Grail (17 page)

Ghosts
was the right word. You could call up a spirit, raise a revenant, but the most you might get was a shade of the person who had been. Too much of personality was ineffable, chemical, embedded in the meat. The soul electric was only a fragment of the soul entire.

The mother of his child was gone, and all he could make himself feel was a kind of dull, unsocketed ache.

Jordan and Jsutien each glanced up as he seated himself. Jsutien was just such a reminder of death in the flesh. He wore the face of Oliver Conn, who had died in Rule of Ariane and Arianrhod’s plots when they infected the whole domaine with an engineered flu and so destroyed Alasdair Conn and most of the old Commodore’s family.

The one who had grown into the crevices of Oliver’s body now had been the seed left over from the world’s last Astrogator. Benedick had not known Jsutien before, and so could not compare what he had been with what he was.

Jordan—the new Chief Engineer—was a lanky, tawny-furred flyer whose wings necessitated she choose a backless kneeling-chair to accommodate them. She had been Tristen’s apprentice and majordomo. Benedick had supported her elevation to her new role—that of an officer in her own right. He hoped he had done right. He hoped she would do better.

They were still waiting for one more. She was not yet late, and as Benedick turned his water glass idly on the tank ledge, the door opened and his youngest sister Chelsea entered the council room. She smiled, and glanced this way and that; each of the assembled acknowledged her.

When she had fetched her own glass of water and seated herself, Benedick cued the silent Angel hovering over them that it was time to begin.

“This is the first meeting of the five hundred and fifty-seventh Council of Engine. We are here to introduce new Chief Engineer Jordan, replacing Caitlin Conn, deceased. Also, to discuss contingency plans and outcomes of our
forthcoming encounter with the existing colonists of the world called Grail. Present are myself—Benedick Conn, acting as secretary, Astrogator Damian Jsutien, Chelsea Conn, and Chief Engineer Jordan.”

Jsutien tilted his head in a peculiarly familiar fashion, though Benedick could not place where he had seen the Astrogator strike that pose before. It was a suspicious, considering gesture, and Benedick filed it away for later contemplation.

“Congratulations, Chief Engineer,” said Jsutien.

“Your name was raised as well,” Benedick said. “But your position as Astrogator makes you difficult to replace.”

“Please,” Jsutien said. “Jordan should have it over me. Over just about anyone.”

Chelsea bit her lip, but nodded. “I am confident she will perform brilliantly.”

Jordan gave them both a half smile. She would have to learn not to be so transparently grateful for approval. “The vote of confidence is more appreciated than you know. I am honored to be selected, Prince Benedick, and I will do whatever work is necessary to support my Captain and her ship.”

“Good,” Benedick said. “If that’s settled, once we’re finished here, Nova will have information for you—a briefing, I am told, from her memories of Hero Ng—and Mallory is preparing the memories of Chief Engineers past to administer to you.”

“Blackest necromancy,” Jordan said, licking her lips. “All right, then. It’s probably best over quickly?”

She did not look as if she were anticipating having the skills and selected memories of generations of Engineers downloaded into her colony. But the instant expertise was necessary to the job and would serve them well. She would accept it, as Caitlin had accepted it before her.

As Nova had accepted the ghosts of Dust and Samael—and
Rien—when she grew out of the shards of other things into an Angel. As Perceval has swallowed down Ariane and Alasdair and Gerald to become Captain.

It was how you learned and grew and internalized the knowledge of those who had gone before you. No matter how bitter, you gagged it down, and hoped you didn’t choke.

“I find,” Benedick said, “that such things generally are. Sometimes time to consider only makes the whole thing worse.”

There was too much work to do to sit here missing Caitlin. He laid his hands flat on the lip of the tank, pushing himself to his feet. More than anything, he wanted to be with Tristen, hunting down Caitlin’s murderer and making him pay in blood and heartache for the thing he had taken from Benedick—a thing so profound that Benedick could not yet even feel its loss.

But he was too close and it was too soon. The shock and silence that echoed through the collapsed caverns of his self meant that he was exactly the wrong person to run the investigation—or even to participate in it. A bitter truth, but one an old man had too much experience not to accept. All those rules about objectivity existed for a reason.

Vengeance was a dish best served by those with no vested interest in seeing it carried out.

Benedick tipped his head back so that his skull dropped almost to his shoulders, easing the pain and tightness across his neck that even his colony could not dull.

Damn it all to hell. He had his own work, and this was the time to be doing it. “Our next item of business is to consider Engine’s role in coming events.”

Jordan glanced at the others. Benedick could see her coming to the realization that these people—all her elders—were waiting for her to speak first.

This was, he thought, a test.

She must have realized that as well, because he saw her
take a breath. And then she said, in a voice that hardly shook at all, “As I see it, there are three primary possibilities. Either we will need to break the world down for materials—in the event that we are permitted to stay; we will need to refit her for war—in the event that we choose to fight for a place here; or we will need to repair and rebuild her, to make her spaceworthy again. That last option is actually the most straightforward, as this system does offer access to a wealth of material in the form of asteroids, icy comets, and water-ice particles in the rings of two of the giant planets—”

Before any final decision could be made, Danilaw and his cabinet had to take their deliberations to the people. Bad Landing was still a community small and tightly knit enough to manage nicely under government by direct democracy, and Danilaw secretly dreaded the day when that changed. The good news, he comforted himself, was that he was likely to be long in his grave—and
certain
to be long done with his stint as City Administrator—before the population reached a crisis point.

Unless they wound up having to assimilate a few hundred thousand genetically engineered space refugees. In that case, all bets were off.

Bad Landing’s infosphere was more than adequate to the task. Because of the strength of some of the opinions expressed, Danilaw made the executive decision not to release the entire tapes of the Cabinet session, but he did cause Captain Amanda’s objections to be summarized and appended, and he made the original broadcast from the
Jacob’s Ladder
available, as well as a translation prepared by Captain Amanda and vetted by himself—though neither
would be available to anyone who did not first sit through Danilaw’s brief, trenchant, and carefully worded introductory speech. But sometimes listening to politicians blather was the price you paid for participating in the process of government.

He also got the remainder of his staff rousted out of bed and released from conflicting primary, secondary, and/or tertiary engagements so they could get started building an information bolus for packet-burst home to Earth. He’d probably have a course of action under way by the time the home government sent him an advisory note, but the newsfeeds would thank him for the consideration.

Danilaw didn’t delude himself. It wouldn’t be long before cracked and edited versions of the alien broadcast were all over the feeds; he’d be surprised if there weren’t a few already, given that the transmission had come unencrypted via primitive tech, and most of the people capable of receiving it had been Gain’s hobbyists. But he also knew that it didn’t hurt to get his own version out as fast as possible, and one of the things he could offer that the hobbyists couldn’t was production quality. His version would be the most complete and, frankly, the one that looked the best. And though he could try not to say the sorts of things that were making ledes all over the network—
a ship out of legend has returned
—Danilaw was confident that human nature would provide the rest.

That finished, he changed into the exercise clothes he kept in a locker in the residential and security barracks, took a seven-kilometer run with his morning-shift bodyguards, and went out to the tables by the water to share a cup of tea and some protein biscuits with the sunrise. He then showered in reclaimed water before falling into the bed set aside for his use.

He dreamed of muscular twelve-armed knots of dodecapodes spelling arcane runes across the ocean floor, and
woke in a cold sweat of fear because he couldn’t understand what they were trying to tell him.

He rose from his bed and paced the cold floor in slippered feet, the fear-induced nausea retreating slowly as he walked back and forth before the portal, watching sunlight shift through the dappled water of Crater Lake. Bits of things—organic matter, sand—danced like dust motes in the rays, and as he watched, a sense of lightness filled him. The scarred dodecapus was the only one in evidence, smooshing its sucker-mouth across the outside surface of the port, scraping up algae and tiny crustaceans.

Fear was not a familiar sensation, and this fear—stranger-fear, fear of the unknown—even less so. Among the legacies of atavism corrected by rightminding was the overactive fear response of the human amygdala to anything foreign or strange. Of course, a certain sense of self-preservation had to be left intact, and for some individuals whose baseline stability was particularly high, the whole threat-response endocrine package could be left intact without making them unsocializable.

Captain Amanda, the Free Legate, would be one such. It was a necessary precursor to the red jewel over her eye; no peace officer could afford to be too trusting. That was why she was so adamant about the potential dangers of the Jacobeans. And, still floating on that sense of goodwill, Danilaw reminded himself that it was her job to be so. He should respect her judgment. She had been left with those emotional cautions for a reason—to make her more able to protect the rest of her species from threats they might not otherwise recognize.

There had been species on Earth—island species, isolated populations—without fear of humans or any other predator. They were gone now, every dodo and Galápagos tortoise among them.

Danilaw smiled at the dodecapus, placing the palm of his hand against the portal near its limb. It curled a tentacle
toward him, pressing sucker-feet against the transparency that divided them. A surge of fellow feeling and a fierce protectiveness filled him, warm and unmistakable as the sunlight. It had never learned to fear humans either, and if Danilaw had his way, it never would.

He’d find a way. He’d find a solution. For Fortune, for the Jacobeans, and for the future. He was suffused with vigor, with joy and hope. He turned from the portal, feeling as if his footsteps should have been effortless. Instead he dragged, heavy-limbed, as if still in a dream. The tiny bedroom, too, was full of light—streamers of it.

Everything surrounding Danilaw took on a crystalline super-reality, bright and warm and perfect—a holy and delighted space. He floated in the center as if the sun and water bore him up, filled with an ecstatic rapture. He let his head drop back on a soft neck. He spread his arms wide and breathed deep to fill his lungs with that divine, that healing, that heavenly light. Something touched him—something that loved him, that would protect him. Something vast and essential, that cared.

He knew the symptoms, though it had been years since he’d experienced them.

Seizure
, he thought.
A bad one
.

The light gave way to darkness. He tried to cry out. But he could not tell if he made a sound as the perfect love washed over him and he fell.

   When Danilaw opened his eyes again, it was in the same darkened room, and Captain Amanda sat on the edge of the bed—beside him—with a bud in her ear and her eyes tuned to her infothing. He lifted his head and she turned instantly, dropping the interface into her shirt pocket.

“Hey,” she said. “Feeling better?”

“How much time did I lose?”

She tipped her pocket open with a fingertip and glanced at the infothing. “Ten minutes,” she said. “I was napping
in the next room and heard you fall. So. Temporal lobe epilepsy?”

Gingerly, he moved his skull and then his limbs, testing them. “Rightminded out years ago. Or so I thought. I still see visions sometimes, but I haven’t had the full tonicclonic experience since I was a student.”

No facial bruising and no pain in his limbs, for a wonder. His ribs ached when he breathed deeply, from which he deduced that he’d fallen across the foot of the bed, and the mattress had protected his head.

“Anything hurt?” Amanda asked.

“Just my pride.” Honesty compelled him. “And a few bruises.”

She was studying his face, frowning. The line it drew between her eyes puckered the skin around the Legate’s jewel. Danilaw imagined the shine of it recording, and looked down. Then she extended a hand, as if to assist him to his feet.

“All right,” she said. “Come on. We just have time to grab some food before duty calls.”

   The Council reconvened after lunch, when everybody else had also gotten some sleep and the infosphere had had a good six hours to start consensus-building and weeding out the opinions of the hysterics and the intractables. By then, they were in possession of another transmission from the
Jacob’s Ladder
, this one granting permission for an envoy to be sent.