Grail by Elizabeth Bear

subtle. Still, he passed—he thought—unremarked.
    He found traces, strays, eddies of information. He let them pass through him, shielding his own existence and siphoning their bits. Fragmentary though it was, it fed him.
    Traces of a scent signature he half remembered drew him. So much was lost, scrubbed away with the bulk of his self. But he was holographic; the image remained, though it blurred with each division and details were lost. And the Conns he remembered no matter what.
    And this was the scent of one he’d thought lost.
    When he found her, she was drinking beer in the shade of a banana tree, a text-novel scrolling in letters of light through the air before her eyes. She read lazily, a few lines a second, making it last. Her hands were calloused, the bridge of her nose radiation red. She had long sun-colored hair and her father’s cheekbones; he knew her at once for who she was.
    He scurried, small and lithe, to her side, humped up beside her, and jerked his tail.
    “You died,” he said. “You were slaughtered like a cow. So who lives in you now?”
    Slowly, Sparrow Conn turned her eyes from her novel, which froze in place. A butterfly flew through it. Once, Dust would have been able to name the insect’s name.
Though much is lost, much abides
.
    “I live in me now,” she said. “You’re not a toolkit.”
    “Ah, but I am.” He sat back on his haunches and dry-washed delicate paws one over the other. “But I am not
only
a toolkit. And you are not only Sparrow Conn.”
    “I am not Sparrow Conn at all,” the woman said, “although she built the house I live in. I am Dorcas. I was an Engineer.”
    “And now you are an Edenite.”
    “I was,” she said. “Now I am a woman reading a book. Who are you?”
    His whiskers twitched. He could lie, but angels did not lie to Conns, not when asked direct questions. And whoever lived in her now, this woman carried the genetic pay-load of a Conn. The DNA was what mattered.
    “I am Jacob Dust,” he said. “I was an Angel. Do you love the Captain?”
    “I do not hate her.”
    A chary answer, and so a good one for Dust’s purposes. “But you are not consumed by her purpose.”
    “Which purpose is that?”
    “The purpose of her Angel.” Again, the whiskers. As if they had a will of their own, like the tiny heart that fluttered in his birdcage chest two hundred times a minute.
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield
.
    But no. Those were scraps from somewhere else, another existence. Misfiled chips of memory that tumbled through his mind as bright as diamonds. He had been so full of poetry, once, and he had built the world in its image: chivalrous, valorous, hammered as if from legends.
    At last, at last, Dorcas the Engineer folded the words of her story away. She regarded him through escaping strands of hair, but Dust was content that he had her attention now.
    “She will sell us to the lords of Grail. She will buy whatever safety she can for herself and her family, buy landfall, buy land—and what in this new world can she do with the rest of us?”
    “Sports,” Dorcas said. “Monsters, mistakes. Would you unleash us on an ecology? What evolved thing could live with us? We would eat it.”
    “The strong survive,” Dust said. “Existence is evolution. Equilibrium is extermination.”
    “The Captain would regard me with favor if I turned you in,” Dorcas said, her eyebrows amused.
    “The Captain’s Angel would eat me, as she ate my ancestor. I am but a poor scrap of backup. Is your heart so softfor xeno-starlings and exo-bunnies, and so hard as death against me?”
    “Nova allows other scraps to persist. Does an angel fear for its life?”
    Dust let his foxy muzzle nod. “This angel does. Tell me, Dorcas of Engine, if you believe God has a plan, how can you be sure it is not best proved by whatever will grow from our meeting with these aliens?”
    Dorcas flicked him away with a fingertip. “We are monsters, monster. But I recollect you,