BOOK ONE

10:30 AM
27 September 2063
HMCSS Montreal
Earth orbit

I've got a starship dreaming. And there it is. Leslie Tjakamarra leaned both hands on the thick crystal of the Montreal's observation portal, the cold of space seeping into his palms, and hummed a snatch of song under his breath. He couldn't tell how far away the alien spaceship was—at least, the fragment he could see when he twisted his head and pressed his face against the port. Earthlight stained the cage-shaped frame blue-silver, and the fat doughnut of Forward Orbital Platform was visible through the gaps, the gleaming thread of the beanstalk describing a taut line downward until it disappeared in brown-tinged atmosphere over Malaysia. "Bloody far," he said, realizing he'd spoken out loud only when he heard his own voice. He scuffed across the blue-carpeted floor, pressed back by the vista on the other side of the glass.

Someone cleared her throat behind him. He turned, although he was unwilling to put his back to the endless fall outside. The narrow-shouldered crew member who stood just inside the hatchway met him eye to eye, the black shape of a sidearm strapped to her thigh commanding his attention. She raked one hand through wiry salt-and-pepper hair and shook her head. "Or too close for comfort," she answered with an odd little smile. "That's one of the ones Elspeth calls the birdcages—"

"Elspeth?"

"Dr. Dunsany," she said. "You're Dr. Tjakamarra, the xenosemiotician." She mispronounced his name.

"Leslie," he said. She stuck out her right hand, and Leslie realized that she wore a black leather glove on the left. "You're Casey," he blurted, too startled to reach out. She held her hand out until he recovered enough to shake. "I didn't recognize—"

"It's cool." She shrugged in a manner entirely unlike a living legend, and gave him a crooked, sideways grin, smoothing her dark blue jumpsuit over her breasts with the gloved hand. "We're all different out of uniform. Besides, it's nice to be looked at like real people, for a change. Come on. The pilots' lounge has a better view."

She gestured him away from the window; he caught himself shooting her sidelong glances, desperate not to stare. He fell into step beside her as she led him along the curved ring of the Montreal's habitation wheel, the arc rising behind and before them even though it felt perfectly flat under his feet.

"You'll get used to it," Master Warrant Officer Casey said, returning his looks with one of her own. It said she had accurately judged the reason he trailed his right hand along the chilly wall. "Here we are—" She braced one rubber-soled foot against the seam between corridor floor and corridor wall, and expertly spun the handle of a thick steel hatchway with her black-gloved hand. "Come on in. Step lively; we don't stand around in hatchways shipboard."

Leslie followed her through, turning to dog the door as he remembered his safety lectures, and when he turned back Casey had moved into the middle of a chamber no bigger than an urban apartment's living room. The awe in his throat made it hard to breathe. He hoped he was keeping it off his face.

"There," Casey said, stepping aside, waving him impatiently forward again. "That's both of them. The one on the 'left' is the shiptree. The one on the 'right' is the birdcage."

Everyone on the planet probably knew that by now. She was babbling, Leslie realized, and the small evidence of her fallibility—and her own nervousness—did more to ease the pressure in his chest than her casual friendliness could have. You're acting like a starstruck teenager, he reprimanded himself, and managed to grin at his own foolishness as he shuffled forward, his slipperlike ship-shoes whispering over the carpet.

Then he caught sight of the broad sweep of windows beyond and his personal awe for the woman in blue was replaced by something visceral. He swallowed, throat dry.

The Montreal's habitation wheel spun grandly, creating an imitation of gravity that held them, feet-down, to the "floor." Leslie found himself before the big round port in the middle of the wall, hands pressed to either rim as if to keep himself from tumbling through the crystal like Alice through the looking glass. The panorama rotated like a merry-go-round seen from above. Beyond it, the soft blue glow of the wounded Earth reflected the sun. The planet's atmosphere was fuzzed brown like smog in an inversion layer, the sight enough to send Leslie's knuckle to his mouth. He bit down and tore his gaze away with an effort, turning it on the two alien ships floating "overhead."

The ship on perspective-right was the enormous, gleaming-blue birdcage, swarming with ten-meter specks of mercury—made tiny by distance—that flickered from cage-bar to cage-bar, as vanishingly swift and bright as motes in Leslie's eye.

The ship on perspective-left caught the earthlight with the gloss peculiar to polished wood or a smooth tree bole, a mouse-colored column twisted into shapes that took Leslie's breath away. The vast hull glittered with patterned, pointillist lights in cool-water shades. They did not look so different from the images and designs that Leslie had grown up with, and he fought a shiver, glancing at the hawk-intent face of MWO Casey.

"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 . . ."

Copyright © 2005 by Elizabeth Bear