Elizabeth Bear - Hammered

Barbara’s dead. Chrétien is dead. Is that one of the signs of getting old? Running out of enemies?

There’s still Valens. Valens, and Dr. Alberta Holmes. But I can’t muster the kind of fury for Valens that I used to carry without thinking, and I don’t have enough dirt to be sure of nailing his ass as thoroughly as I want.

I feel so drained. Helpless. Fragile. Richard is smart enough to let me forget he exists, and I close my eyes and stretch my head back on the pillow, trying to confront the slick emptiness that seems to line my skull.

Which is when the door opens, and Elspeth Dunsany comes in.

She sits down at my bedside and leans forward, hand like a brand on my arm. I’m not sure what I’m expecting, but from the intensity of her expression, it isn’t going to be good. I don’t particularly want company right now.

Chrétien is dead. Barb is dead. Who the hell does that make me? If I don’t exist in opposition to them, to Valens… what, then, am I?

“Genevieve,” Elspeth says, and I think of Maman. Three syllables, big trouble. Her eyes look into mine, very bright. “You’re getting better. Gabe says you’ll be on your feet again soon.”

“So far so good.” I try to sound cheerful, inasmuch as I can when my voice is a slurred mumble. “Elspeth…”

“Shut up before you say something you’re going to regret, Jenny. I don’t want to hear about points of honor, and I don’t want you going off all noble and half-cocked.”

Everything this woman says surprises me. “What do you mean, Doc?”

She grins. It crinkles the corners of her eyes up marvelously, like a mad little elf. I see what Gabe sees in her, the fracturing brilliance of intellect concealed beneath that quiet exterior. There’s someone in there, someone deep as Lake Ontario and sharp as a switchblade, unconventional and oddly ruthless. And I never would have suspected, to see her on the street. “Any idiot can see you’re in love with him. And he’s in love with you.”

“He likes you a hell of a lot, too, Doc.” I struggle to sit up. She lays a hand on my chest and holds me to the pillow, easier than pinning a kitten.

“I know,” she grins. “And I like — love — him. But look: I’m a grown woman. I don’t want a husband, I sure as hell don’t want kids, and I’m not looking to rearrange a life I only just got back. Not around a man. I’m just damned sick of waking up alone every day.”

“I see.” But I don’t. I am not in control of this conversation. “And?”

She shrugs. “You’re good with the girls. You’re good for Gabe. I have a compromise in mind.”

“What’s that?”

The thing about really smart people is that they often see solutions you never would have anticipated. “Easy. You stay the hell out of my way, I stay the hell out of yours. Once in a while we get together for drinks and talk about him behind his back, so he doesn’t think he’s getting away with anything.”

Her lips are compressed with humor, eyes alight with audacity. I shake my head. “Elspeth, I’m not in a place to get involved with anybody. He’s all yours. I mean it.”

She shrugs. “That’s up to you, even if you don’t know what you’re missing. But don’t go blaming me for your crappy decisions, all right?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

Her voice drops as if aggrieved, but I can see the conspiratorial glitter in her eyes. She knows we’re being recorded, and she knows I know. Now I just have to guess what she thinks I’m smart enough to read between the lines to pick up. This woman makes me dizzy.

“You know why we had to capture Richard, don’t you?” she asks.

I dry-swallow. It hurts. Feynman chuckles in the back of my mind. “I imagine Valens brought the kind of threats to bear he usually does,” I say.

She shakes her head. “It’s bigger than that, Jenny. I sacrificed myself for Richard once. Valens knows that. He’s a thing unique in all the world, after all.”

Meaning that he isn’t. Meaning that she wants to know if he’s safe and sound in me. What is the world going to do with three Richard Feynmans? Half a dozen? Twelve? “There’s nothing else like him,” I slur, and a wicked smile dimples her cheeks as she reaches out and adjusts the stuffed wolf Gabe left tucked into my bed. A wolf that’s wearing his dogtags looped into an informal collar.

Madwoman.

Maybe smart people always look that way from the outside.

“You know why we had to take him? We’re crippling him, Jenny — Gabe and I. Enslaving him, bit by bit, because we have to. It’s immoral as hell. But it’s less immoral than the alternative.”

In the back of my mind, I feel Richard nodding. What does she mean, Richard?

His voice is starting to sound like the voice of my conscience. I realize that I will miss him when he’s gone. “Among other things, the worm I planted in the Unitek intranet backdoors Elspeth into the system at administrative levels. I think she’s trying to tell us she knows something she’s not supposed to.”

What’s your guess?

“Valens or Holmes plans to plant a Trojan in the final programming for your implants, I think.” He frowns, and long fingers twist around one another.

I take a breath. It comes out a frustrated hiss. Beauty. Can you cope with this Trojan, when it comes?

“I can only try,” he says, and waves me back to my other conversation.

Which is not the answer I wanted, but it will have to do for now. I turn my attention back to Elspeth. “Tell me about the alternative.”

She rubs a hand across her forehead. “The same reason you need to get better and get out of here. We absolutely cannot permit the Chinese to expand their control of space. We do what we have to, to prevent that.”

“You sound like Valens.”

“Hang him in a year, Jenny. Hang him. Hang Holmes. Hang anybody else you care to. But get us into space and train your replacements.” She lays her left hand flat on my cheek. “I beg you.”

Is this for real?

“She means it,” Richard answers. I almost feel him leaning over my shoulder.

“And think about what I said about Gabe,” she continues. “I really don’t mind sharing.” And then suddenly, unbelievably, Elspeth Dunsany looks me dead in the eyes and, without so much as blinking, bends down and kisses me square on the mouth.

The last time I kissed a girl was sometime in 2043 or maybe ’44, when a redheaded Russian peacekeeper named Yekaterina Kvorschyeva got me drunk on my ass and tried to take advantage of me in the pool room of a dive in Rio. She half had my shirt off when her girlfriend walked in. Thank God for small mercies.

I’ve got nothing against girls, per se. I just don’t have much for them.

Katya didn’t make it out of that war, come to think of it.

My first response is startle and fight-or-flight, but a woman who can barely lift her head isn’t in any shape to do either, so I settle for a smothered protest and somehow manage to get my hand on her shoulder, pushing her away as ineffectually as if I shoved at a hydraulic press. Sometime about the time the feedback starts — different, softer-edged than it used to be, belly-melting and surreal as a good big hit of nitrous oxide — I quit trying to push her away, and open my mouth to let her tongue brush mine. Because that’s when I realize that her right hand is resting over my breast, and her fingertips are spelling out letters against my body.

And damn, that’s smart. Because that’s a damned fine distraction she’s set up, and anybody watching the monitors is unlikely to be thinking real clearly right now. I kiss her back, weakly, and her fingers spell t-r-u-s-t-m-e against the blankets. She draws back a couple of centimeters and catches my eye, and I take a breath and nod, tingling and warm all the way through. I really don’t much like girls. Not that way, anyway. But damn, she can kiss.