It was her network, and every day that she took her eyes off it, every hour she didn’t pepper it with messages and pull the best local leaders into power, every moment that she didn’t prove the value of a centralized coordinator, the net frayed. Maybe that was inevitable. All she had was her name and reputation, Jim’s name and reputation. It was a thin lever arm to move people who wanted to see the kneecapping of Laconia as freedom instead of responsibility.
She prepared messages to the places she thought might be useful: Gregor Shapiro on Ganymede had done the most work with nonlocal signaling protocols; Emilia Bell-Cavat （who was either three weeks late reporting in or whose latest reports had gone astray） was both a secret coordinator of the underground in New Greece system and an expert on noninsect superorganisms; Kachela al-Din worked with direct brain-to-brain communication in a medical context before he’d become a ship designer. They were her straws, and she was reaching for them. The sense of moving too slowly, of being too far behind even as she began, made Duarte’s hive mind seem almost seductive. If across all the spread of the human race, she could just ask her questions, hear the answers, be with the people she needed and wasn’t with . . .
“Hey,” Jim said from the doorway. “Did something happen with Elvi?”
“You mean besides the miraculous appearance and vanishing of the god-emperor in her lab?”
Jim considered. “I mean besides that, but when you put it that way, I guess that would cover a lot of weird. She’s just seemed kind of nervous.”
“I’m going back to the god-emperor thing.”
“I meant around us in particular,” Jim said as he pulled himself into the cabin. “She was going to come have dinner here on the Roci, but she bailed. I feel like maybe something about Amos bothered her.”
“Have you asked her?”
“You see? There you go with your useful, straightforward suggestions. I never come up with those kinds of things myself.”
“Yes, you do.”
He braced himself at the wall behind her, looking over her shoulder at the arrayed underground. “What’ve you got?”
“Just what was in the toolbox before,” she said. “I feel like I came to cook a meal and it turns out it’s a poetry competition. Everything I built was to fight against Laconia back when Laconia was simple things, like invulnerable ships and neofascist authoritarians. Now that it’s become a really invasive bad dream, how do you build a resistance to fight that?”
“It was kind of always an invasive bad dream, but I get what you’re saying,” Jim said. “Plus San Esteban. Don’t forget the boiling dark gods looking to snuff out all life because we annoyed them. Do you have a sense what the plan is?”
“Track Duarte down and talk him out of it,” she said. “Find a way to access and use whatever tools the builders made without turning all humanity into an extended version of Winston Duarte’s hippocampus.”
Jim nodded and rubbed his chin and neck with the flat of his palm in a way that meant he wasn’t convinced. That was fair. She wasn’t either.
“We do have Teresa,” Naomi continued. “She’s the only individual he’s shown enough concern for to adjust his cognition. If she asks him, maybe he’ll change again.”
“Parent and child,” Jim agreed. “That’s powerful stuff. Not sure I’d want to rely on it for, like, the survival of the human race.”
“Failure position is force him out of his position, whatever that is, and find someone else who can step into his place. Cara, Xan. Amos.”
“Jesus, really?”
“Not my first option, but maybe.”
Jim’s sigh was soft, gentle. It would have been less devastating if she hadn’t heard the despair under it. “Detective Miller once told me, ‘We don’t have a right thing, just a plateful of a little less wrong.’”
“Yeah, but he was an asshole.”
Jim laughed, then reached out and put his hand on the back of her head. She pushed back into him, taking pleasure and comfort in the simple physical presence of the man she trusted.
“When you send out the information,” Jim said, almost apologetically. “I mean, when you explain the situation to the rest of the underground? That’s going to pull a trigger.”
“I know,” she murmured.
“You have a plan for that?”
“I do.”
“Am I going to like it?”
“Nope,” she said, and opened her eyes, looking up into his gentle, bright gaze looking back down at her.