Grail

She folded her hands together, interlacing the fingers. She huffed across the knuckles, producing a whistling noise. “I think we should conduct further conversations in person,” she said. “You and Captain Amanda have my permission to dock your ship and come aboard.”

“We will have to observe quarantine,” the Fisher King said. “It will not be so different than this.”

“Different enough,” Perceval said. “The Angel Samael will assist you with your docking arrangements and requirements for environmental isolation. That is my will.”

With a mental signal to Nova, she cut the connection. Tristen had not moved from his seat on the grassy berm opposite, but his hands were folded and he was regarding her. “Turning them over to an angel when they’ve expressed such a strong distaste for the whole concept? I’m not sure that’s politic.”

“Maybe they’ll find out how useful angels are and suffer a thought infection.”

Tristen smiled. “He gets on your nerves.”

Perceval shook her hair back, smoothing the locks behind her shoulders with both hands. “He’s a smug, self- righteous, condescending Mean,” she said. “If he thinks we’re uncivilized thugs, well —”

“We need him, Perceval,” her First Mate cautioned. “Unless you really want to go and take his planet from him.”

Her toes curled into the verdant green turf underfoot. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t tempt me.”

14 it is a library, and I am its necromancer

I lose! They’re loaded dice. Time always plays

With loaded dice.

—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, “Time and the Witch Vivien”

Danilaw Bakare had not realized how thoroughly he anticipated the barbaric splendor of the generation ship’s interior until its grandeur overwhelmed his expectations entirely. The docking bay had the same blasted, repurposed, resurfaced look that characterized the mottled exterior of the vessel. It was also vast, cradling the Quercus entire. Danilaw stood on the tiny habitation deck watching the long, seemingly animate arms of the Jacob’s Ladder embrace the scull, growing over the air lock and avoiding the motes and ports. He could not avoid the comparison to a dodecapus sensitively enveloping its prey.

He sealed his helmet one-handed and turned to make sure Captain Amanda, too, was ready. Seeing her mirror the gesture made him grin; it was good that they were looking out for each other.

“Once more unto the breach,” she said, patting his space-suited shoulder with a bulky gauntlet. There were weapons on her belt, and the Free Legate jewel over her eye told him she knew both physically and ethically how to use them, but that didn’t make him any more comfortable with the necessity—or the fact that he, for the first time in his life, felt naked walking around unarmed. Maybe this will be peaceable. Maybe we can still pull that off. A lot of maybes to contend with.

They lined up by the exit. Captain Amanda cycled the lock around them and ran the decontamination protocol. The exterior door scrolled back slowly, the Quercus’s Fortune-standard atmosphere replaced by something that Danilaw’s suit sensors read as thinner than weak tea and shockingly moist.

Captain Amanda was apparently thinking the same thing. “That’s a lot of free water to leave floating around in a closed habitat …”

She never finished the sentence, which trailed off as if her voice were struck from her. Instead, they stood shoulder-to-shoulder and stock-still, neither at first quite processing what they were seeing. It was a corridor, or an accessway—a means of getting from the Quercus to the interior of the Jacob’s Ladder. But it was—

It was full of trees. Or made of trees, or a tree, or a latticing vine grown into a tree through the passage of centuries. The outside perimeter was a filigree of dark, smooth bole, heavy palmate leaves carpeting every space between. When they stepped over the threshold onto the surface, Danilaw lurched the first step as a slightly different angle of gravity asserted itself. Amanda reached out to steady him; neither fell.

From among the leaves, a swirl of atmosphere—a dust devil?—manifested. It grew and complicated, sweeping up bits of detritus into a roughly human outline. “Hello,” the projection said, as Danilaw shied back from its extended limb-approximation. “Don’t be afraid. Welcome to the world. I am Samael. I have been sent to guide you.”

An angel, Danilaw realized—and now, meeting it, he intuited its history and purpose better than he had before. One of Captain Perceval Conn’s servitors, or masters, or compatriots. Artificial intelligences originally programmed by the Kleptocracy and its creatures. A piece of terrible history, left behind to trouble future generations.

Danilaw felt as if he were confronted by an animate, talking gas chamber, or an iron maiden with pretty manners. What was less ethical than giving artificial intelligence personalities? Than creating—in essence—a slave race: creatures with agency and identity but only the semblance of free will?

Danilaw’s people still used smart systems. But they had long since abandoned the horrific practice of making people of them, and then enslaving the people they had made.

As Danilaw’s pulse accelerated and his oxygen usage spiked, he saw the motion of Amanda’s suit; she had rocked back on her heels. He wondered what she was experiencing. Her knowledge of the relevant history was more detailed than his own; Danilaw suspected that made this encounter all the more unsettling.

If Amanda was more discomfited, she also recovered from it better. “Hello, Samael,” she said. “I am Captain Amanda Friar. This is Danilaw Bakare, City Administrator of Bad Landing.”

The Angel’s sunflower-petal eyebrows quirked. “I was provided with your files,” he said. “If you will come with me, I will bring you to my Captain.”

They fell into step beside him. The corridor was wide enough for all three abreast, though the uneven surface of the interwoven, intergrown branches or trunks made the footing akin to skipping over cobblestones in reduced gravity. If Danilaw took a header, he wouldn’t fall hard.

“Feel free to ask any questions you like,” Samael said. “We are eager to share our knowledge with you as an expression of goodwill, and to establish that we can help your society become more flexible and adaptive. Also, you are welcome to use our resources. If it would make you more comfortable, please feel free to remove your armor.”

Samael gestured around magnanimously. Danilaw blinked, understanding suddenly that for a culture in which every atom of oxygen and molecule of water was an irreplaceable consumable, this was an exceedingly generous offer. Danilaw was accustomed to metering his object and resource usage, observing the Obligations, wasting neither personal nor collective assets. But to a society such as this, centuries out from a habitable world—they had what they had, and there would be no getting more. It went beyond Obligation, beyond social justice. Parsimony was their means of survival.

His confusion and revelation seemed transparent to the Angel, who kept talking as if conducting a familiar guided tour. “You have our word that you may unseal in safety. The Captain has ordered our microfauna and flora to treat your persons and equipment as sterile zones. You will not be colonized.”

“Wait,” Danilaw said. “Your Captain ordered this? Your microbes follow instructions?”

Samael gave him what he would have sworn was a pitying look. “They obey the Captain. Are they not part of the world’s ecology?”

Danilaw saw Captain Amanda’s eyelashes flicker through the wide faceplate of her pressure suit. He thought she smiled, a wry expression he read as wonder, but she concealed it quickly.

“Our viruses aren’t so civilized,” she said. “For your sakes, we should remain sealed.”