Dust jl-1

by Elizabeth Bear

  Perceval stepped back beside her and caught her elbow, bracing her under the heavy pack. Ahead, the men stopped and waited, turning over their shoulders. "Okay?" Tristen said.

  "When we were outside, before—" Rien leaned gratefully on Perceval's strength. "I didn't have time to look."

  Perceval said nothing, just held her arm and gave her that time. Rien made herself breathe slowly, calmly, and inspect her surroundings one element at a time.

  They were in a kind of tunnel-corridor, a transparent tube that lifted away from the dead holde and soared out, reaching on a graceful arc. The world itself hung below, starkly lit; they were above the shadow panels, and Rien could see the photocell surfaces as they turned to the suns.

  From here, she could observe the structure of the Jacob's Ladder. She'd had a confused idea of lattices and bulbous habitats, of corridors threading asymmetrically over the surfaces of anchores and domaines. Of gray metal and patchy paint. Now she saw the world in all its incomprehensible vastness, like a grandly rotating three-dimensional spiderweb, and the complexity bewildered her. "How did they ever move this thing?"

  "How are we going to move it, you mean?"

  Rien swallowed, and tried not to succumb to Hero Ng's despair or her own awe. "It's huge."

  "It's the world," Perceval said. Her parasite wings were bronze in the sunlight, translucent but glittering. She'd let Rien help her shave her head again before they left their father's house, and her scalp was starting, slowly, to match the rest of her in color. "It'll take us five days to walk across. How big did you think it was?"

  Rien shook her head and shaded her eyes from the suns. When she peeped at them—quickly, because even with her symbiont's assistance, the glare was far too bright to stare into—she couldn't tell if they were brighter, or closer, or anything. The light that poured over her was austere, the shadows edged like chips of volcanic glass.

  There wasn't anything to say. There weren't any words. The urge to say anything, to fill up the silence, welled up in Rien, but she knew it for a petty thing and swallowed it. You could try to speak, try to make your mark on this. But it would only make you look ridiculous and weak.

  "Thank you," Rien said when she had looked her fill. The soaring sensation in her belly made her think of when Perceval dived from the air lock holding onto her, and she breathed deeply because she could, and because it felt right. "I can't see the end."

  "We have to save this," Perceval said, hushed. Rien thought she didn't need to speak for Perceval to know she agreed.

  "Come on," Tristen said, when both girls proved reluctant to break the spell. "Let's find a place to sleep."

  They walked in near-silence after that, Gavin clucking to himself occasionally and Perceval maintaining her grip on Rien. As they came down the far side of the arch, she leaned close and said in Rien's ear, "I'm glad you saved me."

  Sometimes people said an obvious thing, and what they meant by it wasn't obvious at all. "I'm glad, too."

  And then Perceval grabbed her by the arm with both hands and flung her away.

  The gravity in the corridor was slight, but definite. Rien half slid, half catapulted into Benedick, who was already turning to catch her. She landed in his arms and he did not fall backward. If he staggered a step, Tristen caught him.

  "Stay back." Perceval stood some meters up the arch of the tube, her hands knotted in fists by her thighs, Pinion flaring, bladed, from her shoulders. Between them, Gavin beat wings slowly, hovering in the light gravity like a moth. "Please." "Perceval—"

  "Stay back!" Her head dropped, the tendons of her neck ridging as if she strained at some impossible burden. "It's the wings."

  Rien might have charged forward, but Benedick's hand was on her shoulder. He pulled her back, clutching, dragging her toward the lock at the bottom of the arch. She fought him, after a moment of shock, trying to reach Perceval.

  It never happened.

  Pinion flexed. The parasite wings convulsed, Perceval's clenched fists opened as she reached spastically forward, caught at the heart of a brazen, shadowy blur.

  An instant later, Gavin's spread wings and tail and talons telescoped, slamming into the sides of the inspection tube. A spiderwork of fine threads grew between them like crystals racing through a supersaturated solution. The tube beyond him shattered. Whatever Perceval might have shouted was lost in the rush of escaping air.

  Benedick curled around Rien as they were blown off their feet. He folded her tight, shielded her with his body, and as they tumbled toward the webwork with Gavin spread-eagled at its heart, Rien saw Perceval fall into the embrace of the Enemy, wings dividing and flailing, the fragments all around her full of refracted sun like shattered crystal.

  21 oh child, he said, all sorrow

  Eager for color, for beauty,

  soon discontented

  With a world of dust and stones and

  flesh too ailing.

  — CONRAD AIKEN, The House of Dust

  When Pinion brought Perceval into Dust's embrace, she was cold. Frost rimed her lashes, crystallizing from the moist air of his holde like pale mascara. He enfolded her, agitating the air around her, creating friction and with it, gentle warmth. He had oxygenated the atmosphere, increased the light levels, made it ready for a human woman.

  Pinion warmed her blood; the link was complete now, and she was as fused to the prosthesis as she had ever been to her engineered wings.

  When she was warm, but still semiconscious, Dust stepped into his avatar—taking special care with his dress—and with Pinion's help hoisted her to her feet. The parasite wings walked her to the bed that awaited her and laid her gently down, folding her tight in their shadows. Protection and restraint.

  She looked very stark there, all in black. Straps crossed her shoulders, but the pack had been tattered by Pinion's struggles, and Dust asked the wings politely to remove its remnants now. They did so, spitting the rag onto the floor, and while his avatar still stood over Perceval, Dust carried it to be recycled.

  His anchore, he realized, was hardly suitable for a mortal guest. Without so much as a gesture, he rearranged himself into chair, table, couch. He brought clean water and fruit and protein.

  And then he settled himself to wait.

  In minutes, she stirred. Pinion and her own symbiont colony, indivisible now, were scrubbing her blood, oxygenating her tissues, repairing cell walls burst by freezing and the damage done by her own boiling bodily fluids. She would be over the injuries before she had a chance to feel them.

  Dust would see to it that she never knew pain again. Never knew doubt, or hunger. And he would try to see to it that she never knew grief, though that was harder to guarantee.

  There was no hair on her forehead to brush away, but he reached out anyway, a cool cloth in his hand, and bathed her brow. "Wake, my beloved."

  Her eyes came open like unshuttered windows. Dust was an imaginative sort; all of the literature the builders had thought worthy, or entertaining, was in his program. He fancied, for a moment, that he could see the suns behind her eyes.

  Of course, it was only poetry.

  And whatever he thought he saw died when she cringed away from him. "Fear not," he said. "You will come to no harm. Perceval Conn, you are precious to me."

  She awakened warm, and comforted, embraced as if in her mother's arms. But something felt wrong—the voice, the hand on her forehead. When she opened her eyes, she did not recognize her surroundings, or the man who stood over her. It all smelled different, cold.

  Uninhabited.

  The man was dark, clear-eyed, beautifully dressed and unhandsome, not tall. He murmured endearments and stroked her face again.

  She trusted him immediately, and knew that she had no logical reason to do so. "Rien?"

  "She is safe," he said. "As are the princes. My brother's servitor protected them."

  "Your brother—"

  "Samael," he said. "The basilisk is his creature."

  "Space," Perceval said. Sh
e flinched back. Her emotions said trust, and it was hard to think through them. Pheromones, perhaps, or an endorphin cocktail fed her by the parasite wings. She should have hacked them off in the snow, if she had to use the dulled edge of Tristen's broken unblade to do so. "You're Dust."

  "Jacob Dust," he said. "Shipmind, shipsoul. Synthetic sapience. Distributed man. At your service, beloved."

  "I am not—" Something squeezed in her chest when she would have said, not your beloved. It hurt. She gasped.

  Was this what Rien felt, when Perceval would not kiss her?

  It was just a chemical cocktail. Dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, oxytocin, and vasopressin. Just the drugs of the brain, an evolutionary response to encourage self-interested individuals to risk everything to propagate. Her symbiont could shut it down—should be shutting it down. Something had affected her program.

  Pinion. Of course.

  She firmed her jaw. "I am not your beloved. I do not love you."

  She would have edged back, but Pinion lived up to its name. It was like struggling in a cotton wool binding; she might contrive to bang her head upon the pillow or kick her heels, but otherwise she was constrained.

  Dust bent down and kissed her forehead. His lips were cool, perfectly resilient. Inhumanly perfect, where Rien's had been warm and rough and damp.

  The chaste small kiss sent a flush of warmth through her.

  She spat in his face.

  The spittle vanished as it struck him, and he drew back and smiled. "Beloved," he said. "Claim me, and I will do your will. I am yours by right, through the line of your foremothers and forefathers. Only let me own you. Perceval. My darling."

  She gritted her teeth and did not speak. "Let me up," she said. "Your monster is hurting me."

  "You can't escape," he said.

  "I'm sure your precautions are exemplary. May I pee?"

  Rien could never have explained how they made it to the air lock. Once the decompression was over—it took hardly any time at all—they managed to scramble to the handholds along the walls of the shattered tunnel. Gavin collapsed into himself when they were secure and clutched Rien's pack, hunkering against her shoulders.

  Following Benedick through the eerie silence, followed by Tristen, she clambered along the rungs, moving as fast as possible without drifting into Benedick's trailing feet. Gravity had failed when the tube broke, and Rien thought the induction fields that delicately manipulated the electromagnetic field to shield the world from the waystars' radiation had likely failed as well.

  In case having been spaced were not encouragement enough to hurry.

  At the end of the tube, Benedick keyed the air lock. Despite her colony, Rien's head already swam with oxygen starvation. She waited for the lock to jam, the power to fail. She had grown too aware of how fragile the world was, how many ways there were to damage it. And in all honesty, she half expected sabotage.

  When the air lock opened smoothly, without releasing a puff of vapor, she had to grit her teeth to restrain the urge to shout. Benedick hauled her after him; she turned and grabbed Tristen's wrist to perform the same service for him. And then they were within, the door sealing, the silence of emptiness replaced by the welcome hiss of atmosphere. Rien's ears popped painfully, as they must have done when she decompressed; it was a miracle her eardrums weren't shattered.

  But then, the Exalt were full of miracles.

  She shook herself. She was getting entirely too accustomed to this Exalt thing, and—

  —and shouldn't she? Wasn't it what she was, now? Should she walk around terrified of her own blood all the time?

  The alternative wasn't only being like Ariane. There was Tristen and Benedick and Mallory. And Perceval.

  Rien curled her nails into her palms. "How are we going to get her back?"

  Gavin hopped from her pack to her shoulder. She reached up, plucked him off, and hugged him in both arms. Like a child clinging to a cuddler, but if that was what it took, she'd do it. He let her, too, serpent's tail dangling and his long neck looped over the back of hers. Watching Benedick and Tristen trade glances made her j feel even more like a child, and that was not okay. "Whatever you two are not saying—"

  "We need to go on to Engine," Benedick said, and Rien gaped.

  "How can you say that?"

  At least Tristen had the decency to show reluctance. Or feign it, though Rien hoped that was only her own bitter suspicion. He cleared his throat and rubbed his cleanshaven cheek with the back of his hand. "It's what Perceval would say, were she with us," he said. "The world is at stake, not only her. And we have no way of knowing where she was taken."

  "And in Engine is her mother," Benedict said. And where another man might have elaborated, he left the implications for Rien to figure out herself, if she could.

  Caitlin Conn was a Chief Engineer. And Rien had no idea what her capabilities were. A week since, and she would have said the Exalt could do anything.

  She looked at her hands.

  "Space with you both," she said, and strode out past Benedick as soon as the air lock irised open, trying very hard not to stomp in a manner of which Head would not have approved. And if Dust had Perceval, and Head was dead...

  Benedick and Tristen were what she had in the world. Even if they were conspiring to parent her.

  It was only a corridor beyond, a low-volume accessway carpeted in overgrown grass. The trimmers had not been by. Rien's legs swished through it; it grabbed at her knees. Strands tugged and broke against her trousers at each stride.

  "Well, hurry up," she called over her shoulder. "You can make me keep walking. But I'm going to walk as far as I can."

  "Rien," Tristen called, "you shouldn't go blithely where you can't see your feet."

  And on the heel of his words, Benedick shouted, "Stop! Holdfast!"

  Rien stopped. It was a voice of command, and it shocked her into immobile obedience, one foot lifted in the air. She teetered, caught herself without dropping the basilisk, and put her shoe down in the print she'd raised it from.

  "Gavin, do you see anything?"

  "Yes," he said. His head tickled below her ear. She felt his beak moving, and then all of him as he wriggled and slithered around the back of her neck until he was crouched on her shoulder again. "Listen to Benedick. Fear not. But be very still, Rien."

  Perceval ate and drank what was provided. She could have starved herself to make a point, but that would have been foolish. Anything Dust cared to introduce into her system, he would not have needed to lace into her dinner. Her every unruly emotion was proof of that.

  At least he had the decency not to watch her dining— well, not in his avatar, though his amorphous person might have been all around her—and to provide fresh clothes and a place to bathe. A shower; hot fresh water. Running water. If it wasn't clean, her symbiont could handle most things.

  Even an engineered influenza. She hadn't told Rien, because it would have been cruel to make her worry about things that were not her fault and which she could not control, but Perceval was still concerned about that.

  If Ariane suffered and died in an ague, it served her right. But Perceval couldn't crave vengeance on all of Rule—well, she could, but she chose not to—and Perceval knew something she hadn't told Rien. The Engine and Rule strains of symbiont were different. It was possible that an illness Perceval could survive (and Rien, colonized by Perceval's symbiont, as well) would be devastating to someone who bore the blood of Rule.

  Perceval was as helpless to affect that as was Rien. But it did not stop her fretting. Even the endorphin cocktail she swam in was insufficient distraction, and she kept telling herself, silently repeating, that she needed to worry as well about that.

  But, "Is this clean?" she asked, to have something to say.

  "Clean enough to drink," he said. "Fear not; the gray water is recycled. I recall gardens, which I shall show you when you are refreshed."

  He gave her privacy again, or as much privacy as she could have with his c
reature welded to her back. The stall was large enough for both Perceval and Pinion, however, and she made a festival of the shower.

  Drying herself in warm air and fluffy towels, she thought, perhaps he isn't so bad. And then she thought also, that is how the hostage identification process starts, dear Perceval.

  When she was dressed, she called to him. "Dust?"

  Following a crystal chime, his voice came from everywhere and none. "Pinion will lead you."

  Words that should have destroyed any warmth she might be feeling, but she was drugged. It helped to think of it that way: drugged on her own chemicals. If she could externalize, make the emotion other, she would not believe it.

  She could not believe it. She could not trust her own desires, only her own discipline.

  She prayed it should prove adequate to the task. "I don't like what you're doing to my brain," she said as she followed the route indicated by the parasite wings. It was a gray corridor, one wall broken occasionally by observation ports. She hesitated to peer through one, like a kidnapped princess peering through an embrasure. It was a dark view; if she cocked her head just right, she could see portions of the world's superstructure backlit by the suns, but no light fell through to illuminate her immediate surroundings. They were deep within the world, and its hungry latticework structure had consumed the available light.

  "Claim me," Dust said. "Be mine. And you can order otherwise."

  He appeared beside her, popping into existence with little fanfare, a cheap special effect. She schooled herself, and did not flinch away.

  "Just through here," he said. He gestured her on with a flourish; a door slid open as she approached. Failing another plan, she went where she was directed.

  He had promised her a garden.

  And so he gave.

  She floated off her feet as she stepped across the threshold, but Pinion was there, supporting her, slow wingbeats shaping her rise. There was light here, a cold reflected light, diffuse, not the hard flat watery light of Benedick's orchard. And the trees—