ceased; he swore more fervently. “Her heart—check her pulse, check her pulse.”
Gain reached for Perceval’s throat. Danilaw had just enough presence of mind to realize his mistake before she got there. Had Gain been impeding him on purpose?
He grabbed her arm with his free hand and pulled her aside. “Not you,” he said. “Get the medic now.”
“Alive,” Perceval said, her voice a wheezing rasp. “Stopped heart—blood loss. Can fix.”
“Perceval? Perceval!”
Gain pushed back at him; Danilaw looked up from the alien he’d dragged half across his lap and fixed her on a stare like a bayonet. “Don’t.”
“Good,” Perceval said, sliding into ever more boneless limpness. “I’ll be back.”
23
another tiny bird came to her hands
Morgen is her name, and
she has learned what usefulness all the herbs bear
so that she may cure sick bodies. Also that art
is known to her by which she can change shape
and cut the air on new wings in the manner of Dedalus.
When she wishes, she is in Brist, Carnot, or Papie;
when she wishes, she glides out of the air onto your lands.
In the house of her fathers, Cynric Conn opened stolen hands and let a bird take wing. Beside her, Benedick craned his head back and watched it whirr toward the ceiling, a blur of liquid green. It vanished into the topmost branches of the olive trees that guarded the gates of Rule.
“Another one scrubbed clean,” Cynric said, with satisfaction. “It makes me suspicious, though. This tawdry little virus—it’s a distraction, not a serious attempt. You know Ariane—”
Benedick shook his head. “If we’re staying here, we’re taking the world apart. Fixing them could be wasted effort, you know.”
A cage full of parrotlets rested by Cynric’s feet. She bent from the waist and pushed her hands through the transparent, flexible membrane that closed its aperture. Her hair fell all around her face, making a tunnel of her vision. She could not see Benedick, but she could feel him there beside her, breathing, shifting from foot to foot.
Another tiny bird came into her hands. Feather, bone, heat, and fragility.
“DNA is an aggressive molecule,” she said, extricating the parrotlet and caging it between her fingers as she stood. It kicked against her palms; she kept its wings pinned gently to its sides so it could not do itself an injury. Having cleared their program, she could have just sprung the cages and unleashed every one of the birds simultaneously, but the older Cynric got, the more she believed in ceremony.
She turned to her brother and extended her hands. “Here, you take this one.”
“Does it go with the non sequitur?” His long, vertically creased face nevertheless brightened as she pushed the little bird upon him. “Just let it fly?”
“Yea, verily.”
He was awkward, opening his hands crookedly, not giving the bird the toss that would throw it into flight. Still it kicked off his palms, leaving pinpricks of blue behind where talons had scratched, and flogged into the air.
He looked at her, holding his hands wide as the blood pulled itself into his body and sealed the wounds. “Was that a lesson, Sister?”
She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “For you, or for the parrotlet? It wasn’t a non sequitur, Ben. But think—the bird wants to live; it wants to propagate its species. On a visceral level that has nothing to do with what we deem cognition, it
Benedick did not speak, but his expression said volumes about doubt and ethics and frustration. Cynric studied the empty air where the birds had flown.
She owed him something for the suffering she had inflicted upon him, the guilt and grief by which she had manipulated him into becoming the man who no longer obeyed and trusted their father. The genesis of that grief had been her salvation and her destruction, her remaking. She knew the grief hadn’t left him; she could see its pressure between his eyes every time he glanced at her.
“And there are only two ways for that need to be met,” she finished.
“Two?” he asked. This time, he crouched himself, reaching in to gather up another few grams of green feathers over racing heart. He handed the parrotlet to Cynric, shaking it gently loose from his thumb when it bit, and retrieved another for himself.
Simultaneously, the Conns released them. Cynric caught her breath to watch them fly. “Either the world can live on—in whatever form—and thus its inhabitants endure, or we can make landfall somewhere that will sustain us all. Do you think we have the wherewithal to terraform, transplant, and sustain an entire ecology?”
Benedick looked at her and shook his head. “Do you suppose there’s a third option?”
“Probably,” she said. “The question is, will we think of it in time?”
“Prince Benedick,” Nova said. “Princess Cynric. There is a crisis on the surface. An assassination attempt has been made against the Captain. She is alive”—the Angel spoke quickly enough that Cynric saw Benedick’s shoulders relax incrementally almost before they could tense—“and wounded. Tristen requests assistance.”
“Evacuation?” Benedick was ever crisp in crisis.
“It would be unwise to move the Captain,” Nova said. “However, I feel it would also be unwise for you to go to her. There is too much potential for a trap.”
“My daughter—”
“Benedick.” Cynric reached across the space to lay a hand on his arm.
“Cynric—”
“I will go to your daughter. What can it harm? I am dead already. Let me see this thing they call a world.”
* * *
Dust’s patron began by laying the open palms of her borrowed body on the pages of the book. She pressed them flat, and Dust felt the roll of her shoulders under his feet when she squared them and drew in a breath. She had a long neck in this body, a pointed chin, and hair that reached her thighs. Dust curled himself in the cave those things made and waited.
Across the table, the Go-Back Engineer who possessed Tristen’s daughter sat, too, pressed her own hands open on the tabletop, and also waited.
Dust heard her heart and breathing quicken as that black, black text began to flow from the page across the backs of Ariane’s hands, sliding over graceful bones and tendons in as fine relief as sculptured porcelain. The book bled text up the outlined muscles of her forearms, the sharp elbow bones. Words glided like projected light and shadow over skin, then vanished beneath the sleeves of her blouse. Dust felt them moving, immaterial but important, under the dry, scratchy pads of his feet, curling up his patron’s throat and swimming across her face. She ran full of words; she glowed with them. They buoyed her blood and burned in the depths of her irises.
“Loading,” she whispered, in a voice full of strange resonances. Words continued to flow into her—words now that were unrecognizable, strings of digits and letters, curious and arcane symbols. There was seemingly no bottom.
“Loading,” she said, again. And again. And, “Dust, I need you.”
The fallen Angel nerved himself, looked into his patron’s eyes, and followed the words within.
