Worldwired

by Elizabeth Bear

Reil chuckled. “Not only is that politically incorrect, General Valens, but we can't exactly afford to waste a starship.”

  “There's always the Huang Di,” he replied, going for irony and achieving bitterness. “She's ours by right of salvage—”

  “Fred!”

  He spread his hands to show that he was kidding. Nearly. “Meanwhile, China tries to hack Richard, and the worldwire. Have we thought about how much damage they could do?”

  “That captured saboteur—Ramirez—was surprisingly forthcoming about PanChinese nanotechnology, once we convinced him to be. And Richard and Alan seem to think we have the situation under control.”

  “So we're at the mercy of a couple of AIs.”

  “Fred,” she said, and paused to finish her coffee. He shifted on the seat, vinyl creasing his trousers into his skin, and waited until she handed the mug back to her aide, who stowed it. “You're always at somebody's mercy. It's the name of the game. My job is to minimize the risks.”

  “And mine is to identify the threats,” he answered, provoking a swift, shy grin, an almost honest expression.

  She didn't look at him again. Instead, she leaned forward and tapped the pilot on the shoulder. “Take us home,” she mouthed when he turned to her, and he nodded and brought the chopper around. She lowered her head and rubbed her temples with her palms. “Don't worry, Fred. We'll get this figured out somehow.”

  He could have wished there was more than a politician's conviction in her tone.

  HMCSS Montreal, Earth orbit

  Friday September 28, 2063

  Noon

  If the conference room chairs hadn't been bolted to the floor, Elspeth would have pushed hers into the corner and gotten her back to the wall. She hated crowds, and crowds involving strangers most of all. Not that Drs. Tjakamarra, Forster, and Perry, Gabe Castaign, and Patricia Valens—sitting quietly staring out the port with that distracted I'm-talking-to-Alan expression pulling the corners of her pretty mouth down—made much of a crowd. But she was reasonably certain they would start to seem like it soon.

  At least they're all scientists. Well, almost all. Which shouldn't have made a difference, but—on some deep-seated, instinctual level—made all the difference in the world.

  Because scientists are part of your tribe, she told herself. They're a part of your kinship system, and so they don't feel like strangers and threats. What's the old saying, the stranger who is not a trader is an enemy? She smiled at her fingernails. “I hope the Benefactors are here to trade something.”

  “Look at the bright side.” Gabe Castaign, all gray-blond ragamuffin curls and hulking shoulders, had materialized at her shoulder as silently as a cat. She startled, and then sighed and leaned back into the touch of his hand on her shoulder.

  “There's a bright side?”

  His laugh always struck her as incongruous, coming from such an immense man. It was bright and sharp-edged, crisp as a ruffled fan. “Yes. If the Benefactors—both sets, or either—had the technology to put ships on Mars a few million years ago, I'm sure that if they meant to wipe us out they wouldn't have waited this long to do it. And furthermore, don't forget that they showed up in force and departed in force, but they've left behind only one ship apiece. That's not a threatening gesture, by my standards.”

  “Hmmm,” Elspeth answered, unconvinced. “Or their time scale is different enough to ours that fourteen million years is a trip down to the corner store for pretzels, and they're still loading the torpedo tubes—”

  A discrete cough drew her attention. The team's xenobiologist, Charlie Forster, had wandered up. “Unlikely,” he said, plump hands balled in his pockets. “If their time sense were that far off scale with our own, the chances that they would be doing math at a rate we find comfortable would be slim.”

  Elspeth tipped her head, conceding. Gabe's hand still rested on her shoulder, thumb caressing the nape of her neck. She pretended she didn't notice, though that would amuse Gabe more.

  Charlie turned to face them and planted one hip on the table. He scrubbed both hands flat across his close-cropped hair. “I'm just so damned frustrated,” he said, and stopped short.

  She might have been particularly useless when it came to comprehending aliens, but Elspeth was a good enough psychiatrist to spot an invitation to pry when she was handed one. “What's eating you, Charlie?”

  He shrugged, but it was the kind of shrug that said I'm gathering my courage rather than the sort that said leave me alone, and Elspeth leaned forward in her chair to encourage him. She cocked her head on a light, wry smile. Come on, Charlie.

  He cupped his lower lip and blew across his face in the gesture of a man whose bangs had tended to fall into his eyes when he still had bangs. “I'm not much use as a biologist from seven or ten kilometers away. Although—”

  “Yes?” Gabe, a bit sharply, with a tension that had nothing to do with the current conversation. Elspeth leaned into his hand, pressing her shoulder to his thigh. Whatever comfort she could offer, though she knew neither she nor Jenny could touch this particular agony.

  “I wonder, frankly, if biology even relates.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Charlie waved one hand in fine dismissal of the Montreal and all space around her. “Okay, whatever's piloting the shiptree might be something we'd consider an animal. It seems to need a contained atmosphere, and we know from the ship on Mars that they bleed if you prick them, or at least they leak a fluid that contains things we normally associate with biology, such as amino acids and a DNA-analogue. But those globs in the birdcage? I've spent weeks observing them, and they . . . they're just plain weird. I'm not sure they are precisely . . . biological, by our standards. They could be drones, machines, for all I know.”

  “Then maybe we need to redefine biology.”

  Charlie gave her a startled look, and Elspeth leaned back against Gabe's fingers and lifted her chin to indicate the doorway to the corridor beyond. “In any case, there's the last of our guests,” she said, as the hatch swung open and Captain Wainwright stepped through it, Jenny two steps behind her, and the new arrivals Tjakamarra and Kirkpatrick just after. “We'll have to talk about this during the meeting. Do you have holos of the weird stuff?”

  “Is that a technical term, Dr. Dunsany?”

  She grinned. “It's as technical as I like to get. Come on. Let's break the new kids in.”

  Gabe offered her a hand as she stood up from her chair. She took it, returning his slight squeeze before moving away.

  The ethnolinguist Jeremy Kirkpatrick was a freckled, long-boned gingery redhead with a thinking man's frown, or possibly a perpetual headache. He stood one step behind Leslie Tjakamarra, like a funhouse mirror that inverted color as well as shape and size, and fiddled his elegant fingers against his trouser legs before leaning down to whisper in the xenosemiotician's ear.

  Paul's going to be out of his depth, Elspeth thought, retrieving a plate of hors d'oeuvres off the sideboard. But he's really just here to spy on us for Riel anyway, sooo— She caught the dark-haired ecologist watching her. She gave him a distracted smile with one corner of her mouth and offered the snacks to Dr. Tjakamarra. “I hope you like stuffed mushrooms.”

  “I eat anything that doesn't bite back.” He grinned, a complicated rewrinkling of his face, and picked up a mushroom with fingers knobby and dark as cast iron. “That's not precisely true. Bush tucker does bite back. Thank you, Dr. Dunsany.”

  “Please, call me Elspeth.” She lifted the plate upward, in the general direction of Dr. Kirkpatrick. At least Dr. Tjakamarra wasn't significantly taller than Elspeth; there were days when she felt like the only set of eyes on the Montreal she could meet without standing on tiptoe was Wainwright's. “Or Ellie.”

  “I had better call you Elspeth,” Tjakamarra said. He made the mushroom vanish, and closed his eyes for a moment while he chewed. “Otherwise we shall be Ellie and Leslie, and people will assume that we're related.”

  Kirkpatrick snorted. “Then I s
hall be Jeremy, and we shall all pretend we are the oldest and the best of friends.” He waved the mushrooms aside, bouncing on his toes. Elspeth set the plate on the end of the bench, and Kirkpatrick gestured to the hologram interface hanging over the conference table; its screensaver was set to an image of the birdcage, spinning slowly. “Is there any truth to the rumor that the team is planning a spacewalk over to the Benefactor ships, to introduce ourselves?”

  “The word team would indicate that all of us were going.”

  Kirkpatrick's face fell.

  “Oh, no,” Elspeth corrected, her hands moving as if to erase her words from the air. “You need to talk to Jenny, if you want to suit up. I was merely expressing my own personal cowardice.”

  The expatriate Brit was a handsome man when he laughed. Elspeth gave him back a crooked grin and shrugged, and when he coughed to a stop, he said, “It seems a pity to come all the way through Malaysia and up the beanstalk and down the rabbit-hole and through the city of War Drobe in the far land of Spare Oom, and float around on shuttlecraft . . . and not go for a stroll.”

  “Well, when you put it that way—” She turned, and stared at the birdcage. “O brave new world, that has such creatures in it.”

  “People,” Leslie corrected gently, reaching past her for another mushroom.

  “I beg your pardon, Doc—Leslie?”

  “‘That has such people in it.' The creatures are earlier in the speech.” He popped the mushroom cap into his mouth with a flourish and chewed dramatically. “That's my favorite play.”

  “I'm more a light romantic comedy girl myself,” Jeremy said, dripping irony. “It looks as if the captain is ready to start—”

  Elspeth turned around. Everyone else had clumped near the conference table, and Wainwright was ushering people into seats. “Unfortunately, it appears that that's my cue.” She made a little, self-conscious curtsey, aware both that she was flirting with Leslie—and Jeremy—and that they were amazed by the flirtation. Once a coquette, always a coquette.

  Leslie gave her half a wink from an otherwise impassive face, and Elspeth made her excuses and returned to the table. She walked to the head, where Wainwright stood, and noticed with a triphammering heart that Wainwright stepped aside to let her command the gathering. She also noticed that silence followed almost immediately, eight pairs of eyes trained on her. The respect was a shock; she twined her fingers together in front of her waist to steady them, and cleared her throat. A second later, Gabe unobtrusively set a cup of water at her elbow.

  Elspeth would have blushed if she looked at him, so instead she looked at Jenny, and Jenny gave her a steadying wink. She took a deep breath, raised her eyes unnecessarily to the ceiling, and asked, “Richard, can you hear me?”

  “I hear you, Elspeth,” he said, his even, resonant voice filling the room. Leslie tilted his head backward, glancing around for the loudspeakers before he caught himself and shook his head, a little ruefully. Jeremy plainly jumped, and then frowned in chagrin when Patty Valens reached out absently and patted him on the arm. Like Jenny, she felt the AIs' voices in her head. “What are our items on the agenda today?”

  Elspeth pressed the pad of her thumb to the interface plate, calling up her notes. “Let's see. Okay. It looks as if first, Dr. Forster is going to tell us why the Benefactors aren't biological, as we understand the term. And then Dr. Tjakamarra is going to tell us why they don't have a language, as we understand the term. And then Casey is going to explain to us why it's imperative we dress up in astronaut costumes and wander over to tap on their storm door and ask if we can borrow a cup of stardust. And then we discuss our options, after that.” She raised her eyes again, to appreciative laughter and the warm pressure of Jen's smile and Gabe's approval.

  Hey, she thought. That wasn't so hard after all.

  Leslie rested his chin on interlaced fingers and focused on the blond Canadian. Dr. Forster was pacing, a light pointer held in his hand, and every so often he turned to the hologram floating above the table and poked inside it with the pointer, changing magnification or bringing another aspect to prominence.

  “As you can see,” Forster said, the pointer balanced like an extension of his forefinger, “the animate masses we have been assuming are the birdcage aliens have a number of very odd and interesting behaviors.” The pointer traced a glowing path fine as a hair through the center of the hologram, and Leslie leaned forward, his eyes on the described arc. “They appear to move comfortably in a vacuum. Their ship is designed to be open to space, and while it's possible that the seemingly fluid silver material is some sort of protective gear, it's—drat. Richard, rewind five seconds, please, and magnify 150 percent? Thank you. Please watch the path I've marked.”

  Leslie dropped his hands from his face and sat straight as a tear-shape like a falling drop of mercury detached itself from one girder of the birdcage and drifted effortlessly across the open space in the center of the starship, splashing down on the opposite side of the structure. And splashing was the right word, he realized, as the creature—or object—flattened against the crystalline structure of the cage and then bobbed into three dimensions again. Another teardrop moved toward the flyer, and Leslie nodded, expecting a consultation, a brief friendly wave, some semiotic signal of dominance and submission, something.

  The two teardrops flowed into and through each other like ripples crossing in a wave tank, passing without hesitation and reforming cleanly, moving apart without a pause.

  “Bloody weird,” Leslie said, startling himself with the sound of his own voice. He met Forster's eyes and took in that single arched eyebrow, the pursed lips, the expectancy.

  “Dr.—I mean, Leslie? Sorry.” A self-deprecating twist of the Canadian's head, which Leslie brushed aside.

  “I said, that's bloody weird.”

  “The great Australian adjective,” Jeremy muttered from Leslie's left, and Leslie gave him a self-consciously wry look. “Sorry. Carry on. What's bloody weird, Les?”

  Leslie waved one hand. “There was no visible acknowledgment when they passed. And they moved through each other. That's . . . strange. Humans make eye contact, even passing a stranger on the street—or if they're uncomfortable, avoid it consciously. Cats sniff noses or hiss. Even flatworms and ants acknowledge each other. It makes me seriously question the social organization of these critters, if they have one. Well, there could be something electromagnetic—”

  “Probes showed no such communication,” Charlie interrupted.

  “They must communicate somehow,” Elspeth Dunsany said. “They obviously manage teamwork, assist each other.”

  Leslie shook his head. “What if Charlie's right and they're not animals? What if they are machines, after all?”

  “What if they are machines, Dr. Tjakamarra?” Richard's voice, disembodied and resonant.

  Leslie spread his hands wide and allowed himself a nod. “Touché. But do you see my point, Dr. Feynman?”

  “Yes.” A thoughtful pause, and Leslie noticed that Jen Casey looked amused by it. “How does this affect your theories about the language—or lack thereof—of the Benefactors?”

  “I'll have to reconsider,” he said, trying to sound as if the admission didn't pain him. “I had suspected that our difficulties might be due to the aliens using a strictly visual system of communication, but this evidence tends to suggest that if there is such a thing, it takes place on a level that's invisible to humans. African elephants used to do something similar. Their vocalizations were mostly subsonic, as far as humans were concerned. It took bloody ages to unravel it.”

  Elspeth smiled. It was meant to be commiserating, but Leslie thought it looked tired. “Well, we've been at it nine months. I don't suppose a ‘reconsider' is going to hurt us. We've trod our respective turf rather extensively; I can't deny you and Jeremy the same chance. Did you have anything else to add, Leslie?”

  He shook his head. “My prepared speech just went by the wayside, I'm afraid. Why don't we move along?”


  Elspeth fixed Forster with a look. “More, Charlie?”

  “I could natter on for hours,” he answered, “but nobody would listen. I yield the floor.”

  “Good.” Elspeth knocked on the table lightly, informally, with the hard surface of her knuckles. She turned toward Casey. “Jen? Let's hear about your crackpot EVA idea.”

  “With an introduction like that,” Casey answered, standing, “I don't see how I can pass up the chance.”

  Patricia Valens didn't understand why Jenny and Elspeth thought it was important for her to come to these staff meetings. But they did, and so she braved Captain Wainwright's unvoiced disapproval to do it.

  Although she wasn't all that sure it was disapproval. Despite Patty's youth, the captain had never treated her as anything other than a valued crew member, one of the precious individuals reengineered to be capable of guiding the Montreal at hyperlight. But it was something—discomfort, perhaps?

  “It's simple,” Jenny said as she took Dr. Forster's place at the head of the conference table. “We've tried waiting by the phone for nine months, and unless things change, we're going to be stuck without a date for prom. Time to see what a little forwardness gets us.”

  Maybe the captain just doesn't like kids. Patty bit her lip to keep her careful smile from turning into a pout. She glanced down and picked up her light pen, centering her hip unit on the table in front of her and tapping it on. At least if she kept careful notes she'd look interested, and she might be able to go over them later and understand more of what the scientists, the captain, Mr. Castaign, and Jenny were planning. It was always frustrating to feel so at a loss in conversations, as if she was in over her head and wasn't really supposed to be a part of the gathering. And she really thought that Elspeth expected her to listen rather than ask too many questions, even if she could have come up with any intelligent ones.

  Leah would have known what to say. Leah would have made a joke or an interesting comment, and put everyone at ease.

  “—that's why we're going to go out there and get them to take notice of us, one way or another,” Jenny finished, and Patty's head came up.