Grail

20 all the world and everything

There was too much light in the room. To Perceval, the space in which Cynric had chosen to examine Jsutien felt washed-out, white-lit, dreamy, like a surgical theater hung with gauze. But Cynric preferred it, or perhaps merely tolerated it without discomfort, and so Perceval bit her tongue.

Benedick sat with them while they went in. The rest of the senior crew and Conns returned to their stations.

There was trust involved in joining forces with Cynric to investigate the contents of Jsutien’s mind—but not so much trust, Perceval thought, as there would be in allowing her to go in alone, and then taking her word for what she found. Perceval had known the woman—or her revenant—for fifty years now, and in that time she had seen nothing to indicate that Cynric, whole or fractional, had ever hesitated at anything she thought necessary, no matter how tragic or distasteful a sane person would have found it.

Cynric was there beside her, holding her hand, the too-intimate bond of blood and colonies flowing between them. Her presence—her assistance—filled Perceval with a strange white puissance, as if all the world and everything were washed out with that same cold light that filled the examination room. It was a dreamy prospect, silhouettes moving against glare and breaking the flooding light into rays.

She would have rather been anywhere else at all, but this was her responsibility. And so Perceval herself, in her person as Captain and guide of the Jacob’s Ladder, leaned down over the chair Damian Jsutien sat in and kissed him on the mouth.

Jsutien’s mouth opened. He eased his jaw, tilting his head back to allow her access. He closed his eyes, as relaxed as a drowsy child accepting a mother’s bedtime kiss.

Perceval let her colony touch his, and slipped herself inside, into the spare and ferny landscape of his soul.

For someone who had inhabited the body for as long as he had, Jsutien had not much populated its mind. Perceval knew he had grown from a seed, a set of recorded preferences and commands and variables that fit into a matrix that could be slipped into a pocket, carried in a hand. But that was just source code, uncompiled. It was just the blueprint for a thing that could grow into a person—a person similar to the person who had recorded it, once upon a time.

Such revenants usually elaborated, populating their environments just as any organic mind might. The neurology affected the personality—but the personality also affected the neurology. Brains changed to accommodate the minds that dwelled in them, just as minds adapted to the architecture of the brain.

Jsutien had left Oliver Conn’s mind as white-walled and unmodified as a rental flat. The space was inhabited but not lived in, and the record of the thing—the person—that had been Damian Jsutien had not spread itself out into the crevices.

Perceval went deeper, but nothing Jsutien could have done could have faked the transparency, the emptiness, the sheer unused space in this head. There was processing power here to spare. Jsutien had just never moved into it. Fifty years on, and he inhabited his own head like a transient with a sleeping bag and a hot plate flopped into one corner of a mansion. He had never, she realized, expected this incarnation to be permanent.

He had never let himself get attached.

Perceval felt Cynric following along beside her, trailing long metaphorical fingers over the furnishings, contemplating the immaterial windows and walls.

“If it were here,” Cynric said, “it should be easy to spot in a head like this.”

Perceval regarded her without turning. Without any outward sign of a reaction at all.

“He never moved in, did he?”

“He never felt welcome here,” Cynric said, “so he stayed out of a sense of duty. But this is all—work. Predictable. Crazy-making. He never developed recreations, or investigated any of the ones his other-self enjoyed. He would have had the muscle memory for Oliver’s sports, or he could have retrained his body to work on Jsutien’s. The mind could be trained to match the body, or the body to match the brain.”

“He’s not our man,” Perceval said.

“Au contraire,” Cynric said. “Something was filling up this space, and now it has been deleted.”

Deleted. Perceval lurched forward in her eagerness, but—regretfully—Cynric shook her head. Here in this space that didn’t precisely exist, she was a long-armed wraith, the wind of Jsutien’s thoughts blowing her robe up between her arms and body until it billowed like the sails of a kite. It arched, lifting.

“Deleted and—”

“Overwritten,” Cynric confirmed. “Come on. We’ll get a better view from a height.”

She sailed up. Perceval followed, until they moved through the cool transparent azure of Jsutien’s spotless mind. It was beautiful and cold. There was no pain here, no loss, no regret, no love.

Perceval found she enjoyed it.

She also enjoyed the landscape spread out below her—a patchwork of this and that and the other thing, the edges ruler-straight, the surfaces mowed tidy. It was more like a schematic of a mind than anyplace anybody spent time, and Perceval again shook her head. It should be impossible to hide anything as large and fiddly as a daemon in here. Jsutien was barely more than a daemon himself.

“She’s not in here.”

“I know,” Perceval said. “That’s not the answer I was hoping for.”

“But I am confident in suggesting that she was. Which means more than one daemon. Which means she could be anywhere.”

“In you or me,” Perceval said.

“Or, more likely, any of the others. Let’s keep that our secret.”

“Let’s,” Perceval agreed. “Because our most important goal remains finding her.”

“And Charity,” Cynric said. “Wherever we find the blade, we find Ariane.”

“Outside,” Perceval said, and returned to herself with a thought. She leaned forward for a moment, elbows akimbo and splayed hands on her knees. Benedick’s hand came to rest on her shoulder. When she looked up, Cynric was regarding her.

“She was in there, but she’s gone. She purged. You’re clean, Astrogator.”

Jsutien let out a long, soft sigh, the first evidence that he had felt concern. “So what now?”

“We have to find Charity,” Perceval said. “Charity, or that damned Bible.”

Nova spoke out of nothing. “An unblade doesn’t register on my sensors. And I have not been able to locate the Bible.”

“Then we search,” said Benedick. “By hand.”

“We cannot search the whole world,” Jsutien protested.

“No,” Benedick answered. “We prioritize.”

By hand indeed—by hand, and by foot, and through the corridors of Engine and Rule and spreading outward. Every available Engineer and denizen of Rule was pressed into service, and not just them. The carnivorous plants turned out in force. The toolkits were arrayed to check crawl spaces. Nova reprogrammed the ship cats and set them seeking.

There were Deckers, too—those closest to AE deck outraged by the murders there, and the rest in service to the ship. Tristen heard muttering from some that the Conns should have done more to protect the victims, and a few of the rumors that wended back to him opined that Conns, indeed, had killed all the inhabitants of AE deck in order to cover up some variously specified crime.

No one was sent out alone, by order of the Captain. Tristen did not miss the care with which Cynric maneuvered to become his partner. They would start their search with the Go-Back Heaven, and Tristen would not send anyone else to brave Dorcas.

In the lift, Cynric and Tristen talked. Cynric seemed to enjoy the conspiracy theories purely from an entertainment standpoint, and amused herself by laying out a few of the crazier ones for Tristen. She sat cross-legged in the corner, her robes draping from her bony wrists, and leaned her head back into the corner while she spoke.

Tristen had seen her so many times, perched in some corner behind the barricade of her bony knees, the lines of her long face defining smiles or frowns. He wondered how it was that he had only now realized that this was the real Cynric, or at least as much the real Cynric as the cold, imperious Sorceress.

“There’s one that says you stole the Bible yourself,” she said. “And that you mean to use it to replace Perceval as Captain.”

Tristen arched his eyebrows. “If I wanted to be Captain, I would have been.” The implications of her words struck him. “Wait. Use it? What use is an old paper book?”

Her head came forward, the long neck lengthening. The stare she leveled at him would have curdled the blood of most men.

“You are no revenant,” she said. “Are your memories fully intact?”

He shifted in his armor. “Flesh or machine memories? I went mad for a while.”

“The legacy Bible.” He nodded.

“It was you who taught me its purpose, Brother mine. When I was small. The Bible is an immutable hard copy of the Builders’ New Evolutionist creed, to be sure, but it’s also a computer—an old-style discrete calculating and remembering machine. And it holds the override codes for the entire world.”

Tristen blinked at what she said. He heard it—of course he heard it—but it seemed to wash over him as a series of abstractions. Nonsense, confused and inarticulate, until he tossed his head like a dog shaking water away. “I’m not following you.”

She rose, the sweep of fabric trailing behind her, and moved toward him. They were of a height, and Tristen knew their father’s features were plain in both their faces. She touched his cheek. “The legacy Bible is a computer. You taught me that.”

“I’m sorry,” Tristen said. “I do not understand.”

He also did not understand the smile that stretched her face—more like a snarl, in truth. But he did understand when she spat “Father!” as if it were the worst curse word she knew.

She touched his cheek. “It appears, Brother Tristen, that somebody has been reprogramming your brain. Removing old knowledge. Would you care to hazard a guess as to who might be responsible?”

He did not doubt her. He wanted to; he could feel the denial in him, rising like the automatic subroutine it might be. But she was Cynric, and whatever else she was, she had never been a liar. “Can you fix it?”

She was angry. “There was nothing Alasdair Conn could do that I could not undo better. One of the things that book was for was rewriting memories, but I have read the book, and know it well. Give us a kiss, Brother dearest.”

It didn’t hurt a bit, and Tristen was left with no sense that anything had altered, but this time when Cynric said the simple words, they made sense and stuck deep in his memory. They were finished before they arrived in the Edenite Heaven.

And the implications of what Cynric said sent a chill through his body that had nothing to do with the temperature controls in his armor. Their father had used the information in the New Evolutionist Bible to remove his memories; Cynric had used it to restore them.

And Ariane had that book now.

As the lift door slid open and they stepped forth into the lock, he said, “You couldn’t have mentioned that earlier?”

The far door began to cycle, Dorcas just visible through the widening gap. Cynric spoke quickly, from the corner of her mouth. “It never occurred to me that you would forget.”

“Tristen,” Dorcas said, as the doorway between them stabilized at its widest aperture. “Cynric. To what do I owe this unexpected joy?”

* * *

Tristen took Dorcas aside and told her that she must call her folk and her snakes in from the fields and gather them in the onion-domed tent that served the Edenites as a hall. He told her she must keep them quiet and collected—fields unweeded, goats unmilked—while he and Cynric went over the Heaven from one end to the other, with no respect for personal privacy or the doors of tents.

She waited, and when they finished—and found nothing, as Tristen had half expected and half feared—it was Tristen who had to go back to her and tell her that they were done, and her folk could return to their residences and their work. Cynric would have done it for him, of course, but he felt he owed it to the woman who inhabited his daughter.

“You’re not sorry,” she said, walking him back to the lift lock, where Cynric waited. “Will you even tell me what you were looking for?”

He studied her, the sway of her hair, the line of her shoulders. He laid a hand on the hilt of his sword—which had been Sparrow’s sword—and felt the weird intelligence in the blade yearn toward her. Mirth did not care if Sparrow’s mind inhabited Sparrow’s body.

He said, “Are you going to tell me you don’t know?”

“I don’t have the Bible,” she said. “Or the sword. I have no desire to rule this sad old world of yours, Tristen Tiger, that all you Conns squabble over with such ferocity. Exactly as if it meant anything at all.”

There was something in her voice, in the levelness of her tone, that took the splinter of unease working through him and froze it to a spike of ice. “Do you know who does have it?”

She let her lips stretch across her teeth. “You know who has it,” she answered. “And you know she isn’t here.”

Tristen was not a cursing man, but sometimes he made an exception. “Don’t fuck with me, Dorcas.”

“Old man,” she said, “I would never. But I’ll tell you what: if I find her, I’ll take care of it for you.”

* * *

It was a long ride home, but as much as Danilaw would have liked to spend the trip getting to know Amanda better and exploring the sprawling reaches of the Jacob’s Ladder, there was enough work to fill almost every waking hour—work complicated by the headaches and malaise caused by the Jacob’s Ladder’s stressed and possibly toxic environment, to which Danilaw was not adapted.

Somewhat to his surprise, language lessons were the least of it. The Jacobeans learned quickly, and once Danilaw had texts sent over the q-sets, they mostly managed by self-study, using him and Amanda for conversational practice. He also could not miss the signs that all was not well—politically speaking—with his hosts. When he asked, Tristen told him that an assassin was at large, one who wished to provoke armed conflict between the Jacobeans and the people of Fortune.

“But don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll find her.”

Still, by the drawn look of his features and the apparent lack of time or sleep among any of the senior crew, Danilaw suspected that they were not growing closer to a solution. More critical to Danilaw personally was time spent managing the situation on Fortune. If on the trip out Danilaw had been surprised by the ease with which he managed his duties remotely, now he was surprised by the degree to and speed with which everything could fall apart.

Administrator Gain was nearly impossible to get ahold of. She sealed herself behind a wall of staff, and whenever Danilaw called, she was unavailable—which, he had to admit, was reasonable, given that conversations with Administrator Jesse—and Danilaw’s own obsessive checking of newsfeeds and the planetary infosphere—provided intelligence of a sticky situation on the ground, indeed.

“People are frightened,” Jesse said. “There’s a good deal of disbelief that one of us committed the sabotage. We’re taking steps to encourage cooperation and discourage hoarding—”

He sighed. They were on audiolink only, and Danilaw could hear the shrug in his voice. “Lifeboat rules,” Danilaw said. “Stay on it. What’s up with Gain?”

“Factionating,” Jesse admitted. “She seems to be coming around to being an open proponent of isolationism. Do you know if she’s been in contact with anyone on the Jacob’s Ladder?”

“Except through official channels?” Danilaw, secure in his own invisibility, allowed himself to rock back and fold his arms for the defensive comfort of the gesture. “What makes you suspect it?”

The considering silence on the other end of the connection was anything but reassuring. “She is the ham radio hobbyist. She might have her own plans. Public opinion is not in favor of welcoming the offworlders, currently, and she seems to be feeding that isolationism. There’s a lot of talk of ‘contamination,’ and frankly, we’ve had some demonstrations. Civil unrest, and I would not be surprised if it is being arranged by agitators. Also, we’ve got preliminary instructions from the homeworld. They basically amount to Stall.”

“Crap. Well, that’s useful.” Danilaw pressed his temples. “Thanks, Jesse. Watch your back, okay?”

“It unsettles me that you feel the need to say that.”

“Not as much as it unsettles me.”

Danilaw paused a moment to let Jesse sign off. He hit the kill on his own q-set before raising his voice to address the air. “Nova? Can you find or make me a musical instrument?”

His own guitar had been lost with the Quercus, and as weird as it felt to be asking thin air for favors, Danilaw suspected he needed something to do with his hands.

The air spoke back. “Easily. What would you like?”

“Guitar,” he said. “Six string. Acoustic.”

Nova materialized before him, just long enough for him to realize that he was getting over his discomfort at dealing with an anthropomorphized artificial intelligence faster than he ever would have imagined possible, and handed him a hard black case as he stood to greet her. “Your wish, etcetera.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Nova?”

She hesitated in the midst of dispersing, streamers of her image blowing off her shape like ribbons in the wind. “Yes, Administrator?”

“Please tell the First Mate or the Captain I would like to speak with them.”

There was no perceptible delay, but Danilaw knew she must have checked with both before she answered. “Of course. The First Mate will see you on the Bridge.”

When Danilaw reached the Bridge, not just Tristen but also Perceval was waiting for him. And Amanda, seated on the grass beside the Captain’s chair, a cup of some hot beverage in her hand. She smiled at him; he winked back. There, at least, was one unexpected and happy outcome of the entire situation.

The Bridge was bright with increased sunlight. Even filtered—as it must be now—it filled the space with warmth and a honeyed glow. The handle of his new guitar case rough against his palm, Danilaw breathed deep—violets, lily of the valley. Alien Earth flowers he had only learned the scents of recently.

In the forward screen, a three-dimensional image of Fortune and its secondary, Favor, fell endlessly one around the other. They were magnified, but even in their magnification Danilaw could feel how close they were. A day or two out now. So close.

So close to home.

So close to irrevocable decisions.

The worst of it was, he had come to like the Jacobeans, in all their sophipathic insanity. They might be grotesques, caricatures, larger than life and full of violence—but they were also shockingly generous and, sometimes, shockingly funny.

Whatever happened next, he thought, he was not going to enjoy it.

“Tea?” Amanda said. She held up her cup and gestured to a pot half hidden in the grass beside the Captain’s chair.

“Please,” Danilaw said. He sat beside her and opened the guitar case; he saw her considering look, and her decision to accept the obvious without asking questions.

The guitar was cool and smooth in his arms. It fit perfectly in the cradle of his torso and thigh. It was, in fact, in tune.

He found a G chord and strummed it. It didn’t have the mellow resonances and tonal quirks of an age-seasoned, handmade instrument, but the intonation was clear and bright. “I see I didn’t need to call a council—”

“The news just came from Aerospace,” Amanda said. “There’s a lighter coming up to meet us. It should be here in twelve hours.”

Danilaw felt his muscles flex involuntarily, digging his thighs and buttocks into the soil where he sat. He breathed out, pushing the tension away, and tried not to let relief dizzy him. Home. Clean, thick air. Full gravity.

A day away.

Tristen, on the far side of Perceval’s chair, folded his hands. “You wanted to speak with me.”

“I may have a partial solution to your situation,” Danilaw said. He did not look at Amanda, not wanting to reopen their old argument about rightminding. “You understand that a majority of the citizens of Fortune are taking an isolationist line—”

Perceval lifted her chin and looked at him. Just looked, but Danilaw felt the heat of embarrassment in every limb.

He swallowed and forced himself on. “We have a world. We can spare a little of it. Just this once. It’s not like generation ships are going to be a common occurrence.”

Tristen huffed. “You’re offering us resources to move on.”

“It’s a shameful bribe,” Danilaw said. “The alternative requires you to submit to rightminding, and integrate into the Fortune colony.”

He did not expect them to like the options. Judging by their thinned lips and sidelong glances, he had been right. But Tristen said, “What about your secondary, Favor? The binary world. You haven’t settled it—”

“It’s still got an ecosystem,” Danilaw said. “A toxic ecosystem, but the potential for introducing an imbalance—”

“Toxic for you,” Tristen said. “We would adapt. We will be forced to adapt to gravity, in any case. We’re not”—he hesitated, as if searching for a sufficiently emphatic word—“inexperienced when it comes to balancing biospheres.”

“I’m sorry,” Danilaw said. “There’s too many of you. And you’re not rightminded. It’s the rightminding, frankly, that will be the biggest sticking point for my people. Without it, they will always see your people as aliens. As the sword of Damocles.”

“I see,” Perceval said.

Amanda pressed a belated cup of tea into Danilaw’s hand, which had dropped away from the neck of the guitar. He sighed and sipped it.

She said, “Why don’t you come down to Fortune with us? When we descend?”

“Excuse me?” Perceval said.

“There’s room in the lighter,” Amanda said. “Come down. Meet a rightminded planet. Then make up your mind.”

Perceval opened her mouth. Tristen placed a hand on her shoulder. “I’m not sure—”

“Oh, never fear,” Amanda said. “I am going to inspect every inch of that lighter before I put anyone on it. A person really only needs to be sabotaged once.”