Hammered jc-1

by Elizabeth Bear

  It doesn’t feel like a real hand — the sensations of pressure and so forth are like the ones you get through pins and needles, and the brutalized musculature at the graft point still screams stiffly with any movement — but that it feels at all is a source of bewildering wonder. There’s still the phantom sensation, but with the clean grafts and the new input to the severed nerves, it’s discomfort now, no worse than the dull ache of a stubbed toe. Actually, for the first time in two and a half decades, my left arm hurts less than just about anything else, as the rest of my body is on fire with the sensations of reawakening flesh. There’s a hand on my right arm, guiding, supporting — my new physical therapist, whom I have already decided I hate.

  And goddamn, it hurts.

  “Come on, Jenny. Viens ici.”

  I open my eyes for a moment, focus on the far end of the bars. Gabe is standing there with his hand out, waiting for me.

  Merci à Dieu, I want a drink and a quiet window. I want to take Gabe out and sit in the sun and drink beer and eat poutine and get silly with the girls. Est-cela si beaucoup de demander?

  Yes. Apparently so.

  It is too much to ask.

  Three meters. It’s only three meters. I could crawl that far. But it doesn’t count if you crawl. You have to do it on your own two feet. At least clinging to things is permitted. Encouraged, even.

  I drag my left foot forward six inches, shift my weight, shift my grip on the bars. “Viens,” Gabriel says, and the pun doesn’t work in French quite the same way it does in English, but I can see from the twinkle in his eyes like sunlight on water that he’s thinking of it. The same way he was making his intentions quite plain when he tucked the wolf into bed with me and showed me the jingling tags around its neck. “Jenny. Come on. Ten more steps and I’ll buy you a burger.”

  Richard is quiet in the back of my head. I think he respects my privacy, and damned if I’m not grateful. “God.” Another shuffle forward, another six inches. It’s going to take more than ten steps, and I know it.

  “Come on, Maker,” he says. “J’ai faim.”

  “You’re gonna get a knuckle sandwich if you keep it up,” I growl, and he bursts out laughing.

  “That’s the Jenny I love.” And damned if he doesn’t look like he means it.

  Which, I think as much as anything, is what makes my hands slip off the bars so that I topple ignominiously forward, onto the mats, the physical therapist rushing to cushion the fall.

  I don’t get my burger that day, because Valens comes as we’re finishing the session and cuts in between Gabe and my wheelchair. Have I mentioned how much I love wheelchairs? Weak as my arms still are, I can’t even manage the damned thing myself.

  “Casey, I want to do some work on the implant programming today if you’re game for it. What do you say?”

  “Jenny,” Richard says in my ear. “This is probably ‘it.’ ”

  I know. I shoot a glance at Gabe around Valens’s hip. Gabe is holding his breath, and the gesture he makes with his head might be a nod, or it might be a shake. I know him well enough to know what it means, too. Be careful, Jenny. I have the strangest, sudden image, of Elspeth spelling out letters on his skin, under the covers in a darkened room. Funny thing is, it doesn’t sting the way I thought it would.

  “Sure, Fred. Hook me up.” I wink at Gabe and he steps back as Valens comes around the side and takes the handlebars on my chair.

  “Gabe. Dinner? Cafeteria?”

  “Sure,” he says. “I’ll bring the girls.”

  “Bring Elspeth, too,” I call over my shoulder, and Valens pushes me out of the room. I wonder where she goes to mass.

  Hah. Maybe I’ll make it there after all.

  Valens helps me to lie facedown on an examining table just like a million other examining tables of my acquaintance. He wires me into the machine with economical movements. My hair’s gotten long, for me, and he pushes it aside before he slips the probes in behind my ears. Valens doesn’t speak, and I’m glad, because my attention is turned inward. Ready, Richard?

  “As I can be.”

  I don’t want to be a puppet again, Richard. I am done with being used.

  “Jenny,” he says, and — having gotten to know a little bit about Richard Feynman in the past three weeks or so — I hear a world of history and the fates of war in that single word. “You and me, kid. We will find a better way to handle this. Get me on that ship. Enough, goddamn it, is enough.”

  What are we going to do about the Chinese?

  “We’ll think of something. I’ll see what I can do about finding the conditioning in whatever Valens is about to load into your brain. Deal?”

  I hesitate. Don’t risk yourself.

  “Just get me on that ship, Jenny.”

  Deal.

  Richard doesn’t find a Trojan horse in the code. Which doesn’t mean anything, really, except he didn’t find one.

  And Valens never did give me my damned HCD back, which means I can’t call Razorface or Mitch and find out what the hell really happened to my sister. Ah, well. You’re in the army now, Jenny Casey. You’re in the army now.

  0900 hours, Sunday 22 October, 2062

  National Defence Medical Center

  Toronto, Ontario

  Valens returns my hip when he signs the paperwork to check me out and tells me he’ll see me at work on Wednesday, no sooner. Simon paces nervously beside me to the revolving front door.

  I won’t let him take my arm when he reaches for it. I didn’t walk into this damned hospital. Either time. But by God I am going to walk out under my own power. I’m leaning on a cane, it’s true. But I’m walking.

  We pause by the big glass windows. Outside, pedestrians in white coats and scrubs click past with professional tunnel vision. He takes a breath. “Jenny, I—”

  “Save it, Simon. You were going to say you’re sorry.”

  “Yes.”

  I look up at him. I actually can’t tell the difference between my left and right side vision anymore. That’s taken some getting used to. “It’s… well, it’s not all right. But I’m over it.” I’m not, really. But let he without sin, and all that… or maybe I’m just too tired to care.

  He looks down at the backs of his hands and then leans forward. And then he kisses me lightly, dryly on the cheek. “You’re the bravest woman I’ve ever met,” he says. “I’m going back to Hartford. Call me if you need anything. Ever, all right?”

  “I will,” I tell him, and clap him lightly on the shoulder before I turn and walk out into the street.

  Living in hotels gets old pretty fast, but it’s a fair sight better than living in hospitals. At sunset, I’m rereading the same screen of a detective novel for the third time, my brain failing to accept the information. My phone rings. I wave my hand through the contact pad, hoping it’s Mitch returning one of my half-dozen calls. If he doesn’t call me back soon, I’m going to have to find some other way to get the information about Unitek and the illegal drug testing onto the street. There has to be a way.

  The image that materializes over the pad is Elspeth. “Jenny. You checked out of the hospital.”

  “Valens released me this morning. I’m—” back at the hotel, I start to say, which is stupid because she called me. “On my own recon until Wednesday morning.”

  “You should have called Gabe or me and let us know you were free. Fortunately, I figured out where to find you. Have you eaten anything yet?”

  So much for my wallow. “Not yet.” I put my HCD aside and stand up. “Do you want to meet somewhere?”

  “We’ll pick you up.” She grins. “We have things to celebrate, after all. Oh. Dress up.”

  She cuts the connection, and I’m left blinking at the brief afterimage that flickers before the phone shuts off. Dress up. I have some clothes I bought to wear to the research lab — slacks and sweaters, mostly. I haven’t owned a skirt in nigh on thirty-five years, and when I go to the closet to try to find something presentable, I realize that I have
a choice between grunge, a royal purple cashmere cowlneck and khakis, or the two dress uniforms that have somehow materialized in my closet, new and pressed.

  Gee, Fred, thanks. I don’t think so.

  Fifteen minutes later I’m showered and changed and picking lint off the turtleneck, settling a blazer over my shoulders. I look up and almost jump back out of it, catching the reflection of a stranger in the big wall of mirrors by the corridor door. “Damn. Lights.”

  The woman looking back at me is a stranger indeed. Her hair has grown out into a sort of boyish bob, steel black, silvering bangs falling across her forehead. They mostly hide the places where smooth, paler skin blends into her tanned medium-brown hide. The skin on the left side of her face, near the hairline, is oddly mottled, like a frog’s.

  It’s all that remains of my scars. I wonder if it’ll fade.

  I step closer to the mirror in the brightened hallway light, a vertical line creasing my brow. I take a breath and then another, feeling strange. If I turned my head to look at this woman on the street, it would be because of her bearing — because she is tall, and stern as the iron color of her hair. It would be because of the stubborn military shoulders and the chipped flint of an unmistakably Iroquois nose, the crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes. I might not even notice the glittering steel of her left hand until she moved it in my line of sight.

  I stuff my left hand into my pocket just to see what I can pass for, and my fingers brush something my new senses tell me is smooth and round. It rattles, and I know what it is before I pull it out.

  A vial of pills.

  “Hah.” The plastic shape prickles my senses. I glance at the clock. Gabe and Elspeth won’t be here for another fifteen minutes. I think about laser-clarity. About calmness, and certainty, and the fact that I’m going to have to sit at a table with the two of them and eat and talk like we’re normal human beings. Richard?

  No answer.

  I stand there for a long moment, looking from the vial to the mirror and back again. And then I put the pills back in my pocket, hang the blazer back in the closet — carefully, so it will be unwrinkled for work on Wednesday — and dig around in the back of the closet for my scarred and terrible old black leather jacket. With the buckles replacing the worn-out zipper, and the third or fourth lining. I put the holster back on the hanger when it falls off. My sidearm is still in the hotel safe. I can’t carry it here, in Canada.

  I shrug stiffly into the elderly jacket and let it hang open over my expensive, breath-soft sweater — a color the queen I was named for might have worn. I rake my fingers through my hair, and it feathers back across my forehead almost like it was meant to. “Well, huh.”

  I look — normal. Hell. In fact, except for the tough-girl jacket—

  I look like Maman.

  There will be time for the pills tomorrow, if I need them. By Wednesday, I expect I will. In the meantime, I pour a glass of bourbon and sit down by the window to wait for my friends.

  9:45 A.M., Tuesday 31 October, 2062

  National Defence Medical Center

  Toronto, Ontario

  Razorface set the cat carrier down on the passenger seat of the rusted blue Bradford and swore, still leaning half in and half out of the cab. “Fuck, Boris, I don’t know what the hell else to do. Where to go. You got any ideas, man?”

  The cat purred and bumped his scarred orange face against the grille of the carrier, pushing his lip up over the chipped tip of a tooth. That chipped tooth reminded Razor of Derek, which made him frown, but Derek had things more or less under control in Hartford even if he’d made it pretty plain that Razorface’s presence was no longer required.

  There had been a lot of blood already. Razor wasn’t ready to make any more of it, just so he could set himself up as some kind of petty warlord again. Even if some of his boys were still loyal. Derek—Whiny, and he chuckled silently at Maker’s name for the boy — was a hell of a lot younger. And this kind of shit was a young man’s game. ‘Cause it turned out that you could do your level best, and there was always a bigger dog one block over, and you hadda be a young dog to take the pounding and come back, and come back, and come back.

  Besides, if Derek was taking care of the city, Razor could retire. And start seeing to the serious business of getting to whoever was behind Maker’s sister, and list of deaths too long to scratch on the inside of his arm.

  He grabbed his crutch from where it leaned against the door of the Bradford, snarling at the ignominy of it. He’d spent longer than he wanted to spend, grounded in Hartford like a fox and then sneaking across the border. The big gangster, moving with a shuffling limp still, right foot in an inflatable cast, shook his head. “Good idea, cat, but nah. She got released from the hospital last week. She ain’t answered her HCD since she went in. I swear something is blocking her messages, cat.”

  Boris flicked scarred ears, and Razorface kept talking. “And the hotel she gave me say she’s gone since last night. Which is good, means she didn’t die in the hospital, but damned if I know where she be.”

  The cat blinked pumpkin-colored, silken eyes through the bars and pursed his whiskers forward. Razorface held a finger out and was rewarded with a brush of wet nose. “Fuck. We can’t go back to Hartford, man. Not unless we goin’ back with an army, and it ain’t worth that shit. Yeah. And here I am losing it, standing on a street corner in Toronto talking to a motherfucking cat.”

  He stopped, rolled his shoulders back, and grimaced. “Goddamn it to Hell,” he said, turning to get his left hand on the door handle.

  The cat purred louder as Razorface closed the door, walked around the front of the truck, and slid into the driver’s seat, first stowing his crutch behind it. He gave the cat one last glance before he keyed the ignition on. “I really miss my dog. You know about that, Boris?”

  Silence answered him. He looked over. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess you do. Where you wanna go, kitty cat?”

  What about you, Razor? He rubbed his jaw hard before he glanced in the mirror and pulled away from the curb. Where you wanna go?

  16:00 hours, Tuesday 31 October, 2062

  Brazilian Beanstalk

  A corporate jet is a more pleasant way to travel than a military transport plane, but I still hate the fact that somebody else is flying this thing. Gabe, Valens, and I are the only passengers… along with my little secret, Richard, riding in the back of my skull. We disembark in Brazil, which has the distinction of being one of several countries I’ve been shot at in. Shot down over, even.

  I don’t know how to describe a space elevator to you unless you’ve seen one.

  They’re called beanstalks, or sometimes skyhooks. To oversimplify, a magnetically propelled car rides a carbon nanotube cable from planetside to an orbiting platform, which is anchored on the other end to a captured asteroid. It reminds me of playing “crack the whip” on ice skates with Barbara and Nell. Barb always won; go figure.

  The idea is, your beanstalk lowers the cost of lifting things into orbit from the farcical to the merely expensive. The journey from earth to orbit takes almost eighteen hours, no more than four times the duration of the flight that brought us here. I didn’t know that. I looked it up on my hip while we were on the flight from Toronto. There’s still been no answer from Mitch, and I’m getting increasingly worried. Scared for Mitch, for Razorface — whom I also haven’t gotten ahold of — and for Leah and Genie and Elspeth, who are still back in Toronto. Hostage, I know perfectly well, for Gabe’s and my good behavior.

  The skyscraper that serves as the base of the thing is lost in the clouds.

  After an extensive search of ourselves and our baggage, a Unitek hostess greets us at the airlock of the corporation’s capsule, which is basically a glorified elevator car. The Executive Elevator, in this case. I’m stiff and uncomfortable in a dapper new plum-colored pantsuit that looks like Barb picked it out.

  The urge to explore before I sit down might be childish, but I do it anyway, wishing I could get
a look at the control room. I’ve heard about old railways, private cars. This is like that — inside, there’s a common room, and four separate little private spaces I might call bunk rooms, but they’re a bit Persian-carpeted for that. Which is funny, I think, because we’ll be in free fall soon enough.

  Then I notice the hammocks retracted neatly into the walls of those private alcoves, and the restraints on the ostentatiously comfortable leather chairs in the lounge. I skip lunch when it’s offered, picturing the disgrace of barfing all over the knotty walnut paneling. I’ve never been in free fall.

  After the hostess gives us our safety instructions and shows us the galley and the jakes, she retreats to the control room. I realize she’s also the car operator. Valens sits down in the lounge area, straps himself into a couch, and promptly falls asleep, leaving Gabe and me sitting across from one another, staring out the windows in silence while acceleration shoves us back into the couches like a hand against the breastbone.

  Sometime later, the pressure drops away. They could accelerate us for longer and get us to Clarke that much faster, but it’s annoying to spend the entire trip under multiple g’s, accelerating and then decelerating again. Sometime in the middle of the ride, the car will reach maximum acceleration and we’ll have free fall.

  Gabe reaches out, curiously, and takes my hand. “May I?”

  “Sure.”

  He turns it over, laying it palm-up on his thigh. The heat of his body radiates through his trousers, warming the back of my hand, but I cannot feel his fingers lightly encircling my wrist. “This is very different from the other one,” he says, fingertips stroking the hollow of the palm. “It doesn’t feel like metal.”

  I’m shivering almost too hard to speak. It isn’t at all like having my right hand stroked: instead, there’s a prickling sort of pressure awareness, fleeting warmth and a tingle that seems to run the length of my spine. I master myself with effort, force the words out evenly. “There’s a polymer ‘skin’ over the steel. Improves my grip and it gives me tactile sensitivity. It’s supposed to be pretty tough, but it will have to be replaced a lot.”