Worldwired jc-3

by Elizabeth Bear

  “My thoughts exactly.” Thank you, Dick.

  Jeremy nodded inside his helmet, and started talking before Charlie could remind him to speak out loud. “Well, which leaves us with the following question. They — it — never exhibited any kind of semaphoring behavior at the unmanned probes. Do you think it knows we're out here?”

  “I can feel them,” Charlie said. “It stands to reason that they can feel me.”

  “And the probes didn't have red and green running lights,” Leslie added, over the speakers rather than inside Charlie's head. “If we're theorizing that the shiptree uses bioluminescence to communicate, and its lights are all at the green and blue and indigo end of the spectrum, maybe it's seeing the Gordon Lightfoot's green running lights as a friendly wave hi.”

  “You never thought to shine a spotlight on it?” Charlie couldn't be quite sure, but he was reasonably sure that Jeremy was rolling his eyes.

  “I'm a biologist,” Charlie said. “This is why we hired you guys.” He craned his neck to get a better look at the whorled shell gliding by under the Gordon Lightfoot's floodlights, emerging from darkness before and disappearing into darkness again behind, outlined by its own rippling glow and the trembling silver-gray threads of whatever it was that trailed off the smooth hull between them. It was like the hulk of some long-submerged wreck revealed and then vanishing in the lights of an exploratory submarine. He could have seen it more plainly in the holoscreens, but there was something about the evidence of his own eyes that tightened his throat and made breathing an effort.

  “Lieutenant,” Jeremy said, “can you dim our lights?”

  “Dim them? Or shut them off?”

  “Well, all the way off. But just flash them a few times.”

  “Damn, look at that thing; it's got no symmetry at all, not bilateral or radial. It's just kind of there.”

  “It's got a fractal pattern, though,” Richard pointed out. “The smaller whorls build to larger whorls and then larger ones. The whole thing looks like a giant toboggan if you squint at it.”

  “How are you managing to squint, Dick?” Charlie shot back, drawing a laugh from Jeremy. The AI was right, though. It was as apt a description as the one that had come to Charlie, of water-worn driftwood. “You know what it reminds me of?”

  “Coral,” Jeremy said promptly, and Dick said “Gypsum crystals, only curved.”

  “Ready to flash lights.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant.” Charlie strained against his restraints to get a better look.

  The sudden darkness in the Gordon Lightfoot, inside and out, was shocking. The cabin lights went out, followed — Charlie presumed, unable to see for himself — by the running lights lining her sides. Isolated in his suit, Charlie counted breaths, counted heartbeats. He could feel Richard and Leslie, feel Jeremy and Peterson in the cockpit of the shuttle, feel his suit and the trickle of cool air into his helmet, and none of it meant a thing beside the… weight of the shiptree, its presence, like an enormous silent breathing beast in the darkness alongside the fragile bubble of the Gordon Lightfoot.

  The darkness lasted three heartbeats. Peterson flashed the shuttle's lights once, twice, a third time… and then left them on, and Charlie drew a single tremulous breath.

  For a moment, the shiptree hung shimmering in space, silent and lovely, quiescent as a slumbering dragon. Until, without warning, the entire length of the strange curved hull went dark.

  “Damn,” Jeremy said.

  Peterson killed the lights of the shuttle again, before Charlie could suggest it. “I hope that thing doesn't move on me,” she murmured in a soft, strained voice. Charlie wouldn't be surprised if she hadn't meant to say it aloud. And then she whispered, “Holy…” as a dim sunlit glow irised into existence on the shiptree's hull, an aperture like a focusing eye.

  “What the bloody hell is that?” said Jeremy, and Charlie grinned in the dark, because the glow illuminated a puff of vapor dispersing into darkness.

  “It's an air lock,” Peterson said.

  “It's an air lock,” Charlie echoed, a second later. “And the atmosphere inside has water vapor in it, and maybe carbon dioxide and oxygen. Would you look at that? Somebody lives in there, boys and girls. Somebody lives in there.”

  “It's bloody beautiful,” Leslie commented from the speakers. The shiptree's lights winked back at them, blue and green and teal, and, with a sigh Charlie couldn't interpret, Peterson illuminated the shuttle.

  “We can't dock,” she said.

  “No. EVA. Safer, anyway, since we won't share any atmosphere with the shiptree that way, and we'll get a nice vacuum bath coming and going.”

  “Is that wise?” Jeremy asked.

  Charlie shrugged, even though Jeremy couldn't see it. “It's what we came here to do. And I think they just invited us in.”

  Jeremy calibrated the atmospheric sampler while Charlie checked the swabs and plates in his test kit. And if alien bugs don't like the taste of agar?

  Then we assume they don't like the taste of people either.

  Hah, Leslie. On the other hand, it wasn't a half-bad point. There was no reason to think that an alien pathogen would find anything tasty about humans. And if it did… well, frankly, Charlie's nanosurgeons might protect him from any ill effects. Assuming anything got through the suit. And in any scientific endeavor there is the element of risk.

  He tapped Jeremy's arm, automatically bracing himself with a strap to account for the reaction. Jeremy looked up and hung the sampler on his belt. “Ready?”

  “As I'll ever be.”

  Charlie made sure his suit radio was live and said, “Lieutenant, we're moving out.”

  “Copy.”

  Together, they glided aft, toward the air lock.

  Charlie went first. Peterson had matched velocities with the shiptree so evenly that he didn't need his attitude thrusters; he just checked the carabiner on the safety line clipped to Jeremy's suit, made sure the line was playing freely through the retractor, and jumped. There was no relative velocity between the Gordon Lightfoot and the alien vessel; Charlie sailed easily across the empty space and landed exactly where he'd aimed, with a firm grip on a whorl outlined in lime-green lights.

  Up close, they looked exactly like firefly lights, but their texture — through the suit — was as hard as that of the surrounding hull. He stopped only half a second before he pressed the bubble of his helmet against the whorl. That might not be wise, Charlie.

  Not that wisdom had ever really been his strong point. “I'm over,” he told Jeremy. Unnecessarily, but Jeremy would wait for verbal confirmation anyway, in case his grip was no good.

  “I'm on my way,” Jeremy replied. Charlie didn't turn his head to look, just firmed his grip on the hull and waited. A faint tug on the safety lines, a light shock of impact through the hull of the shiptree, and Jeremy was beside him. “First step's a lulu,” the linguist said.

  “You aren't kidding. That air lock's big enough for two at a time, I think.”

  “I don't like the idea of that. I'll go first,” Jeremy replied. “I have the atmosphere kit.”

  “There's no atmosphere in there yet. And if the lock cycles with one of us inside and one of us out, we lose the safety lines. And possibly damage the air lock and piss off the natives.”

  “You have a point.” There was a silence, and for a moment Charlie thought Jeremy was going to ask Richard's opinion. Or Wainwright's. Although the captain had been completely silent so far, Charlie had no illusions that she wasn't watching, breath held. She might look cool and reserved, but he knew a professional facade when he saw one. Charlie waited. Jeremy sighed over the radio and said, “All right, then. Side by side.”

  They released their grips on the shiptree's hull on a count of three and kicked off lightly, shadows cast by the Gordon Lightfoot's floods expanding as they drifted back. Attitude jets reversed their trajectory and brought them in a looping half-arc, swish into the wide-open air lock like a free-throw basketball.

&nbs
p; The shuttle's floods were arc-light white, the diffuse glow inside the shiptree the calm, friendly gold of late-afternoon sun. Charlie glanced around as he and Jeremy fetched up against the interior wall of the air lock. The blue-green bioluminescence didn't persist inside the hull. Here, instead, the curved bulkheads bowed together, chambered and knobbed like the inside of a turtle's shell, and each veined ridge glowed sunshine gold.

  “Pretty,” Jeremy said. “That's not a color we get much in bioluminescence on Earth, is it?”

  “No,” Charlie answered. “It looks like a full-spectrum light. I'm going to take some swabs of the walls. Where do you suppose the inside door is?”

  “I think we'd better let the aliens handle cycling the air lock,” Jeremy answered, allowing himself to turn slowly at the end of his tether, scanning the walls of the vaguely spherical chamber. “I'd hate to purge the ship by accident, even if I could find the controls, and there's no guarantee they have anything like our concept of safety interlocks. Doesn't look as if they ever intended there to be gravity in this, does it?”

  “No.” Charlie busied himself opening the plates and sterile swabs. “It'll take some time to culture these, of course. A week or ten days. And I guess we'll want to get some samples of this and that back to the Montreal to run through the mass spec.”

  “Lieutenant Peterson, you'll run these back for us when we've got them ready?” Jeremy didn't need to change frequencies to speak to the shuttle, or the Montreal. Their entire conversation was on an open channel.

  “That's why they sent me along, Dr. Kirkpatrick,” she answered. “As long as you're certain there's no danger.”

  “Never say never,” Charlie quipped, stowing a swab in a sterile baggie and running his glove along the bulkhead. “I wonder if this feels as much like walnut paneling as it looks.”

  “I wonder how it stands up to the extremes of cycling between space and the internal environment, if it's wood.”

  “Nanosurgeons,” Charlie answered, more dryly than he'd intended. “Also, in the very least, the shiptree of Mars wasn't wood. Not exactly.”

  “But enough like wood that you called it a tree—”

  “What the heck else would you call it? Oh, hey.” As his gloves snagged on a rough patch. “There's something different here. A stained area, and the wood fibers are raised.”

  “Diseased?”

  “Maybe.” Charlie tugged his hand free, cautious of the suit's material. The area was a bit sticky, too, as if it were oozing sap. A bit of the bulkhead seemed to shift with his movement. “Ooops.”

  “You're not a very reassuring person to explore an alien ship with, Charlie. What did you do?”

  A shift in the quality of the light alerted him, a shadow falling across his back as the irising door cut the Gordon Lightfoot's floods. “Um. Triggered the air lock?”

  “Dr. Forster? Dr. Kirkpatrick?” Peterson's voice, simultaneous with a Leslie-flavored burst of worry in the back of Charlie's brain.

  “We're good in here,” he said, as the wall opposite began to unfurl from its central ridge like a flower bud spiraling open. “We seem to be allowed in…”

  When the shiptree's atmosphere touched his suit, his helmet frosted over like a beer glass on a humid day. Jeremy cursed. “Can you see anything?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Turn up your suit heaters,” Richard suggested. “Did you get the atmospheric sample?”

  “As soon as I can read the dials, Dick.” Jeremy's tone absolved his words of irritation.

  Charlie worked on clearing the surface of his helmet immediately in front of his face, curls of frost drifting from the creases of his suit and melting into jeweled droplets as they did. “I'd say there's some moisture in the atmosphere—”

  “Hah.” A pause. “Eighty three percent humidity. Yeah, that's some. It's a warm room temperature in here.”

  “Oxygen?”

  “You could light a match, but you might scorch your fingers — let's put it that way. Lots of carbon dioxide, too. A little light on the nitrogen, heavy on the argon by our standards. This shows particulate matter, not to excess. Pollen or dust?”

  “We'll know when we get the filters under a microscope,” Charlie said. Water beaded his faceplate, but he could see the open interior door clearly once he knocked it away. Drifting globules spattered against the air lock's walls, leaving behind a pattern of wet round dots that were rapidly absorbed. “If this is like the one on Mars, there will be a ladder type projection to use for traction when we get into the corridor.”

  “Well, let's go see if they're waiting for us inside,” Jeremy said, checking the safety line before he reached out, flat-palmed the wall, and pushed himself toward the new opening. “I don't see any shadows.”

  “Would you, in this light?”

  “I don't — oh.” Jeremy reached out and caught one lip of the door in his right hand. Charlie drifted into his back, hard.

  “Oof!”

  “Shh.” Before Charlie could complain.

  Charlie caught the other side of the doorway in his left hand and braced himself, and turned away from Jeremy and toward the interior of the shiptree. “Oh,” he said, blinking, trying to clear his eyes, and then realizing they didn't need clearing.

  He and Jeremy had drifted into a jungle, emerging from a hole in the floor — essentially — to drift surrounded by twisted vines and heavy flowering branches thick with glossy leaves. The light glowed from the floor as well as overhead, and small creatures darted and called among the branches. Some of them had feathers or fur in jeweled colors; Charlie glimpsed something like a scarlet tanager with a snakelike neck. Animal voices rang through his helmet, shrillness muffled. Even damped by leaves and space suits the echoes made Charlie think they were in open space.

  A hazy mist wound between the vines and branches, veils of silk that moved in response to air currents. “A zero-G rain forest,” Jeremy said.

  “Cloud forest,” Charlie corrected automatically. “Well, I suppose it could ‘rain,' through some mechanism we're not seeing. Sprayers or something. But it looks like we're seeing plants watered by condensation, and frankly, if I didn't know that I don't know any of these species, I would think I was in Costa Rica. Look at all the pollinators and the insect eaters. They look just like hummingbirds and swifts. Convergent evolution. These critters brought their whole ecosystem with them.”

  Jeremy glanced over at him, flash of teeth as he grinned behind his helmet. “I can hear the throb in your voice, Charlie.”

  “It's not all that different from what we did with the Montreal and her hydroponics farms. These critters might be like us, Jeremy—”

  Jeremy cleared his throat and looked around, shaking more droplets of water off his gauntlets. “They might be,” he said. “But where are they? All this landscape, and no aliens. And no indication of which way we're supposed to go, or who we need to talk to. I could do with a sign that says ‘follow the gray line to customs,' you know?”

  “Maybe we're intended to find our own way in?”

  And one of the leafy, glossy vines uncoiled itself from the structure of the nearest branch, or stanchion, or support pillar, and laid itself across Charlie's shoulders like a heavy, companionable arm.

  0900 hours

  Monday October 15, 2063

  Canadian Embassy

  New York City, New York USA

  On Sunday, the Yankees tie it up three to three, so on Monday I'm stuck with the unpalatable choice between watching the final game of the series, or showing up at the UN to watch General Janet Frye take us all apart in person. I mean, all right, I'm still more of a hockey girl. But I did live in Hartford for over a decade, and it's not like we don't have baseball in Canada.

  On the other hand, I have a coiling feeling in my gut that tells me I should be at the UN when the shit hits the fan. Besides, Riel and Valens are going, and it's not like those two can be trusted out on their own.

  So we wind up making a bit of a funeral festiva
l of it.

  Captain Wu finished his testimony on Saturday, after Patty's second half-day. He remains at the embassy, but Min-xue, whose evidence promises to take nearly as long as mine did, is scheduled for after Frye. Both men join Riel, Valens, Patty, and myself in the lobby, all of us nearly unspeaking as we wait for General Frye. Min-xue's hands are clothed in white leather gloves like the ones Patty and I wear. The gloves are a little too small, kidskin strained over his knuckles, even though he has fine hands. The gloves are probably Patty's spare pair, and the look she gives him when she notices confirms it.

  Min-xue's eyes are unreadable behind dark glasses, but he's wearing a Chinese military uniform. Captain Wu straightens his collar flash for him before we leave, which makes me wonder what's what. It's odd, being outside all these alliances. I'm too old for Patty and Min-xue, not patriotic enough for Valens and Riel. I'm not part of any system at all, I guess. Not anymore.

  Fred clears his throat after five minutes, and we all look at him. He glances from Patty to me and back, and folds his hands behind his back. “While we're waiting for Janet, I don't suppose you've heard from Richard about Drs. Forster and Kirkpatrick.”

  “Of course we have, Papa Fred. Don't be silly.”

  He grins at her. They connect; I can almost hear the click when their eyes make contact, and the cloaks of exhaustion and grief all of us wear fall off them for an instant. Christ, I can't believe how much I miss Leah, just then. And not just Leah. Razorface, too, and Mitch, and Bobbi Yee…

  Dammit.

  I am not losing any more family to this toothy monster that is history. Enough is enough.

  I'm thinking so hard about my gritted teeth that I almost miss Patty's precis of the action on the shiptree. It's a pretty simple one, still: Jeremy and Charlie have brought in a tent and oxygen and food and set up a base camp in the jungle they've discovered, from which they have been launching exploratory jaunts. Their samples have been returned to the Montreal for analysis, and other than a particularly vicious pollen-analogue that looks guaranteed to produce hay fever bad enough that you'd wish it was terminal, nothing that even remotely qualifies as a pathogen has been discovered. Yet.