Grail - Elizabeth Bear [54]
Green tendrils withdrew from the access panel, clutching a wrench, and snaked back a moment later with a different one. “It would be less awkward for me to reach,” the plant said, its voice a breathy hissing.
“Sure, but I’m stronger.”
That sound the plant made might have been agreement.
The host’s visage tensed, along with the muscles of one shoulder. A moment of pressure, and then a sharp metallic bang from inside the bulkhead, followed by soft cursing. The illumination cast by the miniature spotlights wavered.
“Ow,” the plant said.
“Ow,” the host answered, withdrawing a hand, shaking it, knuckles reddened. “How’s your tendril?”
“Bruised,” the plant responded. Not so programmed as to examine its damage visually, however, it did not withdraw from the access.
From his perch by the wall, Dust bared his rodent teeth and made a soft meeping sound. It was a call for attention, and one flower face and one human one swiveled.
The host sat up, delighted. “Toolkit! Now why didn’t I think of that?”
Dust scampered over, hopping plant tendrils, and pressed his cheek to the welcoming hand. This was good. This was the beginning. He had contact now. He felt the sparkle of recognition, and knew Ariane was aware in there, quiescent and biding.
Once he was alone with her, he could talk to Ariane without alerting her host. Until then—well, it was a toolkit that he inhabited. He would contrive to remain useful.
Grief is different to an old man.
The young lack experience of grief. It seems to them arbitrary, capricious, outrageous. They react to loss as to a personal affront, as something that can—and must—be fought.
The old know better. The old have learned better. Or perhaps they just go numb.
Or so it seemed to Benedick. The pain was what it was—but he felt none of the fury he would have once expected, none of the denial … and none of the rage.
He had become resigned, and that was how he knew he was old.
When he sat down across the display tank from Jordan of Engine and Damian Jsutien, Benedick was prepared and he was detached. Everything Caitlin had been, everything she had done, was gone—for now. And if she were restored from backup—if Mallory had her imprint somewhere in the vast orchard library of ghosts—she would not be who she had been anymore than Cynric now was more than a shadow of Cynric then.
Ghosts was the right word. You could call up a spirit, raise a revenant, but the most you might get was a shade of the person who had been. Too much of personality was ineffable, chemical, embedded in the meat. The soul electric was only a fragment of the soul entire.
The mother of his child was gone, and all he could make himself feel was a kind of dull, unsocketed ache.
Jordan and Jsutien each glanced up as he seated himself. Jsutien was just such a reminder of death in the flesh. He wore the face of Oliver Conn, who had died in Rule of Ariane and Arianrhod’s plots when they infected the whole domaine with an engineered flu and so destroyed Alasdair Conn and most of the old Commodore’s family.
The one who had grown into the crevices of Oliver’s body now had been the seed left over from the world’s last Astrogator. Benedick had not known Jsutien before, and so could not compare what he had been with what he was.
Jordan—the new Chief Engineer—was a lanky, tawny-furred flyer whose wings necessitated she choose a backless kneeling-chair to accommodate them. She had been Tristen’s apprentice and majordomo. Benedick had supported her elevation to her new role—that of an officer in her own right. He hoped he had done right. He hoped she would do better.
They were still waiting for one more. She was not yet late, and as Benedick turned his water glass idly on the tank ledge, the door opened and his youngest sister Chelsea entered the council room. She smiled, and glanced this way and that; each of the assembled acknowledged her.
When she had fetched her own glass of water and seated herself, Benedick cued the silent Angel hovering over them that it was time to begin.
“This is the first meeting of the five hundred and fifty-seventh