Chill (24 page)

  The orchid’s hydra-headed blossoms looked delicate, but the tendrils were strong as carbon monofilament. And Benedick did not miss the manner in which—while one remained focused on him, petals up and forward as if straining with attention—the other four dragon faces bent down on their long stems, slicking petals back like reptiles flattening their frills. They gave the impression of hounds nosing after a scent, and indeed he saw one dart forth, grab the stiff, microwaved body of a leech, and gulp it down with head-jerking motions and a swelling of the stem.

While he observed, both worried and fascinated, the blossom that remained focused on him gently brushed his face and said, “The cyberleeches were particularly programmed to hunt for you. Why should that be?”

Now that he was looking for it, he could see the way some of the tuberous stems behind the array of flat-laid leaves expanded and contracted, showing fine, translucent green membranes between dark ribs. The orchid’s breath across his face was sweet, refreshing—not
scented, but laden with exhaled oxygen. He breathed deeply to clear his head.

He didn’t know the answer to the orchid’s question, but he thought he had a pretty good guess. When uncertain, stall.

“Is my sister alive?”

Two more heads—or blossoms—came up to regard him, fanged labellums jutting pugnaciously. They moved closer, swaying the length of his body as if conducting an inspection by sniffing. The gesture allowed him an intimate view of the fangs—sharply curved thorns eight or ten centimeters in length—which seemed quite adequate to a fight.

“Sister?” the orchid asked in a dragony hiss. “The other mammal?”

Its bellows worked even when it wasn’t speaking. He also detected shifting aromas on the air that seemed timed to the pull in and push out. Was that its language?

Not very useful for long-distance communication. But then, neither would its whispery speech be.

“The other mammal,” Benedick confirmed. “Is she alive?”

His orchid—the violet-and-yellow striped one—arched one stem way over as if to confer closely with the white-and-crimson splotched orchid restraining Chelsea. Three other blossoms remained focused on Benedick, while the fifth still snuffled after scraps of meat.

In the second plant’s grasp, Chelsea lifted her sagging chin with neck-cabling effort. Her head wobbled briefly and tipped backward, but Benedick saw her blink. Her throat worked.

Her lips moved. The orchid supporting her shifted a coil of tendrils to support her skull, tipping it gently upright. She got another breath and muttered in broken syllables, “I’ll live. Fuck it all.”

Benedick winced in empathy. The burns on her face
seemed to be healing under the froth of pale green foam, but the skin around it pulled up in dry ridges when she grimaced. Even her symbiont wouldn’t keep that from hurting.

She glanced around, face rearranging itself from its tentative grimace to mild disbelief as she saw what had rescued—or captured—them. “Hello, ah, orchid-people.”

Was that leaf-rustling laughter? The plant that gripped Benedick said, in its rubbing voice, “You have not answered the question, mammals. What have you done to deserve ambush?”

Benedick glanced at Chelsea. She looked up at him from under her eyelashes and somehow managed to twist her lips into what he took for an attempt at a brave grin. It looked more like a rictus.

It stung how much she reminded him of what Caitlin had been when they were still young and courageous in their ignorance. It stung because he had loved Caitlin when she was brash and overconfident, and Caitlin wasn’t that, anymore. And neither was Ben.

“We are on Errantry. We are in pursuit of a fugitive criminal,” he said. “Whether the ambush is her work or not, I am uncertain—but I would theorize that if it were not hers, it might be that of her allies.”

“So that is your purpose here? You are doing nothing but passing through?” It took a moment to realize that the second orchid had spoken this time. Their whispery voices, if you could call them voices, were identical.

“And foraging as we go,” Benedick said, remembering the mushrooms and eggs in the pack.

“You eat plants,” it said. Benedick wished the voice had tone, so he could tell if its diction suggested horror, anger, or simple matter-of-factness.

Benedick turned his head to look significantly at a nearby cyberleech corpse. “And you eat animals. I
would not suggest that you would willingly consume sapient ones.” He hesitated, and looked the closest orchid face in the eyespots. “Would you?”

The rustling—the sound of the spiked, broad, body-armor leaves rubbed one over another in tight, fast circles—it was
definitely
laughter. “Clever mammal,” it said. “Things-that-talk should not dine on things-that-talk. It is as you say. Is it perhaps that you are an ethical animal?”

That he had to stop and think on. Ethical in the intent, at least, he supposed, if not always in the execution.

The orchid did not seem to become restless while he considered. Perhaps plants were patient by nature.

“Perhaps,” he agreed.

The orchid’s coils loosened slightly, though they still cradled his limbs, offering support. One of the plants—his, he thought, by the bellows motions—asked, “Who are you?”

“I am Benedick Conn,” he said. It had provided enough slack in the tendrils now that he could lift his wrist and gesture to Chelsea. “My sister is Chelsea Conn. We are on the Captain’s business.”

“The Captain!” the plant said. “There is a Captain?”

“Perceval Conn,” Benedick said. Then, softly, trying to keep his voice level and calm, he added, “She is my offspring.”

He wondered how much animate plants could be expected to understand mammal biology. They might find
daughter
confusing, or not—there were plants with male and female individuals, but he remembered the reaction to
sister
. It seemed to follow the concept of “offspring” well enough, however.

He felt it shift, resettle itself, and the leaf plates opened into a fantasia of agave-like spiral prickles. It said, “A scion! You must be proud.”

Chelsea shifted in her bonds beside him, making a
small sound that might be worry or discomfort. Benedick felt his lips thin. He drew his shoulders back. Proud was not the right word, but he supposed it could do, if one didn’t mind being entirely incorrect. “She is very brave and clever,” he said, and changed the subject. “I am curious. Do you have names?”

“No names such as mammals use.” It seemed to deflate a little, which might be relaxation. He wondered how it moved, and what it used in place of muscles. Air-filled cells? Carbon filaments?

“How is it you speak our language?”

The rustling peaked. It seemed the orchid could talk and laugh at the same time, because it answered, “Television.”

   The next time Jsutien awoke, he was lucid. Caitlin breathed a sigh of bright relief when he blinked and said, “Chief Engineer?”

“You remember?”

“It’s confusing,” he said. “I remember a lot. I remember dying.”

“Do you remember why my brother woke you?”

He nodded. “I was the astrogator. He told me the ship was under way again.”

“The world is under way, and badly damaged.” There was no grace in hiding the truth. “Do you remember why we chained you?”

He nodded once more, eyes closed, and winced as he probed his forehead, though his colony had long sealed the injury. Instead of commenting on Arianrhod’s escape, however, he swung his legs over the edge of the cot. The stretch webbing sank under his thighs as he grounded his feet. “It’s cold.”

“We’re conserving power.”

He glanced around, frowning, obviously assessing how desperate their situation really was. His hands
chafed together. “Were you—were
we
derelict a long time?”

“More than five hundred years,” she said flatly. It was wanton cruelty and could have sickened her. But in this case, she told herself, ethics would wait on survival. She set her jaw against any revealing expression and waited for the news to strike through his facade.

He must have already suspected, because, though the corners of his eyes tightened, he only nodded. No protests of bereavement, no questions as to the disposition of his family and friends. Of course, the angel could be telling him some of that even now, and Caitlin would not know it.

Clear-eyed, he said, “So why did you bring me back?”

“We’ve lost our navigation, all our star charts, any information on our destination. We are mobile, but our resources are extremely limited. We need your help, Astrogator.” She leaned back and spread her hands, fingers crooked. “We don’t know where we’re going, where we
should
be going, or what to expect, should we reach either destination.”

“It wouldn’t matter if you did,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

His smile, when he got around to finding it, sat crooked across his face. He looked older than Oliver when he did that, as old as he—Damian Jsutien—must have been before he died.

But even when his face smoothed to neutral, she had no urge to call him by his old name. And not because she had not known Oliver: she had only just recognized him by sight. She had told her colony to prevent such accidents, and set it so that it would not even allow her to
think
of him as Oliver in error.

She wondered what it would be like to make that mistake. She wondered what it would be like to know you were capable of making such a mistake. People must
have been so hesitant in the past, so guarded in their speech. No wonder, she thought, that Means were so closemouthed around Exalt.

Maybe Jsutien had the habits of a Mean, still, because he just blinked at her.

She said, again, “What do you mean?”

“This body. Who was he?”

So many answers, all of them bad. She’d never met Oliver. She’d wanted to. Benedick had liked him. Alasdair, it seemed, was easier on the younger ones. Age had mellowed or exhausted him, or they had been so distant from his power that he found no threat in them. “My brother.”

“Oh,” Jsutien said. “And what’s that like for you?”

She shrugged. “Complex. But you knew that. You are avoiding the question, Jsutien.”

He laid his unshackled hand across his right eye socket and pressed hard enough to raise the tendons striating the back. He said, “You are asking me to violate a sacred vow.”

Whatever she had expected, it wasn’t that.
Oh, Ben. What were you thinking when you resurrected this one?
She had to resort to her symbiont to keep the surprise from her voice as she said, “Are you devout?”

His lips curved. She’d caught him out. He laced his fingers in his lap. “I am an astrogator. Of the Ancient Order of the Astrogator-priests. Sworn to uphold the mysteries, and teach only those who serve an apprenticeship and take up vows of rectitude and secrecy.”

“Again, the revealing un-answer. Your secrets died with you, Jsutien. Records were lost in the Breaking. Everything was lost, even the libraries. Your vow is to a dead order.” She paused. “How ancient is that Ancient Order, anyway?”

“Built with the ship,” he admitted. “Ritual and tradition, from the ground up. We were not supposed to know that, but the library knew.”

The library. “Yes,” she said. “I met him—what was left of him, anyway. Jsutien—” How do you break it to someone that he’s the last of his kind? Oh, but he must know, mustn’t he? There was no other reason for Ben to have brought him back. “There are no more astrogators.
You
are the Ancient Order. So it seems to me that the only person who can absolve you of your vows is you.”

He grinned. “Honestly, I was always pretty sure Ng knew the dirty truth. No matter how we obscured our calculations, he could do his own math.”

“Dirty truth?”

“It is a deep mystery of the Ancient Order of Astrogators,” he said archly. “There is no destination. There never was.”

   Caitlin wanted to call Ben, but wanting to call Ben was a sort of dull, constant ache that she was used to by now. So instead she called the bridge, because Nova and Perceval needed to know, and the angel could pass on the information to Ben or anyone else who might be in need of it.

But when she made the connection, Perceval’s face, stark under her shaven scalp, drove everything Caitlin was going to say about Jsutien’s revelation from her lips. She flinched when she saw her daughter, but schooled her expression. She opened her mouth, intending efficient business—

And said, “When was the last time you ate something, honey?”

Perceval’s avatar blinked, and looked over her shoulder at Nova, who had taken shape just behind her. A guilty glance—had the angel been pressing her to eat, or had she warned it off the topic? Her own symbiont would tell her how long it had been, so the glance was not for information’s sake.

Perceval returned her attention to Caitlin. “The angel is fetching food now.”

No one answers me directly
. Something else that could make her homesick for Ben, if she would let it. Why the
hell
did he have that insane need to placate their father? Why couldn’t he have stood up to the old bastard?

“When it comes,” Caitlin said, “try to eat it.”

Apparently, being Captain didn’t remove the urge toward adolescent eye rolls. “Mom? The angel said you had something urgent?”

Caitlin said, “Your father reincarnated the high priest of astrogation from the Moving Times.”

“The news is bad,” Perceval said, and went from daughter to Captain in an instant, “or you wouldn’t be groping around telling me things I already know.”

“The news is
interesting,”
Caitlin corrected. “He confirms the angel’s information from Dust. There was never any destination. The world never had a goal.”