Elizabeth Bear - Worldwired

“Before you declare your shame, Captain,” Min-xue answered, in the same language, as he pulled the papers out of his pocket, “can you please tell me whether you have seen these code sheets before?” He handed them over, keeping his voice low and his body language meek as the three Canadians arranged themselves.

Captain Wu studied each of the sheets carefully. His throat worked. Min-xue laid a fingertip on Captain Wu's knee, knowing that the captain would see it for the concession it was, coming from a pilot.

“I have seen them,” the captain of the Huang Di said.

“Where have you seen them, Captain?”

“Second Pilot, before I answer that, you will tell me where you obtained these.”

“They were your orders to retrieve the asteroid and destroy Toronto, Captain. Were they not?”

“You will answer my question.” Captain Wu sat back, the offending papers dropping from his fingers to scatter on the carpet.

“Under the pearly moon in the endless sea, pearls weep,” Min-xue quoted, tilting his head. “On Lan-t'ien Mountain, jade breeds smoke in warm sun. This passion might be a thing to be remembered Only you were already bewildered and lost.”

“Will you believe I regret it, Min-xue?”

“They came from the person of a Canadian citizen, Captain. A Unitek vice president. One closely involved in the starship program. Before the orders were carried out. She could only have received them from somebody in China. There was a conspiracy. Treason on both sides. And tens of millions died.”

The captain blinked. Min-xue heard Jen shut the door behind him, her prosthetic hand clicking on the handle despite her cotton glove, and smiled. The general might be chivalrous, but not so chivalrous as to forget that one of the women he was squiring was also a noncom.

“Yes,” Captain Wu said. “Those were my orders.”

“From whose hand were they sealed, Captain?”

“The minister of war, Shijie Shu,” he said, all on a breath, and rocked his head back against the headrest, closing his eyes.

“Will you testify to that before the United Nations, Captain?” Valens leaned in, his Mandarin ungrammatical.

Captain Wu looked at Min-xue. Min-xue bit his cheek until he tasted copper and nodded. Captain Wu dropped his eyes to the papers scattered like so many peach blossoms about his feet, and then to his own folded hands, and sighed.

Min-xue looked up at Valens, and swallowed bitterness. And in English he said, “Yes. General, he will testify.”

The instant I'm back on Canadian soil, I feel different. Even a patch of Canadian soil a few dozen yards square, squatting on the eastern edge of America. I'm sure it's psychosomatic, but I feel my shoulders straighten, the wreathed crowns on my epaulets shining a little brighter in the wan autumn morning.

A sugar maple planted inside the elaborate and very functional-looking front gate of the embassy catches my attention, and even if it's snow-laced and bare with the unholy winter, the familiar fractal pattern of those elegant branches soothes me. I wish it were any other October, and the glossy leaves just starting to burn umber and vermilion.

I left Nell's eagle feather on the Montreal . I didn't want to deal with customs and endangered species acts and trying to prove my tribal affiliation and the ten thousand other things that would go wrong. Still, I press my hand against the breast pocket where it would normally be. Even if I don't have the feather, or Nell, or Leah, I can still feel the ghosts gathered around me like ancestors in reverse, where the children die and old warhorses get older in their place.

Surreptitiously, I drag my fingertip over the trunk of the maple tree, just to feel its life. Rough and silky bark snags my glove; I tug it free quickly, hoping no one has noticed.

There's a real live doorman to open the doors for us. He has white spats, and white gloves that are cleaner than mine. I don't think I've ever seen such a thing. As I take my cover off, I'm homesick enough to think the air inside smells of Canada, too. If I don't quite look at them straight, I can almost imagine that the snowy branches behind the panoramic windows of the lobby are old-growth forest rather than well-clipped hemlock. I swear to God I can smell the pine.

Hah. It's probably the floor polish. Come on, Jenny. Get your head out of your ass. Tomorrow we go to war. And try to make sure those kids didn't die for nothing.

It's a prayer, and I know it's a prayer, and I still can't quite bring myself to say, Amen.

2100 hours

Sunday October 7, 2063

HMCSS Montreal

Earth orbit

Charlie hadn't gotten used to not being alone in his own head — hell, in his own body —yet. Because getting kidnapped and genetically engineered by aliens is the sort of thing you should process and move past in a week or two at the outside, really.

He felt Leslie's approval at his sarcasm, and the internal quirk of Richard's humor that would have been a raised eyebrow or a twitched lip if they were simply three men sitting around a conference table, rather than sharing some bizarre brain space including bits and pieces of all three of them, but not all of any, and the undercurrent of alien presences — waiting, observing, straining as hard toward them as they strained back.

We have nothing in common, Charlie thought. He leaned back in his chair, in his lab, among the dying ecospheres and the hydroponics tanks, and swung his feet onto the lab bench. Not even a sensorium .

Richard would relay the inaudible parts of the conversation to Jeremy and Elspeth. The ethnolinguist and the psychiatrist were inwheel, in the work space they had shared with Leslie, modeling symbol structures or something Charlie didn't really understand. Charlie and Leslie could hear and feel everything that occurred in the room through Richard, and Richard would relay his own comments over the interior speakers, so it didn't matter if they were all in the same room or not, and he did his best thinking up here with the soybeans.

We apparently share a powerful desire to talk to one another, Leslie answered. That's more than my ex-wife and I had in common.

The most interesting part of their connection was that, while he didn't have Leslie's skills or his years of experience in just how language and communication worked, he could feel the model that Leslie and Jeremy were building with regard to communication with the aliens. Currently, it looked a great deal like a map. It was a map; a map of something drawn in terms of beings that sensed the architecture of space-time rather than the electromagnetic spectrum.

It would be extraordinarily useful, Charlie judged, once they got the chance to take the Montreal and the Vancouver out on a real spin, and overlay this map with what Richard and the pilots could learn about the feel of the local gravity wells— For crying out loud, Leslie. You realize we don't even have a language with which to discuss this stuff, let alone a symbology with which to talk to the birdcages about it? — they might be able to lay their own visible-light and X-ray map over the alien one.

By the way, we've got the lab results back. I've got to say, these guys really put the xeno into xenobiology. Except what he gave Leslie and Richard wasn't exactly words, but more a concentrated lump of his own experience and the test results and what it all might mean, or might not mean, without the ambiguities of language. For Jeremy and Elspeth's sake, he summarized: They're hydrogen based. What we call metallic colloidal hydrogen, probably supercompressed in their home environment. Something like the rocky core of a gas giant.