Grail - Elizabeth Bear [85]
What he saw beyond the hatchway was exactly what he had anticipated. From the expressions behind the faceplates of the evolved and yet atavistic humans surrounding him, he imagined they were experiencing a more complicated emotional journey, but his own response was first the terrible sorrow and acceptance, and second the cataloging of what must be done to alleviate the situation.
The delicate docking cradle that had so gently webbed in the Quercus was reduced to writhing shards. The limbs that had surrounded it had been deformed by the force of the blast. The debris of the research scull itself was secured within a sort of silvery cargo net. Danilaw could not immediately identify its manufacture. As he watched, it writhed and grew, and spread itself across another few meters of scrap.
The damage was just as the animation had led him to believe, but other elements of the scene seemed wrong.
Danilaw expected salvage equipment, men and women in these shells of strange pressure armor—hardened by its own molecular bonds rather than by programmable fields—working feverishly. He expected medical teams and docbots—and what he saw was a strange absence of most of these things.
Before his eyes, the damage was unknitting itself, the world remade as if someone were running the animation of the explosion in reverse. It was the sort of effect one expected to see in an entertainment, and it stopped him cold where he hung.
He drifted silently for a moment, then opened his mouth and said, “Mallory? Who is effecting those repairs?”
“The Angel,” Mallory said, as if it were a perfectly everyday sort of sentence. “She says there are six crew members mind-dead, a few dozen crew and organisms injured, and the ladder tree was destroyed beyond salvage.”
“Oh,” Perceval said. “That is a pity.”
Mind-dead? Danilaw wondered. But it seemed like an inopportune time to ask.
“Can we clone her?” Tristen asked.
“There should be salvageable cellular material,” Mallory said. “If any of it has an intact nucleus, we can replace the ladder tree. It won’t bring back her experiences, but we have a recent backup. But … it will take centuries for her to grow so large and knowledgeable again.”
“We don’t have centuries,” Perceval said. Danilaw had the distinct sense that quietly, contained within herself, she was grieving.
“Not if Danilaw lets us land,” Mallory said. “But then that begs the question—what would we have done with her when we got to Grail, anyway? What will we do with all our biodiversity?”
“Grail?” Danilaw asked, to cover his flinch. It was an excellent question.
“Your world,” Perceval said, floating before that enormous emptiness. “What do you call it?”
“Fortune,” Danilaw said. “And the sister world is Favor.”
Perceval turned to him and extended an armored hand. “Thank you, Administrator,” she said. “There is little else we can accomplish here. Will you and the Captain join us for dinner?”
She’d asked them if they would prefer a formal dinner and a full presentation to the senior crew, but Administrator Danilaw and Captain Amanda had argued gently for a little more privacy. “The flower of diplomacy likes a well-composted bed,” Danilaw had said, and Perceval had stared at him for a full three seconds before realizing that he was being intentionally ridiculous. The Mean has a sense of humor. It did, in fact, endear him to her—just a little.
And so she fed them on the Bridge, at a table Nova built for the occasion—not too large, oval in shape, the glossy flat surface growing up from the grassy deck on twisted legs as if it had always been rooted there. The food was kept plain, though Head exercised all hir considerable ingenuity on making it also delicious. Sie always said it was more a test of the cook’s art and discrimination to make the simple great, anyway.
Perceval had wondered if her dinner guests would find the food strange, and as truth would have