Grail (23 page)

“But in so constructing the metaphors surrounding your relationship with your artificial intelligences—if I understand correctly what these servants are—you reinforce a historical sophipathology which has resulted in untold billions of deaths, both of humans and other biologicals.”

“So by sophipathology, you mean … a heresy?” That was familiar ground, and Perceval for a moment breathed easier. “We do not prosecute heresies anymore, Administrator Danilaw. That, for us, is ancient history.”

But rather than similarly relieved, the Fisher King looked if possible more tired and distressed. “I mean the kind of ingrained flaw in one’s reason that would lead one to align
one’s self so strongly with a brand of dogma that one might identify others as heretics, actually.”

Perceval pressed her fingernails into her palms. She had anticipated that the cultural disconnect would be vast, and she was only just coming to understand
how
vast it might be. He spoke. For the most part, he used words she understood. But the manner in which he used them left her feeling as if she had just listened to a recording of some nonhuman creature reciting abstract poetry. It was easier to follow the thought processes of an angel.

She said, “I do not understand. How is it that you live without angels?”

He rubbed his face in what she thought was exasperation, though it could have just been exhaustion. She was learning that these alien humans were much like Means—fragile, of fragmented memory, and prone to easy exhaustion—and that in other ways they were not Mean at all.

“How do you live with them?” His irritation, if that was what it was, turned into a headshake. “We just do.”

She folded her hands together, interlacing the fingers. She huffed across the knuckles, producing a whistling noise. “I think we should conduct further conversations in person,” she said. “You and Captain Amanda have my permission to dock your ship and come aboard.”

“We will have to observe quarantine,” the Fisher King said. “It will not be so different than this.”

“Different enough,” Perceval said. “The Angel Samael will assist you with your docking arrangements and requirements for environmental isolation. That is my will.”

With a mental signal to Nova, she cut the connection. Tristen had not moved from his seat on the grassy berm opposite, but his hands were folded and he was regarding her. “Turning them over to an angel when they’ve expressed such a strong distaste for the whole concept? I’m not sure that’s politic.”

“Maybe they’ll find out how useful angels are and suffer a thought infection.”

Tristen smiled. “He gets on your nerves.”

Perceval shook her hair back, smoothing the locks behind her shoulders with both hands. “He’s a smug, self-righteous, condescending
Mean,
” she said. “If he thinks we’re uncivilized thugs, well—”

“We need him, Perceval,” her First Mate cautioned. “Unless you really want to go and
take
his planet from him.”

Her toes curled into the verdant green turf underfoot. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t tempt me.”

Danilaw Bakare had not realized how thoroughly he anticipated the barbaric splendor of the generation ship’s interior until its grandeur overwhelmed his expectations entirely. The docking bay had the same blasted, repurposed, resurfaced look that characterized the mottled exterior of the vessel. It was also vast, cradling the
Quercus
entire. Danilaw stood on the tiny habitation deck watching the long, seemingly animate arms of the
Jacob’s Ladder
embrace the scull, growing over the air lock and avoiding the motes and ports. He could not avoid the comparison to a dodecapus sensitively enveloping its prey.

He sealed his helmet one-handed and turned to make sure Captain Amanda, too, was ready. Seeing her mirror the gesture made him grin; it was good that they were looking out for each other.

“Once more unto the breach,” she said, patting his space-suited shoulder with a bulky gauntlet. There were weapons on her belt, and the Free Legate jewel over her eye told him she knew both physically and ethically how to use them, but that didn’t make him any more comfortable with
the necessity—or the fact that he, for the first time in his life, felt naked walking around unarmed.
Maybe this will be peaceable. Maybe we can still pull that off
. A lot of maybes to contend with.

They lined up by the exit. Captain Amanda cycled the lock around them and ran the decontamination protocol. The exterior door scrolled back slowly, the
Quercus
’s Fortune-standard atmosphere replaced by something that Danilaw’s suit sensors read as thinner than weak tea and shockingly moist.

Captain Amanda was apparently thinking the same thing. “That’s a lot of free water to leave floating around in a closed habitat …”

She never finished the sentence, which trailed off as if her voice were struck from her. Instead, they stood shoulder-to-shoulder and stock-still, neither at first quite processing what they were seeing. It was a corridor, or an accessway—a means of getting from the
Quercus
to the interior of the
Jacob’s Ladder
. But it was—

It was full of trees. Or
made
of trees, or a tree, or a latticing vine grown into a tree through the passage of centuries. The outside perimeter was a filigree of dark, smooth bole, heavy palmate leaves carpeting every space between. When they stepped over the threshold onto the surface, Danilaw lurched the first step as a slightly different angle of gravity asserted itself. Amanda reached out to steady him; neither fell.

From among the leaves, a swirl of atmosphere—a dust devil?—manifested. It grew and complicated, sweeping up bits of detritus into a roughly human outline. “Hello,” the projection said, as Danilaw shied back from its extended limb-approximation. “Don’t be afraid. Welcome to the world. I am Samael. I have been sent to guide you.”

An angel
, Danilaw realized—and now, meeting it, he intuited its history and purpose better than he had before. One of Captain Perceval Conn’s servitors, or masters, or
compatriots. Artificial intelligences originally programmed by the Kleptocracy and its creatures. A piece of terrible history, left behind to trouble future generations.

Danilaw felt as if he were confronted by an animate, talking gas chamber, or an iron maiden with pretty manners. What was less ethical than giving artificial intelligence personalities? Than creating—in essence—a slave race: creatures with agency and identity but only the semblance of free will?

Danilaw’s people still used smart systems. But they had long since abandoned the horrific practice of making
people
of them, and then enslaving the people they had made.

As Danilaw’s pulse accelerated and his oxygen usage spiked, he saw the motion of Amanda’s suit; she had rocked back on her heels. He wondered what she was experiencing. Her knowledge of the relevant history was more detailed than his own; Danilaw suspected that made this encounter all the more unsettling.

If Amanda was more discomfited, she also recovered from it better. “Hello, Samael,” she said. “I am Captain Amanda Friar. This is Danilaw Bakare, City Administrator of Bad Landing.”

The Angel’s sunflower-petal eyebrows quirked. “I was provided with your files,” he said. “If you will come with me, I will bring you to my Captain.”

They fell into step beside him. The corridor was wide enough for all three abreast, though the uneven surface of the interwoven, intergrown branches or trunks made the footing akin to skipping over cobblestones in reduced gravity. If Danilaw took a header, he wouldn’t fall hard.

“Feel free to ask any questions you like,” Samael said. “We are eager to share our knowledge with you as an expression of goodwill, and to establish that we can help your society become more flexible and adaptive. Also, you are welcome to use our resources. If it would make you more comfortable, please feel free to remove your armor.”

Samael gestured around magnanimously. Danilaw blinked, understanding suddenly that for a culture in which every atom of oxygen and molecule of water was an irreplaceable consumable, this was an exceedingly generous offer. Danilaw was accustomed to metering his object and resource usage, observing the Obligations, wasting neither personal nor collective assets. But to a society such as this, centuries out from a habitable world—they had what they had, and there would be no getting more. It went beyond Obligation, beyond social justice. Parsimony was their means of survival.

His confusion and revelation seemed transparent to the Angel, who kept talking as if conducting a familiar guided tour. “You have our word that you may unseal in safety. The Captain has ordered our microfauna and flora to treat your persons and equipment as sterile zones. You will not be colonized.”

“Wait,” Danilaw said. “Your Captain ordered this? Your microbes follow instructions?”

Samael gave him what he would have sworn was a pitying look. “They obey the Captain. Are they not part of the world’s ecology?”

Danilaw saw Captain Amanda’s eyelashes flicker through the wide faceplate of her pressure suit. He thought she smiled, a wry expression he read as wonder, but she concealed it quickly.

“Our viruses aren’t so civilized,” she said. “For your sakes, we should remain sealed.”

“Also,” Danilaw said apologetically, “your atmosphere is slightly thin and sour by our standards. We need to supplement oxygen. How do you—your people, I mean—survive in such low saturations?”

The Angel tossed flowing straw-colored locks over his shoulders. It might be some vegetable fiber, or the mane of some animal that Danilaw did not know. “Naked mole rats.”

“I
beg your pardon
?”

“Naked mole rats,” Samael repeated. “They’re an Earth species of colony-living burrowing rodent that is—or was; they may be extinct on the old planet, although
we
have some—supremely adapted to the, well, the exceptionally
nasty
conditions found in their lairs. Centuries ago, Cynric the Sorceress introduced their adaptations to deoxygenated and toxic atmospheres into the human genome. This enabled our crew to survive and flourish despite the damage wrought to the world by the Breaking.”

“Cynric … the Sorceress?” It was only the light filtering through the bowering leaves on every side that flashed from Amanda’s jewel, but the way it gleamed when she cocked her head led Danilaw to entertain a fantasy that the sparkles were an external indicator of frantic processing activity within.

Samael nodded. Even in profile, the mosaic-approximation of a beaky, lined human face was three-dimensional and compelling. “She was the head of genetic engineering, five hundred and fifty years ago. You can meet her.”

“
Meet
her?”

“For certain. Or her remnant, at least. She is alive again, though incomplete from what she was. There are also a couple of true survivors of the Moving Times and the Breaking. We anticipated that you might be interested in speaking with them.”

Five hundred and fifty
, Danilaw mouthed to Amanda through his faceplate.

She shrugged, as if other insanities still held more of her attention.
Mole rat DNA
, she mouthed back.

Danilaw nodded. Okay, so living five hundred years wasn’t such a surprise after that. Obviously, the
Jacob’s Ladder
survivors had developed life-extending technology. Or they habitually put people in cold storage for centuries at a stretch. One, Danilaw thought, was as likely as the other, though the idea of this ancient genetic engineer being
alive “again,” and somehow damaged by the process, supported the cryogenic theory.

“Where are we going now?” Amanda asked, stretching her legs to keep up with the Angel. He wasn’t tall, but then Danilaw guessed that he also probably wasn’t walking.

“Directly to the Captain,” Samael said. “It’s a big world, however, and I ask you to bear with me.”

A big world indeed. They hiked for over an hour, leaving Danilaw grateful that he’d kept up with his fitness Obligation. Even servo-assisted and allowing for the
Jacob’s Ladder
’s intermittent gravity, his pressure suit was heavy for walking in. At least it processed heat efficiently, or he imagined his visor would have fogged past visibility in the first fifteen minutes.

He was glad it didn’t. Because the
Jacob’s Ladder
—or the world, as Samael insisted on referring to it—only became
more
grand and improbable with what every turning revealed, what lay behind every air lock, gate, or grid.

Each time the Angel, obviously accustomed to taking into account the frailties of corporeal life-forms, apologized for not taking them along the scenic route, Danilaw felt his disbelief strengthen. It would have been difficult to imagine anything more compelling than the insanely complicated ecosystems and architectures he and Amanda were being led through.

The travelers toiled up mossy boulders past cataracts of tumbling water, and animals and birds Danilaw could not begin to identify flocked in every environment. Glades of trees filled arching passageways with transparent walls that showed the architecture of the
Jacob’s Ladder
from within. But for all its wonders, the ship had a patched, weary air to it, like a made-over old quilt ready for the recyclers.

“Here we are,” Samael finally said. “The library.”

It was not, as the door glided wide, what Danilaw would have identified as a library. No paper books, no clay tablets, no inscribed jewels. No holographic, Bose-Einstein,
or magnetic records. No papyrus scrolls and no solid-state archives.

Just a grove of fruit trees, stretching to the curved outside wall of a vast space, surrounded on every side by hungry emptiness.

“Library,” Captain Amanda said. She turned her head, and then her entire body, rotating in her footsteps. Danilaw knew she was scanning the space with her suit recorders, transmitting the data home. As Legate, one of her Obligations was to science and history. “
This
is your
library?
”