Elizabeth Bear: Hammered

“And China is big on Mars, too. Yes. Those are government-funded bases and not partnerships, though. The situation is a little different.”

“How so?” She kicked at a rock, and it bounded away as if winged, flickering as her equipment didn’t quite keep up. She sighed and then brightened. This was still a cool game.

“Well, Canada’s different. The Scavella-Burrell base is funded by a combination of private and public sources. Unitek and its holdings are basically equal partners with the Canadian government in funding the research that goes on there.”

“My dad says,” Leah answered, abandoning all pretense of adulthood as her enthusiasm overwhelmed her, “that Canada never would have made it into space without private money. He was in the army, and he says that after the famine when we had to loan troops to the U.S. and then later, when the Fundamentalist government was in power down there, it cost us so much money that we needed help if we were going to keep up with the Chinese.” She hustled to keep up. Her companion noticed and checked his stride.

“That’s true,” he said. “You shouldn’t just take what your dad says as gospel, of course; you should think for yourself. But he sounds like a smart guy.”

Leah swelled with pride. “My dad’s the best.”

“Did he say why he thought we needed to have a space program? Or was it just keeping up with the Chinese?” He stopped short, scanning the horizon. He seemed to have only one ear on the conversation.

“He says we’re a lot luckier than the rest of the world. Even with the flooding problems and the winters getting colder. And he says that…” She turned around to face him. “I don’t really understand it. It’s something about PanMalaysia and Indonesia, and protecting the Muslim government there and keeping China — he says ‘contained.’ ”

Tuva looked down at her, frost crystallizing on the edges of his breathmask. He moved restlessly, gloved hands dancing through the thin air like birds. “That was the general reasoning, as I understand it. Do you know anything about the Cold War and the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union?”

She shook her head. “That was like, ancient history.”

A complicated expression crossed his half-concealed face. “So it was,” he agreed. “You should look it up; it’s very interesting.”

She might have felt insulted, except there was something in his tone that said that he really did think that interesting was a good enough reason to look something up. He kind of reminded her of her fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Kology, who was her favorite teacher so far.

He kept talking, and something about his plain words and animated tone made everything seem very simple. I bet he’s a teacher in real life.

“It’s got a lot to do with gamesmanship,” he said. He hunkered down and ran his fingers through the iron-red dust underfoot, raking four parallel gouges. “Canada’s been in a lot of peacekeeping efforts in the last fifty years, which it couldn’t have done without corporate money. Some of the wars were really unpopular at home, especially after the universal draft instituted by the Military Powers Act, and there were some real problems with terrorism. Also, wars give rise to new technology. And with the United States tangled up in its internal affairs, there’s been nobody else with the — the sheer stubborn — to oppose China’s empire building.”

“I wouldn’t want to live in China,” Leah said definitively. She twisted one foot in the dust, watching it rise in soft puffs.

Tuva’s head bobbed down and he grinned wide. It was the kind of smile that rearranged his entire face, his eyes sparkling like faceted stones, and it drew a twin from Leah. “But politics… It’s very interesting, when you think about it.”

Leah shrugged, feeling young and uninformed. I’ll be fourteen in May. “There’s a lot I don’t know.”

“That just means you get the fun of learning it. Now then, where’s your half of the treasure map?”

Allen-Shipman Research Facility

St. George Street

Toronto, Ontario

Sunday 3 September, 2062

Morning

Elspeth pulled a shiny, never-used key out of her lab-coat pocket and fitted it into the handle of her door, simultaneously applying her thumb to the lock plate. The handle turned with a well-oiled click and she stepped into her office, savoring a sensation that had once been familiar — although she’d never had an office like this.

She couldn’t resist running her fingers over the real-wood grain of the door and comparing it to battered yellow laminate with a window reinforced with chicken wire — or to plain barred metal, for that matter. “Lights,” she said, and the lights came on as if by magic. She paused for a moment just inside the door. “Lights off,” she said softly, feeling childish, and then “Lights,” once again.

Such a basic thing, illumination that did what you wanted when you wanted it to.

She set a white canvas bag embossed with a corporate logo down against the wall and wandered to the center of her office, leaving the door open. The scent of brewing coffee informed her that she wasn’t the first one in the building. Evergreen carpeting felt luxurious under feet clad in new oxblood loafers — Valens had given her a corporate card and instructions to outfit herself the previous evening — and pale spruce drapes outlined the long window behind her new desk.

Shelves lined the walls. She recognized the books that filled them: texts and journals on psychology, neurology, artificial intelligence. Beside them, biographies of some of the great minds of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Old, worn, many of them battered. Here also, holographic data storage crystals in racks, dozens of them. Hers, confiscated thirteen years before. State of the art, then.

Obsolete technology, now.

The dark wood of the desk gleamed with recent waxing under a clear interface plate, stainless-steel-and-gold desk accessories reflected in the shine. Elspeth took a deep breath, imagining that she almost caught the fragrance of traffic and a late summer, early autumn morning over the scrubbed tang of conditioned air. She opened her eyes, crossed the forest-cool confines of her office, and ran a finger along the neat white labels with their red underlines, hand-lettered and stuck on the flat-top surface of the crystal racks.

Handwriting inked in an erratic combination of green, red, and blue was not her own. It belonged to her former research partner. “Jack,” she murmured. Her eye ran down the little sticky tags, making out numerals, dates, and serial letters faded by the years. Farther down the rack, the labels changed and simplified. Dates and names, covering years of work. They had made daily backups, but saved only the monthlies due to space issues. They’d made daily headlines, too, for a while.

• • •

July 30, 2048: Truth, Tesla, Fuller, Woolf, Feynman.

November 30, 2048: Truth, Tesla, Fuller, Woolf, Feynman.

May 30, 2049: Truth, Tesla, Fuller, Woolf, Feynman.

An empty socket in the rack for June 30 stood out, obvious as a missing kernel on a cob of corn. The last slot, the one labeled Feynman, was empty.

Elspeth licked her lips and glanced around her office. She didn’t see the cameras concealed among sylvan trappings, but she knew they must be there, recording every move. Nevertheless, she could not resist reaching out and running her finger across that last label— June 30, 2049: Feynman —and allowing herself a little, secret smile.