centuries. You never stopped wondering what might have been different.
Even now, with incontrovertible evidence of aliens—human aliens, admittedly, and not so alien as Leviathan, but almost certain to prove weirder than all the nonhuman intelligences that filled up the walls of the world— Benedick found Cat’s presence a reminder of all the errors of a long life. The years and the work had eased things between them, and they were friends again, which was good, because they needed to be able to work together.
But he missed her, as simply as that. And he had never quite stopped wanting her back.
Still, he’d settled for what he could earn, and reconstructing the friendship had also served to reconstruct the trust. He didn’t think there were many people she’d allow to stand over her like this so calmly, invading her personal space while she worked.
He straightened up and came around the display tank to face her. “We can’t assume their intentions,” he said quietly, when he knew he had her attention. It was just a shift of the eyes, but it was enough. They were still a team.
“You’re worried about what will happen when we start exchanging diplomats.”
He shrugged, brushing his hair behind his shoulders. “Nanotechnology, inducer viruses—or whatever they have that’s similar—bacterial agents, engineered or accidental. There’s no telling what could come in on their shoes. And we can’t assume, after centuries of isolation, that we have any reciprocal immunities.”
“And they’re very likely to be Means,” Caitlin said. “Our bugs might just kill them—not to mention the colonies. Are they going to want to become Exalt?”
“It’s something we can bargain with,” Benedick said. “It’s an advantage and possibly a trade good.”
“But it’s combat you’re worried about.”
He felt himself smile. As well as he knew her, it was reciprocated. “Combat. Or treachery.”
She had a peculiar gesture of rubbing her nose that was all hers. “Well, you are our father’s son.”
Benedick folded his hands under his arms.
Her mouth worked around whatever she was thinking of saying. Because it was Caitlin, he would never know how many options she chewed over and discarded before she settled. “I am sorry,” she said. “I was trying to provoke you.”
She stood and punched him lightly on the shoulder. “I’ve got to keep in trim for the aliens. So what do we recommend to the Captain?”
The Captain, their daughter. “We’re going to have to meet with them,” Benedick said. “Especially when we’re asking to share a planet, because I don’t think they’ll cede either of those two potentially habitable worlds to us entirely. It’s not human nature.”
“So even if they are inhumanly gracious, we’re going to have to live with them.”
“And when we do, we need to be aware of and guarded against all the possibilities for disaster.”
Caitlin turned her head, glancing over her shoulder at the system diagrams spinning with stately indifference in the big image tank. “I hope we’re aware of that,” she said. “I hate to think we’re underselling it to ourselves.”
Very little in the world knows more about keeping quiet than does a library.
Dust, who had been a library once, huddled in his ringspotted fur coat, paws dry-washing, all the active senses that might have told him enough about his environment to move in safety drawn inward, turned passive, locked down. He felt the new Angel all around, the web of her presence a veil made of trip wires and snares. If she found him she would eat him, as she had eaten most of him already. As she had eaten every other angel and remnants of angels she had found. If she found him, she would devour him whole. So, with perfect logic, he decided she would not find him at all.
The world had changed from what he knew. While he died, slept, and grew back from a spark, it had evolved from a hulk to a haven, from a shell to a ship.
Who had preserved the spark of him? And who had caused it to awaken here, into the helpful-animal consciousness of this furry toolkit with its deft hands and keen, twitching nose?
And who had thought that this, the eve of landfall, would be an opportune time to return him from the quiet cold of storage?
It seemed to Dust that, first, he must learn who had preserved him, and what that person or those persons intended. And then, having done that, he must decide how he was going to use those intentions to suit his own designs.
Dust was small now. Dust scurried. Dust moved without notice through the channels in the walls of the world. Dust only half recollected himself, but from what he remembered of the angel he had been, he would have left himself resources. Resources baled, blindered, and buried against future need. He had always been a hoarder— that was also after the nature of libraries.
His spotted pink and brown nose twitched. He sniffed, careful of whose spores he brought into the lungs of his insufficient, temporary form. If he could not extend his senses out into the world for fear of drawing the new Angel’s attention, he’d bring the world into himself and parse it that way. Primitive, but it should be effective enough if he were painstaking and meticulous.
He’d find the resources. He’d answer the questions. He’d learn who had brought him back.
He’d reclaim his ship, and he’d win his freedom again.
Dust filtered mouse-soft into the cracks in the walls and was gone.
Caitlin Conn did not have to travel from Engine to the Bridge to speak to, or even to see, her daughter. But she often did, walking down the long corridor past the venerable New Evolutionist Bible and climbing through the irising door to the Bridge before it was entirely open, and for this Perceval was grateful. The loneliness of command was one thing, and the loneliness of missing your family quite another. And seeing and speaking weren’t the same thing as physical contact, oxytocin, pheromones—the bonding chemicals that managed stress and settled cortisol levels.
Perceval managed her own neurochemistry through her symbiont, but manual manipulation of any system so complex, nuanced, and responsive was inevitably cruder and more granular than what the healthy brain managed on its own, with the proper stimulus.
And sometimes it was nice to see her mother and collect a hug.
Caitlin arrived dressed for off-duty, which was another endocrine signal Perceval didn’t get enough of. When the Bridge door dilated to reveal Caitlin’s broad-hipped, broad-shouldered form in blousing trousers and barefoot, it was as if somebody had pulled a plug in Perceval’s spine and let all the stress run out.
The Captain kept the cynicism out of her voice as she said, “Hey, Mom.”
She hadn’t thought she was trying to sound particularly nonchalant, but if the words had come out that way, Caitlin wasn’t buying it. She cleared the doorway quickly and stood just inside while it sealed, hands on her hips and head cocked appraisingly. Caitlin still wore her black unblade, Charity—but there was off-duty, and there was stupidity.
Although Perceval stood still to greet her, her white trousers and shift falling about her with folds unstirred even by the movement of air, Caitlin huffed and glanced around the Bridge as if she could see every moment of Perceval’s last hour.
And perhaps she could, if she were checking in the infrared. The cold Captain’s chair, and the warmth of footsteps sprinkled over the grass and meadow flowers of the Bridge decking. The evidence of Perceval’s tight- reined distress lay everywhere.
“Wearing a groove in the planking?” Caitlin said. Grass whisked between her toes as she came to her daughter. Perceval might be taller, but Caitlin still outmassed her by half. She hunched herself down to accept her mother’s hug, wishing to feel enfolded in it, protected. Nobody could be impervious all the time.
“Pacing the Bridge is the Captain’s prerogative,” Perceval said.
