Caitlin didn"t wince, but it was only long training as a Conn and as an Engineer that kept her impa.s.sive. "You don"t have contact, then."

Nova continued without hesitation, adapting to the interruption. "No reciprocal contact. But a large quant.i.ty of previously interdicted resources have been released to reconstruction applications under crew orders, and the information came encoded in a micropulse that appeared to originate with Samael. The Captain has directed me to refer to you for repurposing instructions."

Caitlin didn"t need to ask for stats. They were already scrolling through her awareness. Mult.i.ton quant.i.ties of metal, polymer, ceramic, conductors, fuel cells, and miscellaneous material had been made available. "The obvious use would be to sh.o.r.e up the unraveling superstructure. Less obviously, we could hold this stuff in reserve for repairs and reconstruction in case we have to cut loose the infected portions of the world. It looks like a lot, but once we start ... Using it is a commitment. And until we determine what the cause of the unraveling is, shoring up would more or less amount to tossing it into a disa.s.sembly machine."

Caitlin reached out and swiped a finger through the ice crystals on her console. The remaining ones glittered in the dim lighting. h.o.a.rfrost.

"Sloughing off the damaged portions of the world presents problems," Nova said. "First, in locating them all. And second, they are not limited to the fringes of the superstructure. The infection has metastasized, and many of the affected sections contain biota."

"I know," Caitlin said. She glanced from the angel"s jewel-presence to Jsutien, but he had closed his eyes again, and anyway this was her decision. She swallowed and made it. "Start constructing backup life-support and propulsion systems. Increase the size of the ram-scoop. Be ready to cut core systems free if necessary."

"But for now?" Nova asked, a nonhuman system seeking unambiguous confirmation.

"For now we hold on."

Much of what Tristen and his companions pa.s.sed was devastation, and much of the devastation was not new. They slithered among wreckage in chambers from which the Enemy had torn all breath and life, ruptured bulkheads frozen in twisted alloy petals like balloons captured at the moment of bursting. The empty sockets of shattered viewports reflected nothing, or-in cases where the panes had webbed but another member failed before the pressure blew them clear-reflected too much, in awkward fragments that never quite matched at the edges.

Salvage had already begun here: many of the damaged sections were obviously in a state of partial deconstruction, and there were great, smooth-edged gaps in the world"s superstructure where materials must have been repurposed to reinforce what could be saved. But there were no signs of rogue colony activity here-the damaged systems and sections were not merely evaporating into s.p.a.ce, and nothing attacked the travelers.

In the blasted sections, some strata had gravity, and more did not. The domaines where one could drift or glide were easier than the ones where one must pick a route across destroyed landscapes and machinery. Tristen had his armor, and Gavin and Samael thought nothing of traversing awkwardly among rent metal, shredded wiring, and the remains of animals and plants frozen brittle at the moment of decompression, though Samael"s tender petals withered and froze bruised-dark, their cell walls shattered. But Mallory suffered in the Enemy"s cold, each such crossing demanding its levy in burst capillaries and lingering shakes.

Tristen had never seen the necromancer so discomfited. Nevertheless, though azure bruises blossomed under pale skin and-each time they returned to the relative warmth of a pressurized section-cerulean blood dripped from Mallory"s nose to splatter the decking or float in eerie globules, there was no complaint.

The pressure doors themselves created another sort of hurdle, as many of them were not actual air locks, just emergency doors intended to maintain the integrity of sections near a damaged module. Mallory knew every code with the certainty of dead men"s memories, and Gavin and Samael between them managed to improvise vacuum seals from their colonies. Through these Mallory and Tristen-with some awkwardness-could pa.s.s.

Mallory and Tristen differed on details of navigation. When they paused in pressurized corridors, twice Mallory suggested a route that would take them ship-east. The necromancer believed this route would allow them to leapfrog through a potentially more intact series of domaines and Heavens, but a combination of half-forgotten organic memory and the urgent opinion of the sword Mirth had Tristen tending more to true south.

After traversing a string of particularly devastated anch.o.r.es, they pa.s.sed through a battered hatchway into warmth. "More salvage," Tristen said, trying to keep from his voice the bitter awareness of how much of what lay behind them had been lost to the Enemy. The saddest module had contained rank after rank of apparently unused acceleration pods, open to s.p.a.ce, their interiors boiled dry.

Samael, handing Mallory a white handkerchief of dandelion clocks with which to mop the blood, said, "We shall have a far smaller world when we are done."

Mallory"s hand folded around the sc.r.a.p of cloth, but all the necromancer"s attention was bent on the pressure door beyond the small antechamber in which they stood. Samael tapped the hesitant fingers, reminding Mallory to absently press handkerchief to nose.

"Grease," Mallory said, and started forward, feet picking their way unerringly across the buckled but clean-swept floor despite patent inattention. The necromancer bent down, blinking eyes splotched cobalt with petechiae all through the sclera. "This door"s in use."

Tristen found his palm on Mirth"s hilt. He turned slowly, scanning other potential entrances to the chamber. There was only the door through which they had entered. He licked his lips and looked again at the floor. Buckled, as he had noticed, with the force of the impact that had sheared through the corridor and the anch.o.r.es beyond. Sc.r.a.ped, too, in long parallel lines that led toward the pressure door. But the floor was very clean.

"Trash," he said, with a particular nauseated horror. "Someone is using this chamber to discard trash. And recently." Recently, because not even the world"s ubiquitous dust and scruff had had time to settle on surfaces.

Samael, if he were human, might have blanched. Instead, he raked back his hair with twig-straw hands and tilted his head as if weighing any number of scathing responses-though Tristen did not think himself the one slated for scathing. The head-tilt was curiously like Gavin"s, which was in its own turn curiously like one Tristen remembered with clear perfection through his colony, though the head-tilter was long lost. When you get old, everyone starts to look like somebody else. And the more important that person was to you, the more people look like them.

Cynric had been ... important, yes. To a lot of people.

After a brief pause, the angel said, "So who throws things away?"

"Children," Mallory answered. "Cultists. Uneducated Means, but all the Means are meant to have been Exalted."

"And all the angels were meant to have been subsumed in the angel," Gavin said, from among Mallory"s hair. Wings made for an expressive shrug, when he chose to use it. He pointed at Samael with his beak.

Samael bowed with a vestigial flourish. "At your service," he said. "I hope you"ll forgive me for ruining the symmetry of your genocide. I was invested in remaining discrete."

There were times to rise to the bait, and times not to. "So what"s beyond the door?" Tristen asked.

"Let"s see," Samael said, and-laying his mosaic hands flat against the alloy hatch-thrust his head through the door to the shoulders. Bits of fluff and leaf, as always, sc.r.a.ped from his field and slid to the floor, left behind.

Tristen thought he heard Gavin snort. Or perhaps he was himself projecting. Angels.

But a moment later, Samael was back, in all his slight translucence, glowering and crossing his arms. "The Heaven beyond the portal looks exactly as it should," he said. "There are signs of habitation, flora and fauna, a well-trammeled path to the pressure door. It seems they"re using this chamber as an improvised air lock."

Mallory echoed the arm-folding gesture. "They who?"

Samael pushed out his lower lip and dropped his chin, frowning up at them past bushy eyebrows. "Go-backs," he said. "I think."

Mallory and Tristen shared a glance. Tristen thought of the open acceleration pods, their fluids boiled away on the Enemy"s empty breath.

"Exalt Go-backs," Mallory said. Then said it again, with a headshake, as if that would help to settle the idea. "Go-backs. For real."

"You can see the dome of the shrine from the pressure door," Samael said.

Gavin flipped his wings and said, with a negligent tail flick, "We could-go back-the way we came."

Tristen shook his head and licked his lips. He tasted the bitter grease of blood and only then realized he"d bitten down.

"Religious fanatics," he said. Then with all the cascading irony of his personal history, though he knew n.o.body else would understand, he added, "How much can they hurt us?"

He touched Mirth"s hilt, for the comforting click when his gauntlet brushed the pommel. No one else spoke, though Tristen let his gaze rest for a moment on each.

They awaited his decision. Even Mallory, though the necromancer did it with a frown and a challenging arch of eyebrow. Well, that"s what Tristen got for pulling rank.

Tristen said, "We"ll go on."

The hatch was sealed, locked, and even mechanically barred, but that proved an insignificant barrier to a necromancer, an angel, and the First Mate. They opened the ways and stepped through, the angel in the lead once more because Tristen had not chosen to object.

Tristen had been in many Heavens through his long life, but the wide world was vast and varied, and he had never seen one such as this. It must be a narrow, irregular s.p.a.ce, and to make the most of it the Builders had terraformed it into a zigzag valley, soil hilled up like canyon walls to either side, one or two towering pinnacles fading into its misty length. It looked steep and water-eroded, and yes, ahead through soft fog Tristen could see the minarets and the blue-and-green enameled-appearing dome of a Go-back Earth shrine.

The entirety of the s.p.a.ce was lush and green, and seemed completely undamaged by the acceleration catastrophe.

Tristen glanced at Samael and Mallory. "What do you call this? This ... landscape?"

To his surprise, it was Mallory who closed eyes in thought, then smiled and answered, "Karst topography. On Earth, it was caused by limestone subsidence."

Along each of the valley"s walls grew ma.s.sive trees hung with moss and strange parasites, through which twined the mist. The angles of growth were odd. Then Tristen realized the gravity was set parallel to the pitch of the slopes, so if one were to step onto them, they would seem level. It was the Builders" way of coaxing a little extra useful s.p.a.ce into the Heaven. They had had their sense of aesthetics, the old ones, rooted in their appreciation of the sublime as G.o.d"s creation. They had tried to uphold that where they could.

Gavin beat wings and heaved himself far more heavily into the air than was, strictly speaking, necessary. "If we"re going forward at all costs," he said, "then let"s stop lollygagging and go forward at all costs."

Irritable words or not, he took care not to outpace them, so Tristen found it easy to keep up. Samael and Mallory flanked Tristen on either side, intent on their surroundings. Mallory in particular seemed determined to soak in every detail, walking hushed and attentive.

The mist-Tristen knew the word, but had rarely felt the phenomenon before-curved around each of Gavin"s metronomic wingbeats on an elegant spiral, as smoke in a test chamber might circle an airfoil. It was breathtaking, as was the sensation of cool water-without-water on his skin where he had left his helm retracted and his faceplate open to show they came in peace.

The mist was their friend, he thought, as they came out of it-Tristen in armor just as white, now in the lead. Mallory was on his left, Gavin"s white wings fanned from one shoulder like an improbable headdress. Samael was on his right, a black coat of beetle sh.e.l.l flaring about his calves like an animated gunslinger"s, transparent enough that Tristen could glimpse landscape through his shoulders.

As the clouds thinned, they came up between black, hunch-shouldered shapes working in the fields that clung to each wall of the valley. People began to straighten from their toil, turn, and stare. It was novel to watch, because the residents stood at obtuse angles to the road, as if the steep valley walls were perfectly level and the rice paddies that covered them were on terraces. Around the ankles of the black-clad farmers, Tristen saw the ripple and splash of fins as fish thrashed away from the waders.

Tilapia. An ancient technique, adapted from Old Earth: cofarming the fish with the rice. Tristen smiled.

And kept smiling, though he realized as the farmers began to draw together, a.s.semble, and walk out of the water that what rippled that water was not exclusively fish. However breathtaking the mist, the topography, the ranks of silent agricultural workers were, none of it was as breathtaking as the bronze-black serpents, creamy-bellied, that slipped from the rice paddies to follow. Tristen caught his breath. Each six meters in length, as large around as a man"s thigh, the snakes were the colors of black pearls and b.u.t.ter.

Sliding across the earth, they seemed small-headed, inoffensive, their eyes like black star sapphires suffused with a silvery overlay of light. Tristen only knew the serpents for what they were because, here and there, one reared up and opened its infamous hood like a flower on an arm-thick stem.

"Cobras," Samael said.

"The Go-backs are snake handlers," Mallory said. "They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover."

"They"re Exalt." Gavin fanned his wings again, stiff pinions rasping against Mallory"s hair. "What"s a little snake neurotoxin?"

"Can"t you see?" Tristen said. "The snakes are Exalt, too."

The serpents in question braided and rebraided themselves across the mossy earth and the road like some animate, sapient memory of water. Tristen watched as one farmer and another paused to stroke the snakes, which seemed to take no notice. He reached out and opened his hand.

If he expected a serpent to flow up under it, pleased like a cat to be stroked, no such thing happened. Instead, the snakes surrounded them, intertwining in a plaited circle ten meters in diameter. A ring of farmers stopped just beyond it. However they dressed, and despite being unarmed, they carried themselves with a light-footed straightness that told Tristen he would not care to fight them. And he certainly would not care to fight them all at once, attended by their familiar serpents.

"h.e.l.lo," he said, and the cobras rose as one, swaying on every side, ribs spreading wide to flare each hood behind a small, smooth head that could not have seemed less threatening until they rose in display. Tristen had seen pit vipers and other venomous snakes-they tended to be heavily jowled, and look savage. The cobras needed no menace by design until they chose to threaten.

"h.e.l.lo," one of the farmers answered. A woman"s voice, the timbre so close to familiar that it made him shudder, though the tone and the phrasing were wrong. Still, his open hand had half reached out, daring the cobras" hiss, before he pulled it back. Her face lay hidden in her black cowled work shirt, but she was obviously the leader. Nothing happens by accident, and so he already suspected what her response would be when he touched the control on his helm and retracted it back into the armor.

She lifted calloused hands and hooked the cowl back with her thumbs. She was fair, as fair as her mother, though not so pale as her father. Her hair was goldenblond, tending to ringlets, her features fine and regular, the pale skin reddened across her cheekbones from work in a high-UV environment.

And yes, he knew her face.

It is not her, he told himself, but that could not stop the rush of neurochemicals that flooded his brain, sent him soaring on a wave of purely incandescent emotion he could not begin to put into words.

It was not her. Not her mind. Not her soul, if you subscribed to the philosophy of souls. But her body, her flesh. His flesh, which theology said should concern him.

It did not matter who dwelt in her, he told himself with bitter sarcasm. What mattered was that his DNA lived on, his genetic potential. The consciousness inhabiting the sh.e.l.l made no difference. She could breed him grandchildren no matter who lived in her head.

"I am Dorcas," she said. "Welcome to our Heaven, Tristen Conn."

Whatever crossed his face, Mallory read it. And laid a hand on Tristen"s elbow in silent, supportive questioning.

The leader of the farmers read it, too. "She died when you were young."

Tristen caught himself before he nodded. One could give away so much to fakirs, driven just by the human reflex to confirm communication. Instead, he fought against and mastered the reflex to swallow. I have never been young.

"How do you know my name?" Better than to admit that she should know his name. But the person who should was not Dorcas, though it was Dorcas who wore her body now.

"You are not exactly unknown, Prince Tristen. You will accompany us."

Her tone made no allowance for argument. She touched her hair. The cobras swayed between them. The circle grew no tighter. And time stretched weary and sharp-edged between them-the few seconds of this conversation, and the gulf of years behind.

In the house of dust, roll yourself in ashes.

Scripture was comforting in direct proportion to its bitterness upon the tongue.

Tristen shook his head. Mallory touched him again, long fingers curving around his armored biceps. Tristen opened his mouth and closed it, opened his mouth once more.

"Tristen?"

"Her name was Sparrow," Tristen said, eventually, because he had to say something. "Before she died, she was my daughter."

13.

available light

Dostoevsky once wrote: "If G.o.d did not exist, everything would be permitted"; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point.... Nor ... if G.o.d does not exist, are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimize our behavior.... We are left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free.

-JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, "Existentialism is a Humanism" (1946)

The orchid"s hydra-headed blossoms looked delicate, but the tendrils were strong as carbon monofilament. And Bened.i.c.k did not miss the manner in which-while one remained focused on him, petals up and forward as if straining with attention-the other four dragon faces bent down on their long stems, slicking petals back like reptiles flattening their frills. They gave the impression of hounds nosing after a scent, and indeed he saw one dart forth, grab the stiff, microwaved body of a leech, and gulp it down with head-jerking motions and a swelling of the stem.

While he observed, both worried and fascinated, the blossom that remained focused on him gently brushed his face and said, "The cyberleeches were particularly programmed to hunt for you. Why should that be?"

Now that he was looking for it, he could see the way some of the tuberous stems behind the array of flat-laid leaves expanded and contracted, showing fine, translucent green membranes between dark ribs. The orchid"s breath across his face was sweet, refreshing-not scented, but laden with exhaled oxygen. He breathed deeply to clear his head.

He didn"t know the answer to the orchid"s question, but he thought he had a pretty good guess. When uncertain, stall.

"Is my sister alive?"