Elizabeth Bear - Worldwired

But anybody who had been undergoing nanosurgery when the crash came was as dead as if somebody had pulled the plug on his respirator. And she was staring right at the biggest, sickest patient of them all. She stood. “Give me an earth view. Full earth, whichever orbital platform has most of the Sun side.”

It was Clarke. She should have known that. The view was North and South America, cloud-swirled oceans and mouse-tinged atmosphere, the landmasses gray-white with unseasonal snowfall, the grasping outline of North America indistinguishable from clouds and ice. The oceans were steel-gray and cadet-blue. Even the clouds had a jaundiced cast, through the shroud of dust.

It was ridiculous, of course, to think that any change would be visible yet. Even if the worldwire failed catastrophically, even if Richard's intervention in the planetary ecosystem had just come to a crashing halt, it would be months, maybe years before the damage showed. Planets were great ponderous things, changing on scales barely noticeable in the span of a human life.

Months, at the inside estimate. Years.

“Captain,” her XO said, very calmly. “I realize this probably isn't the time for this, but we've got a communiqué from ground control in Calgary. They want to know if we can get some telescopic shots of the northeastern seaboard; a research trawler off Newfoundland just blundered into the middle of a shoal of dead fish, and Clarke doesn't have an angle on it due to cloud cover. They're wondering if we can tell them how widespread it is. Shall I tell them we won't be able to, ma'am? Nobody seems to have told them there's a crisis underway.”

Months . She forced her hands to uncurl, unknot from the fists they'd somehow tightened into. It could be nothing. It could be completely unrelated.

For a moment, she was tempted to tell him yes, go ahead, tell them they have to wait. Turn off the cameras. Don't go looking for everything else that's probably going wrong. As if, if she didn't look, it wouldn't be real.

“No,” she said. “Let's have a look at those fish. And get the ship's entomologist and botanist up here, shall we? And Dr. Perry, too. He's an ecologist; he can earn his keep for a change. And tell ground control they need to get in touch with the cabinet, if they can't reach the prime minister in New York, and they're going to want a couple of climatologists with security clearances, and get me a thermal map of the oceans and water vapor shots of the atmosphere, and anything else you can think of that might be useful.”

She felt as if she stood over her own left shoulder, watching, soothed by her own voice of command, as her bridge crew also seemed to be. Exactly as if what she was ordering would make any difference. Exactly as if they could do anything at all, except stand there and watch as the planet thrashed and died.

I wonder if the condemned man has enough time to regret refusing the blindfold? she thought, before she squared her shoulders under the navy-blue uniform and went to do her job.

Now, finally, space was terribly quiet, and Leslie was terribly alone. There was a half an hour's power left in his batteries and he was weak, shivering cold, clear-headed with hunger although the Benefactors had managed to provide him with oxygen and water. They'd given him back his body, he realized, in time for him to let him know that he was going to die. He wondered if the aliens had a concept akin to making one's peace with God. He wondered if they had the concept of death, when they were all of the same creature, one intimately connected mind.

He wondered if they understood that they had killed him.

No. He couldn't think like that. He had his hands back, and his eyes, and his space suit checked out fully functional except the radio and the redlined energy levels, and—

— and he hadn't lost one fragment of the peculiar kinesis he'd inherited from the birdcages, the sense of the whole solar system spinning around him like a clockwork model, like a timepiece assembled by Einstein's watchmaker god. He could still feel it in his gut, rooted in his body as concrete and as invisible as an angel's wings rooted in the angel's shoulders.

He also wondered if the birdcages could see through his eyes, now, could hear through his ears, as he felt through their nameless organs of sense. He hoped so. He hoped they could see the way the sunlight refracted through the bars and the veils of their ship, casting rainbows over the entire interior. He hoped they could see how lovely they were, their bodies merging and separating again like drops of mercury shaken on a plate.

His wondering was answered when the shimmering veils between the struts of the birdcage vanished like popped soap bubbles, revealing the Montreal, the shiptree, and the brown-gray marbled sphere of the Earth behind them, all limned from behind with sunrise. Leslie caught his breath as slanted rays dusted his faceplate with gold and refracted in sprays of color through the prismed latticework that was all that stood between him and naked space, and he felt as if all the voices within him caught their breaths as well — not that they had voices, in particular, or breaths. Yes, he thought. This is my world. This is what light looks like, my friends.

The shiptree was right there, so close he could see the whorls of light along its plume-shaped length. He could feel it out there, feel it press against the curve of space, as if he could reach out and touch it. Oh, if Richard could see this—

Leslie started smiling inside his helmet almost before the idea finished unraveling. Maybe he couldn't tell the Benefactors what he needed. But maybe he could show them.

He wasn't finished yet. He shaped the map for them, let them feel it in his mind. Showed them the way the mass of his body would move, from the birdcage to the shiptree, and asked them for their help in getting there.

And they sang in his head, the answer, the throb and cadence of their voices that were not voices, but a sensation like the press and lift of the surf. (go) they would have said, if what they said was words. (Go) and (go) and (heal) and (go) and (rejoin your mind) and (go) and (heal) and (go) and (come and sing to us again) …

(Come and sing to us again)…

“I will,” Leslie answered. And so they pushed him forward, into night.

When Min-xue lifted himself off her back, Patty was ready for it. She got her toes under her and her hand on the prime minister's wrist and tugged while Min-xue and Jenny crouched scuttling toward the end of the long line of curved tables, and hauled Riel into a squat with an ease that surprised them both. They froze, eye to eye, and Riel licked her lips, her bloodied business suit rising and falling with measured breaths. Riel ducked at a popping, scattered sound. Patty didn't realize it was gunfire until Riel's palm flattened her head against Riel's shoulder, holding her under the level of the tabletop. It won't stop bullets. Will it stop bullets? Alan?

They leaned together hard, but the flat shattering impacts arced away from them, in pursuit of Min-xue and Jenny. The bullets weren't anywhere close; Patty leaned out for a quick glance as the other two pilots clambered over floor-hugging diplomats, leapfrogging each other like 3-D cops. Alan?

Alan still wasn't there.

“Where the hell is security?” Riel asked. “They can't have bought everybody .”

Which was right, wasn't it? The General Assembly hall should be full of men and women with guns. Men and women on their side, security who worked for the UN. “I don't know. I don't know where Alan is either. I don't know—”