of all the specimens, only one of three that still had all of its petals, not directly visible from the toilet, bettering her odds of getting away clean. With care and patience born of insomnia she pried up each of the petals, one at a time, exposing fiberglass that had not seen light since the Vietnam War. Then she worried the circular middle loose. Finally it came free and she gazed at it delightedly on the palm of her hand; it was limned in grime rich with Forthrast biomass, smelling faintly of Comet. The rest of Uncle Richard’s DNA might have been reduced to water vapor and air by the ion-beam scanner, but perhaps traces of it were still embedded in the slip-proof porosities of this artifact. She doubted she would ever make any practical use of it as genetic material, but it did make for a nice souvenir.
15
Lovely people, but the weird was strong in that place,” Phil announced as the town receded in the Land Cruiser’s rearview mirror the next morning. He had swapped places with Anne-Solenne and was now riding shotgun, the better to see Tom and Kevin’s pickup truck. During the night, Tom and Kevin had opened up the locker in its back, taken out the machine gun, and mounted it on the tripod. They’d kept it under a blue tarp until the caravan had got out of town, then pulled over onto the shoulder long enough for Kevin to hop out, remove the tarp, and take a seat atop the locker. For the time being, the barrel was still canted sharply upward and Kevin was keeping his hands off the controls. Apparently the sole point of all this was to make everyone in their vicinity aware that they were a hard target.
“Mmm,” Sophia answered.
“Is this an okay time to talk about the finer points of estate law?” Anne-Solenne asked, swiveling around to cast a significant look behind them. Just a couple of car lengths to their rear, Pete’s SUV loomed. Pete was driving. Most of its seats were occupied by men—a mix of extended family and servants—who were open-carrying a range of long and short guns. “Just so I have a basic TLDR-level grasp of the weirdness? Because those people are super nice and everything but I can tell that you are dancing through a minefield.”
“Per stirpes,” Sophia said, and then spelled it out. “Look it up. Read it and weep. Those of you who finish early may wish to refamiliarize yourselves with the storyline of Bleak House.”
“Per stirpes” turned out to be a term of art, used in writing wills. It basically meant a scheme for dividing up an estate in which the money was split evenly among siblings (or, at any rate, people in the same generation of a family).
“Got the idea?” Sophia said, after she’d given them some time—a stretch of Iowa five miles or so wide—to digest it. “Richard’s will basically said, ‘Create two things: a foundation and a trust. Put some of my money into the foundation and use it to do cool stuff. Put the rest of it into the trust, which is there to provide a safety net for my extended family—so I don’t have any grandnephews who can’t afford to go to college or get medical care or whatever. Set up the trust so that the money is divided per stirpes among my generation.’ He signed that will and then forgot about it. So far, so good. But then he proceeded to get much richer than he had ever imagined. The amount of money that was destined to be dumped into the trust became way bigger than was conceivably needed just for a safety net. It started to look like a ticket to easy street for everyone who could call Richard a brother, an uncle, or a great-uncle.”
“The amount wasn’t capped?” Phil asked.
“Should have been. But wasn’t. One of many defects in the language.”
“And I’m guessing he never got around to updating it?” Anne-Solenne asked.
“Wasn’t in his nature.”
“So, were people, like, just licking their chops and waiting for him to kick the bucket?”
“No, actually. Because he should have lived decades longer than he did. And anyway no one knew what was in the will until Corvus read it in the hospital.”
“Corvallis Kawasaki,” Phil explained. He’d learned that much, at least, from being Sophia’s boyfriend.
“Seriously?” Julian asked. “Corvallis Kawasaki is, like, your family retainer!?”
Sophia met his eyes and thought he was looking at her in a new light.