Grail - By Elizabeth Bear Page 0,43
into the company of its brethren. She breathed over the nest, a benediction or a prayer, and let the branches fall protectively back over the nursery.
As she stepped back, Samael caught her smiling. Feathers drifted around her, shed down from her cloud of protesters, one fingertip-tiny lime-rind-colored wing covert snagged in her hair, its threadlike strands in disarray. Samael swept the detritus up on his covalent fields and drew it into himself, raw material for shirt collar, eyebrows, a flamboyant braided down-fluff earring. That one feather, though, he reached out and plucked up with the simulacra of his fingers.
He smoothed the vanes into a semblance of order and tucked it into his own hair, among the chaff and milkweed floss and dandelion clocks and wheatgrass. Some tiny remnant of the parent parrotlet’s symbiont and inducer virus colonies still hovered in the shaft with a droplet of blood, divorced of its community.
Like everything else living—or half living—in the world, Samael had had a hand in its making. It amused him to take this fragment of his creation back.
As Cynric stepped away from the trees, the parrotlets lost interest in harassing her and returned to their nests. Each pair divided the duty: one perching vigil in the mimosa’s fronds, where the long, curved thorns did not touch them—though the litter of tiny bones decomposing into calcium and trace nutrients among the leaf litter gave testament to the fate of any other small creature unlucky enough to blunder among those branches—and the other in the nest, counting chicks and regurgitating breakfast. The earlier chattering and shrieks of displeasure gave way to chirps and clucking.
Samael folded what passed for his arms. The pleasantries were apparently over. “You came for me?”
Cynric was used to dealing with Angels. She spoke plainly, with the directness of command. “We have a complicated ecological situation to address,” she said. “It is possible that there will be no place for us here, Samael. And the world’s systems are strained beyond expressing; that we have kept them mended as well as we have is only due to diligence and the toughness engineered into every life-form we’ve created. If we have to flee this haven, we have little time in which to mend them if we don’t wish to find ourselves living in a tin tub full of mold and ropes of algae. I require your cooperation.”
She was a Conn—and the revenant and reincorporated remnant of a Conn from when being a member of that terrible family had meant something different than it did under the reign of Captain Perceval. She could require anything of him she desired.
He nodded. “I will report our activities to Nova and the Captain.”
He didn’t actually think there was any irony in her smile. “I would expect no less. A Captain is not a Commodore. And we will need to use the labs. I remember that they are still intact in Rule?”
It wasn’t her memory, exactly, but one salvaged from the symbiotic tool-creature named Gavin, in which she had stored engrams of a portion of her living personality and will. The memories had been mostly sorted into other facilities, and Samael knew the entire structure he now called Cynric was missing great swaths of experience and history from her archives.
Samael had not initially been programmed for the more nuanced human social emotions—relief, gratification, humiliation. But one learned things over the course of an existence, and his program was exceptionally flexible. At some point or another, Israfel—the initial Angel, of which Samael and all his brethren were merely fragments—had been expected to feel devotion to his human masters, and Samael bore within him the results of the adaptations Israfel had made in response.
Cynric’s sanction left him with a sense of satisfaction he might even have characterized as “warm,” if he understood how humans used the term. (He was also given to understand that humans experienced emotions as physical sensations, which required a certain quality of imagination to comprehend.)
A pair of brilliantly colored birds swooped by overhead. Males, sparring—whether over a mate or territory it was impossible to say, and they were gone too fast for Samael to consider asking them. Cynric craned her head back to watch them swoop and dive over the breadth of the oval commuter shaft. She sighed.
“You never did tell me what the parrotlets were for,” Samael said, sensing an opportunity. “When I was Israfel, and after. They’re more than decorative, I think?”
She might have consumed a bit of his other self when she