Grail - Elizabeth Bear [96]
That surprised Perceval into a chuckle. “I think if I’m replaced by Ariane Conn,” she said, “or even the ghost of her, it won’t take you too long to notice. Random hideous murders of people just standing around in corridor intersections minding their own business would fairly quickly give her away. If it doesn’t, you’ll probably catch her after the next erratic cleansing of strangers and hirees who got in her way, or who knew too much.”
The Angel snorted silently, which told Perceval she was winning. But Nova would not be made to back down so easily.
—I could disconnect a body,—she said. Nova’s bodies were disposable. They weighed a few pounds, no more, and they could be dissolved back into the world’s colony core when abandoned.—Just to watch over you.—
“Nova.”
Perceval had never yet seen an Angel make that particular expression—childlike, rueful, reprimanded. She wondered from which of Nova’s component parts it had come, and then wished she hadn’t. These days, she usually managed to see Nova as Nova, rather than the sum of her parts. But there were always the inevitable lapses.
Each time they happened, Perceval considered editing out the emotional/mnemonic function that reminded her of lost loves. And each time, she put the decision off for another day. The pain faded naturally with the years, but she was loathe to lose it all. It might prickle, but it prickled because it was the relic of something dear.
She met Nova’s level look with one of her own. The Angel was the first to glance down.
—As you wish.—
Perceval forced a smile. “I’ll knock to be let out.”
No passes, no incantations, no prestidigitator’s gesturing. Just the veil of titanium drawn transparent across the gap, then thickening, opaquing, and the Angel’s face vanishing behind it. Her interior voice went silent at the same time, and Perceval was left with the bottomless, unsettling emptiness of being alone in her own head for the first time in a half century.
It was cold in the library, and there was no oxygen. It didn’t matter; she was the Captain of the Jacob’s Ladder, and adapted to life in a fragile world that rested like a jewel in the black velvet bosom of the Enemy. She would have liked to have drawn a breath for the simple kinetic consolation of it, but comforted herself with folded arms instead. This was a closed space, small and dark. She was alone here, alone with the voices in her head. And there was a warden outside, to keep her safe from the world and the world safe away from her.
She was Perceval. She was strong. She could do this thing.
She placed the palm of one hand against the cold, cold wall of ice, hard as stone and unmelting before the mere warm heat of any mortal flesh. She grounded herself in that reality and went within.
There were shapes in her head—enemies and strangers. There were people in her program she never would have invited there. The program informed the meat, and the meat informed the person who identified as Perceval, and the person who called herself Perceval controlled the program. An endless loop, an oceanic cycle.
One of those people was the pallid remnant of Ariane Conn—a thing Perceval did not touch willingly or often. Now, though, she girded her loins, rolled up her sleeves, and waded into the fray. For Rien, for Caitlin, for Oliver—for everything Ariane had broken, and everything she had destroyed.
It was not easy.
It was rather like catching an oil slick, to begin with. Ariane might be in her head—might clamor for attention, attempt to force her twisted wisdom on Perceval, might be only a reflection and a memory of the madwoman who had been Ariane Conn in truth—but that did not mean she cared to let Perceval lay hands on her, even metaphorically. Her surface was greasy and insubstantial, and below that the personality of the dead Commodore was thick and sludgy, putrid, repellent. It was probably Perceval’s loathing for Ariane that was corrupting the program (she was reasonably certain that Ariane the narcissist had never seen herself as revolting), but