Grail jl-3 Page 6

  When Nova wasn’t trying to see him as an Exalt might, she observed the way light refracted through the hollow strands, making them seem frosty when in actuality they broke available light into every color of the spectrum. Tristen’s face was angular, his expression concerned. Clad all in white as samite, he made an imposing figure.

  He ducked to get through the door before it finished opening, and he didn’t quite straighten up when he stepped inside. “Hey,” he said. “How is my favorite niece holding up?”

  The light touch was the right touch, in this case. Perceval straightened.

  “Freaked out,” she admitted. She stepped toward Tristen, meeting him halfway across the garden of the Bridge deck while Nova allowed herself to fade back into the landscape. Literally faded into the landscape, vanishing by inches like the Cheshire cat. Making her withdrawal ostentatious would accomplish the opposite of her desire, which was to allow Perceval and Tristen the freedom for a tolerably private and comfortable conversation. But she could soften her edges, shift herself out, and blur into the background, until they did not notice she had left them more or less alone.

  Perceval might still be his favorite niece—his only niece, in the aftermath of Arianrhod and Ariane’s destruction of much of the Conn family—but Tristen had come to accept that she was a woman of maturity and authority, and not the grown girl who had saved his life some decades ago. But unless he was careful, he still saw that skinny, gamine Knight in all her freshly maimed vulnerability. It was the protective urge—the one he would have exercised toward the daughter of his body if that daughter were still, in her own person, living.

  But Perceval didn’t need a protector. She didn’t need a surrogate parent, especially now. No matter how paternal Tristen was tempted to feel toward her, what she needed was a First Mate: a collaborator, a dogsbody, and—occasionally—a friend.

  He frowned at her now, studying her face—the sharp jaw and small nose, the high forehead over deep-set eyes, the architecture of pride and knowledge and competence that the sharp lines of grief could not diminish. She drew her chin back, straightening so he could imagine the stubs of her wings working under her tunic. “What are you looking at?”

  “The best Captain on the ship,” he answered. “Who needs lunch. And probably yesterday’s dinner, too. Have you eaten?”

  She started to shake him off with a hand gesture, but stopped herself. He wondered if it was honesty or concern over revealing too much fragility. After a moment, she licked her lips and glanced away.

  “The Captain is the ship,” he reminded her, although she was already rueful. “Take care of yourself or you can’t take care of us.”

  Nova would have been pressing her to eat. As evidence, a bench beside Perceval’s chair already had covered dishes set on it, but the Angel didn’t command the same moral authority with Perceval that Tristen could. Tristen rolled his eyes at his Captain and got down to the business of sorting through them. He served out portions of beans and black rice, stewed greens, and coffee with honey and almond milk. Once she accepted the plate and the cup, he made a plate for himself as well, and sat down on the grass beside her chair.

  Perceval glanced at it distractedly, wrinkled her nose, and decided upon the grass as well. “You’re worried about something other than tracking down the thieves”—she should have said murderers, but Tristen was just as glad she didn’t—“and talking to whoever might already be living on Grail.”

  Tristen bought time with a mouthful of beans and rice, washed down with a full cup of coffee. Perceval poked at her plate, teasing grains of rice apart with the tines of her fork. He should have taken her to task for it, but instead he poured more coffee from the insulated carafe and nursed it.

  “Things have been quiet lately,” he said. “Politically.”

  It was an oversimplification. “Quiet” in the sense that there had been no uprisings, no mutinies, no revolutions for going on a decade now … until this latest outrage, which might have been little more than an adolescent prank if it had not cost Caitlin Conn her life.

  What could be important enough about an ancient Earth book—a paper book, at that, full of Builder religious nonsense?—to lose two people over it? Go-Backs might care about the contents, but they cared more about ecological impact.

  There might not have been wars, but there had certainly been politicking, and the situation inside the walls of the world was anything but idyllic. In any case where limited resources existed, people would differ on how best they might be allotted. But the differences had not all been violent. Not after the first fifteen or twenty years, during which time Tristen—Tristen Tiger, he thought bitterly—had resumed a role he’d just as soon have left behind. And not after resources had been allotted to repatriating the wounded world’s many Balkanized cultures.

  Still, resentments … persisted. And Tristen shouldered them because the Captain could not—not and still lead effectively.

  “I need to break the news to Dorcas,” he said. “Either she’s involved, and perhaps I can learn something from her reaction—or she’s not, and she might be stirred to do a little investigating of her own.”

  Lightly, Perceval laid her fingers on his wrist. “You are very brave.”

  He shrugged and set his cup aside to free a hand for his fork. It seemed like a cowardly action to scoop sticky coconut-sweet black rice into his mouth rather than to argue, but he didn’t feel brave.

  Perceval waited until he swallowed. “I need you to do more than break the news. I need you and Mallory to find my mother’s killers.”

  Tristen bit his lip, rolling it between his teeth before he released it and took a breath. There was too much chance that he already knew what he would find—though as an investigator he would need to set those preconceptions aside. He wanted to shake his head, refuse, resign his commission and walk back out the Bridge hatchway as he had come in—back down the corridor, which Nova had already fixed as if it had never been torn open.

  But he’d done harder things with a knot of anxiety and sorrow in his gut. Harder things, and worse ones.

  “All right,” he said.

  6

  cometh a monster

  What the hammer? what the chain?

  In what furnace was thy brain?

  —WILLIAM BLAKE, “The Tyger”

  Tristen found the woman who was not his daughter more or less where he had left her when last they spoke, some months before. Which was to say, barefoot and ankle-deep in muddy water, her hands dangling below the shallow pond’s still surface as she stalked something hidden beneath her own reflection. Oblong splashes of mud, some wet and dark, some dried to peanut-butter color and flaking, adhered to the skin and the fine hairs of her calves.

  She half crouched amid the rice plants, her deep gold trousers rolled up to her thighs so that the hems stayed dry, her elbows dangling between her knees as she moved softly, crabwise, each step barely rippling the water.

  Other things did ripple, however, and only some of them were fish. Tristen imagined he should feel more uneasiness than he did at such proximity to the cybernetic guardians of the rice paddies, invisible though they were beneath black water. Maybe the fear of death and discomfort had been cooked out of him like moisture, leaving him desiccated and leathery against the bone.

  What scared him now was danger to the world, to its inhabitants, to Perceval and Nova and everyone else embraced within its fragile walls. Including this woman, for all that her every witnessed breath sent an ice-fine needle of complicated emotion through his lungs and heart. Including this woman, though he knew Perceval half suspected Dorcas had directed the raid that killed Caitlin.

  Dorcas was the leader of the Edenites, rudely termed the Go-Backs—religious and ecological conservatives who had long been opposed to the plans of the Builders. Given what time had revealed about the Builders’ many treacheries, Tristen was becoming inclined to—limited—sympathy.

  You are old, he told himself, and knew it for the simple t
ruth.

  Tristen paused on the edge of the rice field, well back from the shallow water’s edge. His footsteps could cause vibrations that would startle Dorcas’s prey, and the conversation they were about to have would be difficult enough without irritating her.

  She glanced sideways, acknowledging his arrival, but her head stayed bent under the broad-brimmed hat. She slipped forward another step, hesitantly, her toes probing the mud before she shifted her weight. Her hands swayed loosely, almost seeming forgotten.

  Until they lashed out suddenly, darting and twisting at the wrist, lifting simultaneously from the water. She was a slender person, thin-armed, her shoulder blades bony through the back of her worn shirt, but she hooked the fish out of the paddy with tendons flexing in her narrow wrists and tossed its silvery, thrashing body to Tristen.

  Reflexively, he caught it. It flopped against his fingers, muscular and slimy-rough. It was the colors of tarnish and quicksilver, broad-sided and narrow-backed, with bright eyes that stared accusingly at Tristen as it gasped and fought for life.

  He felt a pang of sympathy for it as he crouched to strike its head upon a rock. Once, twice, with a full swing of his arm. After the second blow its spasming muscles relaxed. Brutal, but kinder than letting it suffocate in air.

  Dorcas came back up the levee to him, walking duck-footed on slippery grass and rolling oatmeal-colored sleeves down over browned, fair skin.

  “Lunch,” she said, relieving him of the fish.

  He pushed his hair behind his shoulder. “I’ve eaten.” Even if Perceval hadn’t been able to force herself, Tristen was old enough to have learned when to treat food as fuel and get it inside him any way he could.

  When he’d first come here, it had been the midpoint of a perilous journey. Now, it was a half hour’s pleasant walk and a lift ride from the Bridge. How a few years changed things—but the time hadn’t changed Dorcas, or her Heaven.

  He followed her down the sides of the steep valley between rice paddies and straw-bale plantings of salad vegetables. Other field-workers scarcely glanced up, although a sleek black-and-butter-colored snake head lifted through the water’s surface, tongue flicking as Tristen and Dorcas passed.

  She led him a few hundred meters to a communal kitchen, where she stepped up to an unattended station and leaned her hat against the side. Without ceremony, she expertly cleaned the tilapia. The knife she used was a singlepurpose object, ground thin by many sharpenings, the ceramic blade stained from use. The handle was bound in grubby green marker tape. Tristen thought the blade itself was salvage, some other object repurposed and reshaped, and not originally intended for cutting at all.

  But it worked well enough. She let the blade glide down either side of the spine. “You didn’t come here on a whim.”

  “I didn’t,” he said. He did not bother glancing over his shoulder. He could feel the pressure of other cooks at each shoulder, although, other than a glance of acknowledgment to Dorcas, they had not looked up from their tasks. Tristen was not and would never be popular with the Go-Backs—for reasons he could not argue—though Dorcas herself was willing now and again to sacrifice a few moments of her time for him.

  Tristen turned on the grill and, with a glance at Dorcas, pulled a heavy flat-bottomed pan over the heating element. “Can we speak in private?”

  “I won’t conceal what you tell me from my people, so they may as well hear it from you directly. That way, you can be sure I haven’t misrepresented you.” One more pass of the knife, and the tilapia lay headless and open like an ancient paper book on the cutting board.

  Tristen put oil in the pan and watched it shimmer while Dorcas cleaned her tools and racked them. She waved vaguely at an onion, so he borrowed the wiped knife and diced it, then scooped translucent crescents into the pan. An aroma of cooking organosulfates converting to sugars—alluring enough to have woken the dead—tickled the inside of his nose.

  When Dorcas turned back, she said, “Thank you.”

  She scraped the onions to the edge of the pan. Salted and herbed, the fish went into the oil with a satisfying hiss. Tristen stepped aside, giving her room to work. It was easier to speak to the back of her head and the fine hay-colored locks curling around her hairline—revealed because the body of her hair was upswept into a ponytail. A UV flush colored her wrists where they stretched from the protection of her sleeves.

  He watched her for a moment, then he folded his arms and said, “Grail is inhabited.”

  He had waited until her hands were away from both the knife and the hot pan, and it turned out well, for she jolted as if he had run a current through the floor. From the muffled exclamation of pain off to the left, perhaps he could have timed the revelation better from the point of view of the bystanders.

  “Aliens,” she said, after a moment.

  “Humans,” he replied. “People who use a Roman alphabet and Arabic numerals. People from Earth.”

  Dorcas had been an Engineer once—Exalted in the first Moving Times, during the Breaking of the world. Not too long after Tristen. She had become a Go-Back—one of the colonists and crew members advocating a return to Earth Tristen had so successfully opposed in his youth. He might be personally responsible for her death.

  For she had died. She had died in her old body then, and later her machine memories had been reincarnated in the body of Tristen’s Exalt daughter Sparrow, who had died in the mind because Tristen had not had the courage to follow her out of Rule, but whose form had been taken by the Engineers and given as a shell to one of their own lost ones.

  The person who stood before him wasn’t Sparrow. She was who Sparrow had become, because Tristen had failed her as a father.

  On their first meeting, she had reminded Tristen of his crimes, and were Tristen not Exalt, he would still bear the scars of that meeting. In return, Tristen had placed in her hand his daughter’s haunted sword, though she had not held it long. Given such an inauspicious beginning, he doubted they would ever be friends, but his respect for her was unrivaled.

  “What an irony, to finally come to the world we meant to infest, and to discover that we’ve already infested it.” The fish sizzled as she flipped it. “You think they hopped right over us?”

  Tristen paused, waiting for his moment. “Well, I guess we were delayed for rather a long time.”

  She held it in for a while before the laughter broke free and she snorted—one of those times where it was plain to him that she was not Sparrow and in some ways barely resembled her. The appearance of a face had a lot to do with how one wore it, and Sparrow had grown up in the House of Conn, trained from a young age to comport herself as a lady.

  Dorcas was something else—a high-handed Engineer turned priest. Tristen, who had not known her in her old life, imagined she’d been a woman who played as hard as she worked. And even today, she worked hard.

  She squeezed lemon over the fish, leaving Tristen to wonder where the trees were. This enclave of Go-Backs also exported mango, chocolate, and vanilla—a tropical extravagance of edibles. They were efficient agriculturalists who had maintained better mechanical control of their holdes and domaines than most of the isolated communities on the Jacob’s Ladder. Even after fifty years of occasional visits, he hadn’t had the opportunity to explore more than a small percentage of their Heaven.

  She handed him a plate and gestured to a communal pot of brown rice, steaming slightly around the loose-fitting lid. Tristen ladled out a portion, pressing a depression into the center to hold the fish juices. Dorcas accepted the now-laden plate he handed back without a word.

  The silence held while she slid fish onto the plate, turned off the stove, wiped out the pan, and hung it for the next cook’s use. She pulled a whittled wooden fork from a cup and led him back out into the filtered and supplemented light of the fast-approaching sun.

  Tristen grabbed two bent-metal cups on the way out and dipped them into a water jug by the pavilion door. He dropped onto the grass next to Dorcas as she seated herself
and handed her one of the two when her hand was free. This is my role in life.

  They sipped. The water was faintly dusty-tasting, but sweet, and Tristen’s symbiont told him it was tolerably clean. He wondered if the Go-Backs filtered it through folded cloth after they pulled it out of the fish ponds, or if they had something more elaborate set up.

  After three bites of onions, fish, and rice, she said, “You might have kept that from us.”

  “We might have.”

  “But for how long?”

  He smiled. Another blessing of the circumstances of their reacquaintance—and all the parallel history that lay behind it—was that Dorcas felt no need for polite fictions with him, if she ever felt them with anyone. “I’d prefer to think of us as being on the same team when it comes to the survival of the world and all the people in it. Since we got under way again, there’s been no need for enmity or disagreement between your people and the Conn. We’re going somewhere and, historically speaking, the Edenites”—he chose the polite term—“were all for that. Your faction’s argument against harboring at the waystars was never about returning to Earth; it was always predicated on finding a safe landing zone. And at the time, Earth was the only one we knew how to get to.”

  She had to know where he was going, but she wasn’t going to give him an inch that he didn’t earn. “But?”

  “Things change,” he said softly. “Time passes. We know that better than most.”

  Because we are older than most. The expression she shot him around a forkful of fish was wry and appreciative, or he could spin it that way. But she still didn’t let him off the hook—or whatever the parallel metaphor was for those who preferred to tickle their dinners from the water. For the fish, it was nevertheless as tragic a seduction as any encounter with pole and reel.

  “What I’m suggesting,” he offered, “is that people forget the reasoning behind a dogma, and eventually come to treat the dogma itself as holy writ.”