"Trapped," Rien replied, turning to look at the exterior door. Her shoulders hunched. She knotted her hands together. "We don't keep suits in the locks. I told you."
"You won't need a suit," Perceval said, "if you will trust me."
"Trust you to what?"
"Exalt you." Perceval stroked Rien's arm. The flesh felt cool under the cardigan, but Perceval thought that was just her own fever.
"Infect me?" Rien turned, abruptly, light on the balls of her feet, and backed away from Perceval's touch. "You want to colonize me."
Perceval shrugged. "You've the blood to sustain it. You're old enough. You should have received a colony years ago. And it will keep you alive"—a gesture at the exterior air-lock door—"Outside."
Rien had put her back to the Outside. And on the inside door, Perceval now heard rhythmic hammering.
"What if I'm not?"
"Not?"
"Not your sister." She shook her head, her hair moving on her neck the way Perceval's once had. "Not Benedick's daughter."
Perceval could not help herself. She spread out her hands, palms toward Rien, and tilted her head. "Then it will kill you, Mean."
Rien gestured over Perceval's shoulder. "And so will they."
"Yes."
"Fine then," Rien said, all hollow bravado, and stepped forward into Perceval's arms.
Rien thought it would hurt. She imagined it would be hard, the initiation, that there would be some sense of transformation or wildfire intimation of change.
Not so.
Perceval embraced her, and she smelled the blood and the antiseptic, and when she lowered her mouth over Rien's, Rien tasted the faint sourness of uncleaned teeth. One would think her colony would take care of that for her, but then, it had perhaps been busy.
The kiss was long and soft, fever-hot and gentle, although holding Perceval in her arms was not unlike embracing a rope ladder. Her lips were soft and cracked over the firmness of her teeth, and it seemed as if Rien expanded on her breath like a blown balloon. Rien was reminded that she had always preferred young women.
She giggled, embarrassed, and stepped back—
—and felt, of a sudden, not outside herself, but rather inside herself as she had never felt before. It snapped in, as a whole, abrupt and perfect, the image and awareness of every nerve and every cell. She felt the colony engage her, accept her, rush with each beat of her heart on oxygenated blood to every extremity.
It felt curiously natural.
"Oh," she said.
"Breathe deep." Perceval was fiddling with the key, reshaping her dress into something else. A propulsion pack.
"Let the colony get as much oxygen as it can. We should have about fifteen minutes. I can get us out of Rule in fifteen minutes, and safe back inside."
If it was bravado, Rien would rather not know. "What about the cold?" she asked. "And ebullism?"
"Don't worry; your colony can maintain pressure. It will keep your eyeballs from freezing or your fluids from boiling until long after we run out of oxygen."
"Oh. Good to know."
Perceval laughed. "Hold onto my harness. I'm going to break the door open now. I won't be able to talk to you once we're outside, so just—-for the love of all your ancestors, when we get out there—hang on."
Hold on. Breathe deep.
Simple enough.
When the massive door swung open, though, and the puff of escaping air sailed them grandly into the crooked sunlight between the world's vast webworked cables, Rien forgot anything but the cold black fire-pricked vault of the universe stretching out forever, and the wheeling world that framed it on each side.
6 the beast in the heart of the world
In the sweat of thy fate shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; but out of it wast thou taken: dust thou art, yet absent dust shalt thou be exalted.
Everyone else had forgotten, or was forbidden from remembering, which came to the same thing. Dust had never been human, but he remembered.
He remembered more of being human than the humans did. He contained novels and dramas, actors and singers, stories long untold. He contained histories dead a thousand Earth years. Dead to the world, anyway.
The same thing. The same.
No one in the world had seen a single yellow sun, dug fingers into crumbling natural earth, felt an acid rain trace down her face. Dust had never seen, felt, tasted any of these things either. But he recollected them.
In proper terms, he could not see, feel, taste in any case. But he could approximate. Smell was only a matter of detecting and sorting drifting molecules. Seeing was only a matter of detecting and sorting bounced light.
And what he could not approximate, he could remember.
"The world is mine," said Jacob Dust. "Mine. It has my name on it."
No argument.
No answer.
He hadn't expected one.
Dust hung in soft threads all through the atmosphere of his domaine. It was mostly water vapor now; the world had healed its wounds, and as Dust's need for the luxuries necessary to carbon-based life was small, he did not trouble himself to normalize.
Too much oxygen would only encourage the mortal and unmodified to seek him, anyway.
Dust believed in conserving resources. Energy came from the suns, a vast crimson sphere and a tiny white dwarf that whipped about their common center of gravity with a rotational period of only hours, tethered by a luminous banner dragged from the former, accreting to the latter. Material resources were more limited: only what was in the world, and what the world was made of. But Dust's years were long, and the suns burned bright.
By that brightening, he knew the hours of his safety were numbered. The dwarf star had entered its period of convection. At any point, it might commence a deflagration phase, fusing carbon and then oxygen.
Because the integrity of a dwarf star was dependent on the quantum degeneracy pressure of the core, it would be unable to expand and cool to maintain stability in response to an increase in thermal energy caused by accretion, as a main-sequence star would.
Within seconds, a considerable portion of the carbon and oxygen within the star would be fused into heavier elements. Because the star was supported by degenerate pressure rather than by thermal pressure, this thermonuclear event would cause the core temperature to skyrocket—to employ an entirely inadequate metaphor—by billions of degrees, causing further fusion.
The sun would unbind.
The white dwarf would explode, its outer layers hurled clear in a single apocalyptic paroxysm, a shock front moving at nearly 3 percent the speed of light. In a flare of brilliance that would outshine entire galaxies fiftyfold, the world would end.
The sunlight that warmed Dust, which fed all his inhabitants, heralded the furnace that would burn him. And through that sunlight hurtled a pair of half-grown women, whom Dust watched with amusement and a bit of approval. When the angels were otherwise occupied, he could still use their thousands of eyes, all over the skin of the world.
Those eyes showed him Perceval, Rien clutched in her arms, gliding soundlessly across the hub of the turning world. The go-pack on her back trailed wisps of vapor, a trickle of reactive mass. The sort of thing one usually avoided sacrificing to the great cold Enemy, but then, one made exceptions in an emergency. A sacrifice. A burnt offering to Entropy.
Which, like most gods, took no notice.
Dust was different from other gods. And he was not particular about the intended consecration. It attracted his attention—well, to be fair, his attention had been held already—and that was enough.