Dust

Perceval staggered two steps past her, turned, and caught herself on a twist of ductwork when she almost fell. But she lifted her eyes to Rien's and met them. 'Where's the bck, Rien?'

'Aren't you listening?'

'Rien.'

Rien rolled her eyes, shoved her frizzing tangles off her face, and jerked her chin down a side corridor. 'Here.'

'Come on.' Perceval was dragging Rien again, but once she turned the corner she could see the massive vault door of the air lock. It gave her strength. They were alone in the corridor, though the wail of the siren and the thump of emergency lights on her retinas made her shudder with adrenaline.

Perceval grabbed the great old use-polished wheel on the air-lock door and twisted. Rien, surprising her, grabbed and strained as well. 'Told you,' she said, when the weight resisted them. But then she gasped, and leaned into it harder, as—under Perceval's strength, even without mechanical assistance—the lock began to turn.

Perceval might be light as a ghost, made of twigs and wire. But she was Exalt, daughter of Engineers and the House of Conn, and there was machine strength in her blood. From behind them, she heard running footsteps. She ducked her head and covered Rien with her body as a needle-gun sprayed the bulkhead.

The flesh of her palms broke open on the steel. But that steel yielded and, by inches, the door—thicker than her waist—cracked open. She dropped one arm around Rien and pulled her through and in.

Sealing the door was easier. She thought she felt hands fighting her as she dogged and locked it, but there was an emergency override, and she slapped it. Spring-loaded, ceramic bolts shot home, the impact shivering through the walls of the world.

One would need to cut through to open the interior door.

'Safe,' Perceval said, and sagged against the wall for a moment. The pain of the contact shocked her back to her feet; she had forgotten the wounds. When she lurched forward she tripped and would have fallen if Rien had not steadied her. Without her wings, she was awkward and easily overbalanced.

'Trapped,' Rien replied, turning to look at the exterior door. Her shoulders hunched. She knotted her hands together. 'We don't keep suits in the locks. I told you.'

'You won't need a suit,' Perceval said, 'if you will trust me.'

'Trust you to what?'

'Exalt you.' Perceval stroked Rien's arm. The flesh felt cool under the cardigan, but Perceval thought that was just her own fever.

'Infect me?' Rien turned, abruptly, light on the balls of her feet, and backed away from Perceval's touch. 'You want to colonize me.'

Perceval shrugged. 'You've the blood to sustain it. You're old enough. You should have received a colony years ago. And it will keep you alive'—a gesture at the exterior air-lock door—'Outside.'

Rien had put her back to the Outside. And on the inside door, Perceval now heard rhythmic hammering.

'What if I'm not?'

'Not?'

'Not your sister.' She shook her head, her hair moving on her neck the way Perceval's once had. 'Not Benedick's daughter.'

Perceval could not help herself. She spread out her hands, palms toward Rien, and tilted her head. 'Then it will kill you, Mean.'

Rien gestured over Perceval's shoulder. 'And so will they.'

'Yes.'

'Fine then,' Rien said, all hollow bravado, and stepped forward into Perceval's arms.

Rien thought it would hurt. She imagined it would be hard, the initiation, that there would be some sense of transformation or wildfire intimation of change.

Not so.

Perceval embraced her, and she smelled the blood and the antiseptic, and when she lowered her mouth over Rien's, Rien tasted the faint sourness of uncleaned teeth. One would think her colony would take care of that for her, but then, it had perhaps been busy.

The kiss was long and soft, fever-hot and gentle, although holding Perceval in her arms was not unlike embracing a rope ladder. Her lips were soft and cracked over the firmness of her teeth, and it seemed as if Rien expanded on her breath like a blown balloon. Rien was reminded that she had always preferred young women.

She giggled, embarrassed, and stepped back—

—and felt, of a sudden, not outside herself, but rather inside herself as she had never felt before. It snapped in, as a whole, abrupt and perfect, the image and awareness of every nerve and every cell. She felt the colony engage her, accept her, rush with each beat of her heart on oxygenated blood to every extremity.

It felt curiously natural.

'Oh,' she said.

'Breathe deep.' Perceval was fiddling with the key, reshaping her dress into something else. A propulsion pack.

'Let the colony get as much oxygen as it can. We should have about fifteen minutes. I can get us out of Rule in fifteen minutes, and safe back inside.'

If it was bravado, Rien would rather not know. 'What about the cold?' she asked. 'And ebullism?'

'Don't worry; your colony can maintain pressure. It will keep your eyeballs from freezing or your fluids from boiling until long after we run out of oxygen.'

'Oh. Good to know.'

Perceval laughed. 'Hold onto my harness. I'm going to break the door open now. I won't be able to talk to you once we're outside, so just—-for the love of all your ancestors, when we get out there—hang on.'

Hold on. Breathe deep.

Simple enough.

When the massive door swung open, though, and the puff of escaping air sailed them grandly into the crooked sunlight between the world's vast webworked cables, Rien forgot anything but the cold black fire-pricked vault of the universe stretching out forever, and the wheeling world that framed it on each side.

6 the beast in the heart of the world

In the sweat of thy fate shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; but out of it wast thou taken: dust thou art, yet absent dust shalt thou be exalted.

—GENESIS 3:19, New Evolutionist Bible

Everyone else had forgotten, or was forbidden from remembering, which came to the same thing. Dust had never been human, but he remembered.

He remembered more of being human than the humans did. He contained novels and dramas, actors and singers, stories long untold. He contained histories dead a thousand Earth years. Dead to the world, anyway.

The same thing. The same.

No one in the world had seen a single yellow sun, dug fingers into crumbling natural earth, felt an acid rain trace down her face. Dust had never seen, felt, tasted any of these things either. But he recollected them.

In proper terms, he could not see, feel, taste in any case. But he could approximate. Smell was only a matter of detecting and sorting drifting molecules. Seeing was only a matter of detecting and sorting bounced light.

And what he could not approximate, he could remember.