Elizabeth Bear - Hammered

“She’s too young.” Words from my mouth before I can consider, and then I stop and think. “Except she’s not, is she?”

“Supposedly, it’s minor surgery.” Wheat-colored curls toss slowly back and forth.

I happen to know more about neurology than your average combat veteran. “Extremely minor. Right up there with wisdom teeth, actually. Expensive.”

“The scholarship covers that.”

Huh. “Who’s paying for this scholarship?”

“A VR game company. It’s one of the prizes. I guess Leah’s done really well with it.”

“What else does it cover?”

He taps his fingers on the edge of my desk. “Four years of college, books and tuition plus living expenses.”

“Full ride?”

“Yes. Also.” He measures me from the corners of his eyes. “Apparently Unitek is one of the game sponsors. There was a see me on my terminal from Doctor Holmes this morning. She wants me to enroll Leah in the same program you’re in.”

“Gabe…” Alarm bells going off in my head. “C’est trop cher.”

“Je sais. Toutes les coincidences. We’re both in it deep, Jenny, and I have no idea how the hell we’re going to get out. I can’t walk away from the medical care Genie’s getting. And Leah wants this, and hell — it will give her an edge in the job market when she gets out of school, for all I know.”

It probably will. That’s the killer. Middle-class families are getting neural for their kids in droves. “C’est vrai. It will make things a lot easier for her in fifteen years.”

He sighs. “What do you think?”

“Merci à Dieu. Gabe, I…” Which daughter do you sell for the other one’s sake? “I don’t know, Gabe. Je ne sais pas. Qu’est que tu penses?”

“Je devrai penser de lui.”

I cross to him and put my hand on his arm. “I’ll be around to bounce ideas off of if you need me.”

He’s silent and sharp-edged for a long time before he bites his lip, meaning trouble. “I also came to worry at you about this surgery. When are you scheduled?”

“I’m not.” And we shouldn’t be having this conversation in my office. Which is probably bugged.

“What?”

“Come on. Let’s get coffee.” I wonder what Valens makes of the daily parade down St. George to the Bloor Street coffee shops. He has to know we’re all sneaking out of the building to talk about him behind his back.

Gabe slouches along beside me once we’re outside. The autumn air is crisp: fall will be short after the suffocating summer, and winter hard as a fist in the face. The chill aggravates my limp, but it’s a fair trade-off for being alive on a day like this.

I look over at him, hands stuffed in his pockets and head ducked down like a sulky adolescent. “I’m not doing it. Valens lied to me about what’s going on.” If Valens has ways to eavesdrop on this conversation, I can’t bring myself to care.

That brings his head up, pivoting to stare at me as if pearls and diamonds had just tumbled from my mouth. “Maker. You’re in tough shape. You can’t…”

“Can’t what? Let Valens gut me and start over a second time? Fuck, Gabe, the man has never told the straight truth to anybody in sixty-five years.”

“I know. I know — Jen. I…” His mouth opens and shuts once or twice, like a hooked fish. He stops walking and lays his hand on the bark of a horse chestnut tree, leaning on it hard. Glossy brown nuts litter the sidewalk around our feet. There’s a little patch of grass in front of an apartment building a few feet away, and an equally glossy, fat black squirrel crouches in the middle of it, nibbling a nut. The native black squirrels are almost gone. The gray squirrel, an invader, has driven them out.

Forgive me if I feel a certain kinship with the rodent.

He finds his voice, but it’s brittle, dripping shock and pain. “Jen, you’re talking about dying. Giving up.”

“I know.” How do I explain to this man what it means to me? What I feel I have to do? He sees his best friend saying she’s going to leave him, and not cleanly either, but an inch and a memory at a time. And it’s not like he’s never watched anybody die by inches before.

“Gabe, he fed me some bullshit story about training kids. Saving kids. Safer soldiering through technology. It’s not about that.”

“What’s it about, then?” He bends down to pick up a chestnut that hasn’t come out of its spiky armor. Slowly, with one thumbnail, he picks the fleshy green shell away.

Bigger, better weapons, I could say. Guns in space, on platforms that move faster than the speed of light. But that’s not it exactly. And better us than the Chinese, right? Can’t let them have what we don’t, now that big momma dog U.S.A. isn’t feeling well enough to growl and show teeth at any provocation. “Remember when you came back from South Africa on leave that time? After you went back to combat? After my crash?”

“Yeah.” He tosses the shucked horse chestnut to the ground, and I bend down to pick it up. They’re supposed to be lucky for travelers.

“Remember when you told your girlfriend Kate about me? What Valens had done, the wiring, and the experimentation? And she reported on you to Military Intelligence?”

He nods. “Charges were dropped, eventually.”

“Yes. You remember what you told me then, when I was thinking of going to the press about the whole sordid mess?”

His forehead wrinkles. “I told you to think about your career.”

“I did. I thought about it hard. And I decided to throw it the fuck down the tubes, too, and bend Valens as far over the desk as I could, and give my little terrorist boyfriend every bit of dirt I could rake up on the program.”

He speaks with care, each word coming out as if laid on a counter for consideration. “What happened to change that, Jen?”

And I realize how far down the wrong path I’ve come. “A lot of things.” It’s a lame answer and I know it, so I rush to cover before he can follow it down. “But that’s not the point. He’s doing the same thing again, Gabe. He’s recruiting young soldiers, young civilians. Desperate old warhorses like me. And it’s all just another web of lies.”

It sounds irrational when I try to explain it, but it all has a terrible logic inside of my head. “And that wasn’t enough, Gabe… there’s a 30 percent chance that if I go through this surgery, I’ll be either comatose or flat on my back on a ventilator for the rest of my life. And I’ve been through it before. The surgery, the hospitals. It’s not worth it.”

And Gabe shakes his sandy tousled head at me and frowns, hands fisting loosely as he churns the air. “Marde. There’s a 100 percent chance that if you don’t go through with it, you’ll be dead in five years. And dead or alive, that’s got nothing to do with it, and you know it.”

“What the fuck do you know?” My voice is up an octave; we’re almost shouting on the street.

“I know you,” he says, and the bitterness in his voice stops my retort like an order to halt. “Whatever bullshit logic you’ve worked up to deny it, Casey, the fact of the matter is that you don’t want it because if you have it, you might have to admit that you can have a fucking life, and the only thing that keeps you from that life is fucking fear, Genevieve, and it’s about time you took a good hard look at what it is that is really crippling you.” His voice, which has been rising, drops. “N’est-il pas vrai?”

“Gabe, that’s not it—” But he’s turning away already, back toward the office. I don’t want the surgery because…

Hell.

Because if I have it, I won’t be a cripple anymore.