our only modern-day example.”
“You make a compelling case for the surgery.”
“We’re better people when we’re sane.” He shrugged and spread his hands. “There’s a tension in your ideas. That’s all I’m saying.”
“I know. That’s the problem with rightminding.” She rose from the bunk, shedding the blanket, and crossed the mossy floor to where her borrowed pajamas waited folded on a shelf. “You get to see all the sides of the issue. Mature consideration of the options can be paralyzing.”
He nodded. “What if we offer the Jacobeans resources to repair their ship, and send them on?”
“What if they agree to rightminding?”
“What if they have a civil war over what they’re going to do?” She pulled a camisole over her head, covering the rise of her breasts and the curve of her waist.
Danilaw was sad to see them go, but as much as he would have liked to prolong the interlude, she was right.
“We need to call the Council.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I think we do.
19
the lathe of evolution
In the chronicle of wasted time
I see descriptions of the fairest wights,
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme,
In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights.
When Benedick came with Chelsea and Jordan to arrest Damian Jsutien, they found the Astrogator in his quarters, as Nova had reported. The door stood open, welcoming company, though Benedick did not think Jsutien often entertained.
Jsutien’s room was spare, by Engine standards. The lushness of the corridor vegetation ended at the threshold. Rather than garish colors and a verdancy of symbiotic plants and animals, Jsutien affected surroundings imbued with simple serenity. Stripped of plants, the walls of his chamber revealed convoluted surfaces of piping and ductwork, painted in shades of sand and eggshell-white, eggshell-brown. On the floor, a pallet lay rolled aside and in use as a bolster upon which Jsutien had propped his back. A tray across his lap held hair-fine manipulators and a partially disassembled toolkit. The toolkit, under anesthesia, breathed calmly in and out through a mask.
Draped sheets and ultraviolet established a sterile operating field, and Jsutien’s fingers—Oliver’s fingers, Benedick reminded himself for the first time in years—were coated in a layer of plum-colored surgical spray.
“Just a moment,” Jsutien said. He wiggled a chip into a socket until it emitted a satisfying click. The toolkit, even under sedation, stretched against its restraints and made a small pleased noise.
Jsutien closed it up with surgical glue and speedheal, turning off the anesthesia before releasing its restraints. By the time he’d unfastened the last delicate limb, the faneared device was sitting up and grooming between the toes on the opposite foot. It looked familiar to Benedick; the pattern of spots and stripes reminded him of one he’d destroyed in service, and he felt a momentary pang for the gallant little artifice.
Jsutien wadded up his surgical drapes and peeled the purple down his fingers in wormy inside-out tubes. “There,” he said. “That’s a stopping point. How can I be of service?”
Jordan looked at Benedick, engendering a pang of sympathy he would never demonstrate. It was a difficult time and situation under which to find oneself thrust into a position of authority. Battlefield promotions generally were, and Benedick had endured his share. But that did not dim his fellow feeling for the new and inexperienced Chief Engineer.
He was about to take pity on her when Chelsea, on her left hand, stepped forward. She straightened her back and cleared her throat, leaving Benedick wondering why excellent posture was never a good sign. “Damian Jsutien,” she said. “You are under arrest on suspicion of harboring an unknown daemon, and suspicion of complicity aware or unaware in the murder of Caitlin Conn.”
He stopped, half standing, not yet quite having risen from his crouch. Benedick tensed, a hand on the hilt of his sword, but Jsutien only tilted his head up and blinked at her. “I see,” he said. “I’ll get my shirt. By the way, the extra memory you wanted installed in your toolkit is done.”
Chelsea crouched down and clucked. The fuzzy beast scampered to her, hesitating infinitesimally to sniff her outstretched fingers before swarming up her arm. Under the sweep of her long hair, it quickly made itself into a fur collar.
“Thanks,” she said. She stood, tilting her chin up to look Jsutien in the eye.
“Check that for sabotage,” Benedick said.
She nodded. “Damian, you know we’ll take the best possible care of you, even if you’ve got somebody else in your head.”
He pulled a dress shirt on over his head and tugged the collar laces. When it was settled to his satisfaction, he ran a hand through his tight, dark curls and said, “By the fact that I am coming quietly, you may assume I believe you to have my best interests at heart.”
Dust was bigger now. Not much bigger, not too much, and he took good care not to stray outside the physical confines of the construct body he inhabited. It was safer in here, masquerading as a small, unremarked semi-intelligence. Out there, free-floating, in a colony with real access to the world—out there he would have access to more information, more sensory input, more of the world. And in the process, he would eventually— inevitably—run afoul of Nova.
Who would eat him again, this time as surely as the last time.
So for now he stayed small and stayed with his secret ally, who did not even know herself an ally most of the time. They had goals in common.
His people were being misguided. The people he had been charged to advance, to defend, to force against the lathe of evolution and edge fine were in grave danger. They might make landfall, sell all their majesty and progress for the promise of safety, disassemble the world that had been his body for material and energy, and destroy the ecosystem that had endured greater stress and evolutionary pressures than any mere dirtside ecology —
—and here, on the very verge of triumph, of fulfilling his ancient charge, he could fail.
He would not allow himself to fail. He would not allow his Builders, his angels, and most importantly his mortal (or demimortal) charges to fail so close to completion, to transcendence.
No.
They would not be allowed to fail.
He crouched on his patron’s mule’s shoulder and let her carry him along as she escorted the Astrogator through the halls of Engine, flanked by the new Chief Engineer and the venerable Benedick Conn. This fast-moving squad swept past lesser Exalts and Engineers and construct creatures that flattened themselves against corridor walls and ceilings, as far out of the way as they could manage. Some of them reached out to let the hem of a Conn garment brush them. The old ways—the old respect—might no longer be enforced with terror, but enough of it lingered that Dust was not entirely bereft of hope for the future of Engine and the Conn family. They might have grown soft, but they had not entirely fallen apart.
Central Engineering was an unassuming control booth inside a mighty tower in Engine. The structure was one of dozens that grew from all sides of the world’s greatest Heaven—a vast semispherical cargo hold converted into a city. Flyers blurred from one spire to another across the open space between them. Jordan, this untested Chief Engineer, let her wings feather wide and glanced across Dust’s insignificant pointed nose to Chelsea.
“Nova says the Captain has come to review the questioning,” she said.
