He sighed. Arianrhod was a question all her own. It was not as if anyone had ever been able to control her. "And then when your antecedent died in Engine"--in the Go-back riots, during Caitlin and her sisters' attempt to wrest control of the world from Alasdair, but now did not seem the most exemplary time to mention that--"if I had been with her, if I had stood up with her, she might be living still."
Dorcas's eyebrow raised, but he did not feel guilt in saying it. She might inhabit Sparrow's body now, but the scarce resource had historically been allocations for memory, not resurrected flesh. People were easy to make. There were always more dead than remnants to fill them with.
Dorcas said, "You were not the brother who went to war for him against Cecelia's daughters. You are not the brother whose blade cut Cynric's head from her shoulders."
"Nor did I join them in rebellion," Tristen said. "Think of all the evil I might have averted had I cast down my father then. Apathy is no excuse. Nor is a taste for combat."
She smiled and allowed Mirth to glide back into its sheath. "You were terrifying then."
"You remember?"
"I wasn't an Edenite during the Moving Times, Tristen Conn," she said. "Go-backs don't store their data, or accept colonies." She paused, ironically. "Until now, anyway. I served under your wife. I was a soldier. Do you know what we called you?"
Her hand extended, the sword laid across it. Offering. Slowly, he reached out and lifted it from her palm. Her face remained impassive, but a long chill ran up her spine when the sword left her grasp, so he knew it troubled her. He wondered what the sword had said to her, if indeed it had spoken at all.
Of course he remembered. There had been political cartoons, the white ruff, fangs, stripes, talons. The devil eyes. He'd nursed a little secret pride about it, then.
"Tristen Tiger," he said.
"The man-eater. The tame killer. You do remember." He touched his temple. The colony remembered for him.
"Tristen Tiger would not have survived the venom, you know. I think perhaps you have changed more than I have." She shrugged and spread her hands. "Half a millennium is a long time to live within a monster."
It hadn't been that long. Or rather, he had indeed lived that long, but it was only in the years he'd passed pent up in a dungeon of Ariane's devising, living in filth, that he had come to realize he had been a monster, after all.
A thousand things crowded his mouth, none of them willing to be refined into sensibility. So, instead, he clipped Mirth to his belt and said, "I am glad you've found peace. Even if you are not the woman you were."
"And I am glad you are not the man you were. And I hope you find peace as well, before too much longer." She pursed her lips, craning her neck to see over his shoulder to Samael and Mallory--and Gavin as well. She paused, seeming puzzled, and glanced down at her fingers, which flexed and stretched as if she were absently working out a cramp.
Recollecting herself, she continued. "You've passed the test. We will guide you across our Heaven, and show you the fastest path to your destination."
"You know it?"
"We built it," she said. His eyes must have widened with the surprise and disbelief he felt, because she smirked--turning her head to include Mallory and Samael in its arc--and said, "What did you think the Go-backs were, exactly, Tristen Tiger?"
Tristen glanced at Mallory; the necromancer nodded. Not that it mattered--he suspected Dorcas was interested in his opinion, not that of his companions.
He could have given her the snap answer, the dismissal. And maybe he would have, not too long gone by. To alienate the enemy was a useful defense. But he thought now of ancient history, the thin, perfect memories of his colony predominating over the richer, chemical, organic ones. They had been Engineers, convinced that the best means of survival was to cannibalize what could be saved of the world and return to Earth in a smaller, stripped-down vessel, leaving behind everything designed for colonization and terraforming as useless ballast. Many of them had also been heretics of another stripe: they had believed in the perfection of the human form as a reflection of God's will, and had refused inoculation with Cynric's then newly invented colonies, or any physical augmentation whatsoever.
Alasdair Conn, the Commodore, had opposed them.
Alasdair had believed passionately in the goals and edicts of the Builders: that the purpose of God's creation in Man was to confront harsh environments, to master them, to evolve to meet any challenge. That the ultimate expression of faith was to subject one's self and one's offspring to ever harsher challenges, ensuring survival of the fittest through mortification of the flesh. Of all the species of God's creation, only man had the power to reshape himself in God's image, and Alasdair--whatever his other failings--had not been a hypocrite. A deeply religious man, as moral and spiritual leader of his people he had believed in that obligation with all his heart.
And, as Benedick had pointed out at the time, given conditions when the Builders left, there was no guarantee that Earth was any more able to support life than would be a smoking cinder.
Tristen--a dutiful son, and a dutiful soldier--had gone to war to drive the Go-backs from Engine. He had been doing what he was bid, and in every way that mattered to his father, he had succeeded. If Sparrow died in the war, well, that was the cost of selection. In any case, she'd already passed along her genes to Arianrhod, so it would be easy for Alasdair to fix the line. That the result had been Ariane, Alasdair's eventual murderer, gave Tristen a bitter little frisson of complicated pleasure--his own history with his great-granddaughter notwithstanding.
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 circumstances 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. Assuming 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 passed 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."