Grail - Elizabeth Bear [107]
“You’re not going to call off the defensive cordon?” Amanda said.
Danilaw shook his head. “I am going to countermand any shoot-on-sight orders they may have received, however. Jesse—”
“Right here.”
“Watch your back. Also, keep an eye on Gain. And any contacts she may have should be logged.”
Jesse looked more greenish than ochre, but he nodded. “I will.”
“Good job,” Danilaw said, wishing he felt more confident in it. “You’ll do great. Just stay cool, Administrator.”
20
all the world and everything
What, love, courage!—Christ! he is so pale.
—MATTHEW ARNOLD, “Tristram and Iseult”
There was too much light in the room. To Perceval, the space in which Cynric had chosen to examine Jsutien felt washed-out, white-lit, dreamy, like a surgical theater hung with gauze. But Cynric preferred it, or perhaps merely tolerated it without discomfort, and so Perceval bit her tongue.
Benedick sat with them while they went in. The rest of the senior crew and Conns returned to their stations.
There was trust involved in joining forces with Cynric to investigate the contents of Jsutien’s mind—but not so much trust, Perceval thought, as there would be in allowing her to go in alone, and then taking her word for what she found. Perceval had known the woman—or her revenant—for fifty years now, and in that time she had seen nothing to indicate that Cynric, whole or fractional, had ever hesitated at anything she thought necessary, no matter how tragic or distasteful a sane person would have found it.
Cynric was there beside her, holding her hand, the too-intimate bond of blood and colonies flowing between them. Her presence—her assistance—filled Perceval with a strange white puissance, as if all the world and everything were washed out with that same cold light that filled the examination room. It was a dreamy prospect, silhouettes moving against glare and breaking the flooding light into rays.
She would have rather been anywhere else at all, but this was her responsibility. And so Perceval herself, in her person as Captain and guide of the Jacob’s Ladder, leaned down over the chair Damian Jsutien sat in and kissed him on the mouth.
Jsutien’s mouth opened. He eased his jaw, tilting his head back to allow her access. He closed his eyes, as relaxed as a drowsy child accepting a mother’s bedtime kiss.
Perceval let her colony touch his, and slipped herself inside, into the spare and ferny landscape of his soul.
For someone who had inhabited the body for as long as he had, Jsutien had not much populated its mind. Perceval knew he had grown from a seed, a set of recorded preferences and commands and variables that fit into a matrix that could be slipped into a pocket, carried in a hand. But that was just source code, uncompiled. It was just the blueprint for a thing that could grow into a person—a person similar to the person who had recorded it, once upon a time.
Such revenants usually elaborated, populating their environments just as any organic mind might. The neurology affected the personality—but the personality also affected the neurology. Brains changed to accommodate the minds that dwelled in them, just as minds adapted to the architecture of the brain.
Jsutien had left Oliver Conn’s mind as white-walled and unmodified as a rental flat. The space was inhabited but not lived in, and the record of the thing—the person—that had been Damian Jsutien had not spread itself out into the crevices.
Perceval went deeper, but nothing Jsutien could have done could have faked the transparency, the emptiness, the sheer unused space in this head. There was processing power here to spare. Jsutien had just never moved into it. Fifty years on, and he inhabited his own head like a transient with a sleeping bag and a hot plate flopped into one corner of a mansion. He had never, she realized, expected this incarnation to be permanent.
He had never let himself get attached.
Perceval felt Cynric following along beside her,