Worldwired (49 page)
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
,
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.
But I guess we'll blow up that bridge when we come to it.
I pass a retired soldier on a park bench, stop, and turn back as his profile catches my eye. He climbs to his feet: still in uniform. “The jacket's gotten a little big for you, Fred. Did Patty tell you I was coming?”
She's doing grad work, now, at Oxford. They've rebuilt; Jeremy was invited to teach, and he recruited her as a student. Not that she would have had any trouble getting in, although Fred threw a fit when she decided to leave the service. It's good to see the kid getting what she wants for a change, instead of what her family's told her to want.
He shakes his head, his cover in his hand. Reddened cheeks pouchy, hair gone white but only slightly thinning, eyebrows that probably seem threatening when he glowers. “The
Vancouver
's just left on an exploratory mission, and the
Toronto
is about ready to fly. They're going to give her to Genie as primary pilot, although I don't think Genie's heard that yet, and she's not going to hear it from you.”
“Done at twenty-three. Damn.”
“Kid's special.” He shrugs. “And I wouldn't call it
done.
You have some finished apprentices for us, I hope?”
“Some.” I shoo a curious honeybee away. “So how'd you know I'd be here? Dick rat me out? Did Doc?” Elspeth would, too. If she thought I needed closure.
“Elspeth doesn't talk to me. No, I heard the
Montreal
was home. I guessed.” He sticks his hand out and I take it, glad of my gloves. Brief contact, as if we're in a contest to see who can be the first to let it drop. I turn and keep walking. He falls into step. “Gabe's not here? Elspeth?”
“Couldn't stand to come.”
“Did you ever get married?”
All three of us, Fred, or any two in combination?
Be funny if Elspeth and I did it, and kept Gabe around as a houseboy. Hell, I bet he'd be amused by that. Gabe, I mean. Well, Valens, too. “Why mess with what works?”
No answer to my sarcasm but the splashing of water as he strolls along beside me, supple and spry. Mideighties aren't what they used to be.
I scratch the back of my right hand. “You ever try again?”
“Georges raised parrots. He would have wanted me to pine.” He waves to the tall white stone, with the back of his hand as if his shoulder pained him. “I hear the colony is doing well.”
I shrug. There's a funny story about that, but it's not for today. “They're doing all right, I guess. I see those Benefactor ships are still in orbit.”
“Different two,” he says. “They change off. They still playing music at you?”
“And us at them. Jer, Richard, Elspeth, and Les have a pidgin worked out with the birdcages. And good chunks of a chemical—a pheromone—and a light grammar, I guess you'd call it with the shiptree. It's nice not having to
leave
Elspeth here, thanks to Dick and the wire. Gabe would drive me nuts without her.” I lower my head; he offers a handkerchief. I blow my nose. I'm not the only one. “They did a nice job on the memorial, Fred.”
“They did.”
The tide of pedestrians carries us to the edge of the reflecting pool at a shuffle and hesitates. Nobody pushes. We all take our time. Around me, people are unlacing shoes, rolling up pant legs, sliding stockings off. I do the same, a tidy little pile of socks and spitshined leather by the lip of the pool. People start staring when I peel the gloves off; I hear the murmurs. I hear my name once, twice, and then a ripple of excitement when I shrug off the black trenchcoat and stand there in the sunlight, barefoot in a fifteen-year-old uniform.
I don't look at them, but I can feel them looking at me, and the ones wading out to the island pause, each of them, as if a giant hand stopped and turned them in their tracks. Genie and Patty and Gabe came to the dedication, ten years back.
I couldn't. “Hold my coat for me, Fred.”
He doesn't answer. But he folds the coat over his arm.
The water's sun-warm against my ankles, the black stones slippery and smooth, bumpy with treasures. People stand aside as I stride forward, stinging eyes fixed on the blur of the obelisk, footsteps quick enough to scatter droplets of water like diamonds into the sun. I find the feather in my pocket by touch and draw it out—a little the worse for wear, but safe in its chamois. Like rubies, the beads catch the light when I uncover it.
There are words on the obelisk my eyes are too blurred to make out, even when I step onto the island and pick carefully between the scattered offerings—photos and flags, trinkets and caskets and a full bottle of 18-year-old Scotch—the airworthy ones weighted with the heavier.
I can't quite read the words, but they're graven deep and I trace them with a fingertip:
10:59
PM
December 21, 2062
I tug a bit of sinew from my pocket, because it's traditional, and I wind it around the obelisk—which is slender enough to span with my arms, like the waist of a teenage girl—and then I tie Nell's feather to it. Tight, just above the writing. So the veins I smooth with my fingertips flutter in the breeze and the glass jewels sparkle in the sun.
The stone's warm where I lean my forehead on it. When I straighten up and wipe my nose on the back of my hand, the crowd is so silent I hear my sniffle echo. Every single one of them stares at me, and they don't glance down when I stop at the edge of the island and glare, putting all the eagle in the look I can.
The moment is stillness, utter and heartless, and that stillness continues when I step into the water again and wade back to shore, sodden trouser cuffs clinging to my ankles.
Walking through the water. Trying to get across.
Just like everybody else.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elizabeth Bear shares a birthday with Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, and very narrowly avoided being named after Peregrine Took. This, coupled with a tendency to read the dictionary as a child, doomed her early to penury, intransigence, friendlessness, and the writing of speculative fiction. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and grew up in central Connecticut, with the exception of two years (which she was too young to remember very well) spent in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, in the last house with electricity before the Canadian border. She attended the
After six years in southern
Elizabeth has been at various times employed at: a stable, a self-funded campus newspaper, the microbiology department of a 1,000-bed inner-city hospital, a media monitoring service, a quick-print shop, an archaeological survey company, a doughnut shop (third shift), a commercial roofing material sales company, and an import-export business, with a somewhat flexible attitude toward paperwork among her achievements.
She's a second-generation Swede, a third-generation Ukrainian, and a third-generation Hutzul, with some Irish, English, Scots, Cherokee, and German thrown in for leavening. Elizabeth Bear is her real name, but not all of it. Her dogs outweigh her, and she is much beset by her cats.
ALSO BY ELIZABETH BEAR
HAMMERED
SCARDOWN
How much will it change mankind to assimilate a
truly
alien culture? How much will it alter our modes of being . . . and thinking?
