Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict (32 page)

“Let me be very honest here, very forthright,” Praxis said quietly. “We have received intelligence that you are making plans to bring such weapons into North America, contrary to this treaty. And your government has apparently received comparable intelligence suggesting the Praxis Family Association intends the same. I tell you, in all truth, that I know of no such plans on our part. I pray that you and your government have no plans, either.”

He expected the three men to deny knowing what their government might be thinking and planning, as they were simply a “community association” pursuing charitable goals. Instead, Zhang steepled his fingers in front of his chin.

“I perceive from the distant look that occasionally passes through her eyes,” he began, nodding toward Stacy, “that the young woman here—your great-granddaughter, I believe? My congratulations on such prolificalness! That she has a …
zhuang zhi wu nao,
” he said in an aside to Fu.

“The brain fixture that lets her talk to the computer minds,” Fu supplied.

“Yes,” Zhang said. “This is nothing that your generation and mine now practice. I can sense that you and your first daughter here are not so—‘cut’ is the word, I think? But the younger ones, they have made this leap. My own two sons, my daughter also.” He turned to face his colleagues, and they nodded balefully.

Their children as well,
Praxis inferred. “It is the same among our younger generation, too,” he replied.

“Do you understand then,” Zhang went on, “that from even a small nuclear bomb the …
dian ci mai chong?
”

“Electromagnet pulse,” Fu supplied.

“That this pulse,” Zhang continued, “would not simply shut down the machine intelligences and inconvenience our trading and business partnerships. It would send huge voltages into our children’s heads. Far beyond any local damage from the explosion and radiation, this pulse would destroy their brains. Kill almost an entire generation, instantly.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Praxis said slowly.

“We
do
think of it,” Zhang said. “That is why Kitsap is so important. We value our children. We want to keep them safe.”

“That is my goal as well,” Praxis replied.

“Then we understand each other?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Good! … Is there more to discuss?”

“No, I think not.”

As they were leaving, after Paul had retrieved his weapon and they once more stood in the parking lot, signaling for the AFR-III to return, Callie asked, “What did that accomplish?”

“You don’t know?” Praxis asked, surprised. “Aren’t you a mother as well?”

“He thinks we now share a common ground,” Stacy told her aunt.

“We do share it,” he said. “They will think before acting.”

“And so … do we relax our guard?” Paul asked.

“Oh, no!” Praxis told him. “Not one bit.”

* * *

Kenny Praxis stood in the wide strip of morning light that came through the tall windows of his
pied-à-terre
on the Oakland waterfront. On the bed before him lay Angela, asleep. That first morning she came to him she had told Kenny over breakfast about the fight with her aunt, her long night of decision, and the wrenching effort of leaving her home of almost thirty years—apparently for good. Since then, she had stayed inside the apartment, made love to him, cooked for him, washed his shirts, and refused all calls. It had been an idyllic string of days, but he wondered how long it could last.

Not that he wanted it to end. He was comfortable with Angela. She seemed to be inside his mind, as much as any intelligence. She moved with his rhythms and anticipated them, practically able to complete his sentences. He had never experienced that with any other woman, even one with her own cortical array.

He also felt responsible for Angela—not just because of the scene that had led to the break with her aunt—but for her safety and welfare. She was like a much younger sister, less bossy and authoritative than Anastasia, more like a child. More full of wonder, joy, and patient expectation. He had never before experienced that with a woman, either.

And yet Angela seemed to know just what she wanted. She never spoke of regrets. Not about the break. Not about coming to him in complete abandonment of her old life. She simply presented herself, like a cat on his doorstep, trusting that they would work out the details as they went along.

Kenny had put his business on hold for the past few days. His companion intelligences could handle the routine details of his current cases such as filings and interrogatories. Nothing was due in court, nor would he miss a deadline. His joint work with Antigone was another matter, and he had decided that for the moment the older woman could simply proceed as she liked. He wasn’t answering calls, either.

But now he felt a decision was needed between him and Angela. They couldn’t live forever in Oakland on coffee and croissants, canned corned beef hash, and endless lovemaking.

He sat down on the edge of the bed and touched her shoulder.

Angela smiled and awakened, looking up at him.

“Do you want to get married?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. Then she frowned.

“What? Do you have doubts?”

“Don’t you have to ask—?”

“Who? Your aunt?”

“The Association.”

“There’s no policy on these things,” he said. “I’ll mention it to my great-grandfather, as a matter of courtesy. But he’d have no grounds to object. He knows Antigone and still feels warm affection. And as for her, well, there are some things she will just have to learn to like.”

“You make it sound so easy.”

“Because it is,” he replied.

* * *

Callista Praxis was in a quandary, one that she could not resolve for herself, and one that she did not know how to address among the principal players. Her father had met with the Xin Dalu Tong members and told them “very honestly” and “in all truth” that he was not seeking a nuclear weapon. She trusted her father. She believed in his sincerity. Looking at him during the meeting in Eureka, she had sensed that he, too, believed what he was saying.

And yet she knew, from the approach Susannah had made to her, weeks earlier, that John wanted a weapon or the materials to build one. He had gone directly to the Association’s Planning and Procurement Section to begin the search. He had cut Callie out of the loop for this, presumably because he knew in advance that she would fight him on it. So, officially, she knew nothing about the search, nothing about the lie he had told the Chinese. She could not ask John, and she …

But no. Wait. What had Susannah actually
said?
The request did not come directly from John Praxis. He had discussed it first with Stacy in her lead position with the Diplomatic Service. And Stacy, not knowing how to begin such a search, had pushed the request sideways onto Susannah. But it was so secret that no one else could know. And Susannah had only told Callie because she had heard an old family rumor about her godson Gustavo Reiter.

And yet Stacy had sat in the same meeting in Eureka and betrayed not by a flinch or a wince that she knew the Patriarch was lying in his teeth. Making a lie that could, at some remove, be checked and exposed. Endangering them all. Had life as a senior diplomat so hardened Stacy to issues of truth and falsehood that she could sit there and not blink? Or did she know something else? Something that would explain her reaction? And would confronting her now reveal the truth? Or just invite more lies?

Callie did not know how to move forward with this—until she remembered that the family had one unimpeachable resource. The intelligences that managed their data and drew the connections had no motives. They did not lie. They could err in fact and in judgment, weighing problematical bits and bytes, but they had no reason to dissemble.

With that thought as spur to action, she called up Machiavelli—terrible name for a diplomatic operative!—on her comm wall.

“How may I serve you, mistress?” The machine displayed a face, constructed of selected pixels, that was vaguely familiar. Pale, narrow, hair close cropped, eyes close together and beady as a ferret’s—it was the Renaissance portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli. The intelligence must have had a rueful sense of humor, because it was not a face anyone would trust.

“I want to ask a question in confidence,” she began.

A pause. “Proceed.”

“This is between you and me, understand? I don’t want you to discuss it, either overtly or by omission, with your principal, Anastasia Praxis. Is that understood?”

“Filters are already in place.”

“Then my question.” Callie took in a breath. “Has John Praxis asked her to supply a nuclear weapon?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

She let out that breath. “You understand what I mean by ‘nuclear weapon’?”

“Yes. Do you required a definition or expositive examples?”

“No, that’s all right. … Another question. About a month ago, Anastasia reported to the family council a low-level intelligence analysis that said the Chinese enclave in Seattle was planning to bring a nuclear weapon into North America. What do you know about this?”

“Nothing,” the machine replied.

“Do you dispute the analysis?”

“There was no such analysis.”

“Could one have been generated and reached Stacy without your knowledge.”

A pause. “No. None generated. None surfaced. I have just checked.”

“Have you ever discussed the need for a weapon with Stacy?”

“Not to my present knowledge,” the machine replied.

What did that mean? It sounded to Callie like double-talk. “Would you prepare for analysis the verbatim of all your contacts with Anastasia Praxis over the past two months.”

No response. The dark eyes regarded her steadily.

“Will you
please,
” she said, rephrasing the request, “prepare such a verbatim?”

“The package is waiting in your inbox. It contains several terabytes.”

“Well, I wasn’t planning to read it myself,” Callie replied.

* * *

Jacquie Wildmon at Tallyman Systems had received the testimony of the intelligence identified as Machiavelli with Aunt Callie’s instruction to “grill it, test it, look for anything that relates to, suggests, or implies the acquisition of a nuclear weapon or nuclear materials.”

Even the briefest of superficial surveys of the package made Jacquie shudder. It contained seventeen terabytes of consciousness and subverbal exchanges between the intelligence and Anastasia Praxis in the PFA’s Diplomatic Service. That made it pure dynamite. Did Callie not understand that she had just handed an outsider—inside the family, to be sure, but outside the Association’s power structure, except as a shareholder—the entire contents of their plans, schemes, agreements, loyalties, and deceits? Were this material to fall into any other hands, that person could bring down the Association, or at least embarrass, bamboozle, and confuse its operations for a couple of months, if not damage them for years.

Good thing it had gone to Jacquie herself and not been waylaid inside Tallyman’s information architecture. She immediately quarantined it, with a positive destruct order attached, and considered how to approach the analysis.

The best way would be with Vernier’s help. The intelligence could stream it, take extracts, make summaries, and give it back to her in a clear, human-readable form.

After three minutes of churning, it did so.

What did you find about these weapons?

Nothing,
Vernier replied.
No mention.

So Stacy and her machine never discussed them.

That is not, exactly, what my analysis shows.

Please explain,
Jacquie sent, mystified.

When the intelligence did so, Jacquie ordered it to put the material back into quarantine pending a zero-byte overwrite. Then she chipped a fingernail in her haste to enter the number of Callie’s private line into her comm wall.

“Yes?” her aunt said in answer. And when she recognized Jacquie, “What have you found?”

“The material you sent—it doesn’t have anything like what you asked about.”

Callie’s face did not relax or break into a smile. Evidently this was not good news. “So they never discussed the, um, subject?”

“Not directly. Not in this record,” Jacquie said. “But my intelligence also discovered that these exchanges have been extensively truncated and ligated.”

“What’s that mean in layman’s terms?”

“Pieces have been cut out and the cut ends joined together. Some kind of regressive filter has been applied. But the timing track still shows the lapses.”

“Can you recover those missing pieces?” Callie asked.

“Not from this record. Maybe if I could talk to your intelligence …?”

“That’s not a good idea. So, who would be able to make these cuts?”

“The intelligence’s principal handler,” Jacquie said. “It’s one way we sometimes use to short-circuit the code, say, for error-trapping and, sometimes, for personal privacy. No one else could do it from the outside.”

Now Aunt Callie smiled.

“Did I say something funny?”

“No,” her aunt replied. “Not at all.”

* * *

After a week in Ken’s apartment, Angela returned to her aunt’s residence to inform her about his proposal of marriage. The confrontation took place in Antigone’s living room, with the two women standing across a space of ten feet, a gulf as lost and cold as the continent’s Central Desert in wintertime.

“Not while I draw breath,” Antigone said.

“Aunt, you don’t really mean that.”

“Kenneth is not for you.”

“Then who is?”

She expected her aunt to say no one, to insist that Angela live as a nun, a solitary, member of a secret order dedicated to a sterile celibacy. Instead, she said, “Anyone else.”

“Why do you hate Ken so? I thought you liked him. You brought him into your home, sponsored him, helped educate him, worked with him. He’s a good lawyer. He’s smart and capable. And he comes from a family you’ve long known and is headed by the man who—from everything I can understand—you once, long ago, loved. So why do you turn on Kenneth now?”

In reply, Antigone stared at her. The woman’s face, usually so stiff and immobile, now worked against itself slowly, like heavy clay or thick putty taking shape in uncertain hands. The ghosts of smiles and grimaces, sneers and frowns, passed over her features. Her lips twisted, briefly exposing her teeth, but nothing came.