Grail

6 cometh a monster

Tristen found the woman who was not his daughter more or less where he had left her when last they spoke, some months before. Which was to say, barefoot and ankle-deep in muddy water, her hands dangling below the shallow pond’s still surface as she stalked something hidden beneath her own reflection. Oblong splashes of mud, some wet and dark, some dried to peanut-butter color and flaking, adhered to the skin and the fine hairs of her calves.

She half crouched amid the rice plants, her deep gold trousers rolled up to her thighs so that the hems stayed dry, her elbows dangling between her knees as she moved softly, crabwise, each step barely rippling the water.

Other things did ripple, however, and only some of them were fish. Tristen imagined he should feel more uneasiness than he did at such proximity to the cybernetic guardians of the rice paddies, invisible though they were beneath black water. Maybe the fear of death and discomfort had been cooked out of him like moisture, leaving him desiccated and leathery against the bone.

What scared him now was danger to the world, to its inhabitants, to Perceval and Nova and everyone else embraced within its fragile walls. Including this woman, for all that her every witnessed breath sent an ice-fine needle of complicated emotion through his lungs and heart. Including this woman, though he knew Perceval half suspected Dorcas had directed the raid that killed Caitlin.

Dorcas was the leader of the Edenites, rudely termed the Go-Backs—religious and ecological conservatives who had long been opposed to the plans of the Builders. Given what time had revealed about the Builders’ many treacheries, Tristen was becoming inclined to—limited—sympathy.

You are old, he told himself, and knew it for the simple truth.

Tristen paused on the edge of the rice field, well back from the shallow water’s edge. His footsteps could cause vibrations that would startle Dorcas’s prey, and the conversation they were about to have would be difficult enough without irritating her.

She glanced sideways, acknowledging his arrival, but her head stayed bent under the broad-brimmed hat. She slipped forward another step, hesitantly, her toes probing the mud before she shifted her weight. Her hands swayed loosely, almost seeming forgotten.

Until they lashed out suddenly, darting and twisting at the wrist, lifting simultaneously from the water. She was a slender person, thin-armed, her shoulder blades bony through the back of her worn shirt, but she hooked the fish out of the paddy with tendons flexing in her narrow wrists and tossed its silvery, thrashing body to Tristen.

Reflexively, he caught it. It flopped against his fingers, muscular and slimy-rough. It was the colors of tarnish and quicksilver, broad-sided and narrow-backed, with bright eyes that stared accusingly at Tristen as it gasped and fought for life.

He felt a pang of sympathy for it as he crouched to strike its head upon a rock. Once, twice, with a full swing of his arm. After the second blow its spasming muscles relaxed. Brutal, but kinder than letting it suffocate in air.

Dorcas came back up the levee to him, walking duck-footed on slippery grass and rolling oatmeal-colored sleeves down over browned, fair skin.

“Lunch,” she said, relieving him of the fish.

He pushed his hair behind his shoulder. “I’ve eaten.” Even if Perceval hadn’t been able to force herself, Tristen was old enough to have learned when to treat food as fuel and get it inside him any way he could.

When he’d first come here, it had been the midpoint of a perilous journey. Now, it was a half hour’s pleasant walk and a lift ride from the Bridge. How a few years changed things—but the time hadn’t changed Dorcas, or her Heaven.

He followed her down the sides of the steep valley between rice paddies and straw-bale plantings of salad vegetables. Other field-workers scarcely glanced up, although a sleek black-and-butter-colored snake head lifted through the water’s surface, tongue flicking as Tristen and Dorcas passed.

She led him a few hundred meters to a communal kitchen, where she stepped up to an unattended station and leaned her hat against the side. Without ceremony, she expertly cleaned the tilapia. The knife she used was a singlepurpose object, ground thin by many sharpenings, the ceramic blade stained from use. The handle was bound in grubby green marker tape. Tristen thought the blade itself was salvage, some other object repurposed and reshaped, and not originally intended for cutting at all.

But it worked well enough. She let the blade glide down either side of the spine. “You didn’t come here on a whim.”

“I didn’t,” he said. He did not bother glancing over his shoulder. He could feel the pressure of other cooks at each shoulder, although, other than a glance of acknowledgment to Dorcas, they had not looked up from their tasks. Tristen was not and would never be popular with the Go-Backs—for reasons he could not argue—though Dorcas herself was willing now and again to sacrifice a few moments of her time for him.

Tristen turned on the grill and, with a glance at Dorcas, pulled a heavy flat-bottomed pan over the heating element. “Can we speak in private?”

“I won’t conceal what you tell me from my people, so they may as well hear it from you directly. That way, you can be sure I haven’t misrepresented you.” One more pass of the knife, and the tilapia lay headless and open like an ancient paper book on the cutting board.

Tristen put oil in the pan and watched it shimmer while Dorcas cleaned her tools and racked them. She waved vaguely at an onion, so he borrowed the wiped knife and diced it, then scooped translucent crescents into the pan. An aroma of cooking organosulfates converting to sugars—alluring enough to have woken the dead—tickled the inside of his nose.

When Dorcas turned back, she said, “Thank you.”

She scraped the onions to the edge of the pan. Salted and herbed, the fish went into the oil with a satisfying hiss. Tristen stepped aside, giving her room to work. It was easier to speak to the back of her head and the fine hay-colored locks curling around her hairline—revealed because the body of her hair was upswept into a ponytail. A UV flush colored her wrists where they stretched from the protection of her sleeves.

He watched her for a moment, then he folded his arms and said, “Grail is inhabited.”

He had waited until her hands were away from both the knife and the hot pan, and it turned out well, for she jolted as if he had run a current through the floor. From the muffled exclamation of pain off to the left, perhaps he could have timed the revelation better from the point of view of the bystanders.

“Aliens,” she said, after a moment.

“Humans,” he replied. “People who use a Roman alphabet and Arabic numerals. People from Earth.”

Dorcas had been an Engineer once—Exalted in the first Moving Times, during the Breaking of the world. Not too long after Tristen. She had become a Go-Back—one of the colonists and crew members advocating a return to Earth Tristen had so successfully opposed in his youth. He might be personally responsible for her death.

For she had died. She had died in her old body then, and later her machine memories had been reincarnated in the body of Tristen’s Exalt daughter Sparrow, who had died in the mind because Tristen had not had the courage to follow her out of Rule, but whose form had been taken by the Engineers and given as a shell to one of their own lost ones.

The person who stood before him wasn’t Sparrow. She was who Sparrow had become, because Tristen had failed her as a father.

On their first meeting, she had reminded Tristen of his crimes, and were Tristen not Exalt, he would still bear the scars of that meeting. In return, Tristen had placed in her hand his daughter’s haunted sword, though she had not held it long. Given such an inauspicious beginning, he doubted they would ever be friends, but his respect for her was unrivaled.

“What an irony, to finally come to the world we meant to infest, and to discover that we’ve already infested it.” The fish sizzled as she flipped it. “You think they hopped right over us?”

Tristen paused, waiting for his moment. “Well, I guess we were delayed for rather a long time.”

She held it in for a while before the laughter broke free and she snorted—one of those times where it was plain to him that she was not Sparrow and in some ways barely resembled her. The appearance of a face had a lot to do with how one wore it, and Sparrow had grown up in the House of Conn, trained from a young age to comport herself as a lady.

Dorcas was something else—a high-handed Engineer turned priest. Tristen, who had not known her in her old life, imagined she’d been a woman who played as hard as she worked. And even today, she worked hard.

She squeezed lemon over the fish, leaving Tristen to wonder where the trees were. This enclave of Go-Backs also exported mango, chocolate, and vanilla—a tropical extravagance of edibles. They were efficient agriculturalists who had maintained better mechanical control of their holdes and domaines than most of the isolated communities on the Jacob’s Ladder. Even after fifty years of occasional visits, he hadn’t had the opportunity to explore more than a small percentage of their Heaven.

She handed him a plate and gestured to a communal pot of brown rice, steaming slightly around the loose-fitting lid. Tristen ladled out a portion, pressing a depression into the center to hold the fish juices. Dorcas accepted the now-laden plate he handed back without a word.

The silence held while she slid fish onto the plate, turned off the stove, wiped out the pan, and hung it for the next cook’s use. She pulled a whittled wooden fork from a cup and led him back out into the filtered and supplemented light of the fast-approaching sun.

Tristen grabbed two bent-metal cups on the way out and dipped them into a water jug by the pavilion door. He dropped onto the grass next to Dorcas as she seated herself and handed her one of the two when her hand was free. This is my role in life.

They sipped. The water was faintly dusty-tasting, but sweet, and Tristen’s symbiont told him it was tolerably clean. He wondered if the Go-Backs filtered it through folded cloth after they pulled it out of the fish ponds, or if they had something more elaborate set up.

After three bites of onions, fish, and rice, she said, “You might have kept that from us.”

“We might have.”

“But for how long?”

He smiled. Another blessing of the circumstances of their reacquaintance—and all the parallel history that lay behind it—was that Dorcas felt no need for polite fictions with him, if she ever felt them with anyone. “I’d prefer to think of us as being on the same team when it comes to the survival of the world and all the people in it. Since we got under way again, there’s been no need for enmity or disagreement between your people and the Conn. We’re going somewhere and, historically speaking, the Edenites”—he chose the polite term—“were all for that. Your faction’s argument against harboring at the waystars was never about returning to Earth; it was always predicated on finding a safe landing zone. And at the time, Earth was the only one we knew how to get to.”

She had to know where he was going, but she wasn’t going to give him an inch that he didn’t earn. “But?”

“Things change,” he said softly. “Time passes. We know that better than most.”

Because we are older than most. The expression she shot him around a forkful of fish was wry and appreciative, or he could spin it that way. But she still didn’t let him off the hook—or whatever the parallel metaphor was for those who preferred to tickle their dinners from the water. For the fish, it was nevertheless as tragic a seduction as any encounter with pole and reel.

“What I’m suggesting,” he offered, “is that people forget the reasoning behind a dogma, and eventually come to treat the dogma itself as holy writ.”

“You mean like that book in the case outside the Bridge?”

Tristen nodded. All these centuries later, all the revelations of how his ancestors had betrayed and been betrayed in the name of God, and the idea of blasphemy, still sent a frisson up his neck. Even for an Exalt, the conditioning ran deep.

But she’d mentioned the book first. If she was guilty, would she have done that?

No, he thought. She was too savvy to play those kinds of games with an Exalt. And there was no increase in her pulse or respiration when she spoke.

But she had just given him the opening he had been waiting for.

Watching her face carefully, he lowered his voice and shielded the shape of the words with the dingy cup. “The book that isn’t in the case outside the Bridge anymore, you mean?”

Dorcas also had a lot of experience hiding her emotions. The uptick in her heart rate could have meant anything—but the fact that it happened reassured him that he had not missed a similar one previously.

She met his eyes briefly, then glanced down again. “Your Captain finally jettisoned the damned thing?”

“Three hours ago, an incursion group broke in and stole it,” he answered. “My sister Caitlin’s mind died in the attack.”

Her chin lifted abruptly. Her chest swelled on a sharply taken breath. Adrenaline response. “I am sorry for your loss.”

Not sincere, exactly, but not whatever the opposite was, either. He turned it aside with a lift of his hand. “There’s a radical element among your people that will not support any course of action except reversing course—no matter how Pyrrhic that would appear to be at this juncture.”

“Radical, are they?” Whoever she was now, Dorcas still had Sparrow’s appetite. He had startled her once; she would not show it now, and the meal balanced in her lap was vanishing rapidly, though tilapia were not small fish.

“When their political convictions can move them to unprovoked violence, I find it difficult to think of another term.”

“Like the ones who Exalted an entire colony ship full of life-forms?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he said. “We didn’t expect anything Mean to survive Acceleration.”

“You thought you knew what the world needed. Perhaps some of us would rather have died than be transformed. Perhaps—did you ever think?—perhaps it’s better to die than exploit others.”

“We made a judgment call,” he said. “I suppose you’re right, and that does make me a dangerous radical. So what does that make the extreme element among your people? The ones who consider themselves contaminated? Zealots? Fanatics?”

Dorcas set her plate aside and rubbed her hands on the grass as if wiping off a trace of oil or fish juice. “That’s because, at your heart, you’re still a reactionary.”

Tristen didn’t agree with her, but he also didn’t want to argue. And what was it to him what this woman thought? She wasn’t Sparrow, and nothing he could do would make her so. All he’d do was break his own heart seeking the lost girl in the present-day woman.

Children always grew up strangers, he thought, imagining what a disappointment he had been to his own father. In this case, the strangeness was literal as well as metaphorical.

“Some of your people view Earth as sacred,” he persisted.

“Sacred as circles,” she agreed, “and not just my people, Tristen.”

“Do you know who killed my sister?”

The cut direct. There was the held breath, the chilling of the extremities, the pupil blown wide to catch any scrap of information. Fight or flight.

Just a moment’s worth before she snorted like an alligator and tossed her head. “Would you have me ferret out whosoever it might be and remand them to you for questioning?”

Nobody was sitting nearby now, but Exalt ears could overhear distant conversations. This once, his knowledge of that fact did not affect Tristen’s choice of words. “I leave that up to your conscience. But I would prefer it if you handled any disciplinary issues among the Edenites internally.”

“So you can’t be blamed?”

“Because it reinforces your authority.” He folded his hands. “The murder of my sister cannot be considered to be a matter strictly among the Edenites.”

“Murder, or act of war?”

“Either way,” he said, “I will prosecute it.”

Their gazes were locked, and had been. Tristen made the choice to look down first. He needed Dorcas’s cooperation, offered rather than coerced.

The whisk of skin on skin was her rubbing the palms of her hands together—a worried habit, or anticipation? Her scent was too well controlled to offer him a clue to her motivation, and her heart rate had settled now.

“You’re afraid of sabotage.”

He nodded without meeting her eyes.

“You’re afraid of dying,” she said, “because you have lost your faith. You’ve gotten old, Tristen Tiger, and you cling to life even though it scares you, because you don’t think there’s anything else afterward.”

If she’d been striking for his heart, she’d missed. His apostasy was too ancient and too well-founded for her schoolroom sally to discomfit him. And he thought she revealed more about herself than him in the attempt.

He wanted to reach across the space between them and take her wrist, but restrained himself. “I lost my faith because we can only create the God we can imagine, and we are pathetically small creatures. I lost my faith because I find the prospect of nothingness more heartening than the idea of a God no larger, no greater of spirit, no more numinous than my father.”

He’d been doing fine, maintaining the tone of gentle sarcasm, until he got to the word father. Then his voice cracked, and he found her staring at him with a quizzical expression.

The silence stretched.

“What?”

Dorcas née Sparrow smiled. “The Tiger’s heart,” she said. “I think I saw it.”

What had been a toolkit was a monster now, and not blinded to that metamorphosis. Dust the small and scurrying, Dust the broken-backed—but rats were everywhere in the walls of the world. There has never been a ship without rats.

Dust scuttled among them, of them and not of them, consuming them when it was convenient, ignoring them when it was not. From their corpses he learned the new plan of the world that had been his body, the smell of the ones who inhabited it. He stayed slight, insubstantial. He masked himself in their scent and DNA. He felt Nova all around him as he moved, the corona of her essence and awareness silver-sharp.

But he was just one small thing among other small things—a fluffy cybernetic creature, colony-riddled, moving ring-tailed and spot-backed among millions of its kind. He could get lost, even from an Angel’s awareness.

As well he knew, once having been in his own right an Angel.

But now he was a disease, and he moved through the body of the world as a disease moves through any body—by stealth, by camouflage, by deceit. This new Angel’s awareness of the world was better than Dust’s had been, when Dust was the chiefest among Angels—more complete, more subtle. Still, he passed—he thought—unremarked.

He found traces, strays, eddies of information. He let them pass through him, shielding his own existence and siphoning their bits. Fragmentary though it was, it fed him.

Traces of a scent signature he half remembered drew him. So much was lost, scrubbed away with the bulk of his self. But he was holographic; the image remained, though it blurred with each division and details were lost. And the Conns he remembered no matter what.

And this was the scent of one he’d thought lost.

When he found her, she was drinking beer in the shade of a banana tree, a text-novel scrolling in letters of light through the air before her eyes. She read lazily, a few lines a second, making it last. Her hands were calloused, the bridge of her nose radiation red. She had long sun-colored hair and her father’s cheekbones; he knew her at once for who she was.

He scurried, small and lithe, to her side, humped up beside her, and jerked his tail.

“You died,” he said. “You were slaughtered like a cow. So who lives in you now?”

Slowly, Sparrow Conn turned her eyes from her novel, which froze in place. A butterfly flew through it. Once, Dust would have been able to name the insect’s name. Though much is lost, much abides.

“I live in me now,” she said. “You’re not a toolkit.”

“Ah, but I am.” He sat back on his haunches and dry-washed delicate paws one over the other. “But I am not only a toolkit. And you are not only Sparrow Conn.”

“I am not Sparrow Conn at all,” the woman said, “although she built the house I live in. I am Dorcas. I was an Engineer.”

“And now you are an Edenite.”

“I was,” she said. “Now I am a woman reading a book. Who are you?”

His whiskers twitched. He could lie, but angels did not lie to Conns, not when asked direct questions. And whoever lived in her now, this woman carried the genetic pay-load of a Conn. The DNA was what mattered.

“I am Jacob Dust,” he said. “I was an Angel. Do you love the Captain?”

“I do not hate her.”

A chary answer, and so a good one for Dust’s purposes. “But you are not consumed by her purpose.”

“Which purpose is that?”

“The purpose of her Angel.” Again, the whiskers. As if they had a will of their own, like the tiny heart that fluttered in his birdcage chest two hundred times a minute. To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

But no. Those were scraps from somewhere else, another existence. Misfiled chips of memory that tumbled through his mind as bright as diamonds. He had been so full of poetry, once, and he had built the world in its image: chivalrous, valorous, hammered as if from legends.

At last, at last, Dorcas the Engineer folded the words of her story away. She regarded him through escaping strands of hair, but Dust was content that he had her attention now.

“She will sell us to the lords of Grail. She will buy whatever safety she can for herself and her family, buy landfall, buy land—and what in this new world can she do with the rest of us?”

“Sports,” Dorcas said. “Monsters, mistakes. Would you unleash us on an ecology? What evolved thing could live with us? We would eat it.”

“The strong survive,” Dust said. “Existence is evolution. Equilibrium is extermination.”

“The Captain would regard me with favor if I turned you in,” Dorcas said, her eyebrows amused.

“The Captain’s Angel would eat me, as she ate my ancestor. I am but a poor scrap of backup. Is your heart so soft for xeno-starlings and exo-bunnies, and so hard as death against me?”

“Nova allows other scraps to persist. Does an angel fear for its life?”

Dust let his foxy muzzle nod. “This angel does. Tell me, Dorcas of Engine, if you believe God has a plan, how can you be sure it is not best proved by whatever will grow from our meeting with these aliens?”

Dorcas flicked him away with a fingertip. “We are monsters, monster. But I recollect you, and you were the worst monster of all. I think not, Master Dust. God shall have to sort this one without me.”