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 circumstances 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 scrape 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 space 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 passed 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 encompassed concerned anticipation 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 impassive, 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 dispassionate 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 Benedick's hand.
Gavin felt her back there now like a shadow over his shoulder, a person he didn't know but somehow remembered snatches 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 passed 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 space 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 grass, 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
'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 scraped rock, he felt the deadness of it, the internal weight, and knew that no colony had ever touched this stuff. 'It came off a
'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 shaggy grass. 'Ow!'
'Careful,' Gavin said helpfully. 'Broken glass is sharp.'
'I noticed,' Mallory said, frowning at blue-spotted fingers. 'What's glass?'
'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
