Grail - Elizabeth Bear [76]
With a mental signal to Nova, she cut the connection. Tristen had not moved from his seat on the grassy berm opposite, but his hands were folded and he was regarding her. “Turning them over to an angel when they’ve expressed such a strong distaste for the whole concept? I’m not sure that’s politic.”
“Maybe they’ll find out how useful angels are and suffer a thought infection.”
Tristen smiled. “He gets on your nerves.”
Perceval shook her hair back, smoothing the locks behind her shoulders with both hands. “He’s a smug, self-righteous, condescending Mean,” she said. “If he thinks we’re uncivilized thugs, well—”
“We need him, Perceval,” her First Mate cautioned. “Unless you really want to go and take his planet from him.”
Her toes curled into the verdant green turf underfoot. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t tempt me.”
14
it is a library, and I am its necromancer
I lose! They’re loaded dice. Time always plays
With loaded dice.
—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, “Time and the Witch Vivien”
Danilaw Bakare had not realized how thoroughly he anticipated the barbaric splendor of the generation ship’s interior until its grandeur overwhelmed his expectations entirely. The docking bay had the same blasted, repurposed, resurfaced look that characterized the mottled exterior of the vessel. It was also vast, cradling the Quercus entire. Danilaw stood on the tiny habitation deck watching the long, seemingly animate arms of the Jacob’s Ladder embrace the scull, growing over the air lock and avoiding the motes and ports. He could not avoid the comparison to a dodecapus sensitively enveloping its prey.
He sealed his helmet one-handed and turned to make sure Captain Amanda, too, was ready. Seeing her mirror the gesture made him grin; it was good that they were looking out for each other.
“Once more unto the breach,” she said, patting his space-suited shoulder with a bulky gauntlet. There were weapons on her belt, and the Free Legate jewel over her eye told him she knew both physically and ethically how to use them, but that didn’t make him any more comfortable with the necessity—or the fact that he, for the first time in his life, felt naked walking around unarmed. Maybe this will be peaceable. Maybe we can still pull that off. A lot of maybes to contend with.
They lined up by the exit. Captain Amanda cycled the lock around them and ran the decontamination protocol. The exterior door scrolled back slowly, the Quercus’s Fortune-standard atmosphere replaced by something that Danilaw’s suit sensors read as thinner than weak tea and shockingly moist.
Captain Amanda was apparently thinking the same thing. “That’s a lot of free water to leave floating around in a closed habitat …”
She never finished the sentence, which trailed off as if her voice were struck from her. Instead, they stood shoulder-to-shoulder and stock-still, neither at first quite processing what they were seeing. It was a corridor, or an accessway—a means of getting from the Quercus to the interior of the Jacob’s Ladder. But it was—
It was full of trees. Or made of trees, or a tree, or a latticing vine grown into a tree through the passage of centuries. The outside perimeter was a filigree of dark, smooth bole, heavy palmate leaves carpeting every space between. When they stepped over the threshold onto the surface, Danilaw lurched the first step as a slightly different angle of gravity asserted itself. Amanda reached out to steady him; neither fell.
From among the leaves, a swirl of atmosphere—a dust devil?—manifested. It grew and complicated, sweeping up bits of detritus into a roughly human outline. “Hello,” the projection said, as Danilaw shied back from its extended limb-approximation. “Don’t be afraid. Welcome to the world. I am Samael. I have been sent to guide you.”
An angel, Danilaw realized—and now, meeting it, he intuited its history and purpose better than he had before. One of Captain Perceval Conn’s servitors, or masters, or compatriots. Artificial intelligences originally programmed by the Kleptocracy and