Dust

7 the beat of parasite wings

The air-lock decking was cold under Rien's feet, her own blood seaweedy, meaty-sharp in her mouth, overlaid with an unfamiliar bitterness. Even after speaking to Perceval, she spat and spat. The blood made a streaked puddle by her feet.

She started when Perceval touched her shoulder. "Don't spit it out," she said, the gauzy wings stirring behind her. "Swallow it. You're spitting out your symbiont."

With an effort, Rien did as Perceval instructed. Her throat was raw; it felt like swallowing scrubbers. When she could make herself stand straight, she looked at Perceval and spared herself speech by lifting her right hand, wrist bent, and making a spinning motion.

Perceval seemed to understand. She turned in place.

Rien noticed that the tips of the half-material wings lifted slightly to miss the puddle of slime on the decking. She, too, picked her way around it, cautious about stepping too close. Although, she considered, anything in the air lock was within range, if they lashed out.

The go-pack had vanished. Perceval's pale freckled back was naked from the base of her stubbled skull to the cleft of narrow buttocks. And the wings—translucent, whispery—grew from where her wounds had been. "What do you see?" Perceval asked. When she craned her head over her shoulder, the tendons stood out along her throat all the way up to her ear.

"Are we in Engine?"

"No," Perceval said. "I don't know exactly where we are. The world was spinning. But not in Rule, that's something. What do you see?"

"It's the chains," Rien said. "The nanocolony. It's turned into wings."

"And?"

"And fused with you," she finished, reluctantly. And spoke the next words on a rush, wishing she dared to touch Perceval just then. "Come on, we need to get out of this air lock and figure out where we are."

"And how to get to Father," Perceval said. She turned, decisively, and the wings missed thumping Rien as deftly as if they had been real. With one hand, the Engineer struck the air-lock release. Into the other, she produced the control for the nanotech colony, and was already fussing with it as the air lock cycled.

It had, Rien noticed and did not say, no visible effect.

She walked through the lock behind Perceval, distracted by the distinct, minute sensations of her lungs and skin repairing themselves, or being repaired by her new symbiont. Rien had split her scalp when she was a child, as children do, and the sensation reminded her of the tug of stitches in anaesthetized skin, on a micro level. The lock closed behind her, and they stood in the warm air of the corridor.

Perceval reached up over her shoulder and ran her fingertips from the base to the joint, as far as her arm would reach. She grasped the bone—what would have been the bone, in a living wing—between thumb and forefinger, wrist bent tortuously. She pulled, muscles flexing in her forearm, wiry biceps taut, her breast lifting as her pectorals tensed.

The wing did not budge. Perceval only succeeded in pulling her own shoulder forward. "Ow," she said.

Here in the corridor Rien could see it better. And see how the light did indeed fall through it, as if it were a three-dimensional rendering made real. She let her hand drop by her thigh, defeated. "I think it's engineered out of nanoscaffolds. And it's bonded to my stumps."

"Can you feel it?"

At first, Rien thought Perceval would not answer. The question, on second thought, was quite rude. She winced an apology. But Perceval didn't seem to find it presumptuous. "Yes," she said. Her lips looked thin. A muscle twitched along her jaw, a rhythmic tic. "It doesn't hurt anymore."

Rien thought about raw bone, naked to air, chafed by bandages. Bile rose up her throat.

"I hate this."

All Rien could do was put her hand on her sister's arm. "We need to find out where we are."

"It's warm," Perceval said. "So it's populated. There are a lot of parts of the world that I know nothing about, though. Have you memorized any of the world plans?"

"I've never been out of Rule," Rien said. Even that was overstating the case. She'd never been out of the Commodore's household, not even as far as the algae tanks.

"Well, no matter." Perceval craned her head back. She still held the key box in her hand, clenched like any other useless talisman. Were even Engineers superstitious? And then convulsively, she turned and slammed it against the wall. It shattered, and she let the pieces fall. And then turned away, head jerking as if startled.

Rien opened her mouth, still tasting blood and that machine-oil funk. But a frown of concentration drew down the corners of Perceval's mouth, and she held up one impatient uplifted hand. Whatever Rien had been about to say, she hushed herself.

And so heard the pad of running feet.

Perceval heard them, too. But she could not afford the time or the break in concentration to look. They were unarmed, alone, barely dressed.

The pull of skin across her cheeks told her she was pursing her lips as she concentrated, a habit her mother always teased about. It helped distract her from the weightlessness of her shadowy new wings, which generated a deep and repellent terror.

No one had a schematic of all the world. Not since the moving times, as far as Perceval knew. Not since the engines and the world brain failed, leaving them with partial maps and hard copy. But she knew her history, the stories of the world ships sent out like groping fingers across the Enemy's empty sea, better charted but no less gallant than any unevolved raftsman braving the Pacific. It was a kind of superb blindness, the human push for exploration, for growth.

Or maybe it wasn't. After all, any virus could do the same. Her symbiont, engineered and unintelligent, was even now colonizing the unknown shores of Rien's body.

Still, Perceval was human. She could be forgiven an ethnocentric value judgment. And she was a human with a carefully bred and force-evolved body and a highly engineered prosthesiotomy. She had seen maps. Thus, she could recollect them. And—it was just possible—figure out where they were, at least in the broadest of terms.

Images flickered, turned, shuffled across her inner eye. Sharp and precise, machine-learned: unlike her father, she was not a bred eidetic. But she had a trick he didn't, and she layered and turned and compared. She had her natural spatial sense, heightened for a flyer, and she had the sound of the echoes along the corridor, closer, rounding the corner now. It all built an image, a geography. A map.

She knew where they were.

And then, when she would have expected a hail or a challenge, came the flat hiss of air guns.

Perceval's reflexes were accelerated to the edge of diminishing returns. In a stress situation, thinking chips made her limbs' decisions for her; it could take too long for electricity to flow along nerves. She could assess and act faster than any unengineered creature could dream of, if it could not be precisely described as thinking.

She had no time to react.

Her parasite wings flared wide; they spun her. The sensation was as a child swung around in a strong man's grip, and Perceval was as powerless to hold her ground as that child. One wing cupped Rien, drew her close, and with that Perceval could assist. She caught her sister in her arms and clutched her inside the curve of her body, her nose buried in Rien's greasy dark hair. Rien screamed, or started to scream, and they were slung around again. Perceval felt the vibration of Rien's cry through her rib cage, and could think only how it must hurt to shout like that, with vacuum-stressed lungs.

Perceval wanted to close her eyes. But were she willing to admit cowardice, she barely had the time.

There were four in the corridor: a crossfire, two at each end. They wore coveralls, black with bright patterns in ultraviolet, which made Perceval think they were Exalt.

Without asking questions, without a word, they fired, and continued to fire. And air darts sailed all around Perceval and Rien, slivers of drugged or deadly plastic that were no threat to the world's fragile hull. No one would risk an explosive weapon inside. Mean or Exalt, everyone feared the Enemy more than anything save fire.

The darts made little sound when they struck the parasite wings—no melodramatic clang or thud. Just a patter like the drip of condensation from a conduit. They did not pass through. And wherever the darts flew toward Perceval or Rien, there in advance were the wings.

And then they were moving, again, not flying—the corridor was too narrow and too low—but the jerk at Perceval's shoulders was like flying. The wings—she felt them, felt them spider along the bulkheads and decking, felt the pinion-tips bend, tension between them holding her feet from the floor, felt the strain along their struts. It felt nothing like flesh and membrane and bone.

There were four wings, then, six, nine. The darts sounded like a hard rain. All Perceval could do was cling to Rien, whose forearms were locked over her own, legs trailing, and press her mouth into Rien's hair.

They came among the defenders. One dived aside; Perceval's retina photographed her, arms reaching, weapon thrown aside.

The other one, the wings went through.

If Perceval had a hand free, she would have covered Rien's eyes. They might be of an age, but she could not help but think of her sister as a child, in need of protection. Rien's fingers dug into Perceval's wrist, and there was blood, blue and bright, darkening in atmosphere, the sharp stink of it. Rien sobbed.

The defender was meat, and they were through.

The patter of darts against the parasite wings stopped abruptly when they turned the corner. They passed through lock doors, into abandoned portions of the world where the air was stale and chill radiated from the bulkheads, and it was no longer any effort for her wings to hold her feet from the floor. No gravity and no light: she saw in infrared, and by the faint chill radiance of the greeny-blue fungus that grew in the welded seams of the walls.

No pursuit followed; they were away. Perceval felt the last blood sliding as if frictionless from the wings that weren't hers. It flicked free, shivering globes that struck the corridor walls and stuck, food for that fungus. The wings folded together again, encapsulating Perceval and Rien in a warmer chrysalis.

"Who was that?" Rien said, finally, her voice thready but admirably calm.

Perceval wondered if it was a pretense.

"I don't know anything about them," she admitted.

"Oh." After a silence, though Rien cleared her throat and continued. "I do."

"What?"

Rien was shaking, and her fingers bruised Perceval's flesh against her bones, but Perceval wasn't going to say anything. She waited until Rien organized herself enough to say, "They're on a war footing, don't you think? Expecting invasion."

"Yes," Perceval said. "I think so. I think it's not just Rule and Engine that are fighting. And I know something else."

"You know where we are?"

Perceval nodded. Rien would feel her face move against her hair. "We're a really long way from home."

One of Dust's relics of remembrance was the fond old ideal of gallantry. In watching Perceval and Rien, he recollected it.

He was too much a gentleman to insinuate himself into the awareness of Perceval's wings when they wrapped her and her sister so tightly. They seemed to be functioning as intended.

It was enough.

He held the maidens in his attention for a moment, then released them. Left them huddled in his gift, and turned away.

He could not be distracted by his darling girls when he must be about seducing villains. Something might show, some hint, or texture. Some glimpse, and it would never do for Perceval and Rien to be unsafe, even for a moment.

Dust's guest would be with him shortly. And beyond the girls' safety, Dust couldn't afford to let his rival guess from whence the blow would fall.

Chimes announced a visitor. Not Dust's bells, however. Samael, damn him, selected his own clarion. He chose to be piped aboard like an admiral. Was it any wonder Dust found him unbearable?

The chime was only a courtesy. Samael began to resolve in Dust's chamber almost instantaneously: not a full manifestation, but still something more concrete than a hologram. Real politeness would have waited for an invitation, but Samael was arrogant.

Dust flattered himself that he could have prevented the entrance. But perhaps it was better to appear less than one was, to keep something in reserve—

That he had lost his last argument with Samael did not mean that he would lose them all. Surely not. Still, politeness was a virtue.

With a half-breathed sigh, he resolved a tendril into a concrete state, meeting Samael halfway.

Samael's avatar was cleaning his nails when Dust stepped out of air beside him. It was an ostentatious nail-cleaning, involving a facsimile of a pearl-handled pocketknife, and the parings that fell to Dust's deck spread hairy roots and grew into some creepery vine heavy with fragrant, waxen flowers.

Dust ground it under his polished black boot. "This is not the place nor the time to stake claims."

However mildly he spoke, wherever Samael seemed to be looking, Dust knew his sibling's attention focused on him—at least as far as the current interaction went. He folded his black-sleeved arms over the silver brocade of his vest, aware that it glittered in the light like mail or scales, and let his stare rest on Samael.

Dust's sibling affected a pale and ascetic aspect, long white-blond hair trailing in locks around a narrow basset-hound face. He frowned, and it made him look soft-eyed, but Dust knew it for artifice as surely as the band-collared shirt worn with blue jeans and bare feet and an emerald brocade tailcoat with velvet lapels.

Self-consciously, Samael folded the knife away, and then picked lint from his shoulder. He did not flick that to the floor, but tucked it in his pocket. Which was something, Dust supposed.

He thought Samael would counter with some comment on Dust's lack of sibling hospitality, but Samael hooked his thumbs in the waistband of his jeans. "I want to trade," he said.

Dust stared. He brushed invisible fringes over the edges of Samael's avatar, but for all Samael's reaction the caress— or test—might have been a breath of wind. "Trade?"

"I'm the Angel of Death, aren't I?" The knobby hands turned palm-up now. "And you're the Angel of Memory. So trade me a little knowledge for a little life. A little withholding of death, if you will."

"Don't be ridiculous," Dust said. "You're not the angel of anything."

"That's what they call us. And not just us. Some of them call the old crew angels and demons, too."

"Ahh," Dust said, willing his fingers to stillness when they wanted to worry his sleeves, "but we know better, don't we? Besides, if you were the angel of anything, it would be the angel of... life-support services." He scraped his boot across the deck, leaving a green smear of chlorophyll like a punctuation mark.

"Not very poetic," Samael said, disappointed.

Dust shrugged. He only cared about his own poetry.

"And anyway," Samael continued, with a sweeping dismissal that pulled shirt and coatsleeves up his bony wrist, "in the midst of life support we are in death, o my brother."

Dust kept his attention spread through his anchore, for he suspected that Samael would have liked him to concentrate and neglect his boundaries. "Your trade sounds more like a threat than an equal exchange."

Samael's shrug, one-shouldered with disingenuously tilted head, was disturbingly reminiscent of that of a twelve-year-old girl. "I think there's an Engine girl you've taken an interest in," he said. "What if I could help her?"

"An Engine girl?" Dust thought he could give Samael fair competition when it came to disingenuity. Once upon a time, they would have held this meeting in the channels of the world's analytical engines, but those were long unavailable. They met in the metal if they met at all. And Samael kept all his parts tucked in, like a cat tea-cozied on the rug, so Dust couldn't even brush microsurfaces with him and see if any stray electromagnetic intelligence was seeping free.

"Perceval Foucaulte Conn," Samael said, and if he couldn't trim his nails, he could study them. How peculiar it was, Dust thought, that a century since any of them had had much cause to interact with their creators, they still wore human guise. "She's trapped with her half sister on ep-silon deck, and she could be fumbling around down there for a good long time. She's also suffering from septicemia and a viral infection, and her symbiont is heavily stressed. She needs warmth and food. And medical attention." "And you're offering that assistance?" "It is," Samael said, "what I was built to do." "And the recompense?" That was always the rub, wasn't it? They all dealt from a position of strength; they all had their unique fields. When the Core died, the world had shifted as many of its functions into its symbionts as possible. It had saved itself, against future need. But none of those symbiont colonies could hold the entire mind of the world. They were fragments. Specialists. With differing agendas.

They rarely got along.

"Navigation logs," Samael said. "Starmaps. Tell me where we had been, and where we were en route to."

"Useless," Dust said. There were no engines. There was no way to move.

"I want to know where we are," Samael said. "Give me j that, and I spare your pet."

Then it was Dust's turn to fiddle his fingers. "She's not I a pet."

"Cat's-paw," Samael said. "Dupe. Whatever."

The fragment of Dust that rode along with Perceval's gift-pinions stayed in coded contact with his main colony. He could feel her huddle tighter around Rien, shivering within the thin warmth of the wings. If she had been j closer, if he would not have had to withdraw the fragment I from contact with the suborned colony, Dust might have stroked her shaven head.

No doubt, he thought, the child could use a little love. "Creator," Dust said, fondly. "Inventor and the daughter of inventors."

"Heresy."

"Nevertheless," Dust said. "Her kind invented ours."

"How could something like that invent something like me?"

"Nevertheless," Dust said. "It is what happened."

"You lie."

"No," Dust corrected. "I remember." He turned away— his avatar turned away. His own hovering attention never shifted. Not from Samael's sock-puppet, not from the boundaries of Dust's own domaine. "Navigation logs."

"Yes."

"That's all you want."

"For now."

"Help the maidens," Dust said. "I'll share the logs."

In all fastidiousness, he would have preferred not to touch Samael. It was less risk to his own system to chip off a packet and hand it over—but he did not wish to lose that much of his colony, would not take any of Samael in return, and didn't want to give his sibling that much insight into his program.

Instead, he bent down and "kissed" Samael on the "mouth."

A meshing of programs, but only a surfacy one. A quick handshake and transfer of data, nothing more.

As they broke apart, the information safely handed over, the memory of the kiss left Dust full of an aching emptiness, everywhere his airborne nanoparticles drifted and spread.