transition from clothes to robe and back again--and released his tethers from the floor. 'Your turn. Go get cleaned up, and I'll mind the forum.'
He arched his back and raised his arms, stretching the drape of nanochains like a canopy overhead. When he lowered them again, he said, 'Thank you. No word from the prodigals; communication has not been restored. But Nova and I found some things that may be useful to us.'
'Star charts?' She said it with arch amusement, trying to get a smile, but he answered seriously.
'Not that good. But there's a
Caitlin felt herself begin to smile. 'Astrogation.'
He grinned back before he brushed past her. 'After all, it's what I do.'
While he was gone, she drew rations and arranged a meal: nothing exciting, but a selection of carbohydrates, fats, minerals, and amino acids that would keep two people and their colonies functional and in good repair. When Jsutien reemerged from the locker room, hair still trailing wisps of steam, she tossed him one prewarmed consumable tube of grayish porridge. He caught it, nanochains flaring like a microgravity dancer's drapes, and bit off the top. The gel crunched audibly between his teeth.
'Nature-identical grape,' he said, with a wrinkled nose. 'Boy, this takes me back. And not in an entirely pleasant fashion.'
Caitlin grinned between slurps of porridge. The taste was too sweet, harshly artificial, without the nuance or subtlety of real fruit. 'What's it like?'
'Being back?'
She tossed him a pod of water, too, and watched Oliver's body snag it by reflex at the top of its trajectory. 'Being in the future. If that's not a cruel question.'
He bit open the water, too--stale, if Caitlin's was anything to go on--and sucked it dry, throat and jaw working as he washed down sticky porridge. Then he crumpled up the pod, which crackled in his fist, and shoved it into his mouth. Buying time, Caitlin thought. The contemplative thoroughness of his chewing did nothing to disabuse her of the notion.
Seconds later, he swallowed and said, 'It's a lot like the porridge.'
Under Caitlin's fingertips, readouts tracked, averaged, and streamlined billions of processes, keeping her apprised of repair and defense trends worldwide. There was no need for her to look at the external display, which was only a fail-safe. All the information she needed was right there in her hands. 'I beg your pardon?'
'The porridge,' he said, patting Oliver's stomach. 'Or maybe I should say,
A novel was a kind of static entertainment in the written word. Like a story, but fixed as it was written rather than interactive. Immutable. A historical document.
Caitlin thought she was coming to understand Damian Jsutien. Like him, she finished the last of her rations, then said, 'I am given to understand that you weren't faithful, then.'
He dropped back onto his cot, raking both hands through Oliver's tousled curls, which were still flattened here and there from sleeping. 'What's faith? I was an astrogator. It was my business to lie, not to believe.'
'So why did you come along, if you knew it was a lie?'
'If I knew it was a journey without a destination?' The thing he did with his mouth hurt her, just watching it. 'Better ask why my grandmother came. Why did she take that leap of faith? She wasn't a believer either, not when I knew her. But I imagine whatever she left behind must have been worse than the prospect of death in the cold, for her and her descendants.'
'Were there a lot like her?'
He scratched the side of his chin, fingernails burring against stubble. 'Enough. More than a few. I hope it does not horrify you, the revelation that some of the Builders were cynical.'
Cynical. What a comforting euphemism to mean deception, betrayal, the treacherous use of the faith of hundreds of thousands to lure them to their deaths. 'I know about the bodies in the holdes,' Caitlin said, the most neutral answer she could manage.
'Without data,' he said, 'we always assumed that if the Builders were not simply evil--and that's a lot of pointless work, for evil--they must have been driven by desperation, and the threat of consequences so dire that sending thousands to die in the embrace of the Enemy seemed like a sensible use of resources.' Jsutien waved grandly to Central Engineering, a gesture that encompassed not only the space he and Caitlin inhabited, but all the wrecked world beyond. 'On the other hand, it's also possible that some of them were possessed of a pioneering spirit.'
'People are fundamentally lazy,' she agreed, 'but it's true. Historically speaking--things get colonized somehow. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to rake you over the coals for your dead grandmother's choices.'
'The way you've been raked over the coals of your father's choices, all these years?'
Tentative camaraderie cracked as Caitlin's hand closed convulsively on the nanochain control key in her pocket. 'How do you know that?' she asked, then pinched her lower lip between her teeth to keep from grinding them.
Jsutien, frowning at an image tank, seemed oblivious to her dismay. He had one finger extended as he traced something of interest through the bewildering partial schematic that hung before him, his tongue protruding like a child's in concentration. She imagined young Oliver had never looked so patient, so stern, and it crossed Caitlin's mind to wonder how old Jsutien had been when he died. Old, she'd guess, by Mean standards.
Old and treacherous. She would have to remember that, however fresh and felicitous the face he wore.
'Your brother,' he said. 'You. The obvious family tension between the two of you. The way you avoid eye contact with him. The fact that, except for Tristen, none of the Conns I remember seem to be alive anymore.'
'It's been a long time,' Caitlin said, trying to make it sound like she was only returning his volley. She chafed her cold hands together, trying to restore sensation. Flakes of hoarfrost broke from her shirt cuffs and drifted down. 'Almost nobody you remember is alive anymore, Damian Jsutien.'
That got him to glance away from his tank and crinkle the corners of his eyes in a grin like a lynx's. 'Conns are dangerous. That, I'm pretty sure, will never change.'
Although she was never in solitude, the Captain dined alone. Her meal was rice, greens, yams, and textured vegetable protein, which she shoveled down like sawdust. She ate from a bowl that did not exist with a spoon conjured of primal forces, her eating so mechanical that she'd half finished the food before she paused to marvel at the tools in her hands. 'What a strange old world,' she said.
Across the green field of the bridge, Nova looked up from her work, and Perceval noticed that her effort to define their relationship seemed to be helping the angel's avatar set into a definable shape. Brown skin and silver hair, yes. Nothing like Rien. But female, and soft-eyed, and so nothing like Samael either. Or Dust.
There was no need for the angel's avatar to pretend to be hard at work, or even to make itself apparent when it was not interacting with meat-and-bone crew, but Perceval found herself more comfortable with the illusion that she knew where the angel was and what she was doing--though as an Engineer she also found this a shameful anthropocentrism. Still, she was also more comfortable with its avatar's pretense of being engaged in some vital business. Intellectually, she knew that it was nothing but an animation. Emotionally, instinctively, however, for her to see Nova from the corner of her eye, hands moving and head bowed over a set of displays, helped her accept the angel as a team member and an ally.
She needed that. She needed, she thought dismally, all the help she could get. Because her first response was to recoil from Nova, from the connection she could always feel at her edges, as if Nova were an invader rather than an invited guest. She did not want the angel in her head. She did not want the angel so sharp, and so near.
She'd never expressed those preferences to Nova. But Nova had guessed, or had read them in her subconscious.
