5
Vidoslav Karadzic stood courteously and smiled, extending his hand across the table as Gwendolyn Adair walked into the small private dining room.
Like Gwendolyn herself, he was a direct descendent of a First Wave family. That was a significant social cachet even in relatively recently settled system like Manticore, although—again, like Gwendolyn—he held no aristocratic title or any hope of inheriting one. He was, however, related to two barons and a countess, and his family connections helped to explain his success as a management consultant, since they got him access to almost anyone when he needed it.
Gwendolyn understood how that worked, since she used exactly the same advantages in her own endeavors.
“Gwen! So lovely to see you, my dear!” Karadzic beamed. With his brown hair, brown eyes, and broad, cheerful face, he looked like anyone’s favorite uncle, and he patted the back of the hand he held before he released it and waved her into the chair on her side of the table.
“It’s been too long,” he continued. “Tell me, what can I do for you or George?”
Gwendolyn smiled back, although she, for one, had never been taken in by his cheerful, artless expression. Then again, she knew him rather better than her cousin did. Although Karadzic had handled quite a few management issues for Earl Adair Hollow, all of them had been legal.
“Actually, I’m not here for George,” she said, which didn’t appear to surprise him. “My calendar says I am, so we probably do need to talk about a couple of issues the Foundation’s having with one of its vendors, but the main reason I asked to meet you here is rather different.”
“I’m shocked,” he said mildly, and this time Gwendolyn snorted in amusement.
“I’m sure you are,” she said. The dining room in Karadzic’s private club had excellent security systems, which was one of several reasons he liked to do business here. Especially when the business at hand had any…questionable aspects.
“So, what seems to be the problem?” he asked in a more businesslike tone, and she grimaced.
“It’s the damned treecats,” she said.
“What? Is it possible you’re telling me that you aren’t really fully on board with George’s efforts on their behalf? I’m shocked—shocked!” Karadzic’s surprised expression might have fooled a particularly credulous six-year-old.
“Oh, come on, Vidoslav!” Gwendolyn rolled her eyes. “I’m sure you, of all people, know Angelique Frampton and I are considerably closer than dear George realizes. And I’ll let you guess how she feels about the possibility of the treecats being declared Sphinx’s native sapient species.”
“Given how heavily invested she is in land futures on Sphinx, I don’t have to guess,” he said affably. “So should I take it that Angelique has approached you and your friend Morrow to do something about that?”
“I’m sure we’re not the only ones she’s approached, but yes. And the problem is that I have a ringside seat for how this is likely to play out in the end.”
“Not well from her perspective, I’d wager.”
“Got it in one.” Gwendolyn nodded with a disgusted expression. “I’m fighting a delaying action, and George trusts me enough that I can keep the ‘really-smart-animals-but-not-true-sapients’ door open a crack even in his own mind. But that crack’s getting steadily narrower, and the ’cats are getting steadily more visible. Especially since that business on Gryphon. Clifford Mulvaney’s helping to downplay the extent of their sapience, but I doubt very much that we’ll be able to keep that up a lot longer. It doesn’t help that Stephanie Harrington is such an attractive and articulate spokesperson for them, either! She made Ford look like exactly what he was—a patronizing cretin trying to discredit her testimony by patting her on the head and telling her what a cute little girl she was. The only good thing about it is that for reasons of her own, and I suspect I know what they are, she and her friends have chosen to go slow on asserting the treecats’ intelligence. In the end, though, that’s not going to last. It can’t.”
“Then it would appear you face an insoluble dilemma, my dear,” Karadzic observed.
“That’s one of the things I’ve always liked about you, Vidoslav. How perceptive you are. Except that I don’t believe there are any truly insoluble dilemmas if one can only find the proper angle of attack.”
“Ah?” He raised his eyebrows in polite question.
“I’m not prepared to give up entirely on the notion that we can successfully argue that they aren’t fully sapient,” Gwendolyn said. “I admit the chance of that is fading, but it’s not completely off the table yet. And my fallback plan is to back Hidalgo’s position that they need to be protected from cultural contamination, which means we have to provide reservations for them, where they’ll be safe from disastrous human contact.”
“And said reservations will just happen to be someplace they won’t inconvenience Angelique and her fellow investors?”
“Exactly. But it’s always possible the fallback won’t work, either. For that matter, it’s always possible they’ll be granted protected species status even if they aren’t classified as fully sapient, which will automatically protect their habitat—their native habitat—as well. In fact, I’m willing to bet that one’s coming at us sometime soon, now. So it’s possible that I’ll need a more…a more permanent solution to the problem.”
“And you have such a solution in mind?”
“Well, it would be a pity if something happened to them, wouldn’t it?”
“What sort of ‘something’?” Karadzic asked. “Are you by any chance thinking in terms of a larger rendition of Muriel Ubel’s unfortunate accident?”
“Oh, please, Vidoslav! That was a crude, utterly botched affair. Leaving aside how destructive of the rest of the local biosphere it was, the very scope of the disaster prompted an immediate response that mitigated most of the damage to the treecats themselves. And I’m sure the Sphinx Forestry Service is keeping an eagle eye out for anything else along those lines. Besides, it’s not as if I want the little beasties to suffer.”
“So what do you want?” Karadzic leaned forward, folding his arms on the table, his expression more intent.
“I’m looking for something…subtle. Something that might help encourage the treecats’ champions to be in favor of isolating them from human contact. And something no one could ever trace back to me.” Gwendolyn smiled. “That’s why I’ve come to you. You’re so inventive about these things. And you know so many people in all the most interesting places.”
“I see.” Karadzic leaned back again, rubbing his chin thoughtfully while he gazed sightlessly at nothing in particular. He sat that way for quite some time before his eyes refocused and he looked back at Gwendolyn.
“Did I ever mention to you that I know Joshua Muñoz?”
“At the Urquhart Group?”
“Yes. He and I are actually scheduled to have dinner next Tuesday on a different matter. It’s possible he might be able to assist us with your little problem. For a reasonable fee, of course.”
“Oh, of course! But I’d suggest you put it to him as an on-spec proposition. Angelique isn’t the sort to lay money around on hypothetical projects. She’d probably trust me to greenlight any project, since that would keep her well away from it, but she’s unlikely to put down even a down payment unless there’s a reasonable probability of success. And she’ll probably only pay in full if the plan—whatever it is—actually succeeds. Which means I’d need a well-organized, specific proposal. One I can be confident enough in that I’d feel justified in presenting it to Angelique, bearing in mind that if I sell her on it and then it falls through, the repercussions could be…unfortunate.”
“That goes without saying, my dear.” Karadzic smiled at her. “I’ll get back to you after Joshua and I have our little tête-à-tête.”
* * *
“That was…not bad,” Trudy Franchitti said. “In fact, it was just as good as you said it would be.”
“Told you so.” She sat beside Nosey on the comfortable couch in his hotel room, her legs folded under her while she leaned her head on his shoulder, and he turned his head to kiss her dark hair lightly. “Pinocchio was always one of my favorite stories, when I was a kid. And this HD is actually an adaptation of a fairly late pre-Diaspora animation of it. I’ve seen a few minutes of the original that were digitally preserved, and given the limitations they had with things like CGI, it was actually pretty good. I do like this one better, though.”
“I wonder why we lost track of it,” Trudy mused. “I mean, I’ve seen…echoes, I guess you’d call them, of the same story idea often enough. So where did the original go?”
“I expect it just got lost in the underbrush.” Nosey raised the arm that wasn’t draped around her to turn off the HD with the remote. “I mean, we’ve got an awful lot of recorded history now. No way people could remember all of the children’s stories that were ever written down.”
“You’re probably right.” She nodded and snuggled a little closer. “I did like it, though. A lot.”
There was something almost…wistful about her tone, and Nosey looked down at the crown of her head. He and Trudy were still discovering things about each other—a process he thoroughly enjoyed and planned to continue for the next, oh, fifty T-years or so—but he’d never heard quite that note in her voice before.
“I’m glad. I guess there’s something in all of us that looks for that kind of change,” he said in a deliberately thoughtful tone. “Something that makes us want to be more than we are, especially when it seems impossible.”
“Maybe,” she said.
He hugged her a bit more tightly and pressed another fleeting kiss to her hair.
“That wasn’t what caught your attention in it?” he asked. “I mean, that’s the classic element that all the critics would fasten on. If you’re seeing something else, I’d love to hear it.” She raised her head enough to look at him, and he shrugged. “Hey! You know me. I’m always fascinated by the ‘road not taken.’ I think it’s really cool when someone sees something the rest of the thundering herd misses, and you’ve actually got a pretty good eye for that kind of thing.”
“Yeah—sure!” Trudy snorted. “Next thing you’re going to be telling me I’m as smart as Stephanie!”
Nosey hid an inner frown. He knew about the original friction between Trudy and Stephanie, and knowing both young women, he wasn’t surprised they hadn’t hit it off in the beginning. But as he’d come to care more and more deeply for Trudy, he’d discovered something he suspected Stephanie hadn’t twigged to. Not yet, at least. Which was probably because the one handicap from which Stephanie Harrington had never suffered was lack of self-confidence. She’d suffered the consequences of too much self-confidence often enough, but she’d never heard of the challenge she wouldn’t accept.
And that could very well be the reason Stephanie had never realized that the person behind the flirtatious, challenging, often irritatingly superior and sometimes cuttingly sarcastic persona Trudy had presented to the world for so long—still presented, actually, except with those she’d come to trust—was driven by the exact opposite of Stephanie’s confidence. She hid it well. It had taken months for her protective barriers to come down enough even for Nosey to realize it, but that lack of self-confidence, or maybe what it really was was a lack of self-belief, was there, deep at the heart of her. And he couldn’t figure out why. She was gorgeous, she had a truly wicked sense of humor when it was fully engaged, and she was far, far more intelligent than she gave herself credit for…or allowed others to realize. And one way she’d managed to hide that intelligence from most people—at least until she’d become involved in the baka bakari mess and met Nosey—was to hide behind relationships with “bad boys” like Stan Chang and Frank Câmara. The only place she’d really let her mask slip was in her involvement with Wild and Free.
And now with him.
She’d let a handful of other people in, after the air car accident that killed Stan, but none of the others had seen as deeply beneath her inner barriers as he had, and now he sensed something stirring behind them.
“To be honest,” he said lightly, “I suspect that very few people are as smart as Stephanie. Which, you may have noticed, didn’t keep her from almost getting herself killed the day she and Lionheart met. Compared to mere mortals like myself, however, don’t sell yourself short. You’re not just smart, Trudy. Oh, you are—in fact, I think you’re probably smarter than I am, and I’m not exactly a dummy myself—but what you are that’s a lot more important than just smart is a good, caring person. You have what my mom always called ‘the good heart.’ That’s why you spend so much time with Wild and Free. Although, now that I think about it, maybe the fact that you also spend so much time with me suggests that you aren’t quite as smart as I thought you were.”
She grinned at his last sentence, but the grin was short-lived and her eyes were dark.
He bent his head so that their foreheads touched and cupped the back of her head with his free hand.
“What’s bugging you?” he asked softly. She stiffened, but he held her gently close. “I know something is. Tell me about it.”
“There’s nothing,” she said quickly, and her voice was tauter than it had been.
“Yes, there is,” he disagreed in that same soft tone. “And you don’t have to tell me what it is if you don’t want to, honey. But people do themselves an awful lot of damage when they keep things bottled up inside too long. Especially if they’re hurtful things. Another thing my mom said to me, years ago, is that the knives that cut us most deeply are the ones we sharpen ourselves. She’s a smart lady, my mom. I don’t want you sharpening any more knives than you have to.”
She sat very, very still for a long, silent moment. Then she sighed and let herself relax against his side once more.
“It’s just that…that it wasn’t Pinocchio’s ability to become ‘real’ that I envied him for. It was Geppetto.”
Nosey’s eyebrows rose. That wasn’t exactly the response he’d expected, and yet—
“Geppetto?” he repeated. “You mean for creating him in the first place?”
“No.” Her voice was much lower and her shoulders drooped. “Or not just for that. I envied him because Geppetto loved him.”
The last three words cut Nosey to the heart. He’d never heard that tone from her before, not even when they’d talked about Stan’s death and her own terrible injuries. It was so…bleak. So empty.
He started to say something quickly, something comforting. But then he made himself stop. Made himself simply sit there, holding her, being there for her.
“I never had that, really,” she said finally. “Not from my father, anyway. And I think that may be the thing I most envied—resented, even—about Stephanie and Jessica, back when we were constantly locking horns. Because they had what I didn’t, and god, how I wished I had it, too.”
Her tone was no longer empty. It was hard, bitter. Nosey wrapped both arms around her.
“Tell me,” he said softly. “If you want to.”
“I don’t want to,” she half-whispered, “but I think I need to.”
“I’m listening,” he promised, and saw tears in her eyes as she raised her head to kiss his cheek.
“I know you are. I know you always will be. That’s the thing about you, Nosey Jones. You’re such a good guy you just can’t help caring about people, even when you try to hide it.”
“That’s me!” he told her. “Candidate for sainthood Nosey Jones!”
“I wouldn’t go quite that far,” she said dryly. “On the other hand, I think this is something I need to tell you because you mean so much to me. You need to know it, because I know—don’t think I don’t—that there are times I just seem to…go away in my own head. I’m working on it! But I don’t want this—I don’t want me—to sideswipe you somewhere down the road.”
“Not gonna happen,” he assured her. “I’m here for the long haul, lady. Where am I gonna find someone as gorgeous and smart as you are who’s willing to put up with this schnoz?” He lifted one hand to tap his undeniably prominent nose.
“Yeah, sure.” She rolled her eyes. “And I guess I’m glad you think I’m pretty,” she continued in a softer voice, “but you know what? Sometimes I hate the way I look. I hate the way I act. I don’t want to be me, because really, I never have been. Me, I mean.”
Nosey’s puzzlement must have shown, because she shook her head.
“Nobody ever let me just be ‘me,’ Nosey. I always had to be somebody else. Somebody my father could be ‘proud’ of. Somebody who always did the ‘right thing,’ even when she didn’t think it was, because he did. Somebody who wore the right clothes, had the right opinions, knew where her place was. Somebody who made him look good. And someone who never, ever argued with him.”
Nosey’s jaw tightened. He’d crossed swords with Jordan Franchitti himself, shamed him into doing the right thing more than once with the stories he’d posted to his blog. He knew Franchitti hated anyone who crossed him, just as he resented anyone who criticized him. Yet Jordan had always seemed to dote on Trudy. Anything she’d wanted, she’d gotten, and she’d been his darling, obedient little girl. Right up to the moment during the previous endless summer’s terrible wildfires when she’d defied him to rescue her pets and then taken them to Richard Harrington for medical attention.
He’d obviously resented that, yet he’d seemed to accept it, even when Trudy signed up at Wild and Free, a “gooey-hearted” organization he despised. Yet—
“I don’t like your father,” Nosey told her now. “I never tried to hide that, and I’m pretty sure you’ve figured out how little he likes me. Which I figured was probably why he’s so pissed that you and I are together now. But this sounds like it goes deeper than that.”
“You didn’t see me the day I turned up at Doctor Harrington’s office with my animals during the fires,” she said.
“No, I didn’t even know you then,” he agreed, frowning at the apparent change of subject.
“Might be a good thing you didn’t—see me, I mean.” Her bitter smile held no humor at all. “You’re a lot more observant than most people. You might’ve noticed the bruises.”
“Bruises.” It was his turn to stiffen, and she nodded.
“I was really afraid Stephanie or her folks might notice them,” she said in a low voice. “Or maybe a part of me hoped they would notice. I don’t really know. But it’s not their fault they didn’t. I was in long sleeves, so the bruises on my arms didn’t show, and I told them the one on my face was from running into a door on the way out of the house because of the smoke. It wasn’t.”
“Your father hit you,” Nosey said and heard the iron-ribbed anger in his own voice.
“That was the face,” she said. “The arms were finger marks, where he grabbed me and shook me when I told him I was going after them. He has big hands. The bruises were pretty dark.”
“Oh, Trudy,” he half-whispered as tears prickled the corners of his own eyes.
“Wasn’t the first time,” she continued in an oddly detached monotone. “The first time I remember him slapping me hard enough to knock me down I was about four, I think. I couldn’t have been much older than that, anyway. It probably wasn’t the first time, really, but I realized a few months ago that I don’t have a single memory of him that’s older than when I was four. Or I don’t think I do. It’s a little hard to be sure because they all sort of…blur together. And then there were the ‘spankings.’ I was thirteen before I realized most parents don’t use belts when they ‘spank’ their daughters. But he was my father, and all fathers love their daughters, don’t they? That’s what everyone says, so it must be true…unless there’s something wrong with the daughters. So, obviously, if mine didn’t love me, it must be my fault. So I decided to be the very best daughter I could be, Nosey. I did what he told me to do, I wore what he told me to wear, I even thought what he told me to think, and everything was perfect…as far as anyone else knew.”
“But what about—” he began, then chopped himself off, and she snorted harshly.
“Mom?” She shook her head. “Believe me, I’ve wondered where she was, a time or two. But be fair. They’ve been married twice as long as I’ve been alive, and do you think a man who’d smack a four-year-old around wouldn’t do the same thing to his wife?”
“But she could have asked for help! Not just for herself—for you, too!”
“She could have. She should have, and there are times I resent the hell out of the fact that she didn’t. But I finally realized she’d sold herself the same rationale I had. If he could treat her that way, then it had to be her fault. She’s accepted that even more deeply than I ever did.”
“What a pile of garbage,” Nosey grated. “Nobody deserves that kind of treatment, Trudy. Nobody!”
“Easier to see from the outside than the inside,” she told him. “Even now, there’s a part of me that desperately wants him to decide I’m worthy of being loved after all.”
“And what about your brothers?” Nosey demanded, his tone harsh. “They just stand around and think it’s fine for him to be punching out his wife and his daughter?!”
“Why not? He did it to them, when they were younger, too. Not as much, as they got older, but a lot of that is because they grew up to be younger versions of him. Especially Dan. Trevor’s not as bad, but he’s closer to my age.”
“Then why haven’t you moved out already?”
“It’s not that easy, Nosey. It wasn’t like a teenager could have set up on her own without people asking questions, now was it? And where would I have gone? Besides, he was Jordan Franchitti, and he’d made damned sure I knew how important, how influential, that made him. You may have noticed—” a tiny sliver of actual humor crept into her tone “—how he makes that point to just about everyone. Try growing up as his daughter and hearing it day after day after day at home. So there was never any question in my mind that he could make me come home again. Besides, who was going to believe me over him—take my word for it, or even care about it—when he dragged me home again if I ran away? And how do you think he would have reacted once he did drag me home?”
“But—”
“But somebody probably would have believed. Or at least looked into it.” Trudy nodded. “Except that ten-year-old me and twelve-year-old me didn’t know that.”
“Well, you’ve damned well got somebody to run to now,” he told her flatly.
“I know. And I know you’ve been hinting about that for quite a while now. But I need to be sure, Nosey.”
“Sure that I love you?” He tried—hard—to keep the edge of hurt out of his voice and his expression. And given what she’d just told him, if anyone in the entire universe had reason to question whether or not someone who said he loved her really meant it, it was she. But—
“No, sweetheart,” she said, raising her head to kiss him again. “I’m not worried about that. I just need to be sure in my own mind before I actually move in with you that I’m running to you and not just away from him. You deserve more than to be my hiding place. And I won’t let you be just my hiding place. You’re too important to me for that. Besides, I won’t turn eighteen for another three months, so technically, I’m still a minor, and I’m not going to give him the ammunition to have you charged with contributing to my delinquency. Not—” she looked up at him again, and this time her smile was actually wicked “—that I’m not thoroughly delinquent already, especially when I’m with you!”
He gazed back down at her searchingly, looking deep into her eyes for a long, silent moment. Then, not entirely happily, he nodded.
“All right, I guess I can see that,” he said. “But you won’t be a minor much longer, so start thinking about it a lot harder. And in the meantime, if he ever—and I mean ever, Trudy—lays a finger on you again, you’d better tell me. I don’t care if he’s ‘Jordan Franchitti.’ I care about you, and I’m not letting anyone treat you that way again. You understand me?”
“It means the world to me that you feel that way,” she said. “I’ve got to learn to stand up to him on my own, though.”
“Of course you do. That’s obviously the first step, but there’s no rule that says someone—someone who loves you, like, oh, me—can’t have your back while you do it.”
“I know. It’s taken me a long time to figure it out, but I know that now. Except that it’s not the first step. Not really.”
“It’s not?” He frowned. “In that case, what is?”
“The first step, the really hard step, was to find someone who loved me. Who I knew loved me. And who I could trust enough for him to be the very first person I’ve ever told this to.” She reached up, ran her fingers through his hair, and her smile was misty. “Thank you for being my first step, Nosey Jones.”