"I see," he said. "You will understand if I make no promises?"
She smiled and glanced aside. "What will you do with Arianrhod when you find her?"
"Bring her to justice," Tristen said. Unable to resist, he raised his eyebrows and added, "You know all about that."
Maybe it was too early to tease her--though after all, she had started it. Or maybe not, because the sharp glance she gave him modulated smoothly from irritation to amusement. Dorcas, Tristen suspected, was a person who took quiet pride in not becoming irritated.
She said, "I don't suppose you know where you're going?"
Gavin's long neck rose above Mallory's frizzy curls. "South," he said. "Into the belly of the beast."
Dorcas chuckled. "It's possible you speak truer than you know. I can get you to the bottom of the world, to the Broken Holdes. Can you find your way from there?"
"Inasmuch as we know where we are going," Tristen said. "Something down there has interfered with the world-angel's sensory apparatus, and we are only guessing based on another tracking party's information that her destination is somewhere in the null patch." He would not tell her, just now, how long it had been since his team had had contact with Benedick and Chelsea, or with Nova and Perceval.
"The null patch," Dorcas echoed. "You really have no idea what lives there?"
Samael mimicked a few quick strides and came up between them. "You do?"
"We know all sorts of things," Dorcas said. "Many of us--we were Engineers, remember? After I was a soldier, I became an Engineer, inspired by the memory of Hero Ng." She lowered her voice and spoke conspiratorially. "Some of us are more cynical than others when it comes to the question of the will of God."
Tristen glanced at Samael, at Gavin, at Mallory--each by turn. All three avoided his gaze. "Some of us learned our cynicism the hard way," he replied. "So what's in the null zone?"
"Cynric's last weapon," she said. "A captive monster. A demon so terrible that, after she captured it, Captain Gerald concealed its existence from all but a few. When Alasdair became Commodore after him, Alasdair hid it even from his children, for fear of what they would do with the information."
"For fear of what he'd made them, you mean."
She smiled. "Perhaps that, as well. In any case, Cynric caught two of them. One she took apart, and made things of the pieces. The other she kept captive, held in reserve."
"She used it," Gavin said, craning his neck around to stare at Samael. "Do you really claim no knowledge, Poison Angel, of what it was your mistress wrought?"
"My memory is incomplete," Samael said drily. "Do enlighten us."
Tristen wondered if the basilisk's glance at Dorcas was meant as a request for permission. She made no move to interrupt, and he continued, "She built on it, the way she built on everything she touched, everything she knew. As Dorcas said, she created it a weapon."
"Something to fight our father," Tristen said. "Well, I guess if anyone would remember that--"
Gavin flipped his wings, tail coiling and uncoiling along Mallory's spine so that Tristen wondered what social discomfort looked like on a power tool.
"Those memories are not mine," Gavin said. "And they are ... also incomplete. So you have a route that will take us there, My Lady of the Edenites?"
"We have more than that," she said. "We have regained some limited control of the world's musculature. I can put you there."
In unison, Mallory and Samael said, "Musculature?" which made Tristen feel somewhat more comfortable in his own ignorance.
Dorcas pressed her palms to her eyes. "By the sacred spiral, people. Do you know how the world generates its electricity?"
Silence answered her.
She sighed. Then her hands began to move animatedly as she explained. "It's not just the reactors or the solar panels. I'll give you a hint. The exterior of the world is sheathed in self-healing carbon nanotube 'muscle' that can be used to move portions of the structure around relative to one another."
"That's ingenious," Samael said.
"It's not rocket science." Her lips twisted. "Actually, I guess after a fashion, it is. When not in operation, the musculature uses flex and inertial effects to generate electricity. Thereby"--she snapped her fingers--"keeping the lights on. And the temperature constant, though under the current circumstances I wouldn't be surprised if there are failures on that front."
Tristen blinked, trying to integrate the scientist now emerging with the autocratic priestess he'd thought he was dealing with.
Mallory came to the rescue. "It is our information that there have been failures, some catastrophic. The angel and Engineering were working to contain them when we entered your Heaven. It is possible that by now they've been redressed."
"Your confidence in your masters is touching."
Tristen said, "One thing that troubles me still, Dorcas. When we came in, we saw scrape marks in the air lock. As if you had been discarding trash."
She made a moue. "Sacrifices," she said. "Some believe in appeasing the Enemy."
"Oh," he said. "I see." Desperate for a change of topic, he added, "When do we reach your mode of transport, then?"
"We're in it," Dorcas said. "And in fact, if you look up ahead, you'll see we're almost there."
Tristen craned his neck. Through the tunnel of bowering trees, he glimpsed the hard, clean oval of an air lock. "We're moving."
"Relative to the rest of the world, anyway," she said. She paused, one hand hovering over a DNA lock. She palmed it and the door slid aside, revealing a standard barren cubicle.
It crossed Tristen's mind to imagine that she might very well just decoy them inside to space them, but if that happened, it wasn't as if he and Mallory couldn't survive the Enemy's embrace for a few moments.
He turned to Dorcas and said, "Thank you. If we survive this--"
"You'll be in touch," she said, and touched the armor over his right arm. She met his eyes. "Go with luck. I think you will be sad a long time, Tristen Tiger. But I hope not too sad."
When they passed through the air lock and the interior door sealed across Dorcas's face, Gavin found himself prey to emotions too complex by half for a simple power tool. Grief, regret, guilt, resignation.
These were not his emotions. His emotions currently encompassed concerned anticipation at what they might find ahead, irritation at the delay, vulture worry. The others--the indescribable ones, the painful ones--he knew better than to try to own them. They belonged to someone else, someone to whom he bore no more resemblance than Nova did to Rien. Than Dorcas did to Sparrow. But in conjunction with that knowledge came the uncomfortable corollary: whatever he had behind him had left traces.
As shields glided up over the external windows before him, he observed the latticework architecture scrolling past on all sides and the looming wall of their destination before them. It was an old world, scarred and scorched, blasted bright by radiation and by particles in the nebula. Made clean and new. But inside, so much history, so much betrayal, and so many twisted loyalties.
He wondered if Dorcas were the tabula rasa she pretended.
Tristen seemed impassive, leading Gavin to suspect that his internal turmoil mirrored Gavin's own. Gavin was not prey to the irrational hormonal urges of meat--a kindness for which he thanked his makers--but he was not without feelings. Early researchers had determined that there was no intelligence without desire, and had proven the dispassionate artificial brain to be a wishful construct of twentieth-century myth. Synbiotic emotion might be chilly and distant by human standards, but it existed. Reason was not possible in its absence.