Grail

   Cynric recognized the young Mean who waited in the shuttle—the lighter—for her. Jesse, one of the Administrators of Fortune. He seemed drawn and harried as she took her place, but more than a little overawed by her, and made an awkward, undiplomatic effort to make her feel at ease.

And his mere presence was a pleasant assurance that her chances of making it to the surface in one piece were fairly good. She folded herself into the tight space defined by the acceleration couches and rigged the straps for security. When Administrator Jesse double-checked them, he seemed satisfied.

With a small bump, they came free of the world, and she saw it from a perspective farther away than even when she had captured the Leviathan.

As they accelerated into the gravity well, Cynric made idle conversation with the Administrator. As their path took them between Fortune and its secondary, she found her eye drawn to the smaller world’s cloud-swirls, its dark seas and ragged continents.

“If you won’t share your world,” Cynric said, “what about that one?”

Jesse’s gaze followed her own. “Everything on that one is poison.”

“Too poison for us?”

“It’s a hydrogen sulfide based biosphere,” he said. He glanced at her sideways, eye corners crinkling. “And yet perhaps you are too poison for it.”

Cynric laughed. “You lot make so much of your mental stability. But you’re xenophobes, neophobes, the lot of you. You’ve wired a lack of diversity into your souls.”

He rubbed his chin and frowned, but he did not seem offended. “And you do better?”

She shrugged. “We get along with carnivorous plants and talking screwdrivers. I don’t know what should be so hard about getting along with you.”

   Perceval awakened in a room of wonders, unable to really appreciate any of them. On her left side, vast bubbled portals showed a watery undersea view—a glimpse into the River, perhaps?—and on her right, animate banks of lights winked in oscillating patterns.

She lay, she thought, exposed on a sort of cot or raised pallet, not enclosed in a proper bunk. She didn’t have much pain—a little lingering soreness and stiffness—and she didn’t feel crushed by the weight of her own body, which at first made her think she was back aboard the Jacob’s Ladder.

She didn’t immediately recognize the room she was in, but even now there were probably thousands of places in the world she hadn’t seen with her own eyes. Life was finite—and very busy—and the world was large.

But this room was not lit in any of the ways Perceval recognized, instead illuminated by full-spectrum fixtures that nevertheless didn’t shine in quite the color her eyes expected. And when she said “Nova?” Nova did not answer.

Instead, the face of her Aunt Cynric hove into view, creased with a frown of concern. “How do you feel?”

Perceval self-assessed. “Not bad,” she said. “All things considered.”

“Not bad for somebody who left most of her liver on the pavement?” Cynric spoke in the dialect of Fortune. It was strange to hear her switch languages with such facility and obvious relish.

This idea of languages—of different languages—was something of a novel concept to Perceval. Of course there were dialects aboard the world, and isolated communities had drifted away from one another. But so long as you excepted the anatomically unique creatures, such as the carnivorous plants and the Leviathan, all speech descended from one mother tongue.

Well, there was Language, but that was different—a neurological exploit rather than patterns of sound and movement. And only Cynric had ever been any good at it.

“Pavement,” Perceval said, lingering over the foreign language in her turn. “The liver’s growing back, I hope.”

“Everything seems to be repairing itself nicely.” Cynric patted her shoulder. “You should rest a while longer. We have the gravity turned down to make you more comfortable, but the field only extends over the hospital bed.”

“I have to pee,” Perceval said. “Can I risk a trip to the head, or am I to be subjected to indignities?”

“Better not risk it,” Cynric said. “Tristen is in the hall, guarding the door, and I’m pretty sure he’d glare at us. I’ll get you a pan.”

Perceval sighed and turned her head to watch the ports. Were they still windows when they showed an underwater world outside, sunlight streaming through green translucence thick as glass? Something moved behind them, writhing and alive. The storms, it seemed, had passed.

“We’re underwater,” Perceval said, stating the obvious because it came with a revelation. “That’s why we couldn’t find the settlement.”

“Dug into earth and covered by water,” Cynric agreed. She slid the bedpan under the sheets, and stepped aside while Perceval made the necessary accommodations. “Low-impact.”

“Which we are not.” Perceval relieved herself, thinking of chamber pots and squatting by roadsides and how much of human history was about finding ways to pretend biology didn’t exist. “Cynric …”

There was a silence, as if Perceval’s hesitation had cued her that what came next would be a prickly topic. “I’m listening.”

Perceval nerved herself, and tried to speak not as Captain to Bioengineer but rather as younger relative to elder. Whatever happened, she wouldn’t be Captain much longer now. She probed the bullet wound in her abdomen with her fingertips and tried to imagine what it would be like to regret that.

“I know it’s been a long time, and a lot of changes. I know you might not remember. But—I have wondered for a long time. What was Caithness like?”

Whatever Cynric had expected, whatever she had been braced for, it was not that. She started—the first time Perceval had ever seen that cultivated mask of serenity slip. And then she said, softly, one word.

“Fair.”

“Beautiful? She is not remembered so—”

“No.” Cynric’s hand slid down, a gesture that cut. “They called her Caithness the Just, and she was. To a fineness, to a fault. It must have been a reaction to our father, who was arbitrary and capricious, but in many ways Cate was the one of us most like him. Though she would have scowled to hear me say so.”

“Scowled and not raged?” Perceval handed the bedpan back with care.

Cynric took it with no evidence of distaste. Of course, she’d seen worse. And of course, if you were cutting yourself for tight storage, squeamishness would be one of the first things to go. “She had a temper. But she did not give it rein.”

“That doesn’t sound much like Alasdair.”

She’d met him only once, and she’d been his daughter’s prisoner at the time—a daughter he was furious with, and who was about to kill him—which might not be the best way to get a sense of someone’s personality. But she’d known enough of his sons and daughters now to learn secondhand what they thought of him, and she’d seen the results of his child-rearing. If you could dignify it with that term.

Cynric, sliding the bedpan into what must be a sterilizer, shrugged. It made the long drapes of the robe that concealed her narrow body sway, ripples moving down them as if someone had shaken out a sheet. “The thing in her that was most like our father was her ruthlessness. I call her just. I do not mean to suggest that she was compassionate.”

“Oh.” Perceval settled back against the pillow. Her breath lifted and settled her chest; her heart beat even and sure. She took a moment to contemplate just what a luxury that was, as the stitch of pain across her back eased, forgiving her movement for the immobility that followed.

Perceval had made choices since becoming Captain of which she was not proud. Some—many—of them, she would make again, though she did not claim that justified them. And she blanched at what Cynric had considered a reasonable price—to herself and others—for the survival of the world.

She thought for a moment on what Cynric Conn might experience as an excess of ruthlessness, and folded her arms across her abdomen, mindful of the tubes that fed, medicated, and watered her. “I think I’m glad she’s gone.”

“She would have made a good Captain,” Cynric said. “But so do you. And now you should try to sleep