Grail by Elizabeth Bear

Author:Elizabeth Bear
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780345524850
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-02-22T10:00:00+00:00

She began as a bright dot, a reflective sparkle of obviously variable albedo and mass. As they came up upon her, she gradually resolved into a spiderweb, and then a sort of scaffolding.

Danilaw kept thinking they were closer than telemetry indicated, which alerted him intellectually to her scale. But he couldn’t integrate her true scope until they came within about a kilometer. Then Danilaw’s world-bred senses could no longer mislead him that this looming skeleton was anything other than gargantuan.

Superlatives and adjectives failed him simultaneously. The Jacob’s Ladder hung against its backdrop of stars, covering the entire horizon as revealed to Danilaw and Amanda where they stood before cramped screens in the scull, which did not have a discrete bridge. Danilaw had studied the generation ship’s schematics and designs, such as were still available after an elapsed millennium. He had thought himself prepared, and yet now that it was real, the discomfort of awe humbled him.

She was the largest man-made thing he had ever seen. And that comparison failed to do her justice, because she was orders of magnitude more enormous than the next biggest. Whole ranks and families of planetesimals had died to build her; the raw materials of a man-made world.

She might once have been a wheel, of sorts, although one oppressively vast—or, more precisely, a nested series of skeletal wheels set at angles to one another, like a wirework wind sculpture reproduced at unimaginable scale. Danilaw could see how each had once turned inside the next, how they had been angled to catch available light and cast each other not too much in shadow. He could even see where the immense full-spectrum light cannons had been mounted, aimed so that the pressure of escaping photons would contribute to the great ship’s gentle propulsion. Each turning ring had stabilized the ship, and all together they had acted to make her akin to a giant gyroscope, balanced by her own spin.

She had been lovely once, the Jacob’s Ladder. But now she was an enormous scarred skeleton of nodules joined by tubes, twisted in places and in others crudely repaired. Danilaw could make out generations of technology at work on her hull—hulk would have seemed the better word, except she was warm, a living ship, glowing softly in the infrared.

And she was, unmistakably, moving forward under her own power. He could see the gleam of her engines through the gaps in her frame, and the long cometary plume of her exhaust glazed with reflected sunlight when they came around to approach her on a diagonal, matching trajectories.

Some repairs seemed crude—machine-shop things, scrap metal hammered into place and spot-welded or even riveted to cover the scars of some of her traumatic amputations. Some were more craftsmanlike, with matched edges or careful jury-rigging. There were aluminum, plastic, ceramic alloys, titanium, even cloth painted with a doping compound in evidence, depending on where he looked and which schematic he glanced at.

And then there were the repairs and reductions which seemed almost clean in comparison.

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