Grail (21 page)

“The brain is dead but fresh,” Mallory said. “A virus is interfering with the symbionts, preventing regeneration; Nova and Jordan will likely be able to remove the inhibition and at least get the bodies back. And perhaps learn more about how Nova was kept out of this anchore—”

“And kept from being aware that she was being kept out of this anchore,” Nova added dryly.

Mallory snorted. “Any program—be it based in wetware or hardware—can be hacked.”

“And did you hack her memories?” Tristen asked, stroking the dead woman’s hair back with his armored hand.

“The machine memories were wiped,” Mallory said. “I think these people were used as a stalking horse by a greater enemy. I think that enemy was thorough in covering his or her tracks.”

The smile that curved lovely lips was smug enough to make Tristen shiver with memory.
This is hardly the time
.

But what were a few dozen more dead in his lifetime?

“I notice,” Tristen said—aware that, in terms of cool professionalism, he was overcompensating, “that you specifically mention the machine memories.”

“The meat is empty,” Mallory said. “No electrical impulses left at all. She’s dead.” The necromancer’s palms rasped softly, nervously, against one another. “The local monitoring records have been purged, but there are still neurochemical traces.”

Tristen felt his eyebrows rise.

“Oxytocin, serotonin. Whoever killed her was someone she trusted to do her no harm.”

“A friend?”

“A friend.”

*   *   *   

By the time they’d returned to Rule, Tristen had made his decision. He left Mallory to report to Perceval—the broad details had been handled through Nova and the com, but the Captain would have questions, and both Mallory and Tristen had thought it best if their suspicion that revenant shards of Dust and Ariane might be involved was broken to Perceval in person—and brought the unconscious parrotlet to its creator for a detailed conversation.

Cynric might have been hard at work. She might have been napping on her feet. It was possible, Tristen admitted, pausing just inside the threshold of the door that had slipped open for him as automatically as if he were invited, that she had learned a way to manage both at once, sleeping with one side of her brain at a time like a cetacean. He did not think he’d ever seen her lie down to rest, or even claim a need for it.

But then, she was Cynric the Sorceress—or she was all that was left of what had been Cynric the Sorceress—and she was as much Engine as Engineer.

“Hello, Tristen,” she said without turning. Her head was tilted back on her long neck, the long almond-shaped eyes closed so her lashes smudged her cheeks, her hair—straight as Perceval’s, and browner—trailing across her loose robes to fall the length of her spine. “You have brought something of mine?”

“I think it’s ill or injured.” He came up beside her, extending the transparent clamshell in which he’d nested the parrotlet. It lay amid fleece like an icing decoration on meringue, green on white with its tiny head tucked close to the body, its papery eyelids closed over eyes round as beads.

“Hacked,” she said, accepting the package. It opened at her touch, and she gently insinuated her fingers under the bird’s still form. “How odd. This isn’t the first time anyone has brought me one of these.”

She lifted the tiny thing and put its head in her mouth,
then removed it—damp—and frowned. “It’s been cut off from the rest, poor thing. Somebody who should be performing his own research is attempting to ride my labcoattails, Prince Tristen.”

The shake of her head made her eyes catch the light, and the stud through her nose glowed dimly—the same pale green as the parrotlet. Tristen watched as it shuddered, raised its head slowly, and shook itself as if awakening from a hard dream that had left it logy.

“Hmm,” she said, studying it, then shifted her attention to Tristen. “Thank you. I suppose it will be all right now. Where did you find this?”

“Among a few dozen murdered Deckers.” He handed her a crystal, the same recordings of what he and Mallory had seen that Mallory was delivering to the Captain. She accepted and pocketed it; he had no doubt she would download and integrate the information as soon as he departed. “What could you do with one of those birds? If you were unfriendly to the world, or to its Captain?”

Cynric opened the cage of her fingers and let the bird fly up, circling the irregular outline of her workshop. “They’re a prayer.”

Tristen folded his arms. “I realize,” he said, as jovially as he could manage, “that you have put a great deal of effort and practice into your gnomic utterances, Sister. But I for one would appreciate it if you spoke plainly, just this once.”

She straightened in surprise—not quite a recoil, but a definite reaction—and crunched the clamshell and swaddling between her palms. Her colony—or
a
colony, in any case; here in her workshop, there might be many—disassembled it promptly. She turned to watch the parrotlet spiraling overhead, her feet bearing her in a crooked circle. Tristen turned merely to watch her turn.

“I put something of the Leviathans’ ability to dream the future in them,” Cynric said. “The parrotlets want to live,
you see. And so they help the world live with them. They are a prayer for safety. One that will be listened to.”

“If they were hacked—”

“That one
was
hacked,” she said. “Hacked and then abandoned.”

“So could someone use them to pray for something else?”

She nodded. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I rather imagine they could.”

The research scull
Quercus
was tiny and cramped. Her forty square meters of living space were adequate for one individual, as long as that individual wasn’t claustrophobic and didn’t mind exercising in the sort of wheel one used for caged pets, but it necessitated close cooperation if two unrelated adults were going to inhabit her for any length of time. Every so often, Danilaw found himself pausing to stare out viewports into the velvety space beyond, wondering how human beings had managed under these circumstances before the application of rightminding technology had become so trivial and precise.

Fortunately, Captain Amanda’s basic personality was healthy and resilient, her rightminding was solid, and the earlier evidence of her robust sense of humor proved no fluke. Danilaw had no idea how she put up with him, but as a Free Legate she had effective training in dealing with disparate personalities, and as a social scientist and an expert in C22 society, she was without a doubt more comfortable with the range of human variation than were most people.

Which worked out well for Danilaw, who knew he was quirky. Not everybody’s brain chemistry was as solid as Amanda’s. Danilaw’s underlying genetic issues meant his own emotional balance could stray from perfection, and his inherited neurochemistry meant that his rightminding fell in need of more-frequent-than-usual maintenance. Not enough to cause a social disadvantage, or free him from his Obligations—but enough to make him wish sometimes that it might.

But Captain Amanda knew about that now, and had seemed neither startled nor horrified by the revelation.

On the other hand, staring out the ports of the
Quercus
made him aware that sometimes the annoyance of civil service was worth it. This was not a view everyone got—or even most people. Space travel was expensive and resource-consuming—an extreme privilege accorded him in extreme times.

There were a few other things to be grateful for. Though the research vessel was cramped, her engines were state of the art. She used a quantum drive that took advantage of the same ancient technology that allowed gravity control—and FTL, though the
Quercus
was strictly an in-system, sublight vessel.

In any case, Danilaw hoped he didn’t prove too much of a disruption in Amanda’s routine. She spent the voyage much as he imagined she usually did—buried in research, checking telemetry, and in general doing all three of her jobs simultaneously and well. Meanwhile, Danilaw discovered he could run a city just as well by remote control as while living in it, or so he flattered himself. Admittedly, running Bad Landing was mostly a matter of checking to make sure it was properly running itself and giving it the odd tweak when it didn’t, but there was a level of expertise in knowing what those tweaks were.

In his off hours, Danilaw read up on C21 and C22 customs and cultures, and practiced his guitar, using a pair of
induction clips rather than a speaker out of consideration for his passagemate.

At least, he did so until Captain Amanda looked up from her desk, which she had dragged into her sleeping cubby, and said, “You know, music won’t bother me unless it’s bad, and since you earned it out as a secondary, I can’t imagine it would be.”

He heard her clearly—a benefit of the clips was that they left his ear canals clear—and probably (he thought) failed to hide his surprise. “You can concentrate with all that going on?”

“Crèche raised,” she said. “I can concentrate through anything. Besides, you’re the best entertainment on this tub.” She stretched sturdy legs out of her bunk and stood, bending her spine and leaning back to balance under the lip of the cubby like a cave-climber. The desk she left parked in the bedclothes.

“Tub? Is that any way to talk about your vessel, Captain?”

She grinned and plunked down on the matting. It was soft, conducive as a surface for resting, stretching, or acrobatics—and unlikely to damage anything you dropped on it. Danilaw was growing quite attached to it as a floor covering. It was even easy to vacuum, and if they lost gravity abruptly, it wouldn’t hurt to smack yourself into.

“Well, this is a glorified tugboat run,” she said. “Come on. Play me something our visitors’ umpteen-great-grandparents might have listened to. Didn’t they have genres of religious music?”

He hefted his guitar. He knew a couple that were actually pretty good. If they were anything a Kleptocrat-duped religious fanatic might have grooved out to, that was anybody’s guess. But that wasn’t the point, exactly, was it?

“Sure,” he said. “We can call it research.”

*   *   *   

The trick, Dust thought, always lay in speaking to his patron without alerting her host. It would be a hazardous game. But he knew where to find her—she’d made sure he could follow her movements—and a toolkit could go many places unnoticed, especially in Engine. Dust now took advantage of that freedom.

Travel in this new world was easy. Dangers were clear to see—structural weaknesses and the lairs of ambush predators delineated by caution zones and warning buzzers. There were highways, access shafts, lifts, and functioning air locks everywhere.

Travel in Engine was even easier. The Dust toolkit joined his scurrying brethren, sweeping-whiskers-to-fluffy-tail along the margins of wide corridors, scuttling over cable bridges and through valve doors sized just right for a creature no longer than a man’s forearm.

When he came at last by secret ways to the place his program had summoned him to attend, it was deserted. A cube with twining vines up every wall, nodding flowers of jimsonweed and morning glory basking in the mist that condensed on each petal. The cube’s resident had folded the bedding away before the irrigation cycle, and Dust climbed up on the transparent, bevel-cornered box that housed it and several changes of clothes.

There he sat, grooming the moisture from his tail and hunting up scraps of edibles in the cracks of the mossy sleeping platform, until the cube divider slid aside and a pale hand parted the hanging vines. A face and a shoulder followed; hazel eyes widened in greeting. “Hello, toolkit. Do you have a message for me?”

The host was dressed as an Engineer, but looked like a Conn. Dust knew he should recognize
which
Conn, but those were among the details that had been scraped away by his reduced circumstances and lost.

Dust did have a message, however. Embedded in his program,
a string of phonemes that made words in no language the world had ever heard. A key. A trigger.

That head-tilt melted into something else. The same gesture, the same face—but a different intention behind it.

“Wonderful,” Ariane Conn said. “That worked beautifully. We may speak freely here. Welcome, ghost of Dust. Did you arrange a conversation for me?”

“I did,” the toolkit said, whiskers twitching. Subtlety was another element of his former skill that had been lost in the interests of data compression. He needed information, and so he spoke his question to her. “I do not understand why
you
would reconstitute me, when we were enemies. Your ally, as I recall, was Asrafil.”

She slid the door closed and set the privacy filter. “I went to great lengths—risking this body and the revelation of my own existence—to free my daughter Arianrhod from Caitlin’s machinations.” Her face compressed with grief. “Arianrhod loved Asrafil. She served him. And Asrafil betrayed her to her death. Cynric consumed her.”

Dust nodded his pointed face. Death was always a relative function, a complicated thing when you were dealing with angels or Exalt. People died in pieces, by increments, or were transformed into something else. For Means, death had meant something concrete, a hard limit.

“For certain is death for the born / And certain is birth for the dead,” he quoted, stumbling over a scrap of contextual memory. But that wasn’t quite right, so he choked to a halt and began again. “I am sorry for your loss.”

“One cannot serve angels, Angel. One must own them.”

Dust nodded again. Agreeing with Conns was what you did with them. Whether this one knew he was patronizing her or not, she reached out and stroked the fluff behind his spotted ears. Her touch—or his fur—was so soft that he felt it only as he might have felt a wind.