Scardown

by Elizabeth Bear

  A sidelong glance, considering, his eyes shadowed under a furrowed bow. “We have to get up there first, Casey.”

  “Why is it so important? If only a scrap of humanity is going to survive, is it important that it's us rather than them?” Devil's advocate, I guess. I just really want to see how he'll answer.

  “Because,” he answers. “Call it evolutionary hardwiring. Our kids or their kids. That's all it is. All it's ever been.”

  And more honest words were never spoken. If I were as good a woman as I would like to be, this would be harder, wouldn't it? “Set it up. I need to meet Riel. How soon do we head back to the Montreal?” That last sentence out loud, not through the ear clips.

  “As fast as you can get the kids ready. We've started a big push on the Calgary; she'll be ready by New Year's, and we're going to send Koske over there and two or three of the kids. You're spending Christmas in space.”

  “Fair, as long as I get the turkey dinner.” We're up to the restaurant now, and the smell of eggs frying in grease fills my nostrils. “Fred, I wanted to tell you—your granddaughter's damned good at this.”

  “I know,” he says, holding the door for me. “Do you think I would have pulled her into the program if she wasn't?”

  Lunchtime

  Friday 8 December, 2062

  Allen-Shipman Research Facility

  St. George Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  The personality enneagrams floating in Elspeth's holo-interface might as well have been the shifting colors of a kaleidoscope, for all the sense they were making. She had a habit of leaving her office door open—as much because she could as because she wanted visitors—and the curtains drawn wide to show the Unitek parking lot and the University of Toronto campus beyond. She blinked to clear her contacts and turned to study that view, frustrating centimeters from a solution. The clock in the corner of her desk told her it was almost one, and she felt like everything she needed was staring back at her, just slightly out of order. If she could only get close enough to do more than brush the answer with her fingertips. Urgency clawed at the back of her throat; Leah and Jenny and possibly Gabe would be back aboard the Montreal in under a month, and she needed at least the seed of an AI sooner than that.

  Twelve years ago, she'd gotten the first Richard strictly by accident. She'd set up a sort of a salon—artificial personas, A-life representations of a half-dozen people she'd always wished she could have met. One of them had—for lack of any other useful expression—come to life. And her refusal—as a lifelong pacifist—to use her research to support the war effort had resulted in what should have been a one-way trip to jail. Until Valens had found the key to make her cooperate.

  She startled and turned toward the door when someone cleared her throat just outside it. Elspeth recognized salt-and-pepper hair and a cable-knit dark purple sweater over an angular body. “Fortuitous timing, Jenny. I don't suppose you're hungry?”

  “I was coming to steal you,” Jen Casey said. “I'm done with my morning trials. How's the Frankensteining coming?”

  Elspeth laughed. “I just finished a simulated persona. Let me save it to an environment and I'll come with you. How are you doing?” Loaded question, she knew.

  Jen held up her right hand. It was shaking badly enough that Elspeth could see it from across the office. “Food helps,” she said, wryness twisting her mouth. “Fucking drugs.”

  “Real-time simulation?” Elspeth shook her head. “Look, I think—” She stopped for a moment to concentrate on starting the simulation run before powering her inter-face down. “Jen, I'm something of an expert on psychoactive drugs. Can I ask you a personal question?” She stood, traded her heels for walking shoes, and collected her jacket.

  “I was going to take Leah down to the raptor rehab center after lunch. Want to come?”

  “Where's Gabe?”

  “Genie's got a treatment this afternoon. He's gone to get her from school.”

  “It's Friday already?”

  “Doc,” Jen said, holding the door for her. “You work too hard.”

  Elspeth looked up at the tall, contained-seeming woman. “Too true. Raptor center? Where's that?”

  “On campus. I guess they're having a talk today, and Leah's friend Patty wanted to go—” They passed Holmes in the hall; Unitek's vice-president of research and development gave them a warm nod as they passed, and Elspeth made an effort to return it. “I said I'd take them both.”

  Jen's right hand was trembling hard enough that she had to use her left one to card out. Elspeth frowned. “You're strung out, Jenny. Are you going to change the subject on me again?”

  The door whispered shut behind them, and a fistful of cold air struck Elspeth's face. She tugged her scarf up. Jen didn't seem to notice. “Withdrawal sucks,” she said quietly, without turning to look at Elspeth. “I tried it on a half-dose today, and it's still wracking me up.”

  “Has Valens tested your nanite load recently?”

  “Yeah, it's peaked. Fortunately, the little buggers will clean up my system pretty good if I can lie down and let them work for a couple of hours. But I don't see how they expect Koske and me to fly a starship if we're going to be sucking pills down like fistfuls of Halloween candy.”

  They turned south, through the center of the campus, walking through browned grass along concrete pathways. Elspeth pulled out her hip to message Leah while they walked. “I'll blink the girls and let them know to meet us after lunch. Here's the thing, Jen—you can't. If you have three, four pilots per ship you're talking six- or eight-hour shifts when she's under way. They can't—can't—keep you all performing under rigathalonin for that long, consistently. So there has to be a plan to take the load off. I've been thinking about this.” Gabe pointed out that I might want to be thinking about this.

  “What are you suggesting, Ellie?” Jen stopped and turned toward her, looking her in the eye.

  Elspeth chewed on a breath, remembering how they'd met. The terrible scars Jen Casey had borne with a kind of defiance that Elspeth couldn't help but understand to be rooted in pain and more kinds of fire than the physical. Casey's eyes matched now: both dark brown and piercing—the left one barely distinguishable from the right even if you knew what you were looking for—and the low, bitter stain of fear and anger had gone out of her voice, replaced by a different sort of tension entirely. “You have another run with the kids tonight?”

  “Monday.”

  “So come in over the weekend and try the simulation without the Hyperex.”

  “I . . .” Jen shrugged. “Can't handle the equipment by myself.”

  “Still an M.D.,” Elspeth shot back with a grin. “Okay, a lame-ass research psychiatrist. But I can watch a freaking heart monitor. Honest.”

  Jen lowered her voice. “Your friend is working on getting the whole nanite programming thing nailed down.”

  “Dick never saw anything he didn't want to take apart.” Elsepth stopped dead in her tracks, covered her sudden revelation with a grin. “Hey, a hot dog truck.”

  “Doc, you're a good woman.”

  “Don't let it get around.”

  1300 Hours

  Friday 8 December, 2062

  University of Toronto Main Campus

  Toronto, Ontario

  Ellie and I eat our hot dogs crouched on a cement bench, leaning forward to let the excess sauerkraut drip between our knees. She makes little pleased noises as she chews; the enjoyment's contagious. I'm still failing utterly to hate her.

  Leah and Patty catch up with us before we finish and Leah stands there looking petulant until I buy hot dogs for the girls as well. All three of us chase the frankfurters with a handful of assorted supplements: miscellaneous things a normal person shouldn't swallow, but the nanotech needs for self-repair and maintenance on our wetwiring.

  “Thank you, Master Warrant,” Patricia says with that careful courtesy. She's got a manner of studying the grown-ups around her as if reading them like books—anticipating thei
r expectations. She's awfully self-conscious for a kid. I wonder if somebody hits her. “Can we talk about the drills later?”

  “Stiff. It's Friday!” Leah throws her napkin at Patty and takes off; the older girl catches the wadded paper with a dart of her hand I find eerily familiar and lights out after my goddaughter smooth as a hare. They race across the winter lawns, shrieking and scaring the freshmen, and I'm amazed to realize that neither one of them is that much younger than the college kids. Patty can't quite catch Leah, but it's mostly because Leah hasn't quite gone from coltish to painfully self-conscious yet, and Patty isn't digging in the way a kid would. Still, the break in her quiet intensity makes me smile. She's a good kid, even if her granddad's a son of a bitch.

  “Eagles?” I ask when they trot back, Leah grinning and Patty blushing either from exertion or from embarrassment.

  Leah grins wider as she corrects me. “Raptors, Aunt Jenny.”

  And they say you can't ever go home.

  It's a rehab facility, not an aviary, but two hallways are open to the public with a half-dozen big birds in various stages of rehabilitation on each. The whole place smells scrubbed, and the red-curtained amphitheater has maybe twenty people in it for a capacity of four hundred. It's not hard to get seats in the front row. Judging by the graffiti dug into the foldup desk attached to my chair, it doubles as a classroom. Woody hates fluids. My metal fingers trace letters graven into the faux-wood surface, and I grin. Fluid dynamics, I presume, but the next one puzzles: Johanna my whohometer spins only for you.

  I suppose it's the sentiment that counts. I lean over and whisper in Doc's ear, because the presenter hasn't come out yet and the girls are still passing notes on their hips while Ellie and I pretend we don't notice. “This sort of thing always makes me wish I'd gone to college.”

  She glances at me, surprised. “You didn't?”

  “Noncom,” I answer. “I never finished high school. Got a correspondence diploma.”

  “But—” She starts, and seems to realize how condescending she was about to sound. “You must be very well read.”

  “My mother home-schooled us girls. And—oh.” The woman who walks out onto the stage is stocky, rounded: powerful shoulders and the broad cheeks, high forehead and vanishing nose that tell me she's native, probably Inuit. She smiles at us out of a bright black squint, and the enormous golden eagle on her gauntleted fist turns its head to stare each of us in the eye.

  “Oh,” Elspeth says in turn, and the giggling girls fall silent. “That's the biggest thing I've ever seen.”

  It isn't, of course. But I know what she means. The biologist or whatever she is claims center stage, looks around at the few of us gathered, and calmly reaches up and turns off her collar mike. “Just as well,” she says. “She hates the amplification. This is Athena. She's an endagered species, a Tibetan golden eagle, one of the largest eagles in existence. She's here because the University of Toronto raptor rehab program is the most successful in the world, and there are only about twelve of these beauties left. I'm Dr. Carla Entwhistle, by the way.” A self-deprecating grin that I barely notice, because I'm not just looking at the bird.

  I'm looking at her wing, tuning Dr. Entwhistle out as she runs through the program and its successes. She taps the bird's tailfeathers, though, and as the eagle opens her wings I see quite clearly what I had glimpsed under her feathers.

  Pins in her flesh, some lightweight alloy stark against the russet of her feathers, and a sort of—clamp—that must be holding shattered bones in place until they heal to the metal appliance that makes up wrist joint and the leading edge of her wing. Her eyes fix mine—angry, golden as her name—as Dr. Entwhistle tells us that her ancestors were captured and trained to kill wolves in the Himalayan mountains that were her home. That this eagle—Athena—will fly again. Will be released to the wild, and impregnated before she goes with DNA recovered from a member of her threatened species who did not make it. “Even in the highest corner of the world,” Entwhistle says, a line I can tell she's rehearsed in front of the mirror, “these eagles are being painted out of existence by man.”

  While Entwhistle tells us that the technology used to repair this eagle's devastated wing was, like most veterinary orthopedy, derived from human appliances, my metal hand curls in my lap and I fight the urge to reach into my breast pocket and pull out the eagle feather, bright with beads. I turn my head and say, very soft, to Patty Valens, “How did you girls hear about this?”

  “Papa Fred told me,” she whispers back, eyes on the eagle.

  Oh, of course. You'd think I'd be able to smell a setup by now. Valens meant for me to see this, of course. It's a demonstration, and a message.

  I know where the technology to give that eagle back the sky came from. And I watch her, curious and in command on the biologist's gauntlet, wearing leather jesses but not impressed by her bonds, and I wonder: what the hell could have broken that wing? We can save her. Cyborg-eagle, she'll fly again. Fly on wings of metal and lanceolate feathers, feathers gilded by the sun. Indomitable. Holy. Bloody. Literally bloody, but unbowed.

  Patty watched Casey lean back in her chair as Dr. Entwhistle took the golden eagle backstage and returned with another bird, a snowy owl whose injuries and reconstruction were much less extensive. Patty scooted out of the way, upholstery squeaking against her jeans, as Leah reached across her to tug Casey's sleeve. “Aunt Jenny?” Very low, but it carried.

  Casey shot Leah a look. Leah dropped her voice. “Has Dad ever taken you up to see the eagles at my grandpa's house?”

  “I didn't know there were any.” They leaned together across Patty, dark head bent toward blond, and Patty swallowed.

  “I'll make him,” Leah said with a grin. “In spring when they have babies. I got divebombed once; it was scary. We should bring you, too, Ellie.” Leah leaned even farther around Casey to catch Dr. Dunsany's eye.

  Patty didn't think Leah, looking away again as she spoke, could have caught the smile that curved only the left half of Casey's face. “How is your grand-père going to feel about being descended upon by a full house of people?”

  “He'll love it,” Leah answered confidently, the two years between them rendering her completely oblivious to whatever it was that Patty heard shading Casey's voice.

  Dr. Dunsany lowered her voice, too, and whispered. “How old is Gabe's dad?”

  “Mideighties,” Jenny said dryly. “Conservative type.”

  A slightly hysterical giggle. “I'm sure we'll all get along just fine.”

  Patty bit the inside of her cheek, once more the outsider. Spring is a long time away, she thought. Leah was a lot younger. But she was just as smart as Patty, and didn't seem intimidated by anything Patty did or said.

  It stung not to be included in the invitations. But Mom wouldn't let her go anyway. She'd want Patty studying for her entrance exams. Pilot program or no pilot program.

  Until Leah grabbed her arm and said, “Have you ever seen an eagle's nest?”

  “No,” Patty answered. “I never have.”

  1800 Hours

  Friday 8 December, 2062

  PPCASS Huang Di

  Under way

  Min-xue gloried in his silent dinner with the first and fourth pilots. The fifth pilot was sleeping and the third was on the bridge, and all three men enjoyed a moment when they simply didn't have to speak, interact, or even meet the gaze of anyone else. He floated in a corner of the padded Pilot's Ready Room, chopsticking dumplings out of an insulated sack, and stopped with a pot sticker tucked into his cheek as the interior door irised open.

  The door that led into the Captain's Ready Room.

  He swallowed in haste—the unchewed bolus stretching his throat painfully—and wiped his mouth on his sleeve, tucking the chopsticks into the bag before he zipped it shut and stuck it to the bulkhead. The other two pilots came to attention, floating at odd angles.

  Captain Wu paused inside the doorway and cast a scorching gaze over all of them. “Second Pilot,
” he said, in a voice that carried. Drawn lines creased his cheeks; Min-xue straightened as best he could, pulling himself into the captain's orientation with one hand on a grab bar.

  “Sir.”

  Min-xue kicked off the wall once the captain turned away, and drifted toward him.

  Wu drifted to the far bulkhead, turned, and stared out one of the Huang Di's tiny portholes. A single bright golden disk flared in the darkness: the Sun, limning the curve of Mars crimson beneath them. They'd accomplished something the Westerners hadn't—taming the Huang Di's drive for use in-system. The trick was microsecond bursts calculated in advance, and then desperate corrections with the attitude rockets, gentling the velocity before the starship could impact a planetary body.

  Not precise.

  But effective.

  “Second Pilot,” the captain said, without turning from the window. “A shuttle will be arriving from our interests in the asteroid belt shortly. We'll be bringing a cargo back to Earth.”

  “Captain?”

  “A load of nickel-iron. I wish you to relieve the third pilot for the duration. It may be tricky, and you're the best with the maneuvering jets.”

  “Captain.” The other two pilots didn't speak, but Min-xue could feel their restrained curiosity even as they pretended deafness. “I'm honored.”

  Wu shrugged and turned to face the pilots, putting the shoulder of the planet at his back, stars drifting in his hair. “Also, I'd appreciate it if you'd restrict your off-duty reading to more approved writers. That's all.” He pushed off from the bulkhead and drifted, quite accurately, toward the interconnecting door. Min-xue watched him go, wondering.

  Why does he want the whole ship to know that what we're picking up is asteroidal iron?

  Why are they wasting the Huang Di ferrying iron ore at all?

  9:00 AM

  Sunday 10 December, 2062