Grail

For Arthur bound them not to singleness.

Brave hearts and clean! and yet—God guide them—young.

—ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, “Merlin and Vivien”

Samael the Angel huddled beside a stand of carnivorous mimosa at the edge of a derelict commuter pit, something small and fragile in his hands. Overhead, flocks of green birds wheeled, clamoring, in vaulted spaces against a metal sky. He crouched, cupping it close to his bosom and under his chin. The protectiveness was symbolic; his corporeal body, such as it was, was delineated by swirls of leaf scraps and flower petals, an organic mosaic like an old-Earth parade float—although those had been a festival of conspicuous consumption, and he was … salvage.

On so many fronts.

And so was the thing in his hands—or the energy fields, demarcated by shimmering bands of pollen and pine needles, that passed for his hands. It was tiny and hotter than blood—a naked, bony, pulsing thing dotted with pinfeathers, the head no more than a gaping beak and tight-squinched eyes.

Deep inside it, an ancient and tidily engineered inducer virus pulsed as well, a blue glow imbued with energy, intellect, memory, and will. Samael could feel it, alive and cognizant, as alien as the stone-souled silicon space creature from which Cynric Conn the Sorceress had birthed it.

Samael—Angel of poisons, mutagens, life support, evolution—was not entirely sure what it was thinking in there. But the parrotlet chick he cradled was part of a larger organism as well, and so precious not just for what it was—a life—but also a link to the larger chain of being: the great hierarchy of creation from God to Captain to Angel to Crew, and so on down the line.

Samael felt the Conn woman coming long before her shadow fell across him. Her white robes swept around him; the sapphire in her nostril glittered green. She laid elegant fingers on his shoulder— in his shoulder, for his leaf-litter self indented to her touch and the particles of his being bent around her—and leaned down.

“One of ours,” Cynric said, delighted. Her long face was transformed by a smile. “They’re still flourishing.”

“You wrought well,” he allowed. He shifted the birdlet to one hand and plucked a berry from his breast to feed it, crushing the fruit between fingers that barely existed. Stained blue now, the bird-mouth still gaped greedily. “She fell from the nest. Or perhaps the parents rejected her.”

“Can I see?”

Cynric’s hands were long and blue-white, and far more corporeal than Samael’s own without being any less ethereal. She cupped the birdlet and bent her head to it, leaning close until she took its tiny head into her mouth. It stilled in the dark, and Samael tilted his head to watch.

There was no decisive crunch this time. “Healthy,” she said, having run her assessments and lowered her hands. “Back up into the nest with you, adorable.”

Flocks of green parrotlets, no longer from beak to tail tip than the length of her hand from palm heel to fingertip, mobbed her screaming as she stood up tall and reached spindle arms into the thorny, sensitive branches of the mimosa. The tree swept feathery leaves aside, obedient to the will of the Conn who had engineered its forebears, revealing three stick-and-feather nests full to brimming with huddled, pulsing baby birds.

She leaned in close, sniffing, seemingly impervious to the way the angry flock wheeled and dove and chattered, some going so far as to strike her with doubled talons or pull the strands of her hair. Deliberate, considering, she settled finally on the highest nest and reached within. Samael had never quite had human senses, but he’d lived all his life around women and men, both Exalt and Mean, and so it was no great stretch to imagine her fingers brushing between fragile, prickly, sticky-moist bodies to make space for the lost nestling, and the way her other hand deftly slid it back into the company of its brethren. She breathed over the nest, a benediction or a prayer, and let the branches fall protectively back over the nursery.

As she stepped back, Samael caught her smiling. Feathers drifted around her, shed down from her cloud of protesters, one fingertip-tiny lime-rind-colored wing covert snagged in her hair, its threadlike strands in disarray. Samael swept the detritus up on his covalent fields and drew it into himself, raw material for shirt collar, eyebrows, a flamboyant braided down-fluff earring. That one feather, though, he reached out and plucked up with the simulacra of his fingers.

He smoothed the vanes into a semblance of order and tucked it into his own hair, among the chaff and milkweed floss and dandelion clocks and wheatgrass. Some tiny remnant of the parent parrotlet’s symbiont and inducer virus colonies still hovered in the shaft with a droplet of blood, divorced of its community.

Like everything else living—or half living—in the world, Samael had had a hand in its making. It amused him to take this fragment of his creation back.

As Cynric stepped away from the trees, the parrotlets lost interest in harassing her and returned to their nests. Each pair divided the duty: one perching vigil in the mimosa’s fronds, where the long, curved thorns did not touch them—though the litter of tiny bones decomposing into calcium and trace nutrients among the leaf litter gave testament to the fate of any other small creature unlucky enough to blunder among those branches—and the other in the nest, counting chicks and regurgitating breakfast. The earlier chattering and shrieks of displeasure gave way to chirps and clucking.

Samael folded what passed for his arms. The pleasantries were apparently over. “You came for me?”

Cynric was used to dealing with Angels. She spoke plainly, with the directness of command. “We have a complicated ecological situation to address,” she said. “It is possible that there will be no place for us here, Samael. And the world’s systems are strained beyond expressing; that we have kept them mended as well as we have is only due to diligence and the toughness engineered into every life-form we’ve created. If we have to flee this haven, we have little time in which to mend them if we don’t wish to find ourselves living in a tin tub full of mold and ropes of algae. I require your cooperation.”

She was a Conn—and the revenant and reincorporated remnant of a Conn from when being a member of that terrible family had meant something different than it did under the reign of Captain Perceval. She could require anything of him she desired.

He nodded. “I will report our activities to Nova and the Captain.”

He didn’t actually think there was any irony in her smile. “I would expect no less. A Captain is not a Commodore. And we will need to use the labs. I remember that they are still intact in Rule?”

It wasn’t her memory, exactly, but one salvaged from the symbiotic tool-creature named Gavin, in which she had stored engrams of a portion of her living personality and will. The memories had been mostly sorted into other facilities, and Samael knew the entire structure he now called Cynric was missing great swaths of experience and history from her archives.

Samael had not initially been programmed for the more nuanced human social emotions—relief, gratification, humiliation. But one learned things over the course of an existence, and his program was exceptionally flexible. At some point or another, Israfel—the initial Angel, of which Samael and all his brethren were merely fragments—had been expected to feel devotion to his human masters, and Samael bore within him the results of the adaptations Israfel had made in response.

Cynric’s sanction left him with a sense of satisfaction he might even have characterized as “warm,” if he understood how humans used the term. (He was also given to understand that humans experienced emotions as physical sensations, which required a certain quality of imagination to comprehend.)

A pair of brilliantly colored birds swooped by overhead. Males, sparring—whether over a mate or territory it was impossible to say, and they were gone too fast for Samael to consider asking them. Cynric craned her head back to watch them swoop and dive over the breadth of the oval commuter shaft. She sighed.

“You never did tell me what the parrotlets were for,” Samael said, sensing an opportunity. “When I was Israfel, and after. They’re more than decorative, I think?”

She might have consumed a bit of his other self when she re-created herself. He wasn’t sure; there was so much inside her, and none of it was reliable. Where Nova had integrated and Perceval had subroutined, Cynric had … splintered.

For a moment, he considered whether he’d pushed too far. But he recollected the basilisk Gavin’s sense of humor and fair play. Some of that—all of that—was subsumed in Cynric. It might come with additional memories