Grail

24 the world and the world

The man Captain Amanda had shot was dead, and it was not Amanda’s doing. The sedative rounds hadn’t killed him; the poison capsule in his mouth had done the work instead.

Danilaw couldn’t blame Amanda for the fatality, especially when she so patently blamed herself. But he did find himself confused by it, distressed and befuddled.

“It’s like something from the bad old days,” he said, drawing his legs up into the window embrasure of the conference room. Dodecapodes and small darting fish moved in his peripheral vision. “It doesn’t make sense to sacrifice your life for a political point.”

Across a narrow gap, Amanda perched on the violet glass conference table, her feet kicked up and her ankles crossed. “It does if you think not in terms of politics but revolution. The would-be assassin was named Pan Kagan. A review of his posts and conversations for the past month suggests he was heavily involved in the isolationist movement, and he supported Administrator Gain’s attempt at a bloodless coup.”

“We know she’s behind it,” Danilaw said. “So he killed himself because he believed strongly enough in her cause to die for it. To die to protect her. He had to be viewing himself as a hero.”

“He needed to avoid interrogation. To withhold proof of her complicity.” Amanda slid off the edge of the table and began to pace restlessly.

Danilaw’s mouth filled up with bitterness. He had to give it voice to get it off his tongue. “You know, our system of government is predicated on the idea that nobody in their right mind would ever actually want my job.”

Amanda gave him a look under her eyebrows. “We can prove Gain was behind it.”

She seemed very bright, very certain, almost outlined in light. Oh, not now, he thought, and wondered if he should warn her—but the seizure aura didn’t worsen, and he breathed slowly to calm his racing heart.

“What’s your evidence?”

She folded her hands open before her. “Free Legate,” she said. “I was looking at her when the shot went off, and I have her reaction on record. I’m also trained in semiotics and microexpressions. She was the only person in the group not surprised when the shot was fired.”

“She was expecting it.”

Amanda touched the tabletop, summoning up a three-dimensional image of the rain-soaked party as they had looked at the time—from Amanda’s point of view. Danilaw was amused by the way her attention rarely wandered to him, and when it did, brushed quickly away again.

She was conscientious. And from that, he determined that she was consciously deciding not to let his presence dominate her attention.

He hid his smile—then had it quickly wiped away as Gain’s shoulders stiffened, as Perceval jerked with reaction to the bullet, as Tristen and Amanda turned to run after the shooter.

Amanda froze the playback. She circled the frozen, miniaturized tableau, examining it from all directions. “Did you see it?”

“She didn’t just know in advance,” Danilaw said. “She triggered it. She sent a signal.”

When Tristen entered the sickroom, he found a scene substantially unchanged from what he’d seen the last time. Perceval had turned on her side, which he took as a positive sign, and curled around a pillow like a snuggling child. Cynric stood beyond the sickcot, centimeters from the observation bubble, peering into the water beyond as if the shifting shafts of sunlight that pierced it had divinatory uses.

She turned as he entered. Because her hands stayed lost in the folds of her robe, he knew she had already identified him. He squeezed his mouth together until the words filled the space, then let them out, still not quite knowing what they would say.

“They won’t let us stay. Not unless we become like them.”

She smiled before she turned back to the water. The echoes from the curved port carried her voice back to him, full of strange resonances. “I’m staying. I’ve had enough of Cynric the Sorceress.”

“What do you see out there?”

“Friends, perhaps? There’s life in the waters,” the Sorceress said, with a lift of her pointed chin that reminded him suddenly, painfully, of every proud woman their family had ever spawned.

“Generally speaking,” Tristen said, “that’s where one finds it, if one is going to find it anywhere.”

He came up beside her. Beyond the glass, something big and convoluted rested, mottled limbs like textured scrollwork surrounding a central mass big as a lion’s head. As he watched, colors chased one another across its surface, bands of orange-gold, and dappled purple and periwinkle. When he raised his hand to the glass, it moved abruptly, tentacles uncoiling from their intricate, sinuous twelve-limbed swastika to realign in the opposite direction.

Tristen cleared his throat. “I think it says hello.”

Cynric’s caryatid expression remained unchanged, except for the lift of her brow and the answering quirk of one lip corner. “Generally speaking,” she said, “when one finds life anywhere, does it ask salient questions?”

He’d been joking about it talking, but Cynric wasn’t. Danilaw hadn’t said anything about the native fauna having sapience. That, too, Tristen realized with a sickening twinge, limited the availability of Grail’s resources to him and his people. Swallowing barbed disappointment, he said, “They’re talking to you?”

“Well,” she said, as if explaining to a child, “they don’t use words. Not even Language, which suggests a neurology not at all like ours.”

“Not at all like ours as modified by the symbionts, you mean,” he said. “Not at all like what you and the Leviathan’s get have made us into. We are a hybrid creature, and you know these Means are right to call us alien.”

“Earth octopi were supposed to be quite intelligent.” Cynric pressed one hand to the glass, fingers whitening at the tips, the nail beds flushing cerulean. “We have some DNA. I could build one.”

“What good does that do us if there’s nobody to teach it to speak its own language? Besides, what are the odds, similarity of morphology and habitat aside, that an octopus will speak an alien creature’s language any better than we will? It’s not like we ever learned to talk octopus.”

A change in Perceval’s breathing told Tristen she was awake. Cynric would know it, too, but so long as Perceval did not choose to announce herself, neither of her elders would embarrass her.

Cynric said, “In assuming that it has a language at all, you are commiting an error of cognition. We’re pack animals. We have to talk to survive. What does a solitary intelligence need language for?”

He’d never considered it. Evidence of his own egocentrism etched a path through him; he wondered if it changed anything as it passed. “Some things are just too alien.”

Cynric’s half smile turned inside out and came back up as a sardonic smirk. “Fortunately, so am I.”

“Too alien?”

“You say we are half Leviathan, Brother, and you do not say untrue.” She pressed a hand to the glass, and the creature beyond—mutilated by the attack of some predator, Tristen could now see—glided an appendage across the outside of the bubble to greet her. “And perhaps I am more than half. I say it has no language, and that is true. It’s not using words. But I hear it in my head. In my own voice—not my speaking voice, you understand.”

“Of course not,” he said. “The voice you hear your thoughts in.”

“Some people see their thoughts, you know.”

“Sure,” he said, and touched her shoulder lightly, surprised as always to find her warm and yielding, not statue-hard. “But not us. What is it saying?”

She laughed, moving away from his hand. He let it fall.

“It seems amused,” she said. “It has been watching us—Danilaw’s people, I imagine—for a long time. It doesn’t have a good concept of individuals, per se. It thinks it’s funny how we have to label and categorize everything, and seems to think this is indicative of some moral or intellectual failing of endoskeletal air breathers.”

“It might be right,” Tristen said. “Are you going to tell anyone it’s sentient?”

She moved her hand against the glass. The dodecapus coiled tighter, then swapped sides again. The span of its legs, even curled, was almost as broad as Cynric was tall. A few moments passed, and then it peeled its suckery legs from the observation port and vanished into the water, slipping away on jets of water pumped from flaring valves in its underside.

“I don’t know yet,” she said, seeming curiously unwilling to step back from the port and turn away. “Are the Fisher King’s folk concealing from us that there’s a native intelligence here, and if so, why? What will help us most?”

Tristen had no answer. But he stood beside her until she at long last permitted her hand to fall.

“I am reluctant,” she said eventually—an emotion he had read already in the set of her shoulders, but reading it was not the same as having it admitted to him.

“Reluctant?”

She nodded after the dodecapus. “Our own people,” she said slowly. “I can take from them. They owe us something, some debt of kinship. But what does that owe us?”

He shouldn’t have said it, but he did. “What did the Leviathan’s mate owe us?”

Along with a sidelong glance, she gave him the sharp edge of her smile. “Precisely,” she said. “Precisely my point, all in all.”

Their eyes met, and they understood one another. She was his equal. His peer. One of two in all the world. In all creation.

Ancient history, there between them, was suddenly not so ancient anymore. Everything that had been was about to be left behind, one way or another. If there were ever going to be any answers, it would have to be now.

With his feet on the soil of an alien world, Tristen nerved himself and asked a question he had never had the courage to ask before.

“Do you know who killed my daughter, Cynric?”

She turned her head. He saw the line of her neck, her skull, her ear for a moment before she focused on the window again. He thought maybe her glance had been for Perceval, who still lay under her sheet, as silent as an empty room.

“You need to ask Benedick,” Cynric said. “She was no angel, Tristen. No matter how you remember her.”

Before he could press her, the door opened, and Danilaw and Amanda filed in.

Perceval sat up, the sheet clutched to her breasts as if it could protect her. Danilaw, who had been about to extend a hand to Tristen, paused midmovement and transferred the greeting to her. “Captain,” he said. “I am pleased to see that you are recovering. I’ve come to tell you that Amanda has identified a high-placed conspirator against you, and we are moving to take that person into custody.”

A real conspirator, Perceval wondered, or a convenient scapegoat? Would these aggressively transparent humans stoop to scapegoating? Were they so evolved that their vox populi would be satisfied with caution and certainty?

“Thank you,” she said. “And thank you for the excellence of the medical care that has been provided me. Your conspirator—”

“Administrator Gain Kangjeon,” Amanda said. “I am sure this will not surprise you.”

“If you need her brought in, I would be happy to oblige you.” When Tristen spoke so quietly, Perceval knew that his heart was anything but.

“The Legates should be more or less adequate to the task,” Amanda said. “But it does lead us back to the central problem, doesn’t it? What are we going to do about you?”

Perceval swung her feet down to the floor, allowing it to press cool and smooth against her soles for a moment before she pressed back, and stood. “We are beginning to understand the magnitude of your problem.”

Danilaw nodded, waiting for her to continue. She tucked the trailing ends of the sheet about her in a sort of toga, flicking the creases into some semblance of dignity. “It is easy for us to say you have a whole world and we are but little, give us a crumb. But what is hard for us to understand is that your world is not empty. There is no place in it that is not full of life already …”

“That is the problem,” he said. “And as for us, it is difficult for us to understand how weary you are. How badly you need a harbor. How long you have traveled to arrive here, and by what a slim margin you have survived. We”—he paused, frowned, and seemed to collect a difficult thought—“we live at a very narrow margin with the world. We choose to inhibit our own growth to protect the rights of other creatures.”

“I understand. There are a lot of us. And those creatures you need to protect—like the cephalopods?”

By the window, Tristen and Cynric shifted, but Perceval spared them no attention. She was Captain, still. And she would use what resources were handed her.

“Dodecapodes,” he said.

“You know they’re sapient? And you are squatting on their world?”

His hand came up and pressed his temple over the ear. He shook his head. “You are kidding me. In two hundred years of colonial history, there has never—”

“Danilaw,” Perceval said, taking his broad warm hand, “we are experienced in dealing with nonhuman intelligences. They’re not like you. Or like us. But they’re not as alien as a talking sundew, either. So tell me. Given that they made evolutionary decisions for all of their species not yet born, given that they colonized other, inhabited worlds—how were your ancestors any less monsters than mine?”

There. Familiar ground, a challenge he’d been expecting. She could see it in the satisfied shape of his face. “Mine did it for the future of the species.”

Perceval smiled. “And so did mine. You think your people are so enlightened, but what they are is homogenized. They’re xenophobic—”

“They have a system—” He glanced at Amanda. She made a smug mouth full of I told you so. “You may,” he conceded, “have a point.”

So now Perceval could give him a little more room. “A point you never would have listened to if you were an atavistic human. Because you would have been too busy with your worldview-defense.”

“Sophipathology,” Amanda said, smirk widening. “It’s not a useless concept.”

Danilaw glanced over with what Perceval read as fondness. “I believe in taking responsibility.”

“So take responsibility. Think of your cephalopod friends. Think of making room for us, when we can communicate with them. When we can translate for you with the other intelligent life-form on this world.”

Amanda glanced at him. “Do you believe them?”

Danilaw stepped back. The hand went to his head again, fingertips pushing hard through the tight coils of his hair to dent the flesh over his skull. “Mother—” he said, like a curse word rather than a plea.

He swayed; Amanda put a hand on his shoulder. “Sit,” she said, guiding him down while his legs folded under him. Perceval too moved forward to support him, and Cynric was at her side before she released him and stepped back.

The Sorceress bent over, pulling Danilaw’s eyelids down. “Severe head pain,” she said. “Is that a known health issue, Administrator?”

“It’s not pain,” he said. “It’s aura. Seizure aura. I will be fine. Just back up a little and let me breathe, please.”

She stepped back. Danilaw raised his eyes to follow her. “Saint Cynric,” he said. “Haloed in tentacles. It’s really quite numinous on you.”

“Temporal lobe epilepsy,” Cynric said, her eyebrows rising. “I’d never seen it. We can cure that—”

“It’s usually well controlled,” Danilaw said. “It’s just lately, and at work, that it’s been getting awkward.”

Apparently, Perceval noted, that hand-flip dismissal of personal stress reactions was a human constant.

He seemed to be steadying, calming. His hands rested on his thighs, and when a hesitant knock came on the door he did not startle.

“Come!” Perceval said, because everybody was looking at her. Technically, she supposed, it was her sickroom—

A woman dressed as a member of Danilaw’s security poked her head into the room. “Administrator Gain is under arrest—Danilaw!”

“He’s fine,” Amanda said, just as Danilaw lifted up his head and said, “I’m fine, I’m fine. It’s just an aura. Karen, you have Gain in custody? That’s a relief.”

The security agent nodded. “She doesn’t seem too upset about it. She wanted a message passed.”

“Oh, ruin,” Danilaw said. “Hit me.”

“ ‘I did not do these things for myself,’ ” and it looked as if the agent refrained from eye rolling only through a titanic struggle, “ ‘but for the future.’ ”

Danilaw heaved himself to his feet, straightening faster that Perceval suspected was wise. He seemed none the worse for it, however, though he steadied himself with a hand on Amanda’s arm. “Sounds like religion to me. Have somebody check her rightminding, would you? And Karen—thank you.”

Karen smiled and vanished back whence she had come, her torso retracting through the half-open door like a snail’s head.

Danilaw turned to Amanda. “Well, then. Maybe we can make some decisions in a climate of calm reason now. What do you say?”

But the latch had barely clicked behind the agent when a familiar chime sounded.

“Crap,” Danilaw said. “Did we bring Central Transit down here?”

“That’s for me,” Perceval said. “Nova, we’re here.”

There was lightspeed lag, and Nova was resolving herself from appropriated particles of Perceval’s own colony, so her avatar was watery and faint—a ghostly outline rather than the semblance of solidity.

“Captain,” she said, a staticky flicker snaking across her projection. “We’re under attack. It’s Aria—”

She snapped out of existence, leaving Perceval a half step from lunging after her. She came up short, caught herself, and staggered a step before regaining her balance.

“Should have seen that coming,” Cynric said.

Perceval opened the fists of her hands, aware—as she turned away from Nova—that Tristen was standing right behind her.

And that he had come up behind her on footsteps silent as a cat’s.

“All right, First Mate. What do we do now?”

“Oh, not now,” Danilaw burst out, and folded like a snapped fan to the floor.

The words swirled over Ariane and over Dust. Black as the Enemy, black as time, words webbed them together, words linked them and pulled them in and pulled them down. Dust felt the margins of himself dissolving, the borders of skin, of Chelsea Conn’s body, melting away under his feet.

He fell. Into her, through her, pulling the veil of words behind him like silk into an arrow wound. He pierced Ariane and dissolved into her, and she into him.

She threw her head back and shouted. Majesty crackled around her, her hair flung out and rising in the static charge, a swarm, a storm of words spiraling her body, falling in. Maelstrom. Whirlwind. Event horizon.

And Dust at her core. She shrieked, she swelled. She opened out her hands and embraced the world—all subtlety, all camouflage, all subterfuge discarded. She—they—rose up from her place at the table and stood like a tower. Dust felt Ariane, felt them conjoined—Angel and animus, as it was always meant to be. Felt Chelsea fall aside like a shed skin and the world come into them.

All the words. All the world. And the world was in these words.

And all the words were in him, in her. All together now.

Power in her hands, knowledge in her fingertips. Informing her grasp. Data. Code. Cipher. Source, and sorcery.

There was the book—the Book. And there was the blade—the unblade, a stroke of neutrality through the bright heart of the world. Hyper-real, furious, pronounced light—cut by a thing of infinite absence, of infinite edge. Charity, the unblade. The thing that brushed the world and left an emptiness behind.

All the same. Write it down. Memory, electricity, chemistry. So subjective. So malleable. So ephemeral. Objective reality is in a library. Nothing but echoes lives in a human mind.

The world is what is written down.

I AM THE WORD, said Ariane Dust.

And all the world shook with the sound.