10
this fragment
Beyond the limit of their bond, are these,
For Arthur bound them not to singleness.
Brave hearts and clean! and yet—God guide them—young.
—ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, “Merlin and Vivien”
Samael the Angel huddled beside a stand of carnivorous mimosa at the edge of a derelict commuter pit, something small and fragile in his hands. Overhead, flocks of green birds wheeled, clamoring, in vaulted spaces against a metal sky. He crouched, cupping it close to his bosom and under his chin. The protectiveness was symbolic; his corporeal body, such as it was, was delineated by swirls of leaf scraps and flower petals, an organic mosaic like an old-Earth parade float—although those had been a festival of conspicuous consumption, and he was … salvage.
On so many fronts.
And so was the thing in his hands—or the energy fields, demarcated by shimmering bands of pollen and pine needles, that passed for his hands. It was tiny and hotter than blood—a naked, bony, pulsing thing dotted with pinfeathers, the head no more than a gaping beak and tight-squinched eyes.
Deep inside it, an ancient and tidily engineered inducer virus pulsed as well, a blue glow imbued with energy, intellect, memory, and will. Samael could feel it, alive and cognizant, as alien as the stone-souled silicon space creature from which Cynric Conn the Sorceress had birthed it.
Samael—Angel of poisons, mutagens, life support, evolution—was not entirely sure what it was thinking in there. But the parrotlet chick he cradled was part of a larger organism as well, and so precious not just for what it was—a life—but also a link to the larger chain of being: the great hierarchy of creation from God to Captain to Angel to Crew, and so on down the line.
Samael felt the Conn woman coming long before her shadow fell across him. Her white robes swept around him; the sapphire in her nostril glittered green. She laid elegant fingers on his shoulder—in his shoulder, for his leaf-litter self indented to her touch and the particles of his being bent around her—and leaned down.
“One of ours,” Cynric said, delighted. Her long face was transformed by a smile. “They’re still flourishing.”
“You wrought well,” he allowed. He shifted the birdlet to one hand and plucked a berry from his breast to feed it, crushing the fruit between fingers that barely existed. Stained blue now, the bird-mouth still gaped greedily. “She fell from the nest. Or perhaps the parents rejected her.”
“Can I see?”
Cynric’s hands were long and blue-white, and far more corporeal than Samael’s own without being any less ethereal. She cupped the birdlet and bent her head to it, leaning close until she took its tiny head into her mouth. It stilled in the dark, and Samael tilted his head to watch.
There was no decisive crunch this time. “Healthy,” she said, having run her assessments and lowered her hands. “Back up into the nest with you, adorable.”
Flocks of green parrotlets, no longer from beak to tail tip than the length of her hand from palm heel to fingertip, mobbed her screaming as she stood up tall and reached spindle arms into the thorny, sensitive branches of the mimosa. The tree swept feathery leaves aside, obedient to the will of the Conn who had engineered its forebears, revealing three stick-and-feather nests full to brimming with huddled, pulsing baby birds.
She leaned in close, sniffing, seemingly impervious to the way the angry flock wheeled and dove and chattered, some going so far as to strike her with doubled talons or pull the strands of her hair. Deliberate, considering, she settled finally on the highest nest and reached within. Samael had never quite had human senses, but he’d lived all his life around women and men, both Exalt and Mean, and so it was no great stretch to imagine her fingers brushing between fragile, prickly, sticky-moist bodies to make space for the lost nestling, and the way her other hand deftly slid it back into the company of its brethren. She breathed over the nest, a benediction or a prayer, and let the branches fall protectively back over the nursery.
As she stepped back, Samael caught her smiling. Feathers drifted around her, shed down from her cloud of protesters, one fingertip-tiny lime-rind-colored wing covert snagged in her hair, its threadlike strands in disarray. Samael swept the detritus up on his covalent fields and drew it into himself, raw material for shirt collar, eyebrows, a flamboyant braided down-fluff earring. That one feather, though, he reached out and plucked up with the simulacra of his fingers.
He smoothed the vanes into a semblance of order and tucked it into his own hair, among the chaff and milkweed floss and dandelion clocks and wheatgrass. Some tiny remnant of the parent parrotlet’s symbiont and inducer virus colonies still hovered in the shaft with a droplet of blood, divorced of its community.
Like everything else living—or half living—in the world, Samael had had a hand in its making. It amused him to take this fragment of his creation back.
As Cynric stepped away from the trees, the parrotlets lost interest in harassing her and returned to their nests. Each pair divided the duty: one perching vigil in the mimosa’s fronds, where the long, curved thorns did not touch them—though the litter of tiny bones decomposing into calcium and trace nutrients among the leaf litter gave testament to the fate of any other small creature unlucky enough to blunder among those branches—and the other in the nest, counting chicks and regurgitating breakfast. The earlier chattering and shrieks of displeasure gave way to chirps and clucking.
Samael folded what passed for his arms. The pleasantries were apparently over. “You came for me?”
Cynric was used to dealing with Angels. She spoke plainly, with the directness of command. “We have a complicated ecological situation to address,” she said. “It is possible that there will be no place for us here, Samael. And the world’s systems are strained beyond expressing; that we have kept them mended as well as we have is only due to diligence and the toughness engineered into every life-form we’ve created. If we have to flee this haven, we have little time in which to mend them if we don’t wish to find ourselves living in a tin tub full of mold and ropes of algae. I require your cooperation.”
She was a Conn—and the revenant and reincorporated remnant of a Conn from when being a member of that terrible family had meant something different than it did under the reign of Captain Perceval. She could require anything of him she desired.
He nodded. “I will report our activities to Nova and the Captain.”
He didn’t actually think there was any irony in her smile. “I would expect no less. A Captain is not a Commodore. And we will need to use the labs. I remember that they are still intact in Rule?”
It wasn’t her memory, exactly, but one salvaged from the symbiotic tool-creature named Gavin, in which she had stored engrams of a portion of her living personality and will. The memories had been mostly sorted into other facilities, and Samael knew the entire structure he now called Cynric was missing great swaths of experience and history from her archives.
Samael had not initially been programmed for the more nuanced human social emotions—relief, gratification, humiliation. But one learned things over the course of an existence, and his program was exceptionally flexible. At some point or another, Israfel—the initial Angel, of which Samael and all his brethren were merely fragments—had been expected to feel devotion to his human masters, and Samael bore within him the results of the adaptations Israfel had made in response.
Cynric’s sanction left him with a sense of satisfaction he might even have characterized as “warm,” if he understood how humans used the term. (He was also given to understand that humans experienced emotions as physical sensations, which required a certain quality of imagination to comprehend.)
A pair of brilliantly colored birds swooped by overhead. Males, sparring—whether over a mate or territory it was impossible to say, and they were gone too fast for Samael to consider asking them. Cynric craned her head back to watch them swoop and dive over the breadth of the oval commuter shaft. She sighed.
“You never did tell me what the parrotlets were for,” Samael said, sensing an opportunity. “When I was Israfel, and after. They’re more than decorative, I think?”
She might have consumed a bit of his other self when she re-created herself. He wasn’t sure; there was so much inside her, and none of it was reliable. Where Nova had integrated and Perceval had subroutined, Cynric had … splintered.
For a moment, he considered whether he’d pushed too far. But he recollected the basilisk Gavin’s sense of humor and fair play. Some of that—all of that—was subsumed in Cynric. It might come with additional memories and ambitions now, but the core personality was derived from the same algorithms.
Cynric regarded the backs of her hands. When she drew them up, the draped sleeves of her robe fell over them. “They’re to change the future.” She shrugged. “They want to live. And they’re lucky. They have the stuff of Leviathan in them, and the stuff of Leviathan sometimes dreams true. It’s possibly them, their dreams of self-preservation, that have brought us here. Against all odds and the wishes of the Builders.”
“You are,” he said, “a sorceress.”
“So they tell me.” Her sigh, though, was any woman’s, and weary. “And if we don’t wish to disappoint them, we had best be about our work, Archangel Samael.”
If Sparrow Conn was not what she once was, then Dust would have to find someone who was—or, if not what she once was, one who had become something amenable to Dust. Someone he had been avoiding. Someone who had summoned him back from his oblivion, planted the tiny seed of himself in the shape of this toolkit, and let him grow.
Dust was an Angel. He was by nature a servant, even if his service often meant something more like mastery. It was no angel’s fault if flesh was weak, if memory was stronger than mere meat could bear.
This attempt at winning autonomy abandoned, Dust folded back his whiskers and went through tunnels and tightnesses, in search of the mortal remnant of Ariane Conn.
He found it curious that she had left the choice to him, that she had not commanded his attendance but only left in him the knowledge of where to seek her. Perhaps she preferred the possibility of a willing ally to the certainty of a treacherous slave. No fool, she had blocked his ability to reveal that information—but he could find her for his own self well enough.
She was disguised, which was only to be expected. But he knew where to look for her, although it took some time for him to travel by secret ways from the vale of the Edenites to the very heart of Engine.
When he found her, she was lost in the Conn personality she inhabited, bent forward and buried to the opposite shoulder in an access hatch. Leafy fronds surrounded her on every side—two curled tendrils supporting lights, another extended past her head and neck into the same awkward space her arm was jammed into. Three velvet-red snapdragon heads hung over her, their petals folded neatly back into comet shapes of concentration.
Dust paused at the door, observing. The body of the carnivorous orchid was comprised of tubers and sword-shaped leaves, pulled tight together now in deference to the cramped quarters. The body Ariane inhabited lay among those leaves with apparent trust, despite the orchid’s clawed thorns and toothed flower faces.
“Hand me the five-mil spanner,” the host said.
Green tendrils withdrew from the access panel, clutching a wrench, and snaked back a moment later with a different one. “It would be less awkward for me to reach,” the plant said, its voice a breathy hissing.
“Sure, but I’m stronger.”
That sound the plant made might have been agreement.
The host’s visage tensed, along with the muscles of one shoulder. A moment of pressure, and then a sharp metallic bang from inside the bulkhead, followed by soft cursing. The illumination cast by the miniature spotlights wavered.
“Ow,” the plant said.
“Ow,” the host answered, withdrawing a hand, shaking it, knuckles reddened. “How’s your tendril?”
“Bruised,” the plant responded. Not so programmed as to examine its damage visually, however, it did not withdraw from the access.
From his perch by the wall, Dust bared his rodent teeth and made a soft meeping sound. It was a call for attention, and one flower face and one human one swiveled.
The host sat up, delighted. “Toolkit! Now why didn’t I think of that?”
Dust scampered over, hopping plant tendrils, and pressed his cheek to the welcoming hand. This was good. This was the beginning. He had contact now. He felt the sparkle of recognition, and knew Ariane was aware in there, quiescent and biding.
Once he was alone with her, he could talk to Ariane without alerting her host. Until then—well, it was a toolkit that he inhabited. He would contrive to remain useful.
Grief is different to an old man.
The young lack experience of grief. It seems to them arbitrary, capricious, outrageous. They react to loss as to a personal affront, as something that can—and must—be fought.
The old know better. The old have learned better. Or perhaps they just go numb.
Or so it seemed to Benedick. The pain was what it was—but he felt none of the fury he would have once expected, none of the denial … and none of the rage.
He had become resigned, and that was how he knew he was old.
When he sat down across the display tank from Jordan of Engine and Damian Jsutien, Benedick was prepared and he was detached. Everything Caitlin had been, everything she had done, was gone—for now. And if she were restored from backup—if Mallory had her imprint somewhere in the vast orchard library of ghosts—she would not be who she had been anymore than Cynric now was more than a shadow of Cynric then.
Ghosts was the right word. You could call up a spirit, raise a revenant, but the most you might get was a shade of the person who had been. Too much of personality was ineffable, chemical, embedded in the meat. The soul electric was only a fragment of the soul entire.
The mother of his child was gone, and all he could make himself feel was a kind of dull, unsocketed ache.
Jordan and Jsutien each glanced up as he seated himself. Jsutien was just such a reminder of death in the flesh. He wore the face of Oliver Conn, who had died in Rule of Ariane and Arianrhod’s plots when they infected the whole domaine with an engineered flu and so destroyed Alasdair Conn and most of the old Commodore’s family.
The one who had grown into the crevices of Oliver’s body now had been the seed left over from the world’s last Astrogator. Benedick had not known Jsutien before, and so could not compare what he had been with what he was.
Jordan—the new Chief Engineer—was a lanky, tawny-furred flyer whose wings necessitated she choose a backless kneeling-chair to accommodate them. She had been Tristen’s apprentice and majordomo. Benedick had supported her elevation to her new role—that of an officer in her own right. He hoped he had done right. He hoped she would do better.
They were still waiting for one more. She was not yet late, and as Benedick turned his water glass idly on the tank ledge, the door opened and his youngest sister Chelsea entered the council room. She smiled, and glanced this way and that; each of the assembled acknowledged her.
When she had fetched her own glass of water and seated herself, Benedick cued the silent Angel hovering over them that it was time to begin.
“This is the first meeting of the five hundred and fifty-seventh Council of Engine. We are here to introduce new Chief Engineer Jordan, replacing Caitlin Conn, deceased. Also, to discuss contingency plans and outcomes of our forthcoming encounter with the existing colonists of the world called Grail. Present are myself—Benedick Conn, acting as secretary, Astrogator Damian Jsutien, Chelsea Conn, and Chief Engineer Jordan.”
Jsutien tilted his head in a peculiarly familiar fashion, though Benedick could not place where he had seen the Astrogator strike that pose before. It was a suspicious, considering gesture, and Benedick filed it away for later contemplation.
“Congratulations, Chief Engineer,” said Jsutien.
“Your name was raised as well,” Benedick said. “But your position as Astrogator makes you difficult to replace.”
“Please,” Jsutien said. “Jordan should have it over me. Over just about anyone.”
Chelsea bit her lip, but nodded. “I am confident she will perform brilliantly.”
Jordan gave them both a half smile. She would have to learn not to be so transparently grateful for approval. “The vote of confidence is more appreciated than you know. I am honored to be selected, Prince Benedick, and I will do whatever work is necessary to support my Captain and her ship.”
“Good,” Benedick said. “If that’s settled, once we’re finished here, Nova will have information for you—a briefing, I am told, from her memories of Hero Ng—and Mallory is preparing the memories of Chief Engineers past to administer to you.”
“Blackest necromancy,” Jordan said, licking her lips. “All right, then. It’s probably best over quickly?”
She did not look as if she were anticipating having the skills and selected memories of generations of Engineers downloaded into her colony. But the instant expertise was necessary to the job and would serve them well. She would accept it, as Caitlin had accepted it before her.
As Nova had accepted the ghosts of Dust and Samael—and Rien—when she grew out of the shards of other things into an Angel. As Perceval has swallowed down Ariane and Alasdair and Gerald to become Captain.
It was how you learned and grew and internalized the knowledge of those who had gone before you. No matter how bitter, you gagged it down, and hoped you didn’t choke.
“I find,” Benedick said, “that such things generally are. Sometimes time to consider only makes the whole thing worse.”
There was too much work to do to sit here missing Caitlin. He laid his hands flat on the lip of the tank, pushing himself to his feet. More than anything, he wanted to be with Tristen, hunting down Caitlin’s murderer and making him pay in blood and heartache for the thing he had taken from Benedick—a thing so profound that Benedick could not yet even feel its loss.
But he was too close and it was too soon. The shock and silence that echoed through the collapsed caverns of his self meant that he was exactly the wrong person to run the investigation—or even to participate in it. A bitter truth, but one an old man had too much experience not to accept. All those rules about objectivity existed for a reason.
Vengeance was a dish best served by those with no vested interest in seeing it carried out.
Benedick tipped his head back so that his skull dropped almost to his shoulders, easing the pain and tightness across his neck that even his colony could not dull.
Damn it all to hell. He had his own work, and this was the time to be doing it. “Our next item of business is to consider Engine’s role in coming events.”
Jordan glanced at the others. Benedick could see her coming to the realization that these people—all her elders—were waiting for her to speak first.
This was, he thought, a test.
She must have realized that as well, because he saw her take a breath. And then she said, in a voice that hardly shook at all, “As I see it, there are three primary possibilities. Either we will need to break the world down for materials—in the event that we are permitted to stay; we will need to refit her for war—in the event that we choose to fight for a place here; or we will need to repair and rebuild her, to make her spaceworthy again. That last option is actually the most straightforward, as this system does offer access to a wealth of material in the form of asteroids, icy comets, and water-ice particles in the rings of two of the giant planets—”