Scardown-Jenny Casey-2 (43 page)

“I'm not sure what you're saying, Ellie—”

“Aren't you?” Sly and sideways. I have to swallow my grief and my hope before it all spills down my face again: somehow, she's not broken yet. “She's working toward getting the EU, the Commonwealth, and PanMalaysia to sign a cogovernance agreement. If they come on board, the South American states will follow—”

“PanChina will be a problem. And there's the matter of talking to the aliens—”

She tilts her head to one side. “If it were easy, it wouldn't be fun. Richard can be everyplace at once. Which includes Earth, even if the mobile ships leave, because the
Huang Di
is ours by right of salvage now, and the
Calgary
—”

—
isn't going anywhere. Hah. Yeah.
The irony makes me laugh myself sick: think for a moment of ripping myself free, taking Elspeth and Gabe and Genie and running for the hills—and find out my gorgeous justification is already a part of the prime minister's audacious plan for world cooperation. By the time I'm done, wiping tears onto the back of my left hand, everybody else by the windows is staring at me. I shake my head helplessly and grab Ellie's hand. “There's a hell of a lot of work left to do, if we want it.”

A long silence follows, and Ellie squeezes back. It's Patty who breaks the quiet, surprising me. “The whole world just changed.”

Elspeth, softly: “What do you mean?”

The girl lifts her shoulders, dark hair shining over them. It's a speech she's rehearsed in her head, and it shows. “I mean we've converted the entire planet into a macroprocessor, linked human minds together, invited alien races among us, given ourselves over to the, the
stewardship
of a creature a hell of a lot smarter than we are—”

“Not
smarter,
” Richard says, in my head and with Patty's voice. “Just better at crunching numbers. And stewardship is still not a job I'm equipped for, kid.”

“
What
-ever.” Still perfectly sixteen, and she glares when Ellie and I burst out laughing.

“Nah. I know what you mean.” I shake my head helplessly as Gabe comes up on her other side, still holding on to his daughter as if he'll never let her go. He sighs, and I have to turn from the grief and the faith in his face. But he steps around Elspeth, and reaches out to cup my chin in his hand, turning me away from the glass so that I have to look at his eyes. There's almost a—bubble—around the five of us—me, Elspeth, Gabriel, Patty, Genie. And Richard now, always Richard—the world given voice, or something. Whatever it was that Patty was trying—and failing—to say.

I can feel the rest assembled, but they don't intrude. I have a name for the thing in my belly, but it frightens me to say it.
Hope.
God. I don't want to hope. And I can't seem to help it.

“Well.” He takes a breath like a man who's been holding on to the last one too long, and considers me. “That work you mentioned. Do you want it?”

“No.”
Hell, no
. “But it's got to be done.”

The last army-wagon straggles

along my starswept trail

corners at the terminal world

and vanishes into the cold.

They'll bury their daughters

and their sons in war-gardens

and the common trenches between the suns.

When after a long trail they arrive

we await their coming.

No message we chase them with

no flag to bring them home, but

whispers without voices

visions without eyes.

They travel on.

We choose to forget them.

They travel on,

recalling home.

—Xie Min-xue, “The Ballad of the Star-Wagons”

About the Author

ELIZABETH BEAR
shares a birthday with Frodo and Bilbo Baggins. This, coupled with a tendency to read the dictionary as a child, doomed her early to penury, intransigence, friendlessness, and the writing of speculative fiction. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and grew up in central Connecticut with the exception of two years (which she was too young to remember very well) spent in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, in the last house with electricity before the Canadian border. She currently lives in the Mojave Desert near Las Vegas, Nevada, but she's trying to escape.

She's worked as a stable hand, a fluff-page reporter, a maintainer-of-microbiology-procedure-manuals for a major inner-city hospital, a typesetter and layout editor, a traffic manager for an import-export business, a test-pit digger for an archaeological survey company, a “media industry professional,” and a third-shift doughnut manufacturer.

Her recent and forthcoming appearances include:
SCIFICTION, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, On Spec, H.P. Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror, Chiaroscuro, Ideomancer, The Fortean Bureau,
the Polish fantasy magazine
Nowa Fantastyka,
and the anthologies
Shadows Over Baker Street
(Del Rey, 2003) and
All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories
(Wheatland Press, 2004).

She's a second-generation Swede, a third-generation Ukrainian, and a third-generation Transylvanian, with some Irish, English, Scots, Cherokee, and German thrown in for leavening. Elizabeth Bear is her real name, but not all of it.

Her dogs outweigh her, and she is much beset by her cats.

ALSO BY ELIZABETH BEAR

HAMMERED

Be sure not to miss

W O R L D W I R E D

by

ELIZABETH BEAR

The riveting conclusion
to the series begun in
HAMMERED and SCARDOWN

Coming from
Bantam Spectra in Fall 2005.

Here's a special preview.

WORLDWIRED

on sale Fall 2005

“One cannot walk the Path until one becomes the Path.”

     —Gautama Buddha

1030 Hours
27 September, 2063
HMCSS
Montreal
Earth Orbit

I've got a starship dreaming. And there the hell it is.
Leslie Tjakamarra leaned both hands on the thick crystal of the
Montreal
's observation portal, the cold of space seeping into his palms, and hummed a snatch of song under his breath. He couldn't tell how far away the alien spaceship was—or the fragment he could see when he twisted his head and pressed his face against the port. Earthlight stained the cage-shaped frame blue-silver, and the fat doughnut of Forward Orbital Platform was visible through the gaps, the gleaming thread of the beanstalk describing a taut line downward until it disappeared in brown-tinged atmosphere over Malaysia. “Bloody far,” he said, realizing he'd spoken out loud only when he heard his own voice. He scuffed across the blue-carpeted floor, pressed back by the vista on the other side of the glass.

Someone cleared her throat behind him. He turned, for all he was unwilling to put his back to the endless fall outside. The tall, narrow-shouldered crew member who stood just inside the hatchway met him eye to eye, the black shape of a sidearm strapped to her thigh commanding his attention. She raked one hand through wiry salt and-pepper hair and shook her head. “Or too close for comfort,” she answered with an odd little sort of a smile. “That's one of the ones Elspeth calls the birdcages—”

“Elspeth?”

“Dr. Dunsany,” she said. “You're Dr. Tjakamarra, the xenosemiotician.” She mispronounced his name.

“Leslie,” he said. She stuck out her right hand, and Leslie realized she was wearing a black leather glove on the left. “You're Casey,” he blurted, too startled to reach out. She held her hand out there anyway, until he recovered enough to shake. “I didn't recognize you—”

“It's cool.” She shrugged in a manner entirely unlike a living legend, and gave him a crooked sideways grin, smoothing her dark blue jumpsuit over her breasts with the gloved hand. “We're all different out of uniform. Besides, it's nice to be looked at like real people, for a change. Come on: the pilots' lounge has a better view.”

She gestured him away from the window; he caught himself shooting her sidelong glances, desperate not to stare. He fell into step beside her as she led him along the curved ring of the
Montreal
's habitation wheel, the arc rising behind and before them even though it felt perfectly flat under his feet.

“You'll get used to it,” Master Warrant Officer Casey said, returning his sidelong looks with one of her own. It said she had accurately judged the reason he trailed his right hand along the chilly wall. “Here we are—” She braced one rubber-soled foot against the seam between corridor floor and corridor wall, and expertly spun the handle of a thick steel hatchway with her black-gloved hand. “—come on in. Step lively; we don't stand around in hatchways shipboard.”

Leslie followed her through, turning to dog the door as he remembered his safety lectures, and when he turned back Casey had moved forward into the middle of a chamber no bigger than an urban apartment's living room. The awe in his throat made it hard to breathe. He hoped he was keeping it off his face.

“There,” Casey said, stepping aside, waving him impatiently forward again. “That's both of them. The one on the ‘left' is the ship tree. The one on the ‘right' is the birdcage.”

Everyone on the planet probably knew that by now. She was babbling, Leslie realized, and the small evidence of her fallibility—and her own nervousness—did more to ease the pressure in his chest than her casual friendliness could have.
You're acting like a starstruck teenager
, he reprimanded, and managed to grin at his own foolishness as he shuffled forward, his slipperlike ship-shoes whispering over the carpet.

Then he caught sight of the broad sweep of windows beyond and his personal awe for the woman in blue was replaced by something
visceral
. He swallowed, throat dry, and rubbed his knuckles into his eyes as if they needed clearing. “Wow.”

The
Montreal
's habitation wheel spun grandly, slowly, creating an imitation of gravity that held them, feet down, to the “floor.” Leslie found himself standing before the big round port in the middle of the wall, hands pressed to either rim as if to keep himself from tumbling through the crystal like Alice through the looking-glass, as the astounding panorama rotated like a merry-go-round seen from above. Beyond it, the soft blue glow of the wounded Earth reflected the sun that lay behind the
Montreal
. The planet's atmosphere fuzzed brown like smog in an inversion layer, the sight enough to send Leslie's knuckle to his mouth. He bit down, unconscious of the wetness and the ache, and tore his gaze away with an effort, turning it on the two alien ships floating almost hull-to-hull “overhead.”

The ship on perspective-right was the enormous, gleaming-blue birdcage, swarming with ten-meter specks of mercury—made tiny by distance—that flickered from cage-bar to cage-bar, as vanishingly swift and bright as motes in Leslie's eye.

The ship on perspective-left caught the Earthlight with the gloss peculiar to polished wood or a smooth tree bole, a mouse-colored column twisted into shapes that took Leslie's breath away. The vast hull glittered with patterned, pointillist lights in cool-water shades. They did not look so different from the images and designs that Leslie had grown up with, and he fought a shiver, glancing at the hawk-intent face of Master Warrant Officer Casey close beside him.

“Elspeth—Dr. Dunsany—said you had a theory,” she said, without glancing over.

He returned his attention to the paired alien space ships, peeling his eyes away from Genevieve Casey only with an effort. “I've had the VR implants—”

“Richard told me,” she said, with a sly sideways grin.

“
Richard
? The AI?” And silly not to have expected that either.
It's a whole new road you're walking.
A whole different sort of journey, farther away from home than even his years at Cambridge, when there was still more of an England rather than less.

“Richard, the AI. You'll meet him, I'm sure. He doesn't like to intrude on the new kids until they're comfortable with their wetware. And unless you've got the full ‘borg—” she lightly touched the back of her head “—you won't have to put up with his running patter. Most of the time.” She tilted her head up and sideways, a wry look he didn't think was for him.

She's talking to the AI right now.
Cool shiver across his shoulders; the awe was back, with company. “The new kids. Ah.” Leslie forced himself not to stare, frowning down at the bitten skin of his thumb. “Yes. I spoke to Dr. Dunsany and Dr. Perry regarding my theories....”

“Dr. Tjakamarra—”

“Leslie.”

“—Leslie.” Casey coughed into her hand. “You're supposed to be the foremost expert in interspecies communication in the Commonwealth. Ellie thought you were on to something, or she wouldn't have asked you up here. We get more requests in a week than Yale does in a year—”

“I'm aware of that.” Her presence still stunned him.
Genevieve Casey. The First Pilot. Standing here beside me, leaned up against the window with me like kids peering off the observation deck of the Petronas Towers.
He gathered his wits and forced himself to frown. “You've had no luck talking to them, have you?” A jerk of his thumb indicated the orbiting craft.

“Plenty of math,” Casey said with a shrug. “Nothing you'd call conversation. They don't seem to understand please and thank you.”

“I expected that,” Leslie answered. Familiar ground. Comfortable ground, even. “I'm afraid that if I'm right, talking to them is hopeless.”

“Hopeless?” She turned, leaning back on her heels, her long body ready for anything.

“Yes,” Leslie said, calmer, on his own turf now. “You see, I don't think they
talk
at all.”