Grail (33 page)

He studied her, the sway of her hair, the line of her shoulders. He laid a hand on the hilt of his sword—which had been Sparrow’s sword—and felt the weird intelligence in the blade yearn toward her. Mirth did not care if Sparrow’s mind inhabited Sparrow’s body.

He said, “Are you going to tell me you don’t know?”

“I don’t have the Bible,” she said. “Or the sword. I have no desire to rule this sad old world of yours, Tristen Tiger, that all you Conns squabble over with such ferocity. Exactly as if it meant anything at all.”

There was something in her voice, in the levelness of her tone, that took the splinter of unease working through him and froze it to a spike of ice. “Do you know who
does
have it?”

She let her lips stretch across her teeth. “You know who has it,” she answered. “And you know she isn’t here.”

Tristen was not a cursing man, but sometimes he made an exception. “Don’t fuck with me, Dorcas.”

“Old man,” she said, “I would never. But I’ll tell you what: if I find her, I’ll take care of it for you.”

*   *   *   

It was a long ride home, but as much as Danilaw would have liked to spend the trip getting to know Amanda better and exploring the sprawling reaches of the
Jacob’s Ladder
, there was enough work to fill almost every waking hour—work complicated by the headaches and malaise caused by the
Jacob’s Ladder
’s stressed and possibly toxic environment, to which Danilaw was not adapted.

Somewhat to his surprise, language lessons were the least of it. The Jacobeans learned quickly, and once Danilaw had texts sent over the q-sets, they mostly managed by self-study, using him and Amanda for conversational practice. He also could not miss the signs that all was not well—politically speaking—with his hosts. When he asked, Tristen told him that an assassin was at large, one who wished to provoke armed conflict between the Jacobeans and the people of Fortune.

“But don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll find her.”

Still, by the drawn look of his features and the apparent lack of time or sleep among any of the senior crew, Danilaw suspected that they were not growing closer to a solution. More critical to Danilaw personally was time spent managing the situation on Fortune. If on the trip out Danilaw had been surprised by the ease with which he managed his duties remotely, now he was surprised by the degree to and speed with which everything could fall apart.

Administrator Gain was nearly impossible to get ahold of. She sealed herself behind a wall of staff, and whenever Danilaw called, she was unavailable—which, he had to admit, was reasonable, given that conversations with Administrator Jesse—and Danilaw’s own obsessive checking of newsfeeds and the planetary infosphere—provided intelligence of a sticky situation on the ground, indeed.

“People are frightened,” Jesse said. “There’s a good deal of disbelief that one of us committed the sabotage. We’re
taking steps to encourage cooperation and discourage hoarding—”

He sighed. They were on audiolink only, and Danilaw could hear the shrug in his voice. “Lifeboat rules,” Danilaw said. “Stay on it. What’s up with Gain?”

“Factionating,” Jesse admitted. “She seems to be coming around to being an open proponent of isolationism. Do you know if she’s been in contact with anyone on the
Jacob’s Ladder
?”

“Except through official channels?” Danilaw, secure in his own invisibility, allowed himself to rock back and fold his arms for the defensive comfort of the gesture. “What makes you suspect it?”

The considering silence on the other end of the connection was anything but reassuring. “She is the ham radio hobbyist. She might have her own plans. Public opinion is not in favor of welcoming the offworlders, currently, and she seems to be feeding that isolationism. There’s a lot of talk of ‘contamination,’ and frankly, we’ve had some demonstrations. Civil unrest, and I would not be surprised if it is being arranged by agitators. Also, we’ve got preliminary instructions from the homeworld. They basically amount to
Stall.
”

“Crap. Well, that’s useful.” Danilaw pressed his temples. “Thanks, Jesse. Watch your back, okay?”

“It unsettles me that you feel the need to say that.”

“Not as much as it unsettles me.”

Danilaw paused a moment to let Jesse sign off. He hit the kill on his own q-set before raising his voice to address the air. “Nova? Can you find or make me a musical instrument?”

His own guitar had been lost with the
Quercus
, and as weird as it felt to be asking thin air for favors, Danilaw suspected he needed something to do with his hands.

The air spoke back. “Easily. What would you like?”

“Guitar,” he said. “Six string. Acoustic.”

Nova materialized before him, just long enough for him to realize that he was getting over his discomfort at dealing with an anthropomorphized artificial intelligence faster than he ever would have imagined possible, and handed him a hard black case as he stood to greet her. “Your wish, etcetera.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Nova?”

She hesitated in the midst of dispersing, streamers of her image blowing off her shape like ribbons in the wind. “Yes, Administrator?”

“Please tell the First Mate or the Captain I would like to speak with them.”

There was no perceptible delay, but Danilaw knew she must have checked with both before she answered. “Of course. The First Mate will see you on the Bridge.”

When Danilaw reached the Bridge, not just Tristen but also Perceval was waiting for him. And Amanda, seated on the grass beside the Captain’s chair, a cup of some hot beverage in her hand. She smiled at him; he winked back. There, at least, was one unexpected and happy outcome of the entire situation.

The Bridge was bright with increased sunlight. Even filtered—as it must be now—it filled the space with warmth and a honeyed glow. The handle of his new guitar case rough against his palm, Danilaw breathed deep—violets, lily of the valley. Alien Earth flowers he had only learned the scents of recently.

In the forward screen, a three-dimensional image of Fortune and its secondary, Favor, fell endlessly one around the other. They were magnified, but even in their magnification Danilaw could feel how close they were. A day or two out now. So close.

So close to home.

So close to irrevocable decisions.

The worst of it was, he had come to like the Jacobeans, in all their sophipathic insanity. They might be grotesques, caricatures, larger than life and full of violence—but they were also shockingly generous and, sometimes, shockingly funny.

Whatever happened next, he thought, he was not going to enjoy it.

“Tea?” Amanda said. She held up her cup and gestured to a pot half hidden in the grass beside the Captain’s chair.

“Please,” Danilaw said. He sat beside her and opened the guitar case; he saw her considering look, and her decision to accept the obvious without asking questions.

The guitar was cool and smooth in his arms. It fit perfectly in the cradle of his torso and thigh. It was, in fact, in tune.

He found a G chord and strummed it. It didn’t have the mellow resonances and tonal quirks of an age-seasoned, handmade instrument, but the intonation was clear and bright. “I see I didn’t need to call a council—”

“The news just came from Aerospace,” Amanda said. “There’s a lighter coming up to meet us. It should be here in twelve hours.”

Danilaw felt his muscles flex involuntarily, digging his thighs and buttocks into the soil where he sat. He breathed out, pushing the tension away, and tried not to let relief dizzy him.
Home
. Clean, thick air. Full gravity.

A day away.

Tristen, on the far side of Perceval’s chair, folded his hands. “You wanted to speak with me.”

“I may have a partial solution to your situation,” Danilaw said. He did not look at Amanda, not wanting to reopen their old argument about rightminding. “You understand that a majority of the citizens of Fortune are taking an isolationist line—”

Perceval lifted her chin and looked at him. Just looked, but Danilaw felt the heat of embarrassment in every limb.

He swallowed and forced himself on. “We have a world. We can spare a little of it. Just this once. It’s not like generation ships are going to be a common occurrence.”

Tristen huffed. “You’re offering us resources to move on.”

“It’s a shameful bribe,” Danilaw said. “The alternative requires you to submit to rightminding, and integrate into the Fortune colony.”

He did not expect them to like the options. Judging by their thinned lips and sidelong glances, he had been right. But Tristen said, “What about your secondary, Favor? The binary world. You haven’t settled it—”

“It’s still got an ecosystem,” Danilaw said. “A toxic ecosystem, but the potential for introducing an imbalance—”

“Toxic for you,” Tristen said. “We would adapt. We will be forced to adapt to gravity, in any case. We’re not”—he hesitated, as if searching for a sufficiently emphatic word—“
inexperienced
when it comes to balancing biospheres.”

“I’m sorry,” Danilaw said. “There’s too many of you. And you’re not rightminded. It’s the rightminding, frankly, that will be the biggest sticking point for my people. Without it, they will always see your people as aliens. As the sword of Damocles.”

“I see,” Perceval said.

Amanda pressed a belated cup of tea into Danilaw’s hand, which had dropped away from the neck of the guitar. He sighed and sipped it.

She said, “Why don’t you come down to Fortune with us? When we descend?”

“Excuse me?” Perceval said.

“There’s room in the lighter,” Amanda said. “Come down. Meet a rightminded planet. Then make up your mind.”

Perceval opened her mouth. Tristen placed a hand on her shoulder. “I’m not sure—”

“Oh, never fear,” Amanda said. “I am going to inspect every inch of that lighter before I put anyone on it. A person really only needs to be sabotaged once.”

Nothing could have prepared Perceval for the descent.

The shuttle-pod—a lighter, Captain Amanda said—that would bring them into Grail’s gravity well and (at last) its atmosphere was a dart-shaped creature like a bird, and she stared at it for long moments before she realized that, of course, it was streamlined—aerodynamic. Because they were going into an atmosphere, and that was this vessel’s primary purpose.

An
atmosphere
.

The world was too brittle and unwieldy to bring in close to anything that generated the tidal stresses that wracked the Fortune-Favor system. Two planets of comparable size in an endless falling ballet around each other and their sun made for challenging close orbits, and Perceval was all too aware of the fragility of her old and battered world.

So now she was seeing Grail with her own eyes, for the first time, from the habitation deck of a ship named
Metasequoia
, in honor of a tree genus from old Earth. The so-called dawn redwood was a living fossil species, native to the continent of Asia. According to Nova, there were a
number of
Metasequoia
clones aboard the
Jacob’s Ladder
. Perceval recognized the tree easily when her Angel provided maps and images.

It was not so easy to reconcile the maps and images of Grail—of
Fortune
and
Favor
—with the reality. The orbital simulations showed two worlds, one twenty percent smaller than the other, circling a common center of gravity in an elegant dance. It showed the moment when Favor whipped between Fortune and the sun, and the more leisurely transit behind. It showed the beautiful, braided pattern of the two orbits sliding over and under one another.

It could not show what she witnessed now—the dark worlds, side by side, the smaller sidelit in the narrowest possible band of crescent, the larger just a silhouette rimmed with liquid, evanescent electrum until the
Metasequoia
slid in a wide elliptical turn around the broad hip of the planet and into sunlight.

Sunlight that stroked the lighter as the primary star bulged, refracting through atmosphere and flaring like a diamond in a band of light. Perceval raised a hand to cover her eyes until the polarizing filters and her own pupils adjusted—a brief moment, until her colony dropped compensating veils across her irises. Then her palm dropped to press the port, as if she could touch the jeweled thing revealed before her.

“Most people who live here,” Danilaw said, “have never seen it this way.”

Perceval started and half turned, overbalancing herself. She didn’t fall because Danilaw steadied her, one hand on her shoulders.

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not used to people being able to sneak up on me,” she said. “Usually, there’s an Angel on my shoulder.” Nova was still within range of her thought, but it wasn’t the same
as being surrounded constantly by the invisible fog of her colonies.

Danilaw caught Perceval’s eye, and seemed about to say something. Perceval, however, turned back quickly. She wasn’t going to miss any more of her first sunrise.

The star was already free of the atmosphere’s clinging brilliance, burning clear, pale yellow against the blackness beyond and she sighed. “It’s over so fast.”

“We’re moving at a pretty good clip,” Danilaw said. He came up beside her so she wouldn’t have to turn to speak with him, or maybe he wanted to watch as well.

Fortune swelled in the forward port, dayside illuminated, and Perceval gasped as the
Metasequoia
went nose-down and offered her a lingering view of dark violet and sand gold continents and glittering seas veiled under gauzy drapes of water vapor. Images and simulations had not prepared her for the
depth
of it, the dewy three-dimensionality. It looked real—of course it
was
real—but it also looked close and solid, as if it were a blown-glass bauble, superhumanly detailed, that she could put her hand out and pick up, hold, experience the cool solidity of its weight in her hand if only the viewport were not in the way.