Grail (2 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Bear
“Bear excels at breaking world-altering political acts and military coups into personal ambitions, compromises, and politicians who are neither gods nor monsters.…
Worldwired
is a thinking person’s book, almost more like a chess match than a traditional narrative.… Hardcore science fiction fans—especially those who read David Brin and Larry Niven—won’t want to miss it.”
—Reflection’s Edge
“The language is taut, the characters deep and the scenes positively crackle with energy. Not to mention that this is real science fiction, with rescues from crippled starships and exploration of mysterious alien artifacts and international diplomatic brinksmanship between spacefaring powers China and Canada. Yes, Canada!”
—J
AMES
P
ATRICK
K
ELLY
, author of
Strange but Not a Stranger
and
Think like a Dinosaur
“This final volume really rounds out the series and brings it to an enjoyable end.… The politics of a world racked by global warming and world wars is believable and often electric.… The alien tech is refreshingly alien and overall it feels like we’re somewhere very much fully realized.… An enjoyable, thoughtful and above all fun trio of books. Elizabeth Bear’s work is definitely worth sampling but you probably won’t want to stop with just the one book.”
“A compelling story … Bear has plotted the global geopolitics of the next sixty years with considerable depth and aplomb.”
—Strange Horizons
CARNIVAL
Runner-up for the PKD Award for Best Novel, 2006 Nominated for the Lambda Literary Award for Best SF Novel, 2006
“Bear has a gift for capturing both the pleasure and pain involved in loving someone else, particularly in the acid love story between Kusanagi-Jones and Katherinessen. While these double-crossed lovers bring the novel to a nail-biting conclusion, it is the complex interplay of political motives and personal desires that lends the novel its real substance.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“Enjoyable, thought-provoking … Like the best of speculative fiction, Bear has created a fascinating and complete universe that blends high-tech gadgetry with Old World adventure and political collusion.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Bear’s exploration of gender stereotypes and the characters’ reactions to the rigid expectations of a world of strict gender roles proves fascinating, as does her exploration of political systems gone too far in more than one direction. Her sense of pacing and skill with multifaceted characters prone to all sorts of confused motivations and actions also enrich this action-packed, thought-provoking story.”
—
Booklist
(starred review)
“Another great adventure of ideals, prejudices and consequences by one of the brightest new minds in speculative fiction.”
—Mysterious Galaxy
“This is a book that could have come straight from the so-called golden age … the sort of vivid, pacy novel that used to make science fiction such an exciting genre to read. It is very good to see that this sort of story can still be told.”
—SF Site
“Fans of C. J. Cherryh, Liz Williams and Karin Lowachee will find much to admire in this mix of space opera, feminist utopia, spy thriller and yaoi tale. It’s a unique blend from a young writer who seems determined to extend her limits with every new book.… The Machiavellian back-and-forth, plotting and counterplotting, is unpredictable and exciting, and we get a rich diet of ambushes, duels, kidnappings, escapes and poisonings.”
“
Carnival
will appeal to those who like hard science fiction, and are willing to invest some time and brainpower into learning what makes these characters tick … along with their machinery.”
—The Davis Enterprise
“Beautifully designed … One has to stop and admire the sheer scope of creativity evidenced here.… I look forward to seeing where Elizabeth Bear will take us next.”
—SF Site
“The world and universe created is lush with invention and the characters are appealing in their unorthodox nature … interesting and very dynamic. The politics of New Amazonia and the galaxy are top-notch, full of ambiguities … breathtaking in parts.… Overall,
Carnival
is an interesting book with some excellent extrapolations and is an enjoyable read.… I will be keeping an eye on [Bear’s] releases for a long while to come.”
UNDERTOW
“Compact and entertaining … Bear’s very neatly configured, compact and entertaining novel reminds me of the early novels of George R. R. Martin, back in the days when he used to write science fiction.”
By Elizabeth Bear
GRAIL
CHILL
DUST UNDERTOW
CARNIVAL
WORLDWIRED
SCARDOWN
HAMMERED
Grail
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
A Spectra Mass Market Original
Copyright © 2011 by Elizabeth Bear
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Spectra, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
S
PECTRA
and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Cover design: Carl Galian
eISBN: 978-0-345-52485-0
v3.1
This book is for Stella Evans,
Liz Bourke, and Maddie Glymour.
And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of.
And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.
And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.
—G
ENESIS
28: 15–17, K
ING
J
AMES
V
ERSION
As for ideology, the Hell with it. All of it.
—U
RSULA
K. L
EGUIN
God make thee good as thou art beautiful.
—A
LFRED
, L
ORD
T
ENNYSON
, “The Holy Grail”
1
when the world ended
In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me,
what is this quintessence of dust?
—W
ILLIAM
S
HAKESPEARE
,
Hamlet
, Act II scene i
Danilaw Bakare was on a nightclub stage when the world ended.
His third-day job was as a classical musician. He held the lease on a baby blue electric fab bass, and two nights a nonce he joined up with two guitarists and a drummer to play the greats in a repro dive bar in Bad Landing, on the east rim of Crater Lake. They did all the classics—Buddy Holly, Buddy Guy, Gatemouth Brown, Page and Plant. Thompson, Hendrix, Li, Morris, Mitchell, Kaderli, Kasparyan, Noks, Hynde.
It was one hell of a relief from the first-day job where he spent five days out of nine, and it filled his arts requirement in style. The first-day job was as City Administrator for Bad Landing, which loaned the band a certain notoriety and filled his admin and service logs. He completed the nurturing requirement with volunteer work and babysitting his sister’s kids, half grateful that, given his other commitments, it was a tertiary and half worried he was never going to find the time himself to reproduce.
So he happened to be onstage before a crowd of about
one hundred and seventy-five, holding up Therese while she laid fire through “Johnny B. Goode,” when the end began.
As poets had long suspected, it happened so subtly that Danilaw at first had no idea of the historic significance of events beyond a sensible level of unease. There was no drama. Just a brown-faced citizen in a suit and some discreet hardware, as out of place in mufti—and in the club crowd—as a dodecapus at a tea party. She slipped in through the kitchen, pausing behind the tables where the patrons were seated so only the musicians and staff would see her, planting herself at the end of the bar like she’d been carved there. When Danilaw caught her eye, across all those rapt faces, she frowned and nodded.
She had a round face, a straight nose, and a finely pointed chin. He imagined brown or amber eyes behind smoky lashes, and schooled himself to professional coolness.
Damn
, he thought.
There goes the second set
.
His own security was out in the crowd, but he didn’t know who most of them were and he wasn’t supposed to try to find out. So the citizen must have come with a message too sensitive to transmit, even encrypted.
Thinking too much, he fluffed a chord change, but got it back before the progression fell apart on him. He turned over his shoulder and shot a signal to Chuck, the drummer, who threw in a special fill to let Therese know to end the set. She wrapped up the Chuck Berry in half the time it usually took—a minor tragedy. But as soon as she announced the break, he set his bass in the stand and jumped off the stage, landing between two tables surrounded by startled patrons.
“Sorry, Ciz.” He had to turn sideways to slip between them; the aisles were narrow, and Danilaw both broad and tall. When he got closer to the watcher, he began to realize the true depth of the problem. In addition to her suit and
chrome—headwire and earset—the citizen wore a Captain’s crimson Free Legate jewel over her left eyebrow and a worried expression across the entirety of her face. When Danilaw came up, she didn’t hesitate and she did not mince words.
“Premier, I’m sorry.” Her voice was light and well modulated, but he would bet it could carry across a crowd if necessary. “I’m Amanda Friar. We haven’t met. I’ve been sent to inform you that the homeward perimeter registers a blip.”
Nothing was scheduled incoming for over four hundred days. And certainly nothing from Earth.
“Rogue ship?” he asked.
“Pirates?”
There had been no reliable reports of piracy in Danilaw’s lifetime. But there was history, and there was always a new first time.
Captain Amanda shook her head, giving Danilaw an increment of relief. “She’s broadcasting an identity tag, one there would be no reason to fake.”
That relief faded as he watched her nerve herself.
“An antique tag. On antique equipment. We had to break open the original code files.”
He knew the answer. “The
Jacob’s Ladder.
”
He might as well have said the
Flying Dutchman
. But, incredibly, she nodded.
Danilaw rocked restlessly from foot to foot, controlling his body’s desire to fidget by force of will. Floorboards of salvaged wood creaked under his weight, reprimanding him. “Wrack and waste, the Kleptocracy actually
did
it.”