Scardown

by Elizabeth Bear

  Except nothing does, and if I squint at that incredible creation just right, and under high magnification, I can see things like droplets of mercury—ten-meter droplets of mercury—sliding along its spans like rainbeads down windows. That one's not much like either of the ships on Mars.

  Both the ship trees and the crystal cages are easily as vast as Montreal.

  Elspeth raises her hand and points, finger tracing the path of one drop-of-mercury as it hurtles from one corner of the crystal lattice to another. “Dr. Forster, are those the aliens?”

  Charlie leans forward to peer over her shoulder and then turns his attention to a magnified version on the nearest screen. “The shiny things? Dunno what else they would be. Seem pretty comfy in a hard vacuum, don't they?”

  “Yeah.” Gabe, still holding Genie's hand. I bring Patty with me and follow them forward.

  Elspeth looks up as we come over and smiles. “Patty, what does Richard say?”

  Oh, Ellie. You are still so slick. Patty lost as much as the rest of us. More. Here we are, and we have each other, and links forged in shared fire. And Patty's got herself and the voices in her head.

  “He says they're up to differential calculus,” she responds after a minute. “But no sign of language beyond that. He also says that the ship tree Benefactors—meaning the ones with the organic, grown tech—don't seem to be communicating with the crystal-lattice Benefactors any better than they are at communicating with us.”

  “Oh.” Elspeth shares a significant glance with Charlie, who nods. “Really. They're still just counting”

  “Yes . . .”

  “Richard,” she says, “what would you say is the primary attribute that separates humans—and you and Alan, of course—from animals?”

  “Sapience? It's a matter of degrees,” Patty answers for him.

  Elspeth glances over at me. “Don't suppose you've noticed Jenny here talking to her cat?”

  Richard's words, Patty's voice. “There are studies that indicate that monkeys and dogs, for example, have a sense of humor. And porpoises, African gray parrots, elephants, and some other animals seem to communicate on a very sophisticated level. There's math, of course, but Canadian ravens and some parrots can be taught to count—”

  She cuts Patty off, but gently. “So what do we do that's so different? What's the first use we generally put any new technology to, if it's suitable? Other than bashing each other over the head with it, of course.”

  I clear my throat as Elspeth's meaning comes clear before me. “Richard, who teaches animals to count? Who talks to them?”

  “Researchers,” Patty says. And then, “Oh, my,” in her own voice. “We're patterns of electrical impulses that talk.”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  The two Benefactor ships float side by side, almost nose to nose with the Montreal. The rest remain in higher orbits, drifting, not touching. Wingtip to wingtip, and each one discrete and alone.

  Wonder infuses Patty's voice, Richard's words. “You're suggesting that they need us for something our species is specialized for: talking to things that aren't quite like us.”

  “Which is funny, considering we can't even seem to talk civilly among ourselves.” Elspeth steps away from the window, scrubbing her cold palms on her pants. She whistles low in her throat, shaking her head side to side. “I can't run this project. I don't know the first thing about interspecies communication.”

  “Hell,” I say. “You're supposed to be the smartest living Canadian. Didn't anybody ever teach you to delegate?”

  Ellie looks at me. Her eyebrows rise. “I'm going to need a metric buttload of linguists. And marine biologists, maybe, dolphin and primate researchers—”

  I grin. In spite of myself, I grin.

  “There. You're thinking now, Ellie.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I guess I am.”

  I arch my back and feel my neck crack under the stretch. Squeeze Patty's elbow one last time before I step away. My left arm aches and I find myself rubbing at it the way I used to. Imaginary pain. I imagine someday this scene, the three ships so utterly different from one another, the scarred globe floating behind them, will be one of those images that becomes so familiar that people don't see it anymore. The view that spreads before me is being beamed into every datanet on Earth. Hey, Richard. I have an idea.

  “Yeah?”

  Riel still wants us to go look at this other planet when we've got the Benefactor issue figured out, assuming we ever do. What do you think the odds are that you and Patty and I can convince Wainwright she really wants to steal a starship?

  I sense his hesitation, tapping on the quadruple-paned glass with my steel fingertips. Like tapping on the shark tank glass, and my reflection smiles at me until Razorface and Leah come back to me with an empty ache like a severed limb. Which is not a comparison I make as idly as most.

  Because it occurs to me that you could get a hell of a lot of colonists on a ship as big as the Montreal. And they don't all have to be from Canada, do they?

  “Steal the Montreal?”

  Well. Borrow for a decade or so. I'm fucking tired of following orders. And what the hell are they going to do to stop me, Dick?

  Elspeth puts her hand over mine and pulls it away from the window. “Penny for your thoughts, Jen.”

  I tilt my head and grin, watching the mercury drops continue their gymnastics. “Thinking about colonies. Wondering how Riel would react to the idea of a worldwide talent search instead of just a local one.”

  Elspeth chuckles, that half-swallowed ironic laugh I've got so fond of, and lowers her voice. “Funny you should ask that. How do you feel about extortion?”

  “In a good cause? I'm all for it.”

  “Good. Because Riel plans to use rides to elsewhere on the Montreal—and the Vancouver, when she's spaceworthy—as a carrot to complement the Benefactor stick. Eventually. I imagine it will take a couple of years.” She grins. “Maybe Patty and Dick's friend Min-xue will even get to help fly one of them.”

  “I'm not sure what you're saying, Ellie—”

  “Aren't you?” Sly and sideways. I have to swallow my grief and my hope before it all spills down my face again: somehow, she's not broken yet. “She's working toward getting the EU, the Commonwealth, and PanMalaysia to sign a cogovernance agreement. If they come on board, the South American states will follow—”

  “PanChina will be a problem. And there's the matter of talking to the aliens—”

  She tilts her head to one side. “If it were easy, it wouldn't be fun. Richard can be everyplace at once. Which includes Earth, even if the mobile ships leave, because the Huang Di is ours by right of salvage now, and the Calgary—”

  —isn't going anywhere. Hah. Yeah. The irony makes me laugh myself sick: think for a moment of ripping myself free, taking Elspeth and Gabe and Genie and running for the hills—and find out my gorgeous justification is already a part of the prime minister's audacious plan for world cooperation. By the time I'm done, wiping tears onto the back of my left hand, everybody else by the windows is staring at me. I shake my head helplessly and grab Ellie's hand. “There's a hell of a lot of work left to do, if we want it.”

  A long silence follows, and Ellie squeezes back. It's Patty who breaks the quiet, surprising me. “The whole world just changed.”

  Elspeth, softly: “What do you mean?”

  The girl lifts her shoulders, dark hair shining over them. It's a speech she's rehearsed in her head, and it shows. “I mean we've converted the entire planet into a macroprocessor, linked human minds together, invited alien races among us, given ourselves over to the, the stewardship of a creature a hell of a lot smarter than we are—”

  “Not smarter,” Richard says, in my head and with Patty's voice. “Just better at crunching numbers. And stewardship is still not a job I'm equipped for, kid.”

  “What-ever.” Still perfectly sixteen, and she glares when Ellie and I burst out laughing.

  “Nah. I know what you mean.”
I shake my head helplessly as Gabe comes up on her other side, still holding on to his daughter as if he'll never let her go. He sighs, and I have to turn from the grief and the faith in his face. But he steps around Elspeth, and reaches out to cup my chin in his hand, turning me away from the glass so that I have to look at his eyes. There's almost a—bubble—around the five of us—me, Elspeth, Gabriel, Patty, Genie. And Richard now, always Richard—the world given voice, or something. Whatever it was that Patty was trying—and failing—to say.

  I can feel the rest assembled, but they don't intrude. I have a name for the thing in my belly, but it frightens me to say it. Hope. God. I don't want to hope. And I can't seem to help it.

  “Well.” He takes a breath like a man who's been holding on to the last one too long, and considers me. “That work you mentioned. Do you want it?”

  “No.” Hell, no. “But it's got to be done.”

  The last army-wagon straggles

  along my starswept trail

  corners at the terminal world

  and vanishes into the cold.

  They'll bury their daughters

  and their sons in war-gardens

  and the common trenches between the suns.

  When after a long trail they arrive

  we await their coming.

  No message we chase them with

  no flag to bring them home, but

  whispers without voices

  visions without eyes.

  They travel on.

  We choose to forget them.

  They travel on,

  recalling home.

  —Xie Min-xue, “The Ballad of the Star-Wagons”

  About the Author

  ELIZABETH BEAR shares a birthday with Frodo and Bilbo Baggins. This, coupled with a tendency to read the dictionary as a child, doomed her early to penury, intransigence, friendlessness, and the writing of speculative fiction. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and grew up in central Connecticut with the exception of two years (which she was too young to remember very well) spent in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, in the last house with electricity before the Canadian border. She currently lives in the Mojave Desert near Las Vegas, Nevada, but she's trying to escape.

  She's worked as a stable hand, a fluff-page reporter, a maintainer-of-microbiology-procedure-manuals for a major inner-city hospital, a typesetter and layout editor, a traffic manager for an import-export business, a test-pit digger for an archaeological survey company, a “media industry professional,” and a third-shift doughnut manufacturer.

  Her recent and forthcoming appearances include: SCIFICTION, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, On Spec, H.P. Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror, Chiaroscuro, Ideomancer, The Fortean Bureau, the Polish fantasy magazine Nowa Fantastyka, and the anthologies Shadows Over Baker Street (Del Rey, 2003) and All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories (Wheatland Press, 2004).

  She's a second-generation Swede, a third-generation Ukrainian, and a third-generation Transylvanian, with some Irish, English, Scots, Cherokee, and German thrown in for leavening. Elizabeth Bear is her real name, but not all of it.

  Her dogs outweigh her, and she is much beset by her cats.

  ALSO BY ELIZABETH BEAR

  HAMMERED

  PRAISE FOR

  ELIZABETH BEAR'S

  HAMMERED

  “Hammered is a very exciting, very polished, very impressive debut novel.” —Mike Resnick

  “Gritty, insightful, and daring—Elizabeth Bear is a talent to watch.” —David Brin, author of the Uplift novels and Kil'n People

  “A gritty and painstakingly well-informed peek inside a future we'd all better hope we don't get, liberally seasoned with VR delights and enigmatically weird alien artifacts. Genevieve Casey is a pleasingly original female lead, fully equipped with the emotional life so often lacking in military SF yet tough and full of noir attitude; old enough by a couple of decades to know better but conflicted enough to engage with the sleazy dynamics of her situation regardless. Out of this basic contrast, Elizabeth Bear builds her future nightmare tale with style and conviction and a constant return to the twists of the human heart.” —Richard Morgan, author of Altered Carbon

  “Hammered has it all. Drug wars, hired guns, corporate skullduggery, and bleeding-edge AI, all rolled into one of the best first novels I've seen in I don't know how long. This is the real dope!” —Chris Moriarty, author of Spin State

  “A glorious hybrid: hard science, dystopian geopolitics, and wide-eyed sense-of-wonder seamlessly blended into a single book. I hate this woman. She makes the rest of us look like amateurs.” —Peter Watts, author of Starfish and Maelstrom

  “The language is taut, the characters deep and the scenes positively crackle with energy. Not to mention that this is real science fiction, with rescues from crippled starships and exploration of mysterious alien artifacts and international diplomatic brinksmanship between spacefaring powers China and Canada. Yes, Canada!” —James Patrick Kelly, author of Strange but not a Stranger and Think Like a Dinosaur

  “Packed with a colorful panoply of characters, a mem-orable and likeable anti-heroine, and plenty of action and intrigue, Hammered is a superbly written novel that combines high tech, military industrial politics, and complex morality. There is much to look forward to in new writer Elizabeth Bear.” —Karin Lowachee, Campbell-award nominated author of Warchild

  “Even in scenes where there is no violent action, or even much physical action at all, the thoughts and emotions of Ms. Bear's characters, as well as the dynamic tensions of their relationships, create an impression of feverish activity going on below the surface and liable to erupt into plain view at any moment. . . The language is terse and vivid, punctuated by ironic asides whose casual brutality—sometimes amusing, sometimes shocking—speaks volumes about these people and their world. . . This is a superior piece of work by a writer of enviable talents. I look forward to reading more!” —Paul Witcover, author of Waking Beauty

  “Hammered is one helluva good novel! Elizabeth Bear writes tight and tough and tender about grittily real people caught up in a highly inventive story of a wild and woolly tomorrow that grabs the reader from the get-go and will not let go. Excitement, intrigue, intelligence—and a sense of wonder, too! Who could ask for anything more?” —James Stevens-Arce, author of Soulsaver, Best First Novel 2000 (Denver Rocky Mountain News)

  “In this promising debut novel, Elizabeth Bear deftly weaves thought-provoking ideas into an entertaining and tight narrative.” —Dena Landon, author of Shapeshifter's Quest

  Be sure not to miss

  WORLDWIRED

  by

  ELIZABETH BEAR

  The riveting conclusion

  to the series begun in

  HAMMERED and SCARDOWN

  Coming from

  Bantam Spectra in Fall 2005.

  Here's a special preview.

  WORLDWIRED

  on sale Fall 2005

  “One cannot walk the Path until one becomes the Path.”

  —Gautama Buddha

  1030 Hours

  27 September, 2063

  HMCSS Montreal

  Earth Orbit

  I've got a starship dreaming. And there the hell it is. Leslie Tjakamarra leaned both hands on the thick crystal of the Montreal's observation portal, the cold of space seeping into his palms, and hummed a snatch of song under his breath. He couldn't tell how far away the alien spaceship was—or the fragment he could see when he twisted his head and pressed his face against the port. Earthlight stained the cage-shaped frame blue-silver, and the fat doughnut of Forward Orbital Platform was visible through the gaps, the gleaming thread of the beanstalk describing a taut line downward until it disappeared in brown-tinged atmosphere over Malaysia. “Bloody far,” he said, realizing he'd spoken out loud only when he heard his own voice. He scuffed across the blue-carpeted floor, pressed back by the vista on the other side of the glass.

  Someone cleared her throat behind him. He turned, for all he wa
s unwilling to put his back to the endless fall outside. The tall, narrow-shouldered crew member who stood just inside the hatchway met him eye to eye, the black shape of a sidearm strapped to her thigh command-ing his attention. She raked one hand through wiry salt and-pepper hair and shook her head. “Or too close for comfort,” she answered with an odd little sort of a smile. “That's one of the ones Elspeth calls the birdcages—”

  “Elspeth?”

  “Dr. Dunsany,” she said. “You're Dr. Tjakamarra, the xenosemiotician.” She mispronounced his name.

  “Leslie,” he said. She stuck out her right hand, and Leslie realized she was wearing a black leather glove on the left. “You're Casey,” he blurted, too startled to reach out. She held her hand out there anyway, until he recovered enough to shake. “I didn't recognize you—”

  “It's cool.” She shrugged in a manner entirely unlike a living legend, and gave him a crooked sideways grin, smoothing her dark blue jumpsuit over her breasts with the gloved hand. “We're all different out of uniform. Besides, it's nice to be looked at like real people, for a change. Come on: the pilots' lounge has a better view.”

  She gestured him away from the window; he caught himself shooting her sidelong glances, desperate not to stare. He fell into step beside her as she led him along the curved ring of the Montreal's habitation wheel, the arc rising behind and before them even though it felt perfectly flat under his feet.

  “You'll get used to it,” Master Warrant Officer Casey said, returning his sidelong looks with one of her own. It said she had accurately judged the reason he trailed his right hand along the chilly wall. “Here we are—” She braced one rubber-soled foot against the seam between corridor floor and corridor wall, and expertly spun the handle of a thick steel hatchway with her black-gloved hand. “—come on in. Step lively; we don't stand around in hatchways shipboard.”