Grail - Elizabeth Bear [4]
A Spectra Mass Market Original
Copyright © 2011 by Elizabeth Bear
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Spectra, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Cover design: Carl Galian
eISBN: 978-0-345-52485-0
www.ballantinebooks.com
v3.1
This book is for Stella Evans,
Liz Bourke, and Maddie Glymour.
And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of.
And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.
And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.
—GENESIS 28: 15–17, KING JAMES VERSION
As for ideology, the Hell with it. All of it.
—URSULA K. LEGUIN
God make thee good as thou art beautiful.
—ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, “The Holy Grail”
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
1. when the world ended
2. a child was not to blame
3. divergent evolution
4. a library once
5. harder things, and worse
6. cometh a monster
7. if you can hear me
8. where they ought stand
9. tristen, tiger
10. this fragment
11. adapt
12. carried bright scars
13. this lord of grail
14. it is a library, and I am its necromancer
15. learn to praise the imperfect world
16. a girl who had no wings
17. who ruined all of us
18. a sort of embrace
19. the lathe of evolution
20. all the world and everything
21. for the descent
22. wounds
23. another tiny bird came to her hands
24. the world and the world
25. silence is an answer
26. for my sister
27. the feeble starlight itself
acknowledgments
1
when the world ended
In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me,
what is this quintessence of dust?
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet, Act II scene i
Danilaw Bakare was on a nightclub stage when the world ended.
His third-day job was as a classical musician. He held the lease on a baby blue electric fab bass, and two nights a nonce he joined up with two guitarists and a drummer to play the greats in a repro dive bar in Bad Landing, on the east rim of Crater Lake. They did all the classics—Buddy Holly, Buddy Guy, Gatemouth Brown, Page and Plant. Thompson, Hendrix, Li, Morris, Mitchell, Kaderli, Kasparyan, Noks, Hynde.
It was one hell of a relief from the first-day job where he spent five days out of nine, and it filled his arts requirement in style. The first-day job was as City Administrator for Bad Landing, which loaned the band a certain notoriety and filled his admin and service logs. He completed the nurturing requirement with volunteer work and babysitting his sister’s kids, half grateful that, given his other commitments, it was a tertiary and half worried he was never going to find the time himself to reproduce.
So he happened to be onstage before a crowd of about one hundred and seventy-five, holding up Therese while she laid fire through “Johnny B. Goode,” when the end began.
As poets had long suspected, it happened so subtly that Danilaw at first had no idea of the historic significance of events beyond a sensible level of unease. There was no drama. Just a brown-faced citizen in a suit and some discreet hardware, as out of place in mufti—and in the club crowd—as a dodecapus at a tea party. She slipped in through the kitchen, pausing behind the tables where the patrons were seated so only the musicians and staff would see her, planting herself at the end of the bar like she’d been carved there. When Danilaw caught her eye, across all those rapt faces, she frowned and nodded.
She had a round face, a straight nose, and a finely pointed chin.