Worldwired (27 page)

He felt Leslie's approval at his sarcasm, and the internal quirk of Richard's humor that would have been a raised eyebrow or a twitched lip if they were simply three men sitting around a conference table, rather than sharing some bizarre brain space including bits and pieces of all three of them, but not
all
of any, and the undercurrent of alien presences—waiting, observing, straining as hard toward them as they strained back.

We have nothing in common,
Charlie thought. He leaned back in his chair, in his lab, among the dying ecospheres and the hydroponics tanks, and swung his feet onto the lab bench.
Not even a sensorium
.

Richard would relay the inaudible parts of the conversation to Jeremy and Elspeth. The ethnolinguist and the psychiatrist were in-wheel, in the work space they had shared with Leslie, modeling symbol structures or something Charlie didn't really understand. Charlie and Leslie could hear and feel everything that occurred in the room through Richard, and Richard would relay his own comments over the interior speakers, so it didn't matter if they were all in the same room or not, and he did his best thinking up here with the soybeans.

We apparently share a powerful desire to talk to one another,
Leslie answered.
That's more than my ex-wife and I had in common.

The most interesting part of their connection was that, while he didn't have Leslie's skills or his years of experience in just how language and communication worked, he
could
feel the model that Leslie and Jeremy were building with regard to communication with the aliens. Currently, it looked a great deal like a map. It was a map; a map of
something
drawn in terms of beings that sensed the architecture of space-time rather than the electromagnetic spectrum.

It would be extraordinarily useful, Charlie judged, once they got the chance to take the
Montreal
and the
Vancouver
out on a real spin, and overlay this map with what Richard and the pilots could learn about the
feel
of the local gravity wells—
For crying out loud, Leslie. You realize we don't even have a language with which to discuss this stuff, let alone a symbology with which to talk to the birdcages about it?
—they might be able to lay their own visible-light and X-ray map over the alien one.

By the way, we've got the lab results back. I've got to say, these guys really put the xeno into xenobiology.
Except what he gave Leslie and Richard wasn't exactly words, but more a concentrated lump of his own experience and the test results and what it all might mean, or might not mean, without the ambiguities of language. For Jeremy and Elspeth's sake, he summarized:
They're hydrogen based. What we call metallic colloidal hydrogen, probably supercompressed in their home environment. Something like the rocky core of a gas giant.

Elspeth had her back to the corner, her arms folded over her breasts, just listening. Almost nothing went over her head, but she usually stayed very quiet when the rest of the team was talking about subjects unrelated to her own specialty. Charlie suspected her thought process was keyed to intuition, and her long silences were her way of encouraging the penny to drop.

Leslie's thought, startlingly clear and tight for someone who was wrapped in a bubble of metallic colloidal hydrogen, kilometers away in the cold of space:
You can have a hydrogen-based life form?

Leslie,
Richard said,
apparently you can make a life form out of anything, as long as it has the power to conduct and regulate piezoelectricity.

Exactly,
Charlie agreed.
Don't ask me what keeps them from evaporating out here, though, or just . . . discombobulating. Or—and here's the kicker—how the hell it got that way. The weird part is that that means there's some process by which little informational and structural heterogeneities can arise and persist at pressures that smoosh hydrogen itself down to liquid. That's just
wild
.

Richard gave a scientist's chuckle, the sort that is usually preceded by the phrase “it is intuitively obvious.”
Charlie. You have a creature whose sensory system and technology seem to be predicated on perceiving and manipulating gravity.

He set the coffee cup down, sat back in his chair, and folded his hands behind his head.
That would tend to indicate that they're the original source of the nanotech, since we know the shiptree uses . . . visible light. For something.
His palms were sweating again, and he resolutely ignored it. If he got too nervous Richard would adjust his biochemistry. He hated relying on that. This was his life, a change that had been wrought on him, as randomly and unfairly as if he had lost a limb.

As long as he thought of it that way, and held up for himself the example of Jen Casey—her steel hand winking with machined precision and her absolute refusal to accept pity or, it seemed, to acknowledge even to herself that she had lost anything at all—he could hold it together.
Thank you for not actually laughing at me, Dick.

The AI grinned in his head.
No sweat.

In the other work space, Jeremy looked up from his interface. Charlie experienced the rearrangement of Leslie's attention as the xenosemiotician used the lab motes to follow his old schoolmate's gaze. It wasn't that different from inhabiting somebody else's body along with his own in a VR suit—the ghostly sense of limbs was identical, except it was his own body he felt slightly attenuated from, and the one he cohabited with that floated as if in a sense-dep tank.

Jeremy cleared his throat. “So now that we know what they're made of and how they experience their environment, how do we develop a symbolic system so we can move information?”

Leslie nodded.
And I ask on my own, when do we get started on the shiptrees?

Well, we could always send an EVA team over there, too, and infect their nanites with our nanites. Give
them
one of our scientists. After all, fair's fair.

Bring a camera,
Richard said. Charlie laughed, because of course Richard could record everything that he saw.

Wow,
he said.
Somebody write the date down. You realize that we've just witnessed the death of an ancient concept. Privacy.

Oh, I don't know,
Richard answered.
We can wall each other out more or less effectively. And if you squint at it from the right angle, you already have a bunch of individual consciousnesses inhabiting your head. Freud's id and ego and superego and so forth, or, if you prefer, Jung's “collective unconsciousness” or the left brain and the right brain and the—

“Modular-mind theory, more like,” Elspeth corrected. And then said, “Christ, Dick.”

Elspeth? What?

She straightened, her hands swinging as she stepped away from the wall and started to pace like a professor lecturing a class. “I think you just got yourself that second Nobel Prize, sir. You're absolutely correct. We have got a whole bunch of animals living in our heads already. Alien animals, animals that don't really communicate all that well. You ever hear about the experiments where somebody whose corpus callosum had been severed could be taught completely different things on each side of his brain, and couldn't articulate them to himself?”

Now that I pause to look it up.

“Well, your right brain and your left brain—well, not yours, Richard. You're a special case, of course. But say, Jeremy's, here—”

Jeremy laughed first, and swatted her mocking hand out of his hair. “I've known you not even a month, Elspeth, and already you take liberties with my person.”

She squeezed his shoulder before she stepped away. She folded her hands in front of her again, instead, leaned against the back of a swivel chair, and cleared her throat. “Essentially, the nonverbal side of the brain will resort to hand gestures and drawing images to get its message to the verbal brain. In extreme cases, the left hand will even grab and redirect the right hand when the left brain is about to make a mistake and the right brain knows it. But my point is, the hemispheres don't talk the same language on their best day. They communicate in terms of symbols and emotions and sometimes dreams or uneasy sensations or . . . hunches, for lack of a better term. Which is why so much of any therapist's work is interpreting between the subconscious and the conscious mind, and teaching them to understand each other, and that greedy little reptile in the back of all of our heads, as well.”

Charlie found himself standing, grinning until his cheeks hurt, his hands tight on the edge of the lab bench.
So you're saying we need a therapist, Elspeth?

They were all under tremendous stress, and his timing had been better than usual. When the hysterics dwindled into subdued coughing, Elspeth wiped her eyes on the back of her wrist and said, “In that analogy, I think we are the therapist. Or maybe the corpus callosum. In any case, I think we're halfway there.” Which was bad enough that even Richard groaned. “Leslie, are you getting this? Are you following me?”

You want me to try . . . Oh. Elspeth, Dick. Can you talk to Jenny and see if she can pass along an impression of what space feels like through the Benefactor stardrive?

“You want to see if it matches up with what you feel from the birdcages.”

I want to see if it's the same melody.
Charlie had a distinct sense of Leslie grinning. Charlie shoved his hands into the pockets of his lab coat and for a moment couldn't remember whose gesture that had been, originally, Leslie's or his own. Which would have turned the faint seasick unease in his stomach into full-fledged nausea, if he'd been willing to let it.

You're in denial, Charlie. Your whole life has changed.
And of course he knew Leslie felt the thought, and felt Leslie's warm assurance back through their shared thought process. There was nothing like finding yourself irrevocably mentally
welded
to another middle-aged man, and one with a quite different set of biases and assumptions, to trigger a thoroughly miserable midlife crisis. Even if your counterpart weren't—

A very small spaceship.

Yes, that.
Charlie wondered if Canada would buy him a little red sports car, if he asked extra nicely. As partial compensation for giving away half of his brain.

And I said to myself, self—

There's no guarantee it is irrevocable, Charlie.
Richard's voice, and his unique understanding of what it was like to share a mind with other consciousnesses, was soothing.
When we get Leslie back
—

If you get Leslie back,
Leslie said.

There is no if.

Charlie knew Richard was using the nanotech to regulate hormone and endorphin and adrenaline levels, to keep him calm and sane and rational. It was probably the only reason he
or
Leslie was coherent, rather than enlivening a rubber room planet-side. Or, in Leslie's case, floating between the stars glibbering and meeping like the protagonist of a Lovecraft story. That, and Leslie's strange determination that this was all an adventure, and that he had nothing to lose, and everything to gain.

He chuckled as Leslie's amusement welled up his throat.

I'm culturally programmed to a certain amount of comfort with otherspace,
Leslie said.
Being ungrounded from my body isn't quite the shock it might be to you.

I should have known you'd jump at the opportunity to flaunt your racial superiority,
Charlie answered, and Leslie laughed inside his head. The sarcasm
was
a defense, and he knew Leslie knew it. Still, he felt the chuckle and smiled himself, sharing the response. Because—on the other hand—when Charlie forgot to panic, the sensation of never quite being alone was strangely easy to get used to, and maybe even a little comforting.

“Charlie?” Elspeth's voice, distracting him—or drawing him back from distraction. “Try to stay with us, eh?” The motes showed the sidelong glance Jeremy gave her, and the way he rubbed one hand through his hair and then across his mouth, infinitely tired for the moment when her attention was turned away. Jeremy swallowed and swiveled his chair to stare out the porthole, only vaguely in the direction of the birdcage. A frown tugged the corners of his lips down. Charlie never would have understood the expression if he hadn't felt Leslie's discomfort like the itch of a peeling sunburn.
He's worried about you, Leslie.

Leslie shrugged the comment aside.
He always worried too much about me. Mind if I use your vocal cords for a tick? The motes annoy me.

Help yourself.

“Bob's your uncle. So what do we do next?”

“We talk to the captain about another EVA, I guess,” Elspeth said, and shook her head sadly through the resulting laughter.