Grail - Elizabeth Bear [109]
Tristen had seen her so many times, perched in some corner behind the barricade of her bony knees, the lines of her long face defining smiles or frowns. He wondered how it was that he had only now realized that this was the real Cynric, or at least as much the real Cynric as the cold, imperious Sorceress.
“There’s one that says you stole the Bible yourself,” she said. “And that you mean to use it to replace Perceval as Captain.”
Tristen arched his eyebrows. “If I wanted to be Captain, I would have been.” The implications of her words struck him. “Wait. Use it? What use is an old paper book?”
Her head came forward, the long neck lengthening. The stare she leveled at him would have curdled the blood of most men.
“You are no revenant,” she said. “Are your memories fully intact?”
He shifted in his armor. “Flesh or machine memories? I went mad for a while.”
“The legacy Bible.” He nodded.
“It was you who taught me its purpose, Brother mine. When I was small. The Bible is an immutable hard copy of the Builders’ New Evolutionist creed, to be sure, but it’s also a computer—an old-style discrete calculating and remembering machine. And it holds the override codes for the entire world.”
Tristen blinked at what she said. He heard it—of course he heard it—but it seemed to wash over him as a series of abstractions. Nonsense, confused and inarticulate, until he tossed his head like a dog shaking water away. “I’m not following you.”
She rose, the sweep of fabric trailing behind her, and moved toward him. They were of a height, and Tristen knew their father’s features were plain in both their faces. She touched his cheek. “The legacy Bible is a computer. You taught me that.”
“I’m sorry,” Tristen said. “I do not understand.”
He also did not understand the smile that stretched her face—more like a snarl, in truth. But he did understand when she spat “Father!” as if it were the worst curse word she knew.
She touched his cheek. “It appears, Brother Tristen, that somebody has been reprogramming your brain. Removing old knowledge. Would you care to hazard a guess as to who might be responsible?”
He did not doubt her. He wanted to; he could feel the denial in him, rising like the automatic subroutine it might be. But she was Cynric, and whatever else she was, she had never been a liar. “Can you fix it?”
She was angry. “There was nothing Alasdair Conn could do that I could not undo better. One of the things that book was for was rewriting memories, but I have read the book, and know it well. Give us a kiss, Brother dearest.”
It didn’t hurt a bit, and Tristen was left with no sense that anything had altered, but this time when Cynric said the simple words, they made sense and stuck deep in his memory. They were finished before they arrived in the Edenite Heaven.
And the implications of what Cynric said sent a chill through his body that had nothing to do with the temperature controls in his armor. Their father had used the information in the New Evolutionist Bible to remove his memories; Cynric had used it to restore them.
And Ariane had that book now.
As the lift door slid open and they stepped forth into the lock, he said, “You couldn’t have mentioned that earlier?”
The far door began to cycle, Dorcas just visible through the widening gap. Cynric spoke quickly, from the corner of her mouth. “It never occurred to me that you would forget.”
“Tristen,” Dorcas said, as the doorway between them stabilized at its widest aperture. “Cynric. To what do I owe this unexpected joy?”
* * *
Tristen took Dorcas aside and told her that she must call her folk and her snakes in from the fields and gather them in the onion-domed tent that served the Edenites as a hall. He told her she must keep them quiet and collected—fields unweeded, goats unmilked