Dust

21 oh child, he said, all sorrow

When Pinion brought Perceval into Dust's embrace, she was cold. Frost rimed her lashes, crystallizing from the moist air of his holde like pale mascara. He enfolded her, agitating the air around her, creating friction and with it, gentle warmth. He had oxygenated the atmosphere, increased the light levels, made it ready for a human woman.

Pinion warmed her blood; the link was complete now, and she was as fused to the prosthesis as she had ever been to her engineered wings.

When she was warm, but still semiconscious, Dust stepped into his avatar—taking special care with his dress—and with Pinion's help hoisted her to her feet. The parasite wings walked her to the bed that awaited her and laid her gently down, folding her tight in their shadows. Protection and restraint.

She looked very stark there, all in black. Straps crossed her shoulders, but the pack had been tattered by Pinion's struggles, and Dust asked the wings politely to remove its remnants now. They did so, spitting the rag onto the floor, and while his avatar still stood over Perceval, Dust carried it to be recycled.

His anchore, he realized, was hardly suitable for a mortal guest. Without so much as a gesture, he rearranged himself into chair, table, couch. He brought clean water and fruit and protein.

And then he settled himself to wait.

In minutes, she stirred. Pinion and her own symbiont colony, indivisible now, were scrubbing her blood, oxygenating her tissues, repairing cell walls burst by freezing and the damage done by her own boiling bodily fluids. She would be over the injuries before she had a chance to feel them.

Dust would see to it that she never knew pain again. Never knew doubt, or hunger. And he would try to see to it that she never knew grief, though that was harder to guarantee.

There was no hair on her forehead to brush away, but he reached out anyway, a cool cloth in his hand, and bathed her brow. "Wake, my beloved."

Her eyes came open like unshuttered windows. Dust was an imaginative sort; all of the literature the builders had thought worthy, or entertaining, was in his program. He fancied, for a moment, that he could see the suns behind her eyes.

Of course, it was only poetry.

And whatever he thought he saw died when she cringed away from him. "Fear not," he said. "You will come to no harm. Perceval Conn, you are precious to me."

She awakened warm, and comforted, embraced as if in her mother's arms. But something felt wrong—the voice, the hand on her forehead. When she opened her eyes, she did not recognize her surroundings, or the man who stood over her. It all smelled different, cold.

Uninhabited.

The man was dark, clear-eyed, beautifully dressed and unhandsome, not tall. He murmured endearments and stroked her face again.

She trusted him immediately, and knew that she had no logical reason to do so. "Rien?"

"She is safe," he said. "As are the princes. My brother's servitor protected them."

"Your brother—"

"Samael," he said. "The basilisk is his creature."

"Space," Perceval said. She flinched back. Her emotions said trust, and it was hard to think through them. Pheromones, perhaps, or an endorphin cocktail fed her by the parasite wings. She should have hacked them off in the snow, if she had to use the dulled edge of Tristen's broken unblade to do so. "You're Dust."

"Jacob Dust," he said. "Shipmind, shipsoul. Synthetic sapience. Distributed man. At your service, beloved."

"I am not—" Something squeezed in her chest when she would have said, not your beloved. It hurt. She gasped.

Was this what Rien felt, when Perceval would not kiss her?

It was just a chemical cocktail. Dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, oxytocin, and vasopressin. Just the drugs of the brain, an evolutionary response to encourage self-interested individuals to risk everything to propagate. Her symbiont could shut it down—should be shutting it down. Something had affected her program.

Pinion. Of course.

She firmed her jaw. "I am not your beloved. I do not love you."

She would have edged back, but Pinion lived up to its name. It was like struggling in a cotton wool binding; she might contrive to bang her head upon the pillow or kick her heels, but otherwise she was constrained.

Dust bent down and kissed her forehead. His lips were cool, perfectly resilient. Inhumanly perfect, where Rien's had been warm and rough and damp.

The chaste small kiss sent a flush of warmth through her.

She spat in his face.

The spittle vanished as it struck him, and he drew back and smiled. "Beloved," he said. "Claim me, and I will do your will. I am yours by right, through the line of your foremothers and forefathers. Only let me own you. Perceval. My darling."

She gritted her teeth and did not speak. "Let me up," she said. "Your monster is hurting me."

"You can't escape," he said.

"I'm sure your precautions are exemplary. May I pee?"

Rien could never have explained how they made it to the air lock. Once the decompression was over—it took hardly any time at all—they managed to scramble to the handholds along the walls of the shattered tunnel. Gavin collapsed into himself when they were secure and clutched Rien's pack, hunkering against her shoulders.

Following Benedick through the eerie silence, followed by Tristen, she clambered along the rungs, moving as fast as possible without drifting into Benedick's trailing feet. Gravity had failed when the tube broke, and Rien thought the induction fields that delicately manipulated the electromagnetic field to shield the world from the waystars' radiation had likely failed as well.

In case having been spaced were not encouragement enough to hurry.

At the end of the tube, Benedick keyed the air lock. Despite her colony, Rien's head already swam with oxygen starvation. She waited for the lock to jam, the power to fail. She had grown too aware of how fragile the world was, how many ways there were to damage it. And in all honesty, she half expected sabotage.

When the air lock opened smoothly, without releasing a puff of vapor, she had to grit her teeth to restrain the urge to shout. Benedick hauled her after him; she turned and grabbed Tristen's wrist to perform the same service for him. And then they were within, the door sealing, the silence of emptiness replaced by the welcome hiss of atmosphere. Rien's ears popped painfully, as they must have done when she decompressed; it was a miracle her eardrums weren't shattered.

But then, the Exalt were full of miracles.

She shook herself. She was getting entirely too accustomed to this Exalt thing, and—

—and shouldn't she? Wasn't it what she was, now? Should she walk around terrified of her own blood all the time?

The alternative wasn't only being like Ariane. There was Tristen and Benedick and Mallory. And Perceval.

Rien curled her nails into her palms. "How are we going to get her back?"

Gavin hopped from her pack to her shoulder. She reached up, plucked him off, and hugged him in both arms. Like a child clinging to a cuddler, but if that was what it took, she'd do it. He let her, too, serpent's tail dangling and his long neck looped over the back of hers. Watching Benedick and Tristen trade glances made her j feel even more like a child, and that was not okay. "Whatever you two are not saying—"

"We need to go on to Engine," Benedick said, and Rien gaped.

"How can you say that?"

At least Tristen had the decency to show reluctance. Or feign it, though Rien hoped that was only her own bitter suspicion. He cleared his throat and rubbed his cleanshaven cheek with the back of his hand. "It's what Perceval would say, were she with us," he said. "The world is at stake, not only her. And we have no way of knowing where she was taken."

"And in Engine is her mother," Benedict said. And where another man might have elaborated, he left the implications for Rien to figure out herself, if she could.

Caitlin Conn was a Chief Engineer. And Rien had no idea what her capabilities were. A week since, and she would have said the Exalt could do anything.

She looked at her hands.

"Space with you both," she said, and strode out past Benedick as soon as the air lock irised open, trying very hard not to stomp in a manner of which Head would not have approved. And if Dust had Perceval, and Head was dead...

Benedick and Tristen were what she had in the world. Even if they were conspiring to parent her.

It was only a corridor beyond, a low-volume accessway carpeted in overgrown grass. The trimmers had not been by. Rien's legs swished through it; it grabbed at her knees. Strands tugged and broke against her trousers at each stride.

"Well, hurry up," she called over her shoulder. "You can make me keep walking. But I'm going to walk as far as I can."

"Rien," Tristen called, "you shouldn't go blithely where you can't see your feet."

And on the heel of his words, Benedick shouted, "Stop! Holdfast!"

Rien stopped. It was a voice of command, and it shocked her into immobile obedience, one foot lifted in the air. She teetered, caught herself without dropping the basilisk, and put her shoe down in the print she'd raised it from.

"Gavin, do you see anything?"

"Yes," he said. His head tickled below her ear. She felt his beak moving, and then all of him as he wriggled and slithered around the back of her neck until he was crouched on her shoulder again. "Listen to Benedick. Fear not. But be very still, Rien."

Perceval ate and drank what was provided. She could have starved herself to make a point, but that would have been foolish. Anything Dust cared to introduce into her system, he would not have needed to lace into her dinner. Her every unruly emotion was proof of that.

At least he had the decency not to watch her dining— well, not in his avatar, though his amorphous person might have been all around her—and to provide fresh clothes and a place to bathe. A shower; hot fresh water. Running water. If it wasn't clean, her symbiont could handle most things.

Even an engineered influenza. She hadn't told Rien, because it would have been cruel to make her worry about things that were not her fault and which she could not control, but Perceval was still concerned about that.

If Ariane suffered and died in an ague, it served her right. But Perceval couldn't crave vengeance on all of Rule—well, she could, but she chose not to—and Perceval knew something she hadn't told Rien. The Engine and Rule strains of symbiont were different. It was possible that an illness Perceval could survive (and Rien, colonized by Perceval's symbiont, as well) would be devastating to someone who bore the blood of Rule.

Perceval was as helpless to affect that as was Rien. But it did not stop her fretting. Even the endorphin cocktail she swam in was insufficient distraction, and she kept telling herself, silently repeating, that she needed to worry as well about that.

But, "Is this clean?" she asked, to have something to say.

"Clean enough to drink," he said. "Fear not; the gray water is recycled. I recall gardens, which I shall show you when you are refreshed."

He gave her privacy again, or as much privacy as she could have with his creature welded to her back. The stall was large enough for both Perceval and Pinion, however, and she made a festival of the shower.

Drying herself in warm air and fluffy towels, she thought, perhaps he isn't so bad. And then she thought also, that is how the hostage identification process starts, dear Perceval.

When she was dressed, she called to him. "Dust?"

Following a crystal chime, his voice came from everywhere and none. "Pinion will lead you."

Words that should have destroyed any warmth she might be feeling, but she was drugged. It helped to think of it that way: drugged on her own chemicals. If she could externalize, make the emotion other, she would not believe it.

She could not believe it. She could not trust her own desires, only her own discipline.

She prayed it should prove adequate to the task. "I don't like what you're doing to my brain," she said as she followed the route indicated by the parasite wings. It was a gray corridor, one wall broken occasionally by observation ports. She hesitated to peer through one, like a kidnapped princess peering through an embrasure. It was a dark view; if she cocked her head just right, she could see portions of the world's superstructure backlit by the suns, but no light fell through to illuminate her immediate surroundings. They were deep within the world, and its hungry latticework structure had consumed the available light.

"Claim me," Dust said. "Be mine. And you can order otherwise."

He appeared beside her, popping into existence with little fanfare, a cheap special effect. She schooled herself, and did not flinch away.

"Just through here," he said. He gestured her on with a flourish; a door slid open as she approached. Failing another plan, she went where she was directed.

He had promised her a garden.

And so he gave.

She floated off her feet as she stepped across the threshold, but Pinion was there, supporting her, slow wingbeats shaping her rise. There was light here, a cold reflected light, diffuse, not the hard flat watery light of Benedick's orchard. And the trees—

This holde—this heaven—had all the formal ancient grace of a Nippon-style garden, of which there were a few in Engine. None the size of this one, however, and none, in the absence of defined gravity, composed of trees as old as the world, their gnarled boles shaped in heavy serpentine curves, their bark and leaves a patchwork display of textures and colors. There were smooth red-skinned trees with straining purple twigs, and a contorted gray monster whose flexible golden branches swayed with every shift of the air. One tree was green as a jade carving from the soil to leaf tip, its branches hung with drifting, lobed violet flowers that cast floating petals and a heady thread of aroma onto the air. There were flowers, too, cascades and streamers of them; vines, carpets.

The space was bridged by twisting spans that came together in miniature parklands and separated in distributaries, a massive helical filigree around which Pinion bore her. She heard wings slap air, not her own, and when she guided Pinion back on a spiral, Dust soared up beside her. His wings were much like the ones Ariane had cut from Perceval's shoulders—membranous, soft, dusty with delicate hairs.

Perceval wanted to touch them. She disciplined herself; it was not, she told herself, truly her own desire.

But then, how did she know? How would she know, in the end, what was her desire and what was given her? She might, she thought, have wanted to touch them anyway, so much were they like what she had lost.

"What think you?"

She spread her wings wide, and let them bear her. "None of this has any place on a planet," she said. "None of this was ever intended to be set down to earth again."

"As clever as she is brave," Dust said. "Those who made me—who made Israfel, of whom I am the best and chiefest part—made this as inspiration. And as a laboratory. Those trees are not all that grows in my garden."

Warm air rushed past Perceval's face. She exulted in the flight, the motion—and doubted the exultation. If Dust could make her feel...

Had he robbed her of all joy forever? Or of all trust in her joy, which amounted to the same thing?

"That's a leading comment, Mr. Dust."

"Jacob, beloved," he said, his wingtip brushing Pinion as he flapped to gain altitude. "Follow on."

What else was she to do? She dipped feathertips and followed his turn and glide, deft as if on her own wings. She felt the wind through the feathers, the pressure underneath and above. Flying in free fall was not like flying in gravity. All one's energy went to speed.

They skimmed along one of the twisting, tree-thick bridges, wingtips skimming leaf tips. Dust flew hard, and Perceval bent herself to catch him. A race, then.

She could exult in competition. She would permit herself that. Especially when she conjured the image of smacking him with a wing, sending him spiraling into tree trunks.

She would not condone the part of her that winced to think it.

And then he dove, and she was hot after him, until his wings fanned hard, backdrafting, and as she nearly overshot she felt the sudden brutal grip of gravity.

But on dares, she'd flown in the Broken Holdes as an adolescent, where the gravity could fluctuate without notice. She managed it, would have managed it without Pinion's assistance. She followed Dust into a gap between trees, an unexpected clearing where apparently the gravity worked, and her feet struck the ground featherlight.

Beside her, Dust straightened his suitcoat, wingless again. "Very good," he said.

She would have preened at the praise if it came from her mother, or even Tristen or Benedick. She wanted to preen now. "I will not crave your approval," she said, chin up, driving her nails into her palms. "Stop making me want it."

He glanced sideways, and winked at her. "Follow on."

She did, and he led her under a tree whose crimson branches hung with curious opal-colored fruit that stank of rancid meat. The vines that twined it were like morning glories, the flowers enormous and sickly sweet.

Around the trunk he led her, and into an arch-covered stair. It brought them underground, down a spiral into darkness—or what would have been darkness, had not Dust begun on the second revolution to exude a pallid glow. The light was silver, concentrated at his hands, and with it Perceval, aided by her symbiont, could make her way down perfectly.

They climbed for a long time. She questioned him once—"What is this way? Where are we going?"—but he only turned and smiled, the shadows over his eyes ghastly in the peculiar light. "Farther on," he said. "Farther down."

She wondered if he meant to rape her. Perhaps it should have occurred to her earlier, but it wasn't the sort of thing she was used to considering. If he raised a hand, she vowed, she would fight him with all the strength that was in her.

And there was the question. Did machines' sapiences even think of sex?

She had no idea. So she watched him.

She knew there was a space ahead by the echoes, and when they came to the bottom of the stairs, the glimmer of her escort's light faded into darkness.

"I have come," Dust declaimed.

Perceval wondered if he spoke aloud for her benefit. A machine sapience he might be, but he was also mad as a bachelor uncle—madder, if that uncle happened to be Tristen Conn. As she wondered, however, the lights came up in serried ranks, flicking on in sequence from the far end of the room.

Room was a term of some inadequacy. It might have encircled the entire holde they had just flown to the center of. Perceval could not tell; it arched up out of sight in all directions.

Where above the air had been balmy, here it carried a dank chill. The floor of the chamber was occupied by legions of refrigeration units.

"All this power," she said. She looked at Dust. "All this power expended on—"

"My mission," he answered. "The mission of the Jacob's Ladder." He reached out without looking and grasped her fingers. This once, she did not stop him.

He led her forward, and she went.

The paused before a bank of coolers. "Open one," he said.

Without releasing his hand, half not knowing what to expect, she reached out and she pulled the white door open. Frost cracked; she had to pull. The cold air that fell from it, chilling her ankles and feet, stank of staleness.

It might have been decades since the freezer was open. Centuries.

Within were vials. Each labeled in neat type, with color-coded caps. "Genetic samples," Dust said, when she looked at him blankly. "The biological diversity of a world. Or as much as the builders could cram into their ark."

A treasure. Perceval swallowed. The treasure. The heart of the Jacob's Ladder. Its reason for being. Its very soul.

"Why show me this?"

"When you captain me, you will need to know. Close the door, beloved. There is more."

She shut it, and let him lead her on. Farther in there were glass-topped caskets. Never, she thought, a good sign.

Of course, the crystal faceplates were bearded with hoar, and of course they were cold to the touch. "And open this as well?"

"There is no need," Dust said, and cleared the frost from the nearest with a sweep of his hand.

She bent over it, expecting the staring face, the frozen eyes. But again he surprised her: what lay within the casket was a sad bundle of scarlet feathers, resting on something like an ivory jaguar pelt. "What are these?"

"Extinct species," he said. "DNA. That is a frozen scarlet macaw, and the pelt of a snow leopard." He gestured along the bank. "I have umbrella stands made of rhino legs, and hats decked with the feathers of the passenger pigeon."

She breathed a sigh, half relief and half frustrated adrenaline.

He smiled. "You seemed worried."

"I was having visions of Snow White," she admitted.

His smile widened and he gestured, sweeping. "Oh. The frozen people are down here."

She thought he must be kidding, and she thought she should really be beyond the capacity for shock by now. But when she caught sight of the banks of drawers, like an oversized apothecary's cabinet, she sat down on the edge of the casket, impervious to the chill. "What people are those? Your enemies?"

"Volunteers."

"You tell me they... volunteered to be frozen? Can they be thawed?"

"Well." His shrugs were quite artistic, really, she thought—and quelled the thought. "We have not developed the technology to bring them out of cryogenic stasis alive. But their DNA is still fresh. And that's what matters."

"So what, they're ... dead from Earth? They're suicides?"

He shook his head. "They signed on to the voyage. They may not have known what they were signing consent for."

She had been rising to her feet. She caught her arm to steady herself. "They didn't know?'

He touched her temple tenderly, a gesture that would have been the tucking of her hair, if she had any. "Of course not. Not really. They knew that they were the chosen ones, that they would be remade in the image of God in their cold voyage among the stars. I doubt if any of them appreciated the technical challenges."

"Oh, space." She staggered. She would have fallen if he had not held her up. "There must be thousands of them."

"In all the cryogenic facilities in the world? Beloved, there are close to seven hundred thousand." He shrugged, an even more elegant one. "With Metatron dead, I cannot be certain how many of the freezers have failed, and Samael has had to use some for raw material. For their water and carbon and amino acids. We were not meant to be trapped here so long, and the damage from the explosions caused cascading failures."

Perceval had always thought that being dumbstruck was merely an expression. She shook her head, and tugged herself away from Dust. He let her go, but not too far, and Pinion was always there behind her. "You killed seven hundred thousand people?"

"I did not kill them. Nor did Israfel. The builders killed them. Froze them and sent them to the stars."

"What gave you the right to choose for them? For us, goddamn you?"

"I didn't," Dust said. "I only served those who chose for you. As I was made to do. As I shall serve you."

"Be that as it may," Perceval snapped, frustrated. "Who gave them the right?"

"No one gave them anything." He drew a glittering object from his waistcoat pocket, flipped it open, and glanced at the face of the ancient analog watch within. "The passengers and engineers had the need. The builders had the power, beloved. It's the way of the world."

"It's not the way of mine," Perceval said. But watching his hands as he tucked the watch back into his pocket, it was all she could do to make her voice sound confident.

"Oh, child," he said, all sorrow. "Who do you think your forebears were?"