Elizabeth Bear: Scardown

“Do you have windows in this craft?”

Wainwright chuckles. “Yes, we do.”

Patty hangs back as we enter the forward lounge, looking from view screen to window as if she expects something to jump out and bite her. I let the others drift past me and put my hand on her elbow when she trails them in. She doesn't speak and I don't either. You know what you've lost, sometimes, and there's no point in talking about it. You turn around and look at the ruins, and then you either sink down by the roadside and cry or you pick up your pack and hump on.

Elspeth walks forward, alone against that biggest porthole, and lays both hands against the glass. Two of the Benefactor ships hang out there, and I hear them conversing — or counting — back and forth with that muffled corner of my oh-so-profoundly enhanced brain. Patty shakes her head like a cat with an ear infection. I bet it's driving her nuts, too.

The ship on the perspective-left is the newer arrival: a glossy brown-gray twisted shape like a madman's totem carving, enormous hull limned with soft green and blue and purple lights in arcs and whorls that — almost — resemble patterns. They ripple in time to the rhythm of the bursts of static in my brain. Dit. Dit. Dit.

“Ship tree,” Charlie says, a grin splitting his doughy desk-jockey face.

I give Patty's arm a squeeze.

Perspective-right is the first arrival, and damned if I understand how anything lives in that. It's an enormous scaffolding, a drawn-glass Christmas tree ornament that gleams in the sunlight like leaded crystal. Ribs and vanes and macroscopic arches, the whole amazing structure open to the cold of space as if something were intended to hang in the middle of it, a pearl in a silver wire cage.

Except nothing does, and if I squint at that incredible creation just right, and under high magnification, I can see things like droplets of mercury — ten-meter droplets of mercury — sliding along its spans like rainbeads down windows. That one's not much like either of the ships on Mars.

Both the ship trees and the crystal cages are easily as vast as Montreal .

Elspeth raises her hand and points, finger tracing the path of one drop-of-mercury as it hurtles from one corner of the crystal lattice to another. “Dr. Forster, are those the aliens?”

Charlie leans forward to peer over her shoulder and then turns his attention to a magnified version on the nearest screen. “The shiny things? Dunno what else they would be. Seem pretty comfy in a hard vacuum, don't they?”

“Yeah.” Gabe, still holding Genie's hand. I bring Patty with me and follow them forward.

Elspeth looks up as we come over and smiles. “Patty, what does Richard say?”

Oh, Ellie. You are still so slick. Patty lost as much as the rest of us. More. Here we are, and we have each other, and links forged in shared fire. And Patty's got herself and the voices in her head.

“He says they're up to differential calculus,” she responds after a minute. “But no sign of language beyond that. He also says that the ship tree Benefactors — meaning the ones with the organic, grown tech — don't seem to be communicating with the crystal-lattice Benefactors any better than they are at communicating with us.”

“Oh.” Elspeth shares a significant glance with Charlie, who nods. “Really. They're still just counting”

“Yes…”

“Richard,” she says, “what would you say is the primary attribute that separates humans — and you and Alan, of course — from animals?”

“Sapience? It's a matter of degrees,” Patty answers for him.

Elspeth glances over at me. “Don't suppose you've noticed Jenny here talking to her cat?”

Richard's words, Patty's voice. “There are studies that indicate that monkeys and dogs, for example, have a sense of humor. And porpoises, African gray parrots, elephants, and some other animals seem to communicate on a very sophisticated level. There's math, of course, but Canadian ravens and some parrots can be taught to count—”

She cuts Patty off, but gently. “So what do we do that's so different? What's the first use we generally put any new technology to, if it's suitable? Other than bashing each other over the head with it, of course.”

I clear my throat as Elspeth's meaning comes clear before me. “Richard, who teaches animals to count? Who talks to them?”

“Researchers,” Patty says. And then, “Oh, my,” in her own voice. “We're patterns of electrical impulses that talk.”

“Yeah,” I say.

The two Benefactor ships float side by side, almost nose to nose with the Montreal . The rest remain in higher orbits, drifting, not touching. Wingtip to wingtip, and each one discrete and alone.

Wonder infuses Patty's voice, Richard's words. “You're suggesting that they need us for something our species is specialized for: talking to things that aren't quite like us.”

“Which is funny, considering we can't even seem to talk civilly among ourselves.” Elspeth steps away from the window, scrubbing her cold palms on her pants. She whistles low in her throat, shaking her head side to side. “I can't run this project. I don't know the first thing about interspecies communication.”

“Hell,” I say. “You're supposed to be the smartest living Canadian. Didn't anybody ever teach you to delegate?”

Ellie looks at me. Her eyebrows rise. “I'm going to need a metric buttload of linguists. And marine biologists, maybe, dolphin and primate researchers—”

I grin. In spite of myself, I grin.

“There. You're thinking now, Ellie.”

“Yeah,” she says. “I guess I am.”

I arch my back and feel my neck crack under the stretch. Squeeze Patty's elbow one last time before I step away. My left arm aches and I find myself rubbing at it the way I used to. Imaginary pain. I imagine someday this scene, the three ships so utterly different from one another, the scarred globe floating behind them, will be one of those images that becomes so familiar that people don't see it anymore. The view that spreads before me is being beamed into every datanet on Earth. Hey, Richard. I have an idea .

“Yeah?”

Riel still wants us to go look at this other planet when we've got the Benefactor issue figured out, assuming we ever do. What do you think the odds are that you and Patty and I can convince Wainwright she really wants to steal a starship?

I sense his hesitation, tapping on the quadruple-paned glass with my steel fingertips. Like tapping on the shark tank glass, and my reflection smiles at me until Razorface and Leah come back to me with an empty ache like a severed limb. Which is not a comparison I make as idly as most.

Because it occurs to me that you could get a hell of a lot of colonists on a ship as big as the Montreal. And they don't all have to be from Canada, do they?

“ Steal the Montreal ?”

Well. Borrow for a decade or so. I'm fucking tired of following orders. And what the hell are they going to do to stop me, Dick?

Elspeth puts her hand over mine and pulls it away from the window. “Penny for your thoughts, Jen.”

I tilt my head and grin, watching the mercury drops continue their gymnastics. “Thinking about colonies. Wondering how Riel would react to the idea of a worldwide talent search instead of just a local one.”

Elspeth chuckles, that half-swallowed ironic laugh I've got so fond of, and lowers her voice. “Funny you should ask that. How do you feel about extortion?”

“In a good cause? I'm all for it.”

“Good. Because Riel plans to use rides to elsewhere on the Montreal —and the Vancouver, when she's spaceworthy — as a carrot to complement the Benefactor stick. Eventually. I imagine it will take a couple of years.” She grins. “Maybe Patty and Dick's friend Min-xue will even get to help fly one of them.”