Worldwired

by Elizabeth Bear

  “We should page Genie and Patty,” Elspeth says, swinging her feet off Gabe's lap and sitting up. “And see if we can find something we can pretend is a birthday cake.”

  “No candles shipboard.”

  “You blow,” she says. “I'll flick a flashlight on and off. Wait, better, we'll get Dick to flicker the whole damned ship.”

  “If Gabe were a better hacker, I could flicker the shiptree on and off in Morse code,” Richard answers. Gabe snorts, but holds his peace, switching both hands to work on my feet now that Elspeth has opted out. “It looks like a giant birthday cake anyway, and maybe we'd stand a chance of getting through.”

  We laugh even though it hurts, or maybe because it hurts—like ripping off scabs—and Elspeth gets up to fetch the girls herself rather than just having Alan whisper in Patty's ear, and sometime long about oh three hundred hours on my second birthday Jeremy wanders in, looking like a man who's lost two falls out of three with his mattress, and Elspeth hands him a slice of the vegan brownies that are masquerading as my birthday cake, and between us we have a pretty good party after all.

  1100 hours

  Thursday October 4, 2063

  HMCSS Montreal

  Earth orbit

  You'd think sitting in a hardbacked chair watching an unconscious man breathe would be about as exciting as a grain elevator, but damned if my heart isn't caught painful as a thumb in the hollow of my throat. Because he is breathing. Not awake, but breathing on his own, unventilated. And I know what it's like being stuck inside a body that won't do what you tell it to do, so I sit there beside the bed with my HCD propped on my knee and read to Charlie. Ulysses, currently. The Alfred, Lord Tennyson one, not the James Joyce one. I wouldn't do that to anyone who can't defend himself.

  I've just gotten to the rousing bit at the end when the wheel spins and the hatch glides open with a little pop of balancing pressure. I keep reading, though; it's probably the corpsman coming in to check on the patient, and he can take a pulse through poetry. Except the corpsman wouldn't wait until I finish up and blank my optic, and then clear his throat.

  I crane my neck around and face the hatch. It's Jeremy Kirkpatrick, his ginger curls squashed as if he hasn't combed them since he slept, crow's feet deepening alongside his pale eyes as he squinches down to peer in. “Jen? Got a minute?”

  “Come on in. My company's not going anywhere.”

  He hops over the knee knocker fast, dogging the hatch behind him, and glances down at Charlie's face. “Wainwright not letting us go after Leslie gets right up my nose.”

  He sounds it, too. “You're old friends.”

  “University.” He flops against the hatch and blows between rubber lips. “You're a love to look in on Charlie like this.”

  “Don't let it get out. They'll just make more work for me if they know. I don't suppose you found out anything useful about the alien spit we brought from the birdcage?” The chair digs into the back of my legs, so I stand. Having somebody else in the room makes me restless. I want to pace but content myself by leaning over Charlie, smoothing the hair around his bald spot.

  “Alien spit, huh?” He's grinning when I look up, a tired desperate grin that furrows those crow's-feet even deeper.

  “Got a better name?”

  “Not a more appetizing one. In any case, it would be easier to analyze if the xenobiologist weren't in a coma.” He comes around the end of the bed nearest the door and looks down at Charlie, the corner of his mouth dragging hard. “Dammit—”

  “I'm sorry.” Out before I can bite it back, and he looks away from Charlie and frowns at me. I don't look up, but my peripheral vision shows me the deepening lines between his eyes.

  “Why are you sorry?”

  “Because it was my stupid goddamned idea to provoke the Benefactors into doing something. And they did, didn't they?”

  “And weren't we climbing over ourselves to get involved? And wasn't it you who went out and brought Charlie back?”

  There's obviously no arguing with the man. I bite my tongue before I can say I didn't get Leslie, did I? “Marde.” I'm going to wear a groove in Charlie's head if I keep poking at his hair. I wrap the fingers of my prosthesis around my wrist and curl my meat hand into a fist. “What about the medical labs?”

  “Jen?”

  “To analyze the alien spit. What about the ship's doctor? Or the ship's entomologist or botanist? What about Dick?”

  “What about Dick?” Richard says in my head. “Dick suggests retrieving a good xenobiologist from Earth. Except we already had the best one, and it's not exactly a common specialty.”

  I imagine it's going to get more popular. How many bio students do you think have switched in the last nine months?

  “It'll be a glut on the market. Keep reading. Alan can hear Charlie, and Charlie can hear you. Although he's very confused.”

  Conscious?

  “Sort of. Drifting. Jen, I don't mean to alarm you, and I can't tell you why, but if you notice yourself slowing down, at all, or feeling . . . unwell, bring it to my attention immediately.”

  Dick, are you insinuating there's some kind of problem with the nanotech?

  “I can't confirm that.” He seems to sense my protest before I articulate it. “And no, before you go there, Alan and I don't have the capability to watch each individual nanite constantly.”

  I hope you're watching mine! And Patty's, and Min-xue's. And especially Genie's, even if her load is lighter by about half.

  “I will take the best care of you that I can.” Which isn't much of a promise, if it's meant to be soothing.

  Jeremy blinks at me owlishly. He must have learned to pick out the talking-to-Richard expression by now. “The AI?”

  “Who else? He's worried. About the Benefactor tech.”

  “Ah,” Jeremy says. He leans away from me, gangling arms crossed over his chest. His teeth dimple his lower lip, and—

  Dammit, he knows something I don't. But Richard's silent, too, and for a moment the only sound I can hear is Charlie breathing in and out and in again. It's not a soothing kind of silence. It puts my nerves on edge, and the sight of Jeremy distractedly straightening Charlie's sheet does nothing to ease the worried tightness under my breastbone.

  Then I hear what I'm hearing, and I reach out with my metal hand and grab Jeremy's wrist lightly, just below the projecting bones. “Do you hear that?”

  “Hear what?” His head comes up on his long inelegant neck like a wiry old stag scenting the breeze. He strains to pick whatever threat I've noticed out of the hum of ventilation and the soft endless rasp of an unconscious man breathing.

  Except I'm hearing something else. An echo. An overlay. As if another person were breathing in unison with Charlie, in perfect rhythm, in and out and in again.

  “Bugger,” Jeremy says. “I don't hear anything.”

  “I do,” Dick says, activating the motes in the room so Jeremy can hear him. “Breathing. Not exactly hear. Feel.”

  Jeremy's eyes get big. He looks at me, and I look at him, and we both glance reflexively toward the port, which shows nothing currently but blackness. “Oh, bugger,” he says quietly. “It's Les you two are hearing, isn't it? He's alive out there.”

  I don't answer, but I don't look down.

  “We must fetch him back.”

  I ain't arguing. “Dick,” I say out loud, for Jeremy's benefit. “How much longer do you think it will be before Charlie is modified enough for you to talk to?”

  He uses the wall speakers. “I'll see if I can expedite matters. Without putting them in any further danger, of course. If what I'm reading is correct, I am getting signal from Leslie over the worldwire, strongly enough that Jenny and the rest of the pilots are picking up an echo. It appears that most of his and Charlie's body processes are synchronizing—heart rate, brain function, and so on. Very interesting. All I can postulate is that the birdcages have some method of sustaining his life, and they've infected him with their nanotech as well. Since Charlie's
carrying both their bugs and ours—well, Leslie should be safe out there. As ridiculous as it is to say he's safe.”

  “Of course,” Jeremy says. But he does not sound convinced, and that downward drag twists the corner of his mouth one more time as he meets my eyes and glances quickly away.

  Dr. Tjakamarra.

  Dr. Tjakamarra.

  Leslie's hands weren't cold anymore, because he couldn't feel his hands. He wasn't sure what he could feel, exactly, but his hands weren't part of it. He felt . . . adrift, buoyed as if in a calm enormous sea, except if he had been floating, the currents would have pushed his skin, the sea would have sounded in his ears over the beat of his own heart. And there was no susurrus of white noise, no silken stroke of water.

  In fact, he couldn't feel the boundaries of his body at all. He had no skin, no bones, no tactile sensations. Just warmth, boundlessness, quiet. Nothing breathed in him, and what moved did so on a stately, formal, predetermined pattern; he imagined he felt the way the air must feel, on a still, humid afternoon. Alive, heavy. Electric.

  Waiting for the storm.

  And somewhere, someone was speaking poetry: Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods. The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks . . .

  Dr. Tjakamarra.

  Leslie concentrated on his hands. Hands made the man—no. Hands made man. There were other animals just as smart; nothing in his studies had ever contradicted that bias. Unless the bias itself had led him to dismiss the contradictions.

  Always a possibility that a good scientist should consider. Was he a good scientist? Or was he a crackpot, some sort of half and half creature walking neither the songlines nor the white man's path? Uncommitted?

  Homeless?

  Elephants came closer to H. habilis than anything nonprimate he could name—tool-using creatures of social complexity and intricate language. He could have made a life's work of studying their culture, if they still existed outside of zoos.

  Dr. Tjakamarra. Leslie, can you hear me? It's Alan.

  The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows . . .

  It went beyond hands. Elspeth Dunsany had a theory that the Benefactors were interested in humans because humans had the habit of wanting to talk to anything, everything. It made a certain amount of sense: Leslie himself had often suspected that Homo sapiens would better be rendered as Homo loqui . . . Homo loquacis? Homo something, anyway, and leave it to cooler Latinate heads to decide what, or—

  Homo garrulitas. There. That made him giggle. Or would have, if he could make any sound. If he could hear if he were making any sound.

  Of course, people themselves had always known that talking was the important thing. The real people, the chosen people, God's people are the people who talk our language. The barbarians—are those creatures over there, little better than animals, who make those disgusting noises. It was a human bias that hadn't changed in millions of years—and judging by the continuing tension between the English-speaking USA and recent immigrants, and English-speaking and Francophone Canada (to name two examples at random), it wasn't about to change anytime soon.

  For my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die . . .

  Dr. Tjakamarra. Leslie. Les. Can you hear me?

  Voices. Two voices, not just one. Familiar voices. Sort of. One a man's, and one a woman's. Except they sounded like voices inside his head. Like the voice of his own conscience. Like the voices heard in a dream.

  It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew . . .

  Leslie, I can hear you thinking. Talk to me.

  Les?

  Floating. And then the feather-light brush as of fingertips against his face, and a third voice, another familiar one, babbling nonsense the way he knew he would be babbling nonsense if he could find his mouth, if he had a mouth, if he—

  —and then a chattering complexity underneath it, like a stage full of extras muttering rutabaga rutabaga. And he was floating, drifting. And if he had hands, if he had fingers, he would reach out across the warm nameless darkness and twine his fingers through any fingers he could reach.

  They weren't words.

  Well, there were words, the woman's voice, the poetry: Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' We are not now that strength which in the old days . . .

  And there was the man's voice, too, saying his name over and over again. Leslie. Les. Dr. Tjakamarra.

  Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; One equal-temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

  Jen's voice. Jen Casey's voice. And why that hard-bitten old warrior would be chanting poetry in his ear, he couldn't imagine. And then the other one, the one saying his name, over and over and over, as if whispered in the ear of a dying friend . . .

  “Richard?” he said. Or tried to say, and he heard in the empty resonance of his own head that he had failed to make any noise at all. Richard? Can you hear me? Alan? Richard?

  “Leslie? Is that you?” And it wasn't Richard's voice, not really. It was Charlie Forster's, and it was inside his head, and then it turned into Alan's and Jen's all at the same time, and a thousand voices under that, speaking words in a language he couldn't understand, couldn't even imagine. Words? Not words. Images . . . no. Sensations. Sensations of heat and . . . sensations he had no words for, that his brain insisted on translating into things he had experienced, a huge babble of voices that weren't voices, of sensations that weren't sensations, hurting his ears, hurting his head, hurting his skin. Synesthesia, light that wasn't light but maybe gravity—

  And then a richer voice, not as cool and considering and patient as Alan's, but excited, engaged. Leslie imagined he could almost see the flicker of tumbling hands, the eyebrows rising like wings. It is gravity, Leslie. They “see” gravity! Or sense it, and that explains why their nanotech is in quantum communication and their stardrive uses gravity as its navigational system. Since gravity is the—

  Richard? Is that you? I can hear you. I can hear you!

  He couldn't tell.

  —since gravity is the force we theorize affects all dimensions in a superstring model of the universe, unlike the strong and weak and electromagnetic forces—

  Dick, I hear you! Dick? Jenny? Charlie?

  Echoes. Yammering echoes, and nothing more.

  —they're quantum life forms, Les. The birdcage Benefactors, anyway. Quantum life forms. You were right, you were right; they don't even sense the world the way we do—

  Richard, get me the bloody hell out of here! Help! Dick!

  And just the poetry, the echo of the poetry, and nothing true or concrete or real. He clung to it anyway, to Jen's voice, and the rhythm of the words: To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

  And then silence, long silence. And then, not light, but a lessening of the darkness. A presence, or a dozen presences. A dream within a dream, a sense of companionship he hoped was not self-delusion. Charlie?

  Charlie, is that you? And the voices, and if he'd been able to move, he would have turned and run after those voices, anything, anything to touch and be close with something that was anything, that wasn't the blackness and the untextured warmth. Voices, crowd noise, a hundred or a thousand talkers talking, and no more sense to be made of it than the buzz of cicadas, the twittering of birds. No, not talking, although his human brain insisted on “hearing” the noise impressed upon it by the Benefactor tech infecting his body. He could feel that tech communicating with the other nanosurgeons, worldwide, feel Richard and Charlie and Alan as part of the same intermingled sea of experience, feel Jenny and Patty and Genie and Min-xue and the other human carriers as discrete islands within that sea. And then there was th
e worldwire under it all, the combined weight and presence of the Benefactors, the damaged planet below, the starships and the—

  Damn.

  He could feel half the whole goddamned bloody galaxy.

  Dick?

  “Pretty cool, isn't it?”

  “For my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die—”

  “Jen?” His voice vibrated in his head, not his throat. There was no light, nothing, neither eyelids nor lashes, and he heard Charlie say “Richard?” as if out loud, at the same moment, and then a greedy hand clutched and squeezed his hand, and someone was laughing exultantly in his ear. No, it was Charlie's hand. Not his own hand. He couldn't feel his own hand.

  He opened his eyes and saw nothing at all.

  Jeremy?

  Jeremy? Where are you? Can you hear me?

  “I hear you.”

  Except the voice wasn't in his ear, it was in his head, so he answered without moving his lips, as if in a dream, I know how to talk to the birdcages. Can you hear me? I know how to talk to them now.

  1100 hours

  Friday October 5, 2063

  HMCSS Montreal

  Earth orbit

  Jaime Wainwright had a trick of looking out from under her hair that made her look years younger, and not one whit less dangerous. Charlie liked to catch her at it, that cold professional stare softened through her lashes. He didn't like being the target of it, as he was the target of it now. He'd gone out of his way to find her away from her ready room, away from the bridge—not that it helped much; the whole of the Montreal was her domain. Finding her in the lounge—with a little assistance from Richard—was still a stroke of luck.

  In any case, when she pinned that look against him it took all the courage he could muster not to step back and yield her the floor. Instead, he said, “There has to be something we can do for Les.” He pushed his spectacles up his nose with a fingertip, aware of the smile his archaic affectation produced. “Captain.”