Grail - By Elizabeth Bear Page 0,60

out of her bunk and stood, bending her spine and leaning back to balance under the lip of the cubby like a cave-climber. The desk she left parked in the bedclothes.

“Tub? Is that any way to talk about your vessel, Captain?”

She grinned and plunked down on the matting. It was soft, conducive as a surface for resting, stretching, or acrobatics—and unlikely to damage anything you dropped on it. Danilaw was growing quite attached to it as a floor covering. It was even easy to vacuum, and if they lost gravity abruptly, it wouldn’t hurt to smack yourself into.

“Well, this is a glorified tugboat run,” she said. “Come on. Play me something our visitors’ umpteen-great-grandparents might have listened to. Didn’t they have genres of religious music?”

He hefted his guitar. He knew a couple that were actually pretty good. If they were anything a Kleptocrat-duped religious fanatic might have grooved out to, that was anybody’s guess. But that wasn’t the point, exactly, was it?

“Sure,” he said. “We can call it research.”

* * *

The trick, Dust thought, always lay in speaking to his patron without alerting her host. It would be a hazardous game. But he knew where to find her—she’d made sure he could follow her movements—and a toolkit could go many places unnoticed, especially in Engine. Dust now took advantage of that freedom.

Travel in this new world was easy. Dangers were clear to see—structural weaknesses and the lairs of ambush predators delineated by caution zones and warning buzzers. There were highways, access shafts, lifts, and functioning air locks everywhere.

Travel in Engine was even easier. The Dust toolkit joined his scurrying brethren, sweeping-whiskers-to-fluffy-tail along the margins of wide corridors, scuttling over cable bridges and through valve doors sized just right for a creature no longer than a man’s forearm.

When he came at last by secret ways to the place his program had summoned him to attend, it was deserted. A cube with twining vines up every wall, nodding flowers of jimsonweed and morning glory basking in the mist that condensed on each petal. The cube’s resident had folded the bedding away before the irrigation cycle, and Dust climbed up on the transparent, bevel-cornered box that housed it and several changes of clothes.

There he sat, grooming the moisture from his tail and hunting up scraps of edibles in the cracks of the mossy sleeping platform, until the cube divider slid aside and a pale hand parted the hanging vines. A face and a shoulder followed; hazel eyes widened in greeting. “Hello, toolkit. Do you have a message for me?”

The host was dressed as an Engineer, but looked like a Conn. Dust knew he should recognize which Conn, but those were among the details that had been scraped away by his reduced circumstances and lost.

Dust did have a message, however. Embedded in his program, a string of phonemes that made words in no language the world had ever heard. A key. A trigger.

That head-tilt melted into something else. The same gesture, the same face—but a different intention behind it.

“Wonderful,” Ariane Conn said. “That worked beautifully. We may speak freely here. Welcome, ghost of Dust. Did you arrange a conversation for me?”

“I did,” the toolkit said, whiskers twitching. Subtlety was another element of his former skill that had been lost in the interests of data compression. He needed information, and so he spoke his question to her. “I do not understand why you would reconstitute me, when we were enemies. Your ally, as I recall, was Asrafil.”

She slid the door closed and set the privacy filter. “I went to great lengths—risking this body and the revelation of my own existence—to free my daughter Arianrhod from Caitlin’s machinations.” Her face compressed with grief. “Arianrhod loved Asrafil. She served him. And Asrafil betrayed her to her death. Cynric consumed her.”

Dust nodded his pointed face. Death was always a relative function, a complicated thing when you were dealing with angels or Exalt. People died in pieces, by increments, or were transformed into something else. For Means, death had meant something concrete, a hard limit.

“For certain is death for the born / And certain is birth for the dead,” he quoted, stumbling over a scrap of contextual memory. But that wasn’t quite right, so he choked to a halt and began again. “I am sorry for your loss.”

“One cannot serve angels, Angel. One must own them.”

Dust nodded again. Agreeing with Conns was what you did with them. Whether this one knew he was patronizing her or not, she reached