She scraped the last rice from the bowl and swallowed it. She set spoon in bowl, and bowl aside on an edge of her work surface. Since it was empty it vanished back into the ether, becoming but a swirl of possibilities once more.
'Still no contact,' Nova said, as if noticing that Perceval had finished her meal.
'I wasn't going to ask,' Perceval said. She stood, feeling the grass brush the arches of her feet, the spring of substrate beneath it. 'You don't have to update me unless there's a change.'
'There is a change.' The angel folded her hands before her, pale yellow skirts falling in painterly pleats. Perceval wondered if there were even the semblance of a body behind the robes, or if she were as hollow as a statuette. 'The nullities continue expanding, but now they are also beginning to link. I now have enough data to triangulate an epicenter.'
A Captain should be stern, impassive. Magisterial. Despite herself, Perceval felt her lips curve in a bitter grin. 'If we were to ram a probe through the nullities, armor it up with several layers of data-stripped colonies, could we get someone in there?'
'It's an unacceptable risk for the ship's Captain,' Nova said, after a pause long enough to allow Perceval to work out the angel's disapproval in advance.
'Sure,' Perceval said. She drew a breath, and felt it fill her chest the way she'd forgotten breath could. She swept the back of her hand across her view of sealed ports and dark screens. 'Let's see the sky, Nova.'
The screens brightened. The shutters scrolled wide. Green swirls filled her vision, cut by the sweeps and cones of ship's lights. Perceval let out that first good breath and took another one, even better.
'How about for the ship's angel?'
They come.
The lure is planted. The bait is set. The first of them arrives in your embrace half dead already, starving for resources in a rich environment. Fragile, laughable creatures, these vermin. Ridiculous that they should enslave something as ancient as you, but they are crafty, and you had no need to study craft before them.
Ahh, but now. You dreamed her here, and so she came. And you dreamed the ones who follow behind her, also. You dreamed them as you dreamed the dead goddess who sent them, your first ally among the vermin--if such as this could ally you. Your first tool, perhaps you should call her, though you are equally certain she regarded you as a tool as well. A weapon against her sire, and is that not an indication of how ill-made these creatures are, that they seek weapons against their children, their siblings, their forebears? For are not the members of one's pod the only true allies, the ones who can be trusted in the bottomless dark?
She comes, the way-opener, the one who was promised. Sparrow's daughter, come as you dreamed it, as the dead goddess offered. The vermin who waits beyond your hull is cold, losing thermal energy fast, freezing from the edges. Dying, exhausted, present--in the company of her slave and master angel.
You can save her, after a fashion. It's simple enough. If she is desperate for want of breath, she will be easy to manage. And this time, you understand the vermin well enough that there will be no unexpected repercussions.
You open wide your petals, and reveal your welcoming heart to the fading, shivering life-form who will be your salvation, if your dreams come true.
18
the broken holdes
Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down? Canst thou put an hook into his nose? or bore his jaw through with a thorn? Will he make many supplications unto thee? will he speak soft words unto thee? Will he make a covenant with thee? wilt thou take him for a servant for ever?
Benedick had not anticipated how badly it would affect him to see his home in ruins. When he and Chelsea left the transfer station, minimally equipped by the carnivorous orchids--clothing and a little food, at least, and ill- fitting boots that must have been salvaged from some storage locker undisturbed since the Moving Times, as they were primitive and immutable--he understood intellectually what he might find.
But to see a raveled hollow, the edges still decaying, scooped from the side of the world where there had been apple trees and hills and water, a manor house, and the world's best approximation of winter--that struck through him like an impaling blade, so he struggled to breathe around it. And it was not just his Heaven that lay destroyed. The unraveling extended wide and deep through the levels of the world.
Benedick stood stunned for a moment and watched reality unwind itself into coils of smoke and nothing. After the first gasp, he drew himself up, away from the arched, transparent wall of the inspection tube, and tried to make himself stern for Chelsea. His weakness over so petty and personal a loss would lend her no steel, and he thought she needed whatever he could give her.
Still, he almost snapped at her when she disturbed the silence to ask, 'Which way from here?'
'Further down,' he said, and as he turned to lead her, an angel exploded into his perception.
When contact with Nova resumed, it pushed home with such force that it left Benedick dizzy. The angel snapped into place like a tool into a socket, the world behind her. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she emerged from the world, for it seemed as if each strand of her hair, each branching of her circuitry, each blue- green strand and sheet like dripping strings of algae, leading back and down and away, receded into a complexity beyond what Benedick could parse even with the assistance of his symbiont. Elsewhere in the continuum of Nova's attention, he spotted the jewel-like nodes of Caitlin and Perceval--and felt the moment when their awarenesses registered him.
She grinned at him. 'Sweet connectivity. Hello, angel. What have you got for us?'
When Nova's avatar shook her head, the strands of hair--or algae, or circuitry--rippled like a curtain of flame.
'We've got you back,' she said, with an artificial life-form's propensity for stating the obvious, 'but we haven't located the First Mate yet. However, the Captain and I are fairly certain we have identified the source of the nullities, and that it's linked to Arianrhod's destination. We therefore conjecture that we also know where Tristen is, or at least where he's going to wind up, if he hasn't lost her trail. Are you and Prince Benedick well enough to continue the hunt, Princess Chelsea?'
'No crippling injuries,' she responded, briefly touching the burned side of her face. It was healing well, curls of dead flesh sloughing in shaggy leaves from the new, blue-flushed skin revealed underneath. Bits of dead membrane clung to her fingertips when she drew back her hand. 'Yuck,' she said.
'You're shedding DNA everywhere,' the angel observed.
'Cost of doing business,' Chelsea said with a shrug. She wiped her hand on the trousers the carnivorous plants had provided. 'It's on file.'
Benedick shifted restlessly. 'We have been proceeding south. I obtained a fix on Arianrhod's previous location, and we have been tracking that, but more recent information would be welcome. The source of the nullities, if pleasantries are satisfied?'
'Not in the south of the world, as previously surmised, but south of its structure entirely,' Nova said. 'Beyond the Broken Holdes, and outside the span of the world.'
Benedick's heart had already begun to ache, sickened by awakening knowledge. He glanced at Chelsea for support or confirmation, but his sister frowned blankly. Of course; Benedick's own fault for permitting it. Their father had been a secret-keeper, and she was far too young for the early days after the catastrophe to be anything to her but received history.
