair. "Things just seemed different. But I don't want to keep you away from your work, Del Ray. I just wanted to thank you face-to-face for getting things smoothed out—with the military, the police; all that."

"Still a long way to go. But the military doesn't know that it was Sellars who tipped them off, and they're more than a bit embarrassed a bunch of armed mercenaries were about to take over one of their bases without them even noticing, so they will be just as happy if it all goes away quietly. And as I said, people want to be my friends now. Important people."

He liked it, she realized. Did she begrudge it to him? She didn't think so. "But I still want to say thanks. After all that, I think I would have gone mad if they'd kept me in some government cell."

"So would I," he laughed. "The first time I saw the sky again I burst into tears."

"I didn't have much crying left in me," Renie said. "But I know what you mean." She cautiously levered herself up out of the chair. I might as well be an old woman, she thought. "Like I said Del Ray I won't keep you, got to get going if I'm going to catch my bus."

He reached into his pocket with his good hand. "Here, Renie. For God's sake, take a taxi. A real one."

It hurt. "I don't want any more money from you, Del Ray."

For a moment he too looked stung, then he shook his head slowly. "You don't understand. There's a lot more where that comes from, and it doesn't come from me. I've been talking to our friend Sellars while you've been out of touch. He's hooked me up with a man named Ramsey. You're going to get a surprise, Renie. But trust me, Sellars would want you to take a taxi. Use this."