Grail (16 page)

“Oh,” she said.

“I hope,” he said, “you do not wear it long. But if you do—this may not be a favor I have conferred upon you.”

“I’ve fought a war beside you before, First Officer.” Jordan closed her hand around the badge. “I would not hesitate to so serve again.”

Samael the Angel huddled beside a stand of carnivorous mimosa at the edge of a derelict commuter pit, something small and fragile in his hands. Overhead, flocks of green birds wheeled, clamoring, in vaulted spaces against a metal sky. He crouched, cupping it close to his bosom and under his chin. The protectiveness was symbolic; his corporeal body, such as it was, was delineated by swirls of leaf scraps and flower petals, an organic mosaic like an old-Earth parade float—although those had been a festival of conspicuous consumption, and he was … salvage.

On so many fronts.

And so was the thing in his hands—or the energy fields, demarcated by shimmering bands of pollen and pine needles, that passed for his hands. It was tiny and hotter than blood—a naked, bony, pulsing thing dotted with pinfeathers, the head no more than a gaping beak and tight-squinched eyes.

Deep inside it, an ancient and tidily engineered inducer virus pulsed as well, a blue glow imbued with energy, intellect, memory, and will. Samael could feel it, alive and cognizant,
as alien as the stone-souled silicon space creature from which Cynric Conn the Sorceress had birthed it.

Samael—Angel of poisons, mutagens, life support, evolution—was not entirely sure what it was thinking in there. But the parrotlet chick he cradled was part of a larger organism as well, and so precious not just for what it was—a life—but also a link to the larger chain of being: the great hierarchy of creation from God to Captain to Angel to Crew, and so on down the line.

Samael felt the Conn woman coming long before her shadow fell across him. Her white robes swept around him; the sapphire in her nostril glittered green. She laid elegant fingers on his shoulder—
in
his shoulder, for his leaf-litter self indented to her touch and the particles of his being bent around her—and leaned down.

“One of ours,” Cynric said, delighted. Her long face was transformed by a smile. “They’re still flourishing.”

“You wrought well,” he allowed. He shifted the birdlet to one hand and plucked a berry from his breast to feed it, crushing the fruit between fingers that barely existed. Stained blue now, the bird-mouth still gaped greedily. “She fell from the nest. Or perhaps the parents rejected her.”

“Can I see?”

Cynric’s hands were long and blue-white, and far more corporeal than Samael’s own without being any less ethereal. She cupped the birdlet and bent her head to it, leaning close until she took its tiny head into her mouth. It stilled in the dark, and Samael tilted his head to watch.

There was no decisive crunch this time. “Healthy,” she said, having run her assessments and lowered her hands. “Back up into the nest with you, adorable.”

Flocks of green parrotlets, no longer from beak to tail tip than the length of her hand from palm heel to fingertip, mobbed her screaming as she stood up tall and reached spindle arms into the thorny, sensitive branches of the mimosa. The tree swept feathery leaves aside, obedient to the
will of the Conn who had engineered its forebears, revealing three stick-and-feather nests full to brimming with huddled, pulsing baby birds.

She leaned in close, sniffing, seemingly impervious to the way the angry flock wheeled and dove and chattered, some going so far as to strike her with doubled talons or pull the strands of her hair. Deliberate, considering, she settled finally on the highest nest and reached within. Samael had never quite had human senses, but he’d lived all his life around women and men, both Exalt and Mean, and so it was no great stretch to imagine her fingers brushing between fragile, prickly, sticky-moist bodies to make space for the lost nestling, and the way her other hand deftly slid it back into the company of its brethren. She breathed over the nest, a benediction or a prayer, and let the branches fall protectively back over the nursery.

As she stepped back, Samael caught her smiling. Feathers drifted around her, shed down from her cloud of protesters, one fingertip-tiny lime-rind-colored wing covert snagged in her hair, its threadlike strands in disarray. Samael swept the detritus up on his covalent fields and drew it into himself, raw material for shirt collar, eyebrows, a flamboyant braided down-fluff earring. That one feather, though, he reached out and plucked up with the simulacra of his fingers.

He smoothed the vanes into a semblance of order and tucked it into his own hair, among the chaff and milkweed floss and dandelion clocks and wheatgrass. Some tiny remnant of the parent parrotlet’s symbiont and inducer virus colonies still hovered in the shaft with a droplet of blood, divorced of its community.

Like everything else living—or half living—in the world, Samael had had a hand in its making. It amused him to take this fragment of his creation back.

As Cynric stepped away from the trees, the parrotlets lost interest in harassing her and returned to their nests.
Each pair divided the duty: one perching vigil in the mimosa’s fronds, where the long, curved thorns did not touch them—though the litter of tiny bones decomposing into calcium and trace nutrients among the leaf litter gave testament to the fate of any other small creature unlucky enough to blunder among those branches—and the other in the nest, counting chicks and regurgitating breakfast. The earlier chattering and shrieks of displeasure gave way to chirps and clucking.

Samael folded what passed for his arms. The pleasantries were apparently over. “You came for me?”

Cynric was used to dealing with Angels. She spoke plainly, with the directness of command. “We have a complicated ecological situation to address,” she said. “It is possible that there will be no place for us here, Samael. And the world’s systems are strained beyond expressing; that we have kept them mended as well as we have is only due to diligence and the toughness engineered into every life-form we’ve created. If we have to flee this haven, we have little time in which to mend them if we don’t wish to find ourselves living in a tin tub full of mold and ropes of algae. I require your cooperation.”

She was a Conn—and the revenant and reincorporated remnant of a Conn from when being a member of that terrible family had meant something different than it did under the reign of Captain Perceval. She could require anything of him she desired.

He nodded. “I will report our activities to Nova and the Captain.”

He didn’t actually think there was any irony in her smile. “I would expect no less. A Captain is not a Commodore. And we will need to use the labs. I remember that they are still intact in Rule?”

It wasn’t her memory, exactly, but one salvaged from the symbiotic tool-creature named Gavin, in which she had stored engrams of a portion of her living personality and
will. The memories had been mostly sorted into other facilities, and Samael knew the entire structure he now called Cynric was missing great swaths of experience and history from her archives.

Samael had not initially been programmed for the more nuanced human social emotions—relief, gratification, humiliation. But one learned things over the course of an existence, and his program was exceptionally flexible. At some point or another, Israfel—the initial Angel, of which Samael and all his brethren were merely fragments—had been expected to feel devotion to his human masters, and Samael bore within him the results of the adaptations Israfel had made in response.

Cynric’s sanction left him with a sense of satisfaction he might even have characterized as “warm,” if he understood how humans used the term. (He was also given to understand that humans experienced emotions as physical sensations, which required a certain quality of imagination to comprehend.)

A pair of brilliantly colored birds swooped by overhead. Males, sparring—whether over a mate or territory it was impossible to say, and they were gone too fast for Samael to consider asking them. Cynric craned her head back to watch them swoop and dive over the breadth of the oval commuter shaft. She sighed.

“You never
did
tell me what the parrotlets were for,” Samael said, sensing an opportunity. “When I was Israfel, and after. They’re more than decorative, I think?”

She might have consumed a bit of his other self when she re-created herself. He wasn’t sure; there was so much inside her, and none of it was reliable. Where Nova had integrated and Perceval had subroutined, Cynric had … splintered.

For a moment, he considered whether he’d pushed too far. But he recollected the basilisk Gavin’s sense of humor and fair play. Some of that—all of that—was subsumed in
Cynric. It might come with additional memories and ambitions now, but the core personality was derived from the same algorithms.

Cynric regarded the backs of her hands. When she drew them up, the draped sleeves of her robe fell over them. “They’re to change the future.” She shrugged. “They want to live. And they’re lucky. They have the stuff of Leviathan in them, and the stuff of Leviathan sometimes dreams true. It’s possibly them, their dreams of self-preservation, that have brought us here. Against all odds and the wishes of the Builders.”

“You are,” he said, “a sorceress.”

“So they tell me.” Her sigh, though, was any woman’s, and weary. “And if we don’t wish to disappoint them, we had best be about our work, Archangel Samael.”

   If Sparrow Conn was not what she once was, then Dust would have to find someone who was—or, if not what she once was, one who had become something amenable to Dust. Someone he had been avoiding. Someone who had summoned him back from his oblivion, planted the tiny seed of himself in the shape of this toolkit, and let him grow.

Dust was an Angel. He was by nature a servant, even if his service often meant something more like mastery. It was no angel’s fault if flesh was weak, if memory was stronger than mere meat could bear.

This attempt at winning autonomy abandoned, Dust folded back his whiskers and went through tunnels and tightnesses, in search of the mortal remnant of Ariane Conn.

He found it curious that she had left the choice to him, that she had not commanded his attendance but only left in him the knowledge of where to seek her. Perhaps she preferred the possibility of a willing ally to the certainty of a treacherous slave. No fool, she had blocked his ability to
reveal that information—but he could find her for his own self well enough.

She was disguised, which was only to be expected. But he knew where to look for her, although it took some time for him to travel by secret ways from the vale of the Edenites to the very heart of Engine.

When he found her, she was lost in the Conn personality she inhabited, bent forward and buried to the opposite shoulder in an access hatch. Leafy fronds surrounded her on every side—two curled tendrils supporting lights, another extended past her head and neck into the same awkward space her arm was jammed into. Three velvet-red snapdragon heads hung over her, their petals folded neatly back into comet shapes of concentration.

Dust paused at the door, observing. The body of the carnivorous orchid was comprised of tubers and sword-shaped leaves, pulled tight together now in deference to the cramped quarters. The body Ariane inhabited lay among those leaves with apparent trust, despite the orchid’s clawed thorns and toothed flower faces.

“Hand me the five-mil spanner,” the host said.

Green tendrils withdrew from the access panel, clutching a wrench, and snaked back a moment later with a different one. “It would be less awkward for me to reach,” the plant said, its voice a breathy hissing.

“Sure, but I’m stronger.”

That sound the plant made might have been agreement.

The host’s visage tensed, along with the muscles of one shoulder. A moment of pressure, and then a sharp metallic bang from inside the bulkhead, followed by soft cursing. The illumination cast by the miniature spotlights wavered.

“Ow,” the plant said.

“Ow,” the host answered, withdrawing a hand, shaking it, knuckles reddened. “How’s your tendril?”

“Bruised,” the plant responded. Not so programmed as
to examine its damage visually, however, it did not withdraw from the access.

From his perch by the wall, Dust bared his rodent teeth and made a soft meeping sound. It was a call for attention, and one flower face and one human one swiveled.

The host sat up, delighted. “Toolkit! Now why didn’t I think of that?”

Dust scampered over, hopping plant tendrils, and pressed his cheek to the welcoming hand. This was good. This was the beginning. He had contact now. He felt the sparkle of recognition, and knew Ariane was aware in there, quiescent and biding.

Once he was alone with her, he could talk to Ariane without alerting her host. Until then—well, it was a toolkit that he inhabited. He would contrive to remain useful.

   Grief is different to an old man.

The young lack experience of grief. It seems to them arbitrary, capricious, outrageous. They react to loss as to a personal affront, as something that can—and must—be fought.

The old know better. The old have learned better. Or perhaps they just go numb.

Or so it seemed to Benedick. The pain was what it was—but he felt none of the fury he would have once expected, none of the denial … and none of the rage.

He had become resigned, and that was how he knew he was old.

When he sat down across the display tank from Jordan of Engine and Damian Jsutien, Benedick was prepared and he was detached. Everything Caitlin had been, everything she had done, was gone—for now. And if she were restored from backup—if Mallory had her imprint somewhere in the vast orchard library of ghosts—she would not be who she had been anymore than Cynric now was more than a shadow of Cynric then.