Grail - Elizabeth Bear [108]
“If it were here,” Cynric said, “it should be easy to spot in a head like this.”
Perceval regarded her without turning. Without any outward sign of a reaction at all.
“He never moved in, did he?”
“He never felt welcome here,” Cynric said, “so he stayed out of a sense of duty. But this is all—work. Predictable. Crazy-making. He never developed recreations, or investigated any of the ones his other-self enjoyed. He would have had the muscle memory for Oliver’s sports, or he could have retrained his body to work on Jsutien’s. The mind could be trained to match the body, or the body to match the brain.”
“He’s not our man,” Perceval said.
“Au contraire,” Cynric said. “Something was filling up this space, and now it has been deleted.”
Deleted. Perceval lurched forward in her eagerness, but—regretfully—Cynric shook her head. Here in this space that didn’t precisely exist, she was a long-armed wraith, the wind of Jsutien’s thoughts blowing her robe up between her arms and body until it billowed like the sails of a kite. It arched, lifting.
“Deleted and—”
“Overwritten,” Cynric confirmed. “Come on. We’ll get a better view from a height.”
She sailed up. Perceval followed, until they moved through the cool transparent azure of Jsutien’s spotless mind. It was beautiful and cold. There was no pain here, no loss, no regret, no love.
Perceval found she enjoyed it.
She also enjoyed the landscape spread out below her—a patchwork of this and that and the other thing, the edges ruler-straight, the surfaces mowed tidy. It was more like a schematic of a mind than anyplace anybody spent time, and Perceval again shook her head. It should be impossible to hide anything as large and fiddly as a daemon in here. Jsutien was barely more than a daemon himself.
“She’s not in here.”
“I know,” Perceval said. “That’s not the answer I was hoping for.”
“But I am confident in suggesting that she was. Which means more than one daemon. Which means she could be anywhere.”
“In you or me,” Perceval said.
“Or, more likely, any of the others. Let’s keep that our secret.”
“Let’s,” Perceval agreed. “Because our most important goal remains finding her.”
“And Charity,” Cynric said. “Wherever we find the blade, we find Ariane.”
“Outside,” Perceval said, and returned to herself with a thought. She leaned forward for a moment, elbows akimbo and splayed hands on her knees. Benedick’s hand came to rest on her shoulder. When she looked up, Cynric was regarding her.
“She was in there, but she’s gone. She purged. You’re clean, Astrogator.”
Jsutien let out a long, soft sigh, the first evidence that he had felt concern. “So what now?”
“We have to find Charity,” Perceval said. “Charity, or that damned Bible.”
Nova spoke out of nothing. “An unblade doesn’t register on my sensors. And I have not been able to locate the Bible.”
“Then we search,” said Benedick. “By hand.”
“We cannot search the whole world,” Jsutien protested.
“No,” Benedick answered. “We prioritize.”
By hand indeed—by hand, and by foot, and through the corridors of Engine and Rule and spreading outward. Every available Engineer and denizen of Rule was pressed into service, and not just them. The carnivorous plants turned out in force. The toolkits were arrayed to check crawl spaces. Nova reprogrammed the ship cats and set them seeking.
There were Deckers, too—those closest to AE deck outraged by the murders there, and the rest in service to the ship. Tristen heard muttering from some that the Conns should have done more to protect the victims, and a few of the rumors that wended back to him opined that Conns, indeed, had killed all the inhabitants of AE deck in order to cover up some variously specified crime.
No one was sent out alone, by order of the Captain. Tristen did not miss the care with which Cynric maneuvered to become his partner. They would start their search with the Go-Back Heaven, and Tristen would not send anyone else to brave Dorcas.
In the lift, Cynric and Tristen