Grail - Elizabeth Bear [121]
“If you won’t share your world,” Cynric said, “what about that one?”
Jesse’s gaze followed her own. “Everything on that one is poison.”
“Too poison for us?”
“It’s a hydrogen sulfide based biosphere,” he said. He glanced at her sideways, eye corners crinkling. “And yet perhaps you are too poison for it.”
Cynric laughed. “You lot make so much of your mental stability. But you’re xenophobes, neophobes, the lot of you. You’ve wired a lack of diversity into your souls.”
He rubbed his chin and frowned, but he did not seem offended. “And you do better?”
She shrugged. “We get along with carnivorous plants and talking screwdrivers. I don’t know what should be so hard about getting along with you.”
Perceval awakened in a room of wonders, unable to really appreciate any of them. On her left side, vast bubbled portals showed a watery undersea view—a glimpse into the River, perhaps?—and on her right, animate banks of lights winked in oscillating patterns.
She lay, she thought, exposed on a sort of cot or raised pallet, not enclosed in a proper bunk. She didn’t have much pain—a little lingering soreness and stiffness—and she didn’t feel crushed by the weight of her own body, which at first made her think she was back aboard the Jacob’s Ladder.
She didn’t immediately recognize the room she was in, but even now there were probably thousands of places in the world she hadn’t seen with her own eyes. Life was finite—and very busy—and the world was large.
But this room was not lit in any of the ways Perceval recognized, instead illuminated by full-spectrum fixtures that nevertheless didn’t shine in quite the color her eyes expected. And when she said “Nova?” Nova did not answer.
Instead, the face of her Aunt Cynric hove into view, creased with a frown of concern. “How do you feel?”
Perceval self-assessed. “Not bad,” she said. “All things considered.”
“Not bad for somebody who left most of her liver on the pavement?” Cynric spoke in the dialect of Fortune. It was strange to hear her switch languages with such facility and obvious relish.
This idea of languages—of different languages—was something of a novel concept to Perceval. Of course there were dialects aboard the world, and isolated communities had drifted away from one another. But so long as you excepted the anatomically unique creatures, such as the carnivorous plants and the Leviathan, all speech descended from one mother tongue.
Well, there was Language, but that was different—a neurological exploit rather than patterns of sound and movement. And only Cynric had ever been any good at it.
“Pavement,” Perceval said, lingering over the foreign language in her turn. “The liver’s growing back, I hope.”
“Everything seems to be repairing itself nicely.” Cynric patted her shoulder. “You should rest a while longer. We have the gravity turned down to make you more comfortable, but the field only extends over the hospital bed.”
“I have to pee,” Perceval said. “Can I risk a trip to the head, or am I to be subjected to indignities?”
“Better not risk it,” Cynric said. “Tristen is in the hall, guarding the door, and I’m pretty sure he’d glare at us. I’ll get you a pan.”
Perceval sighed and turned her head to watch the ports. Were they still windows when they showed an underwater world outside, sunlight streaming through green translucence thick as glass? Something moved behind them, writhing and alive. The storms, it seemed, had passed.
“We’re underwater,” Perceval said, stating the obvious because it came with a revelation. “That’s why we couldn’t find the settlement.”
“Dug into earth and covered by water,” Cynric agreed. She slid the bedpan under the sheets, and stepped aside while Perceval made the necessary accommodations. “Low-impact.”
“Which we are not.” Perceval relieved herself, thinking of chamber pots and squatting by roadsides and how much of human