Grail (22 page)

“You should have been mine.” She smiled. “And now you are.”

By stellar-system standards, it wasn’t a long trip—measured in weeks rather than months, which had something to do with the velocities involved, both of the inbound, decelerating vessel and the massively overpowered-for-her-mass
Quercus
.

They had the
Jacob’s Ladder
on telescopic and various other sensory systems (mass detector, q-scanner, electromagnetic, radio telemetry) long before they made direct visual contact.

But there was something about that first real sight of her, with Danilaw’s own eyes, nonetheless.

   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. As the
Jacob’s Ladder
moved against the starfield, bathed in her own lights, the rays of the distant sun, and the floods of the scull, he caught how beveled edges gleamed here and there as if they had been sliced with a knife so hot it left fused edges behind. Other surfaces resembled the sanded luster of frosted glass, as if the metal and ceramic of her hide had itself sublimated into space. Scorch marks, blisters, craters, and volatilized surfaces scarred her everywhere.

When the sharply held breath finally whistled out through his nostrils, it stung. Beside him, Captain Amanda slid her hands into her pockets, flat-palmed, fingers arched back and tendons in relief as if she were packing all the stress away in them.

She said, “When she left Earth’s system, she was the size of Manhattan Island.”

“Well, she isn’t now,” Danilaw answered. “Although I think you’d have to measure her to know. Open a hailing channel, please, Captain?”

The jewel in her forehead flashed as she nodded. But she didn’t move immediately; she stood, watching the vast, battered armature of the alien vessel glide across the darkness behind.

“Captain?”

She shook her head as if rattling herself back into her body. “Sorry. Just thinking. This is the last moment of the world we know, isn’t it? This is history.”

He nodded. “I’ve been having that sensation a lot.”

She blew out through her nose—more a sigh than a snort, but just barely—and looked down at her slippered feet on the decking. “I thought it would feel like more.”

   There was so much to consider, so much to negotiate. Perceval’s head spun with it before the conversation was halfway through. Medical issues, in particular, concerned
the Fisher King—
Danilaw Bakare
, she supposed she was going to have to get used to calling him, this strange gravity-stunted humanoid. He seemed seriously put out to learn that Perceval’s people did not require quarantine precautions or what he referred to as “a gene scrub.”

“We adapt,” Perceval said. “Our immune systems are evolved to handle most pathogens. Even novel ones.”
Except the ones that have been engineered to exploit our colonies
.

She barely remembered the engineered influenza that Ariane had infected her with, though it had wiped out most of the Exalt denizens of Rule, and she herself had only survived because of the intervention of Rien and Mallory the Necromancer. And this was not the venue to bring up the inducer viruses, spliced and machined from the silicon-based symbiotes of the Leviathan into agents for the mental and physical manipulation of any creature they should be introduced into.

The Fisher King
—Bakare, Bakare
—shook his head. “That doesn’t address the issue of protecting my people from
your
pathogens.” He smiled, softening stern words, and made a point of saying something playful. “Unless you can count on your microbes going where they are directed, I think, at this point, it’s wise to maintain quarantine protocols. We’ll come over in suits, if we’re still welcome, and we’ll bring sampling equipment. Once we’ve gotten an idea of what your microfauna are like, we’ll be able to tell if we need to vaccinate, and what sort of isolation and sanitation protocols are necessary before you land on Fortune.”

His choice of words and sentence structures was like something Dust would have recited, flowery and archaic. The good news was, if what he implied in his speeches could be trusted, being granted leave to land on Grail seemed a foregone conclusion. They would have to borrow lighters from the onworlders, or cannibalize the world in order to build their own—a prospect that filled Perceval
with wide-eyed discomfort—although there was no telling what hoops they would have to jump through, and to which indignities they would be subjected, before that came to pass.

And there was always the possibility that Administrator Danilaw was lying. Perceval could not figure out what he’d gain from it—but then, if he was deceiving, it would be in his interests to hide the motives as well as the act. Or acts, for that matter.

Whatever went through the Fisher King’s mind in the moments he stood with his eyes downcast, studying the tips of his boots (if that’s what he was wearing, there below the vidmote’s pickup range), when he raised his gaze to Perceval’s projected image again, his expression was that of a man resolute. He spoke as if he had prepared a speech, as before, but this time there was no resorting to notes. Perceval found herself flattered that he—a Mean—had memorized what he wished to say to her.

Her, in her personage as Captain. Not her-Perceval. He was a Head of State speaking to another Head of State, and foreign as that was, she needed to recollect it. This was not like speaking to Dorcas, or one of the Decker leaders. She was not this man’s liege lord, nor his conqueror.

He said, “We mourned you.”

A simple sentence. Three words: subject, verb, object. So unlike his usual elaborate eloquence, but when he said it, it echoed around her with the weight of his emotion and intention.

“We?” she said, already half knowing. He hadn’t mourned
her
, not in his own person or hers. But she understood where he was going; she just wanted to hear him say it.

“Earth,” he said. “Earth, her people, mourned your ancestors. We believed that the Kleptocracy had killed you all, that they sent you into space to freeze and die.”

Perceval smiled.
The Kleptocracy
. So it had a name.

“They tried.”

As if the weight of her admission had bowed the conversation, they both remained silent for a moment. Perceval supposed it was her place to open the discourse again. When she spoke, she imagined that this Fisher King, this lord of Grail, would understand that her
we
was for her forebears and antecedents, and not relevant to her speaking in her own person.

“We mourned the Earth,” she said.

The Fisher King smiled. “Actually, they did okay.”

Her surprise—shock; call it what it was—must have showed in her face, because he hastened to add, “In the long run, I mean. The late-twenty-second was a nightmare, from all I’ve heard. Deaths measured in the billions, famine, savagery. But the population crash proved a sort of blessing in the long term, because when they began to rebuild, they no longer needed the infrastructure that had been necessary at peak population.”

Perceval licked her lips. “It’s an established principle,” she said. “The survivors of a crisis and their immediate descendants flourish in a wide-open ecology. There is a proliferation of available niches.”

The Premier said, “The survivors don’t have to strive for resources or subsistence. They can turn their attention to less banal pursuits than outcompeting their fellows. And the survivors institutionalized that. They abolished sophipathies, and we took steps to protect our societies from their recurrence. Many of the descendants of those same regulations and procedures are still in place.” He paused. “Do you understand what I am saying?”

“Your legal system,” Perceval said. “You will expect us to abide by it, and cede authority to your leaders.”

The words came with a rush of relief; she hoped she didn’t sound as excited as she felt by the prospect of not being
in charge
anymore. She’d never wanted this role of Captain; she’d never wanted the opinions of dead antecedents echoing through her aching head. And though
she had accepted leadership and symbiosis as part of the cost of saving her people, acceptance was not the same as celebration.

She was no longer the girl she had been when she became Captain. She was a woman now, and a leader, and she had accepted that a good deal of life entailed doing the sorts of things one really would rather not. But Perceval looked into this strange man’s face and glimpsed release, and it excited her.

His reaction did not fill her with confidence, or even allow her to long sustain that welcome relief. He glanced at his colleague, the Captain. Perceval was coming to understand that
Captain
meant something different to these alien humans than it did within the walls of her own world.

He said, “Do you understand what I mean by
sophipathology
?”

“The etymology,” Perceval said carefully, “suggests that a sophipathology is an illness of sophistry, which is to say of illogical or self-referential thought. Perhaps an ingrained or circular sort of reasoning?”

“In C21,” the Fisher King said, “which is our last cultural referent in common and one with which both my colleague and I are familiar—so please forgive me if I rely overheavily on its structures—they would have called it a
toxic meme
. A poisonous and conventionally ineradicable self-perpetuating idea. Because of the vagaries of our evolutionary heritage, it is easy for us to become irrationally loyal to these destructive patterns.

“We have learned to treat for this genetic illness. That treatment is one of the root causes of our prosperity; we require it of all citizens and productive members of society, and we will not permit sophipathologies to become reestablished in our culture.”

The old Perceval would have licked her lips and glanced aside at Tristen, seeking the counsel of his expression. But she and her colony had weathered many storms and attempted
revolutions, and she would give nothing away to this representative of the potential enemy.

“Perhaps you could give me some examples of what you consider an illness of the thought,” she said. “I suspect there are many possible definitions.”

“I have heard you mention angels,” he said, with all the care of a diplomat who expects his words to be unwelcome. “Considering the history of the
Jacob’s Ladder
as a vessel for the Kleptocratic exploitation of those infected by New Evolutionist religious memes, we would consider a belief in angels as a likely pathology. Especially as it is historically and epistemologically linked to similarly illogical and toxic beliefs such as idolatry, worship of one’s own culture as chosen and deserving above all others, and religious and ideological fanaticism. It is our experience that these belief structures are exceptionally virulent, only matched for pathology by irrational economic and moral codes, and capable of persisting in the face of all evidence, suffering, and reason.”

“Angels are real,” Perceval said, measuring her tones, permitting her brow to furrow so the Fisher King would know she struggled to understand. “I am in the presence of one right now. We make them.”