Grail - Elizabeth Bear [91]
“Rats?” He nodded. “Rats and roaches. They follow humanity everywhere.”
“Mmm,” Tristen said. “In that relationship, who has evolved to exploit whom?” He shook his head. “I do not think, Administrator Bakare, that we are all that different. I do not think that we interact with the world and each other with such deep moral differences. I think we have different terms for what we do—that what you term The Obligation, we term Chivalry. But I do think we have common ground, and I think we can find more.” He paused. “My people, you understand, are very adaptable.”
* * *
After the meeting, Samael in all his patchwork magnificence showed Danilaw and Amanda to the quarters they’d inhabit for the rest of their trip home. It was not a long walk—apparently Captain Perceval had seen merit in keeping them centrally located—but it was as full of revelations as every other walk around the corridors had been.
Walking on yielding moss down a spaceship gangway, Danilaw began to understand that the entire starship was an ecosphere—an ecology far more delicately balanced than that of Fortune. And far more aggressively managed. It revealed something to him about the Jacobeans’ culture and experience, if he thought on it carefully. Of course, evolution must be managed. Of course, a biosphere must be maintained.
They had never known another way.
Thinking distracted him, but neither Amanda nor Samael seemed inclined to make small talk, so he needed not divide his attention. It might have been better if he had, however, because he tripped and almost fell when he realized that the large, ornately floral shrub that they were about to pass along the corridor wall was in fact moving. Walking, or not precisely walking, toward them.
It was a bundle of spear-shaped leaves and boles, six tiger-striped, fuchsia-and-lemon flower heads bobbing above its back. Danilaw shied back against the corridor wall as it turned to him; on his left, he felt Amanda do the same.
The giant, self-mobile orchid turned to them and bent its thorn-fanged flower faces into something that looked like a smile. “Welcome, visitors,” it said, and kept walking.
Samael had drawn ahead, and with a glance to Amanda, Danilaw hurried to catch up. Beside him, Amanda stretched her legs. “Talking plant,” she whispered.
He nodded. “I noticed.”
On behalf of his Captain, the Angel of Biosystems apologized for the size and inelegance of the quarters before vanishing in a scatter of withered petals and beetle wings, leaving Danilaw feeling as if he had just choked on his tongue.
The “cramped” quarters they would share were half again as large as the crew habitat on the Quercus, and every square millimeter was soft with life. Mosses ran up the bulkheads so that Danilaw could not tell if the architecture of the space—an anchore, Samael called it—was truly all but cornerless or if it had merely been softened by centuries of growth. Vines—heavy, swaying, and hung with flowers Danilaw did not recognize—curtained two padded alcoves lined with fluffy blankets and pillows absorbent, springy, and soft.
After the Angel left, Amanda took a slow spin at the center of the room, diffuse light dappling her hair. “I don’t know how we’ll adapt,” she said, giving Danilaw a glance through her eyelashes he could only regard as flirtatious.
He smiled back and plunked himself on the mossy edge of the nearer bunk. The tough, yielding little plants were warm above and cool below, exactly as if they had been warmed by the sun. He held his hand out into those spots of light that had scattered across Amanda’s head and shoulders. They shifted, the vining leaves draping the ceiling turning in the breeze from the ventilation ducts. Full-spectrum, warm against his skin.
Behind the vines, rusty stains climbed the mesh the plants twined through, and Danilaw could see where centuries of growth and death had stretched the holes and torn the strands.
Danilaw felt his face prickle.