Worldwired jc-3

by Elizabeth Bear

  Guilt was written all over Leslie's face, and Gabe shook his head and lowered his voice. “Son of a bitch,” he said, too softly for Genie to hear him. “Richard sent you down here, didn't he?”

  “Does it matter if he did?”

  Gabe laughed at the echo of his own thoughts. Genie looked up, startled at the sound, and he smiled at her over Leslie's translucent shoulder, and his heart stuttered painfully in his chest. Dammit, Dick. Why Les and not me?

  She didn't just look like her mother. Calisse de chrisse. She looked like Leah, tall and blond, with that straight nose in profile and the high forehead and the pin-sharp chin. And that was the sore she wore on his heart, of course. She looked like Leah, and she wasn't Leah, and he would never have Leah again. He looked away quickly, before she could see the sparkle in his eyes, and found himself staring directly at Leslie. He sniffled. He couldn't help it.

  And Leslie offered him a weary shrug and a worldly smile. “Do you know what a beginner story is, Gabriel?”

  It took a moment for him to fit the words together in the shape of a sentence. He had to take them apart a couple of times and start over, and once he had them assembled, he had to stop and run them through his brain a couple of times to see if they made sense. “No?”

  “It's a simple story that's still true, but doesn't have all the truth of the sort of complex story you might learn later, if you keep studying a subject.”

  “A child's version.”

  “A beginner's version.”

  He thought about it. He looked at Leslie, and looked up at Genie again, and tried not to see her as Leah. Tried not to hear Leah's name in his head as he studied her profile.

  She wasn't looking at him, as if his quick flinch away had cut her, and she was waiting to see if he would come back and cut her again. Wasn't it supposed to get easier as they grew up?

  She's not my little girl anymore. Except she was; she was growing into a grown daughter, the one that Leah had almost reached, the one Leah had grasped in the short, too-adult minutes before she died. But she was also, and still, Genie.

  He could do this. Hell, he had to do it, whether he could or not. He realized something, and smiled. Because here, after all, was one of his women for whom he could be there when she needed him. “Beginner stories?”

  “Beginner stories,” Les confirmed.

  Gabe rolled his shoulders and stepped inside the hatch. He really had to get out of the habit of talking through them, before it got somebody killed. “Okay. I think I can handle that.”

  Leslie winked before he derezzed, flickering out.

  It was the height of cowardice for Min-xue to stand and leave the table when General Shijie's hound started harrying Casey. And not even cowardice on her behalf. No, as he excused himself and picked his way up the long shallow flight of steps toward the doors at the back of the amphitheater, he couldn't claim empathy as the source of his distress. He was picturing himself behind that podium, and he didn't like it. At all.

  The men's room closest to the General Assembly would be uncomfortably crowded, even midtestimony, but there was another one around the corner, out of the way. And Min-xue, frankly, had had enough of people for the moment. He made his way through the air-curtains and an S-curved hallway, pausing just inside to see if anybody else was present. The echoing tiled room seemed deserted, the low hum of ventilation the only sound. Min-xue selected the urinal in the farthest corner and settled in, trying to blank his mind.

  Fluorescent overhead lights pulsed on ceramic and steel, the strobing effect near-blinding. Min-xue closed his eyes against the flicker and composed himself with poetry. There were tossing oceans for you to cross. If you fell, there were dragons in wild waters.em>

  He could not have failed to hear the door open, or the crispness of shoes on tile. Someone made himself comfortable in the next bay; a curious choice when the entire row was unoccupied. Min-xue finished, opened his eyes, and stole a sideways glance — only to find his fellow bathroom occupant tidy and tucked in, arms folded, standing with military aplomb.

  Min-xue looked down quickly and finished arranging his clothes. “General,” he said, and made a little bow in lieu of offering his hand. Only afterward did he raise his eyes to meet those of the minister of war, wondering at his own ingrained politeness. If he'd thought about it, certainly, he never would have made even that slight gesture of respect.

  Shijie Shu was still looking at him, arms crossed, eyes narrowed like a man who calculated odds he did not like.

  “Pilot Xie Min-xue,” the general answered.

  “How may I be of service?”

  It was refreshing to speak Chinese, however quietly, and it amused him when the general's eyebrows rose at what Min-xue had so carefully failed to offer; he'd neither admitted honor at making Shijie Shu's acquaintance, nor actually placed himself in the general's service. An inquiry was hardly a promise.

  General Shijie cleared his throat harshly and stepped away from the row of urinals and, incidentally, Min-xue, who breathed a silent sigh of relief. He did not like the minister of war standing close enough to touch.

  “I believe you are a very brave young man,” Shijie said, addressing the doors of the off-white stalls lining the back wall. “A patriotic young man.”

  Min-xue had begun walking toward the sinks to wash his hands. He stopped and lifted his chin to look the taller, broader man in the eye. “If you are going to make an offer to buy me, General, I don't require flattery first.”

  “You've been too long among the Canadians.” The general's broad, trustworthy face bent slightly around a frown. “I would not impugn your honor in that manner. You notice I have come to speak to you in person—”

  “In a toilet.”

  “So be it. I have been impressed with your integrity, Pilot Xie. Your resourcefulness. Your honor.”

  “Which you are about to ask me to abrogate.” The water was cold. He plunged his hands in without bothering to adjust it, scrubbed with gritty liquid soap, and ran his hands under the faucet for longer than he needed to.

  “I am asking you to testify to things you know to be true,” the general said quietly. “The Canadians' deceptions. Their manufactured truths. And what you yourself witnessed on board the Huang Di: a captain taken to drink—”

  “Because of your orders.” Shijie's eyes hung over Min-xue's shoulder when Min-xue looked in the mirror.

  “Are you certain they were my orders?” Quietly, and Min-xue had no answer. The general let the silence drag a little, and Min-xue pulled his hands out of the icy water, ducked his head, and laved his face. “Pilot Xie—”

  “General.”

  “Consider for a moment that we have many augments, pilots — and others. Unlike the commonwealth. Consider for a moment that Canada may yet be forced to return the Huang Di and her crew, including you, to our care. That crew contains several other augments, one higher ranking. It is logical to think that the Huang Di's first pilot will be promoted to a newer starship.”

  Ah. There's the bait. And it's rich enough to make the trap seem comfortable enough to live in. “You would promote me to first pilot of the Huang Di, if I testified as you wish.” He straightened, let the water flow cease, and slicked his hair out of his eyes with wet fingers and palms.

  “Not as I wish.” The gaze the general rested on Min-xue was calm and open, completely guileless. “As will best serve China with your honesty. And not first pilot.”

  “What then?” But Min-xue swallowed hard. He already knew.

  “Captain Wu…” The general hesitated delicately. “He will not serve aboard another ship.”

  Yes, Min-xue thought. You broke him and now you cast him aside. He's served his purpose and may be replaced by a new tool.

  He pushed past General Shijie, careful not to touch the other man. He was in the corridor, hand on the heavy door that would take him back into the General Assembly, when he looked from one stiff guard beside the doorway to another, and realized exactly what it was that
Shijie Shu had just offered him.

  Nothing less than the captaincy of the Huang Di.

  Leslie understood now why the pilots fixated so hard on getting into that black leather chair that dominated the bridge like the steel table dominates an operating theater. He knew, because he could feel it — a fraction of it: Richard and the limitless space he occupied.

  It was… intoxicating. As if his senses had enlarged. If he concentrated, he could feel the things that Richard felt — the glorious confusion of moving water and atmosphere that the AI was struggling to learn to model and control, like a swirling breeze on Leslie's skin; and the angular body of the Montreal with its wings and gears and the soft hum of electricity through its veins; and the Benefactors spread across space. Charlie in his lab, and Richard's gossamer touch spanning star systems. No body of his own, no hands, no hope of ever feeling them again when he was honest with himself. Just a dream, an endless dream of space.

  He imagined it felt the way a spider's web feels to the spinner, or a dolphin's sonar to the cetacean. Or perhaps the way a winding road clung to the tires of a sports car, the sensation of that contact almost seeming to extend to the driver's skin.

  The birdcage's alien “map” of the sky, the distorted curves of space-time they felt as plainly as a surfer running a tube felt the surge and power of the wave under his board — Leslie could feel it, too, feel it the same way he'd been able to feel what the land would look like from a few hummed bars of song, once upon a time. It was intoxicating, amazing, as if the boundaries had dropped away from his body and his senses, and he had grown bigger than the skin he could no longer feel.

  It wasn't all he felt. Richard was also feeding him the news coverage and commentary on the day's UN session, now that Jenny's testimony had ended. Information as a fluid, wrapped around him even when he knew that he was wrapped inside a skin of silver, floating in Earth orbit, and he was never going home.

  He couldn't afford to think about that now. There was no guarantee that whatever the Benefactors had done to preserve his consciousness would last from moment to moment, and he wouldn't waste a moment of that time. He was too busy exploring their sensations, translating their mind-maps into something topographic, representative of space as his species perceived it.

  Dick, why can I “feel” Charlie, and not Genie or Patricia?

  “Or Min-xue or Jen?” The AI smiled in his head. “It's because of the way the network is set up. Jenny and the rest are implanted with individual control chips; they're essentially small nanonetworks on their own. You and Charlie are, as near as I can guess, partially on the Benefactor network. And you're also on the worldwire. Controlled like all the nanotech on Earth by the Calgary's processor core.”

  How do you keep that running at the bottom of the ocean?

  “The nanosurgeons are capable of mechanical construction as well as biological repair,” Richard said. “They stay pretty busy. The Calgary wound up in shallow water. If I can get the global conveyor belt working again and manage the climate back to a compromise level, I might have them encourage the local fauna to turn it into an artificial reef. The processor core and the reactor are sealed. And tropical fish are nice.”

  They are indeed. Leslie grinned internally at the image of holo-Richard hovering in midocean like some craggy Madonna of the Fishes, clownfish and Moorish idols nibbling through the seaweedy strands of his hair. Leslie hummed silently, a half-formed thought about who would sing the songs for the roads the starships would travel teasing the edges of his mind. So, Dick, then why not take it back to preindustrial levels?

  “Even if I could, the world had almost three hundred years of adaptation already when Captain Wu tossed that rock at you.”

  Because, of course, you aren't a PanChinese target in any way, Dr. Feynman AI.

  “Technically speaking, I'm not even a doctor.” But it came packaged with another grin. “In any case, there's no point in throwing out the baby with the arctic meltwater, so to speak. It would cause even more chaos to try to reverse all the damage. And I'm not sure I can or want to. I'm not even sure my global conveyor trick is going to work, and it's not going to work quickly. Or without doing some additional damage — I'm up to my virtual armpits in a system that's already in flux, and what I'm doing is heedless and improvident.”

  Leslie agreed, musing. And then he suffered a thought that snapped him out of his meditative state. Dick?

  “Yes, Les?”

  What's to stop the Chinese from nuking the Calgary?

  Richard's pause was pregnant, as he allowed Leslie to get there first. “In the final analysis? There are a number of small inconveniences and inelegances to an attack of that kind. But, overall, there's nothing to stop them.”

  Just like there was nothing to stop Toronto.

  “Just like. Indeed.”

  Would that kill you?

  “No.” Utterly seamless, without the half-expected pause as if the AI was deciding how much information to share. Which meant that Richard had already known how he intended to answer that question, and didn't mind his human friends twigging that he's planned it in advance. “I'm not centralized anywhere, and while it would cost me a fragment of my capacity not to have the Calgary processor to run on, there's still the spare cycles of a googolplex or twelve nanomachines scattered around the Milky Way. It would be a very bad thing for the planet, however, for the worldwire to fail right about now—”

  What you were saying about unstable systems.

  “Exactly. It'd be like cutting the life support on a patient in surgery.”

  Leslie started humming again. Resonance buzzed in his ears. He stopped for a second, hoping to catch the direction it came from. The sound wasn't repeated, and a moment later, he realized he couldn't have heard a sound anyway. Not physically. “Bugger.”

  “What?”

  Oh, I just thought I heard an echo to my humming.

  “Les—”

  Leslie had a funny feeling that he knew what Dick was going to say before he said it. Which wasn't all that surprising, given that he seemed to have become part of Richard's brain. Dick, I think the Benefactors were singing to me.

  Patty's got her back to the door when I walk into the room. The door's unlocked and I know Alan will tell her I'm coming long before I get there, so I don't bother knocking. And she doesn't bother looking up. She's just sitting still, her hair banded into a glossy mahogany snake the length of her spine, her chin resting on the interlaced fingers of her hands. She stares at a two-dimensional photograph in a clear plastic frame pierced with flower cutouts. There are two people in it. The man looks like Fred did when he was younger, only not as good looking, although you'd never get me to admit that Fred Valens was a handsome man. The woman has Patricia's hair.

  “Patty?”

  She sits back in her chair, braces her fine-fingered hands on the edge of the table, and stands. “I thought you did really well out there today, J-Jenny.”

  My cheeks prickle with the blush that must be creeping across them. I won't let her use my title, and she gets all bashful and stares at the floor when she tries to say my given name. Mother Mary, tell me the child doesn't have a crush on me. “It was pretty bad.”

  “It looked like it. Are you coming to get me for supper?”

  “Yeah. The prime minister arrives tonight. Apparently she's decided she needs to keep a closer eye on her lackeys, lest we turn out to have unknown weaknesses.”

  “I guess I'd better wear my good shoes, then.” She squats down and starts digging under the bed. She finds one black loafer and one tennis shoe, and sighs, looking up. “I'm such a flake. It's just not that big of a room!”

  “Are they in the closet?”

  “You know, I bet they are.” Gods, she sounds like a grown-up. She keeps a careful arm's distance between us as she moves across the room, edging around me as if I were a big dog of uncertain temperament, and I don't crowd her. It must be my body language, or maybe she's just psychic, because she breaks out in
prickles every time I get close to her, and I really think I'm doing an okay job of hiding the twist of breathlessness in my chest.

  On the other hand, grown-ups always think they're better at hiding things from kids than they are.

  The other shoes are in the closet. She picks out the loafers, and bends down in front of the mirror to brush her hair. “I have to do that tomorrow.”

  “I know.”

  “Do they always…”

  “Assassinate your character? If they can.”

  She nods, biting her lip in the mirror, thinking about gloss and mascara. I let her; I don't care if we're late to dinner. I can almost see her cataloguing her sins, trying to decide if there are any skeletons in her closet. I want to reassure her, and for a moment I have a grown-up's idiot confidence that anybody so young must be secure in her innocence. I was younger than she is when I did what I did, so really, it's not safe to assume.

  “It must have been hard surviving.” She puts the hairbrush down and does her face efficiently.

  “It was.” I never got to have this conversation with Leah. For a moment, I'm seasick with relief, and then I remember that Gabe and Elspeth are probably having it right now, with Genie. Crap. “You do what you have to do, you know?”

  “Yeah,” she says, and stands up, ready faster than any seventeen-year-old girl has the right to be. “I do. Any idea what's for dinner?”

  A soft chime from her interface draws our attention. A swirl of cool colors shot through with silver materializes over the plate, reminding me of the sky before a thunderstorm. “Patricia? Genevieve? If I may interrupt?”

  It's Patty's room. I look at her. “Sure, Alan,” she says, scuffing into her loafers, toe-and-heel. “Is it a crisis?”