Dust

11 her own salt

It rains into the sea

And still the sea is salt.

—A. E. HOUSMAN,

"Stars, I Have Seen Them Fall"

When the suns emerged from behind the shadow panel, the others came looking for Perceval. She was glad to see them. She was starving, and she'd spent the time while she was waiting—once she'd analyzed and bathed in a clean trickle that flowed through a cracked bulkhead—performing exercises and walking among the trees, which dusted her hair and the parasite wings with petals. Some of those petals were the basilisk's— Gavin's—fault; he paced her, flapping heavily from branch to branch, companionably silent.

She welcomed the company; she was trying not to think about the wings. They weren't heavy enough to restore her balance, and they had a disturbing manner of shifting on her shoulders, demonstrating an eldritch intelligence.

She had paused to watch ants ladder up the trunk of a peach tree when Mallory hailed her. The necromancer's voice echoed off the roof of the Heaven a split second later, making Perceval smile as she turned to face them.

She knew what they had been up to, of course; it would have been hard to miss it, between the giggling and the scent of sex—and nobody had ever warned her how disturbing it would be to hear a necromancer .giggle—but that was all right, wasn't it? Rien was in clean clothes, her hair combed and braided, and Mallory was holding her elbow. They laughed every time they accidentally looked at each other.

Save me, Perceval thought, and said, "What's for breakfast?"

"There was fruit.. ." Mallory gestured to the plum tree they happened to be standing underneath.

"And pluck uninvited, in someone else's garden?"

By the necromancer's expression, Perceval thought Mallory was chewing that over for double meanings. But after a moment, Perceval was rewarded with bright laughter.

"There are stories about that, aren't there? I'll cook, then."

Perceval followed the necromancer back to the campsite. Somewhere along the way, Rien detached herself from Mallory and came to take Perceval's hand; the tension across Perceval's shoulders eased a little, despite the unweight of her wings. They went speedily, though Mallory stopped once to dig ramps and a second time to nick a bunch of mushrooms growing from the stump of a tree. The necromancer had a boot knife, a finger's length and sharp as a razor, to judge by how neatly it parted the fungus's flesh.

"You leave the base." The cluster of mushrooms disappeared into a bag, the knife back into an ankle sheath. "Then it grows again."

When they passed, Perceval wiped a ringer across the moist severed end. She could see the hair-fine corpse-white filaments that vanished into the crumbling stump. "We feed on it, and it feeds on death."

"Everything feeds on death," Mallory answered. "Especially me."

Breakfast was the fungus and ramps, a handful of spinach, and a foil vacuum pouch of silkworm larvae stir-fried in a nonstick wok. Mallory served the result in folded grape leaves; Perceval opened hers flat and, with chopsticks, began picking the pupae out.

"They're good protein," Mallory said, demonstrating. Pop, and crunch in half. Darting chopsticks picked something from the carapace and flicked it away and then the rest was gone as if it had never been. "You'll want a full belly when you go."

Doubtfully, Perceval poked one with the end of a chop-stick. Rien seemed unsqueamish; her breakfast was rapidly disappearing. "Are we going, then? Is Rien well enough?"

"After you eat," Mallory said, managing not to either look at Rien, or giggle. "I'll send Gavin along to guide you. And I'll fix you a pack."

Perceval sighed, picked up the pupae, and bit it in half. People really would eat anything.

It crunched, and tasted of tofu, though the texture inside the shell was more like the part of mango closest to the pit. She peered inside and saw a darker bit, which she—with some difficulty—picked out. The second half followed the first. Mostly she tasted the ramps, and some garlic she hadn't seen Mallory put into the oil.

"All right," she said. "It's not bad."

And it was full of protein; a quick analysis confirmed. Perceval picked up the grape leaf and continued to eat. But something, she thought, seemed strange about the light.

She glanced up at the suns, shading her eyes with a translucent wing, although they adapted fairly well to the direct light.

"Huh," she said. "That's funny."

Mallory looked up, as did Rien, and both made encouraging full-mouthed noises.

"The suns," Perceval explained. "It looks like they're throbbing. We must be having a flare."

"It happens," Mallory said.

"Yes," said Rien, before she paused to swallow. "A lot lately."

It was hard, leaving. After breakfast, Rien wandered from tree to tree, sniffing flowers for the whirls of music and speech and equations that flowed through her head when she did so. She didn't hear Mallory come up behind her until the necromancer reached over her shoulder, tugged a branch down, and said by her ear, "Partake."

"Should I?"

"It's my garden," Mallory answered. "I offered. And wherever you wind up, what you learn here may help you."

The fruit was cool, its purple skin kissed with frosty bloom. She plucked it, raised it to her mouth, but did not bite.

Still in her ear, Mallory said, "Your pack. Food and blankets and fresh clothes."

Rien turned to face the necromancer as the padded strap slid into her other hand. "You offer a lot, for someone who only just met us."

If the exclusionary us hurt, it didn't show in Mallory's expression. "I have reasons to be interested in your quest, and its outcome." A kiss, petal-soft, brushed Rien's mouth. "If the Angel of Communication wasn't dead, I'd tell you I would call."

Rien smiled, and kissed Mallory's moving lips. "I'd tell you you were welcome to. What's the fruit of this tree, then?"

Mallory looked up, leaving Rien to study nose and chin and throat in profile. "Mathematics, I think. Every fruit is different, and there is no way to tell until you put it in your mouth. You know, you're very well educated, for someone who was raised a Mean."

That put Rien's back up. "Head saw to it."

"An unusual person." With a wrist-led gesture, the necromancer indicated a white peach tree that stood in a clear spot, not far. "That is my special tree."

Rien looked at the plum in her hand, and then the heavy pale fruits, bloomed rose-pink, that bowed the branches of the other. "What grows on that one?"

"Memories," Mallory said. "Souls."

Leaving Rien standing, pack in one hand and plum in the other, the necromancer crossed to the peach tree. They weren't huge peaches, just the size to sit in Rien's palm. Mallory walked among them, touching the ones that hung down—then, with a scramble, was among the branches and climbing.

"Come here, Rien."

She stood under the tree and dropped the pack at her feet. Above her, on a swaying branch, Mallory balanced like a wire-dancer, holding out a fruit the color of wine-soaked ivory. Rien put out her hand, and the fruit fell into it.

If the coat of the apricot had been velour, this was cut velvet, as soft and pale as Mallory's skin. Rien raised it to her mouth and sniffed. Nectar, tart-sweet-perfumy, and the green, green sap scent of the broken stem. Where the plum was cool to the touch—she still weighed it in her other hand—this was warm, though Rien could not say if it was from the suns or from Mallory's hand.

"Eat," said the magician in the tree, and Rien lifted the fruit to her lips and bit in.

It wasn't like an apple, or any crisp fruit, where you might sink your teeth in and lever a piece away from the orb. She bit through, faint resistance of the skin and then concupiscent flesh. Juice slicked her cheeks and chin, coursed down her forearm, dripped from her elbow. The flavor was—intense. Honeyed, but not cloying, complex and buoyant.

She hadn't words.

And then she had plenty of words, but none of them were her own.

He was Chief Engineer Conrad Ng, and he had passed through scared and into resigned. His symbiont was failing; there was a limit to the radiation damage that it could repair, and that limit had been reached around the time his flesh began sloughing from his bones. But he was concentrating, as he died. Concentrating hard, on what he knew, on everything recorded in the soft rotting tissue of his brain.

Because while he was dying, a portion of his colony might live. And with it, a portion of his knowledge.

Rien gagged. But Mallory's hand cupped over her own, and Mallory's voice urged, "Eat," and Rien bit into the fruit again.

This time, her own salt flavored it.

Knowledge that would be needed. The ship was damaged beyond repairing. The strike had taken out the main reactor and ruptured the backup; it was in sealing what was left of the core that Ng had also sealed his fate.

They were limping. They were—

"Eat," Mallory said, and Rien choked down the last bite.

There was a binary star, close, but unstable. They might reach it in time to rig solar panels. It might have a habitable world, something that could be mined in a hurry, before the next solar event.

And if it didn't, the Jacob's Ladder could survive in orbit indefinitely. They could park it close enough for light, far enough—hopefully—to be out of danger of the binary system's occasional violent flares.

Until they could repair it. Or until its stressed, jury-rigged systems failed catastrophically.

Already, there were riots among the passengers. There was a rift among the crew. Com thought they should press on, risk it all on a farther, more stable star. Some of them thought they should try to turn back. Personally, Ng thought that should be a shooting offense.

Com couldn't do a damned thing without Engineering.

Chief Engineer Ng was selfishly glad that he was going to be gone before things got any worse.

Rien came back to herself in a snap. The peach pit was clenched in her hand; Mallory gently uncoiled her fingers, knelt down—while Rien stood shaking, wishing she could lick the stickiness off her fingers and not daring—and nudged the moss aside to plant the pit beneath.

"He's dead," Rien said, when she had gathered herself. Her voice startled her. It sounded so strong, and so calm.

Mallory glanced up, sunlight catching on the edges of that mess of dark brown hair in a tawny halo, and answered with pursed lips and a shaken head: "I'm a necromancer, sweet. What did you think that meant?"