Grail - Elizabeth Bear [42]
“When humans first entered space, it was the same way. We dabbled in the gentle currents around our homeworld. We sowed bottle messages upon the deep, sending out drone explorers, and never dared hope that anyone would find them and follow their messages to where we languished, cast away. Some few brave or foolhardy adventurers followed, in vessels hopelessly inadequate for the perils they would face.
“We had numbered you among them. We counted you as heroes lost to the emptiness of space. Today is a day of rejoicing, for we have been proved wrong.”
He paused, letting her see him take a deep breath, and checked his notes again.
“There will be some quarantine protocols to get out of the way, and I’m sure we each have a great deal of news and history to exchange that will interest the other. We will send trade and cultural negotiators. But in the meantime, we would request permission to send a small vessel to dock with your ship. In addition, in the metadata of this transmission, you will find a document containing a list of questions regarding the census of your vessel. Any information you can provide as to the demographics and ideologies of your population would help us greatly in preparing to arrange your reception.”
He smiled—a big, human grin that Perceval found reassuring despite the alien architecture of his features. “We’re looking forward to meeting you.”
9
tristen, tiger
The children born of thee are sword and fire,
Red ruin, and the breaking up of laws.
—ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, “Guinevere”
After the waystars exploded, before the Captain and her officers won back the world, there had been war. War was something Tristen Conn excelled at.
For his Captain, he had fought. Those memories were as clear and bright as they had ever been, burned into his mind with machine perfection, though the emotion and connection blurred with the years. It was like any recording, Tristen thought. You came back to it years later and saw yourself, and wondered who in all the world that person had ever been—so young, so stern, so smooth of skin and soul.
The first of it had been on AE deck, ship-west, in the 9s and 7s. Not Heavens or even holdes, but a cluster of domaines and anchores linked by rodent-maze tubes and air locks. Tristen had entered them at the head of what passed for his army: a band of soldiers neither ragtag nor undisciplined, but drawn from the ranks of Engineers and anyone else Tristen could find whose proclamations of loyalty to the Captain would withstand examination under validation. Not that there weren’t all sorts of ways to fool a validator—even a well-trained and experienced one—especially when one was Exalt, but you had to draw a line somewhere.
Nova had told Tristen and the others that, before Acceleration, this area had been inhabited by a tribe of about seventy Means, operating with some salvaged technology and a lot of scrounging, myth, and ingenuity. Fifty or so of them had survived Acceleration, and all had been Exalted by Caitlin’s decision to release the symbiont colonies into the worldwide ecosystem. This act, intended to preserve the greatest possible diversity of life, was bound to have consequences—anticipated and otherwise.
Nova’s ease of information retrieval from anywhere in the world was a side effect of more recent events. Having reclaimed the world’s neural networks and integrated the memories of the splintered angels she’d consumed, she had access—finally—to an enormous database of useful information.
Tristen entered the anchore where the acceleration tanks were sequestered and smiled to find the reality matched the schematics Nova had provided. The map might not be the territory, but it was amazing how much difference it made to have a working Angel on your side.
The tribespeople had not yet been released from their acceleration tanks, which Tristen thought a mercy—fighting them here, from one cramped anchore to the next, would have meant killing each individual and dragging the bodies from their setts one by one like the corpses of dug-in