Grail

Did you arrange a conversation for me?”

“I did,” the toolkit said, whiskers twitching. Subtlety was another element of his former skill that had been lost in the interests of data compression. He needed information, and so he spoke his question to her. “I do not understand why you would reconstitute me, when we were enemies. Your ally, as I recall, was Asrafil.”

She slid the door closed and set the privacy filter. “I went to great lengths—risking this body and the revelation of my own existence—to free my daughter Arianrhod from Caitlin’s machinations.” Her face compressed with grief. “Arianrhod loved Asrafil. She served him. And Asrafil betrayed her to her death. Cynric consumed her.”

Dust nodded his pointed face. Death was always a relative function, a complicated thing when you were dealing with angels or Exalt. People died in pieces, by increments, or were transformed into something else. For Means, death had meant something concrete, a hard limit.

“For certain is death for the born / And certain is birth for the dead,” he quoted, stumbling over a scrap of contextual memory. But that wasn’t quite right, so he choked to a halt and began again. “I am sorry for your loss.”

“One cannot serve angels, Angel. One must own them.”

Dust nodded again. Agreeing with Conns was what you did with them. Whether this one knew he was patronizing her or not, she reached out and stroked the fluff behind his spotted ears. Her touch—or his fur—was so soft that he felt it only as he might have felt a wind.

“You should have been mine.” She smiled. “And now you are.”

By stellar-system standards, it wasn’t a long trip—measured in weeks rather than months, which had something to do with the velocities involved, both of the inbound, decelerating vessel and the massively overpowered-for-her-mass Quercus.

They had the Jacob’s Ladder on telescopic and various other sensory systems (mass detector, q-scanner, electromagnetic, radio telemetry) long before they made direct visual contact.

But there was something about that first real sight of her, with Danilaw’s own eyes, nonetheless.

   She began as a bright dot, a reflective sparkle of obviously variable albedo and mass. As they came up upon her, she gradually resolved into a spiderweb, and then a sort of scaffolding.

Danilaw kept thinking they were closer than telemetry indicated, which alerted him intellectually to her scale. But he couldn’t integrate her true scope until they came within about a kilometer. Then Danilaw’s world-bred senses could no longer mislead him that this looming skeleton was anything other than gargantuan.

Superlatives and adjectives failed him simultaneously. The Jacob’s Ladder hung against its backdrop of stars, covering the entire horizon as revealed to Danilaw and Amanda where they stood before cramped screens in the scull, which did not have a discrete bridge. Danilaw had studied the generation ship’s schematics and designs, such as were still available after an elapsed millennium. He had thought himself prepared, and yet now that it was real, the discomfort of awe humbled him.

She was the largest man-made thing he had ever seen. And that comparison failed to do her justice, because she was orders of magnitude more enormous than the next biggest. Whole ranks and families of planetesimals had died to build her; the raw materials of a man-made world.

She might once have been a wheel, of sorts, although one oppressively vast—or, more precisely, a nested series of skeletal wheels set at angles to one another, like a wirework wind sculpture reproduced at unimaginable scale. Danilaw could see how each had once turned inside the next, how they had been angled to catch available light and cast each other not too much in shadow. He could even see where the immense full-spectrum light cannons had been mounted, aimed so that the pressure of escaping photons would contribute to the great ship’s gentle propulsion. Each turning ring had stabilized the ship, and all together they had acted to make her akin to a giant gyroscope, balanced by her own spin.

She had been lovely once, the Jacob’s Ladder. But now she was an enormous scarred skeleton of nodules joined by tubes, twisted in places and in others crudely repaired. Danilaw could make out generations of technology at work on her hull—hulk would have seemed the better word, except she was warm, a living ship, glowing softly in the infrared.

And she was, unmistakably, moving forward under her own power. He could see the gleam of her engines through the gaps in her frame, and the long cometary plume of her exhaust glazed with reflected sunlight when they came around to approach her on a diagonal, matching trajectories.

Some repairs seemed crude—machine-shop things, scrap metal hammered into place and spot-welded or even riveted to cover the scars of some of her traumatic amputations. Some were more craftsmanlike, with matched edges or careful jury-rigging. There were aluminum, plastic, ceramic alloys, titanium, even cloth painted with a doping compound in evidence, depending on where he looked and which schematic he glanced at.

And then there were the repairs and reductions which seemed almost clean in comparison. As the Jacob’s Ladder moved against the starfield, bathed in her own lights, the rays of the distant sun, and the floods of the scull, he caught how beveled edges gleamed here and there as if they had been sliced with a knife so hot it left fused edges behind. Other surfaces resembled the sanded luster of frosted glass, as if the metal and ceramic of her hide had itself sublimated into space. Scorch marks, blisters, craters, and volatilized surfaces scarred her everywhere.

When the sharply held breath finally whistled out through his nostrils, it stung. Beside him, Captain Amanda slid her hands into her pockets, flat-palmed, fingers arched back and tendons in relief as if she were packing all the stress away in them.

She said, “When she left Earth’s system, she was the size of Manhattan Island.”

“Well, she isn’t now,” Danilaw answered. “Although I think you’d have to measure her to know. Open a hailing channel, please, Captain?”

The jewel in her forehead flashed as she nodded. But she didn’t move immediately; she stood, watching the vast, battered armature of the alien vessel glide across the darkness behind.

“Captain?”

She shook her head as if rattling herself back into her body. “Sorry. Just thinking. This is the last moment of the world we know, isn’t it? This is history.”

He nodded. “I’ve been having that sensation a lot.”

She blew out through her nose—more a sigh than a snort, but just barely—and looked down at her slippered feet on the decking. “I thought it would feel like more.”

   There was so much to consider, so much to negotiate. Perceval’s head spun with it before the conversation was halfway through. Medical issues, in particular, concerned the Fisher King—Danilaw Bakare, she supposed she was going to have to get used to calling him, this strange gravity-stunted humanoid. He seemed seriously put out to learn that Perceval’s people did not require quarantine precautions or what he referred to as “a gene scrub.”

“We adapt,” Perceval said. “Our immune systems are evolved to handle most pathogens. Even novel ones.” Except the ones that have been engineered to exploit our colonies.

She barely remembered the engineered influenza that Ariane had infected her with, though it had wiped out most of the Exalt denizens of Rule, and she herself had only survived because of the intervention of Rien and Mallory the Necromancer. And this was not the venue to bring up the inducer viruses, spliced and machined from the silicon-based symbiotes of the Leviathan into agents for the mental and physical manipulation of any creature they should be introduced into.

The Fisher King—Bakare, Bakare—shook his head. “That doesn’t address the issue of protecting my people from your pathogens.” He smiled, softening stern words, and made a point of saying something playful. “Unless you can count on your microbes going where they are directed, I think, at this point, it’s wise to maintain quarantine protocols. We’ll come over in suits, if we’re still welcome, and we’ll bring sampling equipment. Once we’ve gotten an idea of what your microfauna are like, we’ll be able to tell if we need to vaccinate, and what sort of isolation and sanitation protocols are necessary before you land on Fortune.”

His choice of words and sentence structures was like something Dust would have recited, flowery and archaic. The good news was, if what he implied in his speeches could be trusted, being granted leave to land on Grail seemed a foregone conclusion. They would have to borrow lighters from the onworlders, or cannibalize the