Elizabeth Bear - Worldwired

“Pilot Xie Min-xue?”

“I am.” Cautiously. Softly, his face slightly averted, so that his hair slid across one eye as if it could protect him from the directness of her stare.

She kicked free and pushed back quickly and dropped her gaze. “I'm Patty — I mean, I'm Patricia Valens. I'm one of the Montreal 's pilots. I'm supposed to show you around.”

His chin lifted when she said “pilots,” and she could almost see the tension in his shoulders ease. “Show me around?”

“Give you a tour,” she said, assuming he had not understood the colloquialism.

“No, I understood.” Did he always speak so softly? “I had assumed I should be confined to quarters.”

She smiled and drifted another half-step away. He breathed easier once he had a little more room. “Escorted,” she said. “At least for a little while. But Richard will help you find your way around. We're supposed to treat you as a guest. Follow me.”

He did, silently, paying very close attention but asking no questions as she gave him the quick tour of the ship. She took him up the ladder in the central shaft so he could get an idea of the Montreal 's size, and he gasped over the mock gravity in the habitation wheel, but “She's bigger than the Huang Di, ” was his only comment, and that after she had showed him the bridge.

“About twice as big.”

Silence descended again, until she showed him to the small cabin that would be his. She stopped beside the hatch, standing to one side. “You'll stay here,” she said. “I'm sorry. I've done all the talking.”

“It's all right,” he said, but didn't undog the hatch or step through it. “I'm not very… talkative.”

They stood in the corridor facing each other. Patty could hear the Chinese pilot breathing, waiting. Finally, she stepped away from the hatch. “You can go in. You don't have to wait for me to open the hatch.”

“It's all right,” he repeated. He swallowed and looked down at his hands, fretting at the strap of the duffel. “Miss Valens.”

“Patricia.” She wasn't sure why she gave him the formal version of her name. Maybe the way his hands shook, almost too fast to see. “Please.”

“Thank you,” he stammered. “I wanted to ask you…”

“Ask,” she said, when he'd been stuck long enough that it seemed as if interrupting would be a mercy.

“Did you know Leah Castaign?”

Patty didn't realize she'd stepped back until the bulkhead stopped her. She stared at him and forced her jaw to close. “You can't have known Leah.”

“No,” he said. “But she—” He sighed, and twisted his head aside again, staring at the floor, his hair a mess from gliding up the shaft in zero G.

Oh . “She died for you,” Patty said. She swallowed hard, but didn't look away when Min-xue's head snapped up.

“Yes. How did you—”

She shrugged. “I know,” she said. “I just know, okay?”

He bit his lip. He nodded. “Okay. Can you tell me about her? A little? Please?”

“I could.” She hesitated. “It would take awhile.”

“I'm not sleepy.”

She studied him a moment. “Do you play table tennis?”

“Table… tennis?”

“Ping-Pong?”

He shook his head. She shook hers right back at him. “What do they teach you in China?”

“How to fly starships.” Dryly, and quicker than she would have expected.

She snorted laughter, tight worry easing across her chest. “All right,” she said. “Put your bag in your cabin and I'll show you the gym and teach you how to play Ping-Pong. And I'll tell you about Leah. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said.

The Chinese pilots were faster. He beat her, seven to three.

Leslie had been next to bigger things. The Petronas Towers, for example. Uluru, which the ignorant called Ayers Rock. The base of the Malaysian beanstalk. The Montreal herself.

Only the rock had made quite the impression on him that the birdcage did.

They came alongside it about its midline, not that it displayed bilateral symmetry. Or radial symmetry, in fact — or any sort of symmetry at all. The design was rococo, the overall impression not too dissimilar from a baroque pearl if you ignored the fact that the silhouette was filigreed rather than continuous. The gaps between the bars of the birdcage were larger than they had seemed, from a distance. Some of the spaces compassed twenty meters.

And still the aliens continued their mechanistic ballet, taking no apparent notice of the cluster of spacesuited humans drifting like kewpie dolls alongside the — hull wasn't quite the right word, was it, for something whose inside and outside were delineated only by courtesy?

Leslie glanced over his shoulder and saw nothing but the edge of his faceplate and the padded interior of the dorsal portion of his helmet. “Jen?”

The pilot drifted up beside him, vapor trailing from her attitude jets. She stopped smartly. Of course, he thought, briefly envious of the reflexes that made her precision possible.

He put the thought aside. Attractive, maybe, to have the speed to pick a bumblebee out of the air. But hardly necessary.

“You rang?” she said. The lines that bound her to Jeremy came slack as the ethnolinguist drifted into the conversation.

Leslie waved a hand at the birdcage. His suit made the gesture broad. “Do you want to make any preparations before we take the plunge?”

He couldn't really tell through the gold-tinted shimmer of her faceplate, but he got the impression that she looked at him before she looked back at the alien ship. “I think maybe we shouldn't go all at once,” she answered.

“I think maybe I should go alone,” Leslie offered. “I'll take my lines off.”

“Dr. Tjakamarra, I cannot permit—” But he cut Lieutenant Peterson off with a second wave of his hand, and she fell reluctantly silent.

“I'm unlikely to drift off into a gravity well from inside the birdcage, Lieutenant.”

She coughed. “Your government would take it very amiss if we misplaced you, sir.”

“I shall be most exquisitely bloody careful, sweetheart,” he said, and flashed her a dazzling smile. Which of course she had no chance of seeing.

“I think I should go.” Not Casey, surprising him, but Charlie Forster. Leslie smiled. Charlie could no more sit on the sidelines for this than Leslie could. If the biologist were a hound, he would have been straining the leash.

Peterson again: “Absolutely—”

Leslie cleared his throat, making sure the suit mike was live before he did it. “Charlie? Elspeth's not here; you're in charge. What say we make it you and me, and the lieutenant and the master warrant can have our suits on override? That way, if they decide we don't know what we're doing, or if we look like we're about to go home the bloody hot way, they can yank us back on remote control?”

Leslie was proud of himself. His voice didn't even shiver. He sounded confident and a little bit amused, and the silence that followed told him they were thinking about it seriously. He tilted his head down and counted breaths, watching the gray-smeared planet spin between his boots.

If they'd been standing on the deck of the Montreal, Casey and Peterson would have been exchanging a long, opaque look. As it was, he was pretty sure they were burning up the private suit channels instead. He forced himself to breathe evenly — it wouldn't do him any good to pop a lung or wind up with nitrogen narcosis or… hell, he wasn't even sure what could go wrong if you were holding your breath in a space suit. And he was pretty sure he wasn't going to research it either. Some things, he was just as happy not knowing.

“All right,” Casey said. “All right, Leslie. It's what we're here for”—and he could hear her knobby shoulders rolling in a shrug—“although I don't like you boys taking point.”