Elizabeth Bear - Worldwired

“Somebody's got to,” Charlie said, while Leslie was still looking for the words. “And it's stupid to risk all of us. Just let us have control of the attitude jets unless it looks like we're getting into trouble. All right?”

“Yeah,” Casey said, and Peterson said “Roger.” And Charlie turned his entire suit to look at Jeremy, as Corporal Letourneau drifted up beside him and started working the carabiners loose. “Jer? Dr. Kirkpatrick?”

“You're goddamned welcome to it, old son,” Jeremy answered from a spot two meters behind Casey. “I'll be pleased to admit yours is bigger than mine. I'll float here and take pictures.”

“Beauty,” Leslie answered, and unclipped the lines from his belt. The gloves made him fumble, but they hid the fact that his hands were shaking, and they kept him from having to look up, away from the spinning earth, in the direction that they were going. “Bob's your uncle. Here we go. Oh, bloody lovely, Jer; look at that.” The line still in his gauntlet, he pointed.

“Les?” Jeremy slid past Jen Casey in an eddy of vapor and leaned on Leslie's shoulder. Miscalculated inertia set them spinning slowly, but Leslie grabbed Jeremy's gauntlet left-handed and got them both stable before Peterson had to intervene.

He looked up at the astronauts and grinned, and this time he was sure they saw it, even through the helmet. “See? No worries. Piece of cake.”

“Les, what did you see?”

He pointed down again. “The Great Wall of China. Look.”

The others looked, and exclaimed. “That used to be the only man-made object you could see from space, supposedly,” Jen said. “Before electric lights. Before the beanstalks.”

“Pretty story,” Les answered.

Charlie's chuckle cut him off. “Pity it's happy horse shit.”

“Charles.” Leslie loaded his voice with teasing disapproval. He used his attitude jets to tilt himself forward, peering through the sunlit thin spot in the pall of dust to see if he could pick out that spider-fine thread again. He could, just barely. “It's not horse shit. It's a beginner story, is all.”

“A beginner story?” Casey, the apt pupil. Of course.

“A story that's part of the truth, but only the uncomplicated part,” Leslie explained. Which was a beginner story in itself, and the circularity pleased him almost as much as the tricksterish unfairness of it all.

“Oh.” She paused, and he could almost feel her thinking. “So what else is man-made that you can see from space, then? That's not lights? Or beanstalks?”

“The Sahara Desert,” Charlie answered. And before anybody could comment further, he moved forward, and Leslie stuck by his side as if they had planned it like that.

Leslie already had that half-assed comparison of the birdcage to some sort of sacred site stuck in his mind when he and Charlie soared through the bars, leaving the rest of the EVA team behind. His cliché generator was ready with images of cathedrals and wild, holy places he'd seen, temples and ziggurats and the hush of mysticism, some animal part of his mind ready to be awed by the angle of sunlight through the bars of the cage.

He couldn't have been more wrong.

The interior of the birdcage hummed with energy, a feeling like a racetrack on Stakes day or a ship's bridge anticipating the order to fire. Electricity prickled the hairs on his arms, and for a moment he thought it was an actual static charge. He turned to see if Charlie's suit glowed blue with Saint Elmo's fire.

Charlie had half-rotated toward Leslie, a fat white doll with a golden face, and their eyes met through the tint as if through mist. “You feel that.”

“I feel something,” Leslie answered. “Like I stuck my finger in a light socket.”

“Dr. Tjakamarra?” Lieutenant Peterson's voice over the suit radio, and Leslie lifted his hand to show he was all right, waved, and continued forward.

“Something's happening,” Charlie said. “Jen, Jeremy? Do you detect any changes out there?”

“Nothing to speak of,” Jeremy answered. “What sort of change am I looking for?”

“It feels like we've entered some sort of an energy field,” Charlie said. Leslie tuned him out, listening to the conversation with only half an ear. “Check for anything in the electromagnetic spectrum. Any kind of leakage.”

A silence. Leslie drifted incrementally forward, edging into the interior of the birdcage the same way he'd edge into a strange horse's paddock — slowly, calmly, but as if he had every right in the world, or out of it , to be there. The teardrop-shaped Benefactors glided soundlessly from bar to bar, some of them passing within tens of meters, and still seemed to take no notice. The prickling on his skin intensified. He glanced about, at the cage, the obliviously moving aliens, at the slick sheen of mercury-like substance that covered the armature of the birdcage. It was visually identical to the substance of the enormous droplet-shaped aliens, and, in fact, when they touched down on one of the beams, they became indistinguishable from it. They slid along the structure like droplets of water along the wires of a wet birdcage, and passed over and through each other like waves, whether they met moving about the armature or sailing through the space inside.

“Nothing's leaking out this way,” Jeremy said. “I can't answer for what's going on inside the birdcage, though. The whole thing could be a sort of—”

“Massive Faraday cage?”

“Or something, yes.”

“Leslie? Charlie?” Jen Casey's voice. She sounded worried; Leslie wondered if someone might be waving at Charlie and himself from their entrance point, but he wasn't about to turn around and look. Leslie craned his head back, trying to get a look directly “up,” toward the top of the armature.

“I hear you, Jen.” Charlie sounded a little odd, too, which wasn't surprising, if his skin was responding to the same storm-prickle Leslie felt. “What's wrong?”

“Richard says the nanite chatter is increasing. I think maybe you should come back.”

They turned to each other again, Leslie and Charlie, and Leslie saw the question in Charlie's eyes. Leslie's hands spread reflexively inside his gauntlets as another shiver slithered up his back.

“We've already made history,” Charlie said.

“And so what if we have? We haven't learned anything yet.”

The flash of Charlie's teeth showed through the tint in his faceplate. “Jen,” he said, “we're going to head out to the middle of this thing at least—”

“Charlie, that's another klick. Maybe a klick and a half.”

“Nothing ventured,” Leslie said, and gave Charlie a thumbs-up before he kicked his maneuvering jets on. “Jen, remind me on the way back out—”

“If you get back out,” she interrupted, but he heard grudging approval in her tone.

“Hey, this is your harebrained scheme, sweetheart.”

She laughed. “All right, Les. Remind you what?”

“Remind me to get a sample of the fluid on the birdcage when we pass by it again, would you? Maybe have Corporal Letourneau run back to the Buffy Sainte-Marie and pick up some sort of sterile containment vessel?” He turned, watching another raindrop slide along another wire. He had to remind himself that the scale was skyscraper beams and elephants at a kilometer or better, and not spiderwebs wet with dew that he could reach out and brush away with his gauntleted hand.

“We had a probe try that, remember? Hydrogen and nanites.”

“Oh, right.” He rolled his eyes at his own obtuseness.

A pause, as if Jenny discussed the problem of samples with Letourneau over local channels, and then the crackle of her voice. “We'll try a magnetic bottle this time; maybe it'll make a difference. Hey guys, are you noticing a lot of static on this channel all of a sudden?”