weight, don’t complain about the chores they’re given. The girl is language, and she’s been translating some of my old workbooks for me—but not for fun. She has to work. She does it dutifully, without complaint, but there’s no joy in it. The boy is math, and he’s the same when I set him jobs that involve measurement or calculation. His work is always perfect. It’s not inspired. I think they didn’t bake properly.”
“You can recycle them if you like.”
This is a rare treat, the opportunity to dismantle something living without needing to justify herself. To his surprise, Leigh says, “Not yet, unless that’s an order. As long as my first pair is around, you won’t authorize a new batch, and they make an interesting control group. One set has become so entangled as to be ritually useless, even if they’re a fascinating puzzle, and a second set has managed to avoid the Doctrine almost entirely. I want to understand why. I’m going to give them another six months, and if they haven’t produced useful results by then, I’m going to set them against each other and see who survives. It will be interesting to see what happens to either set if one of them is killed. I have theories.”
“You always do,” Reed says. “Middleton and Cheswich are the closest we’ve come to the controllable manifest Doctrine. Even her attempts at self-harm have served us; they’ll make him protective, which makes her a lever that can be used. Keep them under watch. If they show signs of entangling further, we may have to intervene. For the time being, we can let them alone. See what they’ll do, given the chance to exist together without external conflicts.”
Leigh frowns. Just a little. More than she usually allows in the presence of her owner and employer. Like all failed experiments, she’s far too aware of what it could mean if she incurs her keeper’s wrath. “All right.” She doesn’t sound pleased. Reed will not punish her for that; flashes of empathy are rare enough from her that he feels inclined to encourage them. Perhaps a bit more empathy would make her a bit less vicious. No less gifted, but . . . less inclined to “accidents” in the lab. “I’ll call Erin with her updated instructions.”
“Very good,” he says. They walk together through the halls of the Congress, away from the old fools who dream of an Impossible City they will never see, and the improbable road has never been more achievable, or closer to hand.
BUCOLIC
Timeline: 17:20 PST, November 16, 2008 (two months at peace).
“When are your parents expecting you?” Dodger is at the far wall, a dry-erase marker in her hand, adding numbers to the columns already there. Her handwriting is surprisingly precise, more like a font processed through a human hand than anything natural; every digit fits into the same amount of space, perfectly matched to its neighbors on either side.
Roger wouldn’t expect anything less. He’s cross-legged on her bed, elbows on his knees. The way she has the room arranged offers no back support; the mystery of her morning yoga classes has been answered. Without them, he’s fairly sure she’d pull a muscle trying to deal with her homework every morning, much less handle the rest of her day. The air smells of marker fumes and cleaning fluid; the single open window can’t clear it all out. Old Bill is on the sill outside, showing with his presence that he could come in if he wanted to, he’s just choosing not to. The sky is gray, and the air tastes of rain, and the world has never been so perfect.
“My flight leaves Sunday morning,” he says patiently. She already has this information: she helped him find the tickets, working some sort of mathematical wizardry to find the best deal for a holiday flight between Berkeley and Cambridge. (Well, San Francisco and Boston: she may be a math wizard, but conjuring airports out of nothing is outside both her skill set and her overall interests. Where would they put it?) “I’ll be gone six days, returning the Saturday after Thanksgiving. You’re still welcome to come, if you want to.”
“And get murdered by my own parents for being an ungrateful child? No, thank you.” She adds another row of figures. “I’ll go home to Palo Alto, and have my father’s deep-fried turkey, and like it. Really. He’s good at things that involve borderline ridiculous amounts of fire. Remember the time zone: I