Elizabeth Bear: Hammered

4:30 P.M., Saturday 2 September, 2062

Bloor Street West

Toronto, Ontario

Gabe Castaign carried his younger daughter up the third flight of stairs, more pleased than he would admit that he wasn’t gagging for breath by the time he reached the landing. In the grand tradition of Toronto apartment buildings, the elevator was slow enough that it might as well have been broken.

Leah held the door to their new apartment open as he carried Genie inside. She curled against his chest, pale hair tumbling over his hands; he held her gently. Many floors below, automobiles hissed on the rain-wet street. “We’re home, Genie,” he said, crossing beige carpeting to lay her on the overstuffed tweed couch. “New home. Are you feeling any better?”

“Some, Dad. Is my bed set up?” She struggled to sit upright, coughing slightly. She sounded better already, as if the mucus in her chest were thinning. Gabe counted his blessings between the fine-etched lines of her ribs. “I’m really tired.”

“Petite chouchou, it is built and ready. You want to walk in yourself?” Over Genie’s shoulder, her older sister caught their father’s eye, teenage brow furrowed tightly. Leah had her mother’s gray-green eyes, and Gabe pushed a little ache aside at that familiar grimace.

“I can. Can I have something to eat? Crackers?”

Gabe checked his watch. “Hungry already? I’ll bring you dinner in bed. Leah?”

“Yes, Dad?”

“Tuck in our little cabbage here, merci beaucoup? I’ll fix her something to eat and bring it in.”

Leah nodded and crouched down beside the sofa to help her sister up. Concentration furrowed Leah’s brow as she led Genie, one arm around her shoulder, from the living room into the room that would be all Geniveve’s own. The two girls had shared a bedroom since Leah was three and Genie was born. Gabe wondered if separating them had been a bad idea. Je peux toujours changer d’avis. He shrugged. And went to make cocoa for his daughters.

Leah Castaign smoothed fuzzy robin’s-egg-blue blankets up over her sister’s lap and rested on the edge of the bed. Genie’s blue jeans slouched on the floor like a shed skin. Leah poked them idly with her toe. “There. All comfortable?”

“Oui. What’d you do while Dad and me were at the hospital?”

“I played on the computer. There’s this VR game I really like. I could show you how sometime.”

“That would be fun.” Genie tugged the blankets higher, and Leah shifted her weight so they came loose. “I wish we were going to the same school this year.”

“Next year. And then you’ll be stuck with me for two years of high school, too. And you’ll have to beat up all the boys who try to tease me.”

Genie laughed, and it turned into a cough as their dad came in, juggling crackers and cocoa. The old wooden floorboards creaked under his footsteps. Leah took her mug and sat on the white-painted wood chair in the corner, watching as he brought Genie her snack. He perched in the same smooth spot Leah had, and that made the corners of her mouth turn up.

Maybe Genie’s going to be okay for a while. She inhaled chocolatey steam. The heat made her eyes water. I wonder why Dad was so funny about taking this job, though. It can’t just have been that he didn’t want to move to Toronto.

As if he knew she was thinking about him, he glanced over and smiled. “Things should be better now, Leah,” he said. “It’s going to be your responsibility to babysit Genie while I’m at work, all right?”

Leah had started nodding when her sister tugged their father’s sleeve. “Dad!” Genie put her mug aside. “I’m old enough to take care of myself.”

“It’s not open for discussion, petite chouchou. Perhaps we will talk in a year or two about who needs a babysitter, eh?”

Leah knew better than to argue with that tone, and she saw Genie did, too. Still, her sister’s lip was getting stubborn, so Leah stood. “Dad, I’m going to go play on the computer, okay?”

He turned away from Genie. When the eye contact broke, her shoulders relaxed and she picked up her cocoa. Leah smiled.

“Not too late, okay?”

“Okay.” She came over and kissed him on the forehead. Even sitting, he was almost as tall as she was, and she’d grown in the past few months. “I promise to be good.”

She could hear him arguing with Genie in low tones as she shut the bedroom door behind herself and went into her own room.

Avatar Gamespace

Mars Starport

Circa A.D. 3400 (Virtual Clock)

Interaction logged Saturday 2 September, 2062, 1900 hours

Leah stifled a giggle behind her breathmask and palmed open the air lock door. Her sister was fast asleep, finally, and she was hiding on the Internet while her dad got ready to start his new job in the morning. What kind of a job starts on Sunday?

She bounced on her toes. That was one thing the VR never got quite right: inanimate objects acted as if they were under lower gravity, but Leah never felt… floaty. I bet if I had neural, it would feel floaty.

“The rebreathers are just silly,” she opined, holding the panel long enough for her companion to step onto the surface.

“How so?” Her companion was older, male, frame spare within his white surface suit. His outline pixilated slightly as he stepped onto the planet surface. Leah followed warily — it was dangerous Outside, and if she got killed out she would lose all her points. Still, finding a Martian Treasure was worth the risk, and the other player had the left half of Leah’s map. She picked up the pace.

He waited politely for her to catch up, letting her walk a few steps in front.

“Well, Tuva — you don’t mind if I call you that, do you?”

“Feel free to shorten the handle. It’s unwieldy.”

She stopped short and turned to regard him suspiciously. “Is that a real word?”

“Unwieldy? Yes.”

“What does it mean?”

“The opposite of wieldy,” he answered, with a grin that stretched around the edges of his breathmask. “You were going to ask me something.”

She turned to the landscape, the distant red undulations blending with a dust-dulled horizon. A pair of shuttles glided in overhead. It was a nice effect, but she wished they could have done something more interesting. Cloud cities, maybe. Someday I’m going to get enough points to make it up to the starships, dammit! She giggled again, sure she was blowing it. He has to know I’m just a kid by now. “I was going to ask you what a Tannu-Tuva was, actually.”

“It used to be a country in Asia. They had interesting postage stamps.”

“What’s a postage stamp?”

She almost heard the smile coloring his voice. “An archaic method of controlling the flow of data from one place to another. You had something to say about rebreathers?”

“Oh.” She checked over her shoulder. He was following her trail through the drift-rippled fines, minuscule particles coloring the air around them and staining their reflective white suits with rust. “By 3400, do you really think humans will need oxygen tanks for stuff like this? Heck, do you think Mars won’t be terraformed by then? We’ve already got two bases.”

“You must be Canadian,” he replied.

“How did you know?”

He laughed. “More space bases than anybody else. First on the Moon, first on Mars.”

“Malaysia runs the asteroids, though. And China.” She decided she didn’t like being followed, so she paused long enough to let him catch up and walk beside her.