Jacob's Ladder 2 - Chill by Elizabeth Bear

Author:Elizabeth Bear [Bear, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: High Tech, Fiction, Science Fiction, General, Science Fiction - High Tech, Fiction - Science Fiction, Space Opera
Publisher: Bantam Books
Published: 2009-12-29T00:00:00+00:00

12

this time of trial and desperation

The greatest and main abuse of Scripture, and to which almost all the rest are either consequent or subservient, is the wresting of it to prove that the kingdom of God, mentioned so often in the Scripture, is the present Church, or multitude of Christian men now living, or that, being dead, are to rise again at the last day.

--THOMAS HOBBES, Leviathan

The mammoth was still screaming.

Gavin, perched on Mallory's shoulder, hid his head under his wing as Prince Tristen and the angel Samael discussed options in low tones. Gavin would have imagined Tristen ruthless, but the First Mate had made it flatly obvious that he had no intention of slaughtering the infant mammoth unless no other humane option remained.

Unlike Tristen, the basilisk wasn't distressed by the uncertain fate of the mammoth, but rather the recurrence of what was becoming a chronic sense of deja vu. He'd been here before; he had seen this before--the broad strokes, if not the particulars. It shouldn't have left a worm of unease gnawing his complacency, but there was something about the mammoth, in particular, that came with a kaleidoscope of unresolving images.

Gavin had never suffered disorientation or the impermanence of memory before the last few days, and the experience was one he would have gladly forgone. Meat people lived with this all the time. It was no wonder every last one of them was clinically insane.

Mallory withdrew a step or two, head tilted, unwilling to intrude into this argument. Gavin, forcing his filters to process the overload of fragmentary remembrances, pulled his head from under his wing.

Whatever Tristen had just said, Samael protested. "Sentiment has no place when it comes to the engineering of biospheres."

Tristen had folded his arms. "Give the mammoth its chance."

"Because there's a place for an elephant on a spaceship?"

"The Builders made one," Tristen said. "They brought it here and ordained its birth in this time of trial and desperation. Who are we to gainsay their insight?"

Gavin forgave Tristen that last, because he said it with a mocking lilt, but he didn't blame Samael for his flinch, the contraction of all his motes and scraps as if around a blow--or the headshake that followed.

"Besides"--Tristen paused, his hand curling restlessly around the pommel of his sword as if to give the speaking weight--"are we not on Errantry?"

Samael looked away, unable to deny the truth of Tristen's statement. Instead, he fell back on the practical. "It won't reproduce."

Tristen's voice went wry, even muffled through Gavin's feathers. "How do you know? Maybe somewhere out there is its perfect complement, already bumbling through some Heaven on broad calf feet."

"We must consider lifeboat rules, My Prince. It will die," Samael said. "And whatever resources it consumes along the way to starvation may result in the deaths of other life-forms, ones with a better chance of long-term survival. It will starve, and perish in great travail and suffering."

"That is," said Tristen, in a voice so strange that Gavin stretched his head forward on its long neck, the better to listen, "the purpose and privilege of life, my dear Angel of Poison.

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