Grail (18 page)

“The real irony here,” Gain said at this second Alien Invasion Policy Meeting (though nobody outside of Danilaw’s head was actually calling it that), “is that we finally make first contact with an alien race after centuries of looking, and they’re us.”

“Not us,” Jesse said. “Something consanguineous. But that’s a different species. Subspecies. Whatever.”

“We can’t state that categorically until we get a look at
the DNA,” Danilaw reminded them. “It’s only been a thousand years of divergence. Speciation can happen fast, but it’s a long shot.”

Gain looked more tired than the rest of them. She leaned forward on her elbows, blinking owlishly. Her hands were folded around a mug of stimulant. But tired or not, the mind behind those bleary eyes remained sharp. “And if they’re as different from us as
neandertalensis
from
sapiens
?”

Danilaw nibbled his cuticle. “We try not to compete for the same habitat.”

He didn’t state the obvious—that sharing an environment with a competitive, hierarchal, primitive version of humanity would require his people to either enforce their own social adaptations on the newcomers, or adopt a more aggressive stance of their own and deal with the long-term repercussions as they occurred.

Many of the most aggressively hierarchical humans had left while the world was collapsing, fleeing in the
Jacob’s Ladder
—an artificial world salvaged from the extravagant wreckage of humanity’s near self-immolation, fueled and funded by a Kleptocracy that did not outlast the launch of more than the first of the elaborate, flimsy, sabotaged vessels. To those who remained behind on an Earth like a gnawed husk, subsistence seemed luxury enough.

Those forebears had already begun rightminding themselves—the decision that provoked the flight of the Jacobeans in the first place. It had been the intentional self-handicapping of a competitor with no equals on the playing field.

To save themselves as a species, Danilaw’s ancestors had bargained away a good deal of the fear, the primate antagonism, the power structures that had driven them to mastery—even overlordship—of their environment. It had required a radical realignment of society and the human brain—forces that had driven those primitive humans to
such intense competition that their entire worldwide society had been designed to contain and facilitate nothing else.

Instead, they had decided to shift the social focus to another, less expressed potential of the human animal—that of peaceable, advantageous cooperation and compromise. In selecting—in
engineering
—for self-sacrifice, commensalism, and negotiation over individualism, hierarchy, and authoritarianism, they had saved the world. They had ushered in an enduring age of peace and—if not prosperity—adequacy of resources for the new, reduced demand.

But it had required a reworking of the entire architecture of human neurology. Centuries later, the extinction event, ecological crisis, and massive population crash that had provoked it—dubbed the Eschaton by various factions at the time—was still remembered with a sort of hushed awe.

A remnant of the human race had emerged from the Eschaton with a renewed sense of desperation, if not purpose. They had refined the crude early techniques of rightminding into a comprehensive program of surgery, chemical therapy, and scientific child-rearing that had allowed humanity to finally
do something
about the clutter of its awkward, self-defeating, self-deluding evolutionary baggage.

Danilaw was grateful for the world they had left him—one in which sufficient resources were assured for each person’s comfort and livelihood, barring catastrophe, and in which pleasures were balanced off against obligations in an endurable and even enjoyable fashion. Like many, he maintained a certain bittersweet nostalgia for the glittering excesses of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—he played in a rock band, and he was not the only one to engage in recreational re-creation.

But it was playacting, an exercise in creativity, and any rational, rightminded individual had to accept that a world without avoidable hunger and war—a world in which diverse human beings could work together to find compromise
positions without the crippling barriers of fanaticism and ideology—was superior to one where they were at one another’s throats constantly.

Sophipathology had not been eradicated. But it was a treatable illness now. Danilaw wished he could be more certain that the incoming Jacobeans would see it the same way.

Captain Amanda spoke first, with the most aggressive analysis. “We have to be prepared to defend ourselves, Administrator Danilaw.”

“You’re in charge of that,” he said. “Have a defense plan for me in two days, please. You can work on it while we pack.”

“We?” Jesse looked like he wasn’t exactly overjoyed by the idea of a field trip. Danilaw knew his primary was heavily pregnant, and the culmination of a reproduction license wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted to miss just because you’d drawn City Admin duty. Especially when you were working on making the psychological shift to primary nurturing duty any day now.

“Captain Amanda and I,” he said. “We’ll go out to greet them, barring any major pushback from the Ciz. We both speak their language, passably if not fluently. And it will appear to be a gesture of trust and goodwill if I go.”

“They’re hierarchical,” Captain Amanda said. “If you go yourself, you will weaken your apparent position with them. They will be used to dealing with administrators as persons of rank, veiled by layers of flunkies and functionaries whose only purpose is to create a haze of isolation around the decision maker. We’re talking about an extremely alien manner of thinking.”

“Well, then,” Danilaw said. “They’re supposed to be New Evolutionists, aren’t they? They’ll adapt.”

   Dust’s second visit to Dorcas came in the dead of her local night. He found her in a low tent, pitched against the
sheltering trunk of a bent palm. Fur-tips wet with the irrigation falling in the Heaven, he crept to the edge of the pallet where she slept, arms folded mantislike to her chest and mouth open, breath rasping in and out with rough regularity. A black-backed synbiotic snake curled against the backs of her knees, basking in whatever heat radiated through her blankets. A sheen like oily rainbows covered its back. Its tongue flicked out when Dust approached; he made well sure to keep the sleeping woman between the rodentlike form he inhabited and the curious snake.

He touched the damp tip of his nose to the woman’s eyelid, prepared to jump back if, on awakening, she swiped at him. But not prepared enough, apparently. She might be Sparrow Conn no longer, but the body she inhabited had all of Sparrow’s hard-won reflexes.

Dust found himself on his back, spine twisted and pinned to the ground, the Go-Back’s hand pressing into his belly. He squeaked surrender, going limp, and bared his minuscule throat to her.

A too-long silence followed. When he opened his eyes again, he found her still shoving him against the ground, the heavy head of the cybernetic cobra swaying at her left shoulder as it regarded him with baleful, candy-colored eyes.

“So,” Dorcas said. “Are you volunteering to feed my snake?”

“However this small one may serve,” Dust said. “But if this small one may suggest, it may be more advantageous to you to listen to the message I bring.”

“Still looking for alliances?” Her voice was not friendly, but she lifted her hand and let him right himself. If he’d chosen to fight, he could have made her regret laying hands on him—but that was hardly in keeping with his current mission of diplomacy.

“I bring more this time.” Because he could not bite, he groomed, busily washing his face and paws. His fur was
gritty with soil. Also, the washing made him look inoffensive. “My patron would like to speak with you in person.”

The Go-Back reached out and let the back of her hand brush the cheek of the cobra. It did not withdraw, but its flared hood smoothed back into the taut black-and-buttercream column of its neck. Dust was a construct, and could not feel fear exactly. But he could feel the toolkit’s arousal levels lowering, its tiny, trembling heartbeat slowing to a mere whirr.

Well, if Dust was going to be eaten by a synbiotic snake, it was probably within his powers to possess that snake’s colony from the inside. He’d fight that war when he came to it.

“Patron,” she said. She pushed herself more fully into a sitting position, adjusting her weight on her seat bones by pushing down on the ground. The snake flicked its tongue once more and seemed to resign in favor of the woman, whipping its long body into a fold of the blankets. It was too bulky to vanish completely, but the bulge could have been a pillow if Dust had not known otherwise. “All right, Dust,” she said. “What is it that you want from me? Other than allegiance, because you must know now that my goals are not yours—”

“Parley with my sponsor,” he said. “I am under the command of another, Go-Back. That is all. She seeks an alliance, and your goodwill. Or at least your sworn word not to oppose her.”

She tapped her fingers on her thigh, twice. She looked down at him, where he huddled by her knee. “What are the politics of Conns to an Edenite? I’ll parley. But she must come to me.”

Tristen Conn was a tiger, and no hound. Mysteries were not his métier. His strength lay in the subtlety of war. But for his Captain’s sake, he would attempt what he did not well understand, and solve the murder of Perceval’s mother.

Before the world was made anew and a Captain sat upon the Bridge, a knight-errant had often been called upon to resolve crimes, to serve as investigator and judge as well. But the crimes of simple folk were often simple as well, unsophisticated, the culprits apparent when the knight-errant applied logic and interview skills to the case. Here, there was no one to interview. The only witnesses were Nova and Perceval, and what Nova had seen was spotty and suspect.

He was fortunate to have assistance in his inquiry. The necromancer Mallory might be a better detective than Tristen, as necromancers were without a doubt temperamentally suited to the investigation of death. He was fortunate as well that he could frame Caitlin’s death as an act of war. That—the shadowy realm of sabotage, spycraft, assassination,
espionage—was a paradigm with which Tristen felt comfortable.

In the privacy of Tristen’s insulated bedchamber in Rule, he and Mallory commenced with the facts they knew. Those facts were comfortingly simple—if frustratingly few. Five persons in armor had entered the corridor outside the Bridge, somehow undetected. They had made off with an antique paper book which had held great religious and symbolic significance to the Builders, and was still sacred to some—perhaps many—of the folk of the
Jacob’s Ladder
. Two of them—the ones Perceval had killed—had been Deckers, and possibly so had the remainder.

But one of those former two had been skilled enough to put Perceval to the test, and at least one of the latter three had been the equal—or the better—of Caitlin Conn, hard as that was for Tristen (who had ranked Caitlin along with Benedick as one of the few warriors nearing to his own skill) to accept.

It was possible that Caitlin’s killer had gotten the drop on her somehow, a possibility that Tristen was cautious in regarding as more plausible
because
it was more comforting.

It would be nice to think Caitlin had made a mistake. But that was the sort of logic that got a man killed through underestimating the threat posed by his adversaries.

It was more likely, Tristen knew, that the person who killed Caitlin had been, like her, a Conn, Exalt and well seasoned to the arts of war.

The three remaining trespassers had made good their escape, successfully using Caitlin’s death to distract Perceval and once again blocking the attention of the ship’s Angel. They had taken with them the paper New Evolutionist Bible, still sealed in its protective case, and Caitlin’s unblade Charity—the last unblade in the world, as far as anyone knew—which had once been Tristen’s before it was shattered and then remade.

Tristen’s chamber lay high up along the curve of Rule’s architecture. He could have had one larger and lower, nearer the courtyard and generally considered more desirable, and in being honest with himself, Tristen admitted that
he
would have preferred the basement. Dark, tight spaces still felt safe to him. One might anticipate claustrophobia as a consequence in someone who had spent decades immured in a living crypt, but the result for Tristen had been the opposite. Expanses seemed too open now, space without walls something you could fall into forever and never escape.

Agoraphobia was a common ailment among those who grew up among the coiled passages and close anchores of the world. The Enemy lay always close enough to fall into—breath-suckingly close, and personally malevolent. Wide-open spaces could kill, and it was only sensible to fear them.

But Tristen had long ago learned that when confronted with fear, he dug in his heels and became stubborn. And so he had chosen quarters far up along the arch of Rule’s bulkhead, arm’s length from the great transparent panels of the sky. He had chosen quarters that floated a hundred meters above the olive trees and grass of the courtyard. A long panel opened out on that side, revealing the gardens and the other wall beyond. On the other side he had a bottomless vista of the skeleton of the world, flattened and distinct against the coffin velvet of the Enemy’s bosom.

Mallory stood now in the narrow point of the room, where interior and exterior panels came together. One hand was pressed palm-flat to each window, as if the necromancer established a current between positive and negative, between warm living atmosphere and the coldest dark of all. Tristen schooled a spontaneous smile, but his warmth at seeing Mallory’s slender silhouette would not be hidden.

It came out in his posture, he thought, the way his chin
and shoulders lifted. Mallory brought energy into any room.