Elizabeth Bear - Worldwired

If you get Leslie back, Leslie said.

There is no if.

Charlie knew Richard was using the nanotech to regulate hormone and endorphin and adrenaline levels, to keep him calm and sane and rational. It was probably the only reason he or Leslie was coherent, rather than enlivening a rubber room planet-side. Or, in Leslie's case, floating between the stars glibbering and meeping like the protagonist of a Lovecraft story. That, and Leslie's strange determination that this was all an adventure, and that he had nothing to lose, and everything to gain.

He chuckled as Leslie's amusement welled up his throat.

I'm culturally programmed to a certain amount of comfort with otherspace, Leslie said. Being ungrounded from my body isn't quite the shock it might be to you.

I should have known you'd jump at the opportunity to flaunt your racial superiority, Charlie answered, and Leslie laughed inside his head. The sarcasm was a defense, and he knew Leslie knew it. Still, he felt the chuckle and smiled himself, sharing the response. Because — on the other hand — when Charlie forgot to panic, the sensation of never quite being alone was strangely easy to get used to, and maybe even a little comforting.

“Charlie?” Elspeth's voice, distracting him — or drawing him back from distraction. “Try to stay with us, eh?” The motes showed the sidelong glance Jeremy gave her, and the way he rubbed one hand through his hair and then across his mouth, infinitely tired for the moment when her attention was turned away. Jeremy swallowed and swiveled his chair to stare out the porthole, only vaguely in the direction of the birdcage. A frown tugged the corners of his lips down. Charlie never would have understood the expression if he hadn't felt Leslie's discomfort like the itch of a peeling sunburn. He's worried about you, Leslie.

Leslie shrugged the comment aside. He always worried too much about me. Mind if I use your vocal cords for a tick? The motes annoy me.

Help yourself.

“Bob's your uncle. So what do we do next?”

“We talk to the captain about another EVA, I guess,” Elspeth said, and shook her head sadly through the resulting laughter.

0800 hours

Monday October 8, 2063

Thanksgiving day (Canada)

Canadian Embassy and Consulate

New York City, New York USA

On Monday morning, I testify.

It's so much like the last time that the face I see in the walnut-framed mirror over my bureau shocks me when I glance into it. I expect the glossy black hair of a child in her third decade, the furrowed, meat-colored scars of fresh burns turning the left side of her face into a Halloween mask. As if the intervening twenty-six years don't exist. As if, when I go downstairs with Frederick Valens to get into the official car that will deliver us to the site of the hearing, it will be Corporal Casey and Captain Valens, and it will be a simple court-martial that I am to testify before, rather than the assembled eyes of the world.

The problems get bigger and bigger. But the level of nausea in my gut remains the same.

That's growth of a sort, I suppose.

I look down to adjust the shining buttons in the cuffs of my professionally pressed dress uniform. The blue steel of my left hand contrasts the deep, mellow richness of the gold. There are no scars on my face anymore, just a mottled patch that doesn't tan evenly, and my hair will be white in another three or four years. And the steel armature on my left side is light and silent and moves like my own hand and wrist, rather than like a clattering horror of an obsolete machine. And it's beautiful, too: a smooth, graceful design.

I clench my long steel fingers into a fist, and feel them press the heel of my metal hand, and close my eyes.

Bernard told me to change the world for him. After I took the stand and said the words that killed him.

I really wonder that I don't feel more irony — more anything — at the fact that it's not going to be my testimony that makes the difference today, this week, this month, but rather the testimony — from beyond the grave — of his niece, Indigo. Who once tried very, very hard to murder me.

I open my eyes. I open my hand. I point my forefinger at the mirror, cock my thumb, and say “bang” under my breath. And then I check the lie of my uniform one more time, pick my cover up off the dresser, flick my thumbs along the brim to make sure it's sitting right, and go downstairs to meet Fred Valens and my fate.

I suppose it's equal parts gift and torture that I'm the first witness. I mean, I've never seen the United Nations before, despite twenty years spent wearing its goddamned baby blue hats, and I'd like the time to look around and get a feel for the place. My overwhelming impression, as the car pulls into the drive, is a confused riot of flags like children shouting for attention, lined up snapping in a breath-frosting wind, below a teal glass curtain wall. The driver gets out to open the door. I stand, and then I stop, looking up, long enough for Fred to clear his throat heavily.

Fat flakes drift from a dirty slate-colored sky and my boots crunch snow in the gutter as I move forward. It's not a big building — especially in comparison to its neighbors, enormous apartments that dwarf it — but the severe hundred-year-old slab shape reminds me of a tombstone. The old building is a little streaked and shabby around the edges, and I can see where the panes have been replaced by less mottled ones. They don't quite match the facade. The marble on the narrow sides is soot stained and showing erosion on what should be fine edges, and the fluid lines of the long concrete Assembly building spilling away from the teal blue high-rise look a little weary, too.

It looks worked hard, that structure.

And yet it's difficult to walk forward into. The damned thing looks heavy. And it might not be all that big, but it's a damned sight bigger than I am.

Escorts take charge of us at the doors, however, and once we step inside my whole impression changes. The broad lobby is airy and bright, the worn silver-and-white marble floors polished until they glow like jade. Mostly I regret the display cases that Fred and I are hustled past too fast for me to get a really good look inside. There's a Moon rock and a Mars rock and a chunk of asteroid and another chunk of one of Saturn's rings, I see that much, and a long display on a destroyed city whose flat, motionless gray photos mark it as something from another era, almost another world. Dresden or Hiroshima, maybe. Mumbai's footage would be in color, if there is a display for Mumbai.

I wonder how long it will be before Toronto is memorialized.

There's a hush about the place, the taste of serious business under way. A woman in a sari hurries through as we cross the lobby, a bindi gleaming red between her brows. She catches my eye as we pass, notices the steel hand, and does a visible double take. Her stride never slackens, but I turn my head, pretending for a minute that I'm not in uniform, and I see her staring over her shoulder as she walks away from us, twisting from the hips to get a better view.

Nice to have a place to go where everybody knows your name.

A young man in hanbok — a dark embroidered jacket and flowing, flame-colored trousers — hurries toward us, his feet scuffing on the marble. A little puddle of melting snow drips from the sole of one of my boots, although I stomped them before I came inside. Valens, of course, looks like he was delivered fresh via teleporter. I tighten my arm against my side so I don't drop my cover in the mud puddle I'm making while I greet our new friend. He's got very dark, very bright eyes, and something faceted winks near the edge of the iris of the left one — a hypoallergenic implant under the clear surface of the cornea, a platinum bauble shaped like a stylized rocket ship. Genie says they're all the rage this year.