Grail - Elizabeth Bear [12]
So he had chosen Mirth, which was not an unblade at all. And considerably safer. Unblades, engines of entropy that they were, required fanatical care in handling and training if they were not to be more of a danger to their wielder than her enemy.
Though Cynric the Sorceress had begged for the favor of her death at his hand, he understood now that it had all been pursuant to her master plan and that the death hadn’t been quite … permanent. Something was lost in translation, surely, when machine memory alone remained, patterned electricity without chemical context. But he hated it when Cynric came back to Engine, when he was forced to remember killing her—with memories of flesh and memories of silicon.
Benedick found irony in his knowledge that the symbiont Cynric herself had created—and inoculated into Benedick by her own hand—was the very thing that allowed Benedick to remember her murder so precisely.
He watched her from the corner of his awareness, her hair as straight and long as his own, but paler—brown where his was black, her eyes gray-blue where his were hazel. She looked the same, but he knew she wasn’t. And he hated how she had changed, and how he could see the core seed of who she had been repopulating the corners of her mind in configurations that were similar to but not the same as those of the woman he had known. He hated knowing that his own actions had been instrumental in pruning her back so brutally, whether by her consent or request.
Perhaps if she visited more often, he would be over it by now.
But she didn’t seem to be paying him any attention. Her hawklike profile was bent over the breakfast table as she dripped honey into her tea, the green sapphire stud in her nostril glinting through the dark, loose strands. A scholar’s robe of white and green drooped from her shoulders and draped her thin arms. She was as skinny as his daughter Perceval.
Benedick sighed silently. For the moment he, too, forced himself to focus on his bread and tea, and the words of Caitlin Conn.
“We would have expected more significant radio flux from a world inhabited by intelligent life.” Caitlin had an educator’s tones. “We would have expected to see them coming—or see them while coming at them. If we’d been expecting other people here, we could have arrived sneakily, or loudly broadcasting our good intentions. But based on the probe we recovered, they seem to rely on some form of tight-beam transmissions that we do not fully understand. We are continuing our analysis.”
“They are definitely human?” Chelsea asked, rolling crumbs of bread between her fingertips. It took courage to ask the obvious question.
“Definitely,” Caitlin said. “The markings on the probe are in an alphanumeric system derived from our own. And my engineers believe their machinery springs from the same roots, though we have undergone centuries of technological drift.”
Cynric sipped her tea. “I am engineering a device to receive and decode them, but these things take time.”
They must be spliced, they must be hybridized. They must be grown to parturition and to enough adulthood to be useful. Even in Cynric’s hands, that might mean days. Weeks.
Cynric licked at the edges of her teeth. “What other signs of life does Grail possess?”
Caitlin was shorter and more compact than Cynric—or Benedick, for that matter. It was from him that Perceval got her rangy build, while Caitlin had broad shoulders and a solid frame. Her auburn hair curled loosely about her nape and ears, cut too short to brush her collar. She had gray-blue eyes, the whites flushed with the pale cobalt tint of her colony, and she favored bright, warm colors—currently, a loose-sleeved tunic in flowing vermilion over a body-tight shirt in a complementary yellow.
When she turned to Cynric, she caught Benedick’s gaze along the way and offered a small, sympathetic smile. He let out the breath he was holding. Time and useful work were healing those wounds, at least.
And speaking of the useful work—or not speaking of it, as the case might be—it was time he was about it.
“Nova reports no structures