Elizabeth Bear - Worldwired

“Bloody hell,” Leslie said out loud. “Charlie, I hate it when you're right.”

“Leslie?”

He didn't jump as Jeremy laid a hand on his shoulder, leaning down a little. He'd felt the linguist coming up behind him. “Yes, Jer?”

“Come on,” he said, letting his hand fall away. “These guys are going to be here all night. Let's get something to eat, and flicker our flashlights at the shiptree for a couple of hours. Maybe we can teach it some nursery rhymes.”

Leslie grinned and got up. Beginner stories.

Sure.

Three years later

1746 hours

Wednesday 15 December 2066

HMCSS Montreal

LaGrange Point, near Valentine

Elspeth has stationed herself by the far wall of the room, where she can see everybody. She keeps looking back and forth between Wainwright, Charlie, Gabe, Patty, Genie, and me. It's a measuring look, as if she's trying to figure out which sand castle is likely to crumble first, so she can shove some more mud up against it. Her irises gleam like polished agate, excitement thrumming through her, giving a lie to the new gray in her hair, coarse wiry strands that go this-way and that-way, oblivious to the direction of her long coiling ringlets. You'd think it would be Gabe who would hold this mad little family together.

You'd be wrong.

She's looking at him when I wander over to her and slouch against the wall, my upper arm against her shoulder. She sighs and leans into the touch, warmth pressing my jumpsuit into my skin. She pushes a little harder, leaning in to me. Neither one of us looks down from the planet on the monitor. “Ugly fucker,” I say, while the whole bridge holds its breath in quiet awe.

The dusty brown planet spins like a flicked bottle top, the ringed, sky-killing bulk of its gray-green motherworld hanging in crescent behind it. The light of the star that warms them isn't quite right either, and from what I understand the bigger planet's orbit is so erratic that the little Earth-like world we plan in our infinite arrogance to colonize will have summers like Phoenix, Arizona, and winters like Thompson, Manitoba. What's not scorched desert is frozen desert.

And based on the first long-range surveys, there's some kind of life down there smart enough to build cities. Still, we learned to talk to the birdcages and the shiptree, and we'll learn to talk to these guys, too. And Manitoba may be cold, but hey, people been living there a hell of a long time now. And like the Benefactors before us, we're a tougher species than we were.

“Bet it will look okay to the crews of those generation ships, when the Huang Di starts retrieving them.”

“When does Min-xue… pardon me, Captain Xie… leave?”

It's become seamless. I don't have to ask Richard; the information is just there, waiting for me, as if I always knew it. “Oh five hundred.” Thank you, Dick. He feels different now, bigger: talking to him is like talking to a reflection in a still pool. It's right there, close enough to touch, but you can feel how deep the water is underneath it.

And how long before we start taking him for granted, too?

“Genie already has.” A rueful acknowledgment, and he dissolves in a shiver of pixels. He'll be back if I need him. Or hell, even if I don't.

I snicker. Elspeth tilts her head against my arm.

Somewhere down there, there's a mountain or a sea that's going to be named after Leah Castaign. Once we pick it out. Koske gets one, too, and the crews of the Quebec and the Li Bo and the Lao Tzu. And after them, the crews of Soyuzes and Apollos that Richard could tell me numbers for, if I bothered to ask him, and some American space shuttles destroyed around the turn of the century, and a Brazilian tug crew killed capturing the rock that anchors the far end of the Clarke beanstalk, and the crew of the first Chinese Mars lander, and then there's twenty years of in-system accidents to get through…

They've already decided the little planet is going to be called Valentine, and the big one Bondarenko.

I just hope we won't run out of planets before we run out of names. On the other hand, chances are good there are going to be more planets, aren't there?

And also that there are going to be more names.

It's quiet a long time. Beep and hum of workstations, rustle of fabric, and not a word spoken as we all stand there and gape like a bunch of fools. I don't miss the fact that Patty reaches out and slings a casual arm around Genie's shoulders as they stand together. Nor do I miss the way Genie leans into the embrace. That jealous pang in my gut can just go to hell.

“Jen?”

I must have got even quieter than the rest of the crew. And Elspeth never needed technology to read anybody's mind. “Doc?”

She stands up straight and gives me another little nudge before she steps half an inch away. “When are you going to forgive Patty for not being Leah?”

I look down at the top of her head for six long seconds before I blink. “Why you always gotta ask the hard questions?”

“It's my job.”

“Uh-huh.” It's a good question, though, even if I hate it. And I know the answer, and I hate that, too: I'm not. It's a crappy answer, and it's not the Hollywood one. But it's true.

On the other hand, that's my problem and not hers, and I don't have to make it hers, do I? Because if I were a grown-up — which I'm not, not by a long shot, and I know that — but if I were a grown-up, I'd walk over there and drop an arm around her shoulders, and I'd pick Genie up, although Genie's big enough that she'd probably smack me for it, and I'd hug both of them until they squeak.

Oh, right. What the hell am I waiting for, again? I mean, really—

What's the worst that could happen?

“Hah,” Richard says in my ear, as I start forward. “Jenny, if you have to ask—”

Many men afterwards become country, in that place, Ancestors.

—Bruce Chatwin , The Songlines

Epilogue: eleven years later

1300 hours

Saturday 15 May 2077

Toronto Impact Memorial

Toronto, Ontario

It's been awhile since I felt soil under my feet: it presses my soles strangely, Earth's gravity harsh after so long aboard the Montreal . And yet I wander through the crowds on a fine May morning: the fifteenth. Leah's twenty-eighth birthday would have been next week. Taurus, the bull, and the year of the rooster. The moon of greening grass and false prophets.

The tourists and dignitaries and mourners don't step aside for me. I keep my head down and my chin hidden behind my collar, and if anyone notices me, it's to wonder why I'm wearing gloves and a trenchcoat on a warm spring day.

What is it that moves us to build gardens where people die?

Not that it's wrong. Something should grow out of this.

Hell. Something did.

I won't find Leah's name anywhere on the black stone paving the bottom of the shallow reflecting pool. Won't find it carved in the dolomite inlaid with stars of steel that surrounds the rippling water, or on the pale green-veined marble obelisk that commemorates the uncounted dead. I won't find Indigo's name or Face's name either, because here there are no names.

Only the water silver over black stone, and the splashing of quiet fountains, and the obelisk yearning skyward like a pillar of light. Like a pillar of desire, rising from an island at the center of the pool. An island the faithful have littered with offerings and farewell gifts.

The smell of lavender and rosemary wafts from the hedges, and early bees and butterflies service the blooms. The drone of their wings is the only sound on the air except for the whispers. Dick's done brilliantly — the ice caps are growing, the oceans receding, although they're still not at anything like historic levels. I hope he's able to stabilize the climate before it flips the other way, into an ice age.