Grail

“Also,” Danilaw said apologetically, “your atmosphere is slightly thin and sour by our standards. We need to supplement oxygen. How do you—your people, I mean—survive in such low saturations?”

The Angel tossed flowing straw-colored locks over his shoulders. It might be some vegetable fiber, or the mane of some animal that Danilaw did not know. “Naked mole rats.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Naked mole rats,” Samael repeated. “They’re an Earth species of colony-living burrowing rodent that is—or was; they may be extinct on the old planet, although we have some—supremely adapted to the, well, the exceptionally nasty conditions found in their lairs. Centuries ago, Cynric the Sorceress introduced their adaptations to deoxygenated and toxic atmospheres into the human genome. This enabled our crew to survive and flourish despite the damage wrought to the world by the Breaking.”

“Cynric … the Sorceress?” It was only the light filtering through the bowering leaves on every side that flashed from Amanda’s jewel, but the way it gleamed when she cocked her head led Danilaw to entertain a fantasy that the sparkles were an external indicator of frantic processing activity within.

Samael nodded. Even in profile, the mosaic-approximation of a beaky, lined human face was three- dimensional and compelling. “She was the head of genetic engineering, five hundred and fifty years ago. You can meet her.”

“Meet her?”

“For certain. Or her remnant, at least. She is alive again, though incomplete from what she was. There are also a couple of true survivors of the Moving Times and the Breaking. We anticipated that you might be interested in speaking with them.”

Five hundred and fifty, Danilaw mouthed to Amanda through his faceplate.

She shrugged, as if other insanities still held more of her attention. Mole rat DNA, she mouthed back.

Danilaw nodded. Okay, so living five hundred years wasn’t such a surprise after that. Obviously, the Jacob’s Ladder survivors had developed life-extending technology. Or they habitually put people in cold storage for centuries at a stretch. One, Danilaw thought, was as likely as the other, though the idea of this ancient genetic engineer being alive “again,” and somehow damaged by the process, supported the cryogenic theory.

“Where are we going now?” Amanda asked, stretching her legs to keep up with the Angel. He wasn’t tall, but then Danilaw guessed that he also probably wasn’t walking.

“Directly to the Captain,” Samael said. “It’s a big world, however, and I ask you to bear with me.”

A big world indeed. They hiked for over an hour, leaving Danilaw grateful that he’d kept up with his fitness Obligation. Even servo-assisted and allowing for the Jacob’s Ladder’s intermittent gravity, his pressure suit was heavy for walking in. At least it processed heat efficiently, or he imagined his visor would have fogged past visibility in the first fifteen minutes.

He was glad it didn’t. Because the Jacob’s Ladder—or the world, as Samael insisted on referring to it—only became more grand and improbable with what every turning revealed, what lay behind every air lock, gate, or grid.

Each time the Angel, obviously accustomed to taking into account the frailties of corporeal life-forms, apologized for not taking them along the scenic route, Danilaw felt his disbelief strengthen. It would have been difficult to imagine anything more compelling than the insanely complicated ecosystems and architectures he and Amanda were being led through.

The travelers toiled up mossy boulders past cataracts of tumbling water, and animals and birds Danilaw could not begin to identify flocked in every environment. Glades of trees filled arching passageways with transparent walls that showed the architecture of the Jacob’s Ladder from within. But for all its wonders, the ship had a patched, weary air to it, like a made-over old quilt ready for the recyclers.

“Here we are,” Samael finally said. “The library.”

It was not, as the door glided wide, what Danilaw would have identified as a library. No paper books, no clay tablets, no inscribed jewels. No holographic, Bose-Einstein, or magnetic records. No papyrus scrolls and no solid- state archives.

Just a grove of fruit trees, stretching to the curved outside wall of a vast space, surrounded on every side by hungry emptiness.

“Library,” Captain Amanda said. She turned her head, and then her entire body, rotating in her footsteps. Danilaw knew she was scanning the space with her suit recorders, transmitting the data home. As Legate, one of her Obligations was to science and history. “This is your library? ”

Here, the atmosphere was warm and thick—a rich mix of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen, with trace elements. Some products of decomposition, some by-products of living things metabolizing. He wished he dared breathe it; from the way the mossy soil dented under his feet, he imagined it smelled intensely green.

Danilaw’s own sensors told him that a warm body was approaching through the orchard, and in a few moments a slender figure ducked branches and appeared. He had expected a hierarchal gauntlet, and to be kept waiting and maneuvering through layers of functionaries until he could be brought before the Captain—presented with great solemnity, like the centerpiece of a feast.

But all that arrived now was an androgynous person clad in tight-fitting blacks and oranges, a halo of frizzy dark curls framing an elfin face. Woman, Danilaw thought, and then No, transgendered. The voice, when it came, was no help at all.

“I’m Mallory,” this person said. “It is a library, and I am its necromancer. The Captain is expecting you. Come in. Oh and—for your own safety—ask before you eat any fruit, please. Some of it is trickier than others.”

Danilaw and Amanda, still accompanied by the semicorporeal Angel, wound among the trees, trying not to jostle ripe fruit from limbs that dripped old Earth delicacies. He recognized oranges and limes—unless those were lemons—persimmons, pomegranates, and something that might be apples. They weren’t round and red, though, but striped red and green and gold in faint striations. There was a dark, almost black, fruit with a glossy bloom, and there was a small red-gold one that might be a cherry—

He lost track just about the time the necromancer led them into a clearing where white cane chairs sat in a circle around a transparent-topped table. It looked like a garden party, except the two individuals rising to meet them from behind that table were the people to whom Danilaw had been speaking via radio, with ever-decreasing delays, for the better part of two months now.

The First Mate was even more attenuated and strange in person, his white hair sparkling like bleached, unspun wool in the brilliant sunlight. That sunlight—clearer and more stark than what Danilaw was used to seeing warmed by miles of atmosphere—fell through the transparent panels overhead. In this direct light, Tristen’s skin was a translucent blue, as if someone had left inky water in an antique teacup until the pigment stained the porcelain. He wore a hardened pressure suit of cool white, the helm and gauntlets removed. The assemblage taken as a whole resembled a medieval suit of armor. Over it hung a sheathed sword, of all the insane archaic devices.

And the Captain—

Danilaw had somehow thought her apparent gauntness and strange proportions were exaggerated by the effect of transmission. If anything, they had been minimized, flattened. The woman who held out her hand to greet him, as unfazed by his space suit as if it were a formal visiting gown, could never pass for an unmodified human. Stage cosmetics could have hidden her skin tone, but not the depth of her chest nor the articulation of the shoulder joints—not to mention the short, peculiar structures on her upper back that lifted her pale dress across them and sometimes seemed to move of their own volition, working like the stump of a three-legged quadruped’s missing limb.

“I am Perceval Conn,” she said. “Welcome to my world. You are the first nonnative to set foot on her in seven hundred years.”

Danilaw was far more self-conscious about his pressure suit than she was. Instead, she cocked her head to look at it, and smiled. “Your armor is a different design from what we use,” she said. “Pardon if I stare. I had thought to offer you lemonade, but—” She gestured with self-deprecation. “I suppose Tristen and Mallory and I will have to drink it ourselves. Can you manage to sit, at least? Mallory, would you find our guests a bench, please? I don’t think the lawn furniture is likely to accommodate them.”