Worldwired

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-shoeBear, Elizabeth is the author of 'Worldwired ', published 2005 under ISBN 9780553587494 and ISBN 0553587498.