A World Too Near (4 page)

He indicated that she should hold out her hand. When she did, Stefan slipped it around her wrist and inserted the two ends together to make a circlet. “That’s the first step. Form a circlet. After pressing the codes into the indentations, the timing is fifty minutes. Time for Quinn to get some distance.”

She dipped her hand, and the metal strip fell off her wrist onto the table. “Oops. Good thing it’s not loaded.”

He stared at her. She had actually dropped a billion-dollar bracelet. Stefan picked it up and replaced the chain in its case. He strove for patience. “We’ll give this to him as soon as the board decides the schedule. It can’t be soon enough. Quinn might not be ideal, but he’s all we’ve got, I’m afraid.”

“We’re all afraid. The board’s afraid.”

“No, not all of them. Only
your
people on the board.” Of course it only took 51 percent to quash the whole deal. They could agree with Helice that Titus Quinn was too shaky, too odd, too driven. They could argue that they needed someone under better control. Someone like Helice. Sitting across from him she looked damn cocky, as though she’d counted the votes and liked her tally.

She gazed out over the city. “All you need to do is compromise a little.”

“Send you instead?” How could she still be harping on this? She was young and inexperienced. Without the language, without decent cultural cover. She knew nothing about the place except what Quinn had told them in debriefings. And by her own admission, he’d withheld plenty: the name of the Tarig lord who could be subverted, for instance. All to make himself indispensable.

“Yes, send me.” She pinned him with a gaze unfettered by wine and goodwill. “I’d stay on task. The man can ruin our only chance. Over there they don’t know that we know what they’re up to. They won’t be on guard yet. We have one chance to take Ahnenhoon out of action. If Quinn blows this—goes looking for the daughter, whatever—we won’t get a second chance. Kiss the Earth good-bye, and wave a last time at the stars. It’s all for burning.” She smiled prettily. “That’s my pitch for the board tomorrow. Like it?”

“No.” He rose, and went to the railing. His hands made sweat marks on the railing. Looking down, he got that little jolt from the profoundly dropping view. If he just knew which way the board would vote. Christ almighty, the Tarig wanted to burn the Rose
like an enduring source of coal. Might take a few decades, but they’d already started the process. Stars sucked out of existence . . .

He turned to her in frustration. “What do you want, Helice?”

“To win.” She joined him at the railing.

“What would you settle for?”

“I’m not sure I have to settle.”

He stared out into a wall of rain borne in on a bank of fog from the river and deflected by the veranda’s climate control. “The thing that bothers me? I just don’t believe you. You don’t think Quinn will fail. You just want to go there yourself, and would sacrifice everything to do it. Sorry. It paints an ugly picture of you, I realize.”

“I don’t deny it. I want to go.”

“Clouds your judgment, you know.”

Her voice went low and throaty. “I was there when he came back—you remember? I listened to him for weeks. Every day, we debriefed him—six, seven hours at a stretch—and yes, I was intrigued. It would take a heart of stone not to . . . not to want to go. The creatures. Those sentient species. The storm walls. I want to see these things for myself. I want that.” She stared into the rain as though she saw them now. “There are other sentient races out there, Stefan. We may never find them otherwise. But they’re in this one place. So yes, I want to go.”

After a pause she said, “But that’s not the reason I’m volunteering. I don’t expect you to believe me.”

“Just tell me what it’ll take to not hear your pitch tomorrow.”

She said simply, “Send me with him. He goes. Okay. But I go with him.”

Stefan looked at her with new appreciation. The woman
could
compromise. She wanted it that much. She wanted the Entire in a strange, unreasoning way. Her fascination might arise from how the place had affected Quinn. A man obsessed. And Quinn had brought her down that path slowly—without, at first, her even noticing it.

She wouldn’t give up; Stefan knew that. He fingered the velvet case in his pocket. So much depended on the little circlet and its delivery to the right place: the core of the enemy.

“All right,” he said. “You go.”

A smile hit her lips and stayed.

“If you’re set on this, make sure your papers are in order.” Tellingly, his mind had jumped to the notion that she would die in the Entire.

She whispered, “Thank you, Stefan.”

It wasn’t a good compromise. Helice could slow Quinn down. She could blow his cover by doing the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing. On the other hand—a critical other hand—she might keep the man on track.

Now that he had overcome the last barrier to Quinn’s departure, he let his mind settle uneasily into the image of Titus Quinn taking possession of the cirque. The man who’d been, until recently, a hermit, and halfway mad. “You think he’ll do the job? You think he can focus on what we need?”

“Frank opinion? He’s not your man. He’s got too much personal history tied up in this. The wife, the daughter. Their home is, or was, the Entire.”

“But this”—he spread his hands in front of him—“is his world. We’ll be utterly dependent on him. I don’t like the man, but he’s no coward.”

She conceded, “Maybe not, but the question is, would he rather save us, or go after his daughter?”

Stefan muttered, “Damn the daughter, anyway. Why couldn’t she have died like her mother?”

Helice turned a sweet expression on him. “You could always give
me
the cirque.”

Relentless, she was. “Let’s just say you’ll be backup. If he fails, then you deliver it.” Every person on the board had misgivings about endangering the Entire with this nano weapon. The place was a rich region to develop, and in some respects the company’s future depended on it. Its byways might offer safe paths to the stars of this universe. But before Minerva could develop the Entire, they had to overcome it. Some might find that distasteful. But he trusted Helice Maki had none of those scruples. She would cleave to her mission like a pit bull.

She nodded, her eyes exultant. “You can count on me, Stefan.”

He imagined the furor when he broke this news to Quinn. “He won’t like you going along, you know.”

“He’ll be okay,” she said. “Because we’re not going to tell him.”

CHAPTER THREE

T
HE YOUNG WOMAN’S FACE held an unsettling combination of ecstasy and innocence. Titus Quinn watched her fluid movements through the window of the Deep Room, that light-filled tank where, as an mSap engineer, she programmed the machine sapient. Her lips moved as she voiced code, but with audio off, the impression was one of a woman dancing in light.

Quinn spoke to Caitlin standing next to him. “She looks too young to train an mSap.”

“You have to be young, remember? Who else could keep up?”

The empty warehouse was a new acquisition. It worried Quinn that Caitlin was here with only two bodyguards—presumably lurking on the grounds, though Quinn hadn’t actually seen them. Lamar Gelde was waiting outside, along with two cars full of security staff, all of them uneasy to be making an unauthorized stop for Quinn’s personal business.

“She’s a renormalization expert,” Caitlin went on. “This sapient’s not brand new. It used to work for the Coastal Desalinization. She’s retraining it, bringing it around to seeing things our way.”

Quinn didn’t like the anthropomorphic references. The mSaps were just machines, not really sapients or some kind of AI. Quantum processors did not a consciousness make.

In the Deep Room, the engineer turned around. Her arms fell to her sides, and some of the light of the mind-field subsided. She looked in their direction, placidly, with that flat, hostile look of the wholly self-absorbed.

“Can she see us?” Quinn asked.

“If she’s paying attention to us. She’s still thinking, though.”

Oh,
thinking
. When you said that about a savvy, one who tested in the upper limits of human intelligence, you said it respectfully. Normal snobbery metastasized into something truly ugly these days, establishing a chasm between
middies
like Caitlin and the technical smart-asses like this young engineer. It gave Quinn a creepy feeling, this intelligence divide, in a world where the rigors of advanced quantum physics and biomolecular engineering evaded the understanding of all but a few. He was one of those, but he’d bypassed the advanced degrees for a fast-track career as a starship pilot. So much for smart.

He and Caitlin left the observation chamber, entering the warehouse proper, soon to house Rob and Caitlin’s new software company. She stopped in front of a double-paneled wood door, stranding her code into the smart surface, releasing the locks.

They entered the office, cozy with rose-colored carpet, an expensive desk, and a view out to a parkland—a far cry from Rob’s former life tending savants like a groomer in a stable. Now Rob was an entrepreneur, thanks to his brother’s millions—Quinn’s travel fees for duties performed in the Entire. Quinn was glad that his brother had finally relented and taken the loan.

Caitlin settled herself into a leather sofa and he sat next to her, glad to have a moment alone with her, wishing he could tell her what he was facing. She’d always been his confidante. But for her safety, he could tell her nothing. And what would he say, anyway? The world will end in fire, Caitlin. You think the world is eternal, but it’s not. It’s fragile. A dry forest waiting to catch a spark. That’s what matter is. Latent fire. He pictured a hot wind sweeping over Portland, a storm of heat and smoke . . . and shook off the
vision.

“How’s Emily?”

“Fine, thank God. She’s doing fine. It could have gone badly, and didn’t. You’re not still thinking you’re responsible?” She shook her head dismissively. “I’ll get us a drink.” Rummaging in boxes on the floor, Caitlin tucked her dark blonde hair behind her ears as it fell forward, casually feminine. She found two cups and a bottle of scotch.

“I don’t have much time, Caitlin.”

She smirked. “You’ve got time, Titus. They’ve got to wait for you. They control so much, but not everything.”

She was right. He wasn’t a slave to their agendas. He was the only person who’d been to that other place and had any idea of how to survive there. The thing that he wanted to tell Caitlin, and couldn’t, was that he might not make it back. He would be entering a Tarig fortress. He hadn’t thought much about escape. He couldn’t think past Ahnenhoon.

She poured him a drink and they toasted each other.

“I’m going back, Caitlin,” he said finally. “Leaving tomorrow.”

Watching Titus, Caitlin took a swallow to cushion her dismay. So soon. Just when she had adjusted to having him back, and with that altered face— more narrow, the eyes too dark, covered as they were with lenses that were supposed to make his eyes look blue. She thought she detected a ring of amber around his irises. But every time he spoke, she found the old Titus. No one was quite like him, with his mannerisms, his way of moving and of thinking. When she’d married Rob she foolishly thought he might be something like his brother. But Rob was only Rob, and the recent vacation hadn’t helped.

Titus said, “I’m worried about you and the kids. It feels like hell to be leaving like this.”

She gestured around her. “You regret that we’ve got our dream company, that we work for ourselves and don’t even need to work?”

“I regret the bastards are crawling all over you like flies on a picnic.”

The biggest fly was Stefan Polich, the man who’d personally threatened to destroy her son’s upcoming testing results if Caitlin didn’t spy on Titus, report on him. She’d expected retaliation when she’d told him to go to hell. Now that Titus was leaving, she braced herself for something along those lines.

“We’ll survive,” she said. “I don’t walk around being scared. Besides, what can you do? You’re going. You have to go.”

Titus hadn’t told her why. And she wasn’t going to ask. He looked like he had things on his mind. That surely would be the adjoining universe, the place where Sydney might still be alive. Caitlin had last seen Sydney and her mother at Minerva’s private airport—Johanna holding Sydney’s hand, Sydney hoisting her own duffel, just like her father’s. That was the last Caitlin ever saw of her niece and sister-in-law.

She wished she’d never been party to the information that Johanna was dead. It removed a barrier between her and Titus. He had to love somebody. A man like that would love somebody, love them ferociously. Here she sat, the good little wife and mother, the good sister-in-law, never breaking the rules, never letting herself go.

Her hand shook as she poured another splash of the scotch.

Misinterpreting, Titus said, “Let me get you more security. My people this time.”

“Titus, no. I’m not going to live like that. Shut up about it. Besides, you think because you’re leaving we’re less secure? After what happened on the beach? Christ. Get you gone, and we’ll be better off.” If he was gone, there’d be no danger of her letting go. Everyone was definitely better off with her
not letting go
.

“If they tinker with Mateo’s Standard Test, I’ll keelhaul their asses using the biggest ship I can hijack.”

She smiled at the bravado. “But we won’t ever know if they tinkered. He either tests savvy or he doesn’t.” She figured Mateo could well be one of the superintelligent. He had his uncle’s genetic heritage, his grandfather’s.

Titus was looking out the window but not seeing the view, she guessed.

It seemed to her that he was already in the other place.

“There are some dark things over there,” he murmured. Perhaps he saw that world right now, instead of the patch of woodland outside the window. “They can hurt us.”

“Titus.” The unpleasant thought struck. “You’re in danger. This trip isn’t just for Sydney, is it?”

A silence stretched on. Then he said, “If I don’t come back I want you to have it all. You and Rob. Everything I have. You’ll need it.”