Worldwired

by Elizabeth Bear

  “I just came to look at the ship.” He dogged the hatch and walked past her, stopping where he could contemplate both the screened and the naked-eye views. The magnified one had the advantage of not spinning.

  Patty bit the tip off her disposable. Dr. Kirkpatrick—no, Jeremy—folded his arms together and shoved his hands into his opposite sleeves. “Be nice to be telepathic about now,” he said.

  “It doesn't help.”

  He glanced at her, brow crinkling. “You can feel them, too?”

  “Sort of.” There's a bright answer. She waved her left hand in a lopsided infinity symbol. “When Alan lets me. It doesn't make any sense, what they think, though. It's just like—”

  “Muttering?”

  “—traffic noise.” Which wasn't quite right either, but the best she could do. She stayed a few steps behind Jeremy, looking past his shoulder rather than standing beside him.

  She wasn't expecting him to turn and fix her with a complicated stare. “You're up late. Aren't you lonely up here?”

  “I'm a pilot.” She covered her expression by taking a drink from the bulb. “It's my job.”

  “Huh.” He looked back out the window. “I hear you're a very good pilot, too. But they sure start you kids young.”

  “Most of them even younger than me.” Like Genie. Who would probably be Leah's age when they did the surgery on her, and . . .

  Jeremy let that hang there for a while without comment, spreading his long-fingered hand against the glass. “I'm just surprised you don't have . . . I don't know. What do girls your age have?” It could have been insulting, but the way he said it, it wasn't. Soft and thoughtful, like he was actually trying to remember what he'd been like at seventeen. But then he kept talking. “Boyfriends, and best girlfriends, and—”

  “I don't.”

  He jumped when she snapped at him. “I beg your pardon.”

  “I just haven't got anybody like that. Just my grandfather and me. He's in Vancouver.” Nobody. Not Carver, and not Leah.

  “No, it's all right,” he said. He turned, framed against the moving brightness. “So why'd you decide to be a pilot?”

  She'd finished her drink somehow, and the limp sticky bubble annoyed her. She hadn't moved far from the panel; she just turned and recycled it. “My grandfather wanted me to do it,” she said. “And my mom wanted me to be a scientist.”

  “What kind of a scientist?”

  “Not an ethnolinguist. If she'd ever heard of one, I mean.” She pushed her hair behind her ears and flipped the ends out of the way, smiling when he laughed.

  “That's okay,” he said. “Ethnolinguistics isn't necessarily considered what you'd call a particularly hard science. Or even a science at all, depending on who you talk to.” He paused. “So what did you want to be, if it wasn't a pilot?”

  “I don't know,” she said. She suddenly decided she wanted another drink, and looked down, unable to meet his eyes. “I guess I never thought about it much. And it's too late now, isn't it?”

  He fell quiet again, not speaking while she dialed another water. It worked on the first try this time. She looked at the disposable, not at Jeremy, when she asked, “So what about you?”

  “What about me what?”

  “Up late. Shouldn't you be sleeping if you're going to EVA tomorrow?”

  “Today.”

  “Oh, right.” She paused. “Well?”

  “If I weren't going to EVA tomorrow,” he said, and shrugged, “I might be able to sleep.”

  “Oh.” Suddenly full of questions, she glanced at him and frowned. “Why'd you become a linguist?”

  “Fate,” he said, coming over to dial a drink for himself as she stepped away from the panel. “Would you believe I didn't learn to talk until I was four?”

  She shouldn't say it. It was unfair and funny and not even accurate. She knew she shouldn't say it. She couldn't help it.

  She grinned widely, bit her drink open, and before she tasted it asked, “And have you shut up since?”

  0900 hours

  Sunday September 30, 2063

  HMCSS Montreal

  Earth orbit

  Three of the Montreal's crew, counting myself, and three very nervous civilian scientists are clipped to a line by the air lock of the Buffy Sainte-Marie, sweating into our helmets because the cooling systems don't kick on until we're EVA. We drift in random orientations; Jeremy and Leslie are still trying to keep their feet toward the floor and their heads pointed in the same direction as the head of whomever they're trying to talk to, like spaceships crossing paths in a holodrama, bobbing nose to nose. It's ingrained in us from the moment we squeeze out of the womb: you keep the shiny side up, and the rubber side down.

  Old spacers laugh at you when you do it, though, which helps break you of the habit pretty quick.

  I move down the row, checking clips, checking the lines. Leslie is locked in to Lieutenant Peterson and Charlie's firmly attached to Corporal Letourneau; I give the carbon filaments a good hard yank to be sure. They're supposed to be unbreakable, but all sorts of equipment doesn't live up to its spec sheets. And the lieutenant may technically rank me, but I have twenty years on her, and she doesn't complain when I check her rig.

  And I don't complain when she checks mine. It's cold out there, and not a place we go idly.

  My line goes to Jeremy; we clip back and forth, our equipment indistinguishable from carabiners and climbing rope. I wouldn't be all that surprised to discover that's exactly what it is; I'm sure Unitek makes harness, and it would certainly be more profitable to rebid it and jack the price up for the military than to design a whole new clip for zero G.

  I hope the carabiner gates are up to the strain of the shoulder attitude jets.

  Jeremy's tall enough that we had to get him one of the extended suits. Not as bad off as Gabe; his had to be special ordered, and if he was army still and not mission-vital, they probably would have just left him dirtside and gone and got somebody else.

  Just my dumb luck they didn't. I check the seals on Jeremy's suit and helmet—he ducks to give me a better angle—and I pat him on the shoulder when he straightens. “Check me out, please.”

  “Sorry.” He runs gloved fingers over all my seals, visual inspection and then the tactile one, pressing each catch to make sure it's locked. He fumbles a little. Not too bad.

  “You okay, Doc?”

  “Cold feet,” he jokes, and it cracks me up, because we're on the sun side of the Buffy Sainte-Marie, and if anything the hide of the little ship would be hot to the touch. If we could touch her. “Everybody all set?”

  I expect they are, but that's not my question to answer. “Everybody ready for the air lock?” I hear a chorus of ayes, and see one nod out of the corner of my eye. “Out loud, please, Les.”

  Charlie's old hat at suit drill, of course, even if he's not got an EVA cert. He smirks at me through the bubble of his helmet; I don't catch his eye, look at Leslie instead. “I can't hear your head rattle in a vacuum, Les.”

  “All set,” he says, tilting his head like he's blushing, but his skin's too dark to tell. “Ma'am.”

  I open the air lock hatch, and we step into a bare, white-walled steel room no bigger than an express elevator. My air already smells like tin and a little bit like sweat, which makes me appreciate how fresh the air on the Montreal is. Those vegetable gardens do the trick, I guess. Corporal Letourneau dogs the hatch behind us, and I turn—full turn in the suit, because your helmet doesn't move with your head—and give them the once-over. Every one of them has a grip on a Jesus handle; I check. Every one of them also has lights glowing green-means-go on the locking ring of his or her suit. “Last chance to chicken out.”

  Silence.

  I didn't really think anybody would.

  I turn back around and slap the hatch open one-handed, hanging on pretty damn tight with the other, myself, so I don't tumble out into all that nothing like a milkweed seed blown from the pod. Leslie gets blown into my back and somersaul
ts past me, but Lieutenant Peterson was wise to that and she's got both hands on the bar, so he pitches up against the end of his line and they don't go tumbling out like two weights tied to a rope and flung.

  “Right,” the lieutenant says, hauling Leslie back into the air lock for no good reason except that we can all hear him breathing—panting—over the suit mike. “Now that we have the drama out of the way, shall we step outside?”

  Despite my instructions, Les nods again, the bobbing movement visible inside his helmet, and the lieutenant takes him out first. I run rearguard with Jeremy, and Charlie and the corporal go in the middle. The Buffy Sainte-Marie hangs behind us like a white-lit Christmas ornament on a black velvet dropcloth.

  I imagine we must look a strange, stringy sort of centipede from the pilot's perspective. He'll keep the shuttle here, stationary with regard to the birdcage and about a klick away, until either the Benefactors dispose of us or we return. When I turn over my shoulder to look back at him, I can see the shiptree outlined as a twist of brighter, bluer lights against the stars, and I wonder if we're starting with the right aliens first. Of course, there's no easy way to get inside that one.

  It's a slow, silent procession—six of us in formation like pallbearers miming an invisible coffin. The lieutenant's slaved our maneuvering jets to her own controls, so we follow in an orderly fashion—even those of us with no clue what we're doing.

  Like any of us have a clue what we're doing anymore.

  A kilometer sounds pretty far, but really, it's no distance at all. Two laps around a footrace track. You can run that far in a few minutes if you're in decent shape. The Montreal herself is close to three kilometers long.

  We cover the distance in twenty minutes flat, in silence except for the occasional murmured instruction over the suit radios, and the thrilled, terrified rattle of our hearts. I'm waiting for some response, some acknowledgment. Some change in the steady, erratic flicker of the silvery teardrops from one place to another across the width of the birdcage. Some indication of whether to continue forward or move back.

  I haven't been so roundly ignored since the time when Leah was twelve and she wouldn't talk to me for three days because I refused to help her run away from home so she wouldn't have to share a room with Genie anymore.

  The good news is, she had nothing on emotional blackmail compared to her dad, or she almost might have broken me. I took her camping instead. A girl knows what it's like to need to get out of town once in a while.

  Hey Richard.

  “Jenny?”

  You with me, sport?

  “I wouldn't miss this for the world.”

  I don't suppose you have a theory about what those birdcage aliens are?

  I feel him shrug, and then his voice comes over my suit radio instead of inside my head. “The master warrant officer wants to know if this particular alien intelligence has any theories about what those other alien intelligences might be like,” he says.

  “Whatever they are, they're swimming around in space bare-assed,” Charlie comments, his voice made tinny in transmission. “I don't think those are suits.”

  “Could they be remotes? Waldos?” Jeremy, and he twists his upper body inside his suit to look at me, as if I have any idea whether he might be right or wrong. “Some sort of nanotech construction?”

  “The probes couldn't tell,” Charlie says. “And when we tried to bring a sample back for analysis, all we got was nanotech and hydrogen.” We're close enough to see them clearly now, without magnification. The aliens are featureless gleaming spheres until they move, and then they stream out from a rounded bow to a trailing point.

  “That's weird,” Richard says. “There's no drag. No air resistance to push them into a teardrop shape.”

  “That's why I think those are the aliens,” Charlie answers. “That looks like an adaptation to moving through fluid.”

  “Or atmosphere?” Leslie asks.

  “Technically, atmosphere is a fluid, in the fluid dynamics sense,” Dick says.

  I keep my damned mouth shut. Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, etcetera, etcetera. Charlie, bless him, has no dignity. “I wonder where something like that grows up. Dick?”

  “You're wondering if I have a theory where they evolved?”

  “I'm wondering if you have a theory what they're made of.”

  “I'd say they're probably patterns of electrical impulses in some sort of supercooled, possibly superconductive colloid. They carry a nanomachine infestation, but while I can sense those machines, I can't piggyback their operating system the way I can the ones you bred, Chuck. They're even farther out of my ambit than the Chinese nanonetwork.”

  “Not only do we not speak their language, or have any kinetics in common, we can't even hack their computers.” Jeremy touches the override on his thigh, adding a little more thrust to what the lieutenant gives him, and drifts to the end of the line that binds us together. I compensate for the gentle tug; he makes a smooth job of it, overall.

  Peterson draws us up a few short yards outside the birdcage, and we spread casually apart. Not too far, though; there isn't any safety in numbers, but the reptile part of our brains can't be made to believe that, no matter how many millions of years of evolution we layer over it.

  “Supercooled?” Charlie asks. “Doesn't that get problematic out here in the sunlight?”

  “They aren't fazed by vacuum, at least,” Jeremy says. “Maybe they come from an extreme environment of some sort—” Stopped cold, he bumps the brow of his helmet with the side of his gauntlet. “Leslie, what if they come from someplace with an opaque atmosphere? Or nearly opaque? Or no light to speak of? Like Venus, say. Or Pluto.”

  Leslie's been silent since the comment about the atmosphere, but the way his suit rocks on the end of its line tells me he just reflexively tried to glance over his shoulder. He looks very small against the massive filigree of the birdcage, a white plastic spaceman doll floating in front of a shifting, faceted fretwork of spun glass. “No physical semiotics,” he answers when he's stable again. “Jeremy, that's pretty damn smart.”

  “Thank you.”

  “More than that,” Charlie puts in. “A completely different set of senses and manner of processing information than we have. No sense of sight, of smell, of hearing. Those would be more foreign to them than . . . a dolphin's sonar sense is foreign to us. No wonder we're having a hell of a time talking to them.”

  “That's what I've been trying to explain,” Leslie says. “It's like Anne Sullivan teaching Helen Keller how to talk, only we can't even take them outside and pump water over their hands until they get that we're trying to show them something.”

  “Les,” I say, “what on earth are you babbling about?”

  “Semiotics,” Leslie answers. Which doesn't help me, but judging by the richness in his tone, he's quite pleased with himself. “Never mind,” he finishes. “Just doing my job.”

  A scatter of the birdcage aliens drifts diagonally across the starship, passing beside and through one another. “So, what do you say we invite ourselves in and sit down?” Richard asks.

  “Do you suppose they're safe to touch?” Leslie's already let himself drift forward; he's ahead of the rest of us by a good three meters now. Lieutenant Peterson is eyeing her end of the lines between them as if she's about to grab a fistful and haul Leslie back to her hand over hand.

  “No. I don't think it's safe to do anything to them.” They're all looking at me. I blink. I hadn't intended to speak just then; it slipped out. “But if I understand you right, Les, you think they can't talk to anything they're not touching?”

  “Got it in one,” he says, straining at the end of his leash. “I'm not sure they can notice us unless we wander in among them.”

  “Forgive me if that sounds like a thoroughly lousy idea.”

  “I know,” he answers, and this time he does grab the ropes and turns himself completely around, so we can see his broad white grin reflecting the running lights of
the Buffy Sainte-Marie. “But it's also what we came out here for, isn't it?”

  And they're all waiting for me. Waiting for me, even though the lieutenant ranks me. Waiting for me because I'm Genevieve Casey, dammit. And calisse de chrisse, I hate this shit.

  “All right,” I say, and I do it without reaching out for Richard, because I already know what Richard's going to say. “All right, guys. Spread out. Let's go on in.”

  Richard watched silently through Min-xue's eyes as Clarke receded behind the Gordon Lightfoot. It was only Min-xue's third trip in a Canadian shuttlecraft. Richard kept an ear on Min-xue's thought process, certain that Min-xue would call for his attention shortly. Right now, the pilot was musing on how he'd never expected to find himself in space again, much less headed for a billet aboard the Canadian flagship. Richard knew that Min-xue had assumed this part of his life was over. Had assumed that his life was over, destroyed in an act of conscience that was also an act of treason. He'd never expected to sit where he sat, the lone passenger on a hastily detoured shuttlecraft, a startling extravagance by Chinese standards.

  Clarke slid out of view as the shuttlecraft turned toward the Montreal. Min-xue couldn't see their destination through the ports on the shuttlecraft's sides, and the pilot's compartment was shielded from the passenger cabin by a bulkhead. There was a monitor on the back side of that bulkhead, and Richard contemplated turning it on for Min-xue, but he wasn't sure if Min-xue wanted the long view of the Montreal, or of Earth, or of the Benefactor ships.

  Both he and Richard knew very well what they all looked like, after all—

  Richard?

  “A good rain knows the season, and comes on with the spring,” Richard quoted, drawing a smile to Min-xue's thin-pressed lips. “I've been wondering if you would want to talk.”

  You're still reading the Tang poets, I see.

  “You are an enormously bad influence,” Richard answered, and Min-xue smiled. “Min-xue, I know you've spoken to the Canadian legal team about the—”