Elizabeth Bear - Wetwired 3 - Worldwired

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WORLDWIRED

Elizabeth Bear

Acknowledgments

It takes a lot of people to write a novel. This one would not have existed without the

assistance of my very good friends and first readers (on and off the Online Writing Workshop

for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror)—especially but not exclusively Kathryn Allen, Chris

Coen, Jaime Voss, James Stevens-Arce, Michael Curry, Ruth Nestvold, Chris Manucy, Bonnie

Freeman, Holly McDowell, Ejner Fulsang, Larisa Walk, John Tremlett, Amanda Downum, and

Leah Bobet. I am also indebted to Stella Evans, M.D., to whom I owe whatever bits of the

medical science and neurology are accurate; Peter Watts, Ph.D., for assistance with questions of

biology; M.Cpl. S. K. S. Perry (Canadian Forces), Lt. Penelope K. Hardy (U.S. Navy), and Capt.

Beth Coughlin (U.S. Army), without whom my portrayal of military life would have been even

more wildly fantastical; Leonid Korogodski and Claris Cates-Smith Ryan for linguistic

assistance; engineer Catherine Morrison and recovering biologist Jeremy Tolbert for fielding

questions about rising sea levels, alien microbiology, and decontamination procedures; safety

engineer Wendy S. Delmater; Meredith L. Patterson, linguist and computer geek, for assistance

with interspecies semiotics; Melinda Goodin for Australian Rules English assistance; Stephen

Shipman, for AI geekery; Chelsea Polk and Kellie Matthews for bolstering my knowledge of

the native music of Soviet Canuckistan; Celia Marsh for emergency, just-in-time delivery of

vintage Kate and Anna McGarrigle; Steven Brust and Caliann Graves, for advice and tolerance;

Dena Landon, Sarah Monette, and Kelly Morisseau, francophones extraordinaire, upon whom

may be blamed any correctness in the Québecois—especially the naughty bits; my agent,

Jennifer Jackson, my copyeditor, Faren Bachelis, and my editor, Anne Groell, for too many

reasons to enumerate; and to Kit Kindred, who is patient with the foibles of novelism.

For the sake of accuracy, I should note that in the interests of drama, my United Nations

bears about the same resemblance to the real one that an episode of Perry Mason bears to an

actual criminal proceeding.

The failures, of course, are my own.

ALSO BY ELIZABETH BEAR

HAMMERED

SCARDOWN

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 University of Connecticut, where her favorite classes were geology and archaeology,

although she majored in English and anthropology.

After six years in southern Nevada, she is currently in the process of relocating to Michigan,

where messages from travelers report trees and snow.

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.

A DF Books NERDs Release

WORLDWIRED

A Bantam Spectra Book / December 2005

Published by

Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

Bantam Books, the rooster colophon, Spectra, and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are

trademarks of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 0-553-90212-1

www.bantamdell.com

v1.0

To Kit

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Editor's Note

BOOK ONE

BOOK TWO

BOOK THREE

About the Author

Also by Elizabeth Bear

Preview for Carnival

Copyright Page

Editor's Note

In the interests of presenting a detailed personal perspective on a crucial moment in history,

we have taken the liberty of rendering Master Warrant Officer Casey's interviews—as

preserved in the Yale University New Haven archives—in narrative format. Changes have been

made in the interests of clarity, but the words, however edited, are her own.

The motives of the other individuals involved are not as well documented, although we

have had the benefit of our unique access to extensive personal records left by Col. Frederick

Valens. The events as presented herein are accurate: the drives behind them must always

remain a matter of speculation, except in the case of Dr. Dunsany—who left us comprehensive

journals—and “Dr.” Feynman, who kept frequent and impeccable backups.

Thus, what follows is a historical novel, of sorts. It is our hope that this more intimate annal

than is usually seen will serve to provide future students with a singular perspective on the

roots of the civilization we are about to become.

—Patricia Valens, Ph.D.

Jeremy Kirkpatrick, Ph.D.

10:30 AM

27 September 2063

HMCSS Montreal

Earth orbit

I've got a starship dreaming. And there it is. Leslie Tjakamarra leaned both hands on the thick

crystal of the Montreal's observation portal, the cold of space seeping into his palms, and

hummed a snatch of song under his breath. He couldn't tell how far away the alien spaceship

was—at least, the fragment he could see when he twisted his head and pressed his face against

the port. Earthlight stained the cage-shaped frame blue-silver, and the fat doughnut of Forward

Orbital Platform was visible through the gaps, the gleaming thread of the beanstalk describing

a taut line downward until it disappeared in brown-tinged atmosphere over Malaysia. “Bloody

far,” he said, realizing he'd spoken out loud only when he heard his own voice. He scuffed

across the blue-carpeted floor, pressed back by the vista on the other side of the glass.

Someone cleared her throat behind him. He turned, although he was unwilling to put his

back to the endless fall outside. The narrow-shouldered crew member who stood just inside

the hatchway met him eye to eye, the black shape of a sidearm strapped to her thigh

commanding his attention. She raked one hand through wiry salt-and-pepper hair and shook

her head. “Or too close for comfort,” she answered with an odd little smile. “That's one of the

ones Elspeth calls the birdcages—”

“Elspeth?”

“Dr. Dunsany,” she said. “You're Dr. Tjakamarra, the xenosemiotician.” She

mispronounced his name.

“Leslie,” he said. She stuck out her right hand, and Leslie realized that she wore a black

leather glove on the left. “You're Casey,” he blurted, too startled to reach out. She held her

hand out until he recovered enough to shake. “I didn't recognize—”

“It's cool.” She shrugged in a manner entirely unlike a living legend, and gave him a

crooked, sideways grin, smoothing her dark blue jumpsuit over her breasts with the gloved

hand. “We're all different out of uniform. Besides, it's nice to be looked at like real people, for a

change. Come on. The pilots' lounge has a better view.”

She gestured him away from the window; he caught himself shooting her sidelong glances,

desperate not to stare. He fell into step beside her as she led him along the curved ring of the

Montreal's habitation wheel, the arc rising behind and before them even though it felt perfectly

flat under his feet.

“You'll get used to it,” Master Warrant Officer Casey said, returning his looks with one of

her own. It said she had accurately judged the reason he trailed his right hand along the chilly

wall. “Here we are—” She braced one rubber-soled foot against the seam between corridor

floor and corridor wall, and expertly spun the handle of a thick steel hatchway with her

black-gloved hand. “Come on in. Step lively; we don't stand around in hatchways shipboard.”

Leslie followed her through, turning to dog the door as he remembered his safety lectures,

and when he turned back Casey had moved into the middle of a chamber no bigger than an

urban apartment's living room. The awe in his throat made it hard to breathe. He hoped he

was keeping it off his face.

“There,” Casey said, stepping aside, waving him impatiently forward again. “That's both of

them. The one on the 'left' is the shiptree. The one on the 'right' is the birdcage.”

Everyone on the planet probably knew that by now. She was babbling, Leslie realized, and

the small evidence of her fallibility—and her own nervousness—did more to ease the pressure

in his chest than her casual friendliness could have. You're acting like a starstruck teenager, he

reprimanded himself, and managed to grin at his own foolishness as he shuffled forward, his

slipperlike ship-shoes whispering over the carpet.

Then he caught sight of the broad sweep of windows beyond and his personal awe for the

woman in blue was replaced by something visceral. He swallowed, throat dry.

The Montreal's habitation wheel spun grandly, creating an imitation of gravity that held

them, feet-down, to the “floor.” Leslie found himself before the big round port in the middle of

the wall, hands pressed to either rim as if to keep himself from tumbling through the crystal

like Alice through the looking glass. The panorama rotated like a merry-go-round seen from

above. Beyond it, the soft blue glow of the wounded Earth reflected the sun. The planet's

atmosphere was fuzzed brown like smog in an inversion layer, the sight enough to send Leslie's

knuckle to his mouth. He bit down and tore his gaze away with an effort, turning it on the two

alien ships floating “overhead.”

The ship on perspective-right was the enormous, gleaming-blue birdcage, swarming with

ten-meter specks of mercury—made tiny by distance—that flickered from cage-bar to

cage-bar, as vanishingly swift and bright as motes in Leslie's eye.

The ship on perspective-left caught the earthlight with the gloss peculiar to polished wood

or a smooth tree bole, a mouse-colored column twisted into shapes that took Leslie's breath

away. The vast hull glittered with patterned, pointillist lights in cool-water shades. They did not

look so different from the images and designs that Leslie had grown up with, and he fought a

shiver, glancing at the hawk-intent face of MWO Casey.

“Elspeth—Dr. Dunsany—said you had a theory,” she said without glancing over.

He returned his attention to the paired alien spaceships, peeling his eyes away from

Genevieve Casey only with an effort. “I've had the VR implants—”

“Richard told me,” she said, with a sly sideways grin.

“Richard? The AI?” And silly not to have expected that either. It's a whole new road you're

walking. A whole different sort of journey, farther away from home than even Cambridge,

when there was still more of an England rather than less.

“Yes. You'll meet him, I'm sure. He doesn't like to intrude on the new kids until they're

comfortable with their wetware. And unless you've got the full 'borg'”—she lightly touched the

back of her head—“you won't have to put up with his running patter. Most of the time.” She

tilted her head up and sideways, a wry look he didn't think was for him.

She's talking to the AI right now. Cool shiver across his shoulders; the awe was back, with

company. Leslie forced himself not to stare, frowning down at the bitten skin of his thumb.

“Yes. I spoke to Dr. Dunsany regarding my theories—”

“Dr. Tjakamarra—”

“Leslie.”

“Leslie.” Casey coughed into her hand. “Ellie thought you were on to something, or she

wouldn't have asked you up here. We get more requests in a week than Yale does in a year—”

“I'm aware of that.” Her presence still stunned him. Genevieve Casey. The first pilot. Leaned

up against the window with me like kids peering off the observation deck of the Petronas Towers. He

gathered his wits and forced himself to frown. “You've had no luck talking to them, have you?”

“Plenty of math. Nothing you'd call conversation. They don't seem to understand please

and thank you.”

“I expected that.” Familiar ground. Comfortable, even. “I'm afraid if I'm right, talking to

them is hopeless.”

“Hopeless?” She turned, leaning back on her heels.

“Yes. You see, I don't think they talk at all.”

Leslie Tjakamarra's not a big man. He's not a young one either, though I wouldn't want to

try to guess his age within five years on either side. He's got one of those wiry, weathered

frames I associate with Alberta cattlemen and forest rangers, sienna skin paler, almost red,

inside the creases beside glittering eyes and on the palms of big thick-nailed hands. He doesn't

go at all with the conservative charcoal double-breasted suit, pinstriped with biolume, which

clings to his sinewy shoulders in as professional an Old London tailoring job as I've seen. When

London was evacuated, a lot of the refugees found themselves in Sydney, in Vancouver—and

in Toronto.

God rest their souls.

He shoots me those sidelong glances like they do, trying to see through the glove to the

metal hand, trying to see through the jumpsuit to the hero underneath.

I hate to disappoint him, but that hero had a hair appointment she never came back from.

“Well,” I say, to fill up his silence. “That'll make your job easier, then, won't it?” What do you

think of them apples, Dick?

Richard grins inside my head, bony hands spread wide and beating like a pigeon's wings

through air. The man's brains would jam if you tied his hands down. Of course, since he's

intangible, that would be a trick. “That's got the air of a leading question about it.” He scrubs

his palms on the thighs of his virtual corduroys and stuffs them into his pockets, white shirt

stretched taut across his narrow chest, his image fading as he “steps back,” limiting his usage of

my implants. “I'll get in on it when he talks to Ellie. No point in spoiling his chance to

appreciate the view. I'll eavesdrop, if that's okay.”

It might be the same asinine impulse that makes English speakers talk loudly to foreigners

that moves me to smile inwardly and stereotype Dr. Tjakamarra's smooth, educated accent into

Australian Rules English. No worries, mate. Fair dinkum.

Richard shoots me an amused look. “Ouch,” he says, and flickers out like an interrupted

hologram.

Dr. Tjakamarra grins, broad lips uncovering tea-stained teeth like a mouth full of piano

keys, and scratches his cheek with knuckles like an auto mechanic's. He wears his hair long,

professorial, slicked back into hard steel-gray waves. “Or that much more difficult, if you

prefer.” His voice is younger than the rest of him, young as that twinkle in his eye. “Talking

isn't the only species of communication, after all.”

He presses his hand flat against the glass again and peers between his fingers as if trying to

gauge the size of the ships that float out there, the way you might measure a tree on the

horizon against your thumb. His gaze keeps sliding down to the dust-palled Earth, his eyes

impassive, giving nothing away.

“How bad is it in Sydney?” I press my steel hand to my lips, as if to shove the words back

in with glove leather. Tjakamarra's head comes up like a startled deer's. I pretend I don't see.

“We heard it,” he says, as his hand falls away from the glass. “We heard it in Sydney.” He

steps back, turns to face me although I'm still giving him my shoulder. He cups both hands

and brings them together with a crack that makes me jump.

“Is that really what it sounded like?”

“More or less—” A shrug. “We couldn't feel the tremors. It wasn't all that loud, fifteen

thousand kilometers away; I would have thought it'd be a sustained rumble, like the old

footage of nuclear bombs. You ever hear of Coober Pedy?”

“Never.”

“There were bomb tests near there. Over a hundred years ago, but I know people who

knew people who were there. They said the newsreels lied, the sound effect they used was

dubbed in later.” He laces his hands together in the small of his back and lifts his chin to look

me in the eye, creases linking his thick, flat nose to the corners of his mouth.

Surreal fucking conversation, man. “So what does a nuclear explosion sound like, Les?”

His lips thin. He holds his hands apart again and swings them halfway but doesn't clap.

“Like the biggest bloody gunshot you ever did hear. Or like a meteorite hitting the planet,

fifteen thousand kilometers away.”

He's talking so he doesn't have to look. I recognize the glitter in his dark brown eyes, darker

even than mine. It took me, too, the first time I looked down and saw all that gorgeous blue

and white mottled with sick dull beige like cancer.

It takes all of us like that.

He licks his lips and looks carefully at the Benefactor ships, not the smeared globe behind

them. “The shot heard round the world. Isn't that what the Americans call the first shot fired in

their colonial revolt?”

“Sounds about right.”

He reminds me of my grandfather Zeke Kirby, my mother's father, the full-blooded one;

he's got that same boiled-leather twist of indestructibility, but my grandfather was an

ironworker, not a professor. His mouth moves again, like he's trying to shape words that won't

quite come out right, and finally he just shakes his head and looks down. “Big universe out

there.”

“Bloody big,” I answer, a gentle tease. He smiles out of the corner of his mouth; we're going

to be friends. “Come on,” I say. “That gets depressing if you stare at it. I'll take you to meet Ellie

if you promise not to tell her the thing about the bomb.”

He falls into step beside me. I don't have to shorten my strides to let him keep up. “She lose

somebody in the—in that?”

“We all lost somebody.” I shake my head.

“What is it, then?”

“It would give her nightmares. Come on.”

Toronto Evacuation Zone

Ontario, Canada

Thursday 27 September 2063

1300 hours

Richard habitually took refuge in numbers, so it troubled him that with regard to the

Impact all he had was approximations. The number of dead had never been counted. Their

names had never been accurately listed. Their families would never be notified; in many cases,

their bodies would never be found.

The population of Niagara and Rochester, New York, had been just under three million

people, although the New York coastline of Lake Ontario was mostly rural, vineyards and cow

pasture. The northern rim of the lake, however, had been the most populated place in Canada:

Ontario's “Golden Horseshoe,” the urban corridor anchored by Toronto and Hamilton, which

had still been home to some seven million despite the midcentury population dip. Deaths from

the Impact and its aftermath had been confirmed as far away as Buffalo, Cleveland, Albany. A

woman in Ottawa had died when a stained-glass window shattered from the shock and fell on

her head; a child in Kitchener survived in a basement, along with his dog. Recovery teams

dragging the poisoned waters of Lake Ontario had been forced to cease operations as the lake

surface iced over, a phenomenon that once would have been a twice-in-a-century occurrence

but had become common with the advent of Shifted winters. It would become more common

still until the greenhouse effect triggered by the Impact began to cancel out the nuclear winter.

An icebreaker could have been brought in and the work continued, but things keep in cold

water. And someone raised the specter of breaking ice with bodies frozen into it, and it was

decided to wait until spring.

The ice didn't melt until halfway through May, and the lake locked solid again in

mid-September. The coming winter promised to be even colder, a savage global drop in

temperatures that might persist another eighteen to twenty-four months, and Richard couldn't

say whether the eventual worldwide toll would be measured in the mere tens of millions or in

the hundreds of millions. Preliminary estimates had placed Impact casualties at thirty million;

Richard was inclined to a more conservative estimate of under twenty million, unevenly

divided between Canada and the United States.

In practical terms, the casualty rate by January 1, 2063, was something like one in every

twenty-five Americans and one in every three Canadians.

The fallout cloud from the thirteen nuclear reactors damaged or destroyed in the Impact

was pushed northeast by prevailing wind currents, largely affecting New York, Quebec,

Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Newfoundland, the Grand Banks, Prince Edward Island,

Iceland, and points between. The emergency teams and medical staff attending the disaster

victims were supplied with iodine tablets and given aggressive prophylaxis against radiation

exposure. Only seventeen became seriously ill. Only six died.

It was too soon to tell what the long-term effect on cancer rates would be, but Richard

expected New England's dairy industry to fail completely, along with what bare scraps had

remained of the once-vast North Atlantic fisheries.

And then, after the famines and the winter, would come a summer without end.

Colonel Valens's hands hurt, but his eyes hurt more. He leaned forward on both elbows

over his improvised desk, his holistic communications unit propped up on a pair of inflatable

splints and the unergonomic portable interface plate unrolled across a plywood surface that

was three centimeters too high for comfort. “Yes,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck, “I'll

hold. Please let the prime minister know it's not urgent, if she has—Constance. That was

quick.”

“Hi, Fred. I was at lunch,” Constance Riel said, chewing, her image flickering in the cheap

holographic display. Valens smoothed the interface plate, cool plastic slightly tacky and gritty

with the omnipresent dust. The prime minister covered her mouth with the back of her left

hand and swallowed, set her sandwich down on a napkin, reached for her coffee. Careful

makeup could not hide the hollows under her eyes, dark as thumbprints. “I was going to call

you today anyway. How's the Evac?”

“Stable.” One word, soaked in exhaustion. “I got mail from Elspeth Dunsany today. She

says the commonwealth scientists have arrived safely on the Montreal. One Australian and an

expat Brit. She and Casey are getting them settled.”

“Paul Perry said the same thing to me this morning,” Riel answered. Her head wobbled

when she nodded.

“That isn't why you were going to call me.”

“No. I have the latest climatological data from Richard and Alan. The AIs say that the nanite

propagation is going well, despite the effects of the—”

“Nuclear winter? Non-nuclear winter?” Valens said.

“Something like that. They're concerned about the algae die off we were experiencing

before the Impact. More algae means less CO2 left in the atmosphere, which means less

greenhouse warming when the dust is out of the atmosphere and winter finally ends—”

“—in eighteen months or so. Won't we want a greenhouse effect then?” To counteract the

global dimming from the dust.

“Not unless 50° or 60°C is your idea of comfort.”

Valens shook his head, looking down at the pink and green displays that hovered under the

surface of the interface plate, awaiting a touch to bring them to multidimensionality. He shook

his head and ricocheted uncomfortably to the topic that was the reason for his call. “We've

done what we can here. It's time to close up shop. Do you want to tour the exclusion zone?”

“Helicopter tour,” she said, nodding, and took another bite of her sandwich. “You'll come

with, of course. Before we open the Evac to reconstruction and send the bulldozers in.”

“You're going to rebuild Toronto?” Valens had years of practice keeping shock out of his

voice. He failed utterly, his gut coiling at something that struck him as plain obscenity.

“No,” she said. “We're going to turn it into a park. By the way, are you resigning your

commission?”

Valens coughed. Riel's image flickered as the interface panel, released from the pressure of

his palm, wrinkled again. “Am I being asked to?”

The prime minister laughed. “You're being asked to get your ass to the provisional capital of

Vancouver, Fred. Where, in recognition of your exemplary service handling the Toronto Evac

relief effort, you will be promoted to Brigadier General Frederick Valens, and I will have a

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