Grail

14 it is a library, and I am its necromancer

Danilaw Bakare had not realized how thoroughly he anticipated the barbaric splendor of the generation ship’s interior until its grandeur overwhelmed his expectations entirely. The docking bay had the same blasted, repurposed, resurfaced look that characterized the mottled exterior of the vessel. It was also vast, cradling the Quercus entire. Danilaw stood on the tiny habitation deck watching the long, seemingly animate arms of the Jacob’s Ladder embrace the scull, growing over the air lock and avoiding the motes and ports. He could not avoid the comparison to a dodecapus sensitively enveloping its prey.

He sealed his helmet one-handed and turned to make sure Captain Amanda, too, was ready. Seeing her mirror the gesture made him grin; it was good that they were looking out for each other.

“Once more unto the breach,” she said, patting his space-suited shoulder with a bulky gauntlet. There were weapons on her belt, and the Free Legate jewel over her eye told him she knew both physically and ethically how to use them, but that didn’t make him any more comfortable with the necessity—or the fact that he, for the first time in his life, felt naked walking around unarmed. Maybe this will be peaceable. Maybe we can still pull that off. A lot of maybes to contend with.

They lined up by the exit. Captain Amanda cycled the lock around them and ran the decontamination protocol. The exterior door scrolled back slowly, the Quercus’s Fortune-standard atmosphere replaced by something that Danilaw’s suit sensors read as thinner than weak tea and shockingly moist.

Captain Amanda was apparently thinking the same thing. “That’s a lot of free water to leave floating around in a closed habitat …”

She never finished the sentence, which trailed off as if her voice were struck from her. Instead, they stood shoulder-to-shoulder and stock-still, neither at first quite processing what they were seeing. It was a corridor, or an accessway—a means of getting from the Quercus to the interior of the Jacob’s Ladder. But it was—

It was full of trees. Or made of trees, or a tree, or a latticing vine grown into a tree through the passage of centuries. The outside perimeter was a filigree of dark, smooth bole, heavy palmate leaves carpeting every space between. When they stepped over the threshold onto the surface, Danilaw lurched the first step as a slightly different angle of gravity asserted itself. Amanda reached out to steady him; neither fell.

From among the leaves, a swirl of atmosphere—a dust devil?—manifested. It grew and complicated, sweeping up bits of detritus into a roughly human outline. “Hello,” the projection said, as Danilaw shied back from its extended limb-approximation. “Don’t be afraid. Welcome to the world. I am Samael. I have been sent to guide you.”

An angel, Danilaw realized—and now, meeting it, he intuited its history and purpose better than he had before. One of Captain Perceval Conn’s servitors, or masters, or compatriots. Artificial intelligences originally programmed by the Kleptocracy and its creatures. A piece of terrible history, left behind to trouble future generations.

Danilaw felt as if he were confronted by an animate, talking gas chamber, or an iron maiden with pretty manners. What was less ethical than giving artificial intelligence personalities? Than creating—in essence—a slave race: creatures with agency and identity but only the semblance of free will?

Danilaw’s people still used smart systems. But they had long since abandoned the horrific practice of making people of them, and then enslaving the people they had made.

As Danilaw’s pulse accelerated and his oxygen usage spiked, he saw the motion of Amanda’s suit; she had rocked back on her heels. He wondered what she was experiencing. Her knowledge of the relevant history was more detailed than his own; Danilaw suspected that made this encounter all the more unsettling.

If Amanda was more discomfited, she also recovered from it better. “Hello, Samael,” she said. “I am Captain Amanda Friar. This is Danilaw Bakare, City Administrator of Bad Landing.”

The Angel’s sunflower-petal eyebrows quirked. “I was provided with your files,” he said. “If you will come with me, I will bring you to my Captain.”

They fell into step beside him. The corridor was wide enough for all three abreast, though the uneven surface of the interwoven, intergrown branches or trunks made the footing akin to skipping over cobblestones in reduced gravity. If Danilaw took a header, he wouldn’t fall hard.

“Feel free to ask any questions you like,” Samael said. “We are eager to share our knowledge with you as an expression of goodwill, and to establish that we can help your society become more flexible and adaptive. Also, you are welcome to use our resources. If it would make you more comfortable, please feel free to remove your armor.”

Samael gestured around magnanimously. Danilaw blinked, understanding suddenly that for a culture in which every atom of oxygen and molecule of water was an irreplaceable consumable, this was an exceedingly generous offer. Danilaw was accustomed to metering his object and resource usage, observing the Obligations, wasting neither personal nor collective assets. But to a society such as this, centuries out from a habitable world—they had what they had, and there would be no getting more. It went beyond Obligation, beyond social justice. Parsimony was their means of survival.

His confusion and revelation seemed transparent to the Angel, who kept talking as if conducting a familiar guided tour. “You have our word that you may unseal in safety. The Captain has ordered our microfauna and flora to treat your persons and equipment as sterile zones. You will not be colonized.”

“Wait,” Danilaw said. “Your Captain ordered this? Your microbes follow instructions?”

Samael gave him what he would have sworn was a pitying look. “They obey the Captain. Are they not part of the world’s ecology?”

Danilaw saw Captain Amanda’s eyelashes flicker through the wide faceplate of her pressure suit. He thought she smiled, a wry expression he read as wonder, but she concealed it quickly.

“Our viruses aren’t so civilized,” she said. “For your sakes, we should remain sealed.”

“Also,” Danilaw said apologetically, “your atmosphere is slightly thin and sour by our standards. We need to supplement oxygen. How do you—your people, I mean—survive in such low saturations?”

The Angel tossed flowing straw-colored locks over his shoulders. It might be some vegetable fiber, or the mane of some animal that Danilaw did not know. “Naked mole rats.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Naked mole rats,” Samael repeated. “They’re an Earth species of colony-living burrowing rodent that is—or was; they may be extinct on the old planet, although we have some—supremely adapted to the, well, the exceptionally nasty conditions found in their lairs. Centuries ago, Cynric the Sorceress introduced their adaptations to deoxygenated and toxic atmospheres into the human genome. This enabled our crew to survive and flourish despite the damage wrought to the world by the Breaking.”

“Cynric … the Sorceress?” It was only the light filtering through the bowering leaves on every side that flashed from Amanda’s jewel, but the way it gleamed when she cocked her head led Danilaw to entertain a fantasy that the sparkles were an external indicator of frantic processing activity within.

Samael nodded. Even in profile, the mosaic-approximation of a beaky, lined human face was three-dimensional and compelling. “She was the head of genetic engineering, five hundred and fifty years ago. You can meet her.”

“Meet her?”

“For certain. Or her remnant, at least. She is alive again, though incomplete from what she was. There are also a couple of true survivors of the Moving Times and the Breaking. We anticipated that you might be interested in speaking with them.”

Five hundred and fifty, Danilaw mouthed to Amanda through his faceplate.

She shrugged, as if other insanities still held more of her attention. Mole rat DNA, she mouthed back.

Danilaw nodded. Okay, so living five hundred years wasn’t such a surprise after that. Obviously, the Jacob’s Ladder survivors had developed life-extending technology. Or they habitually put people in cold storage for centuries at a stretch. One, Danilaw thought, was as likely as the other, though the idea of this ancient genetic engineer being alive “again,” and somehow damaged by the process, supported the cryogenic theory.

“Where are we going now?” Amanda asked, stretching her legs to keep up with the Angel. He wasn’t tall, but then Danilaw guessed that he also probably wasn’t walking.

“Directly to the Captain,” Samael said. “It’s a big world, however, and I ask you to bear with me.”

A big world indeed. They hiked for over an hour, leaving Danilaw grateful that he’d kept up with his fitness Obligation. Even servo-assisted and allowing for the Jacob’s Ladder’s intermittent gravity, his pressure suit was heavy for walking in. At least it processed heat efficiently, or he imagined his visor would have fogged past visibility in the first fifteen minutes.

He was glad it didn’t. Because the Jacob’s Ladder—or the world, as Samael insisted on referring to it—only became more grand and improbable with what every turning revealed, what lay behind every air lock, gate, or grid.

Each time the Angel, obviously accustomed to taking into account the frailties of corporeal life-forms, apologized for not taking them along the scenic route, Danilaw felt his disbelief strengthen. It would have been difficult to imagine anything more compelling than the insanely complicated ecosystems and architectures he and Amanda were being led through.

The travelers toiled up mossy boulders past cataracts of tumbling water, and animals and birds Danilaw could not begin to identify flocked in every environment. Glades of trees filled arching passageways with transparent walls that showed the architecture of the Jacob’s Ladder from within. But for all its wonders, the ship had a patched, weary air to it, like a made-over old quilt ready for the recyclers.

“Here we are,” Samael finally said. “The library.”

It was not, as the door glided wide, what Danilaw would have identified as a library. No paper books, no clay tablets, no inscribed jewels. No holographic, Bose-Einstein, or magnetic records. No papyrus scrolls and no solid-state archives.

Just a grove of fruit trees, stretching to the curved outside wall of a vast space, surrounded on every side by hungry emptiness.

“Library,” Captain Amanda said. She turned her head, and then her entire body, rotating in her footsteps. Danilaw knew she was scanning the space with her suit recorders, transmitting the data home. As Legate, one of her Obligations was to science and history. “This is your library?”

Here, the atmosphere was warm and thick—a rich mix of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen, with trace elements. Some products of decomposition, some by-products of living things metabolizing. He wished he dared breathe it; from the way the mossy soil dented under his feet, he imagined it smelled intensely green.

Danilaw’s own sensors told him that a warm body was approaching through the orchard, and in a few moments a slender figure ducked branches and appeared. He had expected a hierarchal gauntlet, and to be kept waiting and maneuvering through layers of functionaries until he could be brought before the Captain—presented with great solemnity, like the centerpiece of a feast.

But all that arrived now was an androgynous person clad in tight-fitting blacks and oranges, a halo of frizzy dark curls framing an elfin face. Woman, Danilaw thought, and then No, transgendered. The voice, when it came, was no help at all.

“I’m Mallory,” this person said. “It is a library, and I am its necromancer. The Captain is expecting you. Come in. Oh and—for your own safety—ask before you eat any fruit, please. Some of it is trickier than others.”

Danilaw and Amanda, still accompanied by the semicorporeal Angel, wound among the trees, trying not to jostle ripe fruit from limbs that dripped old Earth delicacies. He recognized oranges and limes—unless those were lemons—persimmons, pomegranates, and something that might be apples. They weren’t round and red, though, but striped red and green and gold in faint striations. There was a dark, almost black, fruit with a glossy bloom, and there was a small red-gold one that might be a cherry—

He lost track just about the time the necromancer led them into a clearing where white cane chairs sat in a circle around a transparent-topped table. It looked like a garden party, except the two individuals rising to meet them from behind that table were the people to whom Danilaw had been speaking via radio, with ever-decreasing delays, for the better part of two months now.

The First Mate was even more attenuated and strange in person, his white hair sparkling like bleached, unspun wool in the brilliant sunlight. That sunlight—clearer and more stark than what Danilaw was used to seeing warmed by miles of atmosphere—fell through the transparent panels overhead. In this direct light, Tristen’s skin was a translucent blue, as if someone had left inky water in an antique teacup until the pigment stained the porcelain. He wore a hardened pressure suit of cool white, the helm and gauntlets removed. The assemblage taken as a whole resembled a medieval suit of armor. Over it hung a sheathed sword, of all the insane archaic devices.

And the Captain—

Danilaw had somehow thought her apparent gauntness and strange proportions were exaggerated by the effect of transmission. If anything, they had been minimized, flattened. The woman who held out her hand to greet him, as unfazed by his space suit as if it were a formal visiting gown, could never pass for an unmodified human. Stage cosmetics could have hidden her skin tone, but not the depth of her chest nor the articulation of the shoulder joints—not to mention the short, peculiar structures on her upper back that lifted her pale dress across them and sometimes seemed to move of their own volition, working like the stump of a three-legged quadruped’s missing limb.

“I am Perceval Conn,” she said. “Welcome to my world. You are the first nonnative to set foot on her in seven hundred years.”

Danilaw was far more self-conscious about his pressure suit than she was. Instead, she cocked her head to look at it, and smiled. “Your armor is a different design from what we use,” she said. “Pardon if I stare. I had thought to offer you lemonade, but—” She gestured with self-deprecation. “I suppose Tristen and Mallory and I will have to drink it ourselves. Can you manage to sit, at least? Mallory, would you find our guests a bench, please? I don’t think the lawn furniture is likely to accommodate them.”

Before leaving, Mallory laughed—a charming lilt with an engaging hint of wickedness—and just as androgynous as everything else. Danilaw was beginning to get the idea that it was calculated, a sort of performance.

This person—Mallory—was not what he had expected from what he knew of the transgendered … which was, to be true, mostly derived from popular period music, a notoriously unnuanced and melodramatic means of understanding any given social phenomenon. Danilaw was willing to bet many a C19 romance had ended with neither party shot down dead, but you’d never tell that from the pop songs.

“Thank you,” Danilaw said, to fill the silence. “You have been accommodating. I realize that many of our requests might seem outlandish—”

“You seem reasonably cautious,” Perceval said. “Never fear. We will not judge you based on our deep martial culture.”

Her lips were quirking. Danilaw decided he was being teased. “Do you have a deep martial culture?” He couldn’t help a sideways glance at the First Mate in his Galahad armor, the black sword on his hip.

Captain Perceval turned and regarded him. When he blushed, Danilaw realized, his whole face flushed as blue as a startled dodecapus. “Well, Tristen Tiger,” she said, while Mallory returned with the requested bench, “are you a deep martial culture, Uncle?”

That explained the relationship. Danilaw had wondered if they were lovers—an alien elf-queen and her consort.

First Mate Tristen glanced down. Danilaw watched the flush quell itself in his cheeks as quickly as it had risen. “Once upon a time,” he said, with no apparent irony, “I was for any war I could get. But I got old.”

When he looked up, his transparent eyes were like the first black ice of winter—thin and perilous. Danilaw believed that Captain Perceval had shown him that on purpose, and he made a note. They will fight if they feel they have to.

Very well. So would his folk.

Mallory set the bench up, pausing to laugh behind a hand. “Tristen Tiger,” the librarian, or necromancer, said. “And yet you have always been such a pussycat to me.”

This time the blush was controlled more quickly, but Danilaw saw the daggery look the First Mate shot the necromancer—or librarian. So this was a sport with them, baiting the albino. And if the First Mate was not the Captain’s consort, Danilaw would lay pretty good odds that he had some sort of romantic relationship with the necromancer.

Danilaw seated himself with thanks, ignoring the uncomfortable pressure of his posterior anatomy against the inside of his pressure suit. Captain Amanda sat down beside him.

“We are,” Perceval said, “apparently something of a failure on the martial glory front. Rest assured, we do not require posturing and childish proofs of your moral fortitude. We merely wish to arrive—Oh!”

In his pressure suit, Danilaw did not feel the shock wave, but he saw the results: the trees knocked into sharp bends, as if by a strong wind; the crack of shattering branches and a few boles. The First Mate’s pressure suit writhed about him like a living thing, extruding gauntlets and a helm as he dove after the Captain. She hadn’t quite been knocked tumbling, as Danilaw would have expected, but she did stagger before the force of the blow until her First Mate steadied her. Mallory went down on one knee and both hands, fingers curling into the dirt as if to cling to the world by main strength.

The angel’s leaf-litter-and-straw outline guttered like a breath-whipped candle flame.

Beside Danilaw, Captain Amanda grabbed his upper arm and latched onto a neighboring citrus tree with her other hand, head ducked as if she anticipated the shock wave might be followed by a massive decompression. Danilaw braced for the same.

But there was nothing. A great stillness followed, making him realize how loud with birds and rustling this orchard library had been. The silence was broken first by Tristen saying “Is anyone badly hurt?” and then by the noises of Captain Perceval pushing his armored body off hers.

“Not here,” Mallory said with a faraway expression. “The library is structurally undamaged.”

“Engine and Rule are fine,” Perceval said, her face crossed by a similar expression. They were checking intra-cerebral data links, Danilaw understood, and spared a shudder for how thoroughly these creatures had compromised themselves before the gods of self-modification. “There was an explosion—Oh.”

She turned her head and tilted it from side to side, examining Danilaw and Amanda. “Suicide bombing? I would not like to think it of you—”

“I beg your pardon.” Amanda released Danilaw’s arm and stepped forward, squaring her shoulders. “My people do not engage in acts of terrorism.”

“I see,” the First Mate said. “Then you will be as surprised as I was to learn that your ship has exploded.”