“You’re part of this?” he asked.
“The Exchange is. All that Tse has told you is true. Your daughter is vital. She cannot remain in the Wild. You must not have any contact with her for many years. Only then can she know you are her father. I can promise she will be happy and secure. She will want for nothing.
* * *
Her adoptive parents will love her.”
Anson knew the beginning of a trade when he heard it. “Lay it all out.”
“You will join the United West Coast Army. You will become a special operations general. Then join Earth Central’s Galactic Division as Director. And then the plan will become more straightforward. You will be reunited with your daughter.
“In exchange we guarantee that her life will be as I’ve said.”
Anson shook his head. “I’ll want to keep tabs on her throughout.”
“Not twenty-four seven,” Tse said. “Maybe a monthly sit-rep. The danger is you becoming so involved in her life that your own role changes.”
Anson stood up and moved to face both people, one open-faced, the other inscrutable. “Yes. About that. About the career you’ve mapped for me. I might almost think...”
“And you’d be right,” Tse said. “You will enable victory. If you follow this career path.”
“What else are you offering?”
“You already killed the man who murdered your wife...”
“That fucker at the station!”
“The Seattle kid was a decoy. The real killer was skilled at concealing himself. We can give you the men who hired him.”
“Deal,” Anson said. What the hell, he could always renege. But a small voice in his mind said that he never would.
* * *
It took two days. On the first the owner of a freight business renowned for its meticulous operations was found in an alley with his throat cut. He had taken several minutes to die, unable to call for help because the vocal cords were also severed.
On the second day the eldest son of a wealthy family known for its inspired investments was killed in a hit-and-run.
On the third day Anson Greenaway became a soldier.
And if his resolve ever wavered – name a soldier whose resolve never did – he would remind himself that his wife had died so that he and his daughter could live.
5
It took just under an hour for Greenaway to finish his story. He did so as they flew past Shrewsbury, a client town of Birmingham City State. The jitney kept under thirty kph, as if this was a casual, local flight. Greenaway said the jitney was invisible to all radar. Kara’s AI hadn’t registered any electronic surveillance, so maybe it was. If not there’d be little time for recriminations. She kept silent as he’d talked, not wanting to interrupt the flow.
“Thanks,” Kara said. “That can’t have been easy. But again, you took one hell of a lot on trust.”
“It was Cleo,” he said. “I’d known her all my life. The Exchange is the Wild.” He paused. “Afterwards Cleo was always there to advise me. Like a second mother. Or maybe aunt. She’s not exactly warm. None of the Exchange are.”
“What about your own parents?”
“They got religion when I was twelve. Extreme Buddhism. You know, contemplating the pointlessness of contemplation...”
“Er...”
“Okay, a tad unfair. But not for me. They live in a desert commune with other fanatics. We speak maybe twice a year.”
And for you the alien pre-cogs are another form of fanaticism, Kara thought. She touched his hand. “So we’re both orphans.” Yet something niggled at her mind.
“Thanks for listening.” He tried a smile. “It helped.”
He didn’t say what it helped with and Kara wasn’t too fussed. She had the anomaly now. “The timeline, though. It doesn’t make sense. Or I’m stupid.”
“You’re not.”
She took that as encouragement. “If I heard right, Tatia should be in her early thirties. But she’s at least ten years younger, from the time she was adopted.” She noticed his hands tighten on the controls – he’d switched off the vehicle’s AI, saying it could be traced – and knew she’d found the flaw.
“Thirty-two, in fact,” he all but whispered. “It’s her birthday in a week.”
“I must remember to send a card. Anson, what the fuck?”
“Not my idea,” he said, slowly. “But I agreed...”
A matter of keeping the baby Tatia alive. She was that important... or would be in the future. The alien pre-cog empire plus their human allies were centred on destroying her. Short of keeping Tatia locked away in a castle surrounded by an army, there was little chance she’d survive. Even that wasn’t a guarantee.
Unless the enemy thought she was dead.
“You told me she’d be adopted, be safe!” Greenaway had protested.
“She will be. Very safe.”
“It seems so... so weird. Wrong.”
“You led a sheltered life.” Tse wanted to shock Greenaway into accepting reality. “Until two weeks ago.”
Greenaway decided not to hit Tse. Which presumably Tse would have known? Or maybe not. Pre-cognition could be so complicated. “I get the necessity. But this?”
* * *
Stasis-field preservation wouldn’t become public knowledge for another thirty-five years. One of the human pre-cog families – in which the third son was always destined for castration, instead of the army or the church – had known about it for a very long time. Their version came from a three-hundred-year-old trade with an alien that resembled a large, tight bunch of brightly coloured feathers. It was superior to the stasis tech that would eventually be traded by the Cancri. That last could only preserve small amounts of food.
The earlier version could preserve humans until the power ran out. As far as the Wild scientists figured it, the stasis machine might last for several thousand years. How did it work? Easier to ask what it did than how. And forget the why. It was a cube one metre square that expanded by pressing the sides into a cube three metres square. One side was open. You went inside and into a different time frame.
Do not confuse time with change. The one can be measured by
