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  Grail

  ( Jacob's Ladder - 3 )

  Elizabeth Bear

  Rife with intrigue and betrayal, heroism and sacrifice, Grail brings Elizabeth Bear’s brilliant space opera to a triumphant conclusion.

  At last the generation ship Jacob’s Ladder has arrived at its destination: the planet they have come to call Grail. But this habitable jewel just happens to be populated already: by humans who call their home Fortune. And they are wary of sharing Fortune—especially with people who have genetically engineered themselves to such an extent that it is a matter of debate whether they are even human anymore. To make matters worse, a shocking murder aboard the Jacob’s Ladder has alerted Captain Perceval and the angel Nova that formidable enemies remain hidden somewhere among the crew.

  On Grail—or Fortune, rather—Premier Danilaw views the approach of the Jacob’s Ladder with dread. Behind the diplomatic niceties of first-contact protocol, he knows that the deadly game being played is likely to erupt into full-blown war—even civil war. For as he strives to chart a peaceful and prosperous path forward for his people, internal threats emerge to take control by any means necessary.

  Elizabeth Bear

  Grail

  This book is for Stella Evans,

  Liz Bourke, and Maddie Glymour.

  And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of.

  And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.

  And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.

  —GENESIS 28: 15–17, KING JAMES VERSION

  As for ideology, the Hell with it. All of it.

  —URSULA K. LEGUIN

  God make thee good as thou art beautiful.

  —ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, “The Holy Grail”

  1

  when the world ended

  In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like

  a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me,

  what is this quintessence of dust?

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet, Act II scene i

  Danilaw Bakare was on a nightclub stage when the world ended.

  His third-day job was as a classical musician. He held the lease on a baby blue electric fab bass, and two nights a nonce he joined up with two guitarists and a drummer to play the greats in a repro dive bar in Bad Landing, on the east rim of Crater Lake. They did all the classics—Buddy Holly, Buddy Guy, Gatemouth Brown, Page and Plant. Thompson, Hendrix, Li, Morris, Mitchell, Kaderli, Kasparyan, Noks, Hynde.

  It was one hell of a relief from the first-day job where he spent five days out of nine, and it filled his arts requirement in style. The first-day job was as City Administrator for Bad Landing, which loaned the band a certain notoriety and filled his admin and service logs. He completed the nurturing requirement with volunteer work and babysitting his sister’s kids, half grateful that, given his other commitments, it was a tertiary and half worried he was never going to find the time himself to reproduce.

  So he happened to be onstage before a crowd of about one hundred and seventy-five, holding up Therese while she laid fire through “Johnny B. Goode,” when the end began.

  As poets had long suspected, it happened so subtly that Danilaw at first had no idea of the historic significance of events beyond a sensible level of unease. There was no drama. Just a brown-faced citizen in a suit and some discreet hardware, as out of place in mufti—and in the club crowd—as a dodecapus at a tea party. She slipped in through the kitchen, pausing behind the tables where the patrons were seated so only the musicians and staff would see her, planting herself at the end of the bar like she’d been carved there. When Danilaw caught her eye, across all those rapt faces, she frowned and nodded.

  She had a round face, a straight nose, and a finely pointed chin. He imagined brown or amber eyes behind smoky lashes, and schooled himself to professional coolness.

  Damn, he thought. There goes the second set.

  His own security was out in the crowd, but he didn’t know who most of them were and he wasn’t supposed to try to find out. So the citizen must have come with a message too sensitive to transmit, even encrypted.

  Thinking too much, he fluffed a chord change, but got it back before the progression fell apart on him. He turned over his shoulder and shot a signal to Chuck, the drummer, who threw in a special fill to let Therese know to end the set. She wrapped up the Chuck Berry in half the time it usually took—a minor tragedy. But as soon as she announced the break, he set his bass in the stand and jumped off the stage, landing between two tables surrounded by startled patrons.

  “Sorry, Ciz.” He had to turn sideways to slip between them; the aisles were narrow, and Danilaw both broad and tall. When he got closer to the watcher, he began to realize the true depth of the problem. In addition to her suit and chrome—headwire and earset—the citizen wore a Captain’s crimson Free Legate jewel over her left eyebrow and a worried expression across the entirety of her face. When Danilaw came up, she didn’t hesitate and she did not mince words.

  “Premier, I’m sorry.” Her voice was light and well modulated, but he would bet it could carry across a crowd if necessary. “I’m Amanda Friar. We haven’t met. I’ve been sent to inform you that the homeward perimeter registers a blip.”

  Nothing was scheduled incoming for over four hundred days. And certainly nothing from Earth.

  “Rogue ship?” he asked. “Pirates?”

  There had been no reliable reports of piracy in Danilaw’s lifetime. But there was history, and there was always a new first time.

  Captain Amanda shook her head, giving Danilaw an increment of relief. “She’s broadcasting an identity tag, one there would be no reason to fake.”

  That relief faded as he watched her nerve herself.

  “An antique tag. On antique equipment. We had to break open the original code files.”

  He knew the answer. “The Jacob’s Ladder.”

  He might as well have said the Flying Dutchman. But, incredibly, she nodded.

  Danilaw rocked restlessly from foot to foot, controlling his body’s desire to fidget by force of will. Floorboards of salvaged wood creaked under his weight, reprimanding him. “Wrack and waste, the Kleptocracy actually did it.”

  “And only a thousand years late.” She took his elbow as she led him from the room, back the way she’d come. “Administrator Danilaw?”

  “Captain Amanda?”

  Her thin throat showed it when she swallowed. “Do you suppose anyone’s alive on it, sir?”

  He shook his head, but he didn’t mean no. Something more like awe and incredulity. “I hate to guess. And if they are, what sort of condition do you suppose they’re in?”

  Danilaw collected his open security detail, and Captain Amanda brought him topside. Much of Bad Landing was underground—a compact, low-impact settlement burrowed out of the already-shocked earth surrounding Crater Lake. Surface paths shaded by native vegetation and foul-weather awnings threaded between the gentle slopes of constructed hills. Dwellings, gathering places, and the scattering of rare commercial buildings clustered around meadows and diversity zones. Solar leaves laid flat for the night scaled the water-grooved roofs of earthed buildings and, across the lake, ranks of solar-skinned wind turbines followed the arc of an artificial reef habitat.

  Three smeeps and a robin hopped or flapped a few steps as Danilaw and his entourage stepped out of the biomimetic berm housing the nightclub, encouraging him to smile. The seventeen-year smeeps hadn’t been out much lately—it was coming u
p on one of their breeding and hibernation cycles—and he missed their dusty rose-violet plumage and trilling cries.

  Tonight’s open security detail were well-known to both Danilaw and each other. Karen took point; Banko and Keebler followed along behind, silent in their tuned awareness. Alert but not worried.

  Rightminding was a cure for all sorts of things, but political violence wasn’t always one of them. There were logical reasons, sometimes, for war—although in practice that had not happened in centuries. And even for assassinations. But in a community as small and tight-knit as Bad Landing, security had the advantage of already having a pretty good idea of who the crazies and the justifiably dissatisfied were, and Danilaw made sure there were always routes of complaint open to every citizen.

  On such a pleasant night, the trails were busy under their canopies. Solar-storing fairylights shimmered in the overarching branches of several varieties of violet-black xenotrees, and the nightbirds—robins, screamers, shutterlings—flitted among their branches. The drone of insects hung heavy in the evening cool, throbbing and slower now than it had been at the height of summer. Danilaw kept an eye peeled. A pack of native wild “dogs” had begun patrolling inside the boundaries of Bad Landing—a good sign that the settlement was integrating well, but a possible contributor to the sudden rarity of smeeps. He hoped to catch sight of one, but they were shy and fleeting, and he had yet to glimpse more than eyeshine and a silhouette.

  Along the way, Captain Amanda briefed him on her capabilities and what she knew about the incoming vessel. Danilaw listened and observed, for the moment defaulting to learning mode, while the walkers and the wildlife carried on around them. A couple of joggers passed, running either for the fun of it or to fulfill their Obligation. As Danilaw, Captain Amanda, and the security stepped aside to let them by, something small, nocturnal, and fast-moving brachiated past overhead. It could have been any of half a dozen varieties of treeswinger. It was gone before Danilaw looked up, or maybe it hadn’t gotten close enough to the directional lights for him to pick up more than a suggestion of how it moved.

  The closest Administration Building access was within sight of Crater Lake, out from under the edge of the big xenos.

  It was called a lake, and drainage meant the water was conspicuously less saline than seawater, but the impact scar from the eponymous bad landing communicated directly west to the Sunrise Sea. There was no sunrise over it now. Favor—dark, reflective oceans agleam behind argent bands of cloud—would already be setting as a waning crescent over the forests in the east. Danilaw couldn’t see Fortune’s poisonous sister-world through the trees, but the skies were spread with silver behind heavy boughs.

  He sighed, and turned to enter the access. Danilaw stepped through on Captain Amanda’s heels, all but one of his security peeling away now that he was within the safety of Admin. The access sensors identified his microchip and granted him access, an air cushion lowering the platform smoothly to the deepest level.

  He stepped out of the shaft and tugged his clothes back into order. Captain Amanda walked forward, outlined against the observation blisters that bubbled into the water. Karen followed behind, professionally unobtrusive. Using the access had activated the lights, now glowing dimly around the rims of the windows. Danilaw scanned the port briefly for any sign of an inquisitive dodecapus, but no twisting arms or sucker-feet rewarded him.

  The creatures, with their color-shift skins and multiple eyes, liked to gather around the windows when the Admin offices were occupied. Although they were gentle omnivores, their size and power were sufficient that they could kill any of Fortune’s waterborne apex predators by suffocation, and they lived largely unmolested among the artificial reefs created by the wind farms.

  Danilaw tended to think of them as watching over the human settlers; he was disappointed that none were in evidence. He and Captain Amanda walked the whole length of the observation hall and, before he let her chip-key open the meeting room door, he paused and stuck his head into the final blister.

  It was cooler here, surrounded on three sides by the thermal mass of all that water. Danilaw peered into the blackness of the nighttime lake and frowned. What would it be like if that blackness were outer space? What would it be like if that were all you had ever known?

  Captain Amanda didn’t sigh, but he heard her shifting from foot to foot.

  “Just collecting my thoughts.” He turned back.

  She smiled. “Collect mine, too, while you’re in there?”

  “If I see ’em,” he said, liking her. You didn’t need affection to work well with someone, but if it happened, it could necessitate fewer adjustments to the rightminding. And it was always easier to like funny people—if they could be funny without it being at anyone else’s expense.

  Danilaw thought it might be because humor was on some level an admission of weakness. I’ll show you my defense mechanisms if you show me yours.

  Danilaw tipped his head at the door to the conference room, just to the other side of the entrance to his tiny private office. Another weirdness engendered by his role as City Administrator—who worked in an office anymore? Who met face-to-face? Who commuted? But authority required trappings, and to some people archaicism still meant authority.

  Danilaw did sigh now. “Come on. Let’s go tell them the paradigm has shifted.”

  2

  a child was not to blame

  As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,

  Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;

  As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,

  To the end, to the end, they remain.

  —LAURENCE BINYON, “For the Fallen”

  Perceval Conn glided through warm water, feeling the swirl and suck of eddying currents along her skin, over her scalp, through the tendrils of her unbound hair. The River flowed across open eyes and around the stumps of long-amputated wings. Her corneas adapted to the water’s greater angle of refraction, so her vision lost no clarity.

  She moved through a world of slanted light, warped and repaired River channels, and darting animals: a world brighter than she had seen in decades. As the Jacob’s Ladder approached the destination star, more daylight flooded the world’s arrays, collected and reflected and refracted through sweeping energy nets. Every watt and every joule no longer must be rationed, hoarded, and accounted for. The world could be bright again—and soon, Perceval knew, there would be direct daylight through the world’s many windows. Then the problem would be keeping her cool instead of warm.

  Perceval held her breath comfortably, her symbiont reporting excellent oxygen saturation and low levels of muscular fatigue. She let the River sweep her between thick feathering cables in their corrosion-resistant plating, and slanted columns of ceramic and light. There were fish here, silvery and rose, their backs dappled or freckled or banded or striped.

  Once upon a time, Tristen and Benedick and Rien and Gavin had run along the banks of this River to Engine. In those days, the River had been a poisoned, radioactive coil. The River had been inhabited by the ghost of the world’s broken reactors in the form of a djinn called Inkling, and the run had nearly killed three of the four who made it. That mission of mercy had been on Perceval’s behalf, but Perceval had not been with them. She had been held prisoner by Dust, another fragment of the world’s broken consciousness—the Library, more or less.

  The Angel of Memory, as he styled himself. Perceval remembered him as more of a demon.

  But now the River was clean enough for an Exalt to swim in—cleaner than it needed to be, for such purposes. And now Rien and Gavin were gone, consumed by other intelligences. Inkling and Dust had been assimilated too. They had been folded into Nova, a new Angel—the same being that Rien had given herself up to create. And now they were all three as inextricable from the final product as eggs and flour from cake.

  Perceval had been slow in forgiving herself for her lost loved ones and enemies, and slower in forgiving the new Angel so
forged for the exigencies of her birth. But there was only so long one could hold a grudge, and as the years passed, Perceval found it helped to think of Nova as the child, and of Rien and the others as her parents. Nova was not a shadow of them or something constructed of their remnants … but a new person derived from the old.

  A child was not to blame for the death of a parent.

  It helped, and the River helped too. Swimming its currents wasn’t really like flying—no one who had ever had wings of her own would make that mistake, or use that metaphor. But the warm water was a comfort, and the River was a place where she could be alone—Perceval, just Perceval, and not the Captain. Not in command. This was a place where she could shut out the voices of her internalized ancestors, their wisdom and advice and the constant need to integrate herself while still maintaining connections to their memories.

  She carried a council of elders in her head and in her hardware—with all their egos and all their expectations. And, sometimes, a girl just wanted a minute to herself.

  She missed Rien so much. She had needed Rien so much—needed someone to whom she would always be herself, and not a commander or a tool. But she couldn’t have that. Rien was gone, consumed by the ship’s revenant Angel, and fighting to bring her back or to remake Nova into something more like Rien would lead to the kind of destruction that Perceval’s aunt and enemy Ariane had caused, before Perceval consumed her. But here at least Perceval could have some of what she wanted—the silence inside her own mind, the peace to dwell there, and the smooth tug of water flowing over skin.

  Even to wings, air never felt like something you could grasp and haul yourself up on. The viscosity was too low: it was slippery stuff, running away between your feathers just when you needed it most. But here, she was surrounded, immured, in a substance she could pretend was as solid and protective as the skin of the world.