Elizabeth Bear - Worldwired

Leslie's fingers itched, and he suddenly wished he'd screamed for rescue, twisted the captain's arm until she yelped. Third time's the charm. He wanted to be where Charlie and Jeremy were, doing what they were doing, not somewhere bodiless, cold and eyeless in the dark.

Greedy, he reprimanded. He might not be able to see, or feel, or even feel his body — Richard assured him the suit was still intact, that the Benefactors were still keeping him breathing in there somehow, as bizarre and unsustainable as that seemed — but he could sense things no human had ever sensed before: The weight of the Montreal and the shiptree curving space time. The gravity well of the sun, like a mountain looming on the horizon, the foothills that were the Earth and the moon, the local flickers and fluctuations of the birdcage aliens surrounding him, manipulating epic forces on a scale as precise as the stroke of a surgical scalpel, in patterns modulated and refined to echo themes he gave them.

Playing him the music of the spheres.

He wouldn't permit himself to remember that the odds were a thousand to one that he was going to die out here.

You're where you belong. And you'll get home somehow.

Eventually.

In the meantime, he kept himself busy talking to Charlie, and to Jeremy — through Charlie — and writing exhaustive reports on the data he could collect in between Charlie's xenobiological pursuits. Although, right this instant, both of them were too focused on Dick's feed-via-Casey of what was going on in New York for either one of them to be accomplishing a lot.

There's something to be said for hive minds, Leslie thought.

Charlie didn't have to look up from his perusal of a recovered feather— feather-analogue —to engage the conversation. Ours, or the shiptree's?

Don't you think two hive minds would be a bit coincidental?

There is that. Charlie hooked a toe under a projecting root to keep from drifting, curling his legs to hunch himself closer to the tree-analogue he was examining. Leslie's kinetic sense wanted to echo the movement, wanted to feel his muscles stretch and play as Charlie's did. Bad enough he found himself imagining breathing hard when Charlie clambered around the chambered arboretum that seemed to comprise the majority of the shiptree's interior. And frankly, I'm not sure what we have here is a hive mind, so much as a Gaia-type intelligence. The whole ecosystem, including the ship, seems to function as one beastie; not a threaded intelligence, like Dick, and not separated intelligences, like humans, and not a single big unified brain split into however many bodies it happens to need at a given moment, as I suspect the birdcages are, but something more like the internal structure of the human mind, where various sections handle various functions autonomously, irrespective of whether the consciousness knows what's going on at all.

So you're suggesting this thing's reptile brain is—

Actually housed in a reptile. More or less. Yeah. Charlie's knees ground as he straightened his legs, letting himself drift. Leslie winced in sympathy. Or maybe a shrubbery. The plants are awfully friendly around here. He brushed away a vine that tried to twine around his waist.

And how do they communicate, then?

Leslie felt the shrug as Charlie continued. Chemically? Electrically? Same way your brain does, I guess. Jeremy's done a little poking around here and there; not only is the air we're not breathing a soup of pheromones, but there's nanosurgeons through all this plant life and the whole thing is threaded with conductive material. Heck, if I'm right, the buckytubes that give the thing's hull its tensile strength are also its brain. Based on Richard's theory that all you need for consciousness is the right kind of piezoelectric activity in any sort of substrate that will support it, buckytubes are ideal, as long as they have neurons and synapses. More or less.

“I'm not defining consciousness this week,” Richard said.

Good. Then I won't have to wrestle you for my Nobel Prize. Charlie reached out and caught the branches of a tree-analogue in his gauntleted fist, wiping beads of condensation off his face plate. Dammit. I've had it with this suit. Still nothing doing with the culture plates?

“Charlie,” Richard said, “I'd prefer you waited the full eleven days. I don't like you risking yourself unnecessarily.”

I don't like risking myself at all, Charlie replied. But we've established there's nothing toxic to earthling life in here. The proteins and sugars even twist the right way. And I've got a belly full of alien nanosurgeons that should be able to handle anything I might get myself into. If I wasn't thinking hard about Persephone and Eve, I'd even consider taking a bite out of one of those things that look like azure figs.

You sound like you're talking yourself into something, Chaz. Leslie needed to walk. It was driving him nuts that he couldn't stuff his hands in his pockets and go for a stroll.

Oh, hell, Charlie answered. He reached through the canopy and grasped an outgrowth of the chamber's glowing wall, strands of light sliding through disarrayed greenery. I've already talked myself into it. What's the worst that could happen?

“At least go back to Jeremy and the base camp—” Richard said, but Charlie shrugged inside his space suit again and pushed himself away from the bulkhead, setting himself adrift.

Jeremy would just get in the way, he said, reasonably. Besides, we figured out how to talk to the birdcages when we got swallowed and chewed up a bit, and Les and I are both fine.

Sure. Psychically linked and chock-full of alien micromachines, and I'm stuck in orbit with a space suit that's being renewed by alien tech the only thing keeping me alive, and I can't feel my body. But just peachy, all in all. Chaz—

Trust me, Leslie, Charlie said, and tripped the latches on his helmet with gauntlet-awkward thumbs.

Leslie held his breath, his hands clutching uselessly on nothing but the fabric of his gauntlets as Charlie lifted the helmet aside, as if he could force Charlie to hold his in sympathy, as if—

Charlie blinked, his eyes immediately scratchy and red, and spoke out loud. “Well, I'm allergic to the flower-analogues. The air smells clean. Green, moist — damn, there's a lot of ‘pollen.'”

Are you sure you don't want to put your hat back on?

“Yeah,” he said. Leslie could feel the sneeze building in the back of Charlie's throat, and to be honest, it did feel just like a snoot full of dust and plant sex. And the air did smell glorious through Charlie's nose, fresh and cool and redolent of sweet strange flowers, gingery and complex. “Huh. I'd strip off the rest of my suit, but I don't want to haul it back. Oh, damn.”

Charlie's head went back, his lungs filled with a breath taken for a deep and violent sneeze—

And he vanished like a blown-out candle, completely and painlessly gone . Leslie reached for Richard, and Richard wasn't there. Dick?

Dick?

Nothing. Richard, can you hear me? Bugger all—

His fists clenched hard, hard enough that the lining of his gauntlets cut his hands. Which was when he realized he could feel them, feel his stomach clenching on nothing, the aching head, weird clarity, and nausea that he knew from past experience was the next step after the sharp pangs of unassuaged hunger.

When Richard fell out of her head, Genie almost sat down on the floor. Her knees went wobbly and she clutched wildly about herself before her left hand connected with the wall. She tottered, but stayed up. It wasn't that she didn't know how to do anything without Richard, really. It was just that she had gotten used to not ever being alone.