Chapter 64

Aldara does not deny it.

That is the first surprise, and Veira registers it in the two seconds it takes the old woman to cross her own sitting room and sit down opposite, unhurried, in a house above Reykjavik where the chess position on the side table has moved four squares since February.

"I gave Sunnsdottir the flag notification," Aldara says. "Not the archive. I don't hold the archive. I told her the Vasile documents had surfaced and that a conduit was reading them."

"When."

"The thirteenth. The day after it fired."

"Before or after you called me."

"Four hours before."

Veira sits down because standing would make it a confrontation, and she has come three hours by air and one by road to have something more useful than that.

"You called her first," she says.

"Yes."

"And then you called me at two in the morning and told me you wanted to put something down before March."

"Both of those are true." Aldara does not reach for the coffee pot this time. "You are about to ask me which one I was really doing, and the honest answer is that I did not know until I had done both, and I am seventy-three years old and I still cannot always tell my conscience from my self-preservation until I watch which way my hands move."

"That's not an answer I can plan around."

"No. It is an answer you can use, which is different." Aldara leans forward. "Ask me what I thought Sunnsdottir would do with it."

"What did you think she'd do with it."

"Bury it. Quietly. As she has buried it for thirty-six years." Something in the old face closes over. "She has more to lose than I do. I voted against acknowledgment and I have carried it. She argued for acknowledgment and voted against it, and the transcript exists, and the transcript is worse than the vote. I expected her to move to contain it."

"She filed it."

"She filed something, under seal, which is not the same as filing the minute." Aldara's attention sharpens. "I have been in this system for fifty years, Ms Ashcroft, and a sealed evidentiary submission four days before an advanced ruling session is not a confession. Nobody confesses under seal. Under seal is where you put a thing you intend to detonate at a moment of your choosing."

Veira thinks about it.

"She's not protecting herself," she says slowly. "If she were protecting herself she'd disclose openly and get credit for coming forward."

"Yes."

"So the seal isn't about the 1989 vote at all."

"That is my reading." Aldara sits back. "I think she filed something else. I think the timing is a coincidence in the specific sense that she was already going to move and the surfacing of the minute told her the window was closing." A pause. "And I think Elder Croft applied for urgency on the basis of that submission without knowing what is in it, because urgency requires an Assembly officer's certification and Sunnsdottir is an Assembly officer."

Veira goes very still.

"She certified her own urgency application."

"She certified an urgency application. Croft filed it. Both are procedurally clean and together they are something else entirely, and neither one of them can be challenged without the other." Aldara's mouth does something that is not a smile. "That is not a woman crossing to your opponent. That is a woman using your opponent as a delivery mechanism."

"For what."

"I don't know. I have four days and no standing and a vote in 1989 that means nobody in that Assembly will accept my word on Morna Croft." Aldara stands, crosses to a bureau, and returns with a single sheet of paper. "But I have this, which I have held since 1991, and which I am giving you because I would like to be able to say, at the end, that I did one thing."

Veira takes it.

It is a photocopy of a Kin Assembly attendance register, February 1989. Eleven names in a column, each with a signature beside it.

Ten signatures.

The eleventh line Sunnsdottir, H., Tide (junior) has no signature at all. Beside it, in a clerk's hand: attending by proxy instruction, Elder Rask.

"She wasn't in the room," Veira says.

"She was twenty-four and she was in Reykjavik and she was instructed," Aldara says. "By a senior Tide Elder who died in 2004. Her vote against Morna Croft was not her vote. It was cast on her behalf under a proxy she could not refuse without ending her career in her first year."

Veira looks at the blank line.

"And the transcript," she says. "The argument for acknowledgment. That was hers."

"That was hers. Submitted in writing, read into the record by the chair, and then overridden by a proxy she had no power to withdraw." Aldara sits back down heavily. "I have known this since 1991 and I have never once corrected the record, because correcting it would have required explaining how I obtained an attendance register I was not entitled to. So I let a woman carry a vote she did not cast for thirty-four years."

Veira folds the page.

"She's not detonating a submission against me," she says. "She's detonating one against the proxy system."

"That is one possibility."

"It's the only one that fits." Veira is already standing. "She's got four days, a sealed filing, and the first conduit case in the compact's history where a hybrid is in the room to argue it. If she's spent thirty-six years waiting to unmake the thing that made her complicit"

She stops.

Because the rest of it arrives, and it is worse.

"Aldara. If Sunnsdottir moves against proxy instruction in open Assembly, what happens to the March vote?"

Aldara looks at her for a long moment.

"Six of the twelve current Elder representatives hold at least one proxy commitment," she says. "Including four of Croft's nine."