Grail

23 another tiny bird came to her hands

In the house of her fathers, Cynric Conn opened stolen hands and let a bird take wing. Beside her, Benedick craned his head back and watched it whirr toward the ceiling, a blur of liquid green. It vanished into the topmost branches of the olive trees that guarded the gates of Rule.

“Another one scrubbed clean,” Cynric said, with satisfaction. “It makes me suspicious, though. This tawdry little virus—it’s a distraction, not a serious attempt. You know Ariane—”

Benedick shook his head. “If we’re staying here, we’re taking the world apart. Fixing them could be wasted effort, you know.”

A cage full of parrotlets rested by Cynric’s feet. She bent from the waist and pushed her hands through the transparent, flexible membrane that closed its aperture. Her hair fell all around her face, making a tunnel of her vision. She could not see Benedick, but she could feel him there beside her, breathing, shifting from foot to foot.

Another tiny bird came into her hands. Feather, bone, heat, and fragility.

“DNA is an aggressive molecule,” she said, extricating the parrotlet and caging it between her fingers as she stood. It kicked against her palms; she kept its wings pinned gently to its sides so it could not do itself an injury. Having cleared their program, she could have just sprung the cages and unleashed every one of the birds simultaneously, but the older Cynric got, the more she believed in ceremony.

She turned to her brother and extended her hands. “Here, you take this one.”

“Does it go with the non sequitur?” His long, vertically creased face nevertheless brightened as she pushed the little bird upon him. “Just let it fly?”

“Yea, verily.”

He was awkward, opening his hands crookedly, not giving the bird the toss that would throw it into flight. Still it kicked off his palms, leaving pinpricks of blue behind where talons had scratched, and flogged into the air.

He looked at her, holding his hands wide as the blood pulled itself into his body and sealed the wounds. “Was that a lesson, Sister?”

She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “For you, or for the parrotlet? It wasn’t a non sequitur, Ben. But think—the bird wants to live; it wants to propagate its species. On a visceral level that has nothing to do with what we deem cognition, it needs to survive. It carries the Leviathan’s ability to engineer its own future by wanting; I created it for that. For wanting life, and getting what it wants. It’s just possible that its wanting is what got us here.”

Benedick did not speak, but his expression said volumes about doubt and ethics and frustration. Cynric studied the empty air where the birds had flown.

She owed him something for the suffering she had inflicted upon him, the guilt and grief by which she had manipulated him into becoming the man who no longer obeyed and trusted their father. The genesis of that grief had been her salvation and her destruction, her remaking. She knew the grief hadn’t left him; she could see its pressure between his eyes every time he glanced at her.

“And there are only two ways for that need to be met,” she finished.

“Two?” he asked. This time, he crouched himself, reaching in to gather up another few grams of green feathers over racing heart. He handed the parrotlet to Cynric, shaking it gently loose from his thumb when it bit, and retrieved another for himself.

Simultaneously, the Conns released them. Cynric caught her breath to watch them fly. “Either the world can live on—in whatever form—and thus its inhabitants endure, or we can make landfall somewhere that will sustain us all. Do you think we have the wherewithal to terraform, transplant, and sustain an entire ecology?”

Benedick looked at her and shook his head. “Do you suppose there’s a third option?”

“Probably,” she said. “The question is, will we think of it in time?”

“Prince Benedick,” Nova said. “Princess Cynric. There is a crisis on the surface. An assassination attempt has been made against the Captain. She is alive”—the Angel spoke quickly enough that Cynric saw Benedick’s shoulders relax incrementally almost before they could tense—“and wounded. Tristen requests assistance.”

“Evacuation?” Benedick was ever crisp in crisis.

“It would be unwise to move the Captain,” Nova said. “However, I feel it would also be unwise for you to go to her. There is too much potential for a trap.”

“My daughter—”

“Benedick.” Cynric reached across the space to lay a hand on his arm.

“Cynric—”

“I will go to your daughter. What can it harm? I am dead already. Let me see this thing they call a world.”

* * *

Dust’s patron began by laying the open palms of her borrowed body on the pages of the book. She pressed them flat, and Dust felt the roll of her shoulders under his feet when she squared them and drew in a breath. She had a long neck in this body, a pointed chin, and hair that reached her thighs. Dust curled himself in the cave those things made and waited.

Across the table, the Go-Back Engineer who possessed Tristen’s daughter sat, too, pressed her own hands open on the tabletop, and also waited.

Dust heard her heart and breathing quicken as that black, black text began to flow from the page across the backs of Ariane’s hands, sliding over graceful bones and tendons in as fine relief as sculptured porcelain. The book bled text up the outlined muscles of her forearms, the sharp elbow bones. Words glided like projected light and shadow over skin, then vanished beneath the sleeves of her blouse. Dust felt them moving, immaterial but important, under the dry, scratchy pads of his feet, curling up his patron’s throat and swimming across her face. She ran full of words; she glowed with them. They buoyed her blood and burned in the depths of her irises.

“Loading,” she whispered, in a voice full of strange resonances. Words continued to flow into her—words now that were unrecognizable, strings of digits and letters, curious and arcane symbols. There was seemingly no bottom.

“Loading,” she said, again. And again. And, “Dust, I need you.”

The fallen Angel nerved himself, looked into his patron’s eyes, and followed the words within.

Cynric recognized the young Mean who waited in the shuttle—the lighter—for her. Jesse, one of the Administrators of Fortune. He seemed drawn and harried as she took her place, but more than a little overawed by her, and made an awkward, undiplomatic effort to make her feel at ease.

And his mere presence was a pleasant assurance that her chances of making it to the surface in one piece were fairly good. She folded herself into the tight space defined by the acceleration couches and rigged the straps for security. When Administrator Jesse double-checked them, he seemed satisfied.

With a small bump, they came free of the world, and she saw it from a perspective farther away than even when she had captured the Leviathan.

As they accelerated into the gravity well, Cynric made idle conversation with the Administrator. As their path took them between Fortune and its secondary, she found her eye drawn to the smaller world’s cloud-swirls, its dark seas and ragged continents.

“If you won’t share your world,” Cynric said, “what about that one?”

Jesse’s gaze followed her own. “Everything on that one is poison.”

“Too poison for us?”

“It’s a hydrogen sulfide based biosphere,” he said. He glanced at her sideways, eye corners crinkling. “And yet perhaps you are too poison for it.”

Cynric laughed. “You lot make so much of your mental stability. But you’re xenophobes, neophobes, the lot of you. You’ve wired a lack of diversity into your souls.”

He rubbed his chin and frowned, but he did not seem offended. “And you do better?”

She shrugged. “We get along with carnivorous plants and talking screwdrivers. I don’t know what should be so hard about getting along with you.”

Perceval awakened in a room of wonders, unable to really appreciate any of them. On her left side, vast bubbled portals showed a watery undersea view—a glimpse into the River, perhaps?—and on her right, animate banks of lights winked in oscillating patterns.

She lay, she thought, exposed on a sort of cot or raised pallet, not enclosed in a proper bunk. She didn’t have much pain—a little lingering soreness and stiffness—and she didn’t feel crushed by the weight of her own body, which at first made her think she was back aboard the Jacob’s Ladder.

She didn’t immediately recognize the room she was in, but even now there were probably thousands of places in the world she hadn’t seen with her own eyes. Life was finite—and very busy—and the world was large.

But this room was not lit in any of the ways Perceval recognized, instead illuminated by full-spectrum fixtures that nevertheless didn’t shine in quite the color her eyes expected. And when she said “Nova?” Nova did not answer.

Instead, the face of her Aunt Cynric hove into view, creased with a frown of concern. “How do you feel?”

Perceval self-assessed. “Not bad,” she said. “All things considered.”

“Not bad for somebody who left most of her liver on the pavement?” Cynric spoke in the dialect of Fortune. It was strange to hear her switch languages with such facility and obvious relish.

This idea of languages—of different languages—was something of a novel concept to Perceval. Of course there were dialects aboard the world, and isolated communities had drifted away from one another. But so long as you excepted the anatomically unique creatures, such as the carnivorous plants and the Leviathan, all speech descended from one mother tongue.

Well, there was Language, but that was different—a neurological exploit rather than patterns of sound and movement. And only Cynric had ever been any good at it.

“Pavement,” Perceval said, lingering over the foreign language in her turn. “The liver’s growing back, I hope.”

“Everything seems to be repairing itself nicely.” Cynric patted her shoulder. “You should rest a while longer. We have the gravity turned down to make you more comfortable, but the field only extends over the hospital bed.”

“I have to pee,” Perceval said. “Can I risk a trip to the head, or am I to be subjected to indignities?”

“Better not risk it,” Cynric said. “Tristen is in the hall, guarding the door, and I’m pretty sure he’d glare at us. I’ll get you a pan.”

Perceval sighed and turned her head to watch the ports. Were they still windows when they showed an underwater world outside, sunlight streaming through green translucence thick as glass? Something moved behind them, writhing and alive. The storms, it seemed, had passed.

“We’re underwater,” Perceval said, stating the obvious because it came with a revelation. “That’s why we couldn’t find the settlement.”

“Dug into earth and covered by water,” Cynric agreed. She slid the bedpan under the sheets, and stepped aside while Perceval made the necessary accommodations. “Low-impact.”

“Which we are not.” Perceval relieved herself, thinking of chamber pots and squatting by roadsides and how much of human history was about finding ways to pretend biology didn’t exist. “Cynric …”

There was a silence, as if Perceval’s hesitation had cued her that what came next would be a prickly topic. “I’m listening.”

Perceval nerved herself, and tried to speak not as Captain to Bioengineer but rather as younger relative to elder. Whatever happened, she wouldn’t be Captain much longer now. She probed the bullet wound in her abdomen with her fingertips and tried to imagine what it would be like to regret that.

“I know it’s been a long time, and a lot of changes. I know you might not remember. But—I have wondered for a long time. What was Caithness like?”

Whatever Cynric had expected, whatever she had been braced for, it was not that. She started—the first time Perceval had ever seen that cultivated mask of serenity slip. And then she said, softly, one word.

“Fair.”

“Beautiful? She is not remembered so—”

“No.” Cynric’s hand slid down, a gesture that cut. “They called her Caithness the Just, and she was. To a fineness, to a fault. It must have been a reaction to our father, who was arbitrary and capricious, but in many ways Cate was the one of us most like him. Though she would have scowled to hear me say so.”

“Scowled and not raged?” Perceval handed the bedpan back with care.

Cynric took it with no evidence of distaste. Of course, she’d seen worse. And of course, if you were cutting yourself for tight storage, squeamishness would be one of the first things to go. “She had a temper. But she did not give it rein.”

“That doesn’t sound much like Alasdair.”

She’d met him only once, and she’d been his daughter’s prisoner at the time—a daughter he was furious with, and who was about to kill him—which might not be the best way to get a sense of someone’s personality. But she’d known enough of his sons and daughters now to learn secondhand what they thought of him, and she’d seen the results of his child-rearing. If you could dignify it with that term.

Cynric, sliding the bedpan into what must be a sterilizer, shrugged. It made the long drapes of the robe that concealed her narrow body sway, ripples moving down them as if someone had shaken out a sheet. “The thing in her that was most like our father was her ruthlessness. I call her just. I do not mean to suggest that she was compassionate.”

“Oh.” Perceval settled back against the pillow. Her breath lifted and settled her chest; her heart beat even and sure. She took a moment to contemplate just what a luxury that was, as the stitch of pain across her back eased, forgiving her movement for the immobility that followed.

Perceval had made choices since becoming Captain of which she was not proud. Some—many—of them, she would make again, though she did not claim that justified them. And she blanched at what Cynric had considered a reasonable price—to herself and others—for the survival of the world.

She thought for a moment on what Cynric Conn might experience as an excess of ruthlessness, and folded her arms across her abdomen, mindful of the tubes that fed, medicated, and watered her. “I think I’m glad she’s gone.”

“She would have made a good Captain,” Cynric said. “But so do you. And now you should try to sleep again.”