Dust jl-1

by Elizabeth Bear

  It did not smell like Perceval.

  She tucked it under the pillow, and left it there.

  18 his harness and his promises

  Because these wings are no longer

  wings to fly

  But merely vans to beat the air

  — T. S. ELIOT, "Ash Wednesday"

  Rien must have slept eventually, for when Perceval awakened she was facedown in her pillow, snoring slightly. Perceval, shaking herself free of Pinion and swinging her legs over the lip of the couch, looked at her fondly. Did anyone sleep the way people were shown to sleep in dramas, tidily and composed?

  Perceval would have bent down and kissed Rien on the forehead, but her kiss would not have meant what Rien needed it to, and she did not wish to cause more grief than needful. Instead, she knuckled sleep from her eyes, dressed as silently as possible, and padded barefoot into the hall.

  She'd lost weight, which was only to be expected. She curled her toes on the flooring, a patterned carpet runner, and could see bones and tendons and indigo veins sliding beneath the blue-tinged skin. As if in answer to the thought, her stomach grumbled.

  Well, that was a direction, at least. With Pinion fanning on her shoulders, she rose on tiptoe and rotated slowly, breathing deeply, searching the scent of breakfast—or dinner, as the case might be. Overall, she suspected it was probably closer to dinnertime.

  And she did smell something sweet and grainy, like hot cereal, or baking bread. She followed that aroma, not back through the entrance hall but in the opposite direction, deeper into her father's house. The corridor was chill; she barely felt it. She had been cold so much of late that she wondered if she would ever notice cold again.

  But that scent, and the scent of coffee, drew her on. She wondered if she had somehow slept the clock 'round, but her internals assured her that it was only a little after sixteen hundred. Voices hummed on the air, one of them unmistakably Benedick's baritone, but the words were indistinguishable in echoes. They led her in the same direction as the smell of coffee.

  Eventually she came through a door that looked decorative but was most likely an air seal waiting to fall, and she paused.

  She had expected a dining room, dishes laid on the sideboards or brought by bustling servants. Instead, what she found was a sunny small room, the walls clear yellow and the trim cheerful orange. There was a circular table big enough for six, and Benedick and Tristen—his chin shaven and his hair trimmed halfway down his back—sat at the ten and two positions, their backs to the window, bowls and cups before them.

  Perceval saw a different view from this side of the house: apple trees, their roots humped under the snow, and what must be an airy glade when this side of the world was not frozen. A red bird no bigger than Perceval's hand flitted from branch to branch, whistling. The flare must be over: the light seemed normal, and other senses told her the background radiation was falling off.

  "Rien says the suns are dying," Perceval said. She pulled out a chair and sat, a little forward to make room for Pinion behind her.

  "Her father's daughter," Tristen said. Benedick shook his head, faintly smiling, so Perceval wasn't certain if the dig was directed at her or at him—or even if it was meant to be a dig at all.

  Perceval cleared her throat. "What's for breakfast?" Tristen rose and fetched a cup from the cabinet. The coffee was on the table in a carafe, and Perceval poured her own and doctored it with soy milk and honey. Benedick said only, "How does Rien know?" As she was drinking her coffee and explaining about Hero Ng (Benedick and Tristen shared a significant glance when Perceval told them about Mallory), a bowl of oatmeal appeared at her elbow. The necessities of honey and cinnamon and salt and more soy milk occupied her hands for a moment. She had barely even registered the presence of the resurrectee servant who left it there.

  She finished the story and the oatmeal at close to the same time, and pushed the bowl away. "It sounds as if Hero Ng has been expecting this for a long time. Since the end of the moving times. These suns have always been unstable."

  "Then why bring the world here?" Tristen asked. No doubt a rhetorical question, and none looked more shocked than he when it was answered.

  "Because at the time there was no choice." The voice was deep, gravelly, harsh as if with over- or underuse. Benedick was on his feet before the speaker finished, a pistol in one hand and a dagger in the other. Tristen remained seated, seemingly languid, the drape of his hand and wrist across the tablecloth unchanged. But Perceval could feel the electricity in him. That air of repose was no more reliable than a hunting cat's.

  As for herself, she set her coffee down—it was laced with cardamom, and she harbored intentions of finishing every mouthful—and slowly pushed her chair out to stand. She furled Pinion tight when she turned, so as not to interfere with her father's or her uncle's line of sight or line of fire.

  And when she turned, she saw—a man. A small man, all out of proportion with the voice. His blond hair hung lank on either side of a long, lined face, and his nose looked like it had been repeatedly broken. Perceval blinked. She wasn't sure she'd ever seen someone so fascinatingly ugly.

  He wore a dove-gray morning coat and no shirt, and his feet were as bare as Perceval's and far hornier. "I am Samael," he said, "the Angel of Biosystems. And I am afraid the ghost of Hero Ng is quite correct. It is really time we were going."

  "Not to seem rude," Benedick said, without lowering his weapon, "but amicable relations would be easier established should you reveal how you came to enter my house."

  Samael paused, pale locks threaded through both gnarled hands as he pushed his hair behind his ears, earrings and finger-rings glinting. "Like this," he said, and vanished like a switched-off light.

  Involuntarily, Benedick stepped forward. And Tristen stepped to the side, flanking him. Perceval craned her neck; surely there was meant to be some sort of a special effect when a person disappeared, a flash of light or a pop of air. Not a simple, crisp vanishment.

  And then Samael reappeared, over by the cabinets this time and wearing a green damask greatcoat and a pair of sooty wings that—unlike Pinion—trailed off through the wall.

  "You're a projection," Perceval said.

  Samael clicked his tongue. "Close." He opened a cabinet door and shut it again, ran ticking fingernails over the cherrywood finish, and then picked up a coffee cup and held it out, handle-first, toward Tristen. "If I may presume?"

  Tristen took it cautiously, a long lean and reach. He filled it with coffee and handed it back.

  "Thank you," Samael said, and sipped.

  And Benedick looked sidelong at Tristen and holstered his weapons.

  "Thank you," Samael said. "You only would have shot holes in your paneling, anyway. Technically, I am a distributed machine intelligence, in specific the entity charged with maintaining the habitability of the vessel you call the world. That habitability is in serious danger, and along with it, your lives. What you see before you"— with a flick of his hand, he forestalled Benedick, whatever might have been Benedick's question—"is in fact a sort of hologram, an avatar animated through the refraction of light. I, Samael, am all around you."

  A quick caress stroked Perceval's cheek, though she saw nothing. From Tristen's flinch, he felt the same, and though Benedick remained unmoved, his eyes narrowed.

  "Samael—" Tristen said.

  Samael forestalled him with an upraised hand. "I am here for the princess. Sir Perceval, you must know that everything I say to you, Dust hears. Your neck is bent to his yoke for all to see."

  Pinion flapped once, so Perceval felt the air move between the feathers and feared a paroxysm of bating. Nevertheless, she said, "Can you get it off of me? I care not for his harness, or his promises."

  "I cannot, princess," he said. "Not without consuming it, and I think by now it is too firmly integrated with your symbiont to do so without consuming you, as well."

  "It told me Dust loved me," she said. "It told me he meant to marry me."

&n
bsp; "I am sure he means to," Samael said. "We will see that he doesn't, won't we, gentlemen?"

  It was gratifying, Perceval thought, that Benedict fell back and Tristen glided around the edge of the room to stand at her side. She felt warded, and it made her strong. It would have made her stronger to think that they would honor the authority the angel gave her, and place her in the lead. But when Benedick cleared his throat, the look Samael gave him was conspiratorial, the gesture placating.

  It made Perceval want to bite them both.

  She cast about for something to say, an attempt to reassert control, and came up with a question. "Why would anybody name the Angel of Life Support for poison?"

  Samael drained the last of his coffee and crunched an idle bite from the cup. Whatever, it seemed all the same to him, except the noise of the chewing. He tilted his head as if listening, which made Perceval hope she had asked well. "Because there is no old Hebrew word for mutagen."

  "So you're not just charged with maintaining the world in a habitable state, are you? You're the Angel of Evolution, too. Or something like it." Benedick shifted behind her, but he did not interrupt. And there was Tristen, crooked in the corner, were he could have the wall at his back and watch her and Samael and Pinion all at once.

  "Something," Samael said. However ugly his avatar might be, the smile it wore was absolutely dazzling. While she was considering her next question, he finished the last two bites of his coffee cup.

  Somehow she managed not to look to her father for reassurance. "Can an angel be imperfectly honest?"

  "An angel can be whatever it is created to be," Samael said, with perfect frankness. "Humans are the only animals that intentionally, methodically change themselves. Well, unless you count a queen ant twisting off her wings, but I think you'll agree it's hardly the same thing." He dusted his hands together. "I am going to have to tell you a story."

  Perceval broke. She looked at Benedick; Benedick nodded and pointed to the table and the chairs. In another flicker of light, Samael was seated; the other three joined him a little less tidily, Benedick seating Perceval and Perceval choosing not to make a fuss about it. She sipped cold coffee while he reclaimed his chair, and waited for Samael to speak.

  "The world has a name," he said. "Its name is Jacob's Ladder."

  "I know," said Perceval. "It's painted on the side."

  Samael laughed, but it was the flicker of Tristen's smile that Perceval had been after. He put his elbows on the table and his chin on the backs of his fingers. Again, the deceptive air of repose.

  She drank more coffee and watched the poison angel.

  Samael said, "Do you know the purpose of a generation ship?"

  "Colonization," Benedick said, while Perceval was still mulling her answer. He warmed his coffee cup, refilled Tristen's, and poured the last of the carafe for Perceval. "To carry men among the stars in search of new worlds. It's slow."

  "Generations," Samael said dryly. And then, when Benedick nodded touché, continued, "Does that time in flight need to be wasted time?"

  Perceval thought about what he had said, about ants twisting off their wings. "You could use it for breeding programs, couldn't you?"

  "You could design whatever you wanted," he said. His sooty wings had vanished; she had not noticed exactly when. He shifted in his chair, adjusting the drape of the greatcoat skirts around his legs. "Forced evolution. Mankind by design. Do you know what a Jacob's ladder is?"

  "A toy," she said, and he frowned at her.

  "It is the ladder that angels climb to reach Heaven," he said. "It is the hard path to exaltation."

  "Exalt," she said, tasting the word as if for the first time. "Mean. Forced evolution. The world is a—"

  "Hothouse. Laboratory. With experiments and controls."

  She realized her tongue tip protruded from her mouth in concentration, like a child's. She sucked it back into her mouth and gnawed her upper lip.

  "And then something goes wrong," Perceval said. "Catastrophically wrong."

  "You limp to the nearest star." Samael's bottled-up grin revealed delight in her detective work, even if she was only chasing the trail of crumbs he laid her.

  Despite herself, she liked that smile. "Even if it's not a very good star."

  "Beggars can't be choosers," he said. He sat back and folded his arms with a satisfied air. "If they wish to live. And once one thing has gone wrong, failures cascade. Command and Engineering have differing ideas of how to proceed. The passengers have their own plans. The tame God of the world, the guiding intelligence, cannot maintain itself as a gestalt, and splinters into demiurges, each with a field of interest and a span of control."

  "They don't talk much," Perceval said, hoping to make him laugh again. "If you're the demiurge of evolution, Samael, then what is Dust?"

  "The demiurge of memory. The angel of the data bank, the holographic memory crystal, and the standing wave. The angel of knowing where you have been."

  "But you obviously remember some things."

  "From after the fragmentation." He patted her hand; she tried not to feel patronized. "Or relearned since."

  "And you and Dust don't agree."

  "We agree on what is to be done," Samael said. "We've all been working for centuries to repair, reinforce, and protect the world as much as possible. As have the Engineers."

  It was flattery, but it was also accurate. Perceval nodded.

  Samael continued, "We differ on how to do it."

  Tristen put his hand over the one of Perceval's that Samael had patted. Benedick sat back in his chair, arms folded, listening. Tristen said, "And over who should be in charge?"

  "If you are going to reconstruct the ship's gestalt mind," Samael said apologetically, "somebody is going to have to get eaten. I'm sure you can understand my position."

  "And so there was discord in Heaven," Benedick said. "You wish to thwart Dust."

  "I do."

  Pinion stirred against Perceval's shoulders. Fiercely, silently, she shushed it, and through some miracle it subsided. "And how could I help you, Samael?"

  "That's easy," Samael said. "Don't marry him. Choose me."

  19 the monster who rules

  He said the one he murdered once

  still loves him;

  He said the wheels in wheels of time

  are broken;

  And dust and storm forgotten;

  and all forgiven . . .

  — CONRAD AlKEN, The House of Dust

  Rien woke to Tristen shaking her. She blinked muzzily, protesting, but as soon as she caught his wrist he relented. In a melodrama, he would have had one hand over her mouth to silence her, but apparently he didn't care if she shouted. And so she didn't, and didn't panic either. "Come to the dining room," he said, and stepped into the hall so she could dress in privacy.

  She was grateful that he waited. She had no idea of the way, and wherever Gavin had gone off to, he had not yet returned. He might be on his way back to Mallory, but she didn't think he would leave her without a farewell.

  She hoped, anyway.

  "What happened?" she asked when she caught up with Tristen in the hall. His hair was pulled back in a ponytail, revealing the fine blue-tinted points of his ears, but he'd missed a few wisps that curled this way and that.

  As they walked, he told her—efficiently, a soldier's report—about Samael and his brief history of the world.

  "He's trying to force Perceval to marry him? Did he say why? He's not even a real person. Can a machine intelligence marry?"

  "Well," Tristen said, "she is a Conn. And has a better claim on the chair than even I have, by primogeniture. If she were Commodore, or stood close to the Captain's chair, then he would have a legal link to it."

  "Space," Rien said. "Is that why they're squabbling over her? They're trying to marry an heir to the throne? I'm sorry, Tristen, but that's like some medieval play."

  "I suspect there's more to it." He sounded both amused and angry; a glance at his expression confir
med her opinion. "But Samael isn't telling."

  She blew through her teeth. "And I thought the Exalts were horrible."

  She was happy, she thought, to have Tristen in her family. He was more like Oliver Conn than like Ariane. Instead of reminding her that he was Exalt, and so was she, thank you kindly, he chuckled mournfully and sucked his lip.

  "And do we believe him?" she asked, when they had paused in the hall so Tristen could straighten her collar.

  He shrugged. "An excellent question."

  They came up on the dining room doorway. He rested his hand on her shoulder in reassurance or to keep her from bolting.

  She stepped into the room.

  Benedick and Perceval were seated side by side at a round, heavy-looking table. Across from them was a slight man, not too tall, who hunkered forward like a vulture on a branch. All three glanced up as Tristen and Rien entered. The resurrectee servant who was laying another place at the table did not.

  The one who must be Samael stood and made as if to bow over Rien's hand. She kept it firmly at her side, and over his shoulder saw Perceval smile at her. Bull by the balls, she thought, and looked the Angel of Biosystems in the eye before she said, "We're going to have to move the world."

  It didn't quite set him back on his heels, and anything he gave away would be intentional, anyway—she wasn't about to forget that he was an animation—but he did nod, and meet her just as directly. "The lady is correct."

  "But the world has no engines," she said, and thought: Oh, Space. He likes me. Or at least, she imagined that that was what the angel's steady smile meant. She didn't tell him that it was Hero Ng's knowledge he smiled at.

  He ushered her away from Tristen, toward the table, and into a seat, which he pulled out for her. She permitted herself to be seated, appreciative that her chair was next to Perceval's, as Samael said, "And perceptive. As you observe, this does present a difficulty. Because first, we are going to have to further repair the world."