Grail - By Elizabeth Bear Page 0,67

her head, and then her entire body, rotating in her footsteps. Danilaw knew she was scanning the space with her suit recorders, transmitting the data home. As Legate, one of her Obligations was to science and history. “This is your library?”

Here, the atmosphere was warm and thick—a rich mix of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen, with trace elements. Some products of decomposition, some by-products of living things metabolizing. He wished he dared breathe it; from the way the mossy soil dented under his feet, he imagined it smelled intensely green.

Danilaw’s own sensors told him that a warm body was approaching through the orchard, and in a few moments a slender figure ducked branches and appeared. He had expected a hierarchal gauntlet, and to be kept waiting and maneuvering through layers of functionaries until he could be brought before the Captain—presented with great solemnity, like the centerpiece of a feast.

But all that arrived now was an androgynous person clad in tight-fitting blacks and oranges, a halo of frizzy dark curls framing an elfin face. Woman, Danilaw thought, and then No, transgendered. The voice, when it came, was no help at all.

“I’m Mallory,” this person said. “It is a library, and I am its necromancer. The Captain is expecting you. Come in. Oh and—for your own safety—ask before you eat any fruit, please. Some of it is trickier than others.”

Danilaw and Amanda, still accompanied by the semicorporeal Angel, wound among the trees, trying not to jostle ripe fruit from limbs that dripped old Earth delicacies. He recognized oranges and limes—unless those were lemons—persimmons, pomegranates, and something that might be apples. They weren’t round and red, though, but striped red and green and gold in faint striations. There was a dark, almost black, fruit with a glossy bloom, and there was a small red-gold one that might be a cherry—

He lost track just about the time the necromancer led them into a clearing where white cane chairs sat in a circle around a transparent-topped table. It looked like a garden party, except the two individuals rising to meet them from behind that table were the people to whom Danilaw had been speaking via radio, with ever-decreasing delays, for the better part of two months now.

The First Mate was even more attenuated and strange in person, his white hair sparkling like bleached, unspun wool in the brilliant sunlight. That sunlight—clearer and more stark than what Danilaw was used to seeing warmed by miles of atmosphere—fell through the transparent panels overhead. In this direct light, Tristen’s skin was a translucent blue, as if someone had left inky water in an antique teacup until the pigment stained the porcelain. He wore a hardened pressure suit of cool white, the helm and gauntlets removed. The assemblage taken as a whole resembled a medieval suit of armor. Over it hung a sheathed sword, of all the insane archaic devices.

And the Captain—

Danilaw had somehow thought her apparent gauntness and strange proportions were exaggerated by the effect of transmission. If anything, they had been minimized, flattened. The woman who held out her hand to greet him, as unfazed by his space suit as if it were a formal visiting gown, could never pass for an unmodified human. Stage cosmetics could have hidden her skin tone, but not the depth of her chest nor the articulation of the shoulder joints—not to mention the short, peculiar structures on her upper back that lifted her pale dress across them and sometimes seemed to move of their own volition, working like the stump of a three-legged quadruped’s missing limb.

“I am Perceval Conn,” she said. “Welcome to my world. You are the first nonnative to set foot on her in seven hundred years.”

Danilaw was far more self-conscious about his pressure suit than she was. Instead, she cocked her head to look at it, and smiled. “Your armor is a different design from what we use,” she said. “Pardon if I stare. I had thought to offer you lemonade, but—” She gestured with self-deprecation. “I suppose Tristen and Mallory and I will have to drink it ourselves. Can you manage to sit, at least? Mallory, would you find our guests a bench, please? I don’t think the lawn furniture is likely to accommodate them.”

Before leaving, Mallory laughed—a charming lilt with an engaging hint of wickedness—and just as androgynous as everything else. Danilaw was beginning to get the idea that it was calculated, a sort of performance.

This person—Mallory—was not what he had expected from what he knew