Grail - Elizabeth Bear [29]
But it worked well enough. She let the blade glide down either side of the spine. “You didn’t come here on a whim.”
“I didn’t,” he said. He did not bother glancing over his shoulder. He could feel the pressure of other cooks at each shoulder, although, other than a glance of acknowledgment to Dorcas, they had not looked up from their tasks. Tristen was not and would never be popular with the Go-Backs—for reasons he could not argue—though Dorcas herself was willing now and again to sacrifice a few moments of her time for him.
Tristen turned on the grill and, with a glance at Dorcas, pulled a heavy flat-bottomed pan over the heating element. “Can we speak in private?”
“I won’t conceal what you tell me from my people, so they may as well hear it from you directly. That way, you can be sure I haven’t misrepresented you.” One more pass of the knife, and the tilapia lay headless and open like an ancient paper book on the cutting board.
Tristen put oil in the pan and watched it shimmer while Dorcas cleaned her tools and racked them. She waved vaguely at an onion, so he borrowed the wiped knife and diced it, then scooped translucent crescents into the pan. An aroma of cooking organosulfates converting to sugars—alluring enough to have woken the dead—tickled the inside of his nose.
When Dorcas turned back, she said, “Thank you.”
She scraped the onions to the edge of the pan. Salted and herbed, the fish went into the oil with a satisfying hiss. Tristen stepped aside, giving her room to work. It was easier to speak to the back of her head and the fine hay-colored locks curling around her hairline—revealed because the body of her hair was upswept into a ponytail. A UV flush colored her wrists where they stretched from the protection of her sleeves.
He watched her for a moment, then he folded his arms and said, “Grail is inhabited.”
He had waited until her hands were away from both the knife and the hot pan, and it turned out well, for she jolted as if he had run a current through the floor. From the muffled exclamation of pain off to the left, perhaps he could have timed the revelation better from the point of view of the bystanders.
“Aliens,” she said, after a moment.
“Humans,” he replied. “People who use a Roman alphabet and Arabic numerals. People from Earth.”
Dorcas had been an Engineer once—Exalted in the first Moving Times, during the Breaking of the world. Not too long after Tristen. She had become a Go-Back—one of the colonists and crew members advocating a return to Earth Tristen had so successfully opposed in his youth. He might be personally responsible for her death.
For she had died. She had died in her old body then, and later her machine memories had been reincarnated in the body of Tristen’s Exalt daughter Sparrow, who had died in the mind because Tristen had not had the courage to follow her out of Rule, but whose form had been taken by the Engineers and given as a shell to one of their own lost ones.
The person who stood before him wasn’t Sparrow. She was who Sparrow had become, because Tristen had failed her as a father.
On their first meeting, she had reminded Tristen of his crimes, and were Tristen not Exalt, he would still bear the scars of that meeting. In return, Tristen had placed in her hand his daughter’s haunted sword, though she had not held it long. Given such an inauspicious beginning, he doubted they would ever be friends, but his respect for her was unrivaled.
“What an irony, to finally come to the world we meant to infest, and to discover that we’ve already infested it.” The fish sizzled as she flipped it. “You think they hopped right over