Scardown

by Elizabeth Bear

  Leslie followed her through, turning to dog the door as he remembered his safety lectures, and when he turned back Casey had moved forward into the middle of a chamber no bigger than an urban apartment's living room. The awe in his throat made it hard to breathe. He hoped he was keeping it off his face.

  “There,” Casey said, stepping aside, waving him impatiently forward again. “That's both of them. The one on the ‘left' is the ship tree. The one on the ‘right' is the birdcage.”

  Everyone on the planet probably knew that by now. She was babbling, Leslie realized, and the small evidence of her fallibility—and her own nervousness—did more to ease the pressure in his chest than her casual friendliness could have. You're acting like a starstruck teenager, he reprimanded, and managed to grin at his own foolishness as he shuffled forward, his slipperlike ship-shoes whispering over the carpet.

  Then he caught sight of the broad sweep of windows beyond and his personal awe for the woman in blue was replaced by something visceral. He swallowed, throat dry, and rubbed his knuckles into his eyes as if they needed clearing. “Wow.”

  The Montreal's habitation wheel spun grandly, slowly, creating an imitation of gravity that held them, feet down, to the “floor.” Leslie found himself standing before the big round port in the middle of the wall, hands pressed to either rim as if to keep himself from tumbling through the crystal like Alice through the looking-glass, as the astounding panorama rotated like a merry-go-round seen from above. Beyond it, the soft blue glow of the wounded Earth reflected the sun that lay behind the Montreal. The planet's atmosphere fuzzed brown like smog in an inversion layer, the sight enough to send Leslie's knuckle to his mouth. He bit down, unconscious of the wetness and the ache, and tore his gaze away with an effort, turning it on the two alien ships floating almost hull-to-hull “overhead.”

  The ship on perspective-right was the enormous, gleaming-blue birdcage, swarming with ten-meter specks of mercury—made tiny by distance—that flickered from cage-bar to cage-bar, as vanishingly swift and bright as motes in Leslie's eye.

  The ship on perspective-left caught the Earthlight with the gloss peculiar to polished wood or a smooth tree bole, a mouse-colored column twisted into shapes that took Leslie's breath away. The vast hull glittered with patterned, pointillist lights in cool-water shades. They did not look so different from the images and designs that Leslie had grown up with, and he fought a shiver, glancing at the hawk-intent face of Master Warrant Officer Casey close beside him.

  “Elspeth—Dr. Dunsany—said you had a theory,” she said, without glancing over.

  He returned his attention to the paired alien space ships, peeling his eyes away from Genevieve Casey only with an effort. “I've had the VR implants—”

  “Richard told me,” she said, with a sly sideways grin.

  “Richard? The AI?” And silly not to have expected that either. It's a whole new road you're walking. A whole different sort of journey, farther away from home than even his years at Cambridge, when there was still more of an England rather than less.

  “Richard, the AI. You'll meet him, I'm sure. He doesn't like to intrude on the new kids until they're comfortable with their wetware. And unless you've got the full ‘borg—” she lightly touched the back of her head “—you won't have to put up with his running patter. Most of the time.” She tilted her head up and sideways, a wry look he didn't think was for him.

  She's talking to the AI right now. Cool shiver across his shoulders; the awe was back, with company. “The new kids. Ah.” Leslie forced himself not to stare, frowning down at the bitten skin of his thumb. “Yes. I spoke to Dr. Dunsany and Dr. Perry regarding my theories....”

  “Dr. Tjakamarra—”

  “Leslie.”

  “—Leslie.” Casey coughed into her hand. “You're supposed to be the foremost expert in interspecies communication in the Commonwealth. Ellie thought you were on to something, or she wouldn't have asked you up here. We get more requests in a week than Yale does in a year—”

  “I'm aware of that.” Her presence still stunned him. Genevieve Casey. The First Pilot. Standing here beside me, leaned up against the window with me like kids peering off the observation deck of the Petronas Towers. He gathered his wits and forced himself to frown. “You've had no luck talking to them, have you?” A jerk of his thumb indicated the orbiting craft.

  “Plenty of math,” Casey said with a shrug. “Nothing you'd call conversation. They don't seem to understand please and thank you.”

  “I expected that,” Leslie answered. Familiar ground. Comfortable ground, even. “I'm afraid that if I'm right, talking to them is hopeless.”

  “Hopeless?” She turned, leaning back on her heels, her long body ready for anything.

  “Yes,” Leslie said, calmer, on his own turf now. “You see, I don't think they talk at all.”

  Leslie Tjakamarra's not a big man. He's not a young one, either, though I wouldn't want to try to guess his age within five years on either side. He's got one of those wiry, weathered frames I associate with Alberta cattlemen and forest rangers, sienna skin paler, almost red, inside the creases beside glittering eyes and on the palms of big thick-nailed hands. He doesn't go at all with the conservative charcoal double-breasted suit, pinstriped with biolume, which clings to his sinewy shoulders in as professional an Old London tailoring job as I've seen. When London was evacuated, a lot of the refugees found themselves in Sydney, in Vancouver—and in Toronto.

  God rest their souls.

  He shoots me those sidelong glances like they do, trying to see through the glove to the metal hand, trying to see through the jumpsuit to the hero underneath.

  I hate to disappoint him, but that hero had a hair appointment she never came back from. There's nobody under here but Jenny any more. “Well,” I say, to fill up his silence. “That'll make your job easier, then, won't it?” What do you think of them apples, Dick?

  Richard grins inside my head, bony hands spread wide and beating like a pigeon's wings through air. The man's brains would jam if you tied his hands down, I think. Of course, since he's intangible, that would be a trick. “That's got the air of a leading question about it.” He scrubs his palms on the thighs of his virtual corduroys and stuffs them into his pockets, leaning back, white shirt stretched taut across his narrow chest, his image in my wetware fading as he “steps back,” limiting his usage of my implants. “I'll get in on it when he talks to Ellie. No point in spoiling his chance to appreciate the view. I'll eavesdrop, if that's okay with you.”

  It might be the same asinine impulse that makes English speakers talk loudly to foreigners that moves me to smile inwardly and stereotype Dr. Tjakamarra's very smooth, very educated accent into Australian Rules English. No worries, mate. Fair dinkum.

  Richard shoots me an amused look. “Ouch,” he says, and flickers out like an interrupted hologram.

  Dr. Tjakamarra grins, broad lips uncovering tea-stained teeth like a mouth full of piano keys, and scratches his cheek with knuckles like an auto mechanic's. He wears his hair long, professorial, slicked back into hard steel-gray waves. “Or that much more difficult, if you prefer.” His voice is younger than the rest of him, young as that twinkle in his eye. “Talking isn't the only species of communication, after all.”

  He presses the hand flat against the glass again, and peers between his own fingers as if trying to gauge the size of the ships that float out there, the way you might measure a tree on the horizon against your thumb to see how far you've left to walk. His gaze keeps sliding down to the dust-palled globe of the Earth, his lips pressed thin, his eyes impassive, giving nothing away.

  “How bad is it in Sydney?” I press my steel hand to my lips, shoving the words back in with the leather of the glove, and cover my face as if entranced by the turning lights outside. Dr. Tjakamarra's head comes up like a startled deer's. I have to pretend I don't see it.

  “We heard it,” he says, as his hand falls away from the glass. “We heard it in Sydney.” He s
teps back, turns to face me although I'm still giving him my shoulder. He cups both hands and brings them together with a crack that makes me jump.

  “Is that really what it sounded like?”

  “More or less—” A shrug. “We couldn't feel the tremors. The only fallout we got was dust, and who notices a little more dust? It wasn't all that loud, fifteen thousand kilometers away; I would have thought it'd be a sustained rumble, like the old footage of nuclear bombs. You ever hear of Coober Pedy?”

  “Never.” Person, place, or thing?

  He answers it in the next sentence. “There were bomb tests near there. Over a hundred years ago, but I know people who knew people who were there. They said the newsreels lied, the sound effect they used was dubbed in later.”

  I have no idea where he's going with this. I lean my right shoulder against the cold cold crystal, fold my left arm over my right arm, and tilt my head against the glass. I've got four or five inches on him. He laces his hands together in the small of his back and lifts his chin to look me in the eye, creases linking his thick, flat nose to the corners of his mouth.

  Surreal fucking conversation, man.

  “So what does a nuclear explosion sound like, Les?”

  His lips twist. He holds his hands apart again, and swings them halfway but doesn't clap. “Like the biggest bloody gunshot you ever did hear. Bang. Or like a meteorite hitting the planet, fifteen thousand kilometers away.”

  He's talking so he doesn't have to look. I recognize the glitter in his dark brown eyes, blacker even than mine. It took me too, the first time I looked down and saw all that gorgeous blue and white mottled with sick dull beige like cancer.

  It takes all of us like that. All that I've seen so far, any way. “A bullet is a bullet is a bullet?”

  He licks his lips, and looks carefully at the Benefactor ships and not the smeared globe behind them. “The shot heard ‘round the world. Isn't that what the Americans call the first shot fired in their Colonial revolt?”

  “Sounds about right.”

  “May something more than—dust—grow out of this one.” He sighs, rubbing the back of his left hand with his right-hand thumb. He reminds me of my grandfather Zeke Kirby, my mother's father, the full-blooded one; he's got that same boiled-leather twist of indestructibility, but my grandfather was an ironworker, not a professor. His mouth moves again, like he's trying to shape words that won't quite come out right, and finally he just shakes his head and looks down. “Big universe out there.”

  “Bloody big,” I answer, a gentle tease, and he smiles out of the corner of his mouth, gives me a look out of the corners of his eyes, and I know we're going to be friends. “Come on,” I say. “That gets depressing if you stare at it. I'll take you to meet Ellie if you promise not to tell her the thing about the bomb.”

  He falls into step beside me. I don't have to shorten my strides to let him keep up. “She lose somebody in the—in that?”

  “We all lost somebody.” I shake my head.

  “What is it, then?”

  “It would give her nightmares. Come on.”

  1300 Hours

  Toronto Evacuation Zone

  Ontario, Canada

  Thursday 27 September, 2063

  Richard habitually took refuge in numbers, so it troubled him that when it came to dealing with the Impact, all he had was a series of approximations. The number of dead had never been counted. Their names had never been accurately listed. Their families would never be notified; in many cases, their bodies would never be found.

  The population of Niagara and Rochester, New York, had been just under three million people, although the New York coastline of Lake Ontario was mostly rural, vineyards and cow pasture. The northern rim of the lake, however, had been the most populated place in Canada: Ontario's Golden Horseshoe, the urban corridor anchored by Toronto and Hamilton, which had still been home to some seven million despite the midcentury population dip. Deaths from the Impact and its immediate aftermath had been confirmed as far away as Buffalo, Cleveland, Albany. A woman in Ottawa had died when a stained-glass window shattered from the shock and fell on her head; a child in Kitchener survived in a basement, along with his dog. Recovery teams dragging the poisoned waters of Lake Ontario had been forced to cease operations as the lake surface iced over, a phenomenon that once would have been a twice-in-a-century occurrence but had become common with the advent of shifted winters, and which would become more common still. For a little while, until the greenhouse effect triggered by the Impact began to cancel out the nuclear winter.

  An icebreaker could have been brought in and the work continued . . . but things keep, in cold water. And someone raised the spectre of breaking ice with bodies frozen into it, and it was decided to wait until spring.

  The ice didn't melt until halfway through May, and the lake locked solid again in mid-September.

  The coming winter promised to be even colder, a savage global drop in temperatures that might persist another eighteen to twenty-four months, and Richard frankly couldn't begin to say whether the death toll worldwide at the end of that time would be measured in the mere tens of millions or in the hundreds. Preliminary estimates had placed immediate Impact casualties at thirty million; Richard was inclined to a more conservative estimate of something under twenty, unevenly divided between Canada and the United States.

  In practical terms, the casualty rate was something like one in every twenty-five Americans and one in every three Canadians dead by January first, 2063.

  The fallout cloud from the thirteen operant nuclear reactors damaged or destroyed in the Impact was pushed northeast by prevailing wind currents, largely affecting New York, Quebec, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Newfoundland, the Grand Banks, Prince Edward Island, Iceland, and points between. The emergency teams and medical staff attending the disaster victims were supplied with iodine tablets and given aggressive prophylaxis against radiation exposure. Only seventeen of them became seriously ill. Only six of those died.

  It was too soon to tell what the long-term effect on cancer rates would be, but Richard expected New England's dairy industry to fail completely, along with what bare scraps had still remained of the once-vast North Atlantic fisheries.

  And then, after the famines and the winter—

  —would come a summer without end.

  Colonel Valens's hands hurt, but his eyes hurt more. He leaned forward on both elbows over his improvised desk, his holistic communications unit propped up on a pair of inflatable splints and the hideously un-ergonomic portable interface plate unrolled across a plywood surface that was an inch and a half too high for comfort. “Yes,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck with an aching palm, “I'll hold. Please let the prime minister know it's not urgent, if she has—Constance. That was quick.”

  “Hi, Fred. I was at lunch,” Constance Riel said, chewing visibly, her image flickering in the cheap holographic display. Valens smoothed the interface plate between his hands, cool plastic slightly tacky and gritty with the dust that was never far. The prime minister covered her mouth with the back of the first two fingers on her left hand and swallowed, set her sandwich down on an unfolded paper napkin, reached for her coffee. Careful makeup could not hide the hollows under her eyes, dark as thumbprints. “I was going to call you today anyway. How's the situation in the Evac?”

  “Stable.” One word, soaked in exhaustion. “I got mail from Elspeth Dunsany today. She says the Commonwealth scientists have arrived safely on the Montreal. One Australian and an expat Brit. She and Casey are getting them settled.”

  “—Paul Perry said the same thing to me this morning,” Riel answered. Her head wobbled when she nodded.

  “That isn't why you were going to call me.”

  “No. I have the latest climatological data from Richard and Alan. The AIs say that the nanite propagation is going well, despite the effects of the—”

  “—Nuclear winter? Non-nuclear winter?” Valens said.

  “Something like that
. They're concerned about the algae die-off we were experiencing before the . . . Impact. The nanotech is working on keeping the algal population stable, but Alan and Charlie Forster suggest that once the global cooling effects are over, it might be less catastrophic to consider seeding the oceans with iron to boost algae growth—” The Prime Minister's voice hitched slightly.

  “Like fertilizing the garden.”

  “Exactly. More algae means less CO2 left in the atmosphere from the Impact, which in turn means less greenhouse warming when the dust is out of the atmosphere and winter finally ends—”

  “—in eighteen months or so. Won't we want a greenhouse effect then?” To counteract the global dimming from the Impact dust.

  “Not unless 50 or 60 degrees Celsius is your idea of comfort.”

  “Ah . . .” Valens shook his head, looking down at the pink and green displays that hovered under the surface of the interface plate, waiting only a touch to bring them to multidimensionality. He shook his head, and ricocheted uncomfortably to the topic that was the reason for his call. “We've done what we can here, Constance. It's time to close up shop and come home. Do you want to tour the exclusion zone?”

  “Helicopter tour,” she said, nodding, and took another bite of her sandwich. “You'll come with, of course. Before we open the Evac to reconstruction and send the bulldozers in—”

  “You're going to rebuild Toronto?” Valens had years of practice keeping shock out of his voice. He failed utterly, his gut coiling at something that struck him as plain obscenity.

  “No,” she said. “We're going to turn it into a park. By the way, are you resigning your commission?”

  Valens coughed, hand to his throat. Riel's image flickered as the interface panel, released from the pressure of his palm, wrinkled again. “Am I being asked to?”

  The prime minister laughed. “You're being asked to get your ass to the provisional capital of Vancouver, Fred. Where, in recognition of your exemplary service handling the Toronto Evac relief effort, you will be promoted to Brigadier General Frederick Valens, and I will have a brand-new shiny Cabinet title and a whole new ration of shit to hand you, sir.”