Why do I put up with her? Brüks asked himself for the tenth time. And then, for the first: Why does she put up with me?
But he thought he knew that answer already. He’d suspected it at least since she’d moved in next door: Sengupta liked him, in a weird twisted way. Not sexually. Not as a colleague or a peer, not even as a friend. Sengupta liked Daniel Brüks because he was easy to impress. She didn’t think of him as a person at all; she thought of him as a kind of pet.
Shitty social skills. Rakshi Sengupta was too contemptuous of etiquette to be bothered. But the fact that she didn’t abide by social cues didn’t mean she couldn’t read them. She’d read him well enough, at least; there was no way he’d ever tell Jim Moore what Sengupta had learned about his son. Not Dan Brüks.
He was a good boy.
The next time he saw Lianna, he didn’t.
He heard her voice—“Whoa, watch that—” just a second before the hab tilted crazily askance and pain shot up from—in from…
Actually, he didn’t know where the pain was coming from. It just hurt.
“Holy Heyzeus Dan, you didn’t see that?” Lianna popped magically into existence beside the Commons coffee table as he blinked up from the deck.
The table, he realized. I ran into the table…
He shook his head to clear it. Lianna vanished again—
“Hey—”
—and reappeared.
Brüks hauled himself to his feet, pulled the gimp mask off his face as the pain settled in his left shin. “There’s something wrong with this thing. It’s screwing with my eyes.”
She reached out and took it. “Looks okay. What were you doing?”
“Just trawling the cache. Thought I’d bookmarked an article but I can’t find the damn thing.”
“You encrypt the search?”
Brüks shook his head. Lianna far-focused into ConSensus. “Szpindel et al? ‘Gamma-protocadherin and the role of the PCDH11Y ortholog’”?
“That’s the one.”
“It’s right here.” She frowned, handed back the gimp hood. “Try again.”
He pulled it back on over his head. Search results reappeared in the air before him, but Szpindel wasn’t among them. “Still nothing.”
“Hmm,” Lianna said, and vanished.
“Where are you? You just dis—”
She leaned back into view from nowhere in particular.
“—appeared.”
“There’s the problem,” she said, and peeled the gimp hood back off his scalp. “Induced hemineglect. Probably a bad superconductor.”
“Hemineglect?”
“See why you should get augged? You could just pull up a subtitle, know exactly what I’m talking about.”
“See why I don’t?” Brüks conjured up a definition out of smart paint. “Nobody has to cut my head open to replace a bad superconductor.”
Broken brains that split the body down the middle and threw half of it away: an inability to perceive anything to the left of the body’s midline, to even conceive of anything there. People who only combed their hair on the right side with their right hands, who only saw food on the right side of their plates. People who just forgot about half the universe.
“That is fucked,” Brüks said, quietly awed.
Lianna shrugged. “Like I said, a bad superconductor. We got spares, though; faster’n fabbing a replacement.”
He followed her through the ceiling. “So you never told me why you were so old school,” she said over her shoulder.
“Fear of vivisection. When superconductors go bad. We covered this.”
“The reason that stuff goes bad is because it’s crappy old tech. Internal augs are less failure-prone than your own brain.”
“So they’ll work flawlessly when some spambot hacks in and leaves me with an irresistible urge to buy a year’s supply of bubble bath for cats.”
“Hey, at least the augs are firewalled. It’s way easier to hack a raw brain, if that’s what you’re worried about.
“Then again,” she added, “I don’t think it is.”
He sighed. “No. I guess it isn’t.”
“What, then?”
They emerged into the southern hemisphere. Their reflections, thin as eels, slid across the mirrorball as they passed.
“Know what a funnel-web spider is?” Brüks asked at last.
After the barest hesitation: “I do now.” And a moment later, “Oh. The neurotoxins.”
“Not just any neurotoxins. This one was special. Pharm refugee maybe, or just some open-source hobby that got loose. Might have even been beneficial under other circumstances, for all I know. The little fucker got away. But I felt a nip, right about here”—he spread the fingers of one hand, tapped the webbing between thumb and forefinger with the other—“and I was flat on my back ten seconds later.” He snorted softly. “Taught me not to go sampling without gloves, anyway.”
They crossed the equator, single file. No one in the northern hemisphere.
“Didn’t kill you though,” Lianna observed shrewdly.
“Nah. Just induced the mother of all allergic responses to nanopore antiglials. Any kind of direct neural interface finishes what that little bugger started.”
“They could fix that, you know.” Lianna bounced off the deck and glided along the forward ladder, Brüks clambering in her wake.
“Sure they could. I could take some proprietary drug for the rest of my life and let FizerPharm squeeze my balls every time they change their terms and conditions. Or I could get my whole immune system ripped out and replaced. Or I can take a couple of pills every day.”
The attic.
A warren of pipes and conduits, an engineering subbasement at the top of the ship. Plumbing, docking hatches, great wraparound bands full of tools and spacesuits and EVA accessories. Stone Age control panels in the catastrophic event that anyone might need to take manual control. A stale breeze caressed Brüks’s face from some overhead ventilator; he tasted oil and electricity. Up ahead the docking airlock bulged to starboard like a tinfoil hubcap three meters across; a smaller lock, merely man-size, played sidekick across the compartment. Spacesuits drifted in their alcoves like dormant silver larvae. Portals and panels crowded the spaces between struts and LOX tanks and CO2 scrubbers: lockers, bus boards, a head gimbaled for variable gee.
Lianna cracked one of the lockers and began rummaging about inside.
Yet another ladder climbed farther forward, out of the attic and up along a spire of dimly lit scaffolding. Afferent sensor array up there, according to the map. Maneuvering thrusters. And the parasoclass="underline" that great wide conic of programmable metamaterial the Crown would hide behind when the sun got too close. Photosynthetic, according to the specs. Brüks didn’t know whether it would shuttle enough electrons to run whatever backup drive the Bicamerals were putting together, but at least hot showers were always an option.
“Got it.” Lianna held up a greasy-looking gray washer, smiling.
For a moment. The look of triumph drained from her face while Brüks watched; the expression left behind was bloodless and terrified.
“Lee…?”
She sucked in breath, and didn’t let it out. She stared past his right shoulder as if he were invisible.
He spun, expecting monsters. Nothing to see but the airlock. Nothing to hear but the clicks and sighs of the Crown of Thorns, talking to itself.
“Do you hear that?” she whispered. Her eyes moved in terrified little saccades. “That—ticking…”