Grail - By Elizabeth Bear Page 0,3

and Gavin were gone, consumed by other intelligences. Inkling and Dust had been assimilated too. They had been folded into Nova, a new Angel—the same being that Rien had given herself up to create. And now they were all three as inextricable from the final product as eggs and flour from cake.

Perceval had been slow in forgiving herself for her lost loved ones and enemies, and slower in forgiving the new Angel so forged for the exigencies of her birth. But there was only so long one could hold a grudge, and as the years passed, Perceval found it helped to think of Nova as the child, and of Rien and the others as her parents. Nova was not a shadow of them or something constructed of their remnants … but a new person derived from the old.

A child was not to blame for the death of a parent.

It helped, and the River helped too. Swimming its currents wasn’t really like flying—no one who had ever had wings of her own would make that mistake, or use that metaphor. But the warm water was a comfort, and the River was a place where she could be alone—Perceval, just Perceval, and not the Captain. Not in command. This was a place where she could shut out the voices of her internalized ancestors, their wisdom and advice and the constant need to integrate herself while still maintaining connections to their memories.

She carried a council of elders in her head and in her hardware—with all their egos and all their expectations. And, sometimes, a girl just wanted a minute to herself.

She missed Rien so much. She had needed Rien so much—needed someone to whom she would always be herself, and not a commander or a tool. But she couldn’t have that. Rien was gone, consumed by the ship’s revenant Angel, and fighting to bring her back or to remake Nova into something more like Rien would lead to the kind of destruction that Perceval’s aunt and enemy Ariane had caused, before Perceval consumed her. But here at least Perceval could have some of what she wanted—the silence inside her own mind, the peace to dwell there, and the smooth tug of water flowing over skin.

Even to wings, air never felt like something you could grasp and haul yourself up on. The viscosity was too low: it was slippery stuff, running away between your feathers just when you needed it most. But here, she was surrounded, immured, in a substance she could pretend was as solid and protective as the skin of the world.

Everyone knew to leave the Captain alone while she was swimming. Even the Angel.

So when Nova’s voice broke through her reverie—not so much a sound carried by vibration as a tickle in Perceval’s awareness, urgent with latent information—Perceval felt the sting of adrenaline through every vein.

The contact unfolded, expanding from a shimmering thread to a landscape of information. Perceval quit stroking forward, allowing the buoyancy of her body to carry her to the surface. She did not bob up as she once would have. Hollow bones served no purpose in a girl with no wings, and now she was stronger and heavier than ever she had been when she was a flyer.

As she broke the surface, her head came back, mouth open, lungs expanding her deep chest as she filled herself with air. Her body—flesh and symbiotic colony—took care of that automatically. Which was as well, because Perceval’s awareness was half a hundred miles away, spun out through the fabric of motes, colonies, and electromagnetic webs that made up the ramscoop and nervous system of the Jacob’s Ladder.

The world was braking sharply through the gravity well of the first stellar system she had encountered since leaving the shipwreck stars the better part of fifty years before. Perceval bestrode the vast construction-toy webwork of the world’s frame—its spokes and wires and the baubles of habitats strung between them—and she watched the distant stars turn in the cold dark on every side.

Only one, the destination sun, was close enough to seem warm, and even it was but a brighter mote, alight on the Enemy’s black bosom. Somewhere between here and there lay the potentially habitable world—with its massive satellite—that they had come to colonize.

Astrogator Damian Jsutien, who had plotted their course, relying on information gleaned from an alien prisoner, had taken to sardonically calling it Grail, and the name had stuck.

Perceval’s crippled artificial world was limping to drink from a healing cup. The