Grail - Elizabeth Bear [28]
Tristen found the woman who was not his daughter more or less where he had left her when last they spoke, some months before. Which was to say, barefoot and ankle-deep in muddy water, her hands dangling below the shallow pond’s still surface as she stalked something hidden beneath her own reflection. Oblong splashes of mud, some wet and dark, some dried to peanut-butter color and flaking, adhered to the skin and the fine hairs of her calves.
She half crouched amid the rice plants, her deep gold trousers rolled up to her thighs so that the hems stayed dry, her elbows dangling between her knees as she moved softly, crabwise, each step barely rippling the water.
Other things did ripple, however, and only some of them were fish. Tristen imagined he should feel more uneasiness than he did at such proximity to the cybernetic guardians of the rice paddies, invisible though they were beneath black water. Maybe the fear of death and discomfort had been cooked out of him like moisture, leaving him desiccated and leathery against the bone.
What scared him now was danger to the world, to its inhabitants, to Perceval and Nova and everyone else embraced within its fragile walls. Including this woman, for all that her every witnessed breath sent an ice-fine needle of complicated emotion through his lungs and heart. Including this woman, though he knew Perceval half suspected Dorcas had directed the raid that killed Caitlin.
Dorcas was the leader of the Edenites, rudely termed the Go-Backs—religious and ecological conservatives who had long been opposed to the plans of the Builders. Given what time had revealed about the Builders’ many treacheries, Tristen was becoming inclined to—limited—sympathy.
You are old, he told himself, and knew it for the simple truth.
Tristen paused on the edge of the rice field, well back from the shallow water’s edge. His footsteps could cause vibrations that would startle Dorcas’s prey, and the conversation they were about to have would be difficult enough without irritating her.
She glanced sideways, acknowledging his arrival, but her head stayed bent under the broad-brimmed hat. She slipped forward another step, hesitantly, her toes probing the mud before she shifted her weight. Her hands swayed loosely, almost seeming forgotten.
Until they lashed out suddenly, darting and twisting at the wrist, lifting simultaneously from the water. She was a slender person, thin-armed, her shoulder blades bony through the back of her worn shirt, but she hooked the fish out of the paddy with tendons flexing in her narrow wrists and tossed its silvery, thrashing body to Tristen.
Reflexively, he caught it. It flopped against his fingers, muscular and slimy-rough. It was the colors of tarnish and quicksilver, broad-sided and narrow-backed, with bright eyes that stared accusingly at Tristen as it gasped and fought for life.
He felt a pang of sympathy for it as he crouched to strike its head upon a rock. Once, twice, with a full swing of his arm. After the second blow its spasming muscles relaxed. Brutal, but kinder than letting it suffocate in air.
Dorcas came back up the levee to him, walking duck-footed on slippery grass and rolling oatmeal-colored sleeves down over browned, fair skin.
“Lunch,” she said, relieving him of the fish.
He pushed his hair behind his shoulder. “I’ve eaten.” Even if Perceval hadn’t been able to force herself, Tristen was old enough to have learned when to treat food as fuel and get it inside him any way he could.
When he’d first come here, it had been the midpoint of a perilous journey. Now, it was a half hour’s pleasant walk and a lift ride from the Bridge. How a few years changed things—but the time hadn’t changed Dorcas, or her Heaven.
He followed her down the sides of the steep valley between rice paddies and straw-bale plantings of salad vegetables. Other field-workers scarcely glanced up, although a sleek black-and-butter-colored snake head lifted through the water’s surface, tongue flicking as Tristen and Dorcas passed.
She led him a few hundred meters to a