She could not believe it. She could not trust her own desires, only her own discipline.
She prayed it should prove adequate to the task. "I don't like what you're doing to my brain," she said as she followed the route indicated by the parasite wings. It was a gray corridor, one wall broken occasionally by observation ports. She hesitated to peer through one, like a kidnapped princess peering through an embrasure. It was a dark view; if she cocked her head just right, she could see portions of the world's superstructure backlit by the suns, but no light fell through to illuminate her immediate surroundings. They were deep within the world, and its hungry latticework structure had consumed the available light.
"Claim me," Dust said. "Be mine. And you can order otherwise."
He appeared beside her, popping into existence with little fanfare, a cheap special effect. She schooled herself, and did not flinch away.
"Just through here," he said. He gestured her on with a flourish; a door slid open as she approached. Failing another plan, she went where she was directed.
He had promised her a garden.
And so he gave.
She floated off her feet as she stepped across the threshold, but Pinion was there, supporting her, slow wingbeats shaping her rise. There was light here, a cold reflected light, diffuse, not the hard flat watery light of Benedick's orchard. And the trees—
This holde—this heaven—had all the formal ancient grace of a Nippon-style garden, of which there were a few in Engine. None the size of this one, however, and none, in the absence of defined gravity, composed of trees as old as the world, their gnarled boles shaped in heavy serpentine curves, their bark and leaves a patchwork display of textures and colors. There were smooth red-skinned trees with straining purple twigs, and a contorted gray monster whose flexible golden branches swayed with every shift of the air. One tree was green as a jade carving from the soil to leaf tip, its branches hung with drifting, lobed violet flowers that cast floating petals and a heady thread of aroma onto the air. There were flowers, too, cascades and streamers of them; vines, carpets.
The space was bridged by twisting spans that came together in miniature parklands and separated in distributaries, a massive helical filigree around which Pinion bore her. She heard wings slap air, not her own, and when she guided Pinion back on a spiral, Dust soared up beside her. His wings were much like the ones Ariane had cut from Perceval's shoulders—membranous, soft, dusty with delicate hairs.
Perceval wanted to touch them. She disciplined herself; it was not, she told herself, truly her own desire.
But then, how did she know? How would she know, in the end, what was her desire and what was given her? She might, she thought, have wanted to touch them anyway, so much were they like what she had lost.
"What think you?"
She spread her wings wide, and let them bear her. "None of this has any place on a planet," she said. "None of this was ever intended to be set down to earth again."
"As clever as she is brave," Dust said. "Those who made me—who made Israfel, of whom I am the best and chiefest part—made this as inspiration. And as a laboratory. Those trees are not all that grows in my garden."
Warm air rushed past Perceval's face. She exulted in the flight, the motion—and doubted the exultation. If Dust could make her feel...
Had he robbed her of all joy forever? Or of all trust in her joy, which amounted to the same thing?
"That's a leading comment, Mr. Dust."
"Jacob, beloved," he said, his wingtip brushing Pinion as he flapped to gain altitude. "Follow on."
What else was she to do? She dipped feathertips and followed his turn and glide, deft as if on her own wings. She felt the wind through the feathers, the pressure underneath and above. Flying in free fall was not like flying in gravity. All one's energy went to speed.
They skimmed along one of the twisting, tree-thick bridges, wingtips skimming leaf tips. Dust flew hard, and Perceval bent herself to catch him. A race, then.
She could exult in competition. She would permit herself that. Especially when she conjured the image of smacking him with a wing, sending him spiraling into tree trunks.
She would not condone the part of her that winced to think it.
And then he dove, and she was hot after him, until his wings fanned hard, backdrafting, and as she nearly overshot she felt the sudden brutal grip of gravity.
But on dares, she'd flown in the Broken Holdes as an adolescent, where the gravity could fluctuate without notice. She managed it, would have managed it without Pinion's assistance. She followed Dust into a gap between trees, an unexpected clearing where apparently the gravity worked, and her feet struck the ground featherlight.
Beside her, Dust straightened his suitcoat, wingless again. "Very good," he said.
She would have preened at the praise if it came from her mother, or even Tristen or Benedick. She wanted to preen now. "I will not crave your approval," she said, chin up, driving her nails into her palms. "Stop making me want it."
He glanced sideways, and winked at her. "Follow on."
She did, and he led her under a tree whose crimson branches hung with curious opal-colored fruit that stank of rancid meat. The vines that twined it were like morning glories, the flowers enormous and sickly sweet.
Around the trunk he led her, and into an arch-covered stair. It brought them underground, down a spiral into darkness—or what would have been darkness, had not Dust begun on the second revolution to exude a pallid glow. The light was silver, concentrated at his hands, and with it Perceval, aided by her symbiont, could make her way down perfectly.
They climbed for a long time. She questioned him once—"What is this way? Where are we going?"—but he only turned and smiled, the shadows over his eyes ghastly in the peculiar light. "Farther on," he said. "Farther down."
She wondered if he meant to rape her. Perhaps it should have occurred to her earlier, but it wasn't the sort of thing she was used to considering. If he raised a hand, she vowed, she would fight him with all the strength that was in her.
And there was the question. Did machines' sapiences even think of sex?
She had no idea. So she watched him.
She knew there was a space ahead by the echoes, and when they came to the bottom of the stairs, the glimmer of her escort's light faded into darkness.
"I have come," Dust declaimed.
Perceval wondered if he spoke aloud for her benefit. A machine sapience he might be, but he was also mad as a bachelor uncle—madder, if that uncle happened to be Tristen Conn. As she wondered, however, the lights came up in serried ranks, flicking on in sequence from the far end of the room.
Room was a term of some inadequacy. It might have encircled the entire holde they had just flown to the center of. Perceval could not tell; it arched up out of sight in all directions.
Where above the air had been balmy, here it carried a dank chill. The floor of the chamber was occupied by legions of refrigeration units.
"All this power," she said. She looked at Dust. "All this power expended on—"
"My mission," he answered. "The mission of the Jacob's Ladder." He reached out without looking and grasped her fingers. This once, she did not stop him.
He led her forward, and she went.
The paused before a bank of coolers. "Open one," he said.
Without releasing his hand, half not knowing what to expect, she reached out and she pulled the white door open. Frost cracked; she had to pull. The cold air that fell from it, chilling her ankles and feet, stank of staleness.
It might have been decades since the freezer was open. Centuries.