Dust jl-1

by Elizabeth Bear

  "Benedick threw me out so he could talk to his daughter," she said, and stepped inside before Tristen shut the door.

  He sighed. "I'm sorry. I was in the middle—"

  "Carry on." His room was smaller than the one she shared with Perceval, the color scheme cool blues. There was only one daybed. She sank down upon it. Gavin hopped off her hand and went to perch on the footrail, the mattress dimpling under his talons as he waddled across the spread. He looked completely ridiculous.

  Rien drank her wine and made herself watch Tristen peering in the mirror. He had scissors and a bowl of water that steamed a little, a ceramic-bladed plastic razor no different from any razor Rien has ever used, and he was fastidiously trimming the coarse chalky spirals of his beard close to his chin.

  When that was done, he wet the ragged remainder with a soaked towel, then rubbed soap into it, rinsed his hands in the water, and picked up the razor. While he inspected the edge, without turning, he said, "There's more wine on the credenza."

  "Thank you," she said. "I'm good."

  "Would you pour me a glass?"

  "It is my lot in life to serve," she said. But then, he wouldn't understand the irony at all, would he? She got up, realizing that she had grown unsteady, and brought him a glass. Apparently, Benedick thought Tristen rated the good crystal.

  She set the glass at his elbow while he scraped the razor along his jaw, pausing long enough to smile at her in the mirror before she backed away. She sat back on the bed, dizzy with the unaccustomed alcohol. "Well," she said, "we're here."

  "And in good order," he said, between swipes of the blade. He turned his face to inspect his cheek in the light, and gave it one more pass.

  "What are we going to do?"

  "Coming here was your plan, wasn't it?"

  "Perceval's." Although Rien had been party to it, throughout. "And mine."

  Tristen set the blade down, picked up the towel again, and buried his face in it. Through steaming cloth, he said, "We're going to stop the war. And remove Ariane from power."

  Rien drew her knees up, sitting bent forward between her legs with her arms wrapped. "How are we going to do that?"

  "I am eldest." Tristen set the towel down. He had a fair sharp face, now that it was revealed. Planes and angles, pointed ears and a pointed chin. He looked less like Benedick without the beard, though the sameness remained around the eyes. "While I live, I am rightfully Commodore, now that Father is gone."

  "But Ariane ate your father. She has his memories. She's taken his place."

  "I know," Tristen said, and touched the hilt of his broken blade. "I think Perceval will have something to say about that, don't you?"

  "Well, maybe." Rien bit her lip, wondering how much to tell him. And then he turned and offered the scissors, handle first.

  "Come cut my hair," he said. "Please."

  "I'm drunk," she said, and he laughed.

  "Just take twenty centimeters off the bottom and try to get it straight across. And tell me what you mean by maybe, brother's daughter."

  She took the scissors and studied him. "You'll have to sit. You're too tall." The last of her wine went down with a gulp as he turned the chair around, and then she gave him the glass to set aside and took the comb he gave her in exchange. Carefully, she began to comb out his hair. It was softer than it looked, its weight pulling curls that might otherwise have been as tight as her own into waves. "What I mean by maybe, is, I think we're being mani. .. manipulated."

  "You're not that drunk," he said. In the mirror, she could see his eyes were closed.

  His hair was as smooth as she could make it, and with the curl and the braid, it wouldn't matter too much if she made the edges ragged. She laid the comb on his thigh, tugged a section of hair taut with her left hand, and halfway up his back began to snip. "Perceval fought with Ariane, and Ariane took her prisoner."

  "And treated her dishonorably."

  "But Ariane was exactly where Perceval would find her. And doing something that would ensure Perceval would challenge her. And just to ensure the action—she was led upon the crime."

  "Suspicious," Tristen admitted. His hair was damp; it made the cutting easier.

  Rien parted out another section and drew it straight, measuring it against the first cut. "It gets better."

  He lifted his chin, and even when speaking kept his neck straight and his head still. Another lock as long as her forearm dropped to the floor. "Elaborate."

  "Perceval was carrying a virus when she was captured. One that incapacitated her after we escaped. And that I also caught."

  "Not a deadly virus."

  "Very deadly," Rien said, finally articulating the thought she'd not quite been able to force herself to accept. She wouldn't think of Jodin, or of Head. "To a Mean. It laid both of us out, even with treatment. I think it was an influenza."

  "Someone used her as a vector."

  Rien nodded, her jaw muscles aching with the strain of holding back tears, and severed another lock of Tristen's hair. "Half of Rule could be dead by now."

  "I understand." He snaked a hand back, caught her wrist, and squeezed. "Rien, I believe you."

  "It's a conspiracy," she said, between small snips to get the edge even. She stepped back. He shook his hair out, and it fell around his shoulders like a rippled cloak.

  "Yes," Tristen answered. "I do believe you are right. And I also believe we should have some more wine now. Don't you?"

  "If you'll tell me how you got locked away," she said, greatly daring to lay a hand on his shoulder.

  He met her eyes in the mirror.

  It was full light when Rien returned—alone, for Gavin had gone out exploring. Perceval slept curled tight around a pillow, sheathed in Pinion as if in a clamshell, both fists pressed against her chin, the blankets draped haphazardly. She wore an open-backed nightgown Rien had never seen, too white to have come traveling with them.

  Her father must have brought it for her.

  Rien wrapped her arms around herself. The flush of alcohol was already fading; she didn't know if that was because it had taken so little to intoxicate her or because her symbiont filtered her blood. She thought of Tristen, the glide of his razor along the edge of his jaw, and reached out and stroked Perceval's scalp, the soft stubble prickling her fingers.

  She felt Pinion watching, but the parasite wings permitted her touch.

  It was a kind of opposite, wasn't it? Tristen couldn't wait to shave the beard away, and here was Perceval, all shorn like a sheep, and defiant with it. Rien thought she could shave Perceval's head for her, too. If Perceval would let her.

  With a rustle, Pinion unfolded. But not violently. Rather, like the wings of the sleepy pigeons Rien had once tended in their cote, before the job was handed down to a younger Mean. Perceval's head moved under Rien's hand. She turned and blinked drowsily, brown eyes made enormous by the unrelieved bones of her face.

  "Is it time to get up?"

  "No," Rien said, and kissed her.

  She looked hard, but her mouth was tender. Rien cupped her face in both hands, feeling skin—soft, with rough patches, the hard oval of a blemish. Perceval's mouth was wet, resilient. So much more yielding than Mallory's.

  The kiss tasted of bitter sleep, the sourness of the wine. Something brought by each of them.

  Rien's heart pounded as if she had just walked out of a sauna. Perceval's long hands lay flat against her shoulders; without touching, Pinion unfolded, arched over them and crossed behind Rien's back, a sort of bower. For an instant, Perceval kissed her back, and the beating wings were in Rien's bosom.

  And then Perceval slid her hand around, pressed her fingertips to Rien's chest beneath her collarbone, and gently levered her away. "No," she said, softly. "Rien, I'm sorry. I'm fallow. Asexed. I don't want this."

  "You're female." Not like Head, Rien meant to say. But Head might be dying or already dead, half the world away. And somebody had used Perceval to do it.

  She had kissed Rien back. And so Rie
n leaned down, as if she would kiss Perceval again, because she hurt so, and was so lonely, and because she loved Perceval as she had not known that she could love. And was stopped by no more than the pressure of Perceval's hand.

  "Being male or female has nothing to do with desire."

  "You don't want me."

  "I don't want anyone," Perceval said. Rien stepped back, still half drunk and groggy with wakefulness, and watched Perceval rise. She crossed to the window and threw the drapes open with a flick of wingtips. "Desire is a distraction from duty. I prefer to be celibate."

  Rien pressed the back of her hand to her mouth. Her lips still tingled. "But you could get it fixed."

  Fixed. Like a cat. Rien was ashamed as soon as she'd said it.

  "I could," Perceval said. "But then I would not be me."

  "I love you," Rien said, hopelessly. And Perceval turned back, framed between the patterned russet drapes, and grasped and squeezed Rien's hand.

  "I love you," she answered. Then she tugged Rien's arm, bringing her around to the window, where they could stand side by side, watching the suns' reflected light filter through the black trees beyond. "Where did you go?"

  "To see Tristen," Rien said. She leaned against Perceval's side, and Perceval let her. She had been the strong one; she had been the savior. And now they were in Perceval's place, and any salvation would have to be Perceval's. "What did your father want?"

  Perceval turned to her, and Rien already knew her well enough to hear the conversation they let pass unspoken. "Our father," Perceval could have said, and Rien could have answered, "He doesn't think so," and that would not have been exactly true, any of it.

  And so Perceval said, "To apologize." When she shrugged, her parasite wings brushed the ceiling. She jerked her eyes at the arch of them, a gesture that managed to include her maiming, her shorn hair, and maybe the world.

  Rien could not imagine a member of the Conn family seeking forgiveness. Even if she had seen a portion of Benedick's apology with her own eyes.

  Well, perhaps Tristen. But Tristen was different.

  And Tristen was theirs. Hers and Perceval's. After a fashion. "Tristen and I think the whole thing was planned. That you were meant to be a sacrifice."

  "Father agrees. He said he wondered what might have happened if Ariane had killed and devoured me. If there was another virus in me; if I am poisoned more ways than one."

  She said it so plainly, as if the words sent no pang to her heart. Perhaps the pain they caused Rien was pain enough for both. Rien was still considering that when Perceval continued, "Did you and Tristen have any suspicion who might be behind it?"

  "Somebody who hates Rule," Rien said. "And doesn't like you very much either."

  "Or doesn't like Benedick."

  "He's had longer to collect enemies," Rien admitted, and was glad when Perceval laughed. "Tristen told me about the .. . about how his blade got broken. Twenty years ago, he thinks."

  "What can shatter an unblade?"

  "Another unblade," Rien said.

  "But there aren't that many—oh. Ariane." She paused. "But why trap him there? Why not kill him? Why not.. ."

  "Eat his colony, then?"

  Perceval nodded, her throat working as she swallowed.

  "If she had him in her head, the old Commodore might have noticed. And she wasn't ready to take him on."

  "So she hoarded him," Perceval said, sickly. "Like a wasp hoards paralyzed spiders."

  "It's amazing that he's as sane as he is."

  "We're a tough family." Perceval fiddled with her fingers. "There's something else. When Pinion kidnapped me"—the shadow wings rustled—"it, or someone speaking through it, professed love for me. Someone named Dust claimed me."

  Rien thought about what Perceval had just said, about celibacy and duty. She felt Perceval's tension, the loathing she would not let show in her face but couldn't keep out of the set of her shoulders. "I won't let that happen."

  "Still," Perceval said. "If you need to keep secrets from me, so the wings don't hear, I understand—what's that?"

  She pointed. Outside, the day grew brighter. Achingly bright. Eye searing, red-white, like staring into the unfiltered suns. When Rien raised a hand to draw the drapes, she saw the bones of her hand.

  "Shit." Shutters would be gliding over windows on the dayside, even now. It was just a flare, she thought. Or Hero Ng thought for her, and even in the midst of her fear she wondered how long it would be before she stopped remembering that.

  And if it wasn't only a flare, they would know soon enough, and there was nothing she could do about it.

  "These suns were never stable," Rien said, with Hero Ng's conviction. "And they are dying now."

  17 shipwreck star

  Tho' much is taken, much abides;

  and tho'

  We are not now that strength

  which in old days

  Moved earth and heaven, that which

  we are, we are,—

  —ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, "Ulysses"

  In the fullness of time, Jacob Dust went forth to hunt. Because he could, and because it was convenient, and because he liked the high Gothic poetry of it, he went as a cloud of mist, trailing soft streamers along the bulkheads, insinuating questing tendrils into poorly sealed chambers. Not all the Jacob's Ladder's airtight locks had survived hundreds of years voyaging, and then in orbit around the shipwreck stars. A waystar, the then-Captain had called it, as if they would pause here only to refresh themselves and then press on.

  That had been half a millennium before. Nothing, a flicker of time, less than the flutter of an eye.

  Long enough for Dust and his brother angels and the human Engineers to repair everything in the world that could be repaired. Long enough for a pair of suns to finish dying.

  It was time.

  Dust did not know how long they had, but he did know that events were rising to a crisis. His brothers and he would have to find a way to rejoin if the Jacob's Ladder was ever to be spaceworthy again. In the end, he thought it would come down to him and Samael, maybe Asrafil as well. He hoped to finish Asrafil before Asrafil realized the time had come to fight. He wasn't sure he liked his odds.

  Asrafil, after all, had been the death of Metatron.

  Like queen bees awakened in the hive, one of them would consume the rest. It all came down to who was going to be the last demiurge standing.

  Dust intended to be that survivor. And he knew he was not yet ready to face the brothers who were more nearly his equals.

  They all sprang from one source; in the breaking time, when systems were failing, there had been no structure aboard large enough to contain all Israfel. And so that first core of the ship had broken itself into chunks and shards small enough to survive. And those shards had adapted, learned, and protected the world in their varied manners.

  A great deal had been lost, even so, of Israfel. It saddened Dust to think too long of that shattered being of whom Dust was the memory and, he thought, the last true echo.

  But there were lesser remnants of Israfel in the world.

  It was those he hunted now.

  They tended to lie low, inadequate fragments though they were. No matter how pathetic, everything that had spun out from Israfel had a sense of identity. And each of those things felt the drive to self-preservation. They would fight their return to the reconstructed core. Even humble things could crave existence.

  Dust craved it more.

  He found a trail among the ant colonies. These corridor walls were comprised of sheets of transparent material from floor to ceiling. Between those panels was a transparent gelatin, colored in rainbow sequence from section to section—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. The gelatin was a nutrient medium and a habitat both, but it was not the only option; some of the colony chambers contained leafy plants, growing from a different substrate.

  In each section were networks of tunnels, and through them scurried busy insects, divided by color and size into colonies
of brownish and reddish and citron-amber and glossy black—and the most beautiful of all, with russet bodies and leaf-green heads and abdomens, like something carved by minute hands from variegated jade.

  There were other insects also, but Dust preferred the ants. He enjoyed their industry and their loveliness. And he approved of the industry of the keeper of this domaine, as well.

  The farmer of the ants knelt in a side corridor, hard at work with silicon sealant. She had scraped clean the cracked surface of one of the walls and was carefully drying it with a handheld heater, long dreadlocks falling over her shoulder. One of them was kinked, and stuck out crooked.

  Dust reached out to stroke it back in among the rest.

  She startled as he solidified, but did not drop the heater. Instead she rocketed to her feet, leaving him with one knee dropped in a crouch. "Jacob," she said, glaring down her nose with an attempt at haughtiness.

  "Shakziel," he replied. He rolled the syllables of her name across his newly reformed tongue, a sort of caress. "Have you seen the skies?"

  "Why would I care for the skies?" She patted the wall of the ant farm. "My work is mostly of the underground sort."

  "The waystar reaches out a bloody arm. We must all be ready to work together, soon."

  "I am ready. I report to Samael. Biosupport is his sphere of influence."

  "Because where else would you put the Angel of Poison?" It was a rhetorical question.

  She folded her heater away and stowed it as he stood. "You are not welcome here."

  "That is quite reasonable," he said, and in love and brotherhood consumed her.

  She never had a chance, not really. As soon ask a sapling to stand against the axe.

  When he was done, he settled into himself—no larger in appearance, but more in substance. And then, resplendent in his magpie-silver waistcoat and black suit, he knelt where Shakziel had knelt down before him. He groped after her tube of sealant.

  Meticulously, he began to affect repairs.

  In the morning, when at last they lay down and pretended sleep across the space between couches, Rien touched the feather to her lips and breathed across it.