"Not very poetic," Samael said, disappointed.
Dust shrugged. He only cared about his own poetry.
"And anyway," Samael continued, with a sweeping dismissal that pulled shirt and coatsleeves up his bony wrist, "in the midst of life support we are in death, o my brother."
Dust kept his attention spread through his anchore, for he suspected that Samael would have liked him to concentrate and neglect his boundaries. "Your trade sounds more like a threat than an equal exchange."
Samael's shrug, one-shouldered with disingenuously tilted head, was disturbingly reminiscent of that of a twelve-year-old girl. "I think there's an Engine girl you've taken an interest in," he said. "What if I could help her?"
"An Engine girl?" Dust thought he could give Samael fair competition when it came to disingenuity. Once upon a time, they would have held this meeting in the channels of the world's analytical engines, but those were long unavailable. They met in the metal if they met at all. And Samael kept all his parts tucked in, like a cat tea-cozied on the rug, so Dust couldn't even brush microsurfaces with him and see if any stray electromagnetic intelligence was seeping free.
"Perceval Foucaulte Conn," Samael said, and if he couldn't trim his nails, he could study them. How peculiar it was, Dust thought, that a century since any of them had had much cause to interact with their creators, they still wore human guise. "She's trapped with her half sister on ep-silon deck, and she could be fumbling around down there for a good long time. She's also suffering from septicemia and a viral infection, and her symbiont is heavily stressed. She needs warmth and food. And medical attention." "And you're offering that assistance?" "It is," Samael said, "what I was built to do." "And the recompense?" That was always the rub, wasn't it? They all dealt from a position of strength; they all had their unique fields. When the Core died, the world had shifted as many of its functions into its symbionts as possible. It had saved itself, against future need. But none of those symbiont colonies could hold the entire mind of the world. They were fragments. Specialists. With differing agendas.
They rarely got along.
"Navigation logs," Samael said. "Starmaps. Tell me where we had been, and where we were en route to."
"Useless," Dust said. There were no engines. There was no way to move.
"I want to know where we are," Samael said. "Give me j that, and I spare your pet."
Then it was Dust's turn to fiddle his fingers. "She's not I a pet."
"Cat's-paw," Samael said. "Dupe. Whatever."
The fragment of Dust that rode along with Perceval's gift-pinions stayed in coded contact with his main colony. He could feel her huddle tighter around Rien, shivering within the thin warmth of the wings. If she had been j closer, if he would not have had to withdraw the fragment I from contact with the suborned colony, Dust might have stroked her shaven head.
No doubt, he thought, the child could use a little love. "Creator," Dust said, fondly. "Inventor and the daughter of inventors."
"Heresy."
"Nevertheless," Dust said. "Her kind invented ours."
"How could something like that invent something like me?"
"Nevertheless," Dust said. "It is what happened."
"You lie."
"No," Dust corrected. "I remember." He turned away— his avatar turned away. His own hovering attention never shifted. Not from Samael's sock-puppet, not from the boundaries of Dust's own domaine. "Navigation logs."
"Yes."
"That's all you want."
"For now."
"Help the maidens," Dust said. "I'll share the logs."
In all fastidiousness, he would have preferred not to touch Samael. It was less risk to his own system to chip off a packet and hand it over—but he did not wish to lose that much of his colony, would not take any of Samael in return, and didn't want to give his sibling that much insight into his program.
Instead, he bent down and "kissed" Samael on the "mouth."
A meshing of programs, but only a surfacy one. A quick handshake and transfer of data, nothing more.
As they broke apart, the information safely handed over, the memory of the kiss left Dust full of an aching emptiness, everywhere his airborne nanoparticles drifted and spread.
8 poison angels
Let the dwellers in emptiness bow down before him; in his presence, let his enemies lick up dust.
No matter how she tried to pull them under the covers, Rien's feet stayed cold. She wrapped her arms around her knees and hugged her face down tight, except then it was strange that her back was so uncomfortably warm. And she couldn't breathe. The air was still and stale and tasted of sweat. Perhaps her coffin was malfunctioning. She opened her eyes, expecting energy-saving darkness, and reached out left-handed to grope for the timer switch.
Her fingertips brushed the cool nanomesh of Perceval's parasite wing, and she jerked it back with a gasp, sucking her fingertips as if she'd burned them. "Perceval?"
Yes. Once she was awake, even half awake, she was unlikely to forget again where she was. Her pulse hammered in her throat, a panicky adrenaline reaction, but as soon as she identified it her new internal senses—her colony, her symbiont—adjusted the level of worry to something more sensible and appropriate.
"Oh, space," she said, and pushed at Perceval's arms. She had to get out. It wasn't her. There was an alien holding her, but worse, there was an alien in her, and it was making decisions for her. Don't be scared, her symbiont whispered.
Which, predictably, scared her even more.
Perceval's skin felt wrong. Fragile, papery. Hot. Rien thought if she pulled at it, it would slip and tear like the friable skin over a blister. Perceval moaned. Her breath smelled cloying.
She was sick, and Rien didn't know what to do. She struggled free. Perceval's parasite wings held her in place in the corridor, but Rien kicked too hard and went tumbling. She smacked one wall, smearing fluorescent fungus across the plating, her left arm first numbed from wrist to shoulder and then searingly alive. Tears stung, swelled in the corners of watering eyes, broke from acceleration and spread. But she got her right arm and her legs out, spread them wide—though it was counterintuitive—and slowed her rate of spin.
Rien was half competent in microgravity. But this was different. She was better, faster, seeing trajectories and velocities with her inner eye as if they were projected on a screen. And something was building in her awareness: a model or structure, a schematic of surrounding corridors that stretched beyond what she could immediately perceive. Echoes, she thought. Like a bat.
She bounced off another wall, redirected to the far end of the corridor, and managed to hit with bent knees and take the edge off her velocity. And then she was coming back up the hall at Perceval, but slower now and in a more controlled fashion.
And Perceval was braced.
Rien struck Perceval's pinions with both palms. The left arm buckled, but that didn't matter; it had helped absorb some of the energy. The pinions were not hard, not like hitting the decking, and Rien managed to catch hold of an edge and hold on. "Space and ashes," Rien said.
Perceval hung in midcorridor, suspended between extended pinions, her body curled into a fetal huddle and folded inside another pair of wings as if in a translucent clamshell. They looked like smoke, but when Rien braced herself against the extended wing and reached out to touch her sister, the surface was smooth and quite cool.