Elizabeth Bear: Hammered

I roll that around on my tongue for a moment. “A gift of garbage.”

Charlie grins, delighted that I’m following his logic chain. And hell if it doesn’t make sense. My own ancestors weren’t above salvaging from the middens of the white colonists. I take a breath before I continue. “Get as far as Mars, and we give you the stars. Don’t break stuff, kids.”

“Exactly!”

And then we arrive in front of a dogged hatchway, painted oxymoronic Air Force navy. I come up behind Valens, who offers me a smile a little too fond and possessive for my tastes. “Go ahead, Casey. Open it.”

Cool pressure on my left hand as steel clicks on steel, and I have to lean on the heavy blue door to pop the seal against a slight pressure differential. Airtight, and what’s on the other side wafts through, a draft cold as a ghost.

And conversation is suddenly useless.

I imagine Gabe’s grip on my arm must tighten, but I can’t feel it. I pull away, footsteps slow as if through mud at the end of a march. Forster stops, and I can feel his eyes and Gabe’s upon me. They’re all looking at me — Valens and Wainwright, too. I don’t care. I have eyes for one thing exactly.

Richard’s voice, though I’m already moving: “Dammit, Jenny, get me to the window.”

This is a lounge, a viewing area. The air is cold. The details of furnishing, decking, everything vanishes in the reality of the scene outside the massive, floor-to-ceiling window. The spin of the docking ring is such that, from an outsider’s perspective, I am standing on the “wall” and looking through the “floor.”

The sun is behind Clarke, as if hanging over my shoulder. The broad, tapering rail-edged strand of the beanstalk drops toward a cobalt-blue globe delineated by swirls of vapor-white. I lose sight of an ascending car as it brakes silently toward the center of Clarke, from where it will be switched to one of the half-dozen sets of rails leading to the various airlocks around the edge of the platform.

It looks a hell of a lot better from up here, doesn’t it? The curve of the earth kills my breath dead in my chest. We’re spinning with her, and I can make out the edges of North and South America, the faint outline of the Atlantic coast. It’s holier than a stained-glass window, blues and silvers reminding me of the Madonnas of my childhood. And that’s not all:

She hangs in front of the full Earth, above and to the left from my perspective, gossamer-winged as a dragonfly surfing the solar wind. Lights flicker along her length. Her habitation wheel rotates with a slow grandeur, her silver hide glittering as if faceted in the unfiltered light of the sun.

“The HMCSS Montreal, ” Wainwright says in my right ear. “That’s my baby, Master Warrant. You take good care of her for me, you hear?”

Somehow, Gabe’s come up on my left. He lays one hand on my shoulder where metal and flesh conjoin and tugs my sleeve, touches my fingers. I look down, and see he’s pressed something into my prosthetic hand. An eagle feather. Nell’s eagle feather. For a moment, I can almost feel the station spinning under my boots, before I realize he must have gotton it from Simon, and for the moment, I don’t even care that that means Simon was going through my stuff.

I look up at the starship, the future, the stars. Mother Earth hangs like a sunlit crystal in a kitchen window. The Chinese are three months ahead of us, maybe, and if something isn’t done it’s not ever going to be any different up here than it is down there.

Delicately, precisely, my steel fingers tighten on the beadwork my sister must have sweated over, fretted over. The familiar texture of trade beads— cornaline d’Aleppo, crimson glass — is strange on unreal skin. Not the traditional Kanien’keha: ka designs, but something Nell developed from them just for me.

I haven’t a thing to say, watching the Earth turn, watching the ship turn, wheels within wheels within wheels as Clarke itself revolves under my boots. Richard is strangely silent in my head. They’re all waiting for me to speak, I realize. It’s my moment, somehow. My lips are numb around the words they shape, so silently. Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâce. Le Seigneur est avec vous. They can break you of religion—

Oh, hell.

What’re you gonna do, Sergeant? What are you going to do?

Bernie would have wanted me to change the world. Gabe has always been much more sensible. Still, the perspective might even make him wonder. It all seems so much more manageable from a little distance, doesn’t it?

Well, Jenny? What are you going to do?

“Marde,” I manage at last, in a voice sweet with awe. “So that’s what all the fuss has been about.”