Grail

series of abstractions. Nonsense, confused and inarticulate, until he tossed his head like a dog shaking water away. “I’m not following you.”

She rose, the sweep of fabric trailing behind her, and moved toward him. They were of a height, and Tristen knew their father’s features were plain in both their faces. She touched his cheek. “The legacy Bible is a computer. You taught me that.”

“I’m sorry,” Tristen said. “I do not understand.”

He also did not understand the smile that stretched her face—more like a snarl, in truth. But he did understand when she spat “Father!” as if it were the worst curse word she knew.

She touched his cheek. “It appears, Brother Tristen, that somebody has been reprogramming your brain. Removing old knowledge. Would you care to hazard a guess as to who might be responsible?”

He did not doubt her. He wanted to; he could feel the denial in him, rising like the automatic subroutine it might be. But she was Cynric, and whatever else she was, she had never been a liar. “Can you fix it?”

She was angry. “There was nothing Alasdair Conn could do that I could not undo better. One of the things that book was for was rewriting memories, but I have read the book, and know it well. Give us a kiss, Brother dearest.”

It didn’t hurt a bit, and Tristen was left with no sense that anything had altered, but this time when Cynric said the simple words, they made sense and stuck deep in his memory. They were finished before they arrived in the Edenite Heaven.

And the implications of what Cynric said sent a chill through his body that had nothing to do with the temperature controls in his armor. Their father had used the information in the New Evolutionist Bible to remove his memories; Cynric had used it to restore them.

And Ariane had that book now.

As the lift door slid open and they stepped forth into the lock, he said, “You couldn’t have mentioned that earlier?”

The far door began to cycle, Dorcas just visible through the widening gap. Cynric spoke quickly, from the corner of her mouth. “It never occurred to me that you would forget.”

“Tristen,” Dorcas said, as the doorway between them stabilized at its widest aperture. “Cynric. To what do I owe this unexpected joy?”

*   *   *   

Tristen took Dorcas aside and told her that she must call her folk and her snakes in from the fields and gather them in the onion-domed tent that served the Edenites as a hall. He told her she must keep them quiet and collected—fields unweeded, goats unmilked—while he and Cynric went over the Heaven from one end to the other, with no respect for personal privacy or the doors of tents.

She waited, and when they finished—and found nothing, as Tristen had half expected and half feared—it was Tristen who had to go back to her and tell her that they were done, and her folk could return to their residences and their work. Cynric would have done it for him, of course, but he felt he owed it to the woman who inhabited his daughter.

“You’re not sorry,” she said, walking him back to the lift lock, where Cynric waited. “Will you even tell me what you were looking for?”

He studied her, the sway of her hair, the line of her shoulders. He laid a hand on the hilt of his sword—which had been Sparrow’s sword—and felt the weird intelligence in the blade yearn toward her. Mirth did not care if Sparrow’s mind inhabited Sparrow’s body.

He said, “Are you going to tell me you don’t know?”

“I don’t have the Bible,” she said. “Or the sword. I have no desire to rule this sad old world of yours, Tristen Tiger, that all you Conns squabble over with such ferocity. Exactly as if it meant anything at all.”

There was something in her voice, in the levelness of her tone, that took the splinter of unease working through him and froze it to a spike of ice. “Do you know who does have it?”

She let her lips stretch across her teeth. “You know who has it,” she answered. “And you know she isn’t here.”

Tristen was not a cursing man, but sometimes he made an exception. “Don’t fuck with me, Dorcas.”

“Old man,” she said, “I would never. But I’ll tell you what: if I find her, I’ll take care of it for you.”

*   *   *   

It was a long ride home, but as much as Danilaw would have liked to spend the trip getting to know Amanda better and exploring the sprawling reaches of the Jacob’s Ladder, there was enough work to fill almost every waking hour—work complicated by the headaches and malaise caused by the Jacob’s Ladder’s stressed and possibly toxic environment, to which Danilaw was not adapted.

Somewhat to his surprise, language lessons were the least of it. The Jacobeans learned quickly, and once Danilaw had texts sent over the q-sets, they mostly managed by self-study, using him and Amanda for conversational practice. He also could not miss the signs that all was not well—politically speaking—with his hosts. When he asked, Tristen told him that an assassin was at large, one who wished to provoke armed conflict between the Jacobeans and the people of Fortune.

“But don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll find her.”

Still, by the drawn look of his features and the apparent lack of time or sleep among any of the senior crew, Danilaw suspected that they were not growing closer to a solution. More critical to Danilaw personally was time spent managing the situation on Fortune. If on the trip out Danilaw had been surprised by the ease with which he managed his duties remotely, now he was surprised by the degree to and speed with which everything could fall apart.

Administrator Gain was nearly impossible to get ahold of. She sealed herself behind a wall of staff, and whenever Danilaw called, she was unavailable—which, he had to admit, was reasonable, given that conversations with Administrator Jesse—and Danilaw’s own obsessive checking of newsfeeds and the planetary infosphere— provided intelligence of a sticky situation on the ground, indeed.

“People are frightened,” Jesse said. “There’s a good deal of disbelief that one of us committed the sabotage. We’re taking steps to encourage cooperation and discourage hoarding—”

He sighed. They were on audiolink only, and Danilaw could hear the shrug in his voice. “Lifeboat rules,” Danilaw said. “Stay on it. What’s up with Gain?”

“Factionating,” Jesse admitted. “She seems to be coming around to being an open proponent of isolationism. Do you know if she’s been in contact with anyone on the Jacob’s Ladder?”

“Except through official channels?” Danilaw, secure in his own invisibility, allowed himself to rock back and fold his arms for the defensive comfort of the gesture. “What makes you suspect it?”

The considering silence on the other end of the connection was anything but reassuring. “She is the ham radio hobbyist. She might have her own plans. Public opinion is not in favor of welcoming the offworlders, currently, and she seems to be feeding that isolationism. There’s a lot of talk of ‘contamination,’ and frankly, we’ve had some demonstrations. Civil unrest, and I would not be surprised if it is being arranged by agitators. Also, we’ve got preliminary instructions from the homeworld. They basically amount to Stall.”

“Crap. Well, that’s useful.” Danilaw pressed his temples. “Thanks, Jesse. Watch your back, okay?”

“It unsettles me that you feel the need to say that.”

“Not as much as it unsettles me.”

Danilaw paused a moment to let Jesse sign off. He hit the kill on his own q-set before raising his voice to address the air. “Nova? Can you find or make me a musical instrument?”

His own guitar had been lost with the Quercus, and as weird as it felt to be asking thin air for favors, Danilaw suspected he needed something to do with his hands.

The air spoke back. “Easily. What would you like?”

“Guitar,” he said. “Six string. Acoustic.”

Nova materialized before him, just long enough for him to realize that he was getting over his discomfort at dealing with an anthropomorphized artificial intelligence faster than he ever would have imagined possible, and handed him a hard black case as he stood to greet her. “Your wish, etcetera.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Nova?”

She hesitated in the midst of dispersing, streamers of her image blowing off her shape like ribbons in the