Grail

17 who ruined all of us

When the aliens had left and the rubble of the state dinner was cleared, Perceval reclaimed her Bridge and—mostly—her solitude. Her First Mate stayed with her; her Angel was already in residence, here as everywhere. But the rest of her executive crew knew when to let well enough alone.

This was one of those times, and though she cursed herself for being so predictable, she was grateful of their solicitude.

She stood behind the green bank of her command chair, hands resting on the back, and let herself lean. Hard, until her fingers dented the sod, and the scent of crushed violets and bluets surrounded her.

“Ariane had a backup,” she said.

Tristen was behind her, and she had stripped off her armor and returned it to its locker, but the rasp of his hair told her he nodded. “The signature is … unmistakable. Even Gerald, who ruined all of us, drew a few lines. Ariane kills whatever crosses her path because it pleases her to exert that kind of power, and then justifies it later.”

“The massacre,” Nova said, in that voice that reminded Perceval a little too fiercely of Dust, and his libraries of literature and history and ghosts, “is a tradition of tyrants from immemorial history. Destroy the enemy unto the last child, and sow the earth with salt around his bones.”

“We are the worst monsters there are.” Perceval worked her fingers together, twisting them, massaging the discomfort from her hands. It was the pain of exhaustion, and not even her colony could banish it entirely.

“We are the worst monsters there are,” Tristen agreed. “But we are all we have.”

He came up beside her and nudged her over. The Captain’s chair was broad enough for them to lean on side by side, shoulder to shoulder. Perceval breathed in his warmth and the animal comfort of his presence, the smell of his sweat and pheromones. She let her temple fall against his shoulder and felt the Angel, half solid and half real, upon her other side.

“The Fisher King’s folk. We are their worst nightmare,” she said. “We are the thing they changed themselves utterly to escape from.”

“And they are the thing we changed ourselves utterly to avoid becoming.” Tristen’s voice was deep, mellifluous, a little scratchy. “What are you going to do about Ariane?”

Ariane, her beloved’s half sister. Ariane, the worst of the Conns. Ariane, whose preserved and flattened ghost inhabited Perceval’s own mind, controlled and caged away, yet who seemed to have left another ghost, another revenant, loose in the world to wreak havoc and spread despair. If she had done so, she had wiped her own memory of the backup, or Perceval would have inherited that also.

Although Perceval had to admit, she had failed somewhat, out of distaste. She had not interrogated Ariane as completely as she should have, and even if overwritten with something innocuous to cover the hole, an erased memory could potentially leave a discontinuity.

That might tell them when she had made the backup. Which would in turn tell them where to start looking.

“She’s in my head,” Perceval said. “I suppose I shall have to find out what she knows about it. But I want you and Benedick here when I do it.”

Tristen nodded again. “Benedick will want a piece of her—for Caitlin’s sake and for Rien’s. And for you as well. But he’ll also know he’s emotionally compromised, and he won’t ask to be sent after her.”

“You think I should send him after her anyway.”

“No one is more dogged than Benedick. Or more dangerous when roused.”

“Tristen Tiger is,” she said, reaching across her own chest and left arm to brush her fingertips across his shoulder.

He leaned into the contact. “Tristen Conn is old and tired, My Lady. His claws are blunted and his teeth show yellow in receding gums. But in so long as you need one, I shall be thy tiger. I will find where Ariane has gone to ground, and I will reclaim your mother’s blade, and I will find what she plans for the Bible.”

He paused and took a breath, another. Knowing Tristen, knowing how he nerved himself to speak, Perceval gave him time. Finally, he began, “The Fisher King and his folk …”

“I know,” she said. “Every day they spend with us, the welcome will grow a little cooler, the willingness to share their world a little more remote. If we wish their permission, we will have to change to suit them.”

“It would disappoint the Builders,” Nova said, not so much startling Perceval as reminding her of her presence.

It had become easy to forget the Angel was there—something that never would have happened fifty years before. But now she was as neutral as blood-warm distilled water—a part of the environment. Unremarkable.

“The Builders believed in evolution over all,” Perceval said, “except where they were hypocrites about it. We’ll adapt. If they can be convinced to accept us, we’ll find a niche and exploit it.”

On his indrawn breath, Tristen seemed to swell. She felt him hold it and release before he spoke with resigned formality. “Well, if it comes right down to it, how do they propose to stop us from coming down? We are a war they cannot win.”

“I do not want to kill them,” Perceval said. “I want to prove to them that we, too, have grown from what we were.”

Tristen nodded. “Good luck,” he said.

It was not sarcasm.

While Perceval prepared herself for the task she so patently dreaded, Tristen took it upon himself to contact the most trusted members of the command crew and alert them to the possibility of a rogue revenant at large. He called Benedick in advance of any other, as per his Captain’s wishes. But then he contacted Mallory and Head, amused that his confidence did not extend first to any member of the Conn family but rather to creatures created by them, or evolved in response to the extremes of their creations. Head was a living tool, wrought by Cynric and blessed with free will to a specific task, and Mallory was an immortal with a head stuffed to creaking with the dead—memories recorded and transferred with Conn-derived alien technology: the colonies Cynric had stolen and reengineered.

Mallory took his suggestion calmly, and—surprising Tristen—suggested that the Angel Samael not yet be informed. Given Samael’s history with Ariane, it was probably wisest—and it would prevent Perceval having to waste time and risk unwanted consequences in inhibiting him from taking unguided action against the revenant, if he could find her. The search itself, Tristen knew, could prove quite adequately destructive.

Head surprised him more. He would have thought hir beyond overwrought emotional demonstrations, possibly beyond fear. But the mention of Ariane’s name and the suggestion that she might be returned brought blanched cheeks and denials. Head had known Ariane better than any of them, and dealt with her more personally and in more detail, which could account for a good deal of hir refusal to believe that the most sociopathic of Conns had returned to wreak havoc again.

When sie had done wringing hir hands, however, sie folded them together and said grimly, “Well, the unlamented Princess Ariane aside—begging your pardon, Prince Tristen—it’s clear that, whatever else is going on, we’ve a bad enemy at large and no mistake.”

“No mistake at all,” Tristen responded. Head might not be overly good at anticipating, identifying, and accepting threats, but sie was more than competent to handle the actual disaster in progress with aplomb. “I trust you will be alert to any evidence.”

“Alert and more than alert,” Head said. “Prince Tristen—”

“Yes, Head?”

“Take care of my Captain.”

The first decision Perceval faced was the need to choose a place in which to work. There would have been a certain poetry in using the Captain’s chair, when Ariane had fought with such monomania to claim it, but that chair had too much other and bloody symbolism, even if Perceval only meant to use it as an icon of authority. And Perceval—who had fought her cousin twice to claim it—found she wished to face Ariane this time not as Captain, not even as hopeful claimant to the chair, but as her mother’s daughter.

Vengeance repaired nothing. It replaced nothing. It wrought nothing anew—except the vengeance itself. It was only vengeance, and the splinter of Ariane that Perceval carried within herself was not even the splinter that had planned the attack, carried it out, and killed Caitlin Conn—all assuming Tristen was correct in his deductions, which was by no means a given.

But both fragments were related; both were remainders of the same woman who had destroyed Rule, who had crippled Perceval and shamed her, who had set in motion so many of the schemes and treacheries that Perceval and her family and allies were still paying for. They must share continuity of experience to a certain point, and at that point—where they had divided—lay the key to uncovering where the wicked Conn’s wicked twin was hid.

Perceval left her Bridge and walked instead down the lengthy access corridor. Measured footsteps rang on the deck, carrying her past the niche where the paper Bible sat no longer—good riddance, she should not think—past the seamed, rough-patched section where the Deckers’ breach had been repaired, and past the antechambers sown with sunflowers and all manner of bright things. She stopped by the lift, contemplated the moment, and stepped inside.

It carried her down. Well, not down, precisely, but in, further toward the world’s center of mass and rotation—which the Bridge lingered close beside already. Bridge, Perceval thought, unaccountably cheered by the wordplay, is only one letter from Bride.

And there, at the world’s center of gravity, Perceval walked across the naked breast of the Enemy, herself naked and unarmored. She did not need to travel far. Just a revolution or two, until she found a small, dead-chilled anchore, its deep seams and cracks still full of traces of ice that had not yet sublimated. It had no hatches, no air locks, no visible means of entrance. It had nothing but the chains and cables that connected it to the world—links thick as Perceval’s waist; cables braided of carbon monofilament and titanium—and the weight of ice within.

Trivial enough matters to the Captain of the world.

Perceval laid her hand flat on the surface of the capsule. Moist skin would have frozen there, but Perceval’s skin was dry. “Nova,” she said. “Open this and clear a space inside for me to enter.”

“That was—” Nova said, and if the Angel were not a program, Perceval fancied she would have been able to hear the distaste in her voice.

“Dust’s place,” Perceval agreed. He had never brought her here, preferring the Bridge and the cargo bays for her education, but a wise Captain knew her ship.

“The old computer core,” Nova said, in the voice of one intentionally amending another’s statement when that statement has unintentionally given offense.

Perceval let herself smile, just the corners of her mouth turning upward. It rewarded the Angel when the Angel was making an effort to chivvy her from her brown study. And when Perceval would not be chivvied, such as now. “Let me in.”

Nova made no argument. Her hesitation before following the instruction was so slight it did not even begin to approximate disobedience—so slight nothing less than an Exalt would have even noticed it. Then the Angel spread her arms—a theatrical but dramatic gesture.

Seemingly instantaneously, layers of metal and earth and circuitry and ice began to divide, split, and peel back like the petals of an impossibly robust and complex flower. Ice sparkled in breathless drifts across the darkness of the Enemy, pollinating nothing. Some of the piping had once been warm, but no water flowed through the space now. It was cold and empty.

At last, a stark chamber stood open to space, honeycombed with frozen water. The remnants of the world’s hydrostatic computer core, with its embedded atomic-level read-only memory. The remnants of the physical body of Jacob Dust, the ship’s library.

The ship’s memory, until Nova had eaten him.

This was where he had been born.

No one came near, not even the Angel. Perceval moved toward the center of the architecture of frozen water, sliding herself through razor-paned, fragile knifeblades. Blessing her slightness as she seldom did, she turned sideways to infiltrate between the toothy monoliths of icicles that might be a thousand years old.

When she was seated—she could not say comfortably—among the crystals of solid water as a mouse might secrete itself in a geode, she raised her hand to Nova again. Though she beckoned the Angel closer, she stopped as if limited by propriety at the edge of the chamber.—This is not my place.—

In the silence of vacuum, Perceval could not form the words aloud, but she could make Nova hear them. “You won’t come with me?”

—You are Captain,—Nova said.—I am construct. What do you want me to say?—

Feeling the cold of the ice pillars brush her skin, feeling the tiny water droplets, Perceval slid herself into a corner like a key wedging into a lock. “Seal me up in here,” she said.

Nova jerked back.—I beg your pardon?—

Perceval sighed. “Seal me up. I have someone I need to talk to, and I can’t risk her at large in the world.”

—Shall I isolate the hardware?—

“You shall,” Perceval said, “although I expect it’s too damaged to be of much use. And you shall withdraw yourself as well. You could provide her with a conduit for escape. I fear we must treat the Princess Ariane, when she is aware and unfettered, as a viral presence. I am confident that, offered the slightest chance, she will replicate, spread, and infect anything she can. She may be only a shadow of what she was, but what she was was a treacherousness that surpassed knowledge.”

Nova tilted her head, the brown locks breaking across her face in a manner she must have studied recordings for, because Perceval’s hair certainly never did anything so engaging.—You expect me to leave you in there alone and unsupervised, in the company of Ariane Conn?—

“A mere shadow,” Perceval scoffed. “Don’t forget, I once defeated the real thing. I don’t expect a lot of trouble from a mindprint. Most especially a mindprint I’ve already beaten, and beaten the body it came in, too.”

Nova folded her imaginary arms.—Still.—

“Still,” Perceval answered. “I will be fine, and you may not monitor me.”

—How will any of us know if you lose the battle? What if your shadow of Ariane takes control of you? Then we’ll have two of them running around, unbeknownst to anyone.—

That surprised Perceval into a chuckle. “I think if I’m replaced by Ariane Conn,” she said, “or even the ghost of her, it won’t take you too long to notice. Random hideous murders of people just standing around in corridor intersections minding their own business would fairly quickly give her away. If it doesn’t, you’ll probably catch her after the next erratic cleansing of strangers and hirees who got in her way, or who knew too much.”

The Angel snorted silently, which told Perceval she was winning. But Nova would not be made to back down so easily.

—I could disconnect a body,—she said. Nova’s bodies were disposable. They weighed a few pounds, no more, and they could be dissolved back into the world’s colony core when abandoned.—Just to watch over you.—

“Nova.”

Perceval had never yet seen an Angel make that particular expression—childlike, rueful, reprimanded. She wondered from which of Nova’s component parts it had come, and then wished she hadn’t. These days, she usually managed to see Nova as Nova, rather than the sum of her parts. But there were always the inevitable lapses.

Each time they happened, Perceval considered editing out the emotional/mnemonic function that reminded her of lost loves. And each time, she put the decision off for another day. The pain faded naturally with the years, but she was loathe to lose it all. It might prickle, but it prickled because it was the relic of something dear.

She met Nova’s level look with one of her own. The Angel was the first to glance down.

—As you wish.—

Perceval forced a smile. “I’ll knock to be let out.”

No passes, no incantations, no prestidigitator’s gesturing. Just the veil of titanium drawn transparent across the gap, then thickening, opaquing, and the Angel’s face vanishing behind it. Her interior voice went silent at the same time, and Perceval was left with the bottomless, unsettling emptiness of being alone in her own head for the first time in a half century.

It was cold in the library, and there was no oxygen. It didn’t matter; she was the Captain of the Jacob’s Ladder, and adapted to life in a fragile world that rested like a jewel in the black velvet bosom of the Enemy. She would have liked to have drawn a breath for the simple kinetic consolation of it, but comforted herself with folded arms instead. This was a closed space, small and dark. She was alone here, alone with the voices in her head. And there was a warden outside, to keep her safe from the world and the world safe away from her.

She was Perceval. She was strong. She could do this thing.

She placed the palm of one hand against the cold, cold wall of ice, hard as stone and unmelting before the mere warm heat of any mortal flesh. She grounded herself in that reality and went within.

There were shapes in her head—enemies and strangers. There were people in her program she never would have invited there. The program informed the meat, and the meat informed the person who identified as Perceval, and the person who called herself Perceval controlled the program. An endless loop, an oceanic cycle.

One of those people was the pallid remnant of Ariane Conn—a thing Perceval did not touch willingly or often. Now, though, she girded her loins, rolled up her sleeves, and waded into the fray. For Rien, for Caitlin, for Oliver—for everything Ariane had broken, and everything she had destroyed.

It was not easy.

It was rather like catching an oil slick, to begin with. Ariane might be in her head—might clamor for attention, attempt to force her twisted wisdom on Perceval, might be only a reflection and a memory of the madwoman who had been Ariane Conn in truth—but that did not mean she cared to let Perceval lay hands on her, even metaphorically. Her surface was greasy and insubstantial, and below that the personality of the dead Commodore was thick and sludgy, putrid, repellent. It was probably Perceval’s loathing for Ariane that was corrupting the program (she was reasonably certain that Ariane the narcissist had never seen herself as revolting), but acknowledging the source of the revulsion did not serve to make it any less real.

Still Perceval held the dead woman’s memory close, hugged it to her breast, and delved.

The record of a life ill-spent assaulted her. A great deal of what Ariane treasured was simply hellish to Perceval. The memory of her own maiming was in there, Ariane severing Perceval’s great wings with her weightless unblade. The memory of Tristen’s betrayal and incarceration was there as well. Perceval was tempted to tread lightly around the borders of that last. She knew Tristen would not care to be reminded of his decades in durance vile, nor would he care for her to share the details of his internment. But she was the Captain, and she was Caitlin’s daughter, and it was her responsibility to seek the truth under all the layers of sadism that Ariane could load up on it.

She gritted her teeth—literally as well as metaphorically—and plunged into the stinking depths.

Something that was not there, however, was the information she sought. Seamless, all of it, machine memory meshing up perfectly with the edges of fallible chemical memory, or as much of that latter as was recorded in Ariane’s ghost. Perceval waded through treasured, attention-polished images of her own gaunt flyer’s body, cobalt blood laddering down her protruding ribs and vertebrae as if it descended a staircase, dripping with viscous regularity from the thick, ragged stubs of her wings before it groped together like blind fingers and formed seeking tendrils, trying to seal the unhealing wounds. She walked tiptoe between Ariane’s gloating recollections of the netted dead in Rule, epidemic victims bundled and frozen in the bosom of the Enemy for when their bodies might be needed for raw materials or allowed to heal into the mute and servile resurrected. She watched Ariane kill Alasdair and consume his memories and experience with his colony.

She learned what snapped an unblade, as Ariane’s Mercy met Tristen’s black Charity, and both swords threw black sparks and shatterings along the walls of the world. She saw the battle, and she saw that Tristen was clearly the superior swordsman. But it availed him not when Ariane—that treacherous knight—sent her attendant Angel Asrafil into the matrix of Tristen’s sword, possessing the unblade, weakening its structure, and creating a plane of cleavage through the blade so that it broke across the forte. As Tristen reeled back, Ariane struck with the dagger in her left hand and ended the fight—for a time.

She learned, too, that Ariane had blinded Tristen before she locked him away, though she had used only her main gauche to do it and not her unblade, and so after some time the wound had repaired itself. A cruelty at the time—what good were eyes in eternal darkness?—but an unexpected and unintended mercy in the end, when Perceval, Gavin, and Rien had resurrected Tristen from the tomb.

Perceval learned all these things—things she had already known or suspected. She learned them in too much detail, and too well. At first, Ariane twisted against her, tried to hide, but she was proud of her crimes, fulfilled in her evils. She—her remnant—had been alone with them a long time.

There was a part of Ariane that delighted in showing off for Perceval all the wickedness she’d done. It was a new wickedness, and Perceval’s horror and disgust were most satisfying. Ariane gave her more, unable to resist. It is a human need, to see our accomplishments admired.

And Perceval, gritting her teeth, wading in foulness, quailed and encouraged those confidences.

Then, having encouraged Ariane to open up to her, she began picking Ariane apart. She did not care to assimilate her; she did not want this dragon in her head. But she knew now that she no longer dared leave her intact, encysted and virulent. She would have to consume her, truly, and make of Ariane’s twisted self-creation some useful materials out of which to build a richer and wiser self.

She learned a thousand unsuspected but hardly revelatory cruelties, too. The vivisection of a ship cat Chelsea had adopted as a pet; the theft and destruction of Oliver’s lover; the endless torments heaped upon long-suffering Head, who existed—who had been created—only to please the folk of Rule. Status as a valued servant was not sufficient to protect anyone from Ariane—Doctor and Vintner and others had suffered as well. Alasdair would not have permitted Ariane to interfere with their duties, but given an adequacy of spite and invention, it was not hard for Ariane to make herself a figure of dread and loathing to all and sundry, from highest to most low. Rien, it seemed, had been beneath Ariane’s notice until she was called to serve Perceval, and for that Perceval was grateful. But no one who caught Ariane’s attention escaped unscathed.

But the information she needed was in here somewhere, and she would find it if she must pull each atom of her enemy’s memory from the next and disassemble them all for the component parts.

She’d expected Ariane to fight the integration more vigorously, and indeed her remnant tried. But Perceval had grown stronger and more skilled than when last they fought, and it turned out to be a trivial matter to defeat her ancient enemy again. But the ease of the victory, she thought bitterly, was more than made up for by the distastefulness of the task.

Perceval was examining the record of a monster, and felt lessened for wading through it—and the more so for each bit she plucked, disassembled, and consumed. How was she different from Ariane if she took such pleasure in destroying Ariane?

Examining each bit for the discontinuity was like running her fingers over a polished surface, feeling for the bit of roughness, the seam, the snag. Ariane would have hidden it well, if she were hiding it even from herself. As one would; one did not hide one’s soul away to ensure one’s immortality and then blithely advertise the location.

She found it, at long last, in Rule. There, among the netted bodies, the victims of the engineered influenza that Ariane had used Perceval herself as a vector for, there was a flutter. Not even a skip, but a—a discontinuity. A repetition in the pattern of breaths, in the images of contorted bodies and dead faces.

Time excised and filled up with other time.

“Gotcha,” Perceval whispered. Wild exultation filled her, but she fought it back and adjusted her chemical balance. She didn’t want to feel this joy now, surrounded by the stench and the memory of the dead.

And then she winced, because she realized what it indicated. If the skip was in Rule, at that particular time and place, that meant that Ariane’s Trojan Horse personality was embedded in somebody who had been present in Rule at that time. Which meant one of two places, because if Ariane had copied herself into the surviving splinter of Samael, Nova would have found it when she vetted the contents of his program. That left Head, or one of the members of her staff that she had managed to rescue—

—or the body of Oliver Conn, resurrected now and repurposed to hold the personality of the long-dead Astrogator, Damian Jsutien.

“Shit,” Perceval said—or mouthed, rather, there being no atmosphere to carry the vibrations. Reaching out, she tapped on the library’s external hull.

“Nova?” she said, when the Angel reestablished contact. “I think I’m ready to come out.”

Through the host Conn’s night, while the host slept and Ariane used the body to study, Dust washed his paws and watched the door. His patron rarely said anything, rarely rose from her chair. Instead, she sat before the massive swell of the ancient book, a papery rasp revealing each turned page.

She was not reading. Or rather, she was reading, but she was not reading the words written in ink. There was other information there, leaved through the pages on circuit boards mere molecules thick, wired into the spine on data-jewels that had endured for generations.

Night after night, Ariane—in her borrowed body—figured out the access, learned the technology, unlocked the coding, and bored into the guts of the antediluvian computer. And night after night, Dust sat on the perch by the door and watched her.