Grail - Elizabeth Bear [120]
“And there are only two ways for that need to be met,” she finished.
“Two?” he asked. This time, he crouched himself, reaching in to gather up another few grams of green feathers over racing heart. He handed the parrotlet to Cynric, shaking it gently loose from his thumb when it bit, and retrieved another for himself.
Simultaneously, the Conns released them. Cynric caught her breath to watch them fly. “Either the world can live on—in whatever form—and thus its inhabitants endure, or we can make landfall somewhere that will sustain us all. Do you think we have the wherewithal to terraform, transplant, and sustain an entire ecology?”
Benedick looked at her and shook his head. “Do you suppose there’s a third option?”
“Probably,” she said. “The question is, will we think of it in time?”
“Prince Benedick,” Nova said. “Princess Cynric. There is a crisis on the surface. An assassination attempt has been made against the Captain. She is alive”—the Angel spoke quickly enough that Cynric saw Benedick’s shoulders relax incrementally almost before they could tense—“and wounded. Tristen requests assistance.”
“Evacuation?” Benedick was ever crisp in crisis.
“It would be unwise to move the Captain,” Nova said. “However, I feel it would also be unwise for you to go to her. There is too much potential for a trap.”
“My daughter—”
“Benedick.” Cynric reached across the space to lay a hand on his arm.
“Cynric—”
“I will go to your daughter. What can it harm? I am dead already. Let me see this thing they call a world.”
* * *
Dust’s patron began by laying the open palms of her borrowed body on the pages of the book. She pressed them flat, and Dust felt the roll of her shoulders under his feet when she squared them and drew in a breath. She had a long neck in this body, a pointed chin, and hair that reached her thighs. Dust curled himself in the cave those things made and waited.
Across the table, the Go-Back Engineer who possessed Tristen’s daughter sat, too, pressed her own hands open on the tabletop, and also waited.
Dust heard her heart and breathing quicken as that black, black text began to flow from the page across the backs of Ariane’s hands, sliding over graceful bones and tendons in as fine relief as sculptured porcelain. The book bled text up the outlined muscles of her forearms, the sharp elbow bones. Words glided like projected light and shadow over skin, then vanished beneath the sleeves of her blouse. Dust felt them moving, immaterial but important, under the dry, scratchy pads of his feet, curling up his patron’s throat and swimming across her face. She ran full of words; she glowed with them. They buoyed her blood and burned in the depths of her irises.
“Loading,” she whispered, in a voice full of strange resonances. Words continued to flow into her—words now that were unrecognizable, strings of digits and letters, curious and arcane symbols. There was seemingly no bottom.
“Loading,” she said, again. And again. And, “Dust, I need you.”
The fallen Angel nerved himself, looked into his patron’s eyes, and followed the words within.
Cynric recognized the young Mean who waited in the shuttle—the lighter—for her. Jesse, one of the Administrators of Fortune. He seemed drawn and harried as she took her place, but more than a little overawed by her, and made an awkward, undiplomatic effort to make her feel at ease.
And his mere presence was a pleasant assurance that her chances of making it to the surface in one piece were fairly good. She folded herself into the tight space defined by the acceleration couches and rigged the straps for security. When Administrator Jesse double-checked them, he seemed satisfied.
With a small bump, they came free of the world, and she saw it from a perspective farther away than even when she had captured the Leviathan.
As they accelerated into the gravity