Dust jl-1

by Elizabeth Bear

  "There's a lot of good on a carcass," Dust said. And then he winked, as if he had been seeing if Perceval would recoil.

  She would not give him the satisfaction. "Why so many live passengers, Dust?"

  "Jacob."

  She bit her lip. He shrugged, and turned away.

  "Jacob," she said. Telling herself that it cost her nothing, really. A name was only a name. "Please. If you want my cooperation, explain why you should have it."

  An uplifted hand beckoned, and she came to him. Pinion seemed content to let her walk as she pleased for now, although its touch made her flesh creep. "The Builders named me for a reason," he said. "I am the ladder the angels must climb to achieve Heaven."

  "Samael said the world was a program to force evolution."

  "Samael talks too much."

  If Perceval said that of Rien—well, first it would be a lie, but moreover, she would have said it with love in her voice. Falling from Dust's lips, it came with the cold of the Enemy's empty breath.

  For a moment, Perceval saw him clearly, his gray eyes level, his extended hand. She saw him unclouded by chemical trust, the cold shock of adrenaline clearing her mind. She stared hard, fixed the image, recorded it. Recorded as well the emotion of the moment, and fixed that, too. Some part of her symbiont was still her own; it responded as it should.

  Or perhaps all of it was still hers, loyal, and struggling as hard against Pinion's assault as was Perceval. "How do you force evolution?"

  "If you wanted your grandchildren to grow up angels?" He brushed his fingers down Pinion's edge, and Perceval felt it.

  She stepped back.

  Dust gestured around, at the holde and all its macabre contents. "What would you not stop at?" he asked. "Would you send them out to the stars on a mission of no return, either to grow wings or to die trying?"

  "The builders wanted to make up gods?"

  "I am their memory," Dust said. "They had all the time in the world. All the tools in the world. As you have seen, they were adequately ruthless in engendering mutation. What their own tools would not do, the ionizing radiation would. And making you over in God's image was the only thing they cared for. But this is not mine, this mausoleum of ice."

  "Whose, then?"

  "I told you," he said. "These dead belong to Samael."

  It was a slither and a skid down into the crater, and Rien tried not to think what it was doing to her hands—or what the radiation was doing inside her. She was Exalt now, she reminded herself. One of the monsters.

  From what Samael had told them, more monstrous than anyone had known.

  She would live. And if her flesh blistered and sloughed, what of it? She would think of Perceval, pulled into the cold, and the fire would seem to have no heat.

  Behind her, Benedick was down, and Tristen was coming. Gavin, who had waited above, drifted beside him. If he had any concern that the bubbling pool concealed in the crevasse was hot in more than temperature, he did not show it, but rather circled and circled again through the veils from the smoking water. There was no sign of Inkling. The tiger-thing had fallen back into the water as if it had never been.

  Rien glanced back at Tristen and Benedick. The men's legs were longer. And Gavin had wings. "Ready?" she called, as Tristen half hopped, half slid to the top of the path.

  It might have been stupid, but Rien needed to make the gesture. She turned her back on her father and started running.

  At first she could call it easy. The way sloped down, alongside the steaming river. A ripple of blue-silver light flowed along it, against the current, and Rien was fit and frustrated. If Benedick called after her, she did not hear him.

  She followed the light. Briefly, it crossed her mind that she could have learned from immediate experience and waited. Might as well try to bridle the wind; she was fed up, as Head would have remarked, and too full of fed up to sit down for any more of it.

  She ran. And footsteps followed on hard behind her.

  "I suppose you know where you're going?" Tristen said, running in step a yard behind. He must have passed Benedick.

  "You sound like somebody's dad."

  "You never know. Someday you might find out I am."

  Rien laughed, and felt a traitor for laughing. She could hold on to her anger and determination—they charged every stride—but her misery was no match for the rhythm of her feet. Instead, a black determination rose in her, as if she could feel the wrath coiling her arteries.

  She could welcome that.

  Tristen did not speak again, but rather let her run.

  Her shoes thumped on the path unevenly, for the way was not smooth. She was obliged to leap and scramble, following the deadly water through many levels of the ship. Something was funny with the gravity; she ran down, but beside her the river was flowing up. She imagined if she leapt into it, before it cooked her flesh shredding from bone, she would feel herself carried down, down, back to the beginning.

  However uneven, her steps were a rhythm for meditation. On her left side rose torn metal, stained and savage, weeping rust. Under her feet the smashed bulkheads had been smoothed by many feet, doing as hers did now.

  She twisted through a narrow pass, spiked plates of buckled decking, and slithered from the overhang down to a broad landing below. Rust stained her clothing, tattooed abraded skin. She'd be as hot as Inkling when they came to Engine. Maybe they would give her a gold-lined coffin, cast in lead. They might pour colorless diamonds and topazes through her fingers, so her radiant touch could stain them green and blue, the colors of the abandoned homeworld.

  The colors seething in this fatal river.

  She stepped aside, dropped her hands on her knees, and gasped. Benedick landed lightly beside her, folding into a crouch from which he rose on what seemed the same efficient motion. There was a good watery light by which to see the chamber—blue undulations rippled up the walls as if reflected from the river, but in this case the river was the source.

  Her lungs burned, though her muscles still felt strong. Bile and bitterness painted the back of her throat; her stomach heaved. The skin on the back of her hands was rising in lenticulate bubbles. The air was thin, and growing thinner; she could not fill herself on it no matter how much she sucked in and heaved Out. "How long before we're blinded?" she asked her father, wondering if she could sense the first milky cataract already growing.

  "The dose is no more than four sieverts," Benedick said. "Your symbiont will protect you."

  "For now," Rien said.

  "When it doesn't," Benedick answered, "I shall."

  Gavin swung wide over the water, the crawling light reflecting on the underside of his wings until he shone like a blue jewel. Tristen slithered down beside them, and as he straightened, wheezed, "Run on."

  But Rien was retching. Hands still on her knees, caustic ropes of mucus and bile slipping between her teeth. The blisters on her palms broke. Her hands slipped on their own outer layer of skin, well lubricated with dripping lymph.

  When Tristen took her elbow, she felt the wetness of his flesh weeping, too. "Run on," he said. "For Perceval."

  Rien spat one more mouthful of vomit and made herself rise. "Gavin," she called out. "Lead us!"

  His only answer was to sideslip, turning, and glide toward shore. Then over the bulwark at the edge of their brief landing, and on.

  They followed him down on blistering feet. Tristen was the next to suffer the nausea, turning his head to vomit as he ran. Running downhill jarred feet, ankles, hips, knees. The gravity varied from level to level, sometimes from step to step. They staggered. Rien's skin sloughed where the margins of her clothing rubbed it.

  She vomited, and vomited again. Her hair fell loose in her hands when she wiped it from her forehead. The decking creaked and settled beneath her feet, rusted metal flaking, ragged edges crumbling when they passed too close.

  After another hour, Benedick went to one knee. He fended her back with an outstretched hand when she would have gone to him, vomited
and vomited until the froth that dripped from his lip was cobalt with blood.

  He stood, doubled, fists clenched in his belly. Standing, he vomited again. Rien would have sworn there was nothing left to bring up, but he found something.

  Spatters of his own blue blood.

  Rien wobbled, dizzy. She retched in sympathy, her abdominal muscles contracting as if around a swung fist. She held her hand out to her father, again, and this time he took it and let her pull him on.

  In the fourth hour, she thought, if you had told the Rien of a fortnight past that she would do what she was doing for the love of an inviolate princess, she would have laughed in your face. In the fifth hour, while her joints ached and the swelling in her hands made it impossible for her to tip a water bottle between them, never mind fumbling off the top, she thought, this is what Perceval has given me. In the sixth hour, she thought only of pain, of nausea, of keeping Gavin and Benedick in sight before and Tristen in earshot behind.

  In the seventh hour, she did not think. She followed on in suffering and purgation, a raw red weeping thing that only ran until it stumbled, and then ran on again.

  And on Gavin led them, on and down through hell.

  23 in your name

  I must lie down where all the

  ladders start

  In the foul rag and bone shop

  of the heart.

  —W. B. YEATS, "The Circus Animals' Desertion"

  By the time they came down—or up—the river to Engine, Rien had been leading Tristen hand in hand for an hour. He swayed and had to be guided, and his pale skin tore away, or bruised azure and cerulean wherever she touched him. Gavin rode on his opposite shoulder. Rien wasn't sure the weight was helping her uncle, but Tristen did not complain.

  And he was, after all, a man grown. He could make his own decisions. Even, she thought wryly, if a little child led him by the hand.

  In truth, of course, it wasn't his fault. He was weak from his long imprisonment, and she thought it was only through some unholy force of will that he stayed erect at all. And his pale eyes had failed him; he was blinded by corneal burns.

  The water grew hotter. The steam grew denser. And out of it spoke the voice of Inkling. "You will come to a crosspath," he said. "Go left there. It is too hot for you, if you continue."

  Upriver, to the comet-burst reactor core itself.

  Rien counted clicks on her colony's radiation detector, and decided herself pleased not to be finding out exactly how hot it was in person. "Thank you, Inkling," she said, formally.

  The beast bowed, although not over her hand. Just as well. "You are very welcome, Rien Conn," he said, and vanished into the water like a memory.

  They crept from a vent in the wall and found themselves on a path. A proper path, if narrow; soft grass leading to a blue-painted wall and around the corner. Nothing like the hideous scramble that had brought them this far. "Faster," Rien said.

  Benedick choked. "By four days." His jaw moved as if he were considering spitting out a tooth.

  Someone came toward them. Several someones. Rien could not see clearly enough to make them out, beyond shapes rounding that corner. They bore a stretcher between each pair. She thought how nice it would be to lie down on one of those and sleep.

  The next she knew, someone was lifting her from the grass with brutal hands. She might have fallen, but must they be so brutal?. Every touch was like fire. No, her skin was on fire. Melting away at their touch.

  She heard Benedick talking, heard him explain. Another voice answered, a woman's, stern but comforting because of it. There was music, chimes and flutes and drums. Someone accompanied them. She lay on the stretcher, her eyes closed, and it was very peaceful. A crier sang out: Honor them, for it is in your name that they have done what they have done, over and over again.

  A shadow fell over her, and she made a soft noise in the anticipation of more pain, but something cool dripped onto her lips and she swallowed, and swallowed again, a thin trickle wetting her mouth and soothing the unbearable nausea. She opened her eyes. Somehow, they had come within a mighty city, pearl-colored structures projecting from the walls of the cavernous open space as it arched up and around them. If Rien lifted her head, she could see another stretcher behind her.

  In addition to the bearers at either end, two women walked beside Rien's litter. One was willowy, her silver hair—silver with age, not white like Tristen's—falling in waves. She must be a relative of Perceval's, because she had the same pert nose and broad square cheeks, though softened by time. Her face was more fine of detail than Perceval's, though, so instead of looking square and a bit unfinished, it took Rien's breath away.

  The other was of less than medium height, her auburn hair clipped close, so it only curled once from the scalp.

  Her gray was only a scattering, her face more pug-nosed and not so square. She had freckles and she wore a sword, or more likely an unblade, bumping on her left hip.

  "Rien," Rien said when the flow of water stopped, trying to lift her hand to introduce herself.

  "Shh," said the white-haired woman. "We know who you are, sweetheart."

  Rien reached anyway, got her hand up and onto the woman's arm. But the other one reached down and took her wrist, feather-soft, in a gloved hand. "I think she is asking our names, Arianrhod."

  Arianrhod.

  Arianrhod Kallikos?

  No light shone behind her; no halo graced her head, except in the way the sunlight smoothed down the strands so she seemed all dipped in quicksilver. Arianrhod smiled and wet a cloth for her lips, again.

  "Mother?" Rien would have asked, but when she tried to lever herself up on her elbows, she slid from her own head like sand through fingers, and fell back into the stretcher undone.

  When they left the dead, Dust took Perceval to see the suns. She preceded him silently down echoing corridors, Pinion floating about her with feathertips arched like a child's fingers to trail upon the wall. Even with Dust behind, she strode in confidence, because Pinion would permit no wrong turnings. Even in her confidence, she knotted her fists in hate, because if she chose a direction that Dust disapproved, Pinion also would not permit it.

  An air lock whisked open. She stepped inside. The avatar followed. With a soft hiss, air was pumped from the compartment, and then the external lock slid wide.

  Perceval did not know what she expected, but the bright flicker of the parasite wings about her, lifting her into space, was not it. There was nothing for them to beat against, but still they beat, and she rose free of the world and the world's gravity, emerging from the air lock like a butterfly from a chrysalis, all wreathed in shimmering bronze.

  The cold seemed less. She was only a little uncomfortable, and she thought the parasite wings were protecting her as much as they enslaved. Although she felt pressure and currents against them, she didn't understand how they could fly in vacuum until a voice spoke in her ear.

  Or, the memory of a voice spoke in her mind, more precisely: as there was no air to bear up wings, there was no air to carry sound. But her colony could make her think she heard him, just as it could make her feel that she loved him.

  Dust said, "Pinion is as adaptable as you, beloved. He can fly the solar winds. Light pressure and electromagnetism and matter are all the same to him. Fear not, for he will ward you."

  He had come behind her, and hovered now at her flank, a bowering shadow. She tilted her head forward and looked down into the suns.

  She had seen them from space before. But she had never stepped outside for the sole and express purpose of turning to them, like a sunflower, and watching the old consume the new.

  The waystars were comprised of a smaller and more massive white dwarf primary and its larger but lesser partner, upon whose photosphere it fed. Soon the equilibrium of their dance would fail, and the white dwarf would die with such violence that it would take its entire stellar neighborhood with it.

  Perceval thought of the world behind and around her, the untold thousands o
f lives. The innocents dead and frozen in its holdes. The dead resurrected at work in the chambers of her father's house.

  "What do you want from me?" she asked, thinking that if Dust could speak to her silently, he could hear her when she spoke in return.

  "Only what I have begged," he said. "Be my captain, Perceval Conn. Bring us out of peril; set us under way again."

  "Why me?"

  He snorted softly in her ear. "You would prefer Ariane?"

  Which of course was not an answer. "Bargain with me." She did not take her eyes off the waystars, though she thought maybe she didn't need her eyes. Pinion could see all around, it seemed. And if she could feel what Pinion felt, she could see what Pinion saw.

  Dust nodded. Perceval savaged her cheek with her teeth, for the pain, to not feel comforted by his approval.

  "What is it you wish, beloved?"

  "I want the parasite wings gone. I want you to stop manipulating my biochemistry. I want autonomy."

  "And then you will be my captain?"

  "And then I will consider it. When you permit me to think clearly."

  His hand on her shoulder. They stood on nothingness, framed in the gargantuan lattice of the world, their wings cowls of shadow catching rills of light from the waystars, as when sun falls through the dusty air.

  "No," he said.

  "Then we have nothing to discuss."

  "Have we not? I give you more freedom than you know."

  The parasite wings would not allow her to drift. But she floated, and looked upon the suns with her own eyes, and did not turn to her captor.

  "It is not a gift of freedom," she said, and if she had been speaking aloud it would have been through clenched teeth, "not to seize everything that it is in your power to seize."

  He was silent at her back. His hand fell away. After a little time, while Perceval wondered that her lungs did not yet ache nor her head spin from lack of oxygen, he seemed to collect within himself, and thus to draw away.