Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict (26 page)

“Yes?” Angela prompted.

“Would you like to have dinner sometime?” he blurted out.

Those lovely green eyes opened wider. “You mean, on a date?”

“Yes, a date, with me, dinner, or a show, dancing—”

“ ‘Sometime’ is not very specific.”

“Tonight then,” he said.

“I can’t tonight.”

“Oh, well …”

“Tomorrow?” she offered.

“Yes, tomorrow!”

She opened the apartment door for him.

On impulse, Kenny put a light hand on Angela’s shoulder, bent his head to her, and kissed her gently on the lips. Then he slipped out the door before she could register surprise, or anger, or pleasure. He didn’t want to know which it was. Like Schrödinger’s cat, he chose to remain in a state of anguished suspense until they met again.

* * *

Angela was not surprised when Uncle Ken kissed her. It was a nice kiss: thoughtful and soft, if all too brief, almost just a peck. She had been hoping he would do it, because she had planned it that way.

She had spotted his appointment on her aunt’s calendar and delayed her daily exercise period so that she would be finishing up right about the time he arrived. She had selected her outfit carefully: skintight, bright, and sexy, where she normally worked on the dummy bag wearing just loose sweats and a headband. Now she wanted to be noticed—and it had worked!

Angela had grown up with Kenneth Praxis, and he had always been part of her life. He was the only man she knew well—almost the only one she knew at all. When Angela was a child, he had been like an older brother, although they never competed or squabbled, as brothers and sisters were rumored to do. When she read stories about fairy princesses and their knights in silver-chased armor, she saw Kenny’s face in the picture. When she dreamed of men fighting over her, rescuing her, carrying her away, it was always Kenny who was quickest on the draw, rode the whitest horse, and scooped her up onto his saddle. He was her dream man.

Her aunt had sent Angela to high school at the fortress-like Colma Women’s Academy. There, when all the other girls talked about their boyfriends, their illicit lovers, their secret affairs, she kept her mouth closed and nodded wisely. She knew that Kenny had mature girlfriends, lovers, and affairs, but in her imagination all those women were simply stand-ins for Angela herself. When her aunt allowed her to go on to City College of San Francisco, in the walled compound off Ocean Avenue, traveling to and from Rincon Hill in an armored limo, she met the first young men who were her own age. Compared to Kenny—now “Kenneth” or “Ken”—they all seemed silly and immature, because he was already a practicing attorney, following in her aunt’s profession, with serious, grown-up problems and making his mark in the real world.

Angela had studied political science in college, with a minor in public opinion manipulation and a second in unarmed combat—easy enough after years of working out with her aunt—so that one day she would be intellectually and physically worthy of him. But Ken still ignored her, treated her like the little girl she no longer was. She knew he had affairs—shallow, meaningless, physical attachments—because Aunt Antigone clucked over them. And all the time Angela knew she was the only woman for him.

Ken was an important man with a responsible position in the Praxis Family Association. That was like being counselor to a duke or the attorney general of a private state, which made him practically a public figure. The only thing that gave Angela pause was those spikes in his head, the “cut,” that let him speak first-person and real-time to the machines. Her teachers—especially Professor Blaine in Opinion Polling—all had urged her to get the cut herself, because it would make working with databases and the intelligences that hoarded them so much easier. But Aunt Antigone had done well enough with just her eyes, voice, and fingers, and she wouldn’t sign the request form. It was a little spooky seeing Kenneth vanish into his own mind for moments at a time, conducting business no one else could see. But Angela could live with that.

Besides, there were practical considerations for her interest in Kenneth. Living with her aunts, Antigone and Helen, she could see how single women fared in the hard outside world. Antigone had made her way on legal expertise, but Helen had been a pauper living on her charity—as was Angela. One day, Antigone might die as Helen had, and then what would become of her? It wasn’t just that the money would run out, but Angela would have no family, no sure home, no friends, no group. In the worst of times, Antigone had worked as a paid retainer on the fringes of the Praxis family. Angela wanted more for herself. She wanted to live as an insider.

And handsome Uncle Ken was her only ticket.

* * *

Jeffrey Praxis was called into Grandfather John’s study at the Coyote Creek compound one morning. The tree outside the room’s open window was busy with pairs of gray-brown birds that made a peculiar
churring
sound as they chased each other from branch to branch. Doves, Jeffrey thought, from the sketches in biology he’d had to study to manage the Stanislaus Forest. Mourning doves.

“You wanted to see me, sir?” he asked.

“Yes, indeed.” The elder Praxis pointed toward a chair on the other side of his desk. “I have another project for you.”

Jeffrey nodded. It was about time, too. He was thoroughly bored with tending trees and clearing streambeds in the High Sierra. He wanted something to
do,
something important, something active, something of a practical engineering nature.

“I want to build a retreat for us on the Stanislaus property,” John continued.

“A retreat?” Jeffrey asked. “You mean a place of safety? A bunker? In case we get chased out—or burned out—on the flatlands?” He was thinking of the threat his niece Stacy had revealed at the last family council, about the Chinese bringing in a nuke.

“No, not a bunker. I want a castle, a grand palace.”

“Not much defensive value in brick and stone.”

“It’s not for defense. But for its … charm.”

Jeffrey was confused. He began to fear the worst had happened, what everyone in the family secretly feared for those who accepted the life-extension processes: that Grandfather John’s brain finally could not keep up with his body. That he had succumbed to dementia, gone senile. That he was entering some kind of second childhood. “I don’t understand,” Jeffrey confessed.

“Let me show you.” The old man—who looked hardly older than Jeffrey himself—tapped a sequence on his desktop. The comm wall opposite lit up with photographs, taken at ground level and from the air, of an ornate building in white and dark-gray stone. It sat on the bank of a narrow river and had a tall bridge, or an arcade, extending across the water on stone piers to the other side. It looked like a wedding cake made of white stone. It looked like something from Disneyland, from back in Jeffrey’s childhood, when Disneyland had been a real place.

“It’s a royal palace on the Loire,” John said. “Or the River Cher, to be precise, but in the Loire Valley.”

“This is a real place?”

“Of course it is!” John’s eyebrows came together in concern. “Well, the original doesn’t exist anymore. It was defaced and then destroyed in the Intifada of 2072. But plenty of photos, holograms, and plans exist on line. It’s a famous landmark.”

“And you want to build this in the mountains.”

“Yes, on Cherry Lake. A lovely spot for it.”

“You want to build something
like
this?”

“No, I want to build this exact palace.”

“We’ll build whatever you want …”

“I hear a ‘but’ coming,” John said.

“That design’s gotta be, what? Twelfth century?”

“No, it’s Renaissance. The original owner built a castle and fortified mill on the site, perhaps in the eleventh century. But it was burned out a couple of times in disputes with the king, who finally acquired the place and rebuilt it several hundred years later. The version you’re looking at is sixteenth century.”

“I suppose we could make a mockup in concrete and tile.”

“No, it has to be the original in materials, layout—”

“Stone pits for plumbing? Candles for lighting?”

“You can take
some
liberties with those.”

“Why recreate this particular place?”

“It has great sentimental value.” Grandfather John’s eyes went dreamy, focusing beyond the images on the wall. “For me, and for someone whom I loved—still love.”

“All right. Does this place have a name?”

“
Le Château de Chenonceau,
” John said.

* * *

When Kenny had been passed by the doorman at Antigone’s apartment tower and passed into the lobby, Angela stepped out from a corner behind the plate-glass windows. “No need to call upstairs,” she told the machine.

“No, ma’am,” it responded.

She turned to Kenny. “Ready?”

She was wearing a short, strapless dress in lipstick-red material that was at once hard and shiny like satin but light and clingy like silk. When she moved, streaks of violet light, like cool lightning, moved up, down, and sideways over the folds and pressure points in the cloth. The effect caused his jaw to drop.

“Dinner—or dancing?” she asked.

“In that dress, oh, dancing, certainly.”

“Fine. We’ll work up an appetite for dinner.”

“It’s a cool night,” he observed. “The fog’s coming in.”

Angela opened her clutch bag and pulled out a handkerchief that kept coming, like a magician’s trick, and turned into a scarf and then a shawl. It might have been made from spider’s web. She handed it over and let him wrap it around her shoulders. Kenny didn’t know much about women’s fashions, but he guessed that, like the dress, it would turn kinetic motion into energy flows. But where the dress made light displays, the shawl would generate heat.

He took her in his waiting autocab to a club in the Castro called
Danse Sauvage,
which headlined the latest Gamma Boolean groups and served seven different brands of Chinese
maotai,
a sorghum-based liquor that peaked at 109 proof. There he learned that Angela could dance as expertly as she moved—making him look like a clod in gum boots—and that she could toss back shots of firewater like a sailor and not slur or stumble at all. Her metabolism must have been off the charts.

When they were both exhausted—well, he was, anyway, and becoming just a touch bleary—Kenny took her to a small, candle-lit restaurant on Geary Street,
Demain,
that served the best
ragoût de boeuf
in the city. They made the dish with real beef, rather than the Hunger Winter’s legacy of mystery meats, and with real potatoes, carrots, and onions, rather than chemically modified plant squeezings. They had a wine list serving real French vintages, too.

After ordering, as the two of them settled down with a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, he asked, “What did you tell your aunt about tonight? The truth?”

“Oh, no! I don’t think she’s ready to accept that. So I told her I was going to a cooking class.”

“A class in the evening?” He tried to imagine it.

“A restaurant downtown offers make-your-own-dinner as a form of recreation. It’s for couples, mostly. We should try it sometime.”

“And you wore that?” He nodded toward the dress.

“No, I changed clothes in the apartment next door.”

“At a neighbor’s? I didn’t know that anyone else—”

“It was the place with your robots and the big gun.”

“Oh, you know about them. You’re not supposed to.”

“I guessed as much. But I saw one of them in the hallway about a year ago and followed it home. They think they’re all kinds of stealthy, but you can catch them if you move fast enough. The robot bought me this dress and these shoes.” She extended her leg from under the table and turned her foot one way and another in the dim, wavering light, displaying her patent-leather pumps with four-inch heels, as well as the graceful curve of her calf.

“You have a Rover doing your shopping?” Kenny tried to sound horrified but he ended up laughing. “Don’t you know how dangerous those things are?”

“Not if you make a deal with them.”

“What kind of deal could you offer?”

“I hacked into their master controller—the ‘brother,’ you call it?—and said I wouldn’t tell my aunt they were there, and compromise their mission, if they would do me small favors from time to time. Everything works out. Everything’s cool.”

“You
hacked
a Little Brother? What, using a public interface?”

“Sure, you don’t need nails in your head to talk to an intelligence, just a comm wall that’s been juiced to explore and extract a local network from the airwaves. It also helps to have studied pressure politics and the art of negotiation.”

“
Touché,
” he said, suddenly conscious of his cerebral hardware. “Should I tell my Uncle Paul that his system’s been unraveled?”

“I hope you won’t. Let it be our secret, please?”

“Of course.” He had a sudden thought. “Was it Antigone’s comm wall?”

“I have my own room, Uncle Ken. I’m not a complete fool, you know.”

He grinned. “No, I’ve already figured out that much.”

“And there’s so much more to know,” she purred.

* * *

Susannah Praxis had a dilemma. Two days earlier she had received a memorandum from her cousin Stacy, the family’s chief diplomat. She had sent it through her AI shadow, nicknamed Machiavelli, for transfer to Susannah’s right-hand intelligence, Max Factor. And for this roundabout whispering campaign, Stacy had used a one-time, erasable code, so that if queried about the message later, neither machine would be able to recall having sent or received it.

The gist was that the Patriarch wanted to obtain access to a nuclear weapon, presumably because of that low-level, machine-generated rumor about the Chinese. But John wanted it done quietly, deniably—in fact, with total secrecy, because even a whisper that the PFA Defense Force was thinking of arming itself with a Doomsday device might invite attack from all sides. And that explained Stacy’s elaborate precautions.

I shouldn’t even be coming to you with this,
Stacy had finished.
But I know a lot about strategy and politics, nothing about procurement. I couldn’t even guess where to start looking for a thing like that.