Grail - Elizabeth Bear [7]
Captain Amanda didn’t sigh, but he heard her shifting from foot to foot.
“Just collecting my thoughts.” He turned back.
She smiled. “Collect mine, too, while you’re in there?”
“If I see ’em,” he said, liking her. You didn’t need affection to work well with someone, but if it happened, it could necessitate fewer adjustments to the rightminding. And it was always easier to like funny people—if they could be funny without it being at anyone else’s expense.
Danilaw thought it might be because humor was on some level an admission of weakness. I’ll show you my defense mechanisms if you show me yours.
Danilaw tipped his head at the door to the conference room, just to the other side of the entrance to his tiny private office. Another weirdness engendered by his role as City Administrator—who worked in an office anymore? Who met face-to-face? Who commuted? But authority required trappings, and to some people archaicism still meant authority.
Danilaw did sigh now. “Come on. Let’s go tell them the paradigm has shifted.”
2
a child was not to blame
As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.
—LAURENCE BINYON, “For the Fallen”
Perceval Conn glided through warm water, feeling the swirl and suck of eddying currents along her skin, over her scalp, through the tendrils of her unbound hair. The River flowed across open eyes and around the stumps of long-amputated wings. Her corneas adapted to the water’s greater angle of refraction, so her vision lost no clarity.
She moved through a world of slanted light, warped and repaired River channels, and darting animals: a world brighter than she had seen in decades. As the Jacob’s Ladder approached the destination star, more daylight flooded the world’s arrays, collected and reflected and refracted through sweeping energy nets. Every watt and every joule no longer must be rationed, hoarded, and accounted for. The world could be bright again—and soon, Perceval knew, there would be direct daylight through the world’s many windows. Then the problem would be keeping her cool instead of warm.
Perceval held her breath comfortably, her symbiont reporting excellent oxygen saturation and low levels of muscular fatigue. She let the River sweep her between thick feathering cables in their corrosion-resistant plating, and slanted columns of ceramic and light. There were fish here, silvery and rose, their backs dappled or freckled or banded or striped.
Once upon a time, Tristen and Benedick and Rien and Gavin had run along the banks of this River to Engine. In those days, the River had been a poisoned, radioactive coil. The River had been inhabited by the ghost of the world’s broken reactors in the form of a djinn called Inkling, and the run had nearly killed three of the four who made it. That mission of mercy had been on Perceval’s behalf, but Perceval had not been with them. She had been held prisoner by Dust, another fragment of the world’s broken consciousness—the Library, more or less.
The Angel of Memory, as he styled himself. Perceval remembered him as more of a demon.
But now the River was clean enough for an Exalt to swim in—cleaner than it needed to be, for such purposes. And now Rien and Gavin were gone, consumed by other intelligences. Inkling and Dust had been assimilated too. They had been folded into Nova, a new Angel—the same being that Rien had given herself up to create. And now they were all three as inextricable from the final product as eggs and flour from cake.
Perceval had been slow in forgiving herself for her lost loved ones and enemies, and slower in forgiving the new Angel so forged for the exigencies of her birth. But there was only so long one could hold a grudge, and as the years passed, Perceval found it helped to think of Nova as the child, and of Rien and the others as her