Worldwired by Elizabeth Bear

singing, Les?”
    He grunted and shrugged. “Singing up the country, kind of.”
    “Singing up the country?”
    “The land must first exist as a concept. It must be sung before it can exist. It must be perceived before it can be walked on. It must be dreamed. You should know something about dreamings, shouldn't you? Or do your folks call them by a different name?”
    She was still looking at him, a little quirk twisting her lips out of shape. “You know what an ‘apple' is, Les?”
    “A kind of fruit?”
    “A kind of Indian,” she said dryly. “Red on the outside. White on the inside. They never taught us any of that shit in Catholic school.”
    He laughed and finally returned her glance. “Sweetheart, you'd never believe how familiar you sound. Come with me.”
    “Where are we going, Les?”
    “To the observation lounge,” he said, and started walking that way. There was one advantage to wandering ways and a trained spatial memory; he'd been aboard the
Montreal
less than forty-eight hours, and he already knew his way around.
    The lounge was crowded, for once. There was a poker game in progress by the beverage dispensers and one or two people sitting in chairs near the porthole and monitors. Leslie paused beside those, off to one side so he wouldn't block anyone's view, and gestured Casey in beside him. She came without a word and stood there silently, looking where Leslie was looking. He heard the shallow catch in her breathing and smiled, knowing the deep, spinning view still tightened her chest as well as his own.
    The long fall gave him vertigo, but he waited until the silence got heavy before he said anything more. He waited until she cleared her throat, in fact, and cut her off as smoothly as if he'd been about to start speaking anyway. “You know, in my own country, you could point to any rock, and hill, and gully, and I could tell you who it was.”
    “Who?”
    “They're all ancestors, in the Dreaming. Everything is, in my own—”
    “Do you have a country, Les?”
    Oh, she was good at those sidelong glances, and sharp as a tack. He gave it the silence its weight deserved, and nodded. “Sometimes. I think everybody has a nation . . . sometimes.” And now it was his turn for the sly look across his nose, and she was already looking away when he did it. “Do you?”
    She rubbed her arrogant nose with a gleaming steel forefinger. “Have a nation?”
    He nodded.
    “Sometimes,” she answered, and he laughed. And then she turned to face him full-on, and lowered her voice until they were the only ones in the room. “So tell me about this Dreaming.”
    He gestured out the window, at the stars and the sun-catcher shape of the birdcage, small enough with distance that he could have covered it with his palm. He sorted out a child's explanation, and floated it in simple words. Beginner stories. Truth, but not very much of it, suitable for paddling your toes in. “The Dreaming is what came before, even though it persists to today. And everything that is or will be was already sung, predestined. It's all waiting under the ground to happen.”
    “Everything?”
    “You, me. Piper and Forward. The
Montreal
. Everything. We just haven't found it all yet. And the roads between the stars. Those were sung. That's what the songlines are, roads in music and verse. When you get to the end of your songline, when you don't know the verses anymore, you enter someone else's territory, but the melody continues. And if you know the melody, even if you don't know the language, you can find the way, because the landmarks are in the melody. It's just the stories that are in the words.”
    “By that logic, the Benefactors were already sung, too.”
    “How do you know they weren't?”
    She stared at him. He turned and gave her a grin and she shook her head slowly, ruefully, as if in complex understanding. “Do your songlines go to the stars?”
    He grinned, and nudged her shoulder with his own. “Now you're catching on.