Elizabeth Bear - Worldwired

For my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die…

Dr. Tjakamarra. Leslie. Les. Can you hear me?

Voices. Two voices, not just one. Familiar voices. Sort of. One a man's, and one a woman's. Except they sounded like voices inside his head. Like the voice of his own conscience. Like the voices heard in a dream.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew…

Leslie, I can hear you thinking. Talk to me.

Les?

Floating. And then the feather-light brush as of fingertips against his face, and a third voice, another familiar one, babbling nonsense the way he knew he would be babbling nonsense if he could find his mouth, if he had a mouth, if he—

— and then a chattering complexity underneath it, like a stage full of extras muttering rutabaga rutabaga . And he was floating, drifting. And if he had hands, if he had fingers, he would reach out across the warm nameless darkness and twine his fingers through any fingers he could reach.

They weren't words.

Well, there were words, the woman's voice, the poetry: Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' We are not now that strength which in the old days …

And there was the man's voice, too, saying his name over and over again. Leslie. Les. Dr. Tjakamarra.

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; One equal-temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

Jen's voice. Jen Casey's voice. And why that hard-bitten old warrior would be chanting poetry in his ear, he couldn't imagine. And then the other one, the one saying his name, over and over and over, as if whispered in the ear of a dying friend…

“Richard?” he said. Or tried to say, and he heard in the empty resonance of his own head that he had failed to make any noise at all. Richard? Can you hear me? Alan? Richard?

“Leslie? Is that you?” And it wasn't Richard's voice, not really. It was Charlie Forster's, and it was inside his head, and then it turned into Alan's and Jen's all at the same time, and a thousand voices under that, speaking words in a language he couldn't understand, couldn't even imagine. Words? Not words. Images… no. Sensations. Sensations of heat and… sensations he had no words for, that his brain insisted on translating into things he had experienced, a huge babble of voices that weren't voices, of sensations that weren't sensations, hurting his ears, hurting his head, hurting his skin. Synesthesia, light that wasn't light but maybe gravity—

And then a richer voice, not as cool and considering and patient as Alan's, but excited, engaged. Leslie imagined he could almost see the flicker of tumbling hands, the eyebrows rising like wings. It is gravity, Leslie. They “see” gravity! Or sense it, and that explains why their nanotech is in quantum communication and their stardrive uses gravity as its navigational system. Since gravity is the—

Richard? Is that you? I can hear you. I can hear you!

He couldn't tell.

— since gravity is the force we theorize affects all dimensions in a superstring model of the universe, unlike the strong and weak and electromagnetic forces—

Dick, I hear you! Dick? Jenny? Charlie?

Echoes. Yammering echoes, and nothing more.

— they're quantum life forms, Les. The birdcage Benefactors, anyway. Quantum life forms. You were right, you were right; they don't even sense the world the way we do—

Richard, get me the bloody hell out of here! Help! Dick!

And just the poetry, the echo of the poetry, and nothing true or concrete or real. He clung to it anyway, to Jen's voice, and the rhythm of the words: To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

And then silence, long silence. And then, not light, but a lessening of the darkness. A presence, or a dozen presences. A dream within a dream, a sense of companionship he hoped was not self-delusion. Charlie?

Charlie, is that you? And the voices, and if he'd been able to move, he would have turned and run after those voices, anything, anything to touch and be close with something that was anything, that wasn't the blackness and the untextured warmth. Voices, crowd noise, a hundred or a thousand talkers talking, and no more sense to be made of it than the buzz of cicadas, the twittering of birds. No, not talking, although his human brain insisted on “hearing” the noise impressed upon it by the Benefactor tech infecting his body. He could feel that tech communicating with the other nanosurgeons, worldwide, feel Richard and Charlie and Alan as part of the same intermingled sea of experience, feel Jenny and Patty and Genie and Min-xue and the other human carriers as discrete islands within that sea. And then there was the worldwire under it all, the combined weight and presence of the Benefactors, the damaged planet below, the starships and the—

Damn.

He could feel half the whole goddamned bloody galaxy.

Dick?

“Pretty cool, isn't it?”

“For my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die—”

“Jen?” His voice vibrated in his head, not his throat. There was no light, nothing, neither eyelids nor lashes, and he heard Charlie say “Richard?” as if out loud, at the same moment, and then a greedy hand clutched and squeezed his hand, and someone was laughing exultantly in his ear. No, it was Charlie's hand. Not his own hand. He couldn't feel his own hand.

He opened his eyes and saw nothing at all.

Jeremy?

Jeremy? Where are you? Can you hear me?

“I hear you.”

Except the voice wasn't in his ear, it was in his head, so he answered without moving his lips, as if in a dream, I know how to talk to the birdcages. Can you hear me? I know how to talk to them now.

1100 hours

Friday October 5, 2063

HMCSS Montreal

Earth orbit

Jaime Wainwright had a trick of looking out from under her hair that made her look years younger, and not one whit less dangerous. Charlie liked to catch her at it, that cold professional stare softened through her lashes. He didn't like being the target of it, as he was the target of it now. He'd gone out of his way to find her away from her ready room, away from the bridge — not that it helped much; the whole of the Montreal was her domain. Finding her in the lounge — with a little assistance from Richard — was still a stroke of luck.

In any case, when she pinned that look against him it took all the courage he could muster not to step back and yield her the floor. Instead, he said, “There has to be something we can do for Les.” He pushed his spectacles up his nose with a fingertip, aware of the smile his archaic affectation produced. “Captain.”

Her eyelashes flickered, dusting her cheek. She nodded to the window, which showed nothing.

“Charlie,” she said. “Think for half a minute what I'm risking if I send somebody after him. I think they made it obvious that they weren't interested in giving Dr. Tjakamarra back.” She jerked her head at the view port. Nothing was visible from this angle. Not a glimpse of shiptree or birdcage or Clarke or even a curve of mother Earth flashed past — just the whirl of distant stars.

He didn't need to see the birdcage to know that it was shuttered tight. And furthermore, Leslie said calmly in his ear, I'm here already and I'd be a fucking poor excuse for a scientist if I didn't try to take the opportunity to learn something.