Chill

13 available light

The orchid's hydra-headed blossoms looked delicate, but the tendrils were strong as carbon monofilament. And Benedick did not miss the manner in which--while one remained focused on him, petals up and forward as if straining with attention--the other four dragon faces bent down on their long stems, slicking petals back like reptiles flattening their frills. They gave the impression of hounds nosing after a scent, and indeed he saw one dart forth, grab the stiff, microwaved body of a leech, and gulp it down with head-jerking motions and a swelling of the stem.

While he observed, both worried and fascinated, the blossom that remained focused on him gently brushed his face and said, "The cyberleeches were particularly programmed to hunt for you. Why should that be?"

Now that he was looking for it, he could see the way some of the tuberous stems behind the array of flat-laid leaves expanded and contracted, showing fine, translucent green membranes between dark ribs. The orchid's breath across his face was sweet, refreshing--not scented, but laden with exhaled oxygen. He breathed deeply to clear his head.

He didn't know the answer to the orchid's question, but he thought he had a pretty good guess. When uncertain, stall.

"Is my sister alive?"

Two more heads--or blossoms--came up to regard him, fanged labellums jutting pugnaciously. They moved closer, swaying the length of his body as if conducting an inspection by sniffing. The gesture allowed him an intimate view of the fangs--sharply curved thorns eight or ten centimeters in length--which seemed quite adequate to a fight.

"Sister?" the orchid asked in a dragony hiss. "The other mammal?"

Its bellows worked even when it wasn't speaking. He also detected shifting aromas on the air that seemed timed to the pull in and push out. Was that its language?

Not very useful for long-distance communication. But then, neither would its whispery speech be.

"The other mammal," Benedick confirmed. "Is she alive?"

His orchid--the violet-and-yellow striped one--arched one stem way over as if to confer closely with the white-and-crimson splotched orchid restraining Chelsea. Three other blossoms remained focused on Benedick, while the fifth still snuffled after scraps of meat.

In the second plant's grasp, Chelsea lifted her sagging chin with neck-cabling effort. Her head wobbled briefly and tipped backward, but Benedick saw her blink. Her throat worked.

Her lips moved. The orchid supporting her shifted a coil of tendrils to support her skull, tipping it gently upright. She got another breath and muttered in broken syllables, "I'll live. Fuck it all."

Benedick winced in empathy. The burns on her face seemed to be healing under the froth of pale green foam, but the skin around it pulled up in dry ridges when she grimaced. Even her symbiont wouldn't keep that from hurting.

She glanced around, face rearranging itself from its tentative grimace to mild disbelief as she saw what had rescued--or captured--them. "Hello, ah, orchid-people."

Was that leaf-rustling laughter? The plant that gripped Benedick said, in its rubbing voice, "You have not answered the question, mammals. What have you done to deserve ambush?"

Benedick glanced at Chelsea. She looked up at him from under her eyelashes and somehow managed to twist her lips into what he took for an attempt at a brave grin. It looked more like a rictus.

It stung how much she reminded him of what Caitlin had been when they were still young and courageous in their ignorance. It stung because he had loved Caitlin when she was brash and overconfident, and Caitlin wasn't that, anymore. And neither was Ben.

"We are on Errantry. We are in pursuit of a fugitive criminal," he said. "Whether the ambush is her work or not, I am uncertain--but I would theorize that if it were not hers, it might be that of her allies."

"So that is your purpose here? You are doing nothing but passing through?" It took a moment to realize that the second orchid had spoken this time. Their whispery voices, if you could call them voices, were identical.

"And foraging as we go," Benedick said, remembering the mushrooms and eggs in the pack.

"You eat plants," it said. Benedick wished the voice had tone, so he could tell if its diction suggested horror, anger, or simple matter-of-factness.

Benedick turned his head to look significantly at a nearby cyberleech corpse. "And you eat animals. I would not suggest that you would willingly consume sapient ones." He hesitated, and looked the closest orchid face in the eyespots. "Would you?"

The rustling--the sound of the spiked, broad, body-armor leaves rubbed one over another in tight, fast circles--it was definitely laughter. "Clever mammal," it said. "Things-that-talk should not dine on things-that-talk. It is as you say. Is it perhaps that you are an ethical animal?"

That he had to stop and think on. Ethical in the intent, at least, he supposed, if not always in the execution.

The orchid did not seem to become restless while he considered. Perhaps plants were patient by nature.

"Perhaps," he agreed.

The orchid's coils loosened slightly, though they still cradled his limbs, offering support. One of the plants--his, he thought, by the bellows motions--asked, "Who are you?"

"I am Benedick Conn," he said. It had provided enough slack in the tendrils now that he could lift his wrist and gesture to Chelsea. "My sister is Chelsea Conn. We are on the Captain's business."

"The Captain!" the plant said. "There is a Captain?"

"Perceval Conn," Benedick said. Then, softly, trying to keep his voice level and calm, he added, "She is my offspring."

He wondered how much animate plants could be expected to understand mammal biology. They might find daughter confusing, or not--there were plants with male and female individuals, but he remembered the reaction to sister. It seemed to follow the concept of "offspring" well enough, however.

He felt it shift, resettle itself, and the leaf plates opened into a fantasia of agave-like spiral prickles. It said, "A scion! You must be proud."

Chelsea shifted in her bonds beside him, making a small sound that might be worry or discomfort. Benedick felt his lips thin. He drew his shoulders back. Proud was not the right word, but he supposed it could do, if one didn't mind being entirely incorrect. "She is very brave and clever," he said, and changed the subject. "I am curious. Do you have names?"

"No names such as mammals use." It seemed to deflate a little, which might be relaxation. He wondered how it moved, and what it used in place of muscles. Air-filled cells? Carbon filaments?

"How is it you speak our language?"

The rustling peaked. It seemed the orchid could talk and laugh at the same time, because it answered, "Television."

The next time Jsutien awoke, he was lucid. Caitlin breathed a sigh of bright relief when he blinked and said, "Chief Engineer?"

"You remember?"

"It's confusing," he said. "I remember a lot. I remember dying."

"Do you remember why my brother woke you?"

He nodded. "I was the astrogator. He told me the ship was under way again."

"The world is under way, and badly damaged." There was no grace in hiding the truth. "Do you remember why we chained you?"

He nodded once more, eyes closed, and winced as he probed his forehead, though his colony had long sealed the injury. Instead of commenting on Arianrhod's escape, however, he swung his legs over the edge of the cot. The stretch webbing sank under his thighs as he grounded his feet. "It's cold."

"We're conserving power."

He glanced around, frowning, obviously assessing how desperate their situation really was. His hands chafed together. "Were you--were we derelict a long time?"

"More than five hundred years," she said flatly. It was wanton cruelty and could have sickened her. But in this case, she told herself, ethics would wait on survival. She set her jaw against any revealing expression and waited for the news to strike through his facade.

He must have already suspected, because, though the corners of his eyes tightened, he only nodded. No protests of bereavement, no questions as to the disposition of his family and friends. Of course, the angel could be telling him some of that even now, and Caitlin would not know it.

Clear-eyed, he said, "So why did you bring me back?"

"We've lost our navigation, all our star charts, any information on our destination. We are mobile, but our resources are extremely limited. We need your help, Astrogator." She leaned back and spread her hands, fingers crooked. "We don't know where we're going, where we should be going, or what to expect, should we reach either destination."

"It wouldn't matter if you did," he said.

"What do you mean?"

His smile, when he got around to finding it, sat crooked across his face. He looked older than Oliver when he did that, as old as he--Damian Jsutien--must have been before he died.

But even when his face smoothed to neutral, she had no urge to call him by his old name. And not because she had not known Oliver: she had only just recognized him by sight. She had told her colony to prevent such accidents, and set it so that it would not even allow her to think of him as Oliver in error.

She wondered what it would be like to make that mistake. She wondered what it would be like to know you were capable of making such a mistake. People must have been so hesitant in the past, so guarded in their speech. No wonder, she thought, that Means were so closemouthed around Exalt.

Maybe Jsutien had the habits of a Mean, still, because he just blinked at her.

She said, again, "What do you mean?"

"This body. Who was he?"

So many answers, all of them bad. She'd never met Oliver. She'd wanted to. Benedick had liked him. Alasdair, it seemed, was easier on the younger ones. Age had mellowed or exhausted him, or they had been so distant from his power that he found no threat in them. "My brother."

"Oh," Jsutien said. "And what's that like for you?"

She shrugged. "Complex. But you knew that. You are avoiding the question, Jsutien."

He laid his unshackled hand across his right eye socket and pressed hard enough to raise the tendons striating the back. He said, "You are asking me to violate a sacred vow."

Whatever she had expected, it wasn't that. Oh, Ben. What were you thinking when you resurrected this one? She had to resort to her symbiont to keep the surprise from her voice as she said, "Are you devout?"

His lips curved. She'd caught him out. He laced his fingers in his lap. "I am an astrogator. Of the Ancient Order of the Astrogator-priests. Sworn to uphold the mysteries, and teach only those who serve an apprenticeship and take up vows of rectitude and secrecy."

"Again, the revealing un-answer. Your secrets died with you, Jsutien. Records were lost in the Breaking. Everything was lost, even the libraries. Your vow is to a dead order." She paused. "How ancient is that Ancient Order, anyway?"

"Built with the ship," he admitted. "Ritual and tradition, from the ground up. We were not supposed to know that, but the library knew."

The library. "Yes," she said. "I met him--what was left of him, anyway. Jsutien--" How do you break it to someone that he's the last of his kind? Oh, but he must know, mustn't he? There was no other reason for Ben to have brought him back. "There are no more astrogators. You are the Ancient Order. So it seems to me that the only person who can absolve you of your vows is you."

He grinned. "Honestly, I was always pretty sure Ng knew the dirty truth. No matter how we obscured our calculations, he could do his own math."

"Dirty truth?"

"It is a deep mystery of the Ancient Order of Astrogators," he said archly. "There is no destination. There never was."

Caitlin wanted to call Ben, but wanting to call Ben was a sort of dull, constant ache that she was used to by now. So instead she called the bridge, because Nova and Perceval needed to know, and the angel could pass on the information to Ben or anyone else who might be in need of it.

But when she made the connection, Perceval's face, stark under her shaven scalp, drove everything Caitlin was going to say about Jsutien's revelation from her lips. She flinched when she saw her daughter, but schooled her expression. She opened her mouth, intending efficient business--

And said, "When was the last time you ate something, honey?"

Perceval's avatar blinked, and looked over her shoulder at Nova, who had taken shape just behind her. A guilty glance--had the angel been pressing her to eat, or had she warned it off the topic? Her own symbiont would tell her how long it had been, so the glance was not for information's sake.

Perceval returned her attention to Caitlin. "The angel is fetching food now."

No one answers me directly. Something else that could make her homesick for Ben, if she would let it. Why the hell did he have that insane need to placate their father? Why couldn't he have stood up to the old bastard?

"When it comes," Caitlin said, "try to eat it."

Apparently, being Captain didn't remove the urge toward adolescent eye rolls. "Mom? The angel said you had something urgent?"

Caitlin said, "Your father reincarnated the high priest of astrogation from the Moving Times."

"The news is bad," Perceval said, and went from daughter to Captain in an instant, "or you wouldn't be groping around telling me things I already know."

"The news is interesting," Caitlin corrected. "He confirms the angel's information from Dust. There was never any destination. The world never had a goal."

Perceval's eyes narrowed. She swallowed hard enough that Caitlin could see her thin throat flex. Behind her, Nova leaned forward. "Why would anyone get on a starship with no destination?"

Caitlin felt her lips flex around the knowledge. "It was a scam," she said.

Perceval stared, looked aside, nodded. Glancing at the angel, Caitlin thought. Perceval said, "Like the bodies in the holdes."

"Excuse me?"

"The holdes," the Captain said. "They were full of bodies. Frozen people. The Builders told them they were being placed in cryogenic suspension. But they froze them and killed them and saved their corpses as raw materials."

"Were?" Caitlin said, already knowing the answer. "The ones that were left after the supernova." Perceval made a cutting gesture with her outspread hand. Her voice came tight and quick, but her expression stayed serene, inhuman. The placidity and ruthlessness of an angel. "We're using them."

Caitlin would not punish her daughter by letting shock show across her face. But it made her want to curl forward, as if around a blow to the solar plexus. Oh, baby.

The angel's avatar seemed to watch Perceval closely, and Caitlin appreciated the subtlety of allowing her to see him doing so. Somebody is watching over her. It would have been like Susabo, to offer that implied comfort; Caitlin could not imagine Dust making the effort.

"It makes no sense," Caitlin said. "To build an entire world, and set it adrift. The expense. The waste."

"The ways of the Builders are inscrutable," Nova said.

At least it made Perceval laugh--a sharp, pained bark. When she was finished, she said, "Maybe we are a sacrifice. Maybe we were never intended to survive."

"Bundle up your goods and treasures, and cast them into the dark," Caitlin quoted. She glanced at Jsutien; his nanochains whispered across the floor as he spread his hands in a shrug.

"I don't know," he said. "But then, why even make the ship spaceworthy?"

The angel shook its head. "There's more," he said. "The null zones are still spreading."

It was one of the interesting points of talking to an angel. Caitlin heard his voice inside her mind, like the still, small voice of conscience. He might have been saying anything to Perceval, to Jsutien, even to Tristen and to Chelsea and to Ben.

She had to trust they all heard, as she did, Nova say, "It's a creeping numbness. It begins in the extremities."

Caitlin sucked her lower lip into her mouth and nibbled it. Slowly, considering the implications both metaphysical and mechanical, she answered, "Like leprosy."

Caitlin's words cast a visible pall over the angel's face. That was a new thing, that emotion and reaction. Caitlin did not like to think on where it came from. She looked down, busying her hands on the half-forgotten, half-repaired console she sat behind.

"Do you imply we have been smitten for our offenses?" Nova said, after enough time had passed for Caitlin to wonder.

Caitlin looked up from her work. "Leprosy is not tzaraath, angel. It is not the condemnation of the God of the Builders that afflicts us. Although now I have an image of the world gliding serenely through the very bosom of the Enemy, ringing out bells and crying, Impure! Impure!"

"We have followed the path laid before us," the angel said. Susabo or Inkling--or Samael--would have pronounced it as if the words wore an armor of righteousness. Nova said it softly, big-eyed, as if seeking reassurance.

Caitlin folded one hand inside the other. The angels of the new world would not be like the angels of the old.

The orchids stripped Benedick's and Chelsea's ruined armor off, treated their burns with more of the cooling froth, and supported them through the winding arbors of the vertical forest. Benedick in other days had rarely envied the flyers of Engine--he, too, could have worn wings, if he had wanted them badly enough to put up with the nuisance value--but this journey was apparently the occasion on which he was given the opportunity to revise that opinion. Wings--like Perceval's lost ones--would have been of use here. The orchids were fabulously light for their bulk and moved with facile grace through the branches, drawn on strong, green tendrils. The humans floundered behind, struggling on uneven surfaces, often slipping and saved by their botanical companions.

The orchids were not heavy enough to counterweight a human, but their strength and their mastery of their environment were impressive. They could swing the two Conns bodily from level to level, anchoring themselves with one set of tendrils while lowering the humans as if on ropes.

Shafts of illumination flickered up and across between leafy boughs, but the vegetation competed to collect the available light. As a result, they traveled through humid, hyperoxygenated green gloom, bustling with birds and insects, great and small. Once, the striped orchid snatched a dragonfly from the air and tore it apart between two blossoms without a break in its motion.

Chelsea limped badly and kept touching the side of her face, but otherwise seemed to be recovering. Her harlequin orchid fenced her in tendrils, reminding Benedick of a parent caging a stumbling toddler. Upon inspection, that was not a particularly reassuring comparison.

"Are we prisoners?"

There was a sense that the orchids conferred--Benedick had the sense of a tight, exclusionary glance, though whatever transpired had happened below his or his symbiont's threshold of perception. Then one of them said, "You are on the Captain's business. We will treat your wounds, see you nourished, and escort you to the edge of our sphere of influence. Will that suffice?"

With his peripheral vision, Benedick saw Chelsea's faint nod. She chafed her forearms as if feeling the absence of her armor. Benedick could not have agreed more. Being unprotected--in the face of the Enemy, and whatever Arianrhod could throw at them--worried him more than the threat of combat.

Benedick said, "That would be kind. Are you taking us to your settlement?"

"Settlement?" Another pause, as if for conference. "We do not hive, as do animals. We are taking you through."

That seemed to settle it, and for a while Benedick did not find many further opportunities for conversation. Instead, he concentrated on the jungle, on Chelsea--who was moving more fluidly as her symbiont effected repairs--and on the threats that might lie around every corner.

With the assistance of the orchids, the descent proceeded fast. After half an hour or so, he tried again. "How far down does your domaine extend?"

"We live in this shaft," one of the orchids said--the striped one, Benedick thought, wondering if they had leaders. "There is no light above, nor water below. There, we cannot flourish."

Chelsea perked up, her matted hair breaking over her shoulders. She said, "Do you know what lies below?"

"Surveyors have journeyed south," one said. "We have charts. They are approximate, and may not be useful to you. They are enzymatic."

Chelsea and Benedick shared a glance. "No," he said. "I don't think we would find those easily readable. Can you offer us a description?"

"We can show you." This time, Benedick was certain it was the spotted orchid that had spoken.

"Show us how?" he asked.

It rustled. "On the television."

His symbiont had supplied a definition for the word the first time an orchid used it, so he knew his guide referred to a communications technology as obsolete as daguerreotype or the World Wide Web. Chelsea must have run the same research, because she said, "You're broadcasting on the electromagnetic spectrum?"

Rustling. Mammals, apparently, were pretty funny to a carnivorous plant. The striped orchid swiveled two faces at each of them and said, "We will show you."

The angle of their descent changed. Now, the orchids brought them closer to the shaft walls, slowing travel as the undergrowth thickened so close to the wall-mounted illumination panels. But they seemed to have not far to go. The orchids led them around one last enormous tree trunk and onto a sort of ledge dripping with thigh-thick vines, next to what appeared to be a vine-covered cliff face strangely unpunctuated by the ubiquitous trees.

The spotted orchid flipped two of its bladelike leaves forward, an impressive swivel, and used them to nudge between the vines. If Benedick had his armor, he suspected sonar would map a space beyond--but that suspicion was inadequate to the reality because, as the orchid spread wide its leaves, pushing the vines aside like drapes, flickering light spilled forth and a cavernous bay was revealed.

It was neither a room nor a cavern, but instead something like a hangar with flat video screens lining every wall of a space approximately ten meters tall and over fifty meters deep. Many of them were cracked, smeared, some of those flickering and others dark--but more than half burned brightly, glimmering with transitory images.

The floor was covered with more overgrowth of the vines, while down the center of the hangar ran long, parallel ridges about a meter and a half high, humped up under the foliage. At random intervals upon them, three dozen or so orchids rested, dazzling in their array of shapes and colors.

Many swiveled a face as the striped and the spotted orchid and their two escorted human guests came within the chamber, but not all, leading Benedick to wonder what exactly their sensory organs were and where they might be located. Some of the orchids were meters in length, shuffling arrays of tubers and blossoms with tens of heads. The smallest were no larger than a dog, and these had no blossom-faces at all.

They looked, but they did not come closer. There was some rustling of leaves and puffing of tubers among the orchids who accompanied them. Benedick wondered what they might be explaining.

Studying the layout of the chamber, Benedick came to understand that the humped ridges were rows of chairs, buried under vinous overgrowth. The orchids were only putting them to their intended purpose, although not in their intended fashion. He said, "It's a waiting room."

Chelsea shook her head, then made a face as if regretting the reflexive motion. Here, where the light was better, he could see that her right iris was clouded, but the raw acid burns beneath the flaking green foam that surrounded it were drying and growing over. It was only a matter of time before the eyeball healed, also.

"Transfer station," she corrected. "It's a terminal. What's through that way?"

She pointed at what Benedick had thought to be the back wall. But now, when he squinted, he could see the dense, narrow lines of another wall of vines.

The striped orchid leaned a blossom over her shoulder. "A pressure seal," it said. Benedick saw it shudder; from Chelsea's sidelong glance, she felt the trembling of petals beside her face. "The Enemy lies beyond. There was once another transit shaft there, but it is long failed and disassembled."

The orchid shuffled to the side and fanned all its petals and its blade leaves forward until its outline resembled a parabolic mirror. He knew he was projecting, but Benedick could not help but read its body language as pleased and proud. "Look!" it said. "Television!"

Benedick stepped forward to examine the images. Dramas, comedies, documentaries, something that seemed to feature tiny screaming people running from a creature represented by a man in a poorly articulated costume--all in two dimensions, some of them low-definition in crudely unfocused images, some in images without color. Each one seemed to be broadcast in silence, until he realized that if one sat or stood beside one of the tiny, self-damping, unidirectional speakers that projected from the back of each chair, one could choose a channel. Some of the larger orchids were watching several screens at once, their awkward bodies arranged so as to surround multiple speakers and their blossom-faces twisted this way and that.

Benedick stepped forward, momentarily captivated by an image of a bright wave of fast-moving water humping up, peaking, and curling over itself to break in a long, foaming tube. The sky behind was as brilliant as blood, and as he watched a human being, crouched on a narrow, colorful oblong, shot the length of the tube, just ahead of where it was collapsing into itself.

"What is he doing?" he asked, not caring if Chelsea saw his fascination.

"It's called surfing. That was on Earth," the orchid said. Benedick could hear the foreignness of the ancient words in its tone, or in the hesitation before it said them. "That was all filmed on Earth. The shaft has a library. The oldest among us say the programming repeats after about seventy-two years."

Benedick need not have worried about his sister. She was just as captivated, one hand stretched out as if she could reach the screen--reach into the screen, perhaps. "Is that what planets look like?"

"Parts of them," the orchid answered.

Her tongue flicked out the corner of her mouth. She said, very softly, "I always thought the thing about the sky being blue was poetic license. You know. Hyperbole."

Benedick looked at his youngest sister and thought of Rien, and still could not manage to make himself take her hand, or even to put into words what he thought. Which was: I should like to see one someday, too.