Worldwired (2 page)

“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—”