Whatever Tristen had been about to mouth, unthinking, died upon his tongue. He eased his shoulders in his armor, feeling it resist and settle as he pushed against the gel interior.
"I think you were right," he said.
Dorcas led them through the Heaven like a woman showing them around her house. The snakes and sycophants had mostly dispersed, returning to their tasks in the near-vertical rice paddies, and Mallory came up to walk beside them, Samael trailing like a wisp of smoke behind. Dorcas acknowledged Mallory with a nod, but otherwise continued to speak chiefly to Tristen. To judge by smirk alone, Mallory was more amused than offended.
"Soothe my curiosity," Tristen said. "Why in the world are you willing to help us?"
"Is it not the role of a dutiful daughter?" She must have seen his wince, because she looked away, as if scanning the moss-draped boughs, and gave him a moment to recollect himself. Neither Sparrow nor Aefre had ever had need of such social manners, so the gesture carried with it a hard freight of reminder that Dorcas was not Sparrow.
Again.
Tristen was still working to swallow that when she said, "The reason for our existence as a sect is gone, you know. We are under way again. A solution has been implemented, and in any case, we no longer have the option of abandoning the world and returning home. We have been infected with your symbiont, against our wills; the purity of our form is compromised."
Tristen was tempted to comment on the fact that Dorcas herself had enjoyed the benefits of her symbiont for the last five hundred years, without apparent ill effect to her rise among her church-but under the circ.u.mstances he considered the wisdom of discretion and bit his tongue.
She continued, "Which means that if we are to survive in the world to come, we must make some choices. a.s.suming we live to reach a planetfall, it"s likely to take all of us working together. And toward that end, I can think of worse allies than the world"s First Mate." She paused. "So, to put it in plain terms, you have pa.s.sed my test. And whatever I have done today to earn your enmity, I hope that it will be balanced against the aid I offer now."
"I see," he said. "You will understand if I make no promises?"
She smiled and glanced aside. "What will you do with Arianrhod when you find her?"
"Bring her to justice," Tristen said. Unable to resist, he raised his eyebrows and added, "You know all about that."
Maybe it was too early to tease her-though after all, she had started it. Or maybe not, because the sharp glance she gave him modulated smoothly from irritation to amus.e.m.e.nt. Dorcas, Tristen suspected, was a person who took quiet pride in not becoming irritated.
She said, "I don"t suppose you know where you"re going?"
Gavin"s long neck rose above Mallory"s frizzy curls. "South," he said. "Into the belly of the beast."
Dorcas chuckled. "It"s possible you speak truer than you know. I can get you to the bottom of the world, to the Broken Holdes. Can you find your way from there?"
"Inasmuch as we know where we are going," Tristen said. "Something down there has interfered with the world-angel"s sensory apparatus, and we are only guessing based on another tracking party"s information that her destination is somewhere in the null patch." He would not tell her, just now, how long it had been since his team had had contact with Bened.i.c.k and Chelsea, or with Nova and Perceval.
"The null patch," Dorcas echoed. "You really have no idea what lives there?"
Samael mimicked a few quick strides and came up between them. "You do?"
"We know all sorts of things," Dorcas said. "Many of us-we were Engineers, remember? After I was a soldier, I became an Engineer, inspired by the memory of Hero Ng." She lowered her voice and spoke conspiratorially. "Some of us are more cynical than others when it comes to the question of the will of G.o.d."
Tristen glanced at Samael, at Gavin, at Mallory-each by turn. All three avoided his gaze. "Some of us learned our cynicism the hard way," he replied. "So what"s in the null zone?"
"Cynric"s last weapon," she said. "A captive monster. A demon so terrible that, after she captured it, Captain Gerald concealed its existence from all but a few. When Alasdair became Commodore after him, Alasdair hid it even from his children, for fear of what they would do with the information."
"For fear of what he"d made them, you mean."
She smiled. "Perhaps that, as well. In any case, Cynric caught two of them. One she took apart, and made things of the pieces. The other she kept captive, held in reserve."
"She used it," Gavin said, craning his neck around to stare at Samael. "Do you really claim no knowledge, Poison Angel, of what it was your mistress wrought?"
"My memory is incomplete," Samael said drily. "Do enlighten us."
Tristen wondered if the basilisk"s glance at Dorcas was meant as a request for permission. She made no move to interrupt, and he continued, "She built on it, the way she built on everything she touched, everything she knew. As Dorcas said, she created it a weapon."
"Something to fight our father," Tristen said. "Well, I guess if anyone would remember that-"
Gavin flipped his wings, tail coiling and uncoiling along Mallory"s spine so that Tristen wondered what social discomfort looked like on a power tool.
"Those memories are not mine," Gavin said. "And they are ... also incomplete. So you have a route that will take us there, My Lady of the Edenites?"
"We have more than that," she said. "We have regained some limited control of the world"s musculature. I can put you there."
In unison, Mallory and Samael said, "Musculature?" which made Tristen feel somewhat more comfortable in his own ignorance.
Dorcas pressed her palms to her eyes. "By the sacred spiral, people. Do you know how the world generates its electricity?"
Silence answered her.
She sighed. Then her hands began to move animatedly as she explained. "It"s not just the reactors or the solar panels. I"ll give you a hint. The exterior of the world is sheathed in self-healing carbon nanotube "muscle" that can be used to move portions of the structure around relative to one another."
"That"s ingenious," Samael said.
"It"s not rocket science." Her lips twisted. "Actually, I guess after a fashion, it is. When not in operation, the musculature uses flex and inertial effects to generate electricity. Thereby"-she snapped her fingers-"keeping the lights on. And the temperature constant, though under the current circ.u.mstances I wouldn"t be surprised if there are failures on that front."
Tristen blinked, trying to integrate the scientist now emerging with the autocratic priestess he"d thought he was dealing with.
Mallory came to the rescue. "It is our information that there have been failures, some catastrophic. The angel and Engineering were working to contain them when we entered your Heaven. It is possible that by now they"ve been redressed."
"Your confidence in your masters is touching."
Tristen said, "One thing that troubles me still, Dorcas. When we came in, we saw sc.r.a.pe marks in the air lock. As if you had been discarding trash."
She made a moue. "Sacrifices," she said. "Some believe in appeasing the Enemy."
"Oh," he said. "I see." Desperate for a change of topic, he added, "When do we reach your mode of transport, then?"
"We"re in it," Dorcas said. "And in fact, if you look up ahead, you"ll see we"re almost there."
Tristen craned his neck. Through the tunnel of bowering trees, he glimpsed the hard, clean oval of an air lock. "We"re moving."
"Relative to the rest of the world, anyway," she said. She paused, one hand hovering over a DNA lock. She palmed it and the door slid aside, revealing a standard barren cubicle.
It crossed Tristen"s mind to imagine that she might very well just decoy them inside to s.p.a.ce them, but if that happened, it wasn"t as if he and Mallory couldn"t survive the Enemy"s embrace for a few moments.
He turned to Dorcas and said, "Thank you. If we survive this-"
"You"ll be in touch," she said, and touched the armor over his right arm. She met his eyes. "Go with luck. I think you will be sad a long time, Tristen Tiger. But I hope not too sad."
When they pa.s.sed through the air lock and the interior door sealed across Dorcas"s face, Gavin found himself prey to emotions too complex by half for a simple power tool. Grief, regret, guilt, resignation.
These were not his emotions. His emotions currently encompa.s.sed concerned antic.i.p.ation at what they might find ahead, irritation at the delay, vulture worry. The others-the indescribable ones, the painful ones-he knew better than to try to own them. They belonged to someone else, someone to whom he bore no more resemblance than Nova did to Rien. Than Dorcas did to Sparrow. But in conjunction with that knowledge came the uncomfortable corollary: whatever he had behind him had left traces.
As shields glided up over the external windows before him, he observed the latticework architecture scrolling past on all sides and the looming wall of their destination before them. It was an old world, scarred and scorched, blasted bright by radiation and by particles in the nebula. Made clean and new. But inside, so much history, so much betrayal, and so many twisted loyalties.
He wondered if Dorcas were the tabula rasa she pretended.
Tristen seemed impa.s.sive, leading Gavin to suspect that his internal turmoil mirrored Gavin"s own. Gavin was not prey to the irrational hormonal urges of meat-a kindness for which he thanked his makers-but he was not without feelings. Early researchers had determined that there was no intelligence without desire, and had proven the dispa.s.sionate artificial brain to be a wishful construct of twentieth-century myth. Synbiotic emotion might be chilly and distant by human standards, but it existed. Reason was not possible in its absence.
Gavin felt for Tristen, and only part of that was his program for empathy. Because as sequestered memory cascades continued triggering, he remembered what Sparrow had meant to Cynric. Sparrow was not merely the daughter of Cynric"s heart-Cynric, like Perceval, had chosen to remain fallow-but a daughter of her own creation, as well. There were secrets in Sparrow"s bloodline, data and talents that Cynric the Sorceress had selected for and machined into the genome.
Then she had hidden them from Gavin, choosing to forget, when she had also chosen to die by her brother Bened.i.c.k"s hand.
Gavin felt her back there now like a shadow over his shoulder, a person he didn"t know but somehow remembered s.n.a.t.c.hes of. He thought she had been a strange and manipulative person, even by the standards of the Conn family, and that she had had agendas and obligations that she had never shared with anyone-not Caithness, not Caitlin, and she certainly had not pa.s.sed them on to him.
There was no doubt in his mind that the resurrection of Sparrow"s body in service of a slain Engineer was not an accident. And it made him wonder, then, how Sparrow had died that her body was preserved, but there had been no backup of her mind-not even so much as a seed personality-so soon after the Moving Times, when such technology was still common.
Something must have left her damaged enough that her colony"s memory failed. And perhaps she had made a core seed, and it had been purged-either to make a place for some fragment of the world-angel, or in the service of intentional murder.
Despite the value of hindsight-perhaps especially in hindsight-Gavin found he did not much like Cynric. Or even her memory. And yet these were her fond feelings for Sparrow infecting him.
As the exterior air lock cycled, the basilisk hunkered on Mallory"s shoulder and kept his own counsel.
What stood revealed beyond seemed innocuous enough. Gavin identified a garden, chestnut trees made to seem venerable, mossy stones walling a yard. The corner of a building framed one side of the prospect, and as they emerged cautiously from the air lock, Gavin"s senses informed him that the s.p.a.ce was little more than an acre and a half in area, a tiny Heaven if it qualified as a Heaven at all. The trees were still healing, fat cracks twisting along their boles in some places, but there was some damage that would take years to mend. Heavy shelf mushrooms lay crushed at their bases, and once they were clear of the lock it became evident that the stones forming the back side of the building had tumbled into a heap.
The facade still stood on the near side, however, hollow-eyed and showing the foliage behind it through the windows. Around the footings, colored shards sparkled against gra.s.s, light reflecting from hard-edged splinters.
Tristen unsealed his helm and jolted forward, nearly running, Samael at his heels. Mallory advanced more cautiously, so Gavin had only to fan his wings for balance.
Gavin said, "It"s a chapel."
"It"s mined stone," Tristen corrected, dropping to his knees beside it. "Mined stone."
"From Earth?" Gavin asked. He flapped hard, kicking off Mallory"s shoulder, and flew up to circle the top of the chapel wall. He could see chisel marks, it was true, though it was common enough to fake those-but when he landed and his claws sc.r.a.ped rock, he felt the deadness of it, the internal weight, and knew that no colony had ever touched this stuff. "It came off a planet?"
"Can you imagine how much energy that cost?" Mallory"s voice had enough awe in it that Gavin snaked his head over the edge to look down, but the necromancer had merely paused beside Tristen and knelt there, running long fingers through the s.h.a.ggy gra.s.s. "Ow!"
"Careful," Gavin said helpfully. "Broken gla.s.s is sharp."
"I noticed," Mallory said, frowning at blue-spotted fingers. "What"s gla.s.s?"
"Fused silica," Gavin said. "Very hard. Very brittle."
"Very heavy," Samael commented, selecting a piece and running ghostly fingers through it. "The Builders put this here."
"It certainly got made before the world left the home system." Tristen reached out to touch the stone, his gauntlet slicking back from his fingers. He stroked the wall of the chapel with a reverential hesitancy, then grimaced at his fingers. "It feels like stone."
Mallory said, "No wonder the Go-backs had a means to get here."
"Indeed." His armor would have given him a sensory sphere as complete as Gavin"s, but Tristen nevertheless glanced over his shoulder as if expecting to find somebody watching. He shook his head. "It"s a little piece of what we were. It looks so ..."
"Primitive?" Gavin suggested.
"Fragile," Samael said. "Somebody should see if they can check in with Nova."
"I already tried," Tristen answered, as Gavin felt the attention of another colony tickle along the borders of his awareness. "Still no contact. Come on. We"re on the clock."
"We"re on the clock," Gavin agreed. "And something"s coming."
The something was a familiar s.h.a.ggy-humped outline bigger than a mastiff dog. As they came up on it, Tristen easily identified the mammoth calf he had insisted they free from its trap among the ma.s.sive fig tree"s roots. It waited for them by the far air lock, beyond a gap in the garden wall, its trunk raised as if it were scenting the air, its piggish eyes blinking through strands of coat.
"It followed me home," Samael said. "Can I keep it?"
Tristen shot the angel a scathing glance. "Tell me the truth. You don"t actually know how that got here, how it got ahead of us. Or do you?"
"I don"t," Samael answered, with every evidence of seriousness and sincerity-though an angel could not lie to his First Mate. Theoretically. "But it"s Exalt-more than Exalt. I can feel the edges of its colony from here."
"That"s what I sensed back at the chapel," Gavin agreed. "It"s waiting for us."
"The world is weird," Tristen said, a catchphrase his mother had been fond of. "Let"s go see what it wants, shall we?"
They picked their way toward the gap, Tristen in the lead with one hand on Mirth"s hilt. He tried to move with grace, but now that his euphoria was fading he felt the stiffness in every limb, damage from the cobra venom that his colony had not yet restored.
Tristen paused a few steps from the calf and held out his other hand, fingers flattened to present as smooth a target as possible. The calf tapped his palm with its trunk, fingerlike nubbins moving on his palm. Warm, moist air huffed against his skin. "h.e.l.lo," Tristen said.
The mammoth calf opened its mouth and said, "-"
Mallory blinked and turned toward it. He held out one hand. "Tristen."
"What was that sound?"
"A language," Mallory said. "The Language. Did you not understand it?" Perhaps- "Yes," Tristen answered, knowing what it meant. Not knowing how he had understood it. "How do you know that?"
Mallory said, "I am full of dead men."
Oh.
The necromancer continued, "Job forty-one. Verses thirty-two and thirty-four. You know them."
"In my bones," Tristen agreed.
But he allowed Mallory to recite them. "He maketh a path to shine after him; one would think the deep to be h.o.a.ry. Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear."
Samael, who had been standing silent, head c.o.c.ked and staring, jerked himself upright like a badly managed puppet. "It"s a key. Remember it."
"A key?" Tristen frowned at the angel, hard enough that his face found it uncomfortable. "A key to what?"
The angel spread his arms, lank, pale locks stirring as though his gesture made a wind. "That information has not yet been unlocked to my program," he said. "But I would wager the mammoth knows."
"Great," Gavin said. "What the h.e.l.l are we going to do with a mammoth?"