Born in 1995 in time line two, and adopted at birth by Franz and Emily Douglas, Rita was eight when Clan renegades from time line one nuked the White House. Growing up in President Rumsfeld’s America, she has learned to keep her head down and her nose clean. But there’s only so much she can do to avoid attention. The paranoid high-surveillance state has her under constant surveillance in case the woman who gave her up for adoption (and enemy of the state) takes a renewed interest in her.
Rita has a history and drama studies degree, a pile of student loans, and no great employment prospects. At twenty-five years of age she doesn’t really know where she’s going. But that’s okay. Because the government has big plans for Rita.
See the end of the novel for a principal cast list and a glossary of key terms and vocabulary.
PART ONE
DOG AND PONY SHOW
The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.
—William Gibson
Prologue
BOSTON, 2004
A grandfather and his granddaughter walked under the leaf-bare trees of late autumn:
“Tell me again about Grandma Greta, Grandpa?”
Her gloved hand was fragile and small in his. The clouds were gray overhead, and the chilly Boston air, not quite ready for snow, nevertheless bore the crisp smell of incoming rain. The grass to either side of the metaled path had been mown for the last time this year. Kurt swallowed, rewinding the tapes of memory to a more innocent time. He tried to decide how much more he could tell his adoptive granddaughter about the extraordinary woman who’d died when she was three.
She was ten now, in these chilly dog days of 2004, old enough for another eyedropper-full of truth. Kurt glanced round, checking for eavesdroppers: but Kurt and Rita had come to pay their respects to Grandma late on a weekday, right before Thanksgiving. The only other residents of this park lay silent and unhearing, marked for eternity beneath gravestones and sculpted memorials.
They came to a fork in the path. Here, a narrower trail led off between a grove of trees toward a cluster of grave markers now falling into evening’s shadow. Kurt gently steered his granddaughter onto this path, proceeding on instinct. The cold air numbed his cheeks, matching his mood. Soon he saw the plot, and finally spoke: not looking at the girl, trying to order his thoughts.
“Look at the headstone and tell me what it reads.”
Rita trotted across the grass with the unstudied spontaneity of a child who’d never lost anyone close. She bent to read: “Greta Douglas, wife and mother, born February sixteenth, 1942, Dresden, died August nineteenth, 1998, Boston.” A puzzled frown shadowed her eyebrows at the next phrase: “‘Finally among friends’?”
Kurt nodded. For a moment he choked on his memories. “Everything except the places and the date of her death was a lie.”
“Lies on a gravestone?” The indignation of an outraged youngster had bite.
“Oh yes.” A ghost of a smile tugged at his cheeks: or perhaps it was the proximity of tears. “She was very insistent toward the end. I was to maintain appearances at all costs. Her illness … She was very tired, Rita, but she didn’t want her death to affect the rest of us.”
“But. If it’s all lies … is ‘finally among friends’ untrue too?”
“No.” Kurt took in the rest of the graveyard with a jerk of his chin. “She was buried under a false name, in a country foreign to her, among people who would have been her enemies if they’d known what she was.” Now he too stepped off the path onto the grass, shifting his grip on the bunch of flowers. “So lonely.”
“But…” Monosyllabic awkwardness struck. “Wife and mother?”
“Um.” Kurt squatted, going down on knees that creaked more with every year. He began to unwrap the paper from around the bouquet. “I suppose that bit was true, if you like.” His hands worked busily, without his conscious intervention. Dead flower stems, cold under his fingertips. He remembered Greta’s hands, the warmth of her shared laughter. Her voice a little throaty from the cigarettes, a warning of the emphysema to come. “As true as you want it to be. She was a wife and mother. And as misdirection, it’s perfect: nobody looks twice at a hausfrau, no? Exactly what she wanted on her headstone.”
“She wanted her headstone to misdirect people? Why?”
Kurt arranged the flowers in the empty niche before the headstone, his neck bent. He did this every season, and would continue to do so as long as he was able to. Greta, his one true love, had died while he was still in his fifties. He didn’t expect to ever remarry: for a man in his position it was too risky. But he still had their son, Franz, and Franz’s wife, Emily, and their adopted offspring. He thought of his adoptive grandson, River, and this curious gawky girl with the perpetually stunned-looking dark eyes and restless mind, her talent for deadpan impersonation. “She was a”—he stumbled—“a sort of actress.” Fingers fumbled with a flower stem. “It was all an act for Greta. A role she played. Wife and mother, for example. Just as, before she came to the United States, she was a sergeant in the, the special police, assigned to the Dresden administration. That’s where we met: Dresden, Germany, in ’66.”
“Grandma was a secret policewoman?”
“Ssh! Not so loud.” He’d popped the batteries from their cell phones as they entered the graveyard, and there were no visible cameras here, nothing but the thin whine of an Air Force drone circling high overhead. But you could never be sure you were unobserved. “That’s what she was when I met her, before we crossed the wall to the west. Now”—he placed the last flower in the grave holder, covering his hand as he palmed the coin-sized geocache hidden there—“it’s best if we don’t remember this. At least, not in public.” He straightened up, head still bowed, a hollowness behind his breastbone as he stared at his wife’s gravestone. “I think you are old enough to know the truth. But it’s a family thing. Not for outsiders. You can talk to me or your father about it, but nobody else: it’s not safe.”
“I got that.” Rita nodded vigorously, then fell quiet, caught up in his silence. He took a deep breath, trying to clear his mind. Here was where he ended, emotionally. To the left of Greta’s plot there was another strip of ground, turf undisturbed. He’d join her there eventually, he was sure. He’d sleep the final sleep on an alien shore, unable to go home to a nation that no longer existed.
But there was a cold breeze tugging at his coat, and after a minute the girl began to stamp her feet, clutching her hands under her armpits, and he realized it was unfair of him to expect a coltish tween to indulge his chilly grief. So Kurt straightened and walked back toward the path. He checked his watch with a start. “We’d better go straight home,” he told his granddaughter: “it’s past five.”