Worldwired (12 page)

“Do you have a country, Les?”

Oh, she was good at those sidelong glances, and sharp as a tack. He gave it the silence its weight deserved, and nodded. “Sometimes. I think everybody has a nation . . . sometimes.” And now it was his turn for the sly look across his nose, and she was already looking away when he did it. “Do you?”

She rubbed her arrogant nose with a gleaming steel forefinger. “Have a nation?”

He nodded.

“Sometimes,” she answered, and he laughed. And then she turned to face him full-on, and lowered her voice until they were the only ones in the room. “So tell me about this Dreaming.”

He gestured out the window, at the stars and the sun-catcher shape of the birdcage, small enough with distance that he could have covered it with his palm. He sorted out a child's explanation, and floated it in simple words. Beginner stories. Truth, but not very much of it, suitable for paddling your toes in. “The Dreaming is what came before, even though it persists to today. And everything that is or will be was already sung, predestined. It's all waiting under the ground to happen.”

“Everything?”

“You, me. Piper and Forward. The
Montreal
. Everything. We just haven't found it all yet. And the roads between the stars. Those were sung. That's what the songlines are, roads in music and verse. When you get to the end of your songline, when you don't know the verses anymore, you enter someone else's territory, but the melody continues. And if you know the melody, even if you don't know the language, you can find the way, because the landmarks are in the melody. It's just the stories that are in the words.”

“By that logic, the Benefactors were already sung, too.”

“How do you know they weren't?”

She stared at him. He turned and gave her a grin and she shook her head slowly, ruefully, as if in complex understanding. “Do your songlines go to the stars?”

He grinned, and nudged her shoulder with his own. “Now you're catching on. The road is the song. The song is the road.”

Her expression hardened, a fish that spots the hook. “What do you want, Leslie?”

“I get to suit up and come EVA with you tomorrow, right?”

She sighed and turned back to the window, staring out it, past it. Down the long parallel lines of the starlight, the expression in her eyes distant enough to have a chance of looking farther even than that. She shook her head, but she muttered, “You know how to operate a space suit, son?”

“I've checked out ground side. Never in zero G. Or vacuum.”

“Well,” she said, scrubbing her flesh hand and her steel hand against the thighs of her fatigues, “I guess we'd better get down to a cargo bay and get you some practice, then.”

Fairy tales don't teach children that monsters exist. Children already know that monsters exist. Fairy tales teach children that monsters can be killed.

—G. K. Chesterton

11:00 PM
Saturday September 29, 2063
HMCSS
Montreal
Earth orbit

Sometimes Geniveve Castaign liked to pretend she was invisible. She'd slip out of bed barefoot, midwatch and in the middle of the night. She'd tug her coveralls on over her pajamas, undog the hatchway, and ease her way into the corridor when she was supposed to be in bed asleep.

No one ever said anything, or did more than nod to her in passing. She shared her quarters only with Boris, Jenny's cat who had gotten to be the whole ship's cat by now, and she got special quarters in the civilian corridor because nobody on the ship's crew wanted a twelve-year-old roommate—even Patty, who was seventeen and who had a private room because she was a pilot.

She could wander all night, and as long as she dodged Elspeth and Jenny, nobody ever said anything. Nobody ever said anything, that is, as long as she stayed in the unrestricted-access parts of the ship, because they all felt bad about Leah. And because it wasn't as if Genie had to be up for school. And because the
Montreal
wasn't set up for kids, not yet, and wouldn't be until the first batch of colonists came on board.

And because they knew Richard and Alan were in her head, and Richard and Alan wouldn't let her get into any trouble.

In any case, it was 11 PM, and Genie had been trying to sleep since nine. She gave up, climbed out of her bunk, and went looking for Patty. Patty was up, of course. Patty was nearly a grown-up, and she
was
a pilot. And either she or Jenny always had to be awake and able to get to the bridge. Just in case. Although Patty's on-duty time was supposed to be spent studying.

Which meant she'd probably be in the ready room by the bridge, because Captain Wainwright had made sure there was a state-of-the-art interface in there, and that was also where Genie did her schoolwork, usually while her dad was on duty.

Genie wasn't supposed to be on the bridge unless she was invited. But the ready room also had a door to the corridor, and there was nothing to keep her from climbing in wheel, and nothing to keep her out of the ready room once she got there. Except—

“Where are you off to, young lady?”

Richard's voice always had a certain humorous tint to it when he called her that. She kept climbing up the access ladder, eschewing the lifts.
I couldn't sleep,
she answered.
I'm going to go do some homework.

Which wasn't exactly a lie, and Richard would probably know if she lied, but he didn't always catch on to truths that weren't . . . complete. He was too polite to just read her mind, or at least he pretended to be.

Richard coughed inside her head, a polite cough into the palm of his knobby, elegant hand, the white of his cuff extending past the sleeve of his jacket, a steel-banded watch glittering against his skin.
How come you wear a watch, Richard?

“It gives me something to fiddle with,” he answered, and demonstrated.

But you have a clock in your head.

“I find it helps me relate to meat-type people better if I keep myself reminded of what it's like to be meat. And you don't have a clock in
your
head, kiddo.” Affectionately, and said with the tone that would have gone with a hair-ruffle that Genie was
much
too old for, if Richard had been able to manage it.

No,
she answered, following the gray-carpeted corridor toward the bridge. She no longer even noticed how strange it was that it rose in front of and behind her, disappearing in back of the ceiling. Scuff, scuff, scuff went her feet. She amused herself by scuffing in patterns when she walked; short-long, long-short.
But I have you.

She felt the weight of his contemplation, the flow of ideas and the texture of his emotion, because he permitted her to feel them. A little bit wonder, a little bit pride, a little bit fear. “The ease with which you say that is going to worry people, Genie,” he said, quietly. “They won't understand it. They won't understand why having me in your head, why relying on me to know what time it is, doesn't worry you.”

Then they're pretty silly. You never bother me when I want to be left alone, and you're always there when I need you.
Unlike Leah. Unlike Jenny, who had always come and gone with very little rhyme or reason. Unlike Papa, who had always been worried about Genie because she was sick, and now that she wasn't sick, wasn't worried anymore.

Genie's mouth twitched. She didn't miss the cystic fibrosis. Really, truly. Not at all.

Even if she did miss not being invisible sometimes.

“Still,” he said. “You might want to keep it to yourself. Until there are more people like you. People can be mean when they don't understand things.”

Richard,
she answered dryly, as she reached her destination.
I know that. Do you think you're talking to a child?
He didn't answer. She grinned to herself and held her left hand up to the ready room door sensor so that it could read the control chip implanted under her skin. The door chirped softly and slid open. Genie went inside, and Richard “stayed behind.”

He'd be there if she wanted him. But for now, he did her the courtesy of letting her walk away.

Patty didn't look up when she stepped into the pilots' lounge-slash-ready room. As Genie had guessed, the older girl was bent over an interface plate, her fingers twisted through brunette hair, holding it out of her face like a heavy curtain. “Shouldn't you be in bed?”

“I'm always in bed,” Genie said. “I've spent more of my life in bed than anybody needs to. Whatcha working on?”

“Differentials,” Patty answered, and tucked her hair behind her ear. A few strands snagged on a silver earring shaped like a leaping dolphin; she disentangled them with a bitten fingernail, wincing. “You want something to drink?”

Genie shook her head and hunched down on a stool, tapping at another interface panel on the desktop without any haste, with one finger only. She leafed through her homework files and sighed. She was ten months ahead of the curriculum, and still bored. Leah would have offered to show her how the differentials worked; Leah always did most of her homework with Genie, and bragged to Papa that Genie was smart enough to handle it.

Leah had used to, anyway.

Patty looked up from her homework again, caught Genie's eye, and looked away quickly. Patty's mouth twisted; her expression said
creepy kid,
but Genie was too lonely to get up and leave, even if she knew Patty didn't want her there. Genie put her chin down on her fists and sighed, studying a too-easy problem in spatial geometry that floated in front of her nose. Sometimes she liked to pretend she was invisible.

Sometimes she just suspected she really was.

1:15 AM
Sunday September 30, 2063
HMCSS
Montreal
Earth orbit

The smaller lounge wasn't as private as the pilots' ready room, but Patty didn't feel like being that close to the bridge right now. Besides, if she was in the ready room, she would just start doing homework, and she didn't feel like doing homework.

And furthermore, she'd told Genie she was going to bed, because otherwise Genie would have hidden that big-eyed look behind her hair, never meaning for Patty to see it, and Patty probably would have broken into a thousand pieces all over the ready-room floor. And she didn't really need a crying jag.

Especially not when she was trying to be strong for Genie, and what she really felt like was moping about ostentatiously. Preferably somewhere where somebody could yell at her for it and make her feel suitably misunderstood. But that wouldn't be professional. And it would embarrass her grandfather. And disappoint her mother, if her mother . . .

Well, anyway. Which was why she was standing in the lounge, pretending to look at the magnified view of the shiptree in the holoscreen nearest the porthole. Which didn't help, so she closed her eyes and pressed her face against the crystal. It wasn't cold, though; the
Montreal
was bathed in sunlight, though it was the middle of the night and the ship, lightly staffed as she was, seemed almost deserted. And that was the problem, really.

Because Patty didn't want hero worship. Or sympathy. Or to be treated like blown glass.

All she really wanted was for somebody to yell at her, like a normal person with a normal family and normal problems. Like she was getting a C in physics or moping over a boy or . . .

Anything, really. As long as it didn't involve people walking on eggshells around her. She pushed herself away from the too-warm glass and went to get a disposable of lemon water from the dispenser. She was still fussing with the panel when the wheel on the entry started to spin, undogged from the outside, and the hatch came open.

Jeremy Kirkpatrick folded his long body almost double to peer through the hatchway, and then stepped over the knee knocker quickly and stood up inside the lounge. “You don't mind if I join you, I hope.” He paused for a moment before he closed the hatch, giving her a chance to say no.

“I don't mind,” she said, and finally fought the dispenser into producing her drink. “I'm not very good company, though.”

“I just came to look at the ship.” He dogged the hatch and walked past her, stopping where he could contemplate both the screened and the naked-eye views. The magnified one had the advantage of not spinning.

Patty bit the tip off her disposable. Dr. Kirkpatrick—no,
Jeremy
—folded his arms together and shoved his hands into his opposite sleeves. “Be nice to be telepathic about now,” he said.

“It doesn't help.”

He glanced at her, brow crinkling. “You can feel them, too?”

“Sort of.”
There's a bright answer.
She waved her left hand in a lopsided infinity symbol. “When Alan lets me. It doesn't make any sense, what they think, though. It's just like—”