Grail - Elizabeth Bear [20]
And sometimes it was nice to see her mother and collect a hug.
Caitlin arrived dressed for off-duty, which was another endocrine signal Perceval didn’t get enough of. When the Bridge door dilated to reveal Caitlin’s broad-hipped, broad-shouldered form in blousing trousers and barefoot, it was as if somebody had pulled a plug in Perceval’s spine and let all the stress run out.
To puddle on the floor, she thought, with a grimace. Where you will have to mop it up later.
The Captain kept the cynicism out of her voice as she said, “Hey, Mom.”
She hadn’t thought she was trying to sound particularly nonchalant, but if the words had come out that way, Caitlin wasn’t buying it. She cleared the doorway quickly and stood just inside while it sealed, hands on her hips and head cocked appraisingly. Caitlin still wore her black unblade, Charity—but there was off-duty, and there was stupidity.
Although Perceval stood still to greet her, her white trousers and shift falling about her with folds unstirred even by the movement of air, Caitlin huffed and glanced around the Bridge as if she could see every moment of Perceval’s last hour.
And perhaps she could, if she were checking in the infrared. The cold Captain’s chair, and the warmth of footsteps sprinkled over the grass and meadow flowers of the Bridge decking. The evidence of Perceval’s tight-reined distress lay everywhere.
“Wearing a groove in the planking?” Caitlin said. Grass whisked between her toes as she came to her daughter. Perceval might be taller, but Caitlin still outmassed her by half. She hunched herself down to accept her mother’s hug, wishing to feel enfolded in it, protected. Nobody could be impervious all the time. Except, Perceval thought ruefully as she straightened, possibly Benedick.
“Pacing the Bridge is the Captain’s prerogative,” Perceval said.
In old days, the Bridge would have been a gathering place for senior crew. But the Jacob’s Ladder was alive now, and the world’s control center could be wherever Perceval went. The Bridge was now her retreat, her hermitage.
And like all such places, it could be painfully lonely.
“And provoking the Captain is the Chief Engineer’s,” Caitlin replied. She plunked herself unceremoniously on the grass and stretched out. “Nova, amplified sunlight, please.”
Perceval’s pupils contracted, cones swelling to replace rods in her eyes as the wide windows arching across the surface of the sky paled and depolarized, screens sliding back to widen the apertures. Elements of the world’s halo of symbiotic nanocolonies—which also, along with its ramscoop and other electromagnetic fields, served to insulate it from space debris—became reflective and refractive. Biomimetic sensors in the ship’s colony cloud, and on her hull, helped the prisms and mirrors train themselves on the distant star, gathering its light. Like a sunflower, the Jacob’s Ladder focused itself on distant warmth.
The Bridge shivered with radiation—alien comfort after so many years in the dark.
Perceval was also still getting used to living in a world where more things worked than didn’t.
Caitlin patted the gentle swell of the bank beside her. “Sit, child. Enjoy the light.”
Perceval sat. She composed herself and reclined beside her mother, closing her eyes. But she did not close off the datastreams that painted the inside of her head with a constant flow of information, making her eyes largely extraneous for most purposes more complex than—well—navigating around a room.
She sighed, knowing Caitlin would read the complex of emotions in it—contentment, distress—and also knowing that Caitlin, being a mother, would ask.
Predictability in a parent was a good thing.
“Out with it,” Caitlin said. “What troubles you? Our journey is at an end, our rest in sight. Or rather, different work confronts us, but with luck and the cooperation or capitulation of the current residents, we can fold this world up and live someplace a little easier to maintain.”
“A planet is a closed ecology,