Grail (32 page)

Danilaw wondered what exactly that meant, and furthermore what exactly Gain thought she could accomplish against people who knew how to fight and had centuries of practice in doing it.

“Planetary defenses are engaged to prevent you from approaching the orbit of Fortune,” Jesse said. “A broadcast is being prepared warning the
Jacob’s Ladder
away on pain of destruction. Public opinion is running high against the aliens, Premier.”

“Our evidence suggests the explosion was caused by sabotage committed on Fortune itself,” Danilaw said. “It was an attack by us against them. The
Quercus
’s drive detonated.”

He paused and glanced at Amanda, who had waited just out of pickup range. She leaned forward into reception. “So Gain stepped right into the power vacuum, did she?”

Jesse’s eyes widened. “She ordered an inquest begun at once. Decisively. She stepped up the assemblage of a defense cordon, too. By last night, there was a popular vote
to confirm her as Acting Premier in your absence and … presumed death.”

“Well, I’m not absent anymore,” Danilaw said. “Patch me through to the media center, would you? I can see I have an announcement to make. And some orders to countermand. And an inquest of my own to put into motion.”

“You’re not going to call off the defensive cordon?” Amanda said.

Danilaw shook his head. “I am going to countermand any shoot-on-sight orders they may have received, however. Jesse—”

“Right here.”

“Watch your back. Also, keep an eye on Gain. And any contacts she may have should be logged.”

Jesse looked more greenish than ochre, but he nodded. “I will.”

“Good job,” Danilaw said, wishing he felt more confident in it. “You’ll do great. Just stay cool, Administrator.”

There was too much light in the room. To Perceval, the space in which Cynric had chosen to examine Jsutien felt washed-out, white-lit, dreamy, like a surgical theater hung with gauze. But Cynric preferred it, or perhaps merely tolerated it without discomfort, and so Perceval bit her tongue.

Benedick sat with them while they went in. The rest of the senior crew and Conns returned to their stations.

There was trust involved in joining forces with Cynric to investigate the contents of Jsutien’s mind—but not so much trust, Perceval thought, as there would be in allowing her to go in alone, and then taking her word for what she found. Perceval had known the woman—or her revenant—for fifty years now, and in that time she had seen nothing to indicate that Cynric, whole or fractional, had ever hesitated at anything she thought necessary, no matter how tragic or distasteful a sane person would have found it.

Cynric was there beside her, holding her hand, the too-intimate bond of blood and colonies flowing between them. Her presence—her assistance—filled Perceval with a
strange white puissance, as if all the world and everything were washed out with that same cold light that filled the examination room. It was a dreamy prospect, silhouettes moving against glare and breaking the flooding light into rays.

She would have rather been anywhere else at all, but this was her responsibility. And so Perceval herself, in her person as Captain and guide of the
Jacob’s Ladder
, leaned down over the chair Damian Jsutien sat in and kissed him on the mouth.

Jsutien’s mouth opened. He eased his jaw, tilting his head back to allow her access. He closed his eyes, as relaxed as a drowsy child accepting a mother’s bedtime kiss.

Perceval let her colony touch his, and slipped herself inside, into the spare and ferny landscape of his soul.

For someone who had inhabited the body for as long as he had, Jsutien had not much populated its mind. Perceval knew he had grown from a seed, a set of recorded preferences and commands and variables that fit into a matrix that could be slipped into a pocket, carried in a hand. But that was just source code, uncompiled. It was just the blueprint for a thing that could grow into a person—a person similar to the person who had recorded it, once upon a time.

Such revenants usually elaborated, populating their environments just as any organic mind might. The neurology affected the personality—but the personality also affected the neurology. Brains changed to accommodate the minds that dwelled in them, just as minds adapted to the architecture of the brain.

Jsutien had left Oliver Conn’s mind as white-walled and unmodified as a rental flat. The space was inhabited but not lived in, and the record of the thing—the person—that had been Damian Jsutien had not spread itself out into the crevices.

Perceval went deeper, but nothing Jsutien could have
done could have faked the transparency, the emptiness, the sheer unused space in this head. There was processing power here to spare. Jsutien had just never moved into it. Fifty years on, and he inhabited his own head like a transient with a sleeping bag and a hot plate flopped into one corner of a mansion. He had never, she realized, expected this incarnation to be permanent.

He had never let himself get attached.

Perceval felt Cynric following along beside her, trailing long metaphorical fingers over the furnishings, contemplating the immaterial windows and walls.

“If it were here,” Cynric said, “it should be easy to spot in a head like this.”

Perceval regarded her without turning. Without any outward sign of a reaction at all.

“He never moved in, did he?”

“He never felt welcome here,” Cynric said, “so he stayed out of a sense of duty. But this is all—work. Predictable. Crazy-making. He never developed recreations, or investigated any of the ones his other-self enjoyed. He would have had the muscle memory for Oliver’s sports, or he could have retrained his body to work on Jsutien’s. The mind could be trained to match the body, or the body to match the brain.”

“He’s not our man,” Perceval said.

“Au contraire,” Cynric said. “Something was filling up this space, and now it has been deleted.”

Deleted
. Perceval lurched forward in her eagerness, but—regretfully—Cynric shook her head. Here in this space that didn’t precisely exist, she was a long-armed wraith, the wind of Jsutien’s thoughts blowing her robe up between her arms and body until it billowed like the sails of a kite. It arched, lifting.

“Deleted and—”

“Overwritten,” Cynric confirmed. “Come on. We’ll get a better view from a height.”

She sailed up. Perceval followed, until they moved through the cool transparent azure of Jsutien’s spotless mind. It was beautiful and cold. There was no pain here, no loss, no regret, no love.

Perceval found she enjoyed it.

She also enjoyed the landscape spread out below her—a patchwork of this and that and the other thing, the edges ruler-straight, the surfaces mowed tidy. It was more like a schematic of a mind than anyplace anybody spent time, and Perceval again shook her head. It should be impossible to hide anything as large and fiddly as a daemon in here. Jsutien was barely more than a daemon himself.

“She’s not in here.”

“I know,” Perceval said. “That’s not the answer I was hoping for.”

“But I am confident in suggesting that she was. Which means more than one daemon. Which means she could be anywhere.”

“In you or me,” Perceval said.

“Or, more likely, any of the others. Let’s keep that our secret.”

“Let’s,” Perceval agreed. “Because our most important goal remains finding her.”

“And Charity,” Cynric said. “Wherever we find the blade, we find Ariane.”

“Outside,” Perceval said, and returned to herself with a thought. She leaned forward for a moment, elbows akimbo and splayed hands on her knees. Benedick’s hand came to rest on her shoulder. When she looked up, Cynric was regarding her.

“She was in there, but she’s gone. She purged. You’re clean, Astrogator.”

Jsutien let out a long, soft sigh, the first evidence that he had felt concern. “So what now?”

“We have to find Charity,” Perceval said. “Charity, or that damned Bible.”

Nova spoke out of nothing. “An unblade doesn’t register on my sensors. And I have not been able to locate the Bible.”

“Then we search,” said Benedick. “By hand.”

“We cannot search the whole world,” Jsutien protested.

“No,” Benedick answered. “We prioritize.”

   By hand indeed—by hand, and by foot, and through the corridors of Engine and Rule and spreading outward. Every available Engineer and denizen of Rule was pressed into service, and not just them. The carnivorous plants turned out in force. The toolkits were arrayed to check crawl spaces. Nova reprogrammed the ship cats and set them seeking.

There were Deckers, too—those closest to AE deck outraged by the murders there, and the rest in service to the ship. Tristen heard muttering from some that the Conns should have done more to protect the victims, and a few of the rumors that wended back to him opined that Conns, indeed, had killed all the inhabitants of AE deck in order to cover up some variously specified crime.

No one was sent out alone, by order of the Captain. Tristen did not miss the care with which Cynric maneuvered to become his partner. They would start their search with the Go-Back Heaven, and Tristen would not send anyone else to brave Dorcas.

In the lift, Cynric and Tristen talked. Cynric seemed to enjoy the conspiracy theories purely from an entertainment standpoint, and amused herself by laying out a few of the crazier ones for Tristen. She sat cross-legged in the corner, her robes draping from her bony wrists, and leaned her head back into the corner while she spoke.

Tristen had seen her so many times, perched in some corner behind the barricade of her bony knees, the lines of her long face defining smiles or frowns. He wondered how it was that he had only now realized that this was the real
Cynric, or at least as much the real Cynric as the cold, imperious Sorceress.

“There’s one that says you stole the Bible yourself,” she said. “And that you mean to use it to replace Perceval as Captain.”

Tristen arched his eyebrows. “If I wanted to be Captain, I would have been.” The implications of her words struck him. “Wait.
Use
it? What use is an old paper book?”

Her head came forward, the long neck lengthening. The stare she leveled at him would have curdled the blood of most men.

“You are no revenant,” she said. “Are your memories fully intact?”

He shifted in his armor. “Flesh or machine memories? I went mad for a while.”

“The legacy Bible.” He nodded.

“It was you who taught me its purpose, Brother mine. When I was small. The Bible is an immutable hard copy of the Builders’ New Evolutionist creed, to be sure, but it’s also a
computer
—an old-style discrete calculating and remembering machine. And it holds the override codes for the entire world.”

Tristen blinked at what she said. He heard it—of course he heard it—but it seemed to wash over him as a series of abstractions. Nonsense, confused and inarticulate, until he tossed his head like a dog shaking water away. “I’m not following you.”

She rose, the sweep of fabric trailing behind her, and moved toward him. They were of a height, and Tristen knew their father’s features were plain in both their faces. She touched his cheek. “The legacy Bible is a computer. You taught me that.”

“I’m sorry,” Tristen said. “I do not understand.”

He also did not understand the smile that stretched her face—more like a snarl, in truth. But he did understand
when she spat
“Father!”
as if it were the worst curse word she knew.

She touched his cheek. “It appears, Brother Tristen, that somebody has been reprogramming your brain. Removing old knowledge. Would you care to hazard a guess as to who might be responsible?”

He did not doubt her. He wanted to; he could feel the denial in him, rising like the automatic subroutine it might be. But she was Cynric, and whatever else she was, she had never been a liar. “Can you fix it?”

She was angry. “There was nothing Alasdair Conn could do that I could not undo better. One of the things that book was for was rewriting memories, but I have read the book, and know it well. Give us a kiss, Brother dearest.”

It didn’t hurt a bit, and Tristen was left with no sense that anything had altered, but this time when Cynric said the simple words, they made sense and stuck deep in his memory. They were finished before they arrived in the Edenite Heaven.

And the implications of what Cynric said sent a chill through his body that had nothing to do with the temperature controls in his armor. Their father had used the information in the New Evolutionist Bible to remove his memories; Cynric had used it to restore them.

And Ariane had that book now.

As the lift door slid open and they stepped forth into the lock, he said, “You couldn’t have mentioned that earlier?”

The far door began to cycle, Dorcas just visible through the widening gap. Cynric spoke quickly, from the corner of her mouth. “It never occurred to me that you would forget.”

“Tristen,” Dorcas said, as the doorway between them stabilized at its widest aperture. “Cynric. To what do I owe this unexpected joy?”

*   *   *   

Tristen took Dorcas aside and told her that she must call her folk and her snakes in from the fields and gather them in the onion-domed tent that served the Edenites as a hall. He told her she must keep them quiet and collected—fields unweeded, goats unmilked—while he and Cynric went over the Heaven from one end to the other, with no respect for personal privacy or the doors of tents.

She waited, and when they finished—and found nothing, as Tristen had half expected and half feared—it was Tristen who had to go back to her and tell her that they were done, and her folk could return to their residences and their work. Cynric would have done it for him, of course, but he felt he owed it to the woman who inhabited his daughter.

“You’re not sorry,” she said, walking him back to the lift lock, where Cynric waited. “Will you even tell me what you were looking for?”