Shoggoths in Bloom (35 page)

She was a meter and a half above her that last nut. Her heart stammered. She concentrated on her breathing, on moving smoothly, on turning her head slowly to search out a ledge, a pocket, anything she could get her toe against. There was a little overhang next, which would put her four meters above the nut.

Which translated to eight meters of fall before you took rope stretch into account. For every meter she fell, she’d fall faster than the one before, and when her sixty-three kilos hit that nut whose placement she wasn’t too secure about—

“Come on, Bridge,” she muttered under her breath. “If Val can do it on a leg and a half, what’s your excuse?”

She gathered herself, looked up to judge the distance to the roof, and then turned her head aside to increase the length of her reach and went for it. Foot up, swing, and lunge. Below her, Val cheered loudly. She felt the tug of the rope’s weight below her, the solid pressure of her toe edged on a flake that was far more secure than it looked.

Trust your feet. Trust your feet and go.

She hit it just right, balance and opposition making the move feel easier than it had any right to. Her body a tensile line of strength between hand and foot, she strained up, reached, found the edge. Her fingers gripped; slowly she transferred weight to the hand. Slowly, she eased herself onto the hold—

Her right foot popped off the wall and all her weight fell on her fingertip grip at full arm extension. Pain lanced through her shoulder and the palm of her hand; she swung for a moment, clinging reflexively, and then her own momentum pulled her from the wall.

As she dropped, she tucked. She hit that sketchy placement, and she heard the nut screech loose. She had just enough time for an unformulated hope that the rest of the pro wouldn’t zipper out of the rock when she felt the next piece catch her, and the rope stretch, and she struck the dirt and stones below with disorienting force.

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Brigit hadn’t finished bouncing when Val was beside her, crouched down as well as his prosthesis would allow, running hands across her legs and arms. “Lie still,” he said, even as she reached to push his hands away. “Back up,” she wheezed. “Let me get some air. I’m fine. I’m fine.” Rope stretch had taken most of her weight and she was more embarrassed than hurt, but residual adrenaline left her shaking and weak. She batted his hands away, and Val held his arms wide, recognizing her autonomy even if he didn’t agree with it.

“You might have a spinal injury,” he said.

Carefully, she wiggled her fingers and toes. “No,” she said. “It wasn’t as bad as it looked. My damn foot popped. And then my tendons—”

“How bad?” he asked.

She wiggled her fingers. “Thing I maybe strained a pulley tendon. And the rotator cuff. I don’t think anything is torn.”

She looked up and sighed before continuing, “And I said that placement wasn’t any good—”

“Well,” he answered. “You were right.”

Shakily, achily, Brigid got her feet under her and rolled onto them.

“You didn’t commit,” Val said. “You could have had it if you’d trusted the foot a little more.”

“Tentative.” Brigid shook her head. “I’m such a damn coward.”

Val shrugged and began unclipping the belay. “It’s a tough route. Give yourself a little credit.”

They started up again, this time with Val leading. He got up the thing like a damned mountain goat, edging on the rubber peg of his specialized prosthesis. He was sharp and confident and a little flashy, and Brigid loved watching him climb. But most of all, she envied him the grace and fearlessness with which he met every challenge the rock could provide. It must be easier, she thought, when you weren’t terrified. Watching him climb was like watching Nijinsky dance: he was made for it, and nothing seemed to give him pause.

Even the moves that were too hard for him—of which, admittedly, there weren’t any on the current climb. He’d just hit them, try, and fail undaunted. Until he found the way past whatever was slowing him down.

With the rope above her and Val on top belay, so she couldn’t possibly fall more than a few feet, Brigid sent the route without a single glitch.

“Dammit,” she said at the clifftop, staring down the ninety meters to the dirt below.

“You’re just scared of it,” Val said, rigging a rappel to descend. He’d be easier to resent if he wasn’t so damned nice. “A little more practice.”

“It’s a sophipathology,” Brigid admitted. “I could get my brain hacked. Call it buy in. Employee discount.” She spent enough time developing rightminding protocols—chemical, cognitive, behavioral, and surgical strategies to assist in the development of a mentally healthy population— that it wasn’t much of a stretch.

She continued, “All I want to do is just . . . turn down my amygdalae a little.”

“You are hacking your brain.” He tested the rig, leaning some weight on it before trusting it to lower him to the dirt below. “The old fashioned way. Come on, let’s get down off this rock and find a nice 5.10 you can lead.”

The drive back to New London was exhausted and mostly happy. Brigid still fretted slightly at the edges of her inability to lead the 5.11, but she had the sense to keep it to herself—and to try to enjoy the warm post-exercise glow of all the routes she had sent. She told herself it was human to fret about one failure in the face of many successes. She told herself that telling herself that helped.

“If you’re not falling off,” Val said, interpreting her silence correctly, “you’re not climbing hard enough.”

She shot him a sideways look.

He grinned. “Eyes on the road.”

As if the car wasn’t driving itself, anyway. Brigid dropped Val off and returned the ZIPcar to the charging station. The nearest tram stop was transmitting a half-hour wait, so she retrieved a community bicycle to transport her and her backpack full of gear back to her aptblock.

It was a twenty-minute ride, pedaling slowly under the weight of rope, pro, and other gear balanced across the bike’s panniers. The evening was summer-soft, a breeze off the waters relieving the humidity that had made the hike up Ragged Mountain such dripping misery. Brigid cruised past the salvage sites where workers were disassembling the uninhabitable old buildings doomed to be consumed by the rising waters of Long Island Sound. Brick by brick, stone by stone, beam by beam, the ante-Peak materials would be repurposed and reused.

In the cooler evening, the streets were busy with pedestrians, cyclists, pedicabs, trams, and a few automobiles. About half of the people on the street were privacy-shielded, skinned tight against curious eyes. The bike, fortunately, kept track of their locations for her, limiting the potential for collisions.

Brigid passed the waterfront Jay Street market just as the farmers were closing up shop for the evening. Her skins told her what was available. She paused and bought a melon, greens, and some farmer’s cheese. With pasta, it would make supper—even after a day of climbing.

Her block was a reconstructed building, originally built in the 1800s. The old pale granite façade remained, ornate with a band of archlike engraving below the roofline—but the roof itself had been retrofitted to a modern green farm, the huge old apartments broken up into modern convertibles, and the whole building enclosed in a sunfarm shell. The leaves of the sunflowers were furling for the night as Brigid returned her bike to the rack across the street.

She shouldered her pack with a sigh. The straps had dug bruised spots across the tops of her shoulders. Her calves ached with tiredness as she climbed broad, dished front steps.

Brigid’s apt was on the third floor. Normally, she’d run up. Today, her exhaustion and the weight of her rope made each step an exercise in concentration. But her door opened to the touch of her hand on the security pad. She dropped her climbing gear in the narrow hall closet and kicked her shoes in after.

Padding barefoot across the apt’s soft grass, she carried her dinner to the corner still set as a kitchenette and placed it on the counter. She started water boiling before heading to the bathroom, kicking balled clothes towards the cleanser. Five minutes under warm mist and sonics and she was fit to live in her own skin.

Her apt was spacious: close to seventy square meters of living space, still set for sleeping since she’d left in a predawn hurry. There was no point in putting it back now. Instead, she took her dinner out to the balcony in her pajamas, plate balanced on one hand and her Omni in the other. She should pay attention to the food, but by the time she was done eating odds were she’d fall into bed almost without cleaning her teeth, and the need to research nagged at her.

This was her life now: her body completely recovered from the sailing accident in her teens that had cost her both fathers but her mind still fighting the post-traumatic urges to play it safe, to limit her futures and her horizons. Twenty years ago was not long enough; not as far as the fear was concerned.

Sometimes she could still see the black water tossing below the tilting rail, taste salt and wind and hear her Papa Kevin’s voice loud and forcedcalm, saying Just swing over. If you fall, it’s only into the sea. That was hardwired in, now, locked into her memory through a series of neurological adaptations that she’d spent twelve years educating herself about.

She knew how trauma response and traumatic memory formation worked. She knew how cognitive tactics worked. Using the latter to control the former should have been child’s play, right?

All she had to do was keep climbing. Even though it scared her. And keep trying to trust people, even though they always went away.

Someday, maybe she’d even get on a boat again.

And of course, she thought, that has nothing to do with why you share this great big space with exactly nobody, and all you have to do on a Sunday night is catch up on the journals.

She set the pad down on a table, tapped it on, summoned up a virtual interface—left-handed, so she could eat with the right—and began using the Omni’s touchscreen to flick research windows into the air. She started in the public cloud, looking for popular overviews and opinion—working in a field could mean you lost touch with public perceptions, and public perceptions were part of what she needed to know.

She didn’t stay there long. Her work permissions included deep access to ABM’s research files, and she subscribed to a series of venerable research aggregators such as Science, Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Technology Review, Neurology Journal, Applied Neuromechanics, and half a dozen other technical publications, the cost of each averaging a cool 327.5 revals per annum. Even with the venerable Scientific American in there—and who could miss their “50, 100, 150, and 200 years ago:” cloudfeature?—to bring the cost-per-journal down, it was a little daunting.

She cruised through pages, skimming and flipping, indexing for keywords and metatagging for later perusal. She thought she’d get an overview tonight, sleep on it to integrate, and come back fresh in the morning. She could sleep in. While Brigid had one of the few jobs that still meant reporting to work in the morning—centrifuges and neurosurgery suites didn’t grow in AR—she certainly didn’t need to go into the office every day. A lot of her job was assimilating, synthesizing, and actualizing.