Elizabeth Bear - Worldwired

Silence. And then, “Thank you, Prime Minister.”

“There's nothing to thank me for,” she answered. “He and Casey and Fred's granddaughter are all going to be called on to testify, along with you, Richard, if I have my way. Barring a ballistic missile, Montreal is the safest place around right now. I don't think even PanChina is going to risk a second unprovoked attack in front of the world camera. Not this week, in any case. It would put paid to their claim that the attack on Toronto was the result of fringe elements, for one thing—”

Valens nodded, more to himself than to Riel. “What are you going to do about it?”

She lifted her chin and looked at Richard, hovering over her desk. “You can go now, Dick. Thank you.”

“Thank you, ” he replied, and derezzed.

Riel stared into the middle distance, her mouth twisting.

“Connie? What are you going to do?”

“I'm going to call Premier Xiong and find out exactly what the hell he thinks is going on.”

11:15 AM

29 September 2063

HMCSS Montreal

Since leaving Sydney, Leslie had developed the abysmally bad habit of humming to himself while he worked, as if he were trying to draw his country and his road around his shoulders, especially in its absence. Restlessness was in his bones, his blood, an itch under his skin like ingrained dirt. He couldn't think unless he walked, and he couldn't walk unless he sang, even if the singing was under his breath.

Now, he set out along the Montreal 's toroidal corridors at a good clip, light on his feet, pushing himself a little in the big ship's partial gravity.

Leslie didn't really understand how the Benefactor tech worked, and he knew — in uncomfortable self-honesty — that he did not understand the implications of the discovery that he, Charlie, and Jeremy had made that morning. But he wasn't blind, and he did know that both the xenobiologist and the AI had been frightened— no, had been scared —when they swore him to secrecy on the issue. And so he hummed to himself, big hands swinging loose-fingered on the ends of his arms, eyes just about focused enough to keep him from walking into other pedestrians, ground-eating strides chewing up one lap after another of the Montreal .

On the third lap, pacing footsteps alerted him to company. He didn't glance over, nor did he freeze his uninvited companion out. Instead, he kept walking, still singing under his breath, trusting her to start talking when she had something to say.

Half a lap later, Casey cleared her throat. “We do have treadmills on this tub.”

“Buggered if I'll walk on a treadmill,” Leslie answered amicably. “I like to feel like I'm getting somewhere.”

“And walking in circles does that for you?”

He snorted laughter. “At least the walls move. And I don't have to watch the holos the guy on the next machine is distracting himself with. When I walk, I like to walk.”

“Being in the moment,” she said, surprising him. She had a good, long stride, with a hitch of a limp that he thought was more habit than pain. He stepped up his pace to test her. “What were you singing, Les?”

He grunted and shrugged. “Singing up the country, kind of.”

“Singing up the country?”

“The land must first exist as a concept. It must be sung before it can exist. It must be perceived before it can be walked on. It must be dreamed. You should know something about dreamings, shouldn't you? Or do your folks call them by a different name?”

She was still looking at him, a little quirk twisting her lips out of shape. “You know what an ‘apple' is, Les?”

“A kind of fruit?”

“A kind of Indian,” she said dryly. “Red on the outside. White on the inside. They never taught us any of that shit in Catholic school.”

He laughed and finally returned her glance. “Sweetheart, you'd never believe how familiar you sound. Come with me.”

“Where are we going, Les?”

“To the observation lounge,” he said, and started walking that way. There was one advantage to wandering ways and a trained spatial memory; he'd been aboard the Montreal less than forty-eight hours, and he already knew his way around.

The lounge was crowded, for once. There was a poker game in progress by the beverage dispensers and one or two people sitting in chairs near the porthole and monitors. Leslie paused beside those, off to one side so he wouldn't block anyone's view, and gestured Casey in beside him. She came without a word and stood there silently, looking where Leslie was looking. He heard the shallow catch in her breathing and smiled, knowing the deep, spinning view still tightened her chest as well as his own.

The long fall gave him vertigo, but he waited until the silence got heavy before he said anything more. He waited until she cleared her throat, in fact, and cut her off as smoothly as if he'd been about to start speaking anyway. “You know, in my own country, you could point to any rock, and hill, and gully, and I could tell you who it was.”

“Who?”

“They're all ancestors, in the Dreaming. Everything is, in my own—”

“Do you have a country, Les?”

Oh, she was good at those sidelong glances, and sharp as a tack. He gave it the silence its weight deserved, and nodded. “Sometimes. I think everybody has a nation… sometimes.” And now it was his turn for the sly look across his nose, and she was already looking away when he did it. “Do you?”

She rubbed her arrogant nose with a gleaming steel forefinger. “Have a nation?”

He nodded.

“Sometimes,” she answered, and he laughed. And then she turned to face him full-on, and lowered her voice until they were the only ones in the room. “So tell me about this Dreaming.”

He gestured out the window, at the stars and the sun-catcher shape of the birdcage, small enough with distance that he could have covered it with his palm. He sorted out a child's explanation, and floated it in simple words. Beginner stories. Truth, but not very much of it, suitable for paddling your toes in. “The Dreaming is what came before, even though it persists to today. And everything that is or will be was already sung, predestined. It's all waiting under the ground to happen.”

“Everything?”

“You, me. Piper and Forward. The Montreal . Everything. We just haven't found it all yet. And the roads between the stars. Those were sung. That's what the songlines are, roads in music and verse. When you get to the end of your songline, when you don't know the verses anymore, you enter someone else's territory, but the melody continues. And if you know the melody, even if you don't know the language, you can find the way, because the landmarks are in the melody. It's just the stories that are in the words.”

“By that logic, the Benefactors were already sung, too.”

“How do you know they weren't?”

She stared at him. He turned and gave her a grin and she shook her head slowly, ruefully, as if in complex understanding. “Do your songlines go to the stars?”

He grinned, and nudged her shoulder with his own. “Now you're catching on. The road is the song. The song is the road.”

Her expression hardened, a fish that spots the hook. “What do you want, Leslie?”

“I get to suit up and come EVA with you tomorrow, right?”

She sighed and turned back to the window, staring out it, past it. Down the long parallel lines of the starlight, the expression in her eyes distant enough to have a chance of looking farther even than that. She shook her head, but she muttered, “You know how to operate a space suit, son?”