Grail - By Elizabeth Bear Page 0,66
this? Your microbes follow instructions?”
Samael gave him what he would have sworn was a pitying look. “They obey the Captain. Are they not part of the world’s ecology?”
Danilaw saw Captain Amanda’s eyelashes flicker through the wide faceplate of her pressure suit. He thought she smiled, a wry expression he read as wonder, but she concealed it quickly.
“Our viruses aren’t so civilized,” she said. “For your sakes, we should remain sealed.”
“Also,” Danilaw said apologetically, “your atmosphere is slightly thin and sour by our standards. We need to supplement oxygen. How do you—your people, I mean—survive in such low saturations?”
The Angel tossed flowing straw-colored locks over his shoulders. It might be some vegetable fiber, or the mane of some animal that Danilaw did not know. “Naked mole rats.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Naked mole rats,” Samael repeated. “They’re an Earth species of colony-living burrowing rodent that is—or was; they may be extinct on the old planet, although we have some—supremely adapted to the, well, the exceptionally nasty conditions found in their lairs. Centuries ago, Cynric the Sorceress introduced their adaptations to deoxygenated and toxic atmospheres into the human genome. This enabled our crew to survive and flourish despite the damage wrought to the world by the Breaking.”
“Cynric … the Sorceress?” It was only the light filtering through the bowering leaves on every side that flashed from Amanda’s jewel, but the way it gleamed when she cocked her head led Danilaw to entertain a fantasy that the sparkles were an external indicator of frantic processing activity within.
Samael nodded. Even in profile, the mosaic-approximation of a beaky, lined human face was three-dimensional and compelling. “She was the head of genetic engineering, five hundred and fifty years ago. You can meet her.”
“Meet her?”
“For certain. Or her remnant, at least. She is alive again, though incomplete from what she was. There are also a couple of true survivors of the Moving Times and the Breaking. We anticipated that you might be interested in speaking with them.”
Five hundred and fifty, Danilaw mouthed to Amanda through his faceplate.
She shrugged, as if other insanities still held more of her attention. Mole rat DNA, she mouthed back.
Danilaw nodded. Okay, so living five hundred years wasn’t such a surprise after that. Obviously, the Jacob’s Ladder survivors had developed life-extending technology. Or they habitually put people in cold storage for centuries at a stretch. One, Danilaw thought, was as likely as the other, though the idea of this ancient genetic engineer being alive “again,” and somehow damaged by the process, supported the cryogenic theory.
“Where are we going now?” Amanda asked, stretching her legs to keep up with the Angel. He wasn’t tall, but then Danilaw guessed that he also probably wasn’t walking.
“Directly to the Captain,” Samael said. “It’s a big world, however, and I ask you to bear with me.”
A big world indeed. They hiked for over an hour, leaving Danilaw grateful that he’d kept up with his fitness Obligation. Even servo-assisted and allowing for the Jacob’s Ladder’s intermittent gravity, his pressure suit was heavy for walking in. At least it processed heat efficiently, or he imagined his visor would have fogged past visibility in the first fifteen minutes.
He was glad it didn’t. Because the Jacob’s Ladder—or the world, as Samael insisted on referring to it—only became more grand and improbable with what every turning revealed, what lay behind every air lock, gate, or grid.
Each time the Angel, obviously accustomed to taking into account the frailties of corporeal life-forms, apologized for not taking them along the scenic route, Danilaw felt his disbelief strengthen. It would have been difficult to imagine anything more compelling than the insanely complicated ecosystems and architectures he and Amanda were being led through.
The travelers toiled up mossy boulders past cataracts of tumbling water, and animals and birds Danilaw could not begin to identify flocked in every environment. Glades of trees filled arching passageways with transparent walls that showed the architecture of the Jacob’s Ladder from within. But for all its wonders, the ship had a patched, weary air to it, like a made-over old quilt ready for the recyclers.
“Here we are,” Samael finally said. “The library.”
It was not, as the door glided wide, what Danilaw would have identified as a library. No paper books, no clay tablets, no inscribed jewels. No holographic, Bose-Einstein, or magnetic records. No papyrus scrolls and no solid-state archives.
Just a grove of fruit trees, stretching to the curved outside wall of a vast space, surrounded on every side by hungry emptiness.
“Library,” Captain Amanda said. She turned