Grail (25 page)

However unsettled she was, neither she nor the Fisher King let it affect their demeanor. Two slow drags of air and she spoke again, her voice shaking only slightly. “The obvious conclusion is that the
Quercus
was sabotaged while I was dirtside, picking up Danilaw.”

“We’ll see that you get home,” Perceval said. “After all, we’re headed that way.”

Captain Amanda’s eyebrow arched at the joke. “I guess you are.”

“You’ll want to contact your people; you may use our arrays to do so.”

“We have q-sets,” Danilaw said. “Without the relay on the
Quercus
, we may need a power boost, but we can manage to call home.”

Captain Amanda set her helmet down on the table and leaned her hands on either side of it. “How heavy are your casualties? How may Danilaw and I assist in your salvage operations?”

“Correlating,” Nova said out of the air. Tristen made a point of not noticing when the Fisher King and his companion reacted with startlement. “Please carry on.”

Tristen could have wished that she’d given a number—preferably a small one—but he understood. Her sensors and proprioception had been damaged in the explosion, and Tristen knew from eavesdropping her feed that—under
Perceval’s guidance—she was already engaging search and repair parties, conducting survivor interviews, bringing in medical details. Organizing her immune response, like any organism in the face of attack. He gave her a part of his attention and felt Perceval doing the same.

“It’s deeply problematic that one of our people would resort to terrorism,” Danilaw said. “It’s not that rightminding removes the capability for violence, you understand. But it addresses the irrational evolutionary triggers—territorialism, dominance—that result in a great deal of fighting.”

“Rightminding,” Tristen said, fastening on the unfamiliar word. It sounded somewhat ominous.

“Humans,” Danilaw said, “evolved to collaborate—but also to compete. For resources, status, reproductive success.”

Mallory said, “Competition is essential to evolutionary development.”

“Ah,” Danilaw said. “But after a certain point, evolution is no longer essential to existence.”

It was a peculiar sensation, Tristen thought, to hear a sentence, to understand each word in it, and yet to have the abiding conviction that one had entirely missed the sense. He wasn’t alone: beside him, Perceval—who, like Tristen, had half her attention on Nova’s disaster-remediation efforts—cleared her throat uncomfortably.

And Samael said, “That is a heresy.”

“By your standards,” Danilaw said, “I have no doubt. And by ours, most of the foundations of your society are untenable abominations. Which is going to make things interesting if we have to share a planet.” He glanced at Amanda, who in continuing to strip off her primitive armor had revealed an off-white jumpsuit of some fiber Tristen did not recognize. When she was out of it, her suit softened, compacting neatly to a small bundle attached to an oversized set of oxygen tanks—further evidence of the
fragility of these Means, and their requirements for a rich atmosphere. She retrieved some sort of instrument package from the helmet and slipped it over her head, to dangle on a lanyard.

“Please explain what you mean by rightminding,” Tristen said.

“These days, whenever possible, we do it through genetic surgery,” Danilaw said. “But in an adult, it’s a combination of microsurgery, chiefly to the temporal lobe, and therapeutic normalization of the neurochemistry. We use this process to mitigate some of the atavistic, self-destructive impulses of the human psyche—blind faith, sophipathology, tribalism—so that rational thought can prevail.”

He hesitated. Perceval made a noise of encouragement. It sounded to Tristen as if what Danilaw was describing
was
evolution. Or evolutionism, anyway, so he wasn’t sure where the touchiness lay.

But Danilaw looked at Captain Amanda, and she nodded. “One of my roles is historian,” she said. “I’m here in part because of my interest in C22. And my esteemed colleague is worried about causing you offense because we are unused to dealing with, uh—with natural-minded individuals such as yourselves. And because resistance to the mandated administration of early forms of this process is one of the reasons why your ancestors left Earth.”

“And the other,” Danilaw said, “was because decades of irrational human competition had driven the homeworld into a state of ecological catastrophe, such that it could no longer support large human populations.”

“We were not supposed to survive,” Perceval said.

“We know,” Danilaw said. “The Kleptocratic government—and what they did to your ancestors—was the final weight that really spun public opinion in favor of rightminding everyone. At first it was used to treat incurable ideologues and criminals. Then we moved on to sophipaths
and Kleptocrats. The arcane priests of destructive religious systems such as Capitalism and—forgive me—Evolutionism came next. This was around the time your people moved on. Eventually, the rightminded population exceeded the unrightminded, and the procedure was made mandatory. Those were the last extensive wars Earth fought. Since then, they’ve managed through negotiation and compromise.”

“It’s not so shocking,” Tristen said, thinking of the modifications he’d made to his own mind, memories, and emotional landscape over the years. “The romanticization of a natural human state as somehow superior to a managed one is—your word, I am not certain I’m using it properly?”

“Sophipathology?” Danilaw asked.

“Thought-sickness,” Mallory supplied. Tristen smiled over his shoulder at the necromancer, and was rewarded by a flash of angelic grin through dark coiled hair.

Tristen rubbed his hands together. “So the implication of what you are telling us is that whoever sabotaged your vessel did so in a spirit of complete rationality?”

“Yes,” Amanda said. “And in the spirit of the public good.”

“That is useful information.” Perceval inclined her head like a queen, leaving Tristen to wonder what the squat, earthbound alien couple made of her. “Please, I must address the crisis now; Samael will see you are made comfortable. Now that the autonomous response is complete, there will be decisions that require my full attention.”

Amanda looked at Danilaw, seeking support, Tristen imagined, for whatever she would say next. His nod must have offered it, because when she turned back she spoke directly—and passionately—to Perceval.

“Captain,” she said. “I understand that you have exceptionally good reasons not to trust us currently. But I beg of you—you must have wounded, and I feel a grave responsibility for their pain. As a Legate and ship’s Captain, I have
some medical training. Will you allow Danilaw and me to help in your recovery efforts?”

“Wounded?” Perceval thought for a moment. “We have facilities for them. But if you would care to observe, you are welcome to join us. I would recommend you allow us to provide you with armor before entering the damaged zone.”

“That would be welcome,” Danilaw said.

The Captain nodded. “All right then. Mallory, Tristen? You’re also with me.”

   The pressure suits provided for Danilaw and Amanda were not at all what Danilaw was used to. But having observed Tristen’s “armor” in action, Danilaw was confident that it was a superior technology—as long as it wasn’t prone to catastrophic, untelegraphed failures.

Instructing him and Amanda in its use, Mallory seemed confident that they could handle it. “Even young children have no problem adapting to armor. The armor will take care of you. All you have to do is trust it.”

Danilaw wiggled his fingers in the gauntlets, trying to accustom himself to the feel of the sticky-cool colloidal lining, and eyed the necromancer dubiously. “Trust it?”

“Danilaw,” Mallory said, “this is armor. Armor, this is Danilaw. He is in your charge.”

“I am pleased to be of service, Danilaw.” The armor spoke through pinhole speakers in the neck aperture. Based on Amanda’s jump, she was hearing something similar, which told him the voice response was directional. “Are you familiar with my operation?”

“No,” Danilaw said, finding his voice. He was grateful for his rightminding. He could feel his body’s adrenaline response, the atavistic desire to panic, but he was aware of it as a chemical response, and he controlled it. “I’ve never seen anything like you before.”

“Shall I place myself in training mode?” the armor asked.

“Affirmative,” Danilaw said.

“Normally phrased commands will suffice.” Was that his own embarrassment causing him to imagine a comforting tone in its speech? Or a touch of hesitancy?

“Thank you,” Danilaw said, concealing his stress and irritation that they were not yet moving to relieve the inevitable wounded. He did not know the disaster protocols on the
Jacob’s Ladder
. Captain Perceval’s apparent air of leisureliness might mean only that the situation was under control, and she was too much of a professional to act in haste. But Danilaw’s adrenaline response urged at him nonetheless.
Do something, and do it now
.

He raised his eyes, straightening his spine. Around him, the others seemed garbed and ready. Danilaw was grateful that he still had his q-set; like Amanda’s, it was modular. Now he wore it under this “armor” as he had worn it under the pressure suit, and it gave him a direct link to Amanda.

Probably not a secure one, given the armor’s sensitivity to voice commands. But a way to speak with her, at least. Amanda’s Free Legate status meant she could transmit anything she experienced as it happened, and Danilaw hoped she was doing so. Back on Fortune, Jesse and Gain should be going over the data already.

If Danilaw had thought Samael was giving them a grand tour (or a bit of a runaround) on the way in, the trip back disabused him. It was easier in the alien armor—it did some of the work of walking for him—and they traveled fast now. But the scenery was the same—although, as they moved through it, Danilaw was unsurprised to find it increasingly ravaged.

The scenery also
stopped
more abruptly than it had before.

They passed into the final air lock, still some ways from
where the docking cradle had been, and Tristen turned and said, “Seal up now.”

All five sets of armor answered his command, helms scrolling shut in unison. Danilaw expected a pressure change, but there came no sense of a difference in atmosphere.

“Sealed,” his suit responded, as Danilaw found himself staring through the gold-tinted mask of Tristen’s armor. Tristen nodded—the armor telegraphed the motion—and turned back. When the First Mate cycled the air lock, Danilaw felt his heart squeezing in short rhythm as if it were lodged in the base of his throat. He gasped once, careful not to hyperventilate, and felt the thundering ease.

What he saw beyond the hatchway was exactly what he had anticipated. From the expressions behind the faceplates of the evolved and yet atavistic humans surrounding him, he imagined they were experiencing a more complicated emotional journey, but his own response was first the terrible sorrow and acceptance, and second the cataloging of what must be done to alleviate the situation.

The delicate docking cradle that had so gently webbed in the
Quercus
was reduced to writhing shards. The limbs that had surrounded it had been deformed by the force of the blast. The debris of the research scull itself was secured within a sort of silvery cargo net. Danilaw could not immediately identify its manufacture. As he watched, it writhed and grew, and spread itself across another few meters of scrap.

The damage was just as the animation had led him to believe, but other elements of the scene seemed wrong.

Danilaw expected salvage equipment, men and women in these shells of strange pressure armor—hardened by its own molecular bonds rather than by programmable fields—working feverishly. He expected medical teams and docbots—and what he saw was a strange absence of most of these things.

Before his eyes, the damage was unknitting itself, the world remade as if someone were running the animation of the explosion in reverse. It was the sort of effect one expected to see in an entertainment, and it stopped him cold where he hung.

He drifted silently for a moment, then opened his mouth and said, “Mallory? Who is effecting those repairs?”

“The Angel,” Mallory said, as if it were a perfectly everyday sort of sentence. “She says there are six crew members mind-dead, a few dozen crew and organisms injured, and the ladder tree was destroyed beyond salvage.”

“Oh,” Perceval said. “That is a pity.”

Mind-dead?
Danilaw wondered. But it seemed like an inopportune time to ask.

“Can we clone her?” Tristen asked.

“There should be salvageable cellular material,” Mallory said. “If any of it has an intact nucleus, we can replace the ladder tree. It won’t bring back her experiences, but we have a recent backup. But … it will take centuries for her to grow so large and knowledgeable again.”

“We don’t have centuries,” Perceval said. Danilaw had the distinct sense that quietly, contained within herself, she was grieving.

“Not if Danilaw lets us land,” Mallory said. “But then that begs the question—what
would
we have done with her when we got to Grail, anyway? What will we do with
all
our biodiversity?”

“Grail?” Danilaw asked, to cover his flinch. It was an excellent question.

“Your world,” Perceval said, floating before that enormous emptiness. “What do you call it?”

“Fortune,” Danilaw said. “And the sister world is Favor.”

Perceval turned to him and extended an armored hand. “Thank you, Administrator,” she said. “There is little else
we can accomplish here. Will you and the Captain join us for dinner?”

   She’d asked them if they would prefer a formal dinner and a full presentation to the senior crew, but Administrator Danilaw and Captain Amanda had argued gently for a little more privacy. “The flower of diplomacy likes a well-composted bed,” Danilaw had said, and Perceval had stared at him for a full three seconds before realizing that he was being intentionally ridiculous.
The Mean has a sense of humor
. It did, in fact, endear him to her—just a little.