Chill (25 page)

Perceval’s eyes narrowed. She swallowed hard enough that Caitlin could see her thin throat flex. Behind her, Nova leaned forward. “Why would anyone get on a starship with no destination?”

Caitlin felt her lips flex around the knowledge. “It was a scam,” she said.

Perceval stared, looked aside, nodded. Glancing at the angel, Caitlin thought. Perceval said, “Like the bodies in the holdes.”

“Excuse me?”

“The holdes,” the Captain said. “They were full of bodies. Frozen people. The Builders told them they were being placed in cryogenic suspension. But they froze them and killed them and saved their corpses as raw materials.”

“Were?” Caitlin said, already knowing the answer. “The ones that were left after the supernova.” Perceval
made a cutting gesture with her outspread hand. Her voice came tight and quick, but her expression stayed serene, inhuman. The placidity and ruthlessness of an angel. “We’re using them.”

Caitlin would not punish her daughter by letting shock show across her face. But it made her want to curl forward, as if around a blow to the solar plexus.
Oh, baby
.

The angel’s avatar seemed to watch Perceval closely, and Caitlin appreciated the subtlety of allowing her to see him doing so.
Somebody is watching over her
. It would have been like Susabo, to offer that implied comfort; Caitlin could not imagine Dust making the effort.

“It makes no sense,” Caitlin said. “To build an entire world, and set it adrift. The expense. The
waste.”

“The ways of the Builders are inscrutable,” Nova said.

At least it made Perceval laugh—a sharp, pained bark. When she was finished, she said, “Maybe we are a sacrifice. Maybe we were never intended to survive.”

“Bundle up your goods and treasures, and cast them into the dark,”
Caitlin quoted. She glanced at Jsutien; his nanochains whispered across the floor as he spread his hands in a shrug.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But then, why even make the ship spaceworthy?”

The angel shook its head. “There’s more,” he said. “The null zones are still spreading.”

It was one of the interesting points of talking to an angel. Caitlin heard his voice inside her mind, like the still, small voice of conscience. He might have been saying anything to Perceval, to Jsutien, even to Tristen and to Chelsea and to Ben.

She had to trust they all heard, as she did, Nova say, “It’s a creeping numbness. It begins in the extremities.”

Caitlin sucked her lower lip into her mouth and nibbled it. Slowly, considering the implications both
metaphysical and mechanical, she answered, “Like leprosy.”

Caitlin’s words cast a visible pall over the angel’s face. That was a new thing, that emotion and reaction. Caitlin did not like to think on where it came from. She looked down, busying her hands on the half-forgotten, half-repaired console she sat behind.

“Do you imply we have been smitten for our offenses?” Nova said, after enough time had passed for Caitlin to wonder.

Caitlin looked up from her work. “Leprosy is not tzaraath, angel. It is not the condemnation of the God of the Builders that afflicts us. Although now I have an image of the world gliding serenely through the very bosom of the Enemy, ringing out bells and crying, Impure! Impure!”

“We have followed the path laid before us,” the angel said. Susabo or Inkling—or Samael—would have pronounced it as if the words wore an armor of righteousness. Nova said it softly, big-eyed, as if seeking reassurance.

Caitlin folded one hand inside the other. The angels of the new world would not be like the angels of the old.

   The orchids stripped Benedick’s and Chelsea’s ruined armor off, treated their burns with more of the cooling froth, and supported them through the winding arbors of the vertical forest. Benedick in other days had rarely envied the flyers of Engine—he, too, could have worn wings, if he had wanted them badly enough to put up with the nuisance value—but this journey was apparently the occasion on which he was given the opportunity to revise that opinion. Wings—like Perceval’s lost ones—would have been of use here. The orchids were fabulously light for their bulk and moved with facile grace through the branches, drawn on strong, green tendrils. The
humans floundered behind, struggling on uneven surfaces, often slipping and saved by their botanical companions.

The orchids were not heavy enough to counterweight a human, but their strength and their mastery of their environment were impressive. They could swing the two Conns bodily from level to level, anchoring themselves with one set of tendrils while lowering the humans as if on ropes.

Shafts of illumination flickered up and across between leafy boughs, but the vegetation competed to collect the available light. As a result, they traveled through humid, hyperoxygenated green gloom, bustling with birds and insects, great and small. Once, the striped orchid snatched a dragonfly from the air and tore it apart between two blossoms without a break in its motion.

Chelsea limped badly and kept touching the side of her face, but otherwise seemed to be recovering. Her harlequin orchid fenced her in tendrils, reminding Benedick of a parent caging a stumbling toddler. Upon inspection, that was not a particularly reassuring comparison.

“Are we prisoners?”

There was a sense that the orchids conferred—Benedick had the sense of a tight, exclusionary glance, though whatever transpired had happened below his or his symbiont’s threshold of perception. Then one of them said, “You are on the Captain’s business. We will treat your wounds, see you nourished, and escort you to the edge of our sphere of influence. Will that suffice?”

With his peripheral vision, Benedick saw Chelsea’s faint nod. She chafed her forearms as if feeling the absence of her armor. Benedick could not have agreed more. Being unprotected—in the face of the Enemy, and whatever Arianrhod could throw at them—worried him more than the threat of combat.

Benedick said, “That would be kind. Are you taking us to your settlement?”

“Settlement?” Another pause, as if for conference. “We do not hive, as do animals. We are taking you through.”

That seemed to settle it, and for a while Benedick did not find many further opportunities for conversation. Instead, he concentrated on the jungle, on Chelsea—who was moving more fluidly as her symbiont effected repairs—and on the threats that might lie around every corner.

With the assistance of the orchids, the descent proceeded fast. After half an hour or so, he tried again. “How far down does your domaine extend?”

“We live in this shaft,” one of the orchids said—the striped one, Benedick thought, wondering if they had leaders. “There is no light above, nor water below. There, we cannot flourish.”

Chelsea perked up, her matted hair breaking over her shoulders. She said, “Do you know what lies below?”

“Surveyors have journeyed south,” one said. “We have charts. They are approximate, and may not be useful to you. They are enzymatic.”

Chelsea and Benedick shared a glance. “No,” he said. “I don’t think we would find those easily readable. Can you offer us a description?”

“We can show you.” This time, Benedick was certain it was the spotted orchid that had spoken.

“Show us how?” he asked.

It rustled. “On the television.”

His symbiont had supplied a definition for the word the first time an orchid used it, so he knew his guide referred to a communications technology as obsolete as daguerreotype or the World Wide Web. Chelsea must have run the same research, because she said, “You’re broadcasting on the electromagnetic spectrum?”

Rustling. Mammals, apparently, were pretty funny to a carnivorous plant. The striped orchid swiveled two faces at each of them and said, “We will show you.”

The angle of their descent changed. Now, the orchids brought them closer to the shaft walls, slowing travel as the undergrowth thickened so close to the wall-mounted illumination panels. But they seemed to have not far to go. The orchids led them around one last enormous tree trunk and onto a sort of ledge dripping with thigh-thick vines, next to what appeared to be a vine-covered cliff face strangely unpunctuated by the ubiquitous trees.

The spotted orchid flipped two of its bladelike leaves forward, an impressive swivel, and used them to nudge between the vines. If Benedick had his armor, he suspected sonar would map a space beyond—but that suspicion was inadequate to the reality because, as the orchid spread wide its leaves, pushing the vines aside like drapes, flickering light spilled forth and a cavernous bay was revealed.

It was neither a room nor a cavern, but instead something like a hangar with flat video screens lining every wall of a space approximately ten meters tall and over fifty meters deep. Many of them were cracked, smeared, some of those flickering and others dark—but more than half burned brightly, glimmering with transitory images.

The floor was covered with more overgrowth of the vines, while down the center of the hangar ran long, parallel ridges about a meter and a half high, humped up under the foliage. At random intervals upon them, three dozen or so orchids rested, dazzling in their array of shapes and colors.

Many swiveled a face as the striped and the spotted orchid and their two escorted human guests came within the chamber, but not all, leading Benedick to
wonder what exactly their sensory organs were and where they might be located. Some of the orchids were meters in length, shuffling arrays of tubers and blossoms with tens of heads. The smallest were no larger than a dog, and these had no blossom-faces at all.

They looked, but they did not come closer. There was some rustling of leaves and puffing of tubers among the orchids who accompanied them. Benedick wondered what they might be explaining.

Studying the layout of the chamber, Benedick came to understand that the humped ridges were rows of chairs, buried under vinous overgrowth. The orchids were only putting them to their intended purpose, although not in their intended fashion. He said, “It’s a waiting room.”

Chelsea shook her head, then made a face as if regretting the reflexive motion. Here, where the light was better, he could see that her right iris was clouded, but the raw acid burns beneath the flaking green foam that surrounded it were drying and growing over. It was only a matter of time before the eyeball healed, also.

“Transfer station,” she corrected. “It’s a terminal. What’s through that way?”

She pointed at what Benedick had thought to be the back wall. But now, when he squinted, he could see the dense, narrow lines of another wall of vines.

The striped orchid leaned a blossom over her shoulder. “A pressure seal,” it said. Benedick saw it shudder; from Chelsea’s sidelong glance, she felt the trembling of petals beside her face. “The Enemy lies beyond. There was once another transit shaft there, but it is long failed and disassembled.”

The orchid shuffled to the side and fanned all its petals and its blade leaves forward until its outline resembled a parabolic mirror. He knew he was projecting, but Benedick could not help but read its body language as pleased and proud. “Look!” it said. “Television!”

Benedick stepped forward to examine the images. Dramas, comedies, documentaries, something that seemed to feature tiny screaming people running from a creature represented by a man in a poorly articulated costume—all in two dimensions, some of them low-definition in crudely unfocused images, some in images without color. Each one seemed to be broadcast in silence, until he realized that if one sat or stood beside one of the tiny, self-damping, unidirectional speakers that projected from the back of each chair, one could choose a channel. Some of the larger orchids were watching several screens at once, their awkward bodies arranged so as to surround multiple speakers and their blossom-faces twisted this way and that.

Benedick stepped forward, momentarily captivated by an image of a bright wave of fast-moving water humping up, peaking, and curling over itself to break in a long, foaming tube. The sky behind was as brilliant as blood, and as he watched a human being, crouched on a narrow, colorful oblong, shot the length of the tube, just ahead of where it was collapsing into itself.

“What is he doing?” he asked, not caring if Chelsea saw his fascination.

“It’s called
surfing
. That was on Earth,” the orchid said. Benedick could hear the foreignness of the ancient words in its tone, or in the hesitation before it said them. “That was all
filmed
on Earth. The shaft has a library. The oldest among us say the
programming
repeats after about seventy-two years.”

Benedick need not have worried about his sister. She was just as captivated, one hand stretched out as if she could reach the screen—reach into the screen, perhaps. “Is that what planets look like?”

“Parts of them,” the orchid answered.

Her tongue flicked out the corner of her mouth. She said, very softly, “I always thought the thing about the
sky being blue was poetic license. You know. Hyperbole.”

Benedick looked at his youngest sister and thought of Rien, and still could not manage to make himself take her hand, or even to put into words what he thought. Which was:
I should like to see one someday, too
.

  Walking beside Samael in the midst of the serpents and their wardens, Mallory tilted his head and said into Tristen’s ear, “Does it seem accidental to you that we should find exactly these persons here, at exactly this time?”

“Providence,” Samael whispered on his other side.

Tristen dropped his hand on Mirth’s hilt. He made a low noise in the back of his throat. Snakes were deaf, so the trick was keeping his voice low enough not to attract the attention of Dorcas and her people, while making himself overheard by Samael. Fortunately, angels had excellent ears.