Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 5

The Russian looked up over the rims of his reading gla.s.ses. "Am I an American?"

"No, you're not Martin Luther King, Jr.,"his partner said. "Seven. You'll never get this one."

"Hmph."The Russian set the pen down, considering his partner carefully. Considering the gloating smile. He frowned, feeling his eyebrows pull together. "Am I Caucasian?"

"Yes. Eight."

"Am I-" Hesitation, fingers through hair, a sunny smile as he played his victim onto the hook. "Am I a fictional character?"

"Yes. d.a.m.n you." That exasperated twist of the American's mouth told the Russian he had the answer. One more question, to be sure.

"Ten. Am I a spy?"

"No. You're an agent, you slick son of a b.i.t.c.h. A spy works for the other side. Put me out of my misery already."

"The other side? Whatever happened to 'G.o.dless Soviet?'" No answer except a shrug and a sideways roll of the eyes. The Russian grinned, triumphant. "Clever American. You very nearly had me stumped this time. Except you lied on one answer: not a communist?"

"I thought once I lured you down that backtrail I'd have you chasing red herrings until dinnertime. And how many communists dress in cashmere and drink guava juice for breakfast?"

"My friend, I never claimed to be a good communist. Detente is the art of compromise."

"Ah. I thought it was the art of letting the other fellow have your way."

The Russian answered with a shrug. "Ten games to four. My turn. Your name begins with the letter B."

Formidable.

Terrain.

The stench of rot strikes you like a train: it drives you to your knees and you blink, eyes watering, burning as you try to reconcile the realization that this thing is flesh with its sheer, absolute enormity.

I'm a biologist. This is-geology. What am I doing here?

Shattered buildings lie under its bulk. It oppresses, a fleshy tsunami, canyons and rifts red deep inside, oozing pestilence, maggots writhing in streams. Pseudopods. Trying to cla.s.sify, mind refusing. Rubbery ... skin? Is that a mouth? It looks like a crater.

Pulling the hood of your NBC suit over your face, you switch to internal oxygen. And then you stand and move forward (your tools spade and mattock rather than scalpel and forceps) to a.n.a.lyze the thing that fell from the sky.

Later, stripped of the red-daubed Tyvek, you lean forward in the pa.s.senger seat of a circling helicopter, finger numb on the shutter b.u.t.ton of a camera, listening to the autozoom, autofocus whir. "Bring it lower." The pilot obeys, although you're sure the fetor of the thing rotting thickens the air enough to trap the flimsy helicopter like a dragonfly in amber. Lower doesn't help: the scale of the thing's grey-blistered integument is too vast. You might as well try taxonomy on a watermelon held up to your eye. You think of the blind men and the elephant and you laugh underneath, because you know if you let the sound out it would bubble up like hysteria. It would be hysteria.

Ecological disaster, you think. This thing will foul Lake Michigan like a rotting buffalo in a water hole. You wonder about alien bacteria, viral propagation, impact on endangered species. And then you realize that the decaying latex plain you spiral was once Detroit Wayne County Metro Airport and with the realization comes comprehension: any impact you can imagine is just too f.u.c.king small.

"Take us up some." The pilot does, and the scale starts making sense. Five red furrows like canyons run eerily parallel, and then another five, and then the vast ragged wound, the ma.s.sively torn section that can only look chewed, and-because you are a biologist, were a biologist before you were the President's science advisor, because you are a biologist-you think of shrikes and thorns, leopards and gazelles draped high in the overarching branches of convenient trees.

"Holy s.h.i.t," you whisper, and the helicopter shudders with the pilot's reaction to your outburst.

You raise your eyes to the azure sky. Because it must have been a meal too big even for whatever goes with the claws, the teeth that rove those craters, those canyons.

And predators don't cache kills unless they plan to return...

Gone to Flowers.

I close my eyes and try to feel my left hand.

I'd swear to G.o.d it still dangles on the end of my arm just as it did for the first twenty-four years of my life: taut sensation like a strand of razor-wire looped from elbow to fingertip tells me so, cutting the numb absence of flesh. I want to slap my right hand over the pain, expecting the hot trickle of blood between my fingers. Instead, they curl on the cold metal examining table I'm sitting on, my skinny body stripped to the waist and shrouded in a paper sheet for decency's sake-not that I have all that much to cover up.

"It itches."

"I'm almost finished with the bandages," the doctor, Captain Valens, answers. "Not much to do for the itch, I'm afraid."

"I've lived with worse." My scowl tugs at scar tissue when I glance down. Captain Valens has laid his warm human hand on the gleaming steel of the prosthesis. He might as well touch the hand of a statue. From a point seven centimeters below the proximal end of my humerus, I will never feel anything but phantom pain again.

It must be antiseptic fumes making my eyes sting. The doctor grins at me. "So, what do you think of my masterpiece, Corporal? Not exactly s.e.xy, but it works..."

He's wrong. Dull gleams ricochet off the curved surface as I rotate the wrist, close precise fingers into a fist. It has a sensual air, despite-or because of-its look of pure, seamless evil. The months I've spent with the prototypes and simulations, the days in surgery and the weeks of recovery, the puckered red scars ridging my spine: this is the payoff.

It's s.e.xy. Far s.e.xier than the rest of my fire-scarred body, and I hate it with the sort of ideological loathing that used to be reserved for nuclear weapons and enemy politicians. Which is hypocritical, given the money and metallurgy the Army has spent into my scrawny carca.s.s: after nine years in service and that last bad one, I'm less meat than metal.

I examine a stained pulmonary chart on the wall, but Valens picks up my distress. "The prostheses will get better over the years," he says like a mom who desperately wants her kid to like a dubious present. "That's the next step from a prototype. We'll get a polymer skin on it to match the other one. h.e.l.l, someday you'll have sensitivity, heat, cold, you name it."

I force a scorched jack-o'-lantern grin and give him the finger. "Well, whad-daya know? It works."

And then the door to the treatment room bangs open and I grab for my shirt as Gabe Castaign barges in, a young Yankee nurse caught up in his wake. He's still in uniform, still wearing his baby-blue beret. "Sir!" she tries again, reaching for his sleeve without quite daring to grab him. "You simply cannot just walk in here..."

"Maker!" The nurse falls back a pace. Gabe has that effect on people. "You got the bandages off already? How does it feel?"

A shirt b.u.t.ton cracks in thirds between machine fingers: the one between my b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Of course. I curse in French and try to be more careful. "It feels like a G.o.dd.a.m.n train wreck strapped to my shoulder. But I'll get used to it." Then I realize what his presence in Toronto must mean. My face goes slack in hope and the fear that that hope is in vain. "Gabe-it's over? Tell me it's over." I'm pleading, even knowing it doesn't have to mean ceasefire. He could have been recalled for security detail. They don't let tourists up the CN tower since the last round of bombings. b.l.o.o.d.y shame. b.l.o.o.d.y isolationists.

He glances at his boots, shrugs broad shoulders. Castaign looks the role his great-great-grandfather lived, brawny bear of a fur-trapping northerner with eyes like bay water and hair that would be tousled if it weren't clipped high and tight. Even kept short for a helmet, it curls some. "Papers signed within the week. Nothing official yet, but peace has broken out."

I hit him at chest level and he wraps his arms around me. A moment later he gasps. "Ease off, Jenny!" He rubs his ribs as I back away. "Remind me not to arm-wrestle you."

I can't meet his eyes. "Sorry."

I'm sure they're looking at one another, Valens and Castaign, and I almost feel them reach the decision to go easy on me. Gabe drops a hand on my good shoulder, drawing my eye. "Hey, it's just a bruise, eh? No sweat."

I grin to show I'm trying, turning the damaged side of my face away, exquisitely aware of his touch. Stepping back is d.a.m.n hard. I manage. "No sweat, Gabe." His eyes are very blue. I look down to b.u.t.ton another b.u.t.ton, glad of the excuse. "Let me get some clothes on, will ya?" To Valens: "Can I go?"

"Off-campus? Sure, why not? Sign out." Valens wads gauze into the biohazard bag and peels off his gloves.

"I'll meet you outside in ten minutes." Gabe reverses his headlong charge with a flourish, bootsteps ringing on the speckled tile floor, still trailing that fl.u.s.tered nurse. And that is Captain Gabriel Castaign, CA.

I take a deep breath and finish b.u.t.toning my shirt.

It's more like seven minutes, but Gabe is already surrounded by his usual court: two second lieutenants and another noncom today, standing under bare trees and streetlights. A smaller population has been a mixed blessing: Canada's stayed more civilized than most of the world, but my generation went almost entirely to the military to keep it that way. Especially since the troubles down south closed the border: even the less-radical isolationists admit Detroit and Boston are uncomfortably close to home.

I'd lay odds that Gabe and I are the only ones here who've seen combat yet. Old joke: the difference between a second lieutenant and a private is the private has been promoted.

They'll learn.

Gabriel's friends regard me with blended awe and diffidence as I limp over, feeling the cold in every bone I've ever broken. Just after Christmas, the weather is already bitter.

Gabe hails me as if I hadn't seen him first. "Hey, Casey! This is Bruce and Kate and Peter, but you can call him Horse."

I clasp the hand Peter extends so tentatively. "A man called Horse?" I ask him. He smiles in confusion, but Gabe laughs out loud. He's a fan of old movies too.

"Ladies, this is Jen Casey, but you can call her Maker."

"Maker?" the female lieutenant asks. Gabe has been trying to hang a nickname on me, and it seems to be taking.

"A very bad joke," I reply. She raises an eyebrow and nods, familiar with Gabe's brand of bilingual puns. She's military intelligence, pet.i.te and shapely, with a pert nose and neatly cropped hair, on the right side of the yawning gulf between officer and noncom. I want to hate her for all of those things, but she doesn't flinch when-crisp, smiling-she takes my hand.

"Casey," she says. "You must be here for the research project. Did you have much spinal damage?"

d.a.m.n. I shake my head. "It's less interesting than it sounds." d.a.m.n. I stuff the prosthesis into my pocket to get the weight of their sidelong glances off it.

I haven't been off the National Defence Medical Center-the old Toronto General Hospital-campus in two months: I don't drive anymore and I've been too self-conscious to walk through Toronto's narrow, grey, neon-painted streets. I make them stop by my room on the way out so I can change into a better shirt and a warmer jacket. The boys turn their backs like gentlemen while I do it, even though I duck into the private bathroom-my room's only real luxury. Kate calls through the crack in the door when she lights on something that interests her.

"Is that an eagle feather, Maker?"

Nosey b.i.t.c.h. I pause a moment to ungrit my teeth. "A gift from my sister when I enlisted," I say, unwilling to give her so much but even more unwilling to look ungracious in front of Gabe. "Nell did the beading herself." I come out of the bathroom to see Kate's hand hovering over the shelf beside my bed where the terracotta-colored feather lies in a nest of chamois, bright beads winding the shaft. Warrior colors, violet and red.

"You have a sister?" Gabe asks, surprised. Kate drops her hand, but can't resist brushing her fingertips along the gorgeously mottled vane.

I flinch. "She died." And drag a leather coat out of the cabinet and zip it. "Let's go."

Gabe knows where to find every seedy dive and piece of rough trade in three provinces. The place he chooses features modern music and retro decor, with a striped carpet that makes my eyes ache. Kate leans forward, listening intently while Gabriel tells war stories, and then my arm aches too. Fortunately, the story where he pulls me out of the burning APC at the risk of his own life and the price of my left arm is not featured tonight.

The other three are off on a restroom errand when he reaches across the table and pushes raggedly fringed hair out of my eyes, tracing burn scars with one thick, nibbled finger. "When's this getting fixed?"

"Sweet virgin, no!"

He frowns and leans back, finishing his drink. "You're not a victim, Jen. Why you wanna wear your wounds like a badge?"

Chewing on my lip, I search for the answer that will make sense. "Over a hundred hours of surgery. I can't do anymore." And then I hate myself for the look of pity that crosses his face, so I laugh and shrug it off. "Besides, why bother? The service owns my a.s.s for another eleven years, Gabe. Or until the state of emergency is rescinded and the Mil-Powers Act revoked. You holding your breath for that?" Besides, it's not like my good looks ever got me anything but grief. And Chretien.

Gabe dials two more beers and doesn't answer until they're on the table. "They're not going to send you back out, Maker."

I know. I'm an ideal test subject: healthy enough to survive the ordeal and make a good adaptation to the tech, desperate enough to sign the waivers-and too badly traumatized to ever safely put in a fight again. You'd have to be crazy to allow your spine sliced open and electroconductive cones implanted in your brain to operate a pile of used-car parts. The long flexible box cuddling my spinal column might continue to work for years yet-unless it triggers a total failure. You'd have to be crazy to let somebody do that. Crazy. Or crippled.

The others return before I can answer, and after Kate leans over and kisses Gabe on the side of the neck I plead invalidity and exhaustion and creep away. I don't want to be around to watch... but I don't want to go back to NDMC, either. Kate's eyes follow me as I head for the door.

I wander in and out of the PATH when it gets too cold on the street, and I spend a long time just standing on a corner of Yonge, watching the traffic go by, stippled by the lights of a garlic-noodle shop and a fetish store. That cold chews through my leather jacket until I find another dive in self-defense. I get my drink and sit with my back to the bar, trying to ignore the anchor on the monitor telling me the eighteen-hour-old ceasefire in South Africa has been broken with shots fired near Port Elizabeth. I learn about an engineering lab bombing at the University of Guelph, and receive the rea.s.suring news that a group of extremists are rumored to have stolen a shipment of high-level nuclear waste somewhere in the U.S. Midwest. I concentrate on the crowd to distract myself from the closed-captioning crawl. Inevitably, someone catches my eye.

He might be nineteen. Then again, he might not. Anyway, he's staring at me. Hair half-cropped and half-ragged in Christmas shades of red and green, a studded leather jacket, rings and studs through his soft golden skin: probably the child of one of the families that immigrated from Hong Kong in the '90's. He's got guts, coming here alone. Plenty of people can't tell Beijing from Kyoto, and the j.a.panese are not... popular since our little altercation over the Malaysian trade issue.

My plastic cup cracks in the metal hand. I set the remains on the bar, shaking amber droplets of beer onto the floor before I swagger over to him, three-quarters drunk. I have to yell to be heard. "You got a problem?"

"You look pretty f.u.c.king razor, you know that? Where did you fight?" Disarmed, I half-step away. "South Africa. New England, before." He gestures me to sit. I hook a stool over with my boot. "What's your name?"

"Xu. Everybody calls me Peac.o.c.k." He gestures to his hair by way of explanation. He looks more like a parrot to me.

"I'm Casey. You can call me Maker."

He nods, stands. "So, Maker. You wanna dance?"

I've never been beautiful, but even crippled I've kept some grace. If you can fight and you can screw, you can dance. I think I shock him. He moves with a wiry finality I like, and he doesn't flinch from my scars or from the grip of the machine. He pays for my next drink and we both know what he's buying. We bang our gla.s.ses together dizzily; the room spins in h.e.l.lish Technicolor, a whirl of noise and clientele. He shouts in my ear. "You said you were in Africa!"

I nod hard. He leans closer. "You know a Benson Xu?"

I shake my head and shout back. "Your brother? What is he?"

He puts his mouth against my ear, which makes sense-except he's come to stand between my knees and his hands brush my thighs. "Armor," he shouts.

"He died near Cape Town."

I gulp my whisky and set the gla.s.s on the bar. "When?"

"Six months."

I wave my good hand at the prosthesis. "I was out of it by then. I was heavy infantry. A driver." I wonder why he's not in service. Exemption, or something else? I push the thought away: if I don't ask, I can say I didn't know about it, later.

He grins, reaches up, touches a bit of metal at my collar. I'd forgotten I was wearing a unit pin. "I noticed." He shrugs. The moment is... intimate.

Over the reek of the crowd I smell leather, liquor, sweat, and the harsh chemical scent of dye as he moves in for the kill. That's okay, because he's not even pretending to want me. n.o.body wants a tall, hook-nosed girl with a war-torn body. He wants a symbol. He wants to honor his dead.

I can be a symbol. h.e.l.l. I could use a symbol of my own.

I close my eyes as his hands clench on my thighs, thumbs pressing into muscle as his mouth comes down on mine like a blow struck in anger. I reach up and make a fist in his hair, but I have to open my eyes to do it because I have no sense of where the d.a.m.ned hand is. He groans into my mouth, catching my lip between his teeth, pressing me hard against the railing. The pain is welcome, a counterpoint. It's been a long, long time, but it all feels even better than I remembered.

Our teeth grate together until I taste blood. The crowd jostles us; my stool tilts dangerously under me as I close my eyes again and cling to him for support. I barely have the wit to open the steel hand when I feel him spin away.

There's three of them, but only two move well. The other one is a clumsy giant and all three seem oddly off-balance and slow. Someone shouts something: I can only guess at the words. The big one reaches for me, s.l.u.t kissing a yellow-skinned boy in public. The other two square off with Peac.o.c.k.

I put my hand into the big guy's chest, feeling no resistance. His flesh jumps away from my touch: it's the familiar time dilation of combat, seeming even more exaggerated tonight. Green twigs snapping; he rocks backward, mouth open in a perfect, silent "O" as he tries and fails to breathe. He sags to his knees with a certain stately grandeur.

I move toward the next one, bringing my knee up into his crotch as he turns away from my new boyfriend. Yeah, the girl can fight. The son of a b.i.t.c.h is wearing some sort of protection and he grins as he swipes at me. Slow, clumsy, slow... a hand moves toward me at three-quarters speed. I step around him and elbow his face into the bar. Bone crushes. He falls.

Peac.o.c.k bleeds from the inside of his right arm, but has a knife in his other hand. Another customer rises behind the last thug, raising a chair, and someone else beans him with a bottle, knocking him into the bad guy. Well, that's a riot, then....

I grab Peac.o.c.k's arm. Eyes wild, he's ready to strike until he sees it's me. He catches my sleeve; we break for the door and scamper into the alley, a couple of kids with stolen apples in our pockets and the market in an uproar behind. The air burns cold. I fall against the wall, sick with adrenaline and alcohol. Peac.o.c.k slumps beside me, breathing labored. "s.h.i.t, my jacket!"