Authors: Elizabeth Bear
“You sound like Valens.”
“Hang him in a year, Jenny. Hang him. Hang Holmes. Hang anybody else you care to. But get us into space and train your replacements.” She lays her left hand flat on my cheek. “I beg you.”
Is this for real?
“She means it,” Richard answers. I almost feel him leaning over my shoulder.
“And think about what I said about Gabe,” she continues. “I really don’t mind sharing.” And then suddenly, unbelievably, Elspeth Dunsany looks me dead in the eyes and, without so much as blinking, bends down and kisses me square on the mouth.
The last time I kissed a girl was sometime in 2043 or maybe ’44, when a redheaded Russian peacekeeper named Yekaterina Kvorschyeva got me drunk on my ass and tried to take advantage of me in the pool room of a dive in Rio. She half had my shirt off when her girlfriend walked in. Thank God for small mercies.
I’ve got nothing
against
girls, per se. I just don’t have much
for
them.
Katya didn’t make it out of that war, come to think of it.
My first response is startle and fight-or-flight, but a woman who can barely lift her head isn’t in any shape to do either, so I settle for a smothered protest and somehow manage to get my hand on her shoulder, pushing her away as ineffectually as if I shoved at a hydraulic press. Sometime about the time the feedback starts—different, softer-edged than it used to be, belly-melting and surreal as a good big hit of nitrous oxide—I quit trying to push her away, and open my mouth to let her tongue brush mine. Because that’s when I realize that her right hand is resting over my breast, and her fingertips are spelling out letters against my body.
And damn, that’s smart. Because that’s a damned fine
distraction she’s set up, and anybody watching the monitors is unlikely to be thinking real clearly right now. I kiss her back, weakly, and her fingers spell t-r-u-s-t-m-e against the blankets. She draws back a couple of centimeters and catches my eye, and I take a breath and nod, tingling and warm all the way through. I really don’t much like girls. Not that way, anyway. But damn, she can kiss.
Which is when it gets weird. Because my left hand reaches up, too, even though I didn’t tell it to, and my body is moving the way it does in combat time, no feeling of my mind behind it, weakly pulling her back down and fastening my mouth over hers. And then I realize it’s Richard kissing her, using my body in an unguarded moment, nibbling on her lips like he means it.
The effort exhausts me, and I fall back against the pillow. “I will,” I say, and she knows I’m answering what she wrote and not what she said.
She smiles and wipes her lips with her knuckle, delicate as a cat. “Don’t worry too much about Richard,” she says. “We’re finding ways to limit his freedom of action and leave his cognitive function intact. He’ll be happy with that: you know Dick Feynman never met a concept he didn’t want to peel apart.”
And inside my head, the other Feynman is crowing. “I knew she could do it. Elspeth, you’re beautiful, and I would kiss you again in a second!”
Richard, did she just tell us that she’s building you a back door?
And he laughs and laughs and laughs while Elspeth Dunsany pats me on my shoulder and walks away. If he could, I think he would pick me up by the elbows and swing me around in a circle. “Jenny Casey, we may just get out of this mess after all.”
Afternoon, Saturday 14 October, 2062
National Defence Medical Center
Toronto, Ontario
It hurts.
Even with the narcotics, it hurts more than I would have believed. And I would believe a lot of pain. I’m starting to think, for a while there, I stopped believing in anything
but
pain.
What isn’t pain is numb and tingling. My feet still feel dipped in latex, dangling on the end of my legs like a marionette’s. Fortunately, after only a month in bed, there’s less atrophy than there was the first time I had to learn to walk again. Even Valens is surprised by how fast I’m on my feet—on my feet, clinging to parallel bars with my strange new hand—and Simon is positively staggered.
Walking. Learning to walk. Add that to your list of
once in a lifetime is enough.
The drugs are nice though. I feel floaty behind the pain, and not so cold, even though Valens has cut me back to just enough to take the edge off the agony, while I swear Simon measured the micrograms of my dosage today. So I can focus. Goddamn it, pain is
dull.
Eyes closed. One foot in front of the other, squealing with effort, my right hand slipping on the grab bar with the same sweat that beads my forehead. The left one feels odd. Hell, it’s odd that I can feel it at all. It’s so much lighter than the old one that it doesn’t pull my neck out of
line, and every time I lay the palm of it against the bar, I want to jerk it back.
It doesn’t feel like a real hand—the sensations of pressure and so forth are like the ones you get through pins and needles, and the brutalized musculature at the graft point still screams stiffly with any movement—but that it feels at all is a source of bewildering wonder. There’s still the phantom sensation, but with the clean grafts and the new input to the severed nerves, it’s discomfort now, no worse than the dull ache of a stubbed toe. Actually, for the first time in two and a half decades, my left arm hurts less than just about anything else, as the rest of my body is on fire with the sensations of reawakening flesh. There’s a hand on my right arm, guiding, supporting—my new physical therapist, whom I have already decided I hate.
And goddamn, it hurts.
“Come on, Jenny. Viens ici.”
I open my eyes for a moment, focus on the far end of the bars. Gabe is standing there with his hand out, waiting for me.
Merci à Dieu, I want a drink and a quiet window. I want to take Gabe out and sit in the sun and drink beer and eat poutine and get silly with the girls. Est-cela si beaucoup de demander?
Yes. Apparently so.
It is too much to ask.
Three meters.
It’s only three meters.
I could crawl that far. But it doesn’t count if you crawl. You have to do it on your own two feet. At least clinging to things is permitted. Encouraged, even.
I drag my left foot forward six inches, shift my weight, shift my grip on the bars. “Viens,” Gabriel says, and the pun doesn’t work in French quite the same way it does in English, but I can see from the twinkle in his eyes like sunlight on water that he’s thinking of it. The same way he was making his intentions quite plain when he tucked the
wolf into bed with me and showed me the jingling tags around its neck. “Jenny. Come on. Ten more steps and I’ll buy you a burger.”
Richard is quiet in the back of my head. I think he respects my privacy, and damned if I’m not grateful. “God.” Another shuffle forward, another six inches. It’s going to take more than ten steps, and I know it.
“Come on, Maker,” he says. “J’ai faim.”
“You’re gonna get a knuckle sandwich if you keep it up,” I growl, and he bursts out laughing.
“That’s the Jenny I love.” And damned if he doesn’t look like he means it.
Which, I think as much as anything, is what makes my hands slip off the bars so that I topple ignominiously forward, onto the mats, the physical therapist rushing to cushion the fall.
I don’t get my burger that day, because Valens comes as we’re finishing the session and cuts in between Gabe and my wheelchair. Have I mentioned how much I love wheelchairs? Weak as my arms still are, I can’t even manage the damned thing myself.
“Casey, I want to do some work on the implant programming today if you’re game for it. What do you say?”
“Jenny,” Richard says in my ear. “This is probably ‘it.’”
I know.
I shoot a glance at Gabe around Valens’s hip. Gabe is holding his breath, and the gesture he makes with his head might be a nod, or it might be a shake. I know him well enough to know what it means, too.
Be careful, Jenny.
I have the strangest, sudden image, of Elspeth spelling out letters on his skin, under the covers in a darkened room. Funny thing is, it doesn’t sting the way I thought it would.
“Sure, Fred. Hook me up.” I wink at Gabe and he steps back as Valens comes around the side and takes the handlebars on my chair.
“Gabe. Dinner? Cafeteria?”
“Sure,” he says. “I’ll bring the girls.”
“Bring Elspeth, too,” I call over my shoulder, and Valens pushes me out of the room.
I wonder where she goes to mass.
Hah. Maybe I’ll make it there after all.
Valens helps me to lie facedown on an examining table just like a million other examining tables of my acquaintance. He wires me into the machine with economical movements. My hair’s gotten long, for me, and he pushes it aside before he slips the probes in behind my ears. Valens doesn’t speak, and I’m glad, because my attention is turned inward.
Ready, Richard?
“As I can be.”
I don’t want to be a puppet again, Richard. I am done with being used.
“Jenny,” he says, and—having gotten to know a little bit about Richard Feynman in the past three weeks or so—I hear a world of history and the fates of war in that single word. “You and me, kid. We will find a better way to handle this. Get me on that ship. Enough, goddamn it, is enough.”
What are we going to do about the Chinese?
“We’ll think of something. I’ll see what I can do about finding the conditioning in whatever Valens is about to load into your brain. Deal?”
I hesitate.
Don’t risk yourself.
“Just get me on that ship, Jenny.”
Deal.
Richard doesn’t find a Trojan horse in the code. Which doesn’t mean anything, really, except he didn’t find one.
And Valens never did give me my damned HCD back, which means I can’t call Razorface or Mitch and find out what the hell really happened to my sister. Ah, well.
You’re in the army now, Jenny Casey. You’re in the army now.
0900 hours, Sunday 22 October, 2062
National Defence Medical Center
Toronto, Ontario
Valens returns my hip when he signs the paperwork to check me out and tells me he’ll see me at work on Wednesday, no sooner. Simon paces nervously beside me to the revolving front door.
I won’t let him take my arm when he reaches for it. I didn’t walk into this damned hospital. Either time. But by God I am going to walk out under my own power. I’m leaning on a cane, it’s true. But I’m walking.
We pause by the big glass windows. Outside, pedestrians in white coats and scrubs click past with professional tunnel vision. He takes a breath. “Jenny, I—”
“Save it, Simon. You were going to say you’re sorry.”
“Yes.”
I look up at him. I actually can’t tell the difference between my left and right side vision anymore. That’s taken some getting used to. “It’s … well, it’s not all right. But I’m over it.” I’m not, really. But let he without sin, and all that … or maybe I’m just too tired to care.
He looks down at the backs of his hands and then leans forward. And then he kisses me lightly, dryly on the cheek. “You’re the bravest woman I’ve ever met,” he says. “I’m going back to Hartford. Call me if you need anything. Ever, all right?”
“I will,” I tell him, and clap him lightly on the shoulder before I turn and walk out into the street.
Living in hotels gets old pretty fast, but it’s a fair sight better than living in hospitals. At sunset, I’m rereading the same screen of a detective novel for the third time, my brain failing to accept the information. My phone rings. I wave my hand through the contact pad, hoping it’s Mitch returning one of my half-dozen calls. If he doesn’t call me back soon, I’m going to have to find some other way to get the information about Unitek and the illegal drug testing onto the street. There has to be a way.
The image that materializes over the pad is Elspeth. “Jenny. You checked out of the hospital.”
“Valens released me this morning. I’m—” back at the hotel, I start to say, which is stupid because she called me. “On my own recon until Wednesday morning.”
“You should have called Gabe or me and let us know you were free. Fortunately, I figured out where to find you. Have you eaten anything yet?”
So much for my wallow. “Not yet.” I put my HCD aside and stand up. “Do you want to meet somewhere?”
“We’ll pick you up.” She grins. “We have things to celebrate, after all. Oh. Dress up.”
She cuts the connection, and I’m left blinking at the brief afterimage that flickers before the phone shuts off.
Dress up.
I have some clothes I bought to wear to the research lab—slacks and sweaters, mostly. I haven’t owned a skirt in nigh on thirty-five years, and when I go to the closet to try to find something presentable, I realize that I have a choice between grunge, a royal purple cashmere cowlneck and khakis, or the two dress uniforms that have somehow materialized in my closet, new and pressed.
Gee, Fred, thanks.
I don’t think so.
Fifteen minutes later I’m showered and changed and picking lint off the turtleneck, settling a blazer over my shoulders. I look up and almost jump back out of it, catching the reflection of a stranger in the big wall of mirrors by the corridor door. “Damn. Lights.”
The woman looking back at me is a stranger indeed. Her hair has grown out into a sort of boyish bob, steel black, silvering bangs falling across her forehead. They mostly hide the places where smooth, paler skin blends into her tanned medium-brown hide. The skin on the left side of her face, near the hairline, is oddly mottled, like a frog’s.
It’s all that remains of my scars. I wonder if it’ll fade.
I step closer to the mirror in the brightened hallway light, a vertical line creasing my brow. I take a breath and then another, feeling strange. If I turned my head to look at this woman on the street, it would be because of her bearing—because she is tall, and stern as the iron color of her hair. It would be because of the stubborn military shoulders and the chipped flint of an unmistakably Iro-quois nose, the crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes. I might not even notice the glittering steel of her left hand until she moved it in my line of sight.