comfortable with the necessity—or the fact that he, for the first time in his life, felt naked walking around unarmed. Maybe this will be peaceable. Maybe we can still pull that off. A lot of maybes to contend with.
They lined up by the exit. Captain Amanda cycled the lock around them and ran the decontamination protocol. The exterior door scrolled back slowly, the Quercus’s Fortune-standard atmosphere replaced by something that Danilaw’s suit sensors read as thinner than weak tea and shockingly moist.
Captain Amanda was apparently thinking the same thing. “That’s a lot of free water to leave floating around in a closed habitat …”
She never finished the sentence, which trailed off as if her voice were struck from her. Instead, they stood shoulder-to-shoulder and stock-still, neither at first quite processing what they were seeing. It was a corridor, or an accessway—a means of getting from the Quercus to the interior of the Jacob’s Ladder. But it was—
It was full of trees. Or made of trees, or a tree, or a latticing vine grown into a tree through the passage of centuries. The outside perimeter was a filigree of dark, smooth bole, heavy palmate leaves carpeting every space between. When they stepped over the threshold onto the surface, Danilaw lurched the first step as a slightly different angle of gravity asserted itself. Amanda reached out to steady him; neither fell.
From among the leaves, a swirl of atmosphere—a dust devil?—manifested. It grew and complicated, sweeping up bits of detritus into a roughly human outline. “Hello,” the projection said, as Danilaw shied back from its extended limb-approximation. “Don’t be afraid. Welcome to the world. I am Samael. I have been sent to guide you.”
An angel, Danilaw realized—and now, meeting it, he intuited its history and purpose better than he had before. One of Captain Perceval Conn’s servitors, or masters, or compatriots. Artificial intelligences originally programmed by the Kleptocracy and its creatures. A piece of terrible history, left behind to trouble future generations.
Danilaw felt as if he were confronted by an animate, talking gas chamber, or an iron maiden with pretty manners. What was less ethical than giving artificial intelligence personalities? Than creating—in essence—a slave race: creatures with agency and identity but only the semblance of free will?
Danilaw’s people still used smart systems. But they had long since abandoned the horrific practice of making people of them, and then enslaving the people they had made.
As Danilaw’s pulse accelerated and his oxygen usage spiked, he saw the motion of Amanda’s suit; she had rocked back on her heels. He wondered what she was experiencing. Her knowledge of the relevant history was more detailed than his own; Danilaw suspected that made this encounter all the more unsettling.
If Amanda was more discomfited, she also recovered from it better. “Hello, Samael,” she said. “I am Captain Amanda Friar. This is Danilaw Bakare, City Administrator of Bad Landing.”
The Angel’s sunflower-petal eyebrows quirked. “I was provided with your files,” he said. “If you will come with me, I will bring you to my Captain.”
They fell into step beside him. The corridor was wide enough for all three abreast, though the uneven surface of the interwoven, intergrown branches or trunks made the footing akin to skipping over cobblestones in reduced gravity. If Danilaw took a header, he wouldn’t fall hard.
“Feel free to ask any questions you like,” Samael said. “We are eager to share our knowledge with you as an expression of goodwill, and to establish that we can help your society become more flexible and adaptive. Also, you are welcome to use our resources. If it would make you more comfortable, please feel free to remove your armor.”
Samael gestured around magnanimously. Danilaw blinked, understanding suddenly that for a culture in which every atom of oxygen and molecule of water was an irreplaceable consumable, this was an exceedingly generous offer. Danilaw was accustomed to metering his object and resource usage, observing the Obligations, wasting neither personal nor collective assets. But to a society such as this, centuries out from a habitable world—they had what they had, and there would be no getting more. It went beyond Obligation, beyond social justice. Parsimony was their means of survival.
His confusion and revelation seemed transparent to the Angel, who kept talking as if conducting a familiar guided tour. “You have our word that you may unseal in safety. The Captain has ordered our microfauna and flora to treat your persons and equipment as sterile zones. You will not be colonized.”
“Wait,” Danilaw said. “Your Captain ordered