“Yes. How did you—”
She shrugged. “I know,” she said. “I just know, okay?”
He bit his lip. He nodded. “Okay. Can you tell me about her? A little? Please?”
“I could.” She hesitated. “It would take awhile.”
“I'm not sleepy.”
She studied him a moment. “Do you play table tennis?”
“Table… tennis?”
“Ping-Pong?”
He shook his head. She shook hers right back at him. “What do they teach you in China?”
“How to fly starships.” Dryly, and quicker than she would have expected.
She snorted laughter, tight worry easing across her chest. “All right,” she said. “Put your bag in your cabin and I'll show you the gym and teach you how to play Ping-Pong. And I'll tell you about Leah. Okay?”
“Okay,” he said.
The Chinese pilots were faster. He beat her, seven to three.
Leslie had been next to bigger things. The Petronas Towers, for example. Uluru, which the ignorant called Ayers Rock. The base of the Malaysian beanstalk. The Montreal herself.
Only the rock had made quite the impression on him that the birdcage did.
They came alongside it about its midline, not that it displayed bilateral symmetry. Or radial symmetry, in fact — or any sort of symmetry at all. The design was rococo, the overall impression not too dissimilar from a baroque pearl if you ignored the fact that the silhouette was filigreed rather than continuous. The gaps between the bars of the birdcage were larger than they had seemed, from a distance. Some of the spaces compassed twenty meters.
And still the aliens continued their mechanistic ballet, taking no apparent notice of the cluster of spacesuited humans drifting like kewpie dolls alongside the — hull wasn't quite the right word, was it, for something whose inside and outside were delineated only by courtesy?
Leslie glanced over his shoulder and saw nothing but the edge of his faceplate and the padded interior of the dorsal portion of his helmet. “Jen?”
The pilot drifted up beside him, vapor trailing from her attitude jets. She stopped smartly. Of course, he thought, briefly envious of the reflexes that made her precision possible.
He put the thought aside. Attractive, maybe, to have the speed to pick a bumblebee out of the air. But hardly necessary.
“You rang?” she said. The lines that bound her to Jeremy came slack as the ethnolinguist drifted into the conversation.
Leslie waved a hand at the birdcage. His suit made the gesture broad. “Do you want to make any preparations before we take the plunge?”
He couldn't really tell through the gold-tinted shimmer of her faceplate, but he got the impression that she looked at him before she looked back at the alien ship. “I think maybe we shouldn't go all at once,” she answered.
“I think maybe I should go alone,” Leslie offered. “I'll take my lines off.”
“Dr. Tjakamarra, I cannot permit—” But he cut Lieutenant Peterson off with a second wave of his hand, and she fell reluctantly silent.
“I'm unlikely to drift off into a gravity well from inside the birdcage, Lieutenant.”
She coughed. “Your government would take it very amiss if we misplaced you, sir.”
“I shall be most exquisitely bloody careful, sweetheart,” he said, and flashed her a dazzling smile. Which of course she had no chance of seeing.
“I think I should go.” Not Casey, surprising him, but Charlie Forster. Leslie smiled. Charlie could no more sit on the sidelines for this than Leslie could. If the biologist were a hound, he would have been straining the leash.
Peterson again: “Absolutely—”
Leslie cleared his throat, making sure the suit mike was live before he did it. “Charlie? Elspeth's not here; you're in charge. What say we make it you and me, and the lieutenant and the master warrant can have our suits on override? That way, if they decide we don't know what we're doing, or if we look like we're about to go home the bloody hot way, they can yank us back on remote control?”
Leslie was proud of himself. His voice didn't even shiver. He sounded confident and a little bit amused, and the silence that followed told him they were thinking about it seriously. He tilted his head down and counted breaths, watching the gray-smeared planet spin between his boots.
If they'd been standing on the deck of the Montreal, Casey and Peterson would have been exchanging a long, opaque look. As it was, he was pretty sure they were burning up the private suit channels instead. He forced himself to breathe evenly — it wouldn't do him any good to pop a lung or wind up with nitrogen narcosis or… hell, he wasn't even sure what could go wrong if you were holding your breath in a space suit. And he was pretty sure he wasn't going to research it either. Some things, he was just as happy not knowing.
“All right,” Casey said. “All right, Leslie. It's what we're here for”—and he could hear her knobby shoulders rolling in a shrug—“although I don't like you boys taking point.”
“Somebody's got to,” Charlie said, while Leslie was still looking for the words. “And it's stupid to risk all of us. Just let us have control of the attitude jets unless it looks like we're getting into trouble. All right?”
“Yeah,” Casey said, and Peterson said “Roger.” And Charlie turned his entire suit to look at Jeremy, as Corporal Letourneau drifted up beside him and started working the carabiners loose. “Jer? Dr. Kirkpatrick?”
“You're goddamned welcome to it, old son,” Jeremy answered from a spot two meters behind Casey. “I'll be pleased to admit yours is bigger than mine. I'll float here and take pictures.”
“Beauty,” Leslie answered, and unclipped the lines from his belt. The gloves made him fumble, but they hid the fact that his hands were shaking, and they kept him from having to look up, away from the spinning earth, in the direction that they were going. “Bob's your uncle. Here we go. Oh, bloody lovely, Jer; look at that.” The line still in his gauntlet, he pointed.
“Les?” Jeremy slid past Jen Casey in an eddy of vapor and leaned on Leslie's shoulder. Miscalculated inertia set them spinning slowly, but Leslie grabbed Jeremy's gauntlet left-handed and got them both stable before Peterson had to intervene.
He looked up at the astronauts and grinned, and this time he was sure they saw it, even through the helmet. “See? No worries. Piece of cake.”
“Les, what did you see?”
He pointed down again. “The Great Wall of China. Look.”
The others looked, and exclaimed. “That used to be the only man-made object you could see from space, supposedly,” Jen said. “Before electric lights. Before the beanstalks.”
“Pretty story,” Les answered.
Charlie's chuckle cut him off. “Pity it's happy horse shit.”
“Charles.” Leslie loaded his voice with teasing disapproval. He used his attitude jets to tilt himself forward, peering through the sunlit thin spot in the pall of dust to see if he could pick out that spider-fine thread again. He could, just barely. “It's not horse shit. It's a beginner story, is all.”
“A beginner story?” Casey, the apt pupil. Of course.
“A story that's part of the truth, but only the uncomplicated part,” Leslie explained. Which was a beginner story in itself, and the circularity pleased him almost as much as the tricksterish unfairness of it all.
“Oh.” She paused, and he could almost feel her thinking. “So what else is man-made that you can see from space, then? That's not lights? Or beanstalks?”
“The Sahara Desert,” Charlie answered. And before anybody could comment further, he moved forward, and Leslie stuck by his side as if they had planned it like that.