Grail - Elizabeth Bear [125]
“I am reluctant,” she said eventually—an emotion he had read already in the set of her shoulders, but reading it was not the same as having it admitted to him.
“Reluctant?”
She nodded after the dodecapus. “Our own people,” she said slowly. “I can take from them. They owe us something, some debt of kinship. But what does that owe us?”
He shouldn’t have said it, but he did. “What did the Leviathan’s mate owe us?”
Along with a sidelong glance, she gave him the sharp edge of her smile. “Precisely,” she said. “Precisely my point, all in all.”
Their eyes met, and they understood one another. She was his equal. His peer. One of two in all the world. In all creation.
Ancient history, there between them, was suddenly not so ancient anymore. Everything that had been was about to be left behind, one way or another. If there were ever going to be any answers, it would have to be now.
With his feet on the soil of an alien world, Tristen nerved himself and asked a question he had never had the courage to ask before.
“Do you know who killed my daughter, Cynric?”
She turned her head. He saw the line of her neck, her skull, her ear for a moment before she focused on the window again. He thought maybe her glance had been for Perceval, who still lay under her sheet, as silent as an empty room.
“You need to ask Benedick,” Cynric said. “She was no angel, Tristen. No matter how you remember her.”
Before he could press her, the door opened, and Danilaw and Amanda filed in.
Perceval sat up, the sheet clutched to her breasts as if it could protect her. Danilaw, who had been about to extend a hand to Tristen, paused midmovement and transferred the greeting to her. “Captain,” he said. “I am pleased to see that you are recovering. I’ve come to tell you that Amanda has identified a high-placed conspirator against you, and we are moving to take that person into custody.”
A real conspirator, Perceval wondered, or a convenient scapegoat? Would these aggressively transparent humans stoop to scapegoating? Were they so evolved that their vox populi would be satisfied with caution and certainty?
“Thank you,” she said. “And thank you for the excellence of the medical care that has been provided me. Your conspirator—”
“Administrator Gain Kangjeon,” Amanda said. “I am sure this will not surprise you.”
“If you need her brought in, I would be happy to oblige you.” When Tristen spoke so quietly, Perceval knew that his heart was anything but.
“The Legates should be more or less adequate to the task,” Amanda said. “But it does lead us back to the central problem, doesn’t it? What are we going to do about you?”
Perceval swung her feet down to the floor, allowing it to press cool and smooth against her soles for a moment before she pressed back, and stood. “We are beginning to understand the magnitude of your problem.”
Danilaw nodded, waiting for her to continue. She tucked the trailing ends of the sheet about her in a sort of toga, flicking the creases into some semblance of dignity. “It is easy for us to say you have a whole world and we are but little, give us a crumb. But what is hard for us to understand is that your world is not empty. There is no place in it that is not full of life already …”
“That is the problem,” he said. “And as for us, it is difficult for us to understand how weary you are. How badly you need a harbor. How long you have traveled to arrive here, and by what a slim margin you have survived. We”—he paused, frowned, and seemed to collect a difficult thought—“we live at a very narrow margin with the world. We choose to inhibit our own growth to protect the rights of other creatures.”
“I understand. There are a lot of us. And those creatures you need to protect—like the cephalopods?”
By the window, Tristen and Cynric shifted, but Perceval spared them no attention. She was Captain, still. And she would use what resources were handed her.
“Dodecapodes,” he said.
“You know they’re sapient? And you are squatting on their world?”
His hand came up and pressed his temple over the ear. He