Grail (3 page)

“And only a thousand years late.” She took his elbow as she led him from the room, back the way she’d come. “Administrator Danilaw?”

“Captain Amanda?”

Her thin throat showed it when she swallowed. “Do you suppose anyone’s alive on it, sir?”

He shook his head, but he didn’t mean
no
. Something
more like awe and incredulity. “I hate to guess. And if they are, what sort of condition do you suppose they’re in?”

   Danilaw collected his open security detail, and Captain Amanda brought him topside. Much of Bad Landing was underground—a compact, low-impact settlement burrowed out of the already-shocked earth surrounding Crater Lake. Surface paths shaded by native vegetation and foul-weather awnings threaded between the gentle slopes of constructed hills. Dwellings, gathering places, and the scattering of rare commercial buildings clustered around meadows and diversity zones. Solar leaves laid flat for the night scaled the water-grooved roofs of earthed buildings and, across the lake, ranks of solar-skinned wind turbines followed the arc of an artificial reef habitat.

Three smeeps and a robin hopped or flapped a few steps as Danilaw and his entourage stepped out of the biomimetic berm housing the nightclub, encouraging him to smile. The seventeen-year smeeps hadn’t been out much lately—it was coming up on one of their breeding and hibernation cycles—and he missed their dusty rose-violet plumage and trilling cries.

Tonight’s open security detail were well-known to both Danilaw and each other. Karen took point; Banko and Keebler followed along behind, silent in their tuned awareness. Alert but not worried.

Rightminding was a cure for all sorts of things, but political violence wasn’t
always
one of them. There were logical reasons, sometimes, for war—although in practice that had not happened in centuries. And even for assassinations. But in a community as small and tight-knit as Bad Landing, security had the advantage of already having a pretty good idea of who the crazies and the justifiably dissatisfied were, and Danilaw made sure there were always routes of complaint open to every citizen.

On such a pleasant night, the trails were busy under
their canopies. Solar-storing fairylights shimmered in the overarching branches of several varieties of violet-black xenotrees, and the nightbirds—robins, screamers, shutterlings—flitted among their branches. The drone of insects hung heavy in the evening cool, throbbing and slower now than it had been at the height of summer. Danilaw kept an eye peeled. A pack of native wild “dogs” had begun patrolling inside the boundaries of Bad Landing—a good sign that the settlement was integrating well, but a possible contributor to the sudden rarity of smeeps. He hoped to catch sight of one, but they were shy and fleeting, and he had yet to glimpse more than eyeshine and a silhouette.

Along the way, Captain Amanda briefed him on her capabilities and what she knew about the incoming vessel. Danilaw listened and observed, for the moment defaulting to learning mode, while the walkers and the wildlife carried on around them. A couple of joggers passed, running either for the fun of it or to fulfill their Obligation. As Danilaw, Captain Amanda, and the security stepped aside to let them by, something small, nocturnal, and fast-moving brachiated past overhead. It could have been any of half a dozen varieties of treeswinger. It was gone before Danilaw looked up, or maybe it hadn’t gotten close enough to the directional lights for him to pick up more than a suggestion of how it moved.

The closest Administration Building access was within sight of Crater Lake, out from under the edge of the big xenos.

It was
called
a lake, and drainage meant the water was conspicuously less saline than seawater, but the impact scar from the eponymous bad landing communicated directly west to the Sunrise Sea. There was no sunrise over it now. Favor—dark, reflective oceans agleam behind argent bands of cloud—would already be setting as a waning crescent over the forests in the east. Danilaw couldn’t see Fortune’s
poisonous sister-world through the trees, but the skies were spread with silver behind heavy boughs.

He sighed, and turned to enter the access. Danilaw stepped through on Captain Amanda’s heels, all but one of his security peeling away now that he was within the safety of Admin. The access sensors identified his microchip and granted him access, an air cushion lowering the platform smoothly to the deepest level.

He stepped out of the shaft and tugged his clothes back into order. Captain Amanda walked forward, outlined against the observation blisters that bubbled into the water. Karen followed behind, professionally unobtrusive. Using the access had activated the lights, now glowing dimly around the rims of the windows. Danilaw scanned the port briefly for any sign of an inquisitive dodecapus, but no twisting arms or sucker-feet rewarded him.

The creatures, with their color-shift skins and multiple eyes, liked to gather around the windows when the Admin offices were occupied. Although they were gentle omnivores, their size and power were sufficient that they could kill any of Fortune’s waterborne apex predators by suffocation, and they lived largely unmolested among the artificial reefs created by the wind farms.

Danilaw tended to think of them as watching over the human settlers; he was disappointed that none were in evidence. He and Captain Amanda walked the whole length of the observation hall and, before he let her chip-key open the meeting room door, he paused and stuck his head into the final blister.

It was cooler here, surrounded on three sides by the thermal mass of all that water. Danilaw peered into the blackness of the nighttime lake and frowned. What would it be like if that blackness were outer space? What would it be like if that were all you had ever known?

Captain Amanda didn’t sigh, but he heard her shifting from foot to foot.

“Just collecting my thoughts.” He turned back.

She smiled. “Collect mine, too, while you’re in there?”

“If I see ’em,” he said, liking her. You didn’t need affection to work well with someone, but if it happened, it could necessitate fewer adjustments to the rightminding. And it was always easier to like funny people—if they could be funny without it being at anyone else’s expense.

Danilaw thought it might be because humor was on some level an admission of weakness.
I’ll show you my defense mechanisms if you show me yours
.

Danilaw tipped his head at the door to the conference room, just to the other side of the entrance to his tiny private office. Another weirdness engendered by his role as City Administrator—who worked in an
office
anymore? Who met face-to-face? Who
commuted
? But authority required trappings, and to some people archaicism still meant authority.

Danilaw did sigh now. “Come on. Let’s go tell them the paradigm has shifted.”

Perceval Conn glided through warm water, feeling the swirl and suck of eddying currents along her skin, over her scalp, through the tendrils of her unbound hair. The River flowed across open eyes and around the stumps of long-amputated wings. Her corneas adapted to the water’s greater angle of refraction, so her vision lost no clarity.

She moved through a world of slanted light, warped and repaired River channels, and darting animals: a world brighter than she had seen in decades. As the
Jacob’s Ladder
approached the destination star, more daylight flooded the world’s arrays, collected and reflected and refracted through sweeping energy nets. Every watt and every joule no longer must be rationed, hoarded, and accounted for. The world could be bright again—and soon, Perceval knew, there would be direct daylight through the world’s many windows. Then the problem would be keeping her cool instead of warm.

Perceval held her breath comfortably, her symbiont reporting excellent oxygen saturation and low levels of muscular fatigue. She let the River sweep her between thick
feathering cables in their corrosion-resistant plating, and slanted columns of ceramic and light. There were fish here, silvery and rose, their backs dappled or freckled or banded or striped.

Once upon a time, Tristen and Benedick and Rien and Gavin had run along the banks of this River to Engine. In those days, the River had been a poisoned, radioactive coil. The River had been inhabited by the ghost of the world’s broken reactors in the form of a djinn called Inkling, and the run had nearly killed three of the four who made it. That mission of mercy had been on Perceval’s behalf, but Perceval had not been with them. She had been held prisoner by Dust, another fragment of the world’s broken consciousness—the Library, more or less.

The Angel of Memory, as he styled himself. Perceval remembered him as more of a demon.

But now the River was clean enough for an Exalt to swim in—cleaner than it needed to be, for such purposes. And now Rien and Gavin were gone, consumed by other intelligences. Inkling and Dust had been assimilated too. They had been folded into Nova, a new Angel—the same being that Rien had given herself up to create. And now they were all three as inextricable from the final product as eggs and flour from cake.

Perceval had been slow in forgiving herself for her lost loved ones and enemies, and slower in forgiving the new Angel so forged for the exigencies of her birth. But there was only so long one could hold a grudge, and as the years passed, Perceval found it helped to think of Nova as the child, and of Rien and the others as her parents. Nova was not a shadow of them or something constructed of their remnants … but a new person derived from the old.

A child was not to blame for the death of a parent.

It helped, and the River helped too. Swimming its currents wasn’t really like flying—no one who had ever had wings of her own would make that mistake, or use that
metaphor. But the warm water
was
a comfort, and the River was a place where she could be alone—Perceval, just Perceval, and not the Captain. Not in command. This was a place where she could shut out the voices of her internalized ancestors, their wisdom and advice and the constant need to integrate herself while still maintaining connections to their memories.

She carried a council of elders in her head and in her hardware—with all their egos and all their expectations. And, sometimes, a girl just wanted a minute to herself.

She missed Rien so much. She had needed Rien so much—needed someone to whom she would always be herself, and not a commander or a tool. But she couldn’t have that. Rien was gone, consumed by the ship’s revenant Angel, and fighting to bring her back or to remake Nova into something more like Rien would lead to the kind of destruction that Perceval’s aunt and enemy Ariane had caused, before Perceval consumed
her
. But here at least Perceval could have some of what she wanted—the silence inside her own mind, the peace to dwell there, and the smooth tug of water flowing over skin.

Even to wings, air never felt like something you could grasp and haul yourself up on. The viscosity was too low: it was slippery stuff, running away between your feathers just when you needed it most. But here, she was surrounded, immured, in a substance she could pretend was as solid and protective as the skin of the world.

Everyone knew to leave the Captain alone while she was swimming. Even the Angel.

So when Nova’s voice broke through her reverie—not so much a sound carried by vibration as a tickle in Perceval’s awareness, urgent with latent information—Perceval felt the sting of adrenaline through every vein.

The contact unfolded, expanding from a shimmering thread to a landscape of information. Perceval quit stroking forward, allowing the buoyancy of her body to carry
her to the surface. She did not bob up as she once would have. Hollow bones served no purpose in a girl with no wings, and now she was stronger and heavier than ever she had been when she was a flyer.

As she broke the surface, her head came back, mouth open, lungs expanding her deep chest as she filled herself with air. Her body—flesh and symbiotic colony—took care of that automatically. Which was as well, because Perceval’s awareness was half a hundred miles away, spun out through the fabric of motes, colonies, and electromagnetic webs that made up the ramscoop and nervous system of the
Jacob’s Ladder
.

The world was braking sharply through the gravity well of the first stellar system she had encountered since leaving the shipwreck stars the better part of fifty years before. Perceval bestrode the vast construction-toy webwork of the world’s frame—its spokes and wires and the baubles of habitats strung between them—and she watched the distant stars turn in the cold dark on every side.

Only one, the destination sun, was close enough to seem warm, and even it was but a brighter mote, alight on the Enemy’s black bosom. Somewhere between here and there lay the potentially habitable world—with its massive satellite—that they had come to colonize.

Astrogator Damian Jsutien, who had plotted their course, relying on information gleaned from an alien prisoner, had taken to sardonically calling it Grail, and the name had stuck.

Perceval’s crippled artificial world was limping to drink from a healing cup. The creature—Leviathan—that had given them the data on where to find this planet had also almost destroyed the
Jacob’s Ladder
. And given what the
Jacob’s Ladder
, in the person of Cynric, had done to Leviathan—enslaving it, creating symbiotic nanocolonies from the corpse of its mate—Perceval did not blame the monster for waging war on them.

Perceval found herself conflicted. This—the
Jacob’s Ladder
, the world she had been trying to teach herself to think of as only a ship, only a temporary haven until they found some planet full of trees and rocks and oceans and solid, reliable gravity that nobody ever had to twiddle with—
this
was all she’d ever known. The
Jacob’s Ladder
had brought Perceval and her people all this way, through the claws of the cold and cunning Enemy, even though she had been designed by the treacherous Builders to fail and kill them.