Elizabeth Bear - Hammered

Which is when it gets weird. Because my left hand reaches up, too, even though I didn’t tell it to, and my body is moving the way it does in combat time, no feeling of my mind behind it, weakly pulling her back down and fastening my mouth over hers. And then I realize it’s Richard kissing her, using my body in an unguarded moment, nibbling on her lips like he means it.

The effort exhausts me, and I fall back against the pillow. “I will,” I say, and she knows I’m answering what she wrote and not what she said.

She smiles and wipes her lips with her knuckle, delicate as a cat. “Don’t worry to much about Richard,” she says. “We’re finding ways to limit his freedom of action and leave his cognitive function intact. He’ll be happy with that: you know Dick Feynman never met a concept he didn’t want to peel apart.”

And inside my head, the other Feynman is crowing. “I knew she could do it. Elspeth, you’re beautiful, and I would kiss you again in a second!”

Richard, did she just tell us that she’s building you a back door?

And he laughs and laughs and laughs while Elspeth Dunsany pats me on my shoulder and walks away. If he could, I think he would pick me up by the elbows and swing me around in a circle. “Jenny Casey, we may just get out of this mess after all.”

Afternoon, Saturday 14 October, 2062

National Defence Medical Center

Toronto, Ontario

It hurts.

Even with the narcotics, it hurts more than I would have believed. And I would believe a lot of pain. I’m starting to think, for a while there, I stopped believing in anything but pain.

What isn’t pain is numb and tingling. My feet still feel dipped in latex, dangling on the end of my legs like a marionette’s. Fortunately, after only a month in bed, there’s less atrophy than there was the first time I had to learn to walk again. Even Valens is surprised by how fast I’m on my feet — on my feet, clinging to parallel bars with my strange new hand — and Simon is positively staggered.

Walking. Learning to walk. Add that to your list of once in a lifetime is enough .

The drugs are nice though. I feel floaty behind the pain, and not so cold, even though Valens has cut me back to just enough to take the edge off the agony, while I swear Simon measured the micrograms of my dosage today. So I can focus. Goddamn it, pain is dull .

Eyes closed. One foot in front of the other, squealing with effort, my right hand slipping on the grab bar with the same sweat that beads my forehead. The left one feels odd. Hell, it’s odd that I can feel it at all. It’s so much lighter than the old one that it doesn’t pull my neck out of line, and every time I lay the palm of it against the bar, I want to jerk it back.

It doesn’t feel like a real hand — the sensations of pressure and so forth are like the ones you get through pins and needles, and the brutalized musculature at the graft point still screams stiffly with any movement — but that it feels at all is a source of bewildering wonder. There’s still the phantom sensation, but with the clean grafts and the new input to the severed nerves, it’s discomfort now, no worse than the dull ache of a stubbed toe. Actually, for the first time in two and a half decades, my left arm hurts less than just about anything else, as the rest of my body is on fire with the sensations of reawakening flesh. There’s a hand on my right arm, guiding, supporting — my new physical therapist, whom I have already decided I hate.

And goddamn, it hurts.

“Come on, Jenny. Viens ici.”

I open my eyes for a moment, focus on the far end of the bars. Gabe is standing there with his hand out, waiting for me.

Merci à Dieu, I want a drink and a quiet window. I want to take Gabe out and sit in the sun and drink beer and eat poutine and get silly with the girls. Est-cela si beaucoup de demander?

Yes. Apparently so.

It is too much to ask.

Three meters. It’s only three meters. I could crawl that far. But it doesn’t count if you crawl. You have to do it on your own two feet. At least clinging to things is permitted. Encouraged, even.

I drag my left foot forward six inches, shift my weight, shift my grip on the bars. “Viens,” Gabriel says, and the pun doesn’t work in French quite the same way it does in English, but I can see from the twinkle in his eyes like sunlight on water that he’s thinking of it. The same way he was making his intentions quite plain when he tucked the wolf into bed with me and showed me the jingling tags around its neck. “Jenny. Come on. Ten more steps and I’ll buy you a burger.”

Richard is quiet in the back of my head. I think he respects my privacy, and damned if I’m not grateful. “God.” Another shuffle forward, another six inches. It’s going to take more than ten steps, and I know it.

“Come on, Maker,” he says. “J’ai faim.”

“You’re gonna get a knuckle sandwich if you keep it up,” I growl, and he bursts out laughing.

“That’s the Jenny I love.” And damned if he doesn’t look like he means it.

Which, I think as much as anything, is what makes my hands slip off the bars so that I topple ignominiously forward, onto the mats, the physical therapist rushing to cushion the fall.

I don’t get my burger that day, because Valens comes as we’re finishing the session and cuts in between Gabe and my wheelchair. Have I mentioned how much I love wheelchairs? Weak as my arms still are, I can’t even manage the damned thing myself.

“Casey, I want to do some work on the implant programming today if you’re game for it. What do you say?”

“Jenny,” Richard says in my ear. “This is probably ‘it.’ ”

I know. I shoot a glance at Gabe around Valens’s hip. Gabe is holding his breath, and the gesture he makes with his head might be a nod, or it might be a shake. I know him well enough to know what it means, too. Be careful, Jenny . I have the strangest, sudden image, of Elspeth spelling out letters on his skin, under the covers in a darkened room. Funny thing is, it doesn’t sting the way I thought it would.

“Sure, Fred. Hook me up.” I wink at Gabe and he steps back as Valens comes around the side and takes the handlebars on my chair.

“Gabe. Dinner? Cafeteria?”

“Sure,” he says. “I’ll bring the girls.”

“Bring Elspeth, too,” I call over my shoulder, and Valens pushes me out of the room. I wonder where she goes to mass.

Hah. Maybe I’ll make it there after all.

Valens helps me to lie facedown on an examining table just like a million other examining tables of my acquaintance. He wires me into the machine with economical movements. My hair’s gotten long, for me, and he pushes it aside before he slips the probes in behind my ears. Valens doesn’t speak, and I’m glad, because my attention is turned inward. Ready, Richard?

“As I can be.”

I don’t want to be a puppet again, Richard. I am done with being used.

“Jenny,” he says, and — having gotten to know a little bit about Richard Feynman in the past three weeks or so — I hear a world of history and the fates of war in that single word. “You and me, kid. We will find a better way to handle this. Get me on that ship. Enough, goddamn it, is enough.”

What are we going to do about the Chinese?

“We’ll think of something. I’ll see what I can do about finding the conditioning in whatever Valens is about to load into your brain. Deal?”

I hesitate. Don’t risk yourself.

“Just get me on that ship, Jenny.”

Deal.