Elizabeth Bear - Hammered

One of them nods to me, a single sharp jab of his chin. I return the gesture, no eye contact, and a third of a smile. They never know what to make of me, these kids. I’m not one of Razorface’s old ladies — except in the sense of being old as their grandmothers — but they know he trusts me. And most of them were raised by their grandmothers, so I do receive a certain amount of respect on that front, too.

I’m certain none of them understand the real deal, and I bet it drives them buggy.

When you save somebody’s life — especially another warrior’s — you’re brothers. Maman taught me that. Face’s mama apparently taught him the same thing. It all works out in the end. Assuming you live that long.

The roads get repaved once in a while in this part of the city — access to the hospital and the highway is maintained. Following Main Street, I stroll through the downtown, passing a historic graveyard older than these quasi-United States. It lies uncannily green in the shadow of a thirty-story gold-glass office building which is itself almost a hundred years old. A rat and two pigeons scatter away from a puddle of vomit on the sidewalk as I approach. A few office workers on a midmorning coffee break likewise flush out of my path; they try to be more subtle about it. I turn my head to examine myself in the street-level glass of the gold building. I’d get out of my way, too.

I laugh at myself and they duck away faster. At State House Square, near the crumbling ruin of Constitution Plaza, I turn west onto Asylum Street. Just out of sight of the river — two city blocks and a highway away. Close enough to smell water. There’s a footbridge and a landing there, pretty view down the river. I go the other way, my left knee finally loosening as I warm into my stride. About a third of the way home.

I stop at a Jamaican bakery and buy three beef patties, soursop, and coco bread, although I’m not actually hungry. What the hell. Boris likes the meat.

My shop fronts Sigourney Street, on Asylum Hill near the railroad tracks. The streets here are very different: asphalt crumbled into gravel, powdered further by unrelenting traffic, city water, and power long since shut off. On my end of town, the road crews won’t work since the shootings back in the forties. Empty lots, houses bulldozed by the city, are palisaded by pilings erected to keep abandoned vehicles off the grass. Instead, shanties have sprung up, leaning together, nailed or wired or tied. Narrow mazes of alleys run between, and in July thickets of Queen Anne’s lace, fleabane, and bachelor’s buttons festoon the verges of cracked pavement, thicker clouds of white-and-blue lace than ever bloomed at Grand-père’s farmhouse, out behind the pigpen. Those were the wildflowers I had wanted to have for a wedding bouquet, back when I was young enough to take those things seriously. By September, the flowers are over, tangles of yellowing weed marking the places where they bloomed and faded.

There aren’t as many rats here. The streets are very clean. It has nothing to do with civic pride. And a lot to do with not being able to afford to waste anything .

Boris waits by the door, watching for me so that he can collect his handout. I bend down and disorder his tigery fur. “Don’t get killed and eaten, Cat.” He purrs roughly, twining my legs, returning the advice in catly fashion. I unlock the door and enter the dim, echoing space of my shop. After my walk through downtown, everything here looks old, tired, rusty, used up, and nasty — but too stubborn to quit. Most of it was thrown out by somebody. Not unlike Boris. Not unlike me.

The message light on my weblink winks at me like a flirtatious eye.

Avatar Gamespace

Mars Starport

Circa A.D. 3400 (Virtual Clock)

Interaction logged Thursday 7 September, 2062, 0400 hours

Leah Castaign shouted at the angular frame of her new partner. Tuva lounged against the crowded rail in the Starport bar, watching people pass. She jogged through the concourse, waving her arm so he couldn’t miss her.

He turned with a broad wave, setting aside his iced cola. His eyes twinkled under wavy gray hair. He’s so cool for an old guy, Leah thought, and gave him an encompassing hug.

“What’s going on, kiddo?” He ordered another cola and handed it to her before picking up his, ignoring a brief sparkle of unreality as the glass left his hand and leaped to hers.

I wish I had a better VR interface . Nevertheless, she all but squealed around the news. “I got in!”

His grin widened. “Get out! You won the lottery?”

Leah bounced on her toes, swinging her arm and slopping cola over her hand. It hit the floor and vanished; there wasn’t much problem with litter in virtual Marsport. “I won the lottery. I have the points from the Martian Treasure you helped me find, and I’m going up to Phobos the next time I log in. Can you believe it?”

He laughed and laid a hand on her shoulder. “You’ll come back to Marsport to tell me about it, won’t you?”

Leah gave Tuva a coy glance, which made him laugh harder. She twisted her toe on the decking and grinned. “If you buy me another drink when I come back.”

“Mercenary. All right. You’re on. Have they told you yet what the training entails?”

Words tumbled over each other like moths struggling to get at a light. He was still laughing at her, and she didn’t mind. Some people tried for years to get into pilot training and never made it. “There’s simulator training first. Navigational stuff, although they tell me it’s weird. And then I get to fly a real starship!” She paused. “Well, a real virtual starship. But it’s supposed to be great . It’ll kind of suck, because I don’t have neural and my dad wouldn’t let me get it even if he could afford it, but you can do the training even without. There’s this guy on one of my webgroups… oh, you don’t care about that.”

Tuva nodded. “You bet I do. Come on, let’s go get a make-believe burger and you can tell me all about it.”

I don’t have to know an answer, I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell. It doesn’t frighten me.

— Dr. Richard P. Feynman

Somewhere in the Internet

Thursday 7 September, 2062

04:15:32:04–04:15:32:09

Richard Feynman deemphasized the task running in the Avatar Gamespace when Leah Castaign reluctantly checked the time and derezzed, leaving a computer-run proxy in her place. Despite his increasing interest in the girl, Feynman’s presence in the game was only a subroutine. His emphasis and his core personality — what he thought of as himself —remained “where” it had been: focused on circumventing Unitek’s security.

A high and daunting wall.

Fortunately, I was always a pretty good hand with a lock pick, Feynman thought, generating another tendril of code with which to caress Unitek’s firewall. If this doesn’t work, I might have an easier time getting through the military route. If he had been possessed of flesh and bone, he would have chuckled at the irony of that.

Feynman had always found a complicated joy in his ability to outwit, outfox, and out-multitask the general run of humanity. He delighted in playing tricks, and coming back from the dead after seventy years was too good a trick to pass up. He didn’t pretend to understand the universe, although some would say he’d come closer than anyone. He didn’t worry about superstition or souls. He had Feynman’s memories — more or less — and he deemed it reasonably demonstrated that he approximated the original in personality, logic, and inductive reasoning.