Dust jl-1

by Elizabeth Bear

  The chime was only a courtesy. Samael began to resolve in Dust's chamber almost instantaneously: not a full manifestation, but still something more concrete than a hologram. Real politeness would have waited for an invitation, but Samael was arrogant.

  Dust flattered himself that he could have prevented the entrance. But perhaps it was better to appear less than one was, to keep something in reserve—

  That he had lost his last argument with Samael did not mean that he would lose them all. Surely not. Still, politeness was a virtue.

  With a half-breathed sigh, he resolved a tendril into a concrete state, meeting Samael halfway.

  Samael's avatar was cleaning his nails when Dust stepped out of air beside him. It was an ostentatious nail-cleaning, involving a facsimile of a pearl-handled pocketknife, and the parings that fell to Dust's deck spread hairy roots and grew into some creepery vine heavy with fragrant, waxen flowers.

  Dust ground it under his polished black boot. "This is not the place nor the time to stake claims."

  However mildly he spoke, wherever Samael seemed to be looking, Dust knew his sibling's attention focused on him—at least as far as the current interaction went. He folded his black-sleeved arms over the silver brocade of his vest, aware that it glittered in the light like mail or scales, and let his stare rest on Samael.

  Dust's sibling affected a pale and ascetic aspect, long white-blond hair trailing in locks around a narrow basset-hound face. He frowned, and it made him look soft-eyed, but Dust knew it for artifice as surely as the band-collared shirt worn with blue jeans and bare feet and an emerald brocade tailcoat with velvet lapels.

  Self-consciously, Samael folded the knife away, and then picked lint from his shoulder. He did not flick that to the floor, but tucked it in his pocket. Which was something, Dust supposed.

  He thought Samael would counter with some comment on Dust's lack of sibling hospitality, but Samael hooked his thumbs in the waistband of his jeans. "I want to trade," he said.

  Dust stared. He brushed invisible fringes over the edges of Samael's avatar, but for all Samael's reaction the caress— or test—might have been a breath of wind. "Trade?"

  "I'm the Angel of Death, aren't I?" The knobby hands turned palm-up now. "And you're the Angel of Memory. So trade me a little knowledge for a little life. A little withholding of death, if you will."

  "Don't be ridiculous," Dust said. "You're not the angel of anything."

  "That's what they call us. And not just us. Some of them call the old crew angels and demons, too."

  "Ahh," Dust said, willing his fingers to stillness when they wanted to worry his sleeves, "but we know better, don't we? Besides, if you were the angel of anything, it would be the angel of... life-support services." He scraped his boot across the deck, leaving a green smear of chlorophyll like a punctuation mark.

  "Not very poetic," Samael said, disappointed.

  Dust shrugged. He only cared about his own poetry.

  "And anyway," Samael continued, with a sweeping dismissal that pulled shirt and coatsleeves up his bony wrist, "in the midst of life support we are in death, o my brother."

  Dust kept his attention spread through his anchore, for he suspected that Samael would have liked him to concentrate and neglect his boundaries. "Your trade sounds more like a threat than an equal exchange."

  Samael's shrug, one-shouldered with disingenuously tilted head, was disturbingly reminiscent of that of a twelve-year-old girl. "I think there's an Engine girl you've taken an interest in," he said. "What if I could help her?"

  "An Engine girl?" Dust thought he could give Samael fair competition when it came to disingenuity. Once upon a time, they would have held this meeting in the channels of the world's analytical engines, but those were long unavailable. They met in the metal if they met at all. And Samael kept all his parts tucked in, like a cat tea-cozied on the rug, so Dust couldn't even brush microsurfaces with him and see if any stray electromagnetic intelligence was seeping free.

  "Perceval Foucaulte Conn," Samael said, and if he couldn't trim his nails, he could study them. How peculiar it was, Dust thought, that a century since any of them had had much cause to interact with their creators, they still wore human guise. "She's trapped with her half sister on ep-silon deck, and she could be fumbling around down there for a good long time. She's also suffering from septicemia and a viral infection, and her symbiont is heavily stressed. She needs warmth and food. And medical attention." "And you're offering that assistance?" "It is," Samael said, "what I was built to do." "And the recompense?" That was always the rub, wasn't it? They all dealt from a position of strength; they all had their unique fields. When the Core died, the world had shifted as many of its functions into its symbionts as possible. It had saved itself, against future need. But none of those symbiont colonies could hold the entire mind of the world. They were fragments. Specialists. With differing agendas.

  They rarely got along.

  "Navigation logs," Samael said. "Starmaps. Tell me where we had been, and where we were en route to."

  "Useless," Dust said. There were no engines. There was no way to move.

  "I want to know where we are," Samael said. "Give me j that, and I spare your pet."

  Then it was Dust's turn to fiddle his fingers. "She's not I a pet."

  "Cat's-paw," Samael said. "Dupe. Whatever."

  The fragment of Dust that rode along with Perceval's gift-pinions stayed in coded contact with his main colony. He could feel her huddle tighter around Rien, shivering within the thin warmth of the wings. If she had been j closer, if he would not have had to withdraw the fragment I from contact with the suborned colony, Dust might have stroked her shaven head.

  No doubt, he thought, the child could use a little love. "Creator," Dust said, fondly. "Inventor and the daughter of inventors."

  "Heresy."

  "Nevertheless," Dust said. "Her kind invented ours."

  "How could something like that invent something like me?"

  "Nevertheless," Dust said. "It is what happened."

  "You lie."

  "No," Dust corrected. "I remember." He turned away— his avatar turned away. His own hovering attention never shifted. Not from Samael's sock-puppet, not from the boundaries of Dust's own domaine. "Navigation logs."

  "Yes."

  "That's all you want."

  "For now."

  "Help the maidens," Dust said. "I'll share the logs."

  In all fastidiousness, he would have preferred not to touch Samael. It was less risk to his own system to chip off a packet and hand it over—but he did not wish to lose that much of his colony, would not take any of Samael in return, and didn't want to give his sibling that much insight into his program.

  Instead, he bent down and "kissed" Samael on the "mouth."

  A meshing of programs, but only a surfacy one. A quick handshake and transfer of data, nothing more.

  As they broke apart, the information safely handed over, the memory of the kiss left Dust full of an aching emptiness, everywhere his airborne nanoparticles drifted and spread.

  8 poison angels

  Let the dwellers in emptiness bow down before him; in his presence, let his enemies lick up dust.

  —PSALM 72:9, New Evolutionist Bible

  No matter how she tried to pull them under the covers, Rien's feet stayed cold. She wrapped her arms around her knees and hugged her face down tight, except then it was strange that her back was so uncomfortably warm. And she couldn't breathe. The air was still and stale and tasted of sweat. Perhaps her coffin was malfunctioning. She opened her eyes, expecting energy-saving darkness, and reached out left-handed to grope for the timer switch.

  Her fingertips brushed the cool nanomesh of Perceval's parasite wing, and she jerked it back with a gasp, sucking her fingertips as if she'd burned them. "Perceval?"

  Yes. Once she was awake, even half awake, she was unlikely to forget again where she was. Her pulse hammered in her throat, a panicky adrenaline reaction, but as s
oon as she identified it her new internal senses—her colony, her symbiont—adjusted the level of worry to something more sensible and appropriate.

  "Oh, space," she said, and pushed at Perceval's arms. She had to get out. It wasn't her. There was an alien holding her, but worse, there was an alien in her, and it was making decisions for her. Don't be scared, her symbiont whispered.

  Which, predictably, scared her even more.

  Perceval's skin felt wrong. Fragile, papery. Hot. Rien thought if she pulled at it, it would slip and tear like the friable skin over a blister. Perceval moaned. Her breath smelled cloying.

  She was sick, and Rien didn't know what to do. She struggled free. Perceval's parasite wings held her in place in the corridor, but Rien kicked too hard and went tumbling. She smacked one wall, smearing fluorescent fungus across the plating, her left arm first numbed from wrist to shoulder and then searingly alive. Tears stung, swelled in the corners of watering eyes, broke from acceleration and spread. But she got her right arm and her legs out, spread them wide—though it was counterintuitive—and slowed her rate of spin.

  Rien was half competent in microgravity. But this was different. She was better, faster, seeing trajectories and velocities with her inner eye as if they were projected on a screen. And something was building in her awareness: a model or structure, a schematic of surrounding corridors that stretched beyond what she could immediately perceive. Echoes, she thought. Like a bat.

  She bounced off another wall, redirected to the far end of the corridor, and managed to hit with bent knees and take the edge off her velocity. And then she was coming back up the hall at Perceval, but slower now and in a more controlled fashion.

  And Perceval was braced.

  Rien struck Perceval's pinions with both palms. The left arm buckled, but that didn't matter; it had helped absorb some of the energy. The pinions were not hard, not like hitting the decking, and Rien managed to catch hold of an edge and hold on. "Space and ashes," Rien said.

  Perceval hung in midcorridor, suspended between extended pinions, her body curled into a fetal huddle and folded inside another pair of wings as if in a translucent clamshell. They looked like smoke, but when Rien braced herself against the extended wing and reached out to touch her sister, the surface was smooth and quite cool.

  Even through the cocooning colony, Rien could see Perceval's face shining with sweat, though, and the inflamed red streaks like spiderwebs surrounding the attachment points of her pinions. She tugged, but she had nothing to leverage against except Perceval's other wings—of which there were currently in total six, the four spanning the corridor and the two within which she slept—and it was useless.

  "Oh, please," Rien said. "I have to get her someplace with water and food."

  The pinion shifted, relaxing under Rien's hand. Abruptly, she realized how cold she was, the sweat of too-warm sleeping chilling on her skin, the ends of damp hair freezing. Perceval's pinions might have trapped the warmth when Rien was inside them, but they were themselves as cold as the corridor's frigid air. And Rien was wearing nothing but the sweeping knit trousers, cardigan, and strap-shoulder top.

  "Please," she said again, fearful she had imagined the response. "Perceval, you have the map. I need you. Open your damned pinions."

  When the shell cracked open, the warm air within escaped in a scroll of mist and flaking frost. Perceval floated limp as the third pair of pinions silently merged into the mass of the parasite wings. Rien stretched out from where she clung and touched Perceval's cheek.

  Hot and moist, and Rien's fingers smelled of sickness when she pulled them back.

  "Perceval." Her own pleading voice might have belonged to another. "That's good, sweetheart. Now open your eyes."

  It was what Head might have said. What Head had said, when Rien was little and she was sick. And whether it was Rien's tone of abject fear, or some virtue in the words, when Rien touched Perceval's face again, she turned her cheek into it.

  Slowly, the pinions relaxed further, and with unhurried motions unlike last night's frantic scuttling, began to bear Perceval and Rien forward. The feathertips—well, what would have been the feathertips, if the pinions had real feathers—bent against the corridor bulkheads, and they glided along as if borne by a giant, mechanical, four-legged spider.

  Rien released her grip on the leading edge of the wing and instead caught Perceval's shoulder, floating beside her, huddled close to share warmth. It was easy in the microgravity.

  The parasite wings paced along the corridor for some fifteen minutes, during which Rien's dark-adapted eyes saw nothing but Perceval and deck plates and the teal and lime bioluminescence of various kinds of fungus. And a school of ship-fish, a half-dozen of the oxygen-breathing scavengers floating midair, glass-transparent except for eyes and guts and teeth and streaks of blue and vermilion neon. They hung momentarily in a cloud, and then were gone in a flicker of winfings.

  Rien, light-headed from cold and poor oxygen saturation, wondered if they had come through whatever j crevice the atmosphere and spores had entered through. She would not like to be the sparrow hawk whose dinner depended on catching one.

  Eventually, the pinions paused before a hatchway like a dozen others they had passed. The burning pain in Rien's left arm had dulled to the sharp occasional twinges of a bone bruise, but without releasing Perceval's shoulders, Rien was able to grab and shake her face. "Here?"

  Perceval's eyes were crusted yellow along the lashes. She shivered, and Rien's clothes were wet with Perceval's musty sweat. Whatever the infection, her symbiont was having a fight.

  "Open it," she said, her voice cracked and sticky. "We might be safe in here."

  Rien tried the palm panel, but the hatch—like the previous ones—was dead. Instead, she undogged it manually, made sure Perceval's pinions would hold her in place, and—with one hand holding her sister's—pulled the hatch open.

  At least she knew it wasn't the Enemy on the other side. Overpressure pushed the door into her hand. Her ears popped painfully, and Rien made a small sharp noise.

  The atmosphere that rushed out to surround them was warm and moist, scented pleasantly of chlorophyll and richly composted loam. Birds sang; the interior of the hatch cover trailed vines heavy with unripe slipskin grapes, and a drone of insects broke what Rien now realized was the humming, mechanical unsilence of the cold corridor. There was gravity beyond the door, and she swung forward half deftly to get her feet into it and feel the strength.

  The ship-fish had not come from here.

  Rien swung again, using Perceval's pinions like monkey bars. She generated enough momentum to carry her over the threshold and landed barefoot on mossy soil that squished water over her toes.

  She pulled her injured arm against her chest, hugging it for comfort, and stepped forward. "Perceval," she said. "You found it."

  There was no sound behind her. She turned; Perceval still floated amid the charcoal sketch of her parasite wings. Her eyes were only glassy slits behind her lashes.

  "Pinion," Rien said, feeling foolish, "please follow."

  They moved forward, smooth and graceful, with the speed and assurance of a giant spider. The trailing wing brushed the vine-hung hatch closed again, and Rien heard the thump of bolts as it sealed.

  Then she also heard a flurry of wings, not Perceval's, but smaller and soft-feathered. Something white as star-shine and bigger than a rooster descended before her, fluttering hard.

  The wings were so pale the blood tinted the light shining through them blue, the span a little more than the length of one of Rien's legs. The animal had fishhook talons like a hawk, a long neck leading to a cockatoo-crested head with a heavy, curved, lacquer-black beak. But the eyes were tight-shut, eyelids like the crumpled crepe of an old man's throat, and the tail that coiled around the branch it landed on lashed, scaled and patterned silver-on-blue-white.

  "I am Gavin," said the basilisk. "Welcome to this Heaven, daughters of Benedick."

  Rien did not know w
hat Perceval would have done, but she could imagine it.

  She stepped between the basilisk and her sister. The branch still swayed under its sudden weight, its wings fanning lightly for balance. Rien had seen a mountebank's parrot on a swing, and she thought of that now.

  She didn't know what she'd do when it lunged. Its toes and talons measured together were as long as her pinky finger; its beak looked strong enough to snip that finger off. When it turned its head side to side, she was certain it was measuring the distance between them, and no matter that its eyes were closed. She crouched under its gaze, extended her right arm—the left still stung numb—and groped in wet earth and leaf litter for a stone, a branch ... anything.

  "I greet you politely," the basilisk said. "And you fumble for a rock. Is this how you meet a stranger on the road in Rule? I would worry about your courtesy to guests."

  The oddest thing was its beak, moving like a hand puppet's mouth. Exactly as if a beak and a thick black tongue could form the sounds of human speech—

  Rien remembered the parrot, and shut her gaping jaw. She didn't straighten, though, or drop a knee. Fair words or not, after the past few hours she was not eager to trust a stranger. "I beg your pardon," she said. And pointed back, with her elbow like a bird's bent wing, at Perceval. "This is how we treat guests in Rule. I would not recommend you go there."

  "Indeed. I am your guide to this Heaven, though, and if you come with me I will see what we can do to aid you."

  "And if I don't come with you?"

  The basilisk flipped its wings closed, flight feathers crossing over its back. The sequiny scales on the tail, she saw, made a reticulated pattern in unpigmented white and silver, the bluer, grayer scales showing the color of the blood beneath.

  "Your sister is sick," it said. "If you do not come with me, what will you do?"

  It waited a moment, as if it actually expected her to answer. And when she didn't, its tail uncoiled from the branch with all the sleekness of a heavy-bodied snake, the undersurface hollowing, pulling broad scales into an arch. It launched itself into the air, circled—over Rien's head, but not passing over Perceval—and reversed direction.