Grail

them. Her presence—her assistance—filled Perceval with a strange white puissance, as if all the world and everything were washed out with that same cold light that filled the examination room. It was a dreamy prospect, silhouettes moving against glare and breaking the flooding light into rays.

She would have rather been anywhere else at all, but this was her responsibility. And so Perceval herself, in her person as Captain and guide of the Jacob’s Ladder, leaned down over the chair Damian Jsutien sat in and kissed him on the mouth.

Jsutien’s mouth opened. He eased his jaw, tilting his head back to allow her access. He closed his eyes, as relaxed as a drowsy child accepting a mother’s bedtime kiss.

Perceval let her colony touch his, and slipped herself inside, into the spare and ferny landscape of his soul.

For someone who had inhabited the body for as long as he had, Jsutien had not much populated its mind. Perceval knew he had grown from a seed, a set of recorded preferences and commands and variables that fit into a matrix that could be slipped into a pocket, carried in a hand. But that was just source code, uncompiled. It was just the blueprint for a thing that could grow into a person—a person similar to the person who had recorded it, once upon a time.

Such revenants usually elaborated, populating their environments just as any organic mind might. The neurology affected the personality—but the personality also affected the neurology. Brains changed to accommodate the minds that dwelled in them, just as minds adapted to the architecture of the brain.

Jsutien had left Oliver Conn’s mind as white-walled and unmodified as a rental flat. The space was inhabited but not lived in, and the record of the thing—the person—that had been Damian Jsutien had not spread itself out into the crevices.

Perceval went deeper, but nothing Jsutien could have done could have faked the transparency, the emptiness, the sheer unused space in this head. There was processing power here to spare. Jsutien had just never moved into it. Fifty years on, and he inhabited his own head like a transient with a sleeping bag and a hot plate flopped into one corner of a mansion. He had never, she realized, expected this incarnation to be permanent.

He had never let himself get attached.

Perceval felt Cynric following along beside her, trailing long metaphorical fingers over the furnishings, contemplating the immaterial windows and walls.

“If it were here,” Cynric said, “it should be easy to spot in a head like this.”

Perceval regarded her without turning. Without any outward sign of a reaction at all.

“He never moved in, did he?”

“He never felt welcome here,” Cynric said, “so he stayed out of a sense of duty. But this is all—work. Predictable. Crazy-making. He never developed recreations, or investigated any of the ones his other-self enjoyed. He would have had the muscle memory for Oliver’s sports, or he could have retrained his body to work on Jsutien’s. The mind could be trained to match the body, or the body to match the brain.”

“He’s not our man,” Perceval said.

“Au contraire,” Cynric said. “Something was filling up this space, and now it has been deleted.”

Deleted. Perceval lurched forward in her eagerness, but—regretfully—Cynric shook her head. Here in this space that didn’t precisely exist, she was a long-armed wraith, the wind of Jsutien’s thoughts blowing her robe up between her arms and body until it billowed like the sails of a kite. It arched, lifting.

“Deleted and—”

“Overwritten,” Cynric confirmed. “Come on. We’ll get a better view from a height.”

She sailed up. Perceval followed, until they moved through the cool transparent azure of Jsutien’s spotless mind. It was beautiful and cold. There was no pain here, no loss, no regret, no love.

Perceval found she enjoyed it.

She also enjoyed the landscape spread out below her—a patchwork of this and that and the other thing, the edges ruler-straight, the surfaces mowed tidy. It was more like a schematic of a mind than anyplace anybody spent time, and Perceval again shook her head. It should be impossible to hide anything as large and fiddly as a daemon in here. Jsutien was barely more than a daemon himself.

“She’s not in here.”

“I know,” Perceval said. “That’s not the answer I was hoping for.”

“But I am confident in suggesting that she was. Which means more than one daemon. Which means she could be anywhere.”

“In you or me,” Perceval said.

“Or, more likely, any of the others. Let’s keep that our secret.”

“Let’s,” Perceval agreed. “Because our most important goal remains finding her.”

“And Charity,” Cynric said. “Wherever we find the blade, we find Ariane.”

“Outside,” Perceval said, and returned to herself with a thought. She leaned forward for a moment, elbows akimbo and splayed hands on her knees. Benedick’s hand came to rest on her shoulder. When she looked up, Cynric was regarding her.

“She was in there, but she’s gone. She purged. You’re clean, Astrogator.”

Jsutien let out a long, soft sigh, the first evidence that he had felt concern. “So what now?”

“We have to find Charity,” Perceval said. “Charity, or that damned Bible.”

Nova spoke out of nothing. “An unblade doesn’t register on my sensors. And I have not been able to locate the Bible.”

“Then we search,” said Benedick. “By hand.”

“We cannot search the whole world,” Jsutien protested.

“No,” Benedick answered. “We prioritize.”

   By hand indeed—by hand, and by foot, and through the corridors of Engine and Rule and spreading outward. Every available Engineer and denizen of Rule was pressed into service, and not just them. The carnivorous plants turned out in force. The toolkits were arrayed to check crawl spaces. Nova reprogrammed the ship cats and set them seeking.

There were Deckers, too—those closest to AE deck outraged by the murders there, and the rest in service to the ship. Tristen heard muttering from some that the Conns should have done more to protect the victims, and a few of the rumors that wended back to him opined that Conns, indeed, had killed all the inhabitants of AE deck in order to cover up some variously specified crime.

No one was sent out alone, by order of the Captain. Tristen did not miss the care with which Cynric maneuvered to become his partner. They would start their search with the Go-Back Heaven, and Tristen would not send anyone else to brave Dorcas.

In the lift, Cynric and Tristen talked. Cynric seemed to enjoy the conspiracy theories purely from an entertainment standpoint, and amused herself by laying out a few of the crazier ones for Tristen. She sat cross- legged in the corner, her robes draping from her bony wrists, and leaned her head back into the corner while she spoke.

Tristen had seen her so many times, perched in some corner behind the barricade of her bony knees, the lines of her long face defining smiles or frowns. He wondered how it was that he had only now realized that this was the real Cynric, or at least as much the real Cynric as the cold, imperious Sorceress.

“There’s one that says you stole the Bible yourself,” she said. “And that you mean to use it to replace Perceval as Captain.”

Tristen arched his eyebrows. “If I wanted to be Captain, I would have been.” The implications of her words struck him. “Wait. Use it? What use is an old paper book?”

Her head came forward, the long neck lengthening. The stare she leveled at him would have curdled the blood of most men.

“You are no revenant,” she said. “Are your memories fully intact?”

He shifted in his armor. “Flesh or machine memories? I went mad for a while.”

“The legacy Bible.” He nodded.

“It was you who taught me its purpose, Brother mine. When I was small. The Bible is an immutable hard copy of the Builders’ New Evolutionist creed, to be sure, but it’s also a computer—an old-style discrete calculating and remembering machine. And it holds the override codes for the entire world.”

Tristen blinked at what she said. He heard it—of course he heard it—but it seemed to wash over him as a