Grail (6 page)

Captain Amanda shook her head, the sharp edge of her glossy black bob moving against the brown skin of her neck. She disagreed, but not strongly enough that she would countermand Danilaw’s command. He watched as she drew a breath and re-aimed the conversation, feeling lucky in the egolessness of this unexpected addition to his team. If she really believed he was misguided, he thought she would intervene more strongly. For now, she’d registered her opinion and was content to trust his judgment.

Instead of arguing, she began providing historical context. “They left Earth, among other reasons, to avoid rightminding. There’s no telling what they are like, after all this time, or what their society has become.”

Danilaw nodded. “At this point, depending on how fast they’ve been moving, we can assume they have undergone at least a few centuries of social development. They were radical Christians, and we’re a millennium out of practice
in dealing with people who are locked into anomalous temporal lobe feedback. We just don’t know how to handle the faithful anymore. They may be pacifists or militant, religious or atheistic. Or both, or all four, in Mendelian combinations. At this point, if any significant number have survived for any length of time, they probably no longer represent a homogenous society.

“Worse, approximately one percent of unrightminded humans are psychopaths, and a considerably larger proportion—perhaps as much as thirty percent—are sophipaths, leading to entire societies devoted to upholding untenable ideologies. The pathological brain is no more wired to accept evidence contradictory to its dogma than a flutterby is wired to understand that the image of the rival it attacks in a mirror is its own reflection. The more argument erupts, the more people grow wedded to defending their sophistries, and those who attempt to guide a resolution through compromise are seen as traitors to both groups.”

Gain tapped her fingers on the thick table edge. Her mouth worked. “You make it sound like they are a bunch of sociopaths.”

Captain Amanda shook her head, but Danilaw thought it was more in elaboration than contradiction. “Sociopathy is a relatively minor element. Basically, unrightminded humans are almost incapable of rational thought. If you think of them as small children, without impulse control, any understanding of the subjectivity of emotion, or the ability to compromise, you will not be far wrong. And the crew and passengers of the Kleptocracy-era sublight ships were the worst of the lot—delusional to the point of sacrificing entire ecologies on the altar of faith.”

Danilaw placed his hands on the table’s heavy surface, attracting the attention of Captain Amanda and his cabinet without the need to interrupt. “We might be dealing with a generation ship packed to the portholes with inbred religious
fanatics. We might be dealing with an already extant war incoming.”

He had thought the implications of war would silence them for a minute, and the breath-held sigh that orbited the room confirmed his conjecture. It felt … curious to raise such a specter from the past. He might as well threaten them with pogroms or a genocide. Mass enslavement. Mutilations. Withheld medical care, exposure on ice floes, or a child sex trade. The bubonic plague or leprosy.

Yet antique horrors seemed somehow appropriate to a discussion of the antique hulk bearing down upon them. Danilaw could see the effect on each of the cabinet members: Administrator Jesse lowering his chin to his hands to stare moodily into the data displays embedded in the thick crystal tabletop; Administrator Gain rubbing the bridge of her nose with the last two fingers on her right hand, the thumb and the other two splayed across the olive skin of her temple and forehead as if he was making her eyes hurt. Semiotic indications of attention, concern, and concentration.

Jesse tipped his head. “But didn’t they worship the same god?”

“More or less,” said Captain Amanda. “But they appear to have found plenty of things to fight over anyway. Today we believe that many of these people’s brains never matured—that they suffered from temporal lobe malfunctions causing fanaticism and ideopathy, and that their frontal lobes never fully myelinated. Think of them as—potentially—toddlers with nuclear weapons.”

Conversation was more interesting than one man droning on and on. It held the audience better. And Danilaw would have used puppets if he thought it would get his cabinet to pay attention.

“But it’s also important to remember,” he added, “that any potential for violence or memetic pathology is balanced by the other possibilities of what we may find. A society
different from ours, with cultural and social riches of its own. Hybrid vigor, including species of animals and plants entirely lost to Earth during the Quilian mid-Holocene extinction event—the so-called Eschaton. Art, science, technology. An entire parallel track of human culture.”

Administrator Gain said, “If I remember my history correctly, we should also consider that, compared to our society, these people were remarkably homogenous, genetically speaking, and of a type no longer well represented in our genetic pool. Almost all of them were drawn from Western European stock. If they can be rightminded, it’s an opportunity to—well, to outcross.”

“It’s an opportunity for a lot of things,” Danilaw said. “The sort of profound, universe-changing opportunity that comes along once or twice in a hundred years.”

“I take it from your comments that they haven’t hailed us yet?” Jesse said.

“No.” Danilaw smoothed the scratchy material of his work coat over his arms. “We’re contemplating sending a scull out to greet them, which is why Captain Amanda is with us. That, and she was instrumental in decoding the signal.”

Gain offered Amanda a respectful nod. Amanda returned it. “Research is my primary. Driving spaceships is a tertiary, but I need it for my work.”

“Well done,” Gain said.

Amanda looked down. “There are risks to sending out a scull—and even bigger risks to boarding the ship, if that is the choice we make. Debris, antagonizing any residents, contagion. I would recommend drones before any manned mission, although we should limit those contacts. Drones can seem quite threatening.”

Gain turned from the waist to face Danilaw directly. “You mentioned that they are still using radio broadcast technology. You may not know that there is a culture of
radio hobbyists here on Fortune who still play with primitive equipment. I know a few; I think they could be brought in as consultants. We could contact them in advance.”

Jesse made a noise of agreement. Gain, finished speaking, seemed to be taking notes on her infothing. Amanda lifted a jug of water from the surface of the table, leaving a ring of condensation.

As she poured, she resumed. “I speak the language, though—or I speak the language they used when they left Earth. But as you can imagine, it’s been centuries for them as well, and no doubt the language has diverged.”

Danilaw spoke the tongue, too, or had accrued a tolerable understanding over the years, given how he fulfilled the arts requirement of his Obligation. A significant fraction of the seminal twentieth- and twenty-first-century rock and roll was in English, and the people consigned to—or escaping in—the
Jacob’s Ladder
had spoken primarily that language.

He’d have to arrange backup childcare for his sister’s kids, but that was a minor inconvenience. He could go.

“The good news,” Gain said, “is they don’t seem to be sneaking. But that doesn’t explain why they haven’t hailed us. If they had, those radio operators I mentioned would be talking of nothing else.”

Danilaw pulled another glass over and pushed it toward Amanda with his fingertips. She finished with her own and filled it without looking up, then offered the pitcher to Gain and Jesse. Jesse accepted and filled two more cups.

Danilaw drank and spoke. “There’s a possibility they don’t know we’re here. Remember, they left Earth just at the beginning of the quantum revolution. They should have artificial gravity, but we can’t be sure what directions their research will have taken since then—assuming they have advanced and not regressed. They are broadcasting on radio frequencies, which means they’re subject to lightspeed
lag. And if they’re looking for evidence of habitation on those same frequencies, they won’t find anything. Or at least, not much—I assume your friends are a small group?”

“Not the biggest,” Gain admitted with a smile. “There’s a few dozen of us.”

“They may not even be looking.” Amanda set her water glass down and twirled it between her fingers. “Why would they expect us to have leapfrogged them? When they left Earth, its society seemed more likely to knock itself back to the Paleolithic—if it was
lucky
—rather than survive into the quantum age. As far as they know, they fled a smoking cinder, a world rendered uninhabitable by ecological collapse.”

Her words fell into a silent room. Jesse fidgeted. Gain leaned forward on her elbows and, after a few moments, quietly said, “Will they want to fight us?”

Danilaw rolled his cup between his hands, stopping when the bottom squeaked painfully on the tabletop. “I don’t know,” he said. “Possibly.”

Benedick watched the recording of the captured probe twice, leaning over Caitlin’s shoulder, trying not to think about the smell of her hair. So many mistakes; so many regrettable events in an existence measured in centuries. You never stopped wondering what might have been different.

Even now, with incontrovertible evidence of aliens—human aliens, admittedly, and not so alien as Leviathan, but almost certain to prove weirder than all the nonhuman intelligences that filled up the walls of the world—Benedick found Cat’s presence a reminder of all the errors of a long life. The years and the work had eased things between them, and they were friends again, which was good, because they needed to be able to work together.

But he missed her, as simply as that. And he had never quite stopped wanting her back.

Still, he’d settled for what he could earn, and reconstructing the friendship had also served to reconstruct the trust. He didn’t think there were many people she’d allow to stand over her like this so calmly, invading her personal space while she worked.

He straightened up and came around the display tank to face her. “We can’t assume their intentions,” he said quietly, when he knew he had her attention. It was just a shift of the eyes, but it was enough. They were still a team.

“You’re worried about what will happen when we start exchanging diplomats.”

He shrugged, brushing his hair behind his shoulders. “Nanotechnology, inducer viruses—or whatever they have that’s similar—bacterial agents, engineered or accidental. There’s no telling what could come in on their shoes. And we can’t assume, after centuries of isolation, that we have any reciprocal immunities.”

“And they’re very likely to be Means,” Caitlin said. “Our bugs might just kill them—not to mention the colonies. Are they going to want to become Exalt?”

“It’s something we can bargain with,” Benedick said. “It’s an advantage and possibly a trade good.”

“But it’s combat you’re worried about.”

He felt himself smile. As well as he knew her, it was reciprocated. “Combat. Or treachery.”

She had a peculiar gesture of rubbing her nose that was all hers. “Well, you are our father’s son.”

Benedick folded his hands under his arms.
Don’t remind me
. “Yes, he would have assumed the worst. But that does not universally indicate that he would have been wrong.”

Her mouth worked around whatever she was thinking of saying. Because it was Caitlin, he would never know how many options she chewed over and discarded before she settled. “I am sorry,” she said. “I was trying to provoke you.”

That
he could smile for. “Cheap sport,” he said. “I’d have thought such an easy opponent beneath you.”

She stood and punched him lightly on the shoulder. “I’ve got to keep in trim for the aliens. So what do we recommend to the Captain?”

The Captain, their daughter. “We’re going to have to
meet with them,” Benedick said. “Especially when we’re asking to share a planet, because I don’t think they’ll cede either of those two potentially habitable worlds to us entirely. It’s not human nature.”

“So even if they are inhumanly gracious, we’re going to have to live with them.”

“And when we do, we need to be aware of and guarded against all the possibilities for disaster.”

Caitlin turned her head, glancing over her shoulder at the system diagrams spinning with stately indifference in the big image tank. “I hope we’re aware of that,” she said. “I hate to think we’re underselling it to ourselves.”

   Very little in the world knows more about keeping quiet than does a library.

Dust, who had been a library once, huddled in his ringspotted fur coat, paws dry-washing, all the active senses that might have told him enough about his environment to move in safety drawn inward, turned passive, locked down. He felt the new Angel all around, the web of her presence a veil made of trip wires and snares. If she found him she would eat him, as she had eaten most of him already. As she had eaten every other angel and remnants of angels she had found. If she found him, she would devour him whole. So, with perfect logic, he decided she would not find him at all.

The world had changed from what he knew. While he died, slept, and grew back from a spark, it had evolved from a hulk to a haven, from a shell to a ship.

Who had preserved the spark of him? And who had caused it to awaken here, into the helpful-animal consciousness of this furry toolkit with its deft hands and keen, twitching nose?

And who had thought that this, the eve of landfall, would be an opportune time to return him from the quiet cold of storage?

It seemed to Dust that, first, he must learn who had preserved him, and what that person or those persons intended. And then, having done that, he must decide how he was going to use those intentions to suit his own designs.