Click. "Oh shit." For a moment she thought she was going to be all right, but then her stomach twisted. She barely made it to the bathroom in time, holding back the dry heaves until she was over the toilet bowl. Why me?
How did I end up in this mess? she asked the mirror, sniffing and trying to dry her eyes. It's like some kind of curse!
Fifty minutes later, it was a shaken but more composed Wednesday who climbed the two steps down from the space elevator capsule into a concrete-and-steel arrivals hall, presented her passport to the immigration official, and staggered blinking into the late-afternoon sunlight on New Dresden.
"Wow," she said softly.
Her rings vibrated for attention. She sighed. "Cancel block."
"Are you feeling less stressed?" asked Herman, as if nothing had happened.
"I think so."
"Good. Now please pay attention to where we are going. I am adding your destination to the public geotracking system. Follow the green dot."
"Green dot—okay." A green dot appeared on the floor, and Wednesday followed it passively, feeling drained and depressed. She'd almost psyched herself into looking forward to the reception, but Herman's news had unhinged her again, bringing her tenuous optimism crashing down. Maybe Frank would be able to cheer her up, but just then she wanted only to go back to her luxury suite and lock the door and get stinking drunk.
It took another three hours of boredom, dozing in the seats of a maglev capsule hurtling at thousands of kilometers per hour through an evacuated tunnel buried deep under oceans and continents, before she arrived in the capital. Typical, why couldn't they build the beanstalk closer to the main city?
Or move the city? she sniffed to herself. Getting around on a planet seemed to take a very long time, for no obvious reason.
Sarajevo was old, with lots of stone buildings and steel-and-glass skyscrapers.
It was badly air-conditioned, with strange eddying breezes and air currents and a really disorienting, upsetting blue-and-white fractal plasma image in place of a decent ceiling. It was also full of strange-looking people in weird clothes moving fast and doing incomprehensible things. She passed three women in fake peasant costume—New Dresden had never been backward enough to have a real peasantry—waving credit terminals. A bunch of people in rainbow-colored luminous plastic gowns roller-bladed past, surrounded by compact remotes buzzing around at ear level. Cars, silent and melted-looking, slunk through the streets. A fellow in grimy ripped technical mountaineering gear, bubble tent folded at his feet, seemed to be offering her an empty ceramic coffee cup. People in glowing glasses gesticulated at invisible interfaces; laser dots all over the place danced ahead of people who needed guidance. It wasn't like Septagon, it was like—
It's like home. If home had been bigger and brasher and more developed, she realized, tenuously making a connection to her memories of their last family visit to Grandma's house.
One thing pricked her attention: it was the lack of difference. She'd been worried at first about going down-well wearing a party costume she'd have been comfortable with back home. "Don't worry," Herman told her.
"Moscow and Dresden are both McWorlds—the original colonists had similar backgrounds and aspirations. The culture will feel familiar to you.
You can thank media diffusion for that; it will not be like the New Republic, or Turku, or even as different as Septagon." And indeed, it wasn't. Even the street signs looked the same.
"And we were nearly at war with these people?" she asked.
"The usual stupid reasons. Competitive trade advantage, immigration policy, political insecurity, cheap slow transport—cheap enough to facilitate trade, too expensive to facilitate federalization or the other adjustments human nations make to minimize the risk of war. The McWorlds all took something from the dominant terrestrial globalized culture with them when they were settled, but they have diverged since then—in some cases, radically. Do not make the mistake of assuming you can discuss politics or actions of the government safely here."
"As if I would." Wednesday followed her green dot round a corner and up a spiraling ramp onto a road-spanning walkway, then into a roofed-over mall.
"Where am I supposed to be meeting Frank?"
"He should be waiting for you. Along this road. There."
He was sitting on a bench in front of an abstract bronze sculpture, rattling away on his antique keyboard. Killing time. "Frank, are you okay?"
He looked up at her and pulled a face—a grimace that might have been intended as a smile but succeeded in doing nothing to reassure her. His eyes were red-rimmed and had bags under them, and his clothing looked as if he'd been living in it for a couple of days. "I, I think so." He shook his head. "Brr." He yawned widely. "Haven't slept for a long, uh … " He trailed off.
Party overload, she thought dispassionately. She reached out and took his hand, tugging. "Come on!"
Frank lurched to his feet and caught his balance. The keyboard concertinaed away into a pocket. He yawned again. "Are we in time?"
She blinked, checking her timepiece: "Sure!" she said brightly. "What have you been doing?"
"Not sleeping." Frank shook himself. "I'm a mess. Mind if I freshen up first?"
He looked almost apologetic.
She grinned at him. "That looks like a public toilet over there."
"Okay. Two minutes."
He took nearer to a quarter of an hour, but when he returned he'd had a shower and run his outerwear through a fastcleaner. "Sorry 'bout that. Do I look better?"
"You look fine," she said diplomatically. "At least, you'll pass. Are you going to fall over on me?"
"Nope." He dry swallowed a capsule and shuddered slightly. "Not until we get back to the ship." He tapped the pocket with his keyboard in it.
"Captured enough color for three features, interviewed four midlevel government officials and six random civilians, grabbed about four hours of full-motion. One last push and—" This time his smile looked less stressed.
"Okay, let's go." She took his hand again and led him along the street.
"You know where we're going? The embassy reception hall?"
"Never been there." She pointed at the floor. "Got a guide."
"Oh good, tell everyone where we're going," he muttered. "I just hope they don't mistake me for a vagrant."
"An, uh, what? What was that?"
"A vagrant?" He raised an eyebrow at her. "They don't have them where you come from? Lucky."
She checked the word in her lexicon. "I'll tell them you're my guest," she said, and patted his hand. Having Frank around made her feel safe, like walking through a strange town with a huge and ferocious guard dog—the biological kind—to protect her. Her spirits rose as they neared the embassy.
Embassies were traditionally the public representatives of a nation abroad.
As such, they tended to be built with a swagger, gratuitously broad facades and conspicuously gilded flagpoles. The Muscovite embassy was typical of the breed, a big, classically styled limestone-and-marble heap squatting sullenly behind a row of poplar trees, a discreet virtual fence, and a lawn that appeared to have been trimmed with a micrometer gauge and nail scissors. But something about it wasn't quite right. It might have been the flag out front—set to half-mast ever since the dreadful day, years ago, when the diplomatic causal channel went dead—or something more subtle.
There was a down-at-heel air to it, of retired gentry keeping up appearances but quietly living beyond their means.
And then there was the security cordon.
"I'm Wed—uh, Victoria Strowger," Wednesday chattered to the two armed cops as they examined her passport, "and this is Frank Johnson, my guest, and isn't this exciting?" She clapped her hands as they waved her through the archway of an explosive sniffer. "I can't believe I've been invited to a real embassy function! Wow, is that the Ambassador? No?"
"You don't have to lay it on quite that thick," Frank said tiredly, catching up with her a minute later. "They're not idiots. Pull a stunt like that at a real checkpoint, and they'll have you in an interrogation cell before your feet touch the ground."
"Huh?" She shook her head. "A real checkpoint? What was that about, then?"
"What it was about was telling everybody that there are guards about.
There are all sorts of real defenses all around us, and barely out of view.
Dogs, drones, all sorts of surveillance crap. Guess I was right—this stinks of a high-alert panic."
"Oh." She leaned closer to him as she glanced around. There was a large marquee dome behind one wing of the embassy, lights strung between trees—and a handful of adults, one or two of them in elaborate finery but most of them simply wearing office garb, wandering around clutching glasses of fizzy wine. "Are we in danger?" From what Herman said—
"I don't think so. At least, I hope not."
There were tables in the dome, attentive catering staff and bottles of wine and battalions of glasses waiting to be filled, a spread of canapes and hand rolls and other bite-sized snacks laid out for the guests. A clump of bored-looking visitors clutched their obligatory glass and disposable platter, and in one or two cases a sad-looking handheld flag. The first time Wednesday saw a flag she had to look away, unsure whether to laugh or cry. Patriotism had never been a huge Muscovite virtue, and to see the way the fat woman in the red pants held on to her flag as if it were a life preserver made Wednesday want to slap her and yell Grow up! It's all over! Except it also felt like … like watching Jerm, aged three, playing with the pewter pot containing Grandpa's ashes. Abuse of the dead, an infection of history. And now, he was gone. She looked away, sniffed, and tried to clear the haze in her eyes. She'd never much liked her kid brother anyway, but not having him around to dislike felt wrong.
A man and a woman wearing sober outfits that would have been at home in a law office were working the guest crowd in a low-key manner.
Wednesday's turn came remarkably fast. "Hello, I'm pleased you could be here today," said the woman, fixing Wednesday with a professionally polished smile that was almost as tightly lacquered as her hair. "I'm Mary-Louise. I don't believe I've had the pleasure of meeting you before?"
"Hi, I'm Wednesday." She forced a tired smile. Crying earlier had dried out the skin around her eyes. "I'm just passing through, actually, on board the Romanov. Is this a regular event?"
"We host one like it every year to mark the anniversary. Is there one where you live, can I ask?"
"I don't think so," Wednesday said doubtfully. "Centris Magna, in Septagon.
Quite a lot of us went there from Old Newfie—"
"Station eleven! Is that where you came from?"
"Yes."
"Oh, very good! I had a cousin there. Listen, here's Subminister Hasek, come to be very cultural with us tonight. We've got food, drink, a media presentation, and Rhona Geiss will be singing—but I've got to see to everyone else. Help yourself to everything, and if you need anything else, Mr. Tranh there will see to you." She vanished in a flurry of wide sleeves and coattails, leaving Wednesday to watch in bemusement as a corpulent old man the size of a brown bear shambled slowly into the dome, a gleaming, polished woman at either side. One of them reminded Wednesday of Steffi so much that she blinked, overtaken by an urge to say hello to the friendly ship's officer. When she looked again, the moment of recognition passed. A gaggle of teenagers gave ground to the threesome reluctantly as they walked in front of a circle of stewards setting up a table.
Wednesday accepted a glass of wine and cast around for Frank, but he'd wandered off somewhere while the greeters had been working her. Expect trouble. Sure, but what kind?
A row of glass doors had been shoved back from the room at one side of the embassy, and a couple of embassy staffers were arranging rows of chairs across the floor, then out onto the manicured lawn. The far wall of the reception room had become a screen, a blue-white-green disc eerily similar to the one Wednesday had seen from orbit as she boarded the orbit-to-surface elevator capsule. It floated in the middle of a sea of stars.
Home, she thought, dully. She hadn't felt homesick for years, not really, and then it had been for Old Newfie rather than this abstraction of a place she'd been born on—but now she felt a certain dangerous nostalgia begin to bite, and an equal and opposite cynical impulse to sneer at the idea.
What has Moscow ever done for me? she asked herself. Then memory stabbed at her: her parents, the look on Mayor Pocock's face as they'd hauled down the flag in the hub concourse before the evacuation … too many memories. Memories she couldn't escape.
Herman spoke in her earbud: "Most people come for the readings, remain for the singing of the national anthem, then leave and get steaming drunk.
You might want to emulate them."
Twenty minutes and one glass of wine later, Wednesday found a corner seat at one end of the front row. The other visitors were filtering in slowly, nothing like as organized as a funeral party entering a chapel of rest. By all appearances a number of them were already leading her at the drinking.
As the room filled up, and some people spilled onto the overflow chairs on the lawn, Wednesday felt someone sit in the chair next to her. "Frank?"
She glanced round.
"These are your people?" he said. Something in his expression made her wonder if he had internal ghosts of his own to struggle with. He seemed haunted by something.
"What is it?" she asked.
He shook his head. "Some other time." She turned round to face the front.
A few stragglers were still filling the seats, but a door had opened to one side of the podium and a dignified-looking albeit slightly portly woman—possibly middle-aged, possibly a centenarian, it was difficult to tell—walked up to the stage.
With her chestnut hair tied back with a ribbon, her black embroidered coat buttoned at the waist and cut back above and below, and the diamond-studded chain of office draped across her shoulders, she was exactly what Wednesday-had expected the Ambassador to be. She cleared her throat and the sound system caught and exploded her rasping breath across the lawn. "Welcome," she said. "Again, welcome. Today is the fifth anniversary, absolute time standard years, of the death, and exile, of our compatriots.