Grail - Elizabeth Bear [32]
“You’re afraid of sabotage.”
He nodded without meeting her eyes.
“You’re afraid of dying,” she said, “because you have lost your faith. You’ve gotten old, Tristen Tiger, and you cling to life even though it scares you, because you don’t think there’s anything else afterward.”
If she’d been striking for his heart, she’d missed. His apostasy was too ancient and too well-founded for her schoolroom sally to discomfit him. And he thought she revealed more about herself than him in the attempt.
He wanted to reach across the space between them and take her wrist, but restrained himself. “I lost my faith because we can only create the God we can imagine, and we are pathetically small creatures. I lost my faith because I find the prospect of nothingness more heartening than the idea of a God no larger, no greater of spirit, no more numinous than my father.”
He’d been doing fine, maintaining the tone of gentle sarcasm, until he got to the word father. Then his voice cracked, and he found her staring at him with a quizzical expression.
The silence stretched.
“What?”
Dorcas née Sparrow smiled. “The Tiger’s heart,” she said. “I think I saw it.”
What had been a toolkit was a monster now, and not blinded to that metamorphosis. Dust the small and scurrying, Dust the broken-backed—but rats were everywhere in the walls of the world. There has never been a ship without rats.
Dust scuttled among them, of them and not of them, consuming them when it was convenient, ignoring them when it was not. From their corpses he learned the new plan of the world that had been his body, the smell of the ones who inhabited it. He stayed slight, insubstantial. He masked himself in their scent and DNA. He felt Nova all around him as he moved, the corona of her essence and awareness silver-sharp.
But he was just one small thing among other small things—a fluffy cybernetic creature, colony-riddled, moving ring-tailed and spot-backed among millions of its kind. He could get lost, even from an Angel’s awareness.
As well he knew, once having been in his own right an Angel.
But now he was a disease, and he moved through the body of the world as a disease moves through any body—by stealth, by camouflage, by deceit. This new Angel’s awareness of the world was better than Dust’s had been, when Dust was the chiefest among Angels—more complete, more subtle. Still, he passed—he thought—unremarked.
He found traces, strays, eddies of information. He let them pass through him, shielding his own existence and siphoning their bits. Fragmentary though it was, it fed him.
Traces of a scent signature he half remembered drew him. So much was lost, scrubbed away with the bulk of his self. But he was holographic; the image remained, though it blurred with each division and details were lost. And the Conns he remembered no matter what.
And this was the scent of one he’d thought lost.
When he found her, she was drinking beer in the shade of a banana tree, a text-novel scrolling in letters of light through the air before her eyes. She read lazily, a few lines a second, making it last. Her hands were calloused, the bridge of her nose radiation red. She had long sun-colored hair and her father’s cheekbones; he knew her at once for who she was.
He scurried, small and lithe, to her side, humped up beside her, and jerked his tail.
“You died,” he said. “You were slaughtered like a cow. So who lives in you now?”
Slowly, Sparrow Conn turned her eyes from her novel, which froze in place. A butterfly flew through it. Once, Dust would have been able to name the insect’s name. Though much is lost, much abides.
“I live in me now,” she said. “You’re not a toolkit.”
“Ah, but I am.” He sat back on his haunches and dry-washed delicate paws one over the other. “But I am not only a toolkit. And you are not only Sparrow Conn.”
“I am not Sparrow Conn at all,” the woman