Regeneration (2 page)

“It wouldn't. At least, not if I were involved.”

“You think norms will see it that way? Even with your involvement? They mostly like and respect you, Mik, but not
that
much. Not enough. And the UPP would have to respond to their concerns.”

“So.” Mikal steepled his three-fingered, double-thumbed hands under his chin and glared at Rob. “My choices are to join the UPP and risk becoming ineffectual, or to back an alternative and be thought of as the enemy.”

“I'm not . . . That's a bit dramatic . . .” Rob appeared to wilt slightly. “Look, you're worried about whether they'll continue to prioritize gem issues? Well, they'd
really
have no reason to then. Neither of us wants that to happen.”

“There's a third option. I could stay the hell out of it, stay independent. I've won two elections that way. The UPP never wanted me until there was something in it for them.”

“You know that's not true, Mik. You could have joined any time—”

“
Could have,
yes. There's a difference between not shutting the door in my face—probably—and sending a parade of ever-more-impressive delegates to try and talk me into it.” He appraised the other man thoughtfully. “What are they scared of, Rob?”

He threw his hands up in exasperation. “What do you think? They're afraid of losing the next election. What happened last time wasn't a fluke, Mik. The Trads are starting to gain ground. It's one thing to have you and a few other indies scattered here and there, but most gems end up voting UPP because the only other option is a Trad candidate. If another progressive party emerges and splits the vote, they could very well end up winning. Then where would you be?”

“Thirteen years is a long time,” Mikal mused. “The UPP is in its third term in government, and if they did manage to get in again . . . Two decades of the same party in power isn't great for democracy, is it?”

“It's the reason we've been able to build the kind of society in which I can be sitting here now having this conversation with you.
You think we'd be better off with the people who opposed the Declaration and voting rights, who still oppose funding for reproductive and educational support, back in charge?”

“Probably not, but me joining the UPP wouldn't prevent it. And a new party might happen anyway, no matter what I do. I told you, it's not my idea.” He drummed his fingers lightly on the tabletop, still thinking. “Which begs the question, really. How much of this desperation to get me on board is because of Thames Tidal?”

“A lot.” Rob looked straight at him, and this time his gaze did not waver. “A
lot
.”

A sharp, season-shifting breeze cut facets across the water's surface, turning it from tea-dark choppiness into a shimmering kaleidoscope of mirror-bright wavelets every time the sun sailed out from behind a cloud. Gabriel, scanning the normally flat pool of Sinkat Basin as he strode across a footbridge, winced at the glare, and came to a halt, leaning against the railing. There were fewer boats than usual casting their shadows over the water, and even fewer people to be seen on the quays. He was used to arriving much earlier, when residents of the amphibious neighborhood were still bustling to work themselves.

He knew the basin was likely to be as quiet as the quayside at this hour, but still he directed his gaze straight down. As his eyes adjusted he felt the pull, hypnotic, drawing him below the first few light-dappled feet. Shadows shifted and moved down there, tempting him to try and identify something recognizable in the murky depths. Almost without realizing it, he tapped at the thin wire that encircled his head. The background hum of stream-feeds, a barely sensed white-noise growl—the sensation for him of the cranial band on standby—winked out.

For a moment there was nothing in its place but true silence. Then he felt his own talent assert itself, whispers of thought and emotion sliding across each other like the echoes of distant conversation. He bent over the railing, squinting into the water, concentrating hard. Something flickered across his consciousness: a blur of red twenty feet deep, sinuous and moving fast. It was as much a texture in his mind as anything he could have been sure of using his eyes alone.

He tilted his head, following as the red flicker curved toward the underwater entrance to Thames Tidal Power. The ovoid building sat at the terminus of the quay, all shiny, pearl-white curves soaring high above the hard edges of recycled stone and reinforced concrete, plunging down into the waves that lapped against it. Twelve convex wedges of tough, translucent thermal membrane, like the segments of a gigantic, elongated orange, were supported on a dense biopolymer scaffold embedded with the nanoscale capacitors of the company's quantum-battery technology. Two-thirds of the structure gleamed solid in the sunshine topside; the rest appeared to waver and flex in the dappling brown water below. The energy efficiency and seductively organic design of the building had made it famous, and celebrated. Gabriel felt a familiar surge of pride in his revolutionary workplace.

Just that morning he had ended up having to explain, again, that it was indeed his as much as anyone else's: the class found the cooperative concept both attractive and perplexing. He wanted to talk to Agwé about some of the things the students had said, and hoped she was on her way to the office. She'd been too distorted by the water for him to get more than a fleeting sense of presence, though he had no business feeling for her mind anyway.

He reluctantly pulled his awareness back—and it snagged on another mind, disconcertingly close beside him and with a familiar bite to it, knife-sharp, chili-sharp, but overlaid with something that felt like toffee and marshmallows: a sticky, pillowy sweetness. He looked down, wondering whether the mood of the moment would be moon-faced self-possession or madcap silliness, and found his sister regarding him gravely.

“Hey. Where'd
you
come from?”

“
You
should know. Your band's off. How come you didn't know I was there?”

Gabriel resisted the urge to reach up and tap it guiltily back on. “What makes you think I didn't?”

She gave him a look of pure scorn and turned to peer through the safety barrier, her cheeks squashed between the bridge's narrow, close-set balusters, the top of her head pressing up against the underside of the rail on which he was still leaning.

“You didn't,” she said, with a certainty that brooked no dissent. “You were reading someone. In the water. I saw.
And
”—he could hear the needling tone come into her voice, probing, searching for a soft spot to poke at and annoy—“
you
didn't know I was there. You didn't hear me.”

“I wasn't listening for you, Eve.”

“Who were you listening for, then?”

“No one.”

“Then you should've been able to hear me. You
couldn't
!”

“I couldn't be bothered.”

“I am immune to your power!” She had lost interest in the water and was gripping the balusters tightly, the better to lean back at a precarious angle and peer up at him. Her dark eyes were alive with mischief now, under a tangle of summer-bleached blond hair.

“I wish.” Gabriel started toward the quay and the topside entrance to the Thames Tidal building. Eve swung away from the rail to skip along beside him.

“You cannot hear what's in my head,” she declared, with as much pomposity as an eight-year-old could manage.

“That's 'cause there's nothing
in
your head, squirt.”

“Liar, liar! I'm
thinking
bad
thoughts
.” Eve hopped from one foot to the other, solemnity abandoned in favor of gleeful torment. Gabriel sighed theatrically at her. Her mind was indeed often as still and unruffled as Sinkat Basin itself, a slightly scary blankness beneath which he could sense half-formed thoughts and unfocused emotions morph and shift. But she had popped out of that tabula-rasa state with typical suddenness and now there was a distinctly Eve-flavored refrain running through his own mind. He was relieved to note that
her moral rebellion amounted, pretty much, to mentally reciting
bad thoughts bad thoughts bad thoughts
over and over.

“That's all you've got? Evie, that's just boring.”

“It's not boring. It's
bad
.”

“Bo-
ring,
” he repeated, as
Gabe is a doo-doo head
rang clear in his skull. She repeated the thought, watching him for a reaction. He considered mouthing the words back to prove he'd registered them, but decided against it; that was just as likely to encourage her. Instead he fell back on a disappointed head-shake, an attempt at unsmiling big-brother admonishment that had no effect whatsoever.

“
Yoouu
can't
heeaar
me,” Eve sang. She was in front of him now, skipping backward and smirking. He tapped the cranial band back on. The hum settled in immediately, blurring out the fragments of nearby minds that washed through his brain the rest of the time.

“Okay, now I
half
can't hear you. Which is a relief, believe me. You can shut up with the other half any time you like.”

“
Gabe is a
—” she began, and then stopped abruptly, pouting. Gabriel shot his own triumphant smirk at her. She knew very well that the rude things she could get away with thinking were absolutely not permitted to be spoken out loud.

“You never answered my question. What are you doing down here? I thought Papa was going to be in the café all day.”

“He is. I came with Mama.” Eve pointed as they came up to the entrance. “She's with Pilan, looking at something.”

“What kind of looking?”

“Her kind.”

They clattered down the short ramp that sloped gently from the end of the quay to the gillung entrance. The main doorway, an airlock, was currently unpressurised and riding just above the water's surface. Gabriel pressed a finger to the identipad while Eve fidgeted impatiently beside him. She darted ahead as the outer door hissed open, through the unsealed pressure chamber and into the airwalk passage beyond. “They're along here, in the room where you work. I bet they've been
watching
us,” she said, for the internal photofilters of the biopolymer membrane were mostly set to transparent, and what looked like pearly translucence on the outside was from the inside clear as glass.

Mama would never have let you go without her if she couldn't watch you all the way into my care,
he thought.
You are smart, Eve, and you know that.

What he said was, “Don't run,” reaching out to hook a finger into the back of her sweater as she surged forward. “Eve, seriously. People live here.”

“They work here.”

“They also live here. And kicking up a racket where people work isn't okay either.” He released her as she fell into sullen step beside him and frowned down at the top of her head. She had been like this more and more lately: cocksure, mouthy, careless of others. He told himself it was just another phase in the mercurial, messy business of growing up, but underneath he felt a tinge of worry. Eve was no more an ordinary child than he himself had been, and the truth was that no one knew quite what to expect of her either.

Gaela looked up as they came into the main project office, a huge room organized into clusters of workstations that took up most of the first topside level. Gabriel wondered, from the appraising expression on her face as she glanced at Eve before meeting his own gaze, whether she had been having the same thought. With the cranial band now powered on, he couldn't tell.

Eve skipped over to Gaela, triumphantly declaring, “I found him!” as she threw her arms around their mother.

“He wasn't exactly hidden,” Gaela responded drily, cuddling her daughter back and trying, and failing, to run a hand through Eve's hair. “Though I guess your hairbrush is? Hi, honey.” This to Gabriel. “We saw you on the far side of the quay—”

“
You
saw him,” Eve corrected, and Gaela sighed.

“Yes, Evie, I saw your brother and said you could go meet him, since it looked like you might spontaneously combust if you didn't.”

Gaela's comment drew chuckles from the people with her: a man and a woman of almost identical height, both with the long torsos, webbed digits and luminescent green hair characteristic of the gillung subspecies. Beyond that, the similarity faded. Pilan was barrel-chested and powerful, his copper-colored skin contrasting sharply with his short, lime-bright locks. Lapsa was slender and seal-dark; her
glowing shoulder-length ringlets were the deep shade of sea-grass. Her pregnant belly pressed her bodysuit proudly outward.

Eve gave the comment a moment's tilt-headed consideration before silently ducking away to scramble onto a chair and peer at a screen on which an infographic was slowly morphing in response to incoming telemetry.

Gabriel slung his satchel onto a worktop. “Hi Mama. Lapsa, Pilan. What's up?”

“Not much. Just some vid files Pilan thought I should take a look at.” There was a deliberate casualness to his mother's voice as she tucked her tablet away, and an exchange of glances between the other two, that told Gabriel she had let Eve go so they could speak privately, as well as get a moment's peace. He said nothing.

Pilan shrugged one brawny arm into the meshed utility vest that kept his tools and other kit organized and within easy reach underwater, and then clapped Gabriel on the shoulder. “So how does it feel to be seventeen? We heard it was quite a party.”

“A lot like sixteen so far. The party was great, though.”

“Agwé was there,” Eve announced, without looking around.

Gabriel could think of no response except to glare at his sister; his mother would probably disapprove of him strangling her.

“She had a great time,” said Lapsa, watching him with amusement. “Ready to get back to work?”

“Very ready,” he replied. Then, to Pilan, with a sideways glance at Eve, “Anything I need to know?”

“It can wait until we get back.”

Lapsa slid her tablet into a pocket. Through the clear wall they could see a shuttle-boat preparing to head out to the estuary, and Gabriel blinked in surprise at the sight of Agwé, wearing a cherry-red bodysuit, leaping lightly on board with her vidcam slung over one shoulder.

“Just keep us looking good on the streams,” Pilan went on, following his gaze. “Topsider attention's going to spike in the next few days.”

They all knew this; Gabriel could not imagine why Pilan felt it necessary to remind him. The look on his boss's face was unreadable.
“Thanks, Gaela,” Pilan added as the flame-haired woman started chivvying a reluctant Eve away from the monitor. “I'll message you if there's anything else.”

And then he and Lapsa and his mother and Eve were gone, leaving Gabriel with the impression that deep and unseen currents had washed through the conversation.

There were enough messages waiting for him that he was able, for an hour or so, to push aside his curiosity. With the switch from storage- to supply-phase less than a week away, there was a rush on to make sure everything was done and checked and double-checked. A few months earlier, when installation of the turbines and battery banks was in full swing and the carping from rival firms, Trad politicians, and random trolls had become increasingly frequent and frantic, Gabriel had feared that their opponents might succeed in delaying the launch, if not derailing it completely. Now a quick glance at the infographic that had captured Eve's attention confirmed that every indicator was green or, at worst, tinged with amber. The project looked to be right on target.

And that meant that while the engineers and technicians could expect to settle into a routine as they moved from the varied tasks of developing the plant to the regular rhythms of operation, his own workload was likely to increase in both volume and unpredictability—another good reason to have taken a few days off before the launch.

As he pulled up feeds and opened the bespoke monitoring apps Herran had helped him write, he could see that the constant murmur of stream chatter about Thames Tidal Power was already picking up. It was no more than he'd expected. He remembered Agwé's surprise, when the plan to extend the tidal turbine arrays that powered Sinkat and the Squats had first begun to leak out onto news and socialstreams, that the prospect of a cheaper source of cleanly generated, easily stored, and infinitely sustainable energy had not been universally welcomed. That led to his mother consulting on security, especially for the two quantum-battery banks where vast energies were stored on either shore of the estuary, and to him having a series
of increasingly intense discussions, first with Agwé herself, and then with Lapsa and Pilan, about how to manage the streams and deal with blowback from the public.