Dust

The one who must be Samael stood and made as if to bow over Rien's hand. She kept it firmly at her side, and over his shoulder saw Perceval smile at her. Bull by the balls, she thought, and looked the Angel of Biosystems in the eye before she said, 'We're going to have to move the world.'

It didn't quite set him back on his heels, and anything he gave away would be intentional, anyway—she wasn't about to forget that he was an animation—but he did nod, and meet her just as directly. 'The lady is correct.'

'But the world has no engines,' she said, and thought: Oh, Space. He likes me. Or at least, she imagined that that was what the angel's steady smile meant. She didn't tell him that it was Hero Ng's knowledge he smiled at.

He ushered her away from Tristen, toward the table, and into a seat, which he pulled out for her. She permitted herself to be seated, appreciative that her chair was next to Perceval's, as Samael said, 'And perceptive. As you observe, this does present a difficulty. Because first, we are going to have to further repair the world.'

Silence greeted his proclamation.

And then Perceval said, as if she had been expecting Benedick or Tristen to step in, 'How do you propose to do that, sir, when all of Engine and all your brothers have been unable to do more than keep the ship alive and patched up for the past half a thousand Solar years?'

'Metatron is dead,' Samael said. 'And so is Susabo, the Angel of Propulsion. We'll go to Engine, and we will teach them how to heal those wounds.'

Rien had to reach out and grab Perceval's forearm to steady herself. 'We can't,' she said, quick and firm—like Head speaking to the butler. 'We have to go to Rule. There's sickness there—'

'Didn't you want to head off the war?'

'How did you know that?'

He touched the lobe of one ear, obviously amused that she had even bothered asking. 'Still a demiurge. In any case, your best chance for stopping the fighting is to bring Perceval back to Engine.'

'Someone in Engine betrayed her,' Rien said, as Tristen put a hand on the table and reminded, 'I have business in Rule, as does Sir Perceval.'

Benedick nodded. 'Business better addressed with an army at your back, brother, if you arrive back in Rule while Ariane is Commodore.'

Silence. Rien squeezed Perceval's wrist until Perceval wrapped Rien's fingers in her own much longer ones. Tristen tapped each nail in turn on the tabletop, and Rien looked down. Predictable. The men were ganging up on them.

In the following silence, the servant reappeared. Silent as always, he slid a plate of egg-sub and toast in front of Rien and then slipped away again.

She let go of Perceval's wrist and picked up her fork. Tiredness and frustration aside, she needed the food. She hoped there was more in the kitchen.

'Very well,' Perceval said, saving Rien one more time. 'We will go to my home in Engine, then.'

How quickly the years fall away and the passage of time ceases meaning. We have each a purpose: we are bred to it, engineered for it, or we are drawn to it out of some fathomless innate longing that we cannot explain. Some unlucky few must discover—or create—it on their own, but those are rarer in these days, when by the grace of the forebears we are manufactured to our place in the order of the world.

We have our destinies. We race for them, fight for them, fulfill them.

Or we fail them.

Listen, Perceval. Do you hear your long immortal life stretched out before you, before the stars?

I have so much to teach you, my dear.

The young do not believe in endings. They do not believe in death. They do not believe in time. Everything takes forever to happen, and twenty years is a long time.

Under those circumstances, the apocalypse can seem sexy. Death is a fetish, a taste of the edge.

It is not real.

And so the days are long, and though time holds us green and dying, we cannot feel the drag of our chains hauling us forward to the end.

But the old, Perceval. The old have forgiven time. Whatever time you may have is too little. If you live a thousand years—as I nearly have, and you surely will—it does not matter. Unless you have given up, laid down your tools, and folded idle hands to wait, beloved, you will still be in the middle of something when you die.

The world is a wheel, and we are all broken on it.

And that is fine and just.

For there is never any hurry, until there is no time.

A presence touched Dust's fringes, and a voice spoke from the vortex of the air. 'Musing on the fate of worlds, dear brother?'

'Asrafil,' Dust said. 'Well. I greet thee, Angel of Blades. I was expecting brother Samael.'

Dust turned from his contemplation, and coalesced. Not in his own chambers; less greatly daring than Samael, perhaps, but Asrafil not chosen to enter Dust's domaine. They met where their edges brushed, in one of the voids in the world's great Tinkertoy structure.

Contrary to the epithet, Asrafil carried no weapons. When he coalesced, he wore an avatar Dust knew of old, which gave Dust pause for a fraction of a second. Why did they still wear these human skins, when they so rarely spoke to humans anymore?

It was in the design, of course. Reflexive.

Part of the program, a kind of junk DN A.

Asrafil's chosen form was that of a man, bird-boned and frail, without Samael's hard muscularity. His scalp shone bare, more polished than shaven, and he wore black— gloves, shoes, an ankle-length wide-lapeled coat like a pillar—that only accentuated his slenderness. He seemed far too small to be the source of the air of wicked malice that surrounded him, but Dust knew better. 'I trust we need not debate the gravity of the situation?'

Dust chose not to acknowledge the pun. The crinkle at the corner of Asrafil's left eye was enough to tell him it was intentional. 'You want help.'

Inevitable. You never saw your family until they wanted something.

Asrafil smiled, the corners of his mouth lifting to 'his ears in an expression that was chilling even by angelic standards.

'You know, brother. I did not murder Metatron.' One long gloved finger tapped his temple, just in the dimple of the sphenoid bone. 'I keep him by me, always handy. All is made right: he hasn't left me since we quarreled.'

'I am going to assume that was not meant as a threat.'

'How can it be a threat, Jacob, when we both know how this must end? If we survive, if we preserve the world, one of us will inevitably subsume the other.'

Dust studied his fingernails. The great wheel of the world turned in the suns, shadows drifting across its latticed surfaces. The cold of space was nothing to him, and his avatar would not drift; he was anchored in the invisible fringe of his own being. 'You think it shall come down to you and me?'

Asrafil's motionlessness remained unnerving, no matter how long he floated there, arms crossed, head angled slightly. 'Already, you snatch Samael's servants away. I should think that a very clear message. How many of the others could stand before either of us? It must be you or me, in the end.'

Dust made a noncommittal noise. 'I should come out here more often,' he said. 'Look at that.'

That was the suns, entwined in their love that was death, the dominant dwarf partner gleaming like a diamond at the center of its barred accretion disk, the red giant mottled with sullen spots. The luminous hues of the accretion disk were as lovely as any sunset, infrared at the outer edges and stark white at the inner, shading through crimson and vermilion and a lucent orange that pierced Dust to the heart of his aesthetic