Grail - Elizabeth Bear [139]
“I want to come away with you,” Amanda said, while they were passing cream from hand to hand. “I want to see the solar system.”
Cynric’s head came up, her eyebrows rising, but if the feeling of his face were anything to go on, it was nothing to Danilaw’s expression. “Oh,” he said, and settled back.
“This is a chance that will never occur again,” she said. “A chance to live without rightminding, to travel—” Her breath caught. “I can’t say no.”
“No,” he said. He smoothed his right hand over the back of his left. “All this time the dodecapodes have been using the structural quirks of my neurology to try to reach us. It seems ungrateful to go running off—”
“The ones who are leaving are not bound even to the gravity well,” Cynric said. “The feeble starlight itself will suffice to feed them, if they spread far enough apart.” Cynric cleared her throat. “It’s not the solar system they’ll claim, but eventually the universe. It might be lonely. It will be strange. Do you really want to be one of them?”
Danilaw’s heart leapt up his throat. “I—”
“Do you want to?”
“I have Obligations,” he said. “Family. Work.”
“We always do.” Cynric steepled insectile fingers. “You people are all bodhisattvas. You’re all such adults, with your culture of self-sacrifice and your perfectly myelinated frontal lobes, your beautifully refined senses of consequence. I used to make people like you as servants.”
“Head,” Amanda said, with a glance at Danilaw as if checking what he thought.
“Angels are servants,” said Danilaw, reminding himself that his anger was most likely just ego-defense, and useless. “And so are we.”
“Go on. Serve your own self for a while. What I did—it was a lousy thing to do,” Cynric admitted. “But once they’re made they want to live as much as anything. What are you going to do, unmake them? And if your people are adults, my people are all such children—reckless, selfish, egocentric. Waiting for a divine plan to direct us. Maybe it would be good for you and me to trade places for a while. We both might be stretched by it.”
Danilaw chuckled. “They’re not going to let you run Bad Landing.”
“They don’t have to,” Cynric said. “They just have to let me talk to the dodecapodes. Do you think they know the divine plan that leads to all this mess?”
“I don’t think there’s a divine plan,” Danilaw said haltingly.
“Then what does any of this matter?”
“It matters to us,” Danilaw said. “Isn’t that enough?”
“Then go,” Cynric said. “Go and explore. Become a thing of light. If you find out you hate it, maybe you can even find a way to come home someday. Not all gates open in only one direction.”
Mallory found Tristen and Benedick coiled close, and hurried in on taut-stretched sails, praying to be there in time. But they were not fighting. In fact, as Mallory drew up, it became evident that the conversation was one of mutual comfort, not a prelude to war.
The necromancer drew up and waited. Not too long—Tristen must have noticed, because after a few moments he ended the talk with his brother and came over.
“You lived,” he said, brushing fringes.
“After a fashion,” Mallory answered. “And as well as anyone. I am still collecting my trees—or whatever it is my trees have been transubstantiated into. I suppose I shall have to herd them now, like a shepherdess with an idle flock. Or let them wither—”
Tristen’s mood colored dismissal. He did not believe that Mallory would do any such thing to the orchard of memories so long guarded. And now that they had assumed a more animate form—along with all the other life aboard the Jacob’s Ladder—the necromancer’s task would only grow more interesting.
“You’ve found your purpose in life,” he said. “It’s keeping the past alive for the future. A necromancer, maybe—or a guardian of memories? That is not such a small thing.”
If Mallory had anything now that could be called eyes, exactly, they would have been cast down, cold arms folded. “I thought you would kill Benedick.”
The color of dismissal deepened.