Elizabeth Bear - Worldwired

“Excuse me?” She straightened up, tucking her tangled hair primly behind her ears, and looked him in the eyes. “Dr.—”

“Kirkpatrick.”

“Of course. You're Irish.”

“English,” he answered, turning to put his back against the bulkhead beside hers. “Don't let the name and the red hair fool you. Although I don't suppose I'm particularly English anymore.”

Patty blinked. “How can you stop being English?”

“When there stopped being an England,” he answered, with a clipped-off sigh. “I'm a citizen of the commonwealth now. A man without a country.” And then he tilted his head and lifted one shoulder like a bird fluffing a wing, and he grinned. And Patty grinned back at him, before she even knew she was going to do it.

1330 hours

Friday September 28, 2063

HMCSS Montreal

Earth orbit

Gabe's always been stronger than anybody had any right to be, and I can't stand to see him like this. Locked up inside, tight as a drum, an emptiness behind his eyes that I can't shift and neither can Elspeth. It makes me want to take him away and cosset him and call him pet names and protect him until the ice unlocks a little and he learns how to breathe again. And instead Wainwright's appointed me the bearer of bad tidings. Again.

Mind, it's not that I'm taking it any better than Gabe is. It's just that I've got more practice. So I walk over and cut him out of conversation with Charlie and Leslie, take him by the elbow, and press the back of my hand against my forehead, over my eyes. “Gabe, I'm going to go lie down a bit. Too many people, too much light, too much noise.”

He nods.

I tilt my head at where Patty stands pressed into a corner, Dr. Kirkpatrick — who is obviously savvier than I gave him credit for — shielding her from the room with his body. Elspeth keeps shooting her worried looks, but Elspeth is trapped in conversation with Wainwright and Perry, so it's up to me.

Gabe just looks at me, lips pursed, and I gesture to Patty with my eyes once more. Help me get her out of here, Gabe .

It's almost as if kids have become invisible to him, since Leah. I've seen him do it to Genie, too, as if looking at her were a pain so enormous it might suck him up like a black hole sucking light from a star. Poor kid lost her sister and half of her papa in one fell blow, but it's probably better to be treated like a stranger come calling than overprotected, for all it hurts more. And Genie has Elspeth, who took her in from day one.

And now I've got to break it to both of them that Genie's tracked for the same modifications that have me working on a migraine and Patty scrunched into the corner like a hermit crab into its shell. And I've still got to have more words with the captain, because I promised Richard I'd help him save that Chinese boy he befriended.

That Chinese boy, who saved a lot of other people. And it'll be easier with Gabe's help than without. And I really do have to get Patty the hell out of this party and into a warm shower and a bed before she freaks out all over the floor. “Gabe,” I say, finally, because he's just not getting it — which is scary in itself, because Gabe is sharp —“walk us to our rooms?”

“What?” He blinks, and I realize my voice has called him back from far away. “Oui, certainement. Just let me go make our excuses.” He shoves his glass blindly at the table edge and turns away. It's only my bullet-catching reflexes that let me intercept it on its way to the floor. Ginger ale splashes my glove. I set the glass down and suck sweetness out of the leather absentmindedly, watching his broad back as he walks away.

No, Gabe's not doing well at all. But there are moments when he's almost like his old self, and after I extricate Patty and he rejoins us by the door, I get to see a flash of Gabe Castaign, lurking under that pall of grief. He smiles at me and then ducks through the blue-painted pressure hatch, his shoulder scraping the frame. As Patty and I follow, he holds the hatch aside gallantly, hamming it up with a bow. I reach out in passing and tweak his ear; he yelps. He's performing, and I can't tell if it's for Patty's sake or mine.

It doesn't matter. It's a good sign amid all the bad. “Where's Genie?”

“Richard's teaching her precalc in one of the hydro gardens. Should we pick her up along the way?”

“No,” I say. “He's got a knack for making even math fun. She's probably enjoying herself.” I glance sideways at Patty. She's listening, walking alongside us, her head down so her hair hides her profile. She hasn't been the same since Leah died, either — hell, let's be honest, I have no room to judge, myself — and it suddenly hits me, what the solution to my problem is. Genie, and Patty, and the empty space in the middle that could be closed up, between them. Except I'm going to have to pull it off without either one of them suspecting, because neither one of them is going to want to love anybody in Leah's place, or even appear to. Richard?

“Right here.” Always, like an interface left on standby; just wiggle your fingers and it flickers to life. “And yes, Genie's fine. About Min-xue—”

I'm getting there. You never did tell me why our conversation about Hercules made you jump like a shocked colt.

“I'm still running equations. I don't want to raise any false hopes until I know it can be done.”

Richard— But he's adamant, and I can feel it. The bastard always did like to spring surprises. And if he's still working on it, it's one hell of a problem. Something I've noticed lately about him and his mostly-silent alter ego. “Gabe, does Richard seem faster to you lately?”

“Gossiping, Jen?”

I can't be talking behind your back when you're in my head.

“Fair enough,” he says, as Gabe checks his step a half-stride to let me catch up with him and gives me a thoughtful look. Patty looks up as well, hazel eyes glittering under a mahogany fringe. “Yes,” Gabe says. “And I can tell you why.”

“All right. Patty, do you want something to drink now that we're out of the crush?” Not that a couple of handfuls of people is really a crush, but I remember how claustrophobic the wiring made me at first. And I had what they call a good adaptation.

“No, thank you, Jenny.” The kid's had entirely too much respect for authority stomped into her. And I don't even think it's all Fred Valens's fault.

“Well,” I say, “I do. Let's go find a chair in the lounge nobody uses, and Gabe can tell us his theory. What do you say?”

Gabe's got that raised eyebrow like he knows I'm up to something, but he nods, the corners of his mouth writhing with the effort of wrestling his smirk back into the cage.

I manage to get Patty to take a Coke, once we're seated in the fat, plush chairs of the smaller crew lounge. She draws her feet up under her butt with enviable flexibility and holds the unbreakable cup in both hands, staring past me and out the porthole. I never get tired of looking either, but I don't think the view really has her attention.

“Okay. Tell me about the AIs, Gabe.”

“Well,” he says, and threads his fingers together. “Based on my conversations with Richard, what's going on is that, in addition to acting as directors for the nanites as they breed through Earth's ecosystem, Richard and Alan are running on the spare cycles in the nanocritters themselves. It's a distributed network in the truest sense — no, it's a distributed brain ; neurons and synapses and glial cells, or a mechanical approximation of the same.”

“A planet-sized brain,” Patty says, suddenly engaged.