Grail - By Elizabeth Bear Page 0,61

out and stroked the fluff behind his spotted ears. Her touch—or his fur—was so soft that he felt it only as he might have felt a wind.

“You should have been mine.” She smiled. “And now you are.”

By stellar-system standards, it wasn’t a long trip—measured in weeks rather than months, which had something to do with the velocities involved, both of the inbound, decelerating vessel and the massively overpowered-for-her-mass Quercus.

They had the Jacob’s Ladder on telescopic and various other sensory systems (mass detector, q-scanner, electromagnetic, radio telemetry) long before they made direct visual contact.

But there was something about that first real sight of her, with Danilaw’s own eyes, nonetheless.

She began as a bright dot, a reflective sparkle of obviously variable albedo and mass. As they came up upon her, she gradually resolved into a spiderweb, and then a sort of scaffolding.

Danilaw kept thinking they were closer than telemetry indicated, which alerted him intellectually to her scale. But he couldn’t integrate her true scope until they came within about a kilometer. Then Danilaw’s world-bred senses could no longer mislead him that this looming skeleton was anything other than gargantuan.

Superlatives and adjectives failed him simultaneously. The Jacob’s Ladder hung against its backdrop of stars, covering the entire horizon as revealed to Danilaw and Amanda where they stood before cramped screens in the scull, which did not have a discrete bridge. Danilaw had studied the generation ship’s schematics and designs, such as were still available after an elapsed millennium. He had thought himself prepared, and yet now that it was real, the discomfort of awe humbled him.

She was the largest man-made thing he had ever seen. And that comparison failed to do her justice, because she was orders of magnitude more enormous than the next biggest. Whole ranks and families of planetesimals had died to build her; the raw materials of a man-made world.

She might once have been a wheel, of sorts, although one oppressively vast—or, more precisely, a nested series of skeletal wheels set at angles to one another, like a wirework wind sculpture reproduced at unimaginable scale. Danilaw could see how each had once turned inside the next, how they had been angled to catch available light and cast each other not too much in shadow. He could even see where the immense full-spectrum light cannons had been mounted, aimed so that the pressure of escaping photons would contribute to the great ship’s gentle propulsion. Each turning ring had stabilized the ship, and all together they had acted to make her akin to a giant gyroscope, balanced by her own spin.

She had been lovely once, the Jacob’s Ladder. But now she was an enormous scarred skeleton of nodules joined by tubes, twisted in places and in others crudely repaired. Danilaw could make out generations of technology at work on her hull—hulk would have seemed the better word, except she was warm, a living ship, glowing softly in the infrared.

And she was, unmistakably, moving forward under her own power. He could see the gleam of her engines through the gaps in her frame, and the long cometary plume of her exhaust glazed with reflected sunlight when they came around to approach her on a diagonal, matching trajectories.

Some repairs seemed crude—machine-shop things, scrap metal hammered into place and spot-welded or even riveted to cover the scars of some of her traumatic amputations. Some were more craftsmanlike, with matched edges or careful jury-rigging. There were aluminum, plastic, ceramic alloys, titanium, even cloth painted with a doping compound in evidence, depending on where he looked and which schematic he glanced at.

And then there were the repairs and reductions which seemed almost clean in comparison. As the Jacob’s Ladder moved against the starfield, bathed in her own lights, the rays of the distant sun, and the floods of the scull, he caught how beveled edges gleamed here and there as if they had been sliced with a knife so hot it left fused edges behind. Other surfaces resembled the sanded luster of frosted glass, as if the metal and ceramic of her hide had itself sublimated into space. Scorch marks, blisters, craters, and volatilized surfaces scarred her everywhere.

When the sharply held breath finally whistled out through his nostrils, it stung. Beside him, Captain Amanda slid her hands into her pockets, flat-palmed, fingers arched back and tendons in relief as if she were packing all the stress away in them.

She said, “When she left Earth’s system, she was the size of Manhattan Island.”

“Well, she isn’t now,” Danilaw answered.