Grail - Elizabeth Bear [95]
“That was—” Nova said, and if the Angel were not a program, Perceval fancied she would have been able to hear the distaste in her voice.
“Dust’s place,” Perceval agreed. He had never brought her here, preferring the Bridge and the cargo bays for her education, but a wise Captain knew her ship.
“The old computer core,” Nova said, in the voice of one intentionally amending another’s statement when that statement has unintentionally given offense.
Perceval let herself smile, just the corners of her mouth turning upward. It rewarded the Angel when the Angel was making an effort to chivvy her from her brown study. And when Perceval would not be chivvied, such as now. “Let me in.”
Nova made no argument. Her hesitation before following the instruction was so slight it did not even begin to approximate disobedience—so slight nothing less than an Exalt would have even noticed it. Then the Angel spread her arms—a theatrical but dramatic gesture.
Seemingly instantaneously, layers of metal and earth and circuitry and ice began to divide, split, and peel back like the petals of an impossibly robust and complex flower. Ice sparkled in breathless drifts across the darkness of the Enemy, pollinating nothing. Some of the piping had once been warm, but no water flowed through the space now. It was cold and empty.
At last, a stark chamber stood open to space, honeycombed with frozen water. The remnants of the world’s hydrostatic computer core, with its embedded atomic-level read-only memory. The remnants of the physical body of Jacob Dust, the ship’s library.
The ship’s memory, until Nova had eaten him.
This was where he had been born.
No one came near, not even the Angel. Perceval moved toward the center of the architecture of frozen water, sliding herself through razor-paned, fragile knifeblades. Blessing her slightness as she seldom did, she turned sideways to infiltrate between the toothy monoliths of icicles that might be a thousand years old.
When she was seated—she could not say comfortably—among the crystals of solid water as a mouse might secrete itself in a geode, she raised her hand to Nova again. Though she beckoned the Angel closer, she stopped as if limited by propriety at the edge of the chamber.—This is not my place.—
In the silence of vacuum, Perceval could not form the words aloud, but she could make Nova hear them. “You won’t come with me?”
—You are Captain,—Nova said.—I am construct. What do you want me to say?—
Feeling the cold of the ice pillars brush her skin, feeling the tiny water droplets, Perceval slid herself into a corner like a key wedging into a lock. “Seal me up in here,” she said.
Nova jerked back.—I beg your pardon?—
Perceval sighed. “Seal me up. I have someone I need to talk to, and I can’t risk her at large in the world.”
—Shall I isolate the hardware?—
“You shall,” Perceval said, “although I expect it’s too damaged to be of much use. And you shall withdraw yourself as well. You could provide her with a conduit for escape. I fear we must treat the Princess Ariane, when she is aware and unfettered, as a viral presence. I am confident that, offered the slightest chance, she will replicate, spread, and infect anything she can. She may be only a shadow of what she was, but what she was was a treacherousness that surpassed knowledge.”
Nova tilted her head, the brown locks breaking across her face in a manner she must have studied recordings for, because Perceval’s hair certainly never did anything so engaging.—You expect me to leave you in there alone and unsupervised, in the company of Ariane Conn?—
“A mere shadow,” Perceval scoffed. “Don’t forget, I once defeated the real thing. I don’t expect a lot of trouble from a mindprint. Most especially a mindprint I’ve already beaten, and beaten the body it came in, too.”
Nova folded her imaginary arms.—Still.—
“Still,” Perceval answered. “I will be fine, and you may not monitor me.”
—How will any of us know if you lose the battle? What if your shadow of Ariane takes control of you? Then we’ll have two of