She hoped, anyway.
"What happened?" she asked when she caught up with Tristen in the hall. His hair was pulled back in a ponytail, revealing the fine blue-tinted points of his ears, but he'd missed a few wisps that curled this way and that.
As they walked, he told her—efficiently, a soldier's report—about Samael and his brief history of the world.
"He's trying to force Perceval to marry him? Did he say why? He's not even a real person. Can a machine intelligence marry?"
"Well," Tristen said, "she is a Conn. And has a better claim on the chair than even I have, by primogeniture. If she were Commodore, or stood close to the Captain's chair, then he would have a legal link to it."
"Space," Rien said. "Is that why they're squabbling over her? They're trying to marry an heir to the throne? I'm sorry, Tristen, but that's like some medieval play."
"I suspect there's more to it." He sounded both amused and angry; a glance at his expression confirmed her opinion. "But Samael isn't telling."
She blew through her teeth. "And I thought the Exalts were horrible."
She was happy, she thought, to have Tristen in her family. He was more like Oliver Conn than like Ariane. Instead of reminding her that he was Exalt, and so was she, thank you kindly, he chuckled mournfully and sucked his lip.
"And do we believe him?" she asked, when they had paused in the hall so Tristen could straighten her collar.
He shrugged. "An excellent question."
They came up on the dining room doorway. He rested his hand on her shoulder in reassurance or to keep her from bolting.
She stepped into the room.
Benedick and Perceval were seated side by side at a round, heavy-looking table. Across from them was a slight man, not too tall, who hunkered forward like a vulture on a branch. All three glanced up as Tristen and Rien entered. The resurrectee servant who was laying another place at the table did not.
The one who must be Samael stood and made as if to bow over Rien's hand. She kept it firmly at her side, and over his shoulder saw Perceval smile at her. Bull by the balls, she thought, and looked the Angel of Biosystems in the eye before she said, "We're going to have to move the world."
It didn't quite set him back on his heels, and anything he gave away would be intentional, anyway—she wasn't about to forget that he was an animation—but he did nod, and meet her just as directly. "The lady is correct."
"But the world has no engines," she said, and thought: Oh, Space. He likes me. Or at least, she imagined that that was what the angel's steady smile meant. She didn't tell him that it was Hero Ng's knowledge he smiled at.
He ushered her away from Tristen, toward the table, and into a seat, which he pulled out for her. She permitted herself to be seated, appreciative that her chair was next to Perceval's, as Samael said, "And perceptive. As you observe, this does present a difficulty. Because first, we are going to have to further repair the world."
Silence greeted his proclamation.
And then Perceval said, as if she had been expecting Benedick or Tristen to step in, "How do you propose to do that, sir, when all of Engine and all your brothers have been unable to do more than keep the ship alive and patched up for the past half a thousand Solar years?"
"Metatron is dead," Samael said. "And so is Susabo, the Angel of Propulsion. We'll go to Engine, and we will teach them how to heal those wounds."
Rien had to reach out and grab Perceval's forearm to steady herself. "We can't," she said, quick and firm—like Head speaking to the butler. "We have to go to Rule. There's sickness there—"
"Didn't you want to head off the war?"
"How did you know that?"
He touched the lobe of one ear, obviously amused that she had even bothered asking. "Still a demiurge. In any case, your best chance for stopping the fighting is to bring Perceval back to Engine."
"Someone in Engine betrayed her," Rien said, as Tristen put a hand on the table and reminded, "I have business in Rule, as does Sir Perceval."
Benedick nodded. "Business better addressed with an army at your back, brother, if you arrive back in Rule while Ariane is Commodore."
Silence. Rien squeezed Perceval's wrist until Perceval wrapped Rien's fingers in her own much longer ones. Tristen tapped each nail in turn on the tabletop, and Rien looked down. Predictable. The men were ganging up on them.
In the following silence, the servant reappeared. Silent as always, he slid a plate of egg-sub and toast in front of Rien and then slipped away again.
She let go of Perceval's wrist and picked up her fork. Tiredness and frustration aside, she needed the food. She hoped there was more in the kitchen.
"Very well," Perceval said, saving Rien one more time. "We will go to my home in Engine, then."
How quickly the years fall away and the passage of time ceases meaning. We have each a purpose: we are bred to it, engineered for it, or we are drawn to it out of some fathomless innate longing that we cannot explain. Some unlucky few must discover—or create—it on their own, but those are rarer in these days, when by the grace of the forebears we are manufactured to our place in the order of the world.
We have our destinies. We race for them, fight for them, fulfill them.
Or we fail them.
Listen, Perceval. Do you hear your long immortal life stretched out before you, before the stars?
I have so much to teach you, my dear.
The young do not believe in endings. They do not believe in death. They do not believe in time. Everything takes forever to happen, and twenty years is a long time.
Under those circumstances, the apocalypse can seem sexy. Death is a fetish, a taste of the edge.
It is not real.
And so the days are long, and though time holds us green and dying, we cannot feel the drag of our chains hauling us forward to the end.
But the old, Perceval. The old have forgiven time. Whatever time you may have is too little. If you live a thousand years—as I nearly have, and you surely will—it does not matter. Unless you have given up, laid down your tools, and folded idle hands to wait, beloved, you will still be in the middle of something when you die.
The world is a wheel, and we are all broken on it.
And that is fine and just.
For there is never any hurry, until there is no time.
A presence touched Dust's fringes, and a voice spoke from the vortex of the air. "Musing on the fate of worlds, dear brother?"
"Asrafil," Dust said. "Well. I greet thee, Angel of Blades. I was expecting brother Samael."
Dust turned from his contemplation, and coalesced. Not in his own chambers; less greatly daring than Samael, perhaps, but Asrafil not chosen to enter Dust's domaine. They met where their edges brushed, in one of the voids in the world's great Tinkertoy structure.
Contrary to the epithet, Asrafil carried no weapons. When he coalesced, he wore an avatar Dust knew of old, which gave Dust pause for a fraction of a second. Why did they still wear these human skins, when they so rarely spoke to humans anymore?
It was in the design, of course. Reflexive.
Part of the program, a kind of junk DN A.
Asrafil's chosen form was that of a man, bird-boned and frail, without Samael's hard muscularity. His scalp shone bare, more polished than shaven, and he wore black— gloves, shoes, an ankle-length wide-lapeled coat like a pillar—that only accentuated his slenderness. He seemed far too small to be the source of the air of wicked malice that surrounded him, but Dust knew better. "I trust we need not debate the gravity of the situation?"