Scardown jc-2

by Elizabeth Bear

  He glares at me and frames a denial. I lay my steel hand on his shoulder and squeeze. “No,” he says.

  “Do.”

  “If the world don't end,” he says, and I have to be satisfied with that. “You want Indy and me to handle Holmes for you? I bet she'd be down with that.”

  I bet she would, too. “I'll call you,” I say. “Don't do anything unless you hear—”

  He grins, and I know I'm screwed. Razorface does whatever the hell he wants, whenever he wants to, and then he nods and smiles and pretends he told me all about it beforehand. “Hang tough, Maker.”

  Oh, fuck it. I gotta get back to work. “You, too, Razorface. You hang tough, too.”

  I don't even bother looking surprised when I get back to my office and Valens shows up thirty seconds after I sit down at my desk. “I went for a walk,” I say before he can ask.

  “I don't care,” he says. “We've got a problem, Casey, and I bet you know something about it, but I haven't got time to discuss it now. You and Patty, Leah and Castaign leave for the Montreal tonight. Go home and pack.” The look he levels at me takes the resilience out of my knees. I couldn't get up if I wanted to.

  “The Montreal isn't safe.”

  “Unitek is cutting funding for the starflight program. Riel says she'll back you as far as it goes, but it happens now. We keep the four boys on Earth in reserve, in case something does happen to your group. Before Unitek gets into a pissing match with Canada over beanstalk access. Riel will commission the Calgary, and Koske and Leah will take her. We can have her drive on-line in a week.”

  “—not ready—”

  “Shut up. I don't have time to argue.” Spit-shined shoes scuff the floor. “You'll be prepared to leave for an extrasolar destination by the new year.”

  I bite the inside of my cheek, thinking of Razorface. Something lasers through my gut when I do. HD whatever the hell it is. Sixty-nine light-years away. “What about Genie?”

  I know the answer before he shakes his head. “She'll get medical care,” he says. “As long as Riel can keep the program going. Castaign and Dunsany have already been transferred to the Canadian Army; they're doing the paperwork now. But the CCP and Unitek Medical programs — Genie's out of those.”

  I don't know where I find the strength to stand, to come around the desk. “She's a kid, Fred. You need to make Holmes understand—”

  “It's not Holmes,” he says, and I see a cold light in his eyes that I recognize, and I don't like at all. “It's the board. There are some allegations surfacing regarding Alberta's actions in Hartford, and her employment of your sister. Alberta may be able to save her job, if a fall guy steps forward. If nobody ever finds out about the prime minister and Indigo Xu.” Low winter sunlight glints off his hair. “She should be able to regain funding in the new year. If.”

  “Fred.” Shit. Jenny, you may have miscalculated this one.

  Really, Casey?

  You think?

  Stupid, stupid, stupid. I reach for his arm. He's not listening. He crosses to the window, pushes the curtain aside, and stares out across the parking lot. “Fred.”

  He turns around, leaving indented footprints in the nap of the rug. “Give Patty a note for me when you're on the beanstalk?” He holds out an old-fashioned envelope like the kind you'd use for a wedding invitation. A strange, formal gesture: a handwritten note.

  I take it from his big, blunt fingers, noticing the pale beginnings of liver spots on the backs of his hands. “Where are you going to be?”

  “Hartford,” he says with finality, and turns to leave me standing there. Unable to resist the drama, he stops beside the door. “After that, probably the electric chair.”

  He had me until then. Valens always was the hero of his own movie. Every inch of him.

  I take one step forward. “Fred.”

  “What?”

  “I'm not sorry,” I say in a stranger's voice. “But I'll say nice things about you when you're dead.” I don't know if he glances over his shoulder before he leaves, because I can't watch. I swallow and look down. And when the door clicks behind him, I fumble my hip from my pocket and key Razorface, tell him to back off Holmes and I mean it this time. His hip, of course, isn't on.

  He isn't taking my calls.

  I should call Riel. I should warn Holmes myself. If it's Face and his vengeance aginst the Montreal, you would think the choice ought to be clear. Except I know that the only way to stop Razorface at this point is to kill him.

  And I'd have an easier time cutting my own throat.

  There comes a day, I guess, when you have to let the whole wide world make its own damned mistakes and then clean them up as best it can. Just keep running and trust in God, and hope you stay in front of the steamroller somehow.

  Brave words.

  I wonder if anybody ever actually believes them, or if we're all just pretending as hard as we can.

  6:50 PM

  Tuesday 19 December, 2062

  Bloor Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  Leah twisted her hands in her lap and stared at the wall. Ellie's not coming. Genie's not coming. Bryan—a guilty little smile, quickly brushed away—Bryan's not coming either.

  What are we going to do?

  She struggled off the sofa, barked her shin on the coffee table, and took it out on the overnight bag on the floor by Ellie's favorite chair. “Putain de marde!” And then she glanced guiltily over her shoulder to make sure no one had heard her swear. Dad hadn't come home from his errands yet, though, and Leah was alone in the apartment except for Genie.

  Genie, who was in her bedroom and wouldn't open the door. I'll try again, Leah decided. Stupid little piggy. “Oink, oink,” she muttered under her breath — and then she felt bitterly guilty. She judged right, at least, and didn't sting her knuckles on the door by knocking too fast. She laid the palm of her hand flat against the wood and leaned forward. “Genie?”

  “Alle!”

  The clarity of her sister's voice startled her. She'd expected words clogged with tears. “Genie, ouvre la porte, s'il te plaît.”

  “Non. Je ne veux pas te voir.” But Leah heard soft footsteps across the area rug and the hardwood floor, and the rough wooden door slid away from her palm. Bright eyes peered through the crack. “Que veux-tu?”

  “Let me in?”

  Genie started to push the door shut. Leah leaned on it.

  “You're leaving!”

  “I have to.”

  Genie struggled with the door, trying to get her shadowy weight behind it. It didn't work: Leah stepped into the room and Genie spun away, shouting. “I want to come, too! I won't get to talk to you or Papa at all. It'll be just me and Ellie, and you won't come back, and Aunt Jenny won't come back either, and I hate you all!” Genie threw herself across the room and collapsed on the bed, covers bunching in her bird-claw hands.

  Won't come back.

  Like Mom. Leah blinked and could have kicked herself for not catching on quicker. “This is about Mom, isn't it?”

  “No.” Muffled under covers, followed by a coughing fit that made Genie's shoulders huddle down like a clenching fist.

  “Genie, don't. You'll make yourself sick.” Leah crossed over to her and sat down on the bed. Richard, what do I do?

  “Elspeth will take care of her, Leah.” The voice in her ear sounded different, and she frowned.

  You can't talk to Elspeth. Just me and Aunt Jenny, and we'll both be on the Montreal. And then Leah smiled. Richard, you can make the nanites work for Genie, too. And they could fix her cystic fibrosis. They don't have to augment her or anything. You could just — and—

  “Leah, no.” That definitely wasn't Richard's voice.

  You're Alan. Genie was crying — silently, but Leah could tell it was for real by the way her sister's whole body curled around the pain. “Chérie, it's safer here—”

  “Je ne soigne pas!”

  And not-Richard's voice, as if in her other ear. “Not exactly. We're — us. Bo
th of us. I'm still what I was.”

  So you'll help me.

  “I will not make the nanites self-programming. It's not safe.”

  You're self-programming. It will make her well!

  “I'm not safe either, you know. Leah, what are you doing?”

  Shut up. Leah gave Genie's shoulders a squeeze, and stood up. “I'll make it better,” she said quietly. Richard — whoever you are — you're going to do this for me. Because I'm doing it whether you help or not.

  1905 Hours

  Tuesday 19 December, 2062

  Bloor Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  “Jenny.”

  Richard? Except it isn't Richard, is it, quite? I stop with one foot on the stairs up to Gabe's apartment, my duffel bag slung over my shoulder. The new polymer on my left hand itches, and I press it against my BDUs. What do you need?

  “Hurry. Leah—”

  I've covered half the flight before I realize I dropped the duffel bag, and I don't really care. It takes longer to unlock the door than it did to pound up the stairs, and the first thing I smell is the rankness of blood, sticky sweet as corn syrup. “Oh, fuck.”

  Genie's bedroom. I hear them in there, hit the door hard enough to bounce it against the wall. The room's too warm by anybody's standards but mine; Genie keeps the thermostat set high. She's so damned skinny. I can't take in the scene all at once; my brain images it in fragments. Genie's comforter spotted in red, Leah bent over and Genie stretched out flat. “Leah, what did you do?…”

  She just looks into her sister's face. Genie's eyes are closed; the shadows around them look like bruises. And then I see that Leah has their wrists tied together with a bandanna, cheesy blood brother scene from an old 2-D movie or a kid's holoshow. “Leah?”

  “It's okay,” she says. “I made her better.” And smiles through the smears of red crusting across her mouth and in her long wheat-golden hair, where she must have carelessly rubbed her hand.

  Richard. Did you?…

  “No,” he says. “Genie's not infected. I can keep the nanites from propagating into her bloodstream. But I think she needs to go to a hospital now.”

  2030 Hours

  Tuesday 19 December, 2062

  National Defence Medical Center

  Toronto, Ontario

  Goddamnit to hell, I am sick of hospitals. And Valens still insists we leave tonight. We need to be on the Montreal when he drops his bombshell in Hartford. I stand at Gabe's shoulder, Ellie on the other side, and Leah sulks in a chair by the waiting room door. “I wouldn't have hurt her,” she says, picking at the healing scab on her wrist.

  Gabe and I look at each other, but it's Dr. Ellie, her lips pressed thin, who crosses the tile floor and crouches down beside Leah. “She needed six stitches, Leah.”

  “She told me to do it.”

  “You told her it would fix her lungs.”

  I rest my steel hand on Gabe's shoulder. He feels like a rock, a granite statue. Unmovable. Richard. What are we doing here? Is there any way this plan of Valens's can work?

  “I've been reviewing the climate change data,” he says, and it's Richard's voice, clean and plain, without a trace of Alan.

  What's the word?

  My right hand slips into my pants pocket, fretting the folding knife Leah used to open her wrist, and Genie's. Damned if I know why I picked it up. Old habit not to leave weapons lying around. Programming.

  With my inner vision, I see his beaked nose angle to one side, following the twist of his mouth. “It's a very complicated system. A chaotic one, in fact.”

  You're stalling. I squeeze the side of Gabe's neck where it runs into his broad back. He notices me, pulls his stare in from the middle distance, gives me a look that says it all until I slide my arm around his waist and make it look like I'm leaning on him. His heart rattles inside his chest.

  “Well, the good news is that we probably won't have to worry about rising oceans for too much longer. The plankton die-off is the least of our problems. If the Atlantic continues to get colder at the poles, and the severity of the winters increases—” He shakes his head. “We're currently in an interglacial period. That will end.”

  Interglacial period? You mean — between ice ages? Gabe's heart rate seems to drop slightly. I slow my breathing, hoping he'll unconsciously pace to it. His arm around my shoulders tightens slightly as Elspeth says something low to Leah and Leah kicks her heel against the molded burnt-orange leg of the chair.

  “No.” A pause, as if the AI collected his thoughts, but I know it's a courtesy to us meat intelligences to let us keep up with him. “This is an ice age. Just a break between glaciations. There's two ways it can go from here: either a complete global warming, with shallow seas and tropical climates across the temperate zone — or a glacial period. One that might be severe enough to provoke a ‘snowball Earth' scenario.”

  That's a vivid enough mental image that I don't really need to ask for a definition. Oh. How soon?

  “On a geological scale… yesterday.”

  I can't take this hospital for one more second. Not one. Richard. Could the nanites stop that? Could we build a control chip big enough — or a control AI, what about that? I squeeze Gabe one last time and slide away. “I'll meet you at the airport,” I tell him. “Give Genie my love before you go, okay?”

  He nods. I clasp Ellie's shoulder before I tug her away from Leah and Leah to her feet. I should say something. Explain. Tell her I love her, but my voice won't work around the cold, slick stone blocking my throat. “You have a thought, Jenny?” Richard asks, almost sounding like himself again.

  What Leah did, I whisper back. We could do that — only bigger and better. Why not?

  “Because there's time to come up with a better solution,” he says.

  I'm running out of time. If they ship everybody with the nanotech off planet, Richard—

  “We'll think of something,” he answers, soothing. I shiver and fist my hands in my pockets, turning to look for Leah.

  “Aunt Jenny?” She looks up at me, her mother Geniveve's gray-green gaze and Gabe's golden hair, and I close my eyes so the burn in their corners doesn't get away from me. I know what I wish I could do, with a kind of queasy finality I've only felt once before in my life. I would die for her, Richard. I lean down and put my lips against her ear. “Leah, mon coeur. Fais ce que tu dois. Toujours.” She startles in my arms, pulling back, and I catch her eye and smile. You do as you think you must. “Je suis fière de toi.”

  “I'm proud of you, too,” she begins, reaching for me, but I slip out of her arms and away from Gabe before he realizes what's going on, and out the door. Melodrama, sure, but I don't feel I can leave without saying good-bye. When I see her again we will be soldiers, and once that happens I don't quite know if we can ever not be soldiers again.

  Lake Ontario borders Toronto on the south, and I walk that way, fingering the pocketknife I took away from Leah with my right hand. You didn't answer my question, Dick. Could the nanotech handle this ecological crisis?

  “Probably,” he answers. Reluctantly. “And remain as vulnerable to a cracker as you, and Koske, and the Montreal have proved—”

  Vulnerable unless somebody like you is in charge.

  “And vulnerable to me if I were in charge,” he argues, but I have the answer to that. “Do you really want a computer program standing in loco parentis over the entire human race? A cybernetic fairy godfather?”

  Richard, if you wanted to rule the planet not a one of us could stop you.

  “What would I want with a planet?”

  My point exactly, sir— I suppose, thinking about it — I suppose it wouldn't actually have to be the lake. But the symbolism seems very important all of a sudden, and I'm still arguing with Richard when I come down ice-rimed, streetlit Queen's Quay, scale an angle of the fence around a waterfront museum — closed for the winter — and duck down under the pier where it's dark, skidding on my butt among trash and ice and litter. The ice feels like s
teel under my feet when I climb back up on them, more solid than the deck plates on the Montreal.

  This is going to take some walking.

  “I won't do this for you, Jenny.”

  “Richard,” I say out loud, watching my breath coil and twine. I head south, balance hard to find on the windswept ice. The sun's barely down, but the wind cuts my skin like the knife in my pocket. “It's not for me. And I haven't decided yet what I'm doing, have I?”

  “Gabe is coming,” Richard says, a tinge of Alan — a tinge of alien — creeping into his voice. “Leah, too. You scared them.”

  I glance back over my shoulder, don't see anything moving, and press my elbow against my side so the bulge of the glass beads on Nell's feather — still in my pocket — dents my breast. “If I did it, it would be for them,” I answer, realizing how insane my one-sided conversation would look if anyone were watching. “Scientific detachment is all well and good, Richard. But Alberta's going to take a few thousand — maybe a few hundred thousand — people off the planet and leave the rest to rot here.”

  “Yes.”

  “Genie's going to die, Dick. And this could save her.”

  “Yes.”

  “The nanites are a self-evolving system. They protect their host.”

  “That, too.”

  “So—” Still nobody moving back onshore when I turn to look, and the wind this far out on the ice could peel the skin off my face. I kneel on ice like coals of fire. “—why not experiment with a bigger host?”

  “What if you're wrong?”

  “Then the end comes a little faster,” I say, and brace myself on three limbs. “How long do you think it would take to punch through this?”

  It's not easy. Ice chips sting my cheeks for ten minutes before the crust snaps under a sledgehammer blow of my steel hand. My right hand is numb and my ears have quit burning. Lake water splashes my face and I barely feel it. Don't feel it at all as it freezes between the fingers of my left hand, but I stretch them, cracking frost chips off metal. Concave flakes crunch under my knees when I shift back and dig in my pocket for Leah's knife, but my fingers are so numb I have to tear the pocket open and pick it up in my steel hand.