“An antiquated catchphrase,” Richard says. “You might call it an advertising slogan.”
But is it really going to change the way the planet is run? Or is it just going to give us more differences to fight over?
“Too soon to tell. Might eventually give world leaders a hell of a lot of grief making people believe geographic boundaries have any value, though.”
“That will take generations,” Min-xue interjects.
I run both hands through my hair, turning my back on him — except I can't, really, because I carry him with me as I walk to the porthole and pause.
“Only one or two, Min-xue. Patty's already adapting to her AI linkages with real fluidity.”
Dick, does Ellie know about this yet? Valens and Riel?
“Only you two.”
They need to. They need—
Shit.
“Ah. I see you've arrived.”
“The Benefactors.” I say it out loud, and Min-xue, who has closed his eyes against the flicker of the lights, jumps at the sound of my voice. I don't see him jump. I feel it. Completely fucking bizarre.
That thing they do. Where they… slide through each other. That's why they grabbed Les and Charlie; they're still trying to talk to us.
He doesn't comment.
What are we going to do about it, Dick?
“It's easier to get forgiveness than permission.”
Because conspiracy's served us so very well in the past.
“There is that,” he says, spreading his fingers wide as nets while Min-xue looks on, watching silently. I catch something from him, a flicker of Chinese, a rhythm like poetry. It calms him, whatever it is. Mantras?
“Li Bo,” he answers, with that same off-center smile.
I know where you're going, Dick.
Richard likes watching me think, damn him to hell. “What?”
This is it. This is everything. I press my face against the cold, cold porthole crystal as if it could calm the sensation that has me shivering, the same sensation you have when you look up and you can see the wave breaking, and it's not on you yet, and it's much much bigger than you and it's much much too late to get out of the way. How did Charlie reprogram the first nanites, Dick? How did he get them to accept our alien earthling code?
“Gabe and I know the process. It's more straightforward than you might think.”
It's Min-xue, strangely, who breaks the tableau. I feel him come up behind me, and — light as a leaf brushing my skin — lay his palm against my shoulder, carefully touching only cloth. “It could kill them,” I say.
“Staying where they are will likely kill them, too.”
“And you're relying on my conscience, Dick?”
“The last time I checked, you were still arguably a human being. If I'm going to organize a coup, I'd feel better knowing I'm not a megalomaniac AI.”
Dick. He grins before I say it. You are a megalomaniac AI. That doesn't change the fact that you're right. Min-xue?
The Chinese pilot stares at me as I turn around to face him. His arm drops to his side. He looks at where Richard would be if Richard existed, and he nods, slowly, his eyes unfocused and his expression grave. “If the nanites are how the Benefactors communicate among themselves, and they've taken our two scientists alive, we might be forgiven for assuming that the contact is a further attempt to communicate with us.”
Of course, since we've seen no proof that the two groups of Benefactors can talk between themselves, there's no guarantee that adding a third language to the Tower of Babel will help—
“Did you spend your entire childhood in Sunday school, Jen?”
It only felt like it. Look, I'd feel better about this if we could ask Charlie and Leslie if they were game.
“So would I.”
“When fate intervenes, we serve where we are standing,” Min-xue says. “They would do it, if they knew.”
He's right, of course. How do you propose to pull this off?
“I'm going to… the closest equivalent would be to say I'm going to flash the bios on some of the nanites in the Benefactor… um, conjoined mass? When Charlie reworked the original Benefactor tech into something we could use, he cleaned out their brains with a focused electromagnetic pulse, and then retrained them. I don't have time to do that, but I do have considerably more information on how they work than he did when he started. And I have Gabe, who's a better code jockey than Charlie ever was.”
I try not to glow too much at the praise of Gabe. I'm somewhat attached to him.
“And then,” Richard finishes, “I'm going to try to take control of the birdcage entity, and get it to kick Leslie and Charlie free. I'll need somebody to catch them, if it works.”
Me, he means, or Min-xue. Or Patty. “And if it doesn't?”
“Then I'm going to use the nanites to begin to modify Charlie and Leslie.”
Without medical support.
“It will be less drastic than your surgery, Jen. I don't need them wired fast enough to fly a starship, after all. I just need to be able to read their minds.”
I find myself nodding, agreeing, knowing perfectly well that Wainwright and Valens are going to take turns breaking my fingers when they find out I knew about this, and I'm not even going to be able to work up a valid protest that I don't deserve it. All right, Dick. I'll take responsibility. But dammit—
“Yes, Jen?”
I want to be with you when you go on in.
Leslie Tjakamarra dreamed of flying, and he dreamed of being bitten to death by ants. Not separately, by turns, but both at once, in a timeless conflation of then and now and when that blurred into an unceasing whole. He dreamed of the wave that rolls across the water, but cannot change the water, and he dreamed he was rocked in the womb of the mother, wrapped in the coils of the rainbow snake. He dreamed he was dying, and the sun bleached his bones, both at once. All at once.
All right now.
Leslie Tjakamarra had a starship dreaming, and he had joked that it was just as well that he had no taste for starship, as his kinship with them precluded his killing and eating one. He had a starship dreaming, and all things that were had been sung already, were just waiting under the ground for their time to come. Alive in the Dreaming before they were alive in the world.
He had a starship dreaming, and here he was, drifting in space, blind and deaf, warm enough that he knew his heaters hadn't broken, cool enough that he knew he hadn't been knocked into sunlight with his radiators failing. He wasn't sure if the blow had caused his faceplate to opaque, or if it was simply too dark to see, or if he had been blinded. His inner ear told him he was floating rather than spinning, and while he couldn't move his arms or legs, pins and needles told him he hadn't been paralyzed. He might have a moment's air left, or an hour's, or a day's; however much it was, it was a lifetime's worth.
Time passed and the tingling in his fingertips receded, leaving cold numbness. He could imagine, if he thought about it very hard, that he felt a squishy colloid between his fingers, a texture that resembled mud mixed with cold Vaseline. The chill crept upward, numbing his palms, making his wrists and the bones of his hands ache before the sensation left them.
This is going to be a long, chilly way to die, Leslie thought, and tried to relax into it, to relax into the dream and the dying.