Part 21 (1/2)

Whatever Tristen had been about to mouth, unthinking, died upon his tongue. He eased his shoulders in his armor, feeling it resist and settle as he pushed against the gel interior.

”I think you were right,” he said.

Dorcas led them through the Heaven like a woman showing them around her house. The snakes and sycophants had mostly dispersed, returning to their tasks in the near-vertical rice paddies, and Mallory came up to walk beside them, Samael trailing like a wisp of smoke behind. Dorcas acknowledged Mallory with a nod, but otherwise continued to speak chiefly to Tristen. To judge by smirk alone, Mallory was more amused than offended.

”Soothe my curiosity,” Tristen said. ”Why in the world are you willing to help us?”

”Is it not the role of a dutiful daughter?” She must have seen his wince, because she looked away, as if scanning the moss-draped boughs, and gave him a moment to recollect himself. Neither Sparrow nor Aefre had ever had need of such social manners, so the gesture carried with it a hard freight of reminder that Dorcas was not Sparrow.

Again.

Tristen was still working to swallow that when she said, ”The reason for our existence as a sect is gone, you know. We are under way again. A solution has been implemented, and in any case, we no longer have the option of abandoning the world and returning home. We have been infected with your symbiont, against our wills; the purity of our form is compromised.”

Tristen was tempted to comment on the fact that Dorcas herself had enjoyed the benefits of her symbiont for the last five hundred years, without apparent ill effect to her rise among her church-but under the circ.u.mstances he considered the wisdom of discretion and bit his tongue.

She continued, ”Which means that if we are to survive in the world to come, we must make some choices. a.s.suming we live to reach a planetfall, it's likely to take all of us working together. And toward that end, I can think of worse allies than the world's First Mate.” She paused. ”So, to put it in plain terms, you have pa.s.sed my test. And whatever I have done today to earn your enmity, I hope that it will be balanced against the aid I offer now.”

”I see,” he said. ”You will understand if I make no promises?”

She smiled and glanced aside. ”What will you do with Arianrhod when you find her?”

”Bring her to justice,” Tristen said. Unable to resist, he raised his eyebrows and added, ”You know all about that.”

Maybe it was too early to tease her-though after all, she had started it. Or maybe not, because the sharp glance she gave him modulated smoothly from irritation to amus.e.m.e.nt. Dorcas, Tristen suspected, was a person who took quiet pride in not becoming irritated.

She said, ”I don't suppose you know where you're going?”

Gavin's long neck rose above Mallory's frizzy curls. ”South,” he said. ”Into the belly of the beast.”

Dorcas chuckled. ”It's possible you speak truer than you know. I can get you to the bottom of the world, to the Broken Holdes. Can you find your way from there?”

”Inasmuch as we know where we are going,” Tristen said. ”Something down there has interfered with the world-angel's sensory apparatus, and we are only guessing based on another tracking party's information that her destination is somewhere in the null patch.” He would not tell her, just now, how long it had been since his team had had contact with Bened.i.c.k and Chelsea, or with Nova and Perceval.

”The null patch,” Dorcas echoed. ”You really have no idea what lives there?”

Samael mimicked a few quick strides and came up between them. ”You do?”

”We know all sorts of things,” Dorcas said. ”Many of us-we were Engineers, remember? After I was a soldier, I became an Engineer, inspired by the memory of Hero Ng.” She lowered her voice and spoke conspiratorially. ”Some of us are more cynical than others when it comes to the question of the will of G.o.d.”

Tristen glanced at Samael, at Gavin, at Mallory-each by turn. All three avoided his gaze. ”Some of us learned our cynicism the hard way,” he replied. ”So what's in the null zone?”

”Cynric's last weapon,” she said. ”A captive monster. A demon so terrible that, after she captured it, Captain Gerald concealed its existence from all but a few. When Alasdair became Commodore after him, Alasdair hid it even from his children, for fear of what they would do with the information.”

”For fear of what he'd made them, you mean.”

She smiled. ”Perhaps that, as well. In any case, Cynric caught two of them. One she took apart, and made things of the pieces. The other she kept captive, held in reserve.”

”She used it,” Gavin said, craning his neck around to stare at Samael. ”Do you really claim no knowledge, Poison Angel, of what it was your mistress wrought?”

”My memory is incomplete,” Samael said drily. ”Do enlighten us.”

Tristen wondered if the basilisk's glance at Dorcas was meant as a request for permission. She made no move to interrupt, and he continued, ”She built on it, the way she built on everything she touched, everything she knew. As Dorcas said, she created it a weapon.”

”Something to fight our father,” Tristen said. ”Well, I guess if anyone would remember that-”

Gavin flipped his wings, tail coiling and uncoiling along Mallory's spine so that Tristen wondered what social discomfort looked like on a power tool.

”Those memories are not mine,” Gavin said. ”And they are ... also incomplete. So you have a route that will take us there, My Lady of the Edenites?”

”We have more than that,” she said. ”We have regained some limited control of the world's musculature. I can put you there.”

In unison, Mallory and Samael said, ”Musculature?” which made Tristen feel somewhat more comfortable in his own ignorance.

Dorcas pressed her palms to her eyes. ”By the sacred spiral, people. Do you know how the world generates its electricity?”

Silence answered her.

She sighed. Then her hands began to move animatedly as she explained. ”It's not just the reactors or the solar panels. I'll give you a hint. The exterior of the world is sheathed in self-healing carbon nanotube 'muscle' that can be used to move portions of the structure around relative to one another.”

”That's ingenious,” Samael said.

”It's not rocket science.” Her lips twisted. ”Actually, I guess after a fas.h.i.+on, it is. When not in operation, the musculature uses flex and inertial effects to generate electricity. Thereby”-she snapped her fingers-”keeping the lights on. And the temperature constant, though under the current circ.u.mstances I wouldn't be surprised if there are failures on that front.”

Tristen blinked, trying to integrate the scientist now emerging with the autocratic priestess he'd thought he was dealing with.

Mallory came to the rescue. ”It is our information that there have been failures, some catastrophic. The angel and Engineering were working to contain them when we entered your Heaven. It is possible that by now they've been redressed.”

”Your confidence in your masters is touching.”

Tristen said, ”One thing that troubles me still, Dorcas. When we came in, we saw sc.r.a.pe marks in the air lock. As if you had been discarding trash.”

She made a moue. ”Sacrifices,” she said. ”Some believe in appeasing the Enemy.”

”Oh,” he said. ”I see.” Desperate for a change of topic, he added, ”When do we reach your mode of transport, then?”

”We're in it,” Dorcas said. ”And in fact, if you look up ahead, you'll see we're almost there.”

Tristen craned his neck. Through the tunnel of bowering trees, he glimpsed the hard, clean oval of an air lock. ”We're moving.”

”Relative to the rest of the world, anyway,” she said. She paused, one hand hovering over a DNA lock. She palmed it and the door slid aside, revealing a standard barren cubicle.

It crossed Tristen's mind to imagine that she might very well just decoy them inside to s.p.a.ce them, but if that happened, it wasn't as if he and Mallory couldn't survive the Enemy's embrace for a few moments.

He turned to Dorcas and said, ”Thank you. If we survive this-”

”You'll be in touch,” she said, and touched the armor over his right arm. She met his eyes. ”Go with luck. I think you will be sad a long time, Tristen Tiger. But I hope not too sad.”

When they pa.s.sed through the air lock and the interior door sealed across Dorcas's face, Gavin found himself prey to emotions too complex by half for a simple power tool. Grief, regret, guilt, resignation.

These were not his emotions. His emotions currently encompa.s.sed concerned antic.i.p.ation at what they might find ahead, irritation at the delay, vulture worry. The others-the indescribable ones, the painful ones-he knew better than to try to own them. They belonged to someone else, someone to whom he bore no more resemblance than Nova did to Rien. Than Dorcas did to Sparrow. But in conjunction with that knowledge came the uncomfortable corollary: whatever he had behind him had left traces.