Grail - Elizabeth Bear [78]
Samael nodded. Even in profile, the mosaic-approximation of a beaky, lined human face was three-dimensional and compelling. “She was the head of genetic engineering, five hundred and fifty years ago. You can meet her.”
“Meet her?”
“For certain. Or her remnant, at least. She is alive again, though incomplete from what she was. There are also a couple of true survivors of the Moving Times and the Breaking. We anticipated that you might be interested in speaking with them.”
Five hundred and fifty, Danilaw mouthed to Amanda through his faceplate.
She shrugged, as if other insanities still held more of her attention. Mole rat DNA, she mouthed back.
Danilaw nodded. Okay, so living five hundred years wasn’t such a surprise after that. Obviously, the Jacob’s Ladder survivors had developed life-extending technology. Or they habitually put people in cold storage for centuries at a stretch. One, Danilaw thought, was as likely as the other, though the idea of this ancient genetic engineer being alive “again,” and somehow damaged by the process, supported the cryogenic theory.
“Where are we going now?” Amanda asked, stretching her legs to keep up with the Angel. He wasn’t tall, but then Danilaw guessed that he also probably wasn’t walking.
“Directly to the Captain,” Samael said. “It’s a big world, however, and I ask you to bear with me.”
A big world indeed. They hiked for over an hour, leaving Danilaw grateful that he’d kept up with his fitness Obligation. Even servo-assisted and allowing for the Jacob’s Ladder’s intermittent gravity, his pressure suit was heavy for walking in. At least it processed heat efficiently, or he imagined his visor would have fogged past visibility in the first fifteen minutes.
He was glad it didn’t. Because the Jacob’s Ladder—or the world, as Samael insisted on referring to it—only became more grand and improbable with what every turning revealed, what lay behind every air lock, gate, or grid.
Each time the Angel, obviously accustomed to taking into account the frailties of corporeal life-forms, apologized for not taking them along the scenic route, Danilaw felt his disbelief strengthen. It would have been difficult to imagine anything more compelling than the insanely complicated ecosystems and architectures he and Amanda were being led through.
The travelers toiled up mossy boulders past cataracts of tumbling water, and animals and birds Danilaw could not begin to identify flocked in every environment. Glades of trees filled arching passageways with transparent walls that showed the architecture of the Jacob’s Ladder from within. But for all its wonders, the ship had a patched, weary air to it, like a made-over old quilt ready for the recyclers.
“Here we are,” Samael finally said. “The library.”
It was not, as the door glided wide, what Danilaw would have identified as a library. No paper books, no clay tablets, no inscribed jewels. No holographic, Bose-Einstein, or magnetic records. No papyrus scrolls and no solid-state archives.
Just a grove of fruit trees, stretching to the curved outside wall of a vast space, surrounded on every side by hungry emptiness.
“Library,” Captain Amanda said. She turned her head, and then her entire body, rotating in her footsteps. Danilaw knew she was scanning the space with her suit recorders, transmitting the data home. As Legate, one of her Obligations was to science and history. “This is your library?”
Here, the atmosphere was warm and thick—a rich mix of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen, with trace elements. Some products of decomposition, some by-products of living things metabolizing. He wished he dared breathe it; from the way the mossy soil dented under his feet, he imagined it smelled intensely green.
Danilaw’s own sensors told him that a warm body was approaching through