Grail

swaddling between her palms. Her colony—or a colony, in any case; here in her workshop, there might be many—disassembled it promptly. She turned to watch the parrotlet spiraling overhead, her feet bearing her in a crooked circle. Tristen turned merely to watch her turn.

“I put something of the Leviathans’ ability to dream the future in them,” Cynric said. “The parrotlets want to live, you see. And so they help the world live with them. They are a prayer for safety. One that will be listened to.”

“If they were hacked—”

“That one was hacked,” she said. “Hacked and then abandoned.”

“So could someone use them to pray for something else?”

She nodded. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I rather imagine they could.”

13 this lord of grail

All red with blood the whirling river flows,

The wide plain rings, the dazed air throbs with blows.

Upon us are the chivalry of Rome—

Their spears are down, their steeds are bathed in foam.

—MATTHEW ARNOLD, “Tristram and Iseult”

The research scull Quercus was tiny and cramped. Her forty square meters of living space were adequate for one individual, as long as that individual wasn’t claustrophobic and didn’t mind exercising in the sort of wheel one used for caged pets, but it necessitated close cooperation if two unrelated adults were going to inhabit her for any length of time. Every so often, Danilaw found himself pausing to stare out viewports into the velvety space beyond, wondering how human beings had managed under these circumstances before the application of rightminding technology had become so trivial and precise.

Fortunately, Captain Amanda’s basic personality was healthy and resilient, her rightminding was solid, and the earlier evidence of her robust sense of humor proved no fluke. Danilaw had no idea how she put up with him, but as a Free Legate she had effective training in dealing with disparate personalities, and as a social scientist and an expert in C22 society, she was without a doubt more comfortable with the range of human variation than were most people.

Which worked out well for Danilaw, who knew he was quirky. Not everybody’s brain chemistry was as solid as Amanda’s. Danilaw’s underlying genetic issues meant his own emotional balance could stray from perfection, and his inherited neurochemistry meant that his rightminding fell in need of more-frequent-than-usual maintenance. Not enough to cause a social disadvantage, or free him from his Obligations—but enough to make him wish sometimes that it might.

But Captain Amanda knew about that now, and had seemed neither startled nor horrified by the revelation.

On the other hand, staring out the ports of the Quercus made him aware that sometimes the annoyance of civil service was worth it. This was not a view everyone got—or even most people. Space travel was expensive and resource-consuming—an extreme privilege accorded him in extreme times.

There were a few other things to be grateful for. Though the research vessel was cramped, her engines were state of the art. She used a quantum drive that took advantage of the same ancient technology that allowed gravity control—and FTL, though the Quercus was strictly an in-system, sublight vessel.

In any case, Danilaw hoped he didn’t prove too much of a disruption in Amanda’s routine. She spent the voyage much as he imagined she usually did—buried in research, checking telemetry, and in general doing all three of her jobs simultaneously and well. Meanwhile, Danilaw discovered he could run a city just as well by remote control as while living in it, or so he flattered himself. Admittedly, running Bad Landing was mostly a matter of checking to make sure it was properly running itself and giving it the odd tweak when it didn’t, but there was a level of expertise in knowing what those tweaks were.

In his off hours, Danilaw read up on C21 and C22 customs and cultures, and practiced his guitar, using a pair of induction clips rather than a speaker out of consideration for his passagemate.

At least, he did so until Captain Amanda looked up from her desk, which she had dragged into her sleeping cubby, and said, “You know, music won’t bother me unless it’s bad, and since you earned it out as a secondary, I can’t imagine it would be.”

He heard her clearly—a benefit of the clips was that they left his ear canals clear—and probably (he thought) failed to hide his surprise. “You can concentrate with all that going on?”

“Creche raised,” she said. “I can concentrate through anything. Besides, you’re the best entertainment on this tub.” She stretched sturdy legs out of her bunk and stood, bending her spine and leaning back to balance under the lip of the cubby like a cave-climber. The desk she left parked in the bedclothes.

“Tub? Is that any way to talk about your vessel, Captain?”

She grinned and plunked down on the matting. It was soft, conducive as a surface for resting, stretching, or acrobatics—and unlikely to damage anything you dropped on it. Danilaw was growing quite attached to it as a floor covering. It was even easy to vacuum, and if they lost gravity abruptly, it wouldn’t hurt to smack yourself into.

“Well, this is a glorified tugboat run,” she said. “Come on. Play me something our visitors’ umpteen-great- grandparents might have listened to. Didn’t they have genres of religious music?”

He hefted his guitar. He knew a couple that were actually pretty good. If they were anything a Kleptocrat- duped religious fanatic might have grooved out to, that was anybody’s guess. But that wasn’t the point, exactly, was it?

“Sure,” he said. “We can call it research.”

*   *   *   

The trick, Dust thought, always lay in speaking to his patron without alerting her host. It would be a hazardous game. But he knew where to find her—she’d made sure he could follow her movements—and a toolkit could go many places unnoticed, especially in Engine. Dust now took advantage of that freedom.

Travel in this new world was easy. Dangers were clear to see—structural weaknesses and the lairs of ambush predators delineated by caution zones and warning buzzers. There were highways, access shafts, lifts, and functioning air locks everywhere.

Travel in Engine was even easier. The Dust toolkit joined his scurrying brethren, sweeping-whiskers-to- fluffy-tail along the margins of wide corridors, scuttling over cable bridges and through valve doors sized just right for a creature no longer than a man’s forearm.

When he came at last by secret ways to the place his program had summoned him to attend, it was deserted. A cube with twining vines up every wall, nodding flowers of jimsonweed and morning glory basking in the mist that condensed on each petal. The cube’s resident had folded the bedding away before the irrigation cycle, and Dust climbed up on the transparent, bevel-cornered box that housed it and several changes of clothes.

There he sat, grooming the moisture from his tail and hunting up scraps of edibles in the cracks of the mossy sleeping platform, until the cube divider slid aside and a pale hand parted the hanging vines. A face and a shoulder followed; hazel eyes widened in greeting. “Hello, toolkit. Do you have a message for me?”

The host was dressed as an Engineer, but looked like a Conn. Dust knew he should recognize which Conn, but those were among the details that had been scraped away by his reduced circumstances and lost.

Dust did have a message, however. Embedded in his program, a string of phonemes that made words in no language the world had ever heard. A key. A trigger.

That head-tilt melted into something else. The same gesture, the same face—but a different intention behind it.

“Wonderful,” Ariane Conn said. “That worked beautifully. We may speak freely here. Welcome, ghost of Dust.