Dust

6 the beast in the heart of the world

Everyone else had forgotten, or was forbidden from remembering, which came to the same thing. Dust had never been human, but he remembered.

He remembered more of being human than the humans did. He contained novels and dramas, actors and singers, stories long untold. He contained histories dead a thousand Earth years. Dead to the world, anyway.

The same thing. The same.

No one in the world had seen a single yellow sun, dug fingers into crumbling natural earth, felt an acid rain trace down her face. Dust had never seen, felt, tasted any of these things either. But he recollected them.

In proper terms, he could not see, feel, taste in any case. But he could approximate. Smell was only a matter of detecting and sorting drifting molecules. Seeing was only a matter of detecting and sorting bounced light.

And what he could not approximate, he could remember.

"The world is mine," said Jacob Dust. "Mine. It has my name on it."

No argument.

No answer.

He hadn't expected one.

Dust hung in soft threads all through the atmosphere of his domaine. It was mostly water vapor now; the world had healed its wounds, and as Dust's need for the luxuries necessary to carbon-based life was small, he did not trouble himself to normalize.

Too much oxygen would only encourage the mortal and unmodified to seek him, anyway.

Dust believed in conserving resources. Energy came from the suns, a vast crimson sphere and a tiny white dwarf that whipped about their common center of gravity with a rotational period of only hours, tethered by a luminous banner dragged from the former, accreting to the latter. Material resources were more limited: only what was in the world, and what the world was made of. But Dust's years were long, and the suns burned bright.

By that brightening, he knew the hours of his safety were numbered. The dwarf star had entered its period of convection. At any point, it might commence a deflagration phase, fusing carbon and then oxygen.

Because the integrity of a dwarf star was dependent on the quantum degeneracy pressure of the core, it would be unable to expand and cool to maintain stability in response to an increase in thermal energy caused by accretion, as a main-sequence star would.

Within seconds, a considerable portion of the carbon and oxygen within the star would be fused into heavier elements. Because the star was supported by degenerate pressure rather than by thermal pressure, this thermonuclear event would cause the core temperature to skyrocket—to employ an entirely inadequate metaphor—by billions of degrees, causing further fusion.

The sun would unbind.

The white dwarf would explode, its outer layers hurled clear in a single apocalyptic paroxysm, a shock front moving at nearly 3 percent the speed of light. In a flare of brilliance that would outshine entire galaxies fiftyfold, the world would end.

The sunlight that warmed Dust, which fed all his inhabitants, heralded the furnace that would burn him. And through that sunlight hurtled a pair of half-grown women, whom Dust watched with amusement and a bit of approval. When the angels were otherwise occupied, he could still use their thousands of eyes, all over the skin of the world.

Those eyes showed him Perceval, Rien clutched in her arms, gliding soundlessly across the hub of the turning world. The go-pack on her back trailed wisps of vapor, a trickle of reactive mass. The sort of thing one usually avoided sacrificing to the great cold Enemy, but then, one made exceptions in an emergency. A sacrifice. A burnt offering to Entropy.

Which, like most gods, took no notice.

Dust was different from other gods. And he was not particular about the intended consecration. It attracted his attention—well, to be fair, his attention had been held already—and that was enough.

Dust could not reach Perceval's colony. It would not see him; it would not hear him. It was blinded and deafened to any of his blandishments. He could not see through her eyes, speak through her lips. She possessed it fully, and all its service, and Rien's new daughter-colony was likely forbidden to Dust as well, and would only grow more so as Rien mastered it, and imprinted it with her personality.

But the chains that had become a dress and which now were a simple propulsion device, trickling pressurized atmosphere—that colony had no guiding intelligence.

Dust reached out through wireless connections, through the constant soft hum of telemetry in which the world floated, embedded. He saw as the colony saw—not that it was seeing, exactly. He tasted Perceval's skin, felt her fever-heat (she was very brave, and very ill), felt the bones and skin pressed to the go-pack like a man might feel a lover's spine pressed to his chest. He felt Rien's hands clenched on his straps as she clung against Perceval's chest, shivering and awed.

Like a man waking a child who must not cry out, Dust tickled the edges of the go-pack colony. It was stupid, lobotomized, an idiot system. He made it whole, alert, aware. It was fit only for following orders. He gave it autonomy—of a sort.

Perceval and Rien passed under the stark shadows of the cabling, which with no atmosphere to refract or soften the light remained razor-edged upon their skin. They passed by the hub of the world, where Dust's house was, and where the abandoned bridge moldered. Rien's eyes moved as she read the gold and black lettering upon the hull.

Jacob's Ladder.

Behind the words was painted a double helix, green and yellow, red and white and blue.

"This is my world," said Jacob Dust, as they passed the skin of his domaine, Perceval and Rien in the arms of his newborn son. "My world. My name."

Phantom pain.

It was only phantom pain. Except it wasn't pain, exactly, because it didn't hurt. Rather, Perceval thought she felt her wings stretch and cup, pulling against the knotted, insulted muscles of her chest and back.

It must be only the cold of space on her unhealed wounds, the severed nerves and the reprogramming damage of the unblade. It was still bleeding, she thought, her blood and her colony still groping for lost members and severed flesh. She would have to make it stop bleeding somehow. She would have to heal the unhealable wound.

She wasn't self-deluding enough to imagine she could ever replace what a weapon like Innocence had pared away.

So she concentrated on Rien, shivering, huddled, but craning her neck to see. She concentrated past Rien, too, on the far wall of the world, to which they had come halfway. There must be a hatch, an air lock. There must be a way inside.

Blood or no blood, Exalt though she was, she might be able to half feel wings she didn't have, but her fingers were already going numb. There was no warmth trapped between her and Rien, as there would have been in the coldest imaginable air. There was nothing there but the Enemy, -surrounding them, stealing their heat and strength. The great emptiness waited for them all.

It couldn't have her now.

Rien's jaw worked, her lips stubbornly pressed together. Not that she could have said anything—the Enemy would steal her words, and more of her warmth with it. So Perceval was pleased that she had the sense to shut her mouth and cling to the harness straps.

They needed more acceleration. A fine balance; she didn't want to strike the far side of the hub with too much of a difference in inertia. And they could not afford to overshoot and try to come back. Perceval might survive it, but Rien's colony was fragile and new.

She'd freeze solid if they missed, and even if Engine could bring her back, there was a risk of brain injury. Or of resurrecting only the body, the person within long fled.

Perceval found she was fond of Rien's voice. She did not care to have her lose it.

As an additional problem, Perceval thought, as they approached the towering shadow of the far rim, there was relative motion to consider. The world rotated in a stately fashion, but as they crossed the hub, the direction of that movement appeared to reverse. In other words, if the wall they had exited—a wall kilometers in breadth, and they had emerged by the top or sunward edge of it—was spinning to the left, the wall ahead spun to the right, and they were drifting the wrong way to match velocities.

Perceval hoped they had enough reactive mass left to make a difference. Perhaps she should hoard it... but when they came gliding among the silent, waist-thick, spinning cables of the far side, she needed the maneuverability, and she needed to be ready. Slowly, so as not to startle Rien, Perceval loosed her clasp on her sister's shoulders. Rien's fingers whitened on the harness— Perceval risked shifting her attention from the onrushing hull and saw the skin crack where they tightened—but she held on and huddled close.

Perceval could not feel her fingers. Ironic cruelty, that the cold stung along the ghost bones of her wings.

The cables spun slower, covered less distance, near the center of the hub. Easier to catch, safer to brake yourself against. But it would take too long to crawl along them to the rim. I am on the horns of a dilemma, Perceval thought, and almost giggled, picturing a spiky-horned, two-headed animal. It was all the evidence she needed of oxygen deprivation.

It was all so silent. Perceval heard her own blood hum in her ears, a kind of ringing she thought was just the firing of unused nerves. She reached out before her, both arms and her curved flyer's toes on their long legs, and now the hull was rushing at them like a spinning saw blade, each protrusion or projection another chance at death.

She didn't have time to reprogram the go-pack on the fly, but reversing the thrust was easy enough. All she had to do was use the attitude jets to turn herself, to put her back to the rim of the world, and face away. Rien was looking over her shoulder, Rien with her eyes so wide and weeping tears that crazed with ice and froze to her lashes and had to be shaken away.

Perceval hoped she understood.

They were slowing, though; that, Perceval could feel in her inner ear, in her bones, in her teeth. Now? No. Now?

And then Rien gave the harness straps a yank, and ! Perceval felt something skip past her toes, bang her foot hard and spin her, but as she whirled like a throwing star, a flat spin with limbs extended, she saw some kind of antennae or mast as it glided past.

It was Rien who grabbed it, and held onto the harness with the other hand, and then with a skull-rattling jerk they were moving, and Perceval got a knee hooked around the thing, and they turned with the ship until it seemed that they moved not at all. Instead the universe wheeled around them, while they hung on the edge of the world, motionless and sublime.

Perceval might have hugged Rien and kissed her, but she felt the ice crystals growing in her own skin, her colony losing its battle. Hand over hand, she pulled them down the mast, and hand over hand, along the grab bars set in the hull. Ahead was an air lock, round, outlined in green paint and the dark sockets of long-dead lights.

It was locked, but Perceval was Exalt. The world opened its doors to her.

And then they were inside, in the heat, in the moisture, and the air was freezing to their skin, cracking off in great flakes when they moved, the sting of thawing flesh too much to be borne. Perceval's knees folded and so did she, knees everywhere and forehead on the heels of her hands, slumped forward automatically as if she still had wings.

Rien coughed up blood. Bright, frothy, oxygenated. Lung blood, and still more red than blue; she must have tried to hold her breath. It didn't matter; they were inside now. Whatever she had sustained, her colony would heal.

Except she was staring at Perceval, not her own blood on the floor. Her voice cracked and raggedy, she rasped, "Perceval. Your wings."

And by some luck, before Perceval called Rien any of those perfectly appropriate names that sprang to mind, she glanced past her and saw them reflected in the inside air-lock hatch. Spread out behind her, no hollow bone and soft membrane but seemingly wrought of shadow and mist and silk. Pearl and charcoal and silver, raddled this way and that like a colt's thin legs. A pair, indeed, of ghostly wings.