Undertow (29 page)

“I’m not him,” Jean said.

Lucienne came three more steps, leaned in, turned her head and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “I’m not her either. You’d better know that from the top.”

André turned his back and walked away. There was bound to be someone in the area who could find him a shower and cot. And he couldn’t stomach standing there and watching them stare at each other anymore.

And he wanted a nap before somebody came to arrest him.

They were well clear of the explosion by the time the hydrogen tanks that Cricket had rigged went off. They heard it through the storm, and Cricket saw the column of flame, and some of the burning wreckage when it fell. None of it came close to them, though—Gourami was already swimming strongly away, and the lights of the cruiser had already been out of sight.

Cricket, at least, was praying they’d cooked off the virus rather than releasing it into the ocean. She didn’t know if ranids prayed, and it didn’t seem like a good time to ask. Wind whipped her; rain hammered her; the tall seas tossed them both. Cricket put her whole will into her hands, knotted in Gourami’s harness, and the ranid kept her head above water. She lost feeling in her fingers; she thought she might lose use of both hands. Water blinded her. Slammed her. Spun them like flotsam, like dancers, like foam on the curve of a wave.

The ocean under the storm was warm, warm as the bayou in sunlight. If it had been cold she would have died, rattling teeth, hard shivers, and then the calm chill of sleep in the dark dark ocean.

But it was warm, and Gourami kept her head above water. And Cricket lived.

The storm passed in fifty quarters. Dehydration was the worst enemy, though Cricket got some moisture from whitefish that Gourami hunted. She missed the storm, when the sun baked her. In the storm, she’d been able to catch rainwater in her open mouth, a little. She let her hair fall over her face to protect her skin as much as possible. Gourami hid them both under festoons of algae. They floated without moving when a nessie as long as the sunken cruiser glided past, its gray back just another long gliding wave…rolling in the wrong direction.

When it was gone, Gourami ducked underwater, and croaked over and over, calling, calling again.

They drifted a day and a half before the search volunteer ranids found them, a coast guard cutter gliding behind them. Of the ship Cricket had destroyed, there were no other survivors.

There was no contact with Earth; neither Closs nor Greene were there to demand her arrest and detention. When she was released from the hospital, she went free.

Some nine months later, the first liner arrived. And with it, the capacity for communication with Rim and Core were reestablished. It would take several years to repair and reconstruct the transfer station, but there were still more ships outbound to Greene’s World, and they could form the framework for a temporary system. The planet wasn’t dead.

The first thing Cricket did when she had connex was call Lucienne. She was sitting in a white cane chair on the outside deck of a little bar in Landward, waiting for Nouel, nursing a seabreeze that had cost a mint. Grapefruit juice wasn’t cheap, anymore.

It was meant to be a brief call; it had already been on the news that the Greene’s World Charter Trade Corporation was disbanded. Lucienne said there was no need for Cricket to testify. André Deschênes and Jean Kroc had served.

“Do you want to talk to André, Cricket? He’s awaiting sentencing, but I can get a call through.” She smiled. “He’ll do less time than Morrow. They’re not letting
her
out again.”

Cricket paused, and considered tangled emotions. She interlaced her fingers and rolled her neck to crack it. “Call me Fisher,” she said. “It’s what I go by now. And no. Not really.”

Lucienne nodded. “Do you still see the ranid called Gourami?”

“Sometimes,” Cricket admitted. “Se’s busy parenting. Thirty-six egglings. Apparently, none of them are related. ‘Gourami’s family.’ They were on the news.”

“André said he wonders if you will take it something from him.”

So Cricket knew that Lucienne had André in another chat. And that was fine; it was good to know he was doing all right.

“What sort of something?”

“Payment on a debt. A story, he says.”

A story. Gourami had told her a lot of stories while they drifted. And Cricket had told Gourami a few.

And they had stayed in touch, though Gourami was a parent and a far-swimmer now, honored among se kin.

Yes. Cricket could take Gourami a story. But she wanted to know something before she said yes. “Is it a good story or a sad story? I mean, how does it end, Lucienne?”

Lucienne’s eyes defocused briefly, her chin dropping. When she looked back, she shrugged. “He says he doesn’t know. He’s not sure yet. But he’ll let you know when he finds out, if you want.”

Cricket picked at the arm of the chair with a fingernail. Nouel was coming up the sidewalk, his hat cocked against the glare, a walking stick swinging in his left hand.

“He can call,” Cricket said, and waved Nouel over. When he caught her eye, she reached for her drink. He was wearing a big grin; he’d been talking to his girlfriend. “When he knows how it ends.”

About the Author

ELIZABETH BEAR was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. This, coupled with her childhood tendency to read the dictionary for fun, has led inevitably to penury, intransigence, and the writing of speculative fiction. Her hobbies include incompetent archery, practicing guitar, and reading biographies of Elizabethan playmenders.

She is the recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for best New Writer and the author of over a dozen published or forthcoming novels, including the
Locus
Award–winning Jenny Casey trilogy and the Philip K. Dick Award–nominated
Carnival
. A native New Englander, she spent seven years near Las Vegas, but now lives in Connecticut with a presumptuous cat.

Also by Elizabeth Bear

HAMMERED

SCARDOWN

WORLDWIRED

CARNIVAL

Be sure not to miss

DUST

by

Elizabeth Bear

This is the first book of a thrilling new
space opera trilogy that combines
elements of
Ghormenghast
and Zelazny’s
Amber
novels with
Upstairs, Downstairs
—all
set on a vast generation ship orbiting a doomend star.

Coming in spring of 2008.

Turn the page for a special
preview

DUST

Coming in Spring 2008

AT THE CORNER OF THE WINDOW, A WAXEN SPIDER SPUN.

Rien’s trained eye saw the spider, the way her spinning caught the light. But Rien did not move her rag to break the threads and sweep the cobweb down. She pressed to the wall between that window and the door and held her breath, praying like the spider that no eye would fall on her, as Lady Ariane Conn and her knights brought the naked prisoner from Engine in.

Rien knew the prisoner was of noble blood by her chains. They writhed at her wrists in quicksilver loops of nanotech. In terms of energy, costlier than rubies and more rare, but forestalling any untoward transformations.

The girl was tall, almost sexless in her slenderness, and anything but sensual, though she was naked except for streaks of indigo blood, and dirt, and manacles. Her bony face was square, and tired sweat stuck her dirt-brown hair to her cheeks and shoulders. The only breadth on her, other than across the jaw and cheekbones, was in the wiry muscles of her shoulders and her chest. Even her bare feet were narrow and elegant.

Rien could not see her hands through the twisting chains, but judged they must be the same. Nobody would waste chains like that on a Mean when cheap extruded would serve. And then there was the way she bore herself—strong, shameless steps that swept the nanotech across the floor behind her like silken swags—and the buttermilk blue of her complexion.

Furthermore, the prisoner was escorted in by a half-dozen soldiers with beam weapons slung across ablative armor carapaces, faces concealed under closed and tinted masks. The girl—no older than Rien, though far more imposing—was Family.

Rien drew back among the other upstairs maids, twisting her polishing cloth between her hands, but started when Head’s hand fell on her. Rein craned her neck around, catching a comforting glimpse of Head’s craggy profile, the long furrows beside hir nose, and whispered. “Will there be war?”

Head squeezed. The pain was a comfort. “When isn’t there? Don’t worry, girl. We’re beneath soldiers. It never touches
us
.”

Rien’s mouth made an O. “Who’s
she
then?”

Head’s hand slid down Rien’s sloping shoulder and brushed her elbow when it dropped. “That’s Perceval. They’ll want her well-fed once she’s in her cell.”

The chained girl’s eyes swept the room like searchlights. Rien lowered her gaze when the stare seared over her.

Head cleared hir throat. “You can do it.”

Care for the prisoner
. Not a job for an upstairs maid. Not a job for a mere girl. “But—”

“Hush,” said Head.

And Rien had run out of words, anyway. For when the girl Perceval passed, back still straight as a dangled rope, chin lifted, and eyes wide, Rien saw what she had not seen before.

From long gashes between her shoulder blades, two azure ropes of blood groped down her back, across her spine. They writhed when they touched each other, like columns of searching ants.

Fruitlessly. The wings they sought had been severed at the root. And if Rien were to judge by the Lord’s daughter Ariane striding beside the captive, her unblade bumping her thigh, the maiming would be permanent.

That sword’s name was Innocence, and it was very old.

Rien raised her hand to her mouth and bit at the skin across the bones as the mangled angel was led through the hall, down the stair, and away.

At first, Perceval thought the tickle in the hollow of her collarbone was the links of a silver necklace she always wore, kinking where they draped over bone. Then, as she came awake, she remembered that she was a prisoner of the House of Rule, and they had taken her necklace along with her clothes, and so it must be a trailing strand of hair.

But she turned her head, and nothing slid across her nape and shoulders. They’d shaved her head—one more humiliation, and not remotely the worst.

Perceval’s arms were chained over her head, and as her shifting weight fell against them, sensation briefly returned. The chains were not cold and hard, but had stretch and give, like oiled silk. Fighting them was like fighting the River, like a child wrestling adult power.

But she must fight anyway.

She bent her elbows, dragged at the bonds, tugged the sheets of nano that chained her feet to the floor. It hurt, though her weight was halved now; though her shoulders were shorn as naked as her scalp. They set the gravity high, here. Her muscles hardened reflexively across her shoulders and her deep-keeled breast, and where translucent blood-warmed membrane should have cupped air, instead she felt the clean-cut rounds of bone twist in her new-scabbed wounds.

The tickle at her throat was a forlorn tendril of blood, still groping for the severed wing.

At least there was light here, light from a high window, falling warm and dusty across her scalp and shoulders. Perceval knew it was only to taunt, like the breeze that ghosted between the bars, but she found it a small mercy anyway. If she were to die here, at least she would die within sight of the sun, its strength soaking her bones.

She wrapped her fingers around the sheets of nano, straining to close numb hands, working her fists to move the blood inside. Sensation came back to her in pins and needles, bursts of static along chastened nerves. The effort broke her scabs, and more blood ran from her wounds, dripping along her spine, outlining a buttock’s curve. The blood was hotter than the sunlight.

She would not weep for her wings. She would not weep here at all. Not for anything.

She pulled at her chains again, and again, and stopped only when she heard the echo of a footstep on the stair.

Rien came down the spiraling polycarbonate steps, one elbow brushing the wall for balance as she steadied a tray on her hands. Sunlight falling through the stairs cast her shadow on the welded floor seven stories below. Her shoes tinkled on the high-impact plastic, the sound ringing back from roof and walls.

The prisoner would know that she was coming, which of course was the design.

At the bottom of the stair was an arched doorway into a short passage. There was no door, nor any need of one; no one who could escape nano-chains would be forestalled by anything as fragile as a material barrier. Rien passed the locked and trapped controls and stepped through into the spacious, well-lit dungeon.

Perceval hung in her bonds like a marionette from a rack, head lolling and fingers limp. She did not stir when Rien entered, but Rien thought she saw the quick gleam of a flickering eye. “I’ve brought food,” she said, and set the tray on a folding stand beside the door.

The food was quinoa porridge, steamed and sweetened with honey and soy milk, and a jug of peppermint tisane. Simple fare, but nourishing: the same breakfast Rien had partaken of, though colder now. Rien picked up the bowl, a transparent plastic spoon, and an absorbent shock-wove napkin, and crossed the chamber to where the prisoner hung, silhouetted by falling light. “Lift up your head,” Rien said, trying to sound stern. “I know that you’re awake.”

Fortunately, the bowl was durable. Because when the prisoner lifted up her head, and blinked eyes the same color and transparency as the peppermint tea, and said “Hello, Rien,” Rien dropped it.

Some of the milk and porridge splashed out when Rien dropped the bowl. It spattered Perceval’s ankle, and her chains writhed toward it, defensively. But once they tasted the spill, they withdrew again. Nonplussed, Perceval could not help thinking.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I did not mean to startle you. Was that for me, Rien?”

The girl stammered, staring. She was small, fine-boned, with delicate features and a wild froth of frizzy black hair chopped off shoulder-long and clipped back with jeweled plastic spiders that spun a transparent hairnet between them, something cheap and pretty.

She looked nothing like her mother. But then, who did?

“It is for you,” she managed, bending down to pick up the bowl. It hadn’t overturned.

She picked the spoon off the floor as well, and scrubbed it on the hem of her tan blouse. As if a little dirt from the dungeon floor could discomfit Perceval, now.

When Rien looked up again, Perceval spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness. She could not feed herself with her hands bound up in chains, the strain dripped fire down her neck and shoulders, which hurt even more, ridiculously, than the missing wings.
Ariane Conn,
Perceval promised herself, feeling a little ridiculous. She could say the name a thousand times, but it would not free her, nor put her in a place where she could fight Lady Ariane.

Except here, unlooked-for, was the child Rien, sent to serve Perceval in her captivity, apparently in all innocence. An Engineer’s miracle. Perceval arched up on the balls of her feet to ease her arms and shoulders as Rien fussed with the spoon.

Maybe Perceval had a friend in Rule, after all.

“I will feed you,” Rien said, as if noticing Perceval’s gesture. She spooned porridge and held it up, so Perceval had only to push her chin forward to take it.

Of course the stuff might be drugged, but they had her in nano-chains. If they wanted to poison her—or kill her, or interrogate her—there were easier means.

And Perceval had no doubt those means would be used.

Even such a small motion as eating made her want to gasp in pain, though she schooled herself to let only a little air hiss from her nose. Rien noticed, however, and after Perceval had her mouthful, Rien walked around her to examine her back.

Mere nudity could not make Perceval naked, but standing spread-eagled while a servant of the House of Rule gawked at her stumps was true humiliation. She lifted her chin anyway, and chewed the porridge before she swallowed it. The stewed grains popped between her teeth. She could taste the flowers in the honey. Thyme and lavender, she thought.

A mercy, that Rien did not touch her. But she did say, as if she would like to touch, “So why is it that your wounds aren’t healed?”

Perceval shuddered, as if Rien’s words had been a hand brushed across the fine shaved stubble on her nape.

Her wounds weren’t healed because she could not bear to heal them. She could not bear to admit that she would never fly again. And that was the darkest kind of foolishness.

She did not need to close her eyes to heal herself. She just reached into the symbiotic web that interleaved her brain, pumped through her veins, and laced her flesh and muscle, willing the wounds to heal. There was a prickle and itch; she felt the scabs writhing, the cells growing, the wounds sealing closed. She let the chains take her weight again, though the pain was dizzying. Healing exhausted her.

Rien still stood behind. Perceval could picture her, mouth agape, watching the scars knit where the unblade had bitten deep. She wondered if she could actually feel the heat of the girl’s palm hovering near her freckled back, or if she only imagined that Rien would want to touch and barely restrained herself.

In any case, now Perceval needed food more than before.

“The porridge,” she said, and Rien gasped an apology, scampering around to raise the spoon and bowl again.

Perceval ate it all, and drank the tea. And as Rien was leaving, Perceval stood up strong and stretched against her chains. If she had wings, they would have fanned for balance—

Instead, the tender healed skin broke, and blood trickled in quill-thin streams down her back once more.

Rien ascended the stairs again, shaking. The empty bowl rattled on the plastic tray, and her feet clicked on the transparent steps. The echo—through strangely silent halls—could have been the reverberation of Perceval’s voice, as if the prisoner called after her: Rien, Rien, Rien.

When Rien came into the kitchen with the dirty bowl, Roger was there with Head, being trained to supervise the scrubbers. He was skinny and dark—a beaky, random-jointed man with a cleft chin, in counterpoint to Head’s stocky muscularity. Head glanced up as Rien came in, and with a flick of fingers gestured her closer. Rien leaned past Roger to slide the dishes into the scrubbers. Pink and frothy, they reached up to cushion and coat each item as it dropped from Rien’s hand.

Head stepped closer and pinched Rien’s cheek to make her smile. “Why the worryface, Rien?”

Strange that sie should tease, when Head’s own expression was taut. But that was Head. Sie had been castellan and householder to the Conn family since Tristen and Aefre were crawling babes, to hear hir tell it. Rule might have grown up around hir.

Head had no need to enforce hir authority through blows or remonstrations. And Rien, who was without family, could think of none she trusted more. “Head, she knew my name.”

Head tched, and touched Roger’s elbow to draw his attention to a place where the scrubbers were working over the same spot again and again, caught in a feedback loop. “They say demons know all sorts of things,” Head said, without a glance at Rien. “And if what crawls out of Engine is not demons, why, there are no demons in the world.”

Rien snorted, and that
did
net her a jaundiced look. “You have opinions, Miss Rien?”

“No, Head.”

But Head smiled, a quick flicker of lips, and Rien smiled back before she dropped her eyes to the scuffed toes of her shoes. Then Head dipped a hand into hir pocket and extended the closed fist to Rien.

What sie laid in Rien’s cupped palms, though, was no gift, but a crumpled length of black crepe. “While you were in the dungeon, the Commodore struck Lady Ariane because of the prisoner,” Head said. “And the princess sent for a sharpening stone. You’ll want to be ready with that.”

At the sound of footsteps, Rien backed into the shadows of the portrait hall, wringing her rag between her hands. It was slightly greasy, aromatic of lemon oil.

If she closed her eyes and crowded the wall, she could convince herself that she smelled only that, and not the acrid machine-oil scent of noble blood. She could convince herself that the burled gold-and-black ironwood frame of the Commodore’s portrait—of the
old
Commodore’s portrait, now—was deep enough to hide her, even as it shadowed the image of Alasdair I within.