Grail (26 page)

And so she fed them on the Bridge, at a table Nova built for the occasion—not too large, oval in shape, the glossy flat surface growing up from the grassy deck on twisted legs as if it had always been rooted there. The food was kept plain, though Head exercised all hir considerable ingenuity on making it also delicious. Sie always said it was more a test of the cook’s art and discrimination to make the simple great, anyway.

Perceval had wondered if her dinner guests would find the food strange, and as truth would have it, they seemed to. Not so strange, however, that they failed to apply themselves to the dishes with concentration.

She got a sense that their culture focused a kind of ritual attentiveness on food. They ate in small bites, carefully timed, and both of them inspected each mouthful before consuming it. Perceval hoped it wasn’t out of fear of toxicity. She’d had Nova analyze their metabolites—it wasn’t invasive, so she didn’t feel she needed to ask permissions—and it appeared that, within detectable tolerances, they could eat what she ate.

Could eat. Whether they habitually did eat it seemed questionable, given the scientific rigor with which they investigated their dinners. Perceval expected questions, but they did not quiz their hosts, just inspected, chewed, considered,
and swallowed. Tristen and Mallory supported the conversation, the necromancer especially putting forth efforts to be sparkling, but Perceval could sense the awkwardness hovering between the two groups of diners.

And it was hard indeed to find common ground for conversation when gossip about common acquaintances and family business were off the table. Perceval had never realized before how much of what went on at the average meeting was devoted to navigating the complex relationships that linked Conn and Engine.

Mallory managed a fair trade in humorous anecdotes about long-dead Conns and Engineers, leaving enticing pauses in the narrative, but Perceval could not help but notice that Danilaw and Amanda seemed completely at a loss as to how to handle them. Finally, she set her utensils down, folded her hands in front of her mouth, and said, “I wouldn’t force conversation on you, but this feels awkward to me. Is there some manner in which the hospitality could be improved?”

Her alien guests did a lot of talking to each other with their eyes. They shared a glance now, lingering enough that she wondered if they were telepaths or had some sort of implant that allowed silent communication. Amanda finally looked back at Perceval and said, “It’s another of those cultural differences. We’re socialized from a young age to believe that eating is serious business, requiring attention and gratitude. Cookery is the performance of an art, and like any ephemera, it should be savored. Also, there is the matter of honoring the former existence of the food, and acknowledging the lives that go to feed us.”

Tristen frowned, but it seemed like the study of concentration rather than one of disagreement. “You honor the sacrifice?”

“That,” Amanda said, “would imply complicity on the part of the lunch. And in general, I suspect anything we eat would prefer to continue existing as something other than
a source of fuel. No; we merely try to recognize our impact, so we may manage it.”

“Oh.” Mallory chased the rubbery coil of a steamed snail around the plate before cornering it in a small puddle of herbed oil. With fork tines poised before painted lips, the necromancer said, “We are insufficiently reverent of the dead.”

The aliens did that eye thing again. This time, Danilaw nodded and spoke. “After a fashion, though I might have left out the value judgment. We are attempting to engage with you without discrimination.”

“Or relativism,” Tristen said. “And we very much appreciate your consideration of the long centuries our people have been separated, and the time it will take to negotiate those alienations.”

“Not to mention,” Amanda said, “the time it will take even to identify them.”

Perceval let her fork lie alongside the plate, unwilling to risk disturbing the delicate balance of actual communication taking place. She leaned forward, minding her manners and keeping her elbows by her sides—it would have made her mother proud, she thought, with a pang—and started to say something that would continue the diplomacy that had somehow, organically, commenced.

Only Nova spoke in her head, soft and definite. “Cynric is about to enter the Bridge.”

When the door slid open on another of the generation ship natives—the Conn family, as they called themselves, and Danilaw was starting to understand that, indeed, they shared familial links as close as those uniting the First Families of Fortune—Danilaw laid his fork down somewhat reluctantly beside his plate. The strange food was, well, strange—but it was interesting, stimulating, and delicious, once he chose to ignore his genetic predisposition to fear novelty. Strange things, after all, could be poison, but he was reasonably certain that these strange
people
had more to gain by keeping him and Amanda alive, and he had the Captain’s assurances that everything on the table was safe.

He was beginning to trust the new people’s medical technology. That seemed far more advanced than anything Earth or Fortune had to offer—although he knew it came at a cost of illegal bioengineering.

This alien, like the others before, was attenuated and androgynous, straight hair falling in locks over white-clothed shoulders. It
—she
—paused within the door, allowing the hatch to spiral closed behind her with a fine, practiced
sense of drama and how to frame herself for best effect. Danilaw wondered if she had a secondary as an actress.

He was amused to notice that he was already treating each new incursion of the Conn family into his presence with a wary, even jaundiced, eye and a sense that some fresh hell had found him. From the way both Perceval and Tristen looked up warily from the dinner table, he thought, in this case, it might not even be the culture shock talking.

“Aunt,” Perceval said, without rising. “I must admit, your presence is unexpected.”

“Of course,” said the newcomer. “I planned it that way. I hear there was an explosion.”

“Indeed there was,” Danilaw said, hoping he had understood the way the Jacobeans did not stand on ceremony. “Someone apparently sabotaged our scull. I am Danilaw Bakare, Administrator of Bad Landing. This is Captain Amanda Friar.”

“Cynric Conn,” she said. “I’m the head of bioengineering. I imagine I’ll be working closely with your ecologists in order to adapt our people as closely to Fortune as possible.”

She
didn’t call his homeworld Grail—even though she spoke so casually of engineering her family, as if they were machines.

On the other hand, that flexibility might lead them to accept rightminding without too much trouble
.

That’s my Dani, his mother would have said. Always on the bright side. She’d never known how much of that was effort and pretense.

Cynric extended her hand and he accepted it, startled when she gave a little squeeze. She was of a sameness with the other Conns—tall, planar, pale, and blue-featured. The jewel that flashed in her face reminded him of Amanda’s, but he thought it was a piercing rather than an implant.
No Free Legates here
.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said.

If she noticed how noncommittal he was, she accepted it without a ripple. She let his hand drift out of hers and turned her attention to the people behind the table, touching Amanda lightly as well. After that, though, she folded her arms and stood before the table in her long robes like some attenuated representation of a wingless angel.

“Captain,” she said. “I suppose you’re wondering how I managed to walk between the raindrops when I came in.”

“Passing Nova unnoticed is a feat,” Perceval agreed. “I presume you wouldn’t mention it if you didn’t mean to explain.”

Danilaw spared a moment to reflect on whether this discussion of business in front of new guests was honest indifference to what he learned of his hosts’ capabilities, or saber rattling for his and Amanda’s benefit.

Cynric smiled, showing the tendons around her mouth. “I learned it from what Mallory and Tristen uncovered among the Deckers.”

“The parrotlet,” Tristen said. His studied impassivity dropped away, leaving the traces of a smile that startled Danilaw a little. It looked so
human
amid the alien architecture of his face. “Which begs the question. Was it a miscalculation that it survived, or did they want us to find it and learn this?”

“I did not ingest original material from the parrotlet,” Cynric said. “That seemed rather obviously unwise, even before I located the Trojan in it. But I reproduced the design, and wrote my own code. And I learned some things about who killed the Deckers.”

“Pardon me,” Danilaw said, trying to remember to keep his elbows off the table when he leaned forward, “but do I understand correctly that someone is dead?”

“Murdered,” Cynric agreed, crossing to stand beside the table, one hand resting on Perceval’s shoulder, her body so slight inside her robes that she seemed made up more of the
sway of fabric than any other thing it might be hung upon. “Dozens, murdered.”

Perceval cleared her throat. Cynric looked down at the top of her head, fingers rippling as she squeezed the Captain’s shoulder. “Is there any point in hiding it from them that we have factions in this world, and some of those factions are violent? What does that make us, other than a human society?”

An unrightminded human society
. But Danilaw didn’t think this was the time to raise that specter again. “Terrorist trouble?”

“More like a garden-variety mass murder in order to hide the identity of a criminal,” Mallory said, when it seemed that no one was going to demand that information be withheld from the newcomers. Danilaw felt Amanda stir on his left, heard the rustle of her clothes.

Cynric said, “Someone arranged the assassination of our Chief Engineer, and then killed a deck full of accomplices, accessories, and probable innocent bystanders who might have been able to provide an identification. I have been working with the limited physical evidence that was left behind. I should not have interrupted your dinner”—she gestured to the table—“but I admit, I found my new toy clever enough that I wanted to show it off to anyone available.”

She smiled winningly, and—as with Tristen—the very existence of that smile made Danilaw reconsider her.

Amanda cleared her throat. “I was going to say that if you already have terrorists, that explains why you’re so willing to give us a pass on blowing up your ship.” She shrugged. “But this wasn’t someone attempting to influence political policy through the slaughter of innocents?”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Perceval said. “But I don’t think that was the primary motive for
these
deaths. You seem more familiar with the varieties of criminal activity than I would have expected from a people who practice routine psychosurgery.”

“We don’t remove the capability for violence,” Danilaw said. “Just the more irrational motives. The purpose of rightminding is to reinforce free will and to remove the atavistic urges that underly it, not to create a perfect, bid-dable army of human robots.”

“For one thing,” Amanda said, letting her biceps brush his elbow, “who would do the bidding? As we attempted to explain before, sometimes people have perfectly rational reasons for violence.”

“Ours don’t,” Mallory said, one curved brow arched over a chocolate-colored eye. “And I guess I fail to understand how what you describe differs from the evils of the Kleptocracy.”

Unlike the other aliens, Mallory did not stumble over the term, but spoke it as if it were familiar.
Interesting. And how close to the devil immortality is this one?

“Not evil,” Danilaw said. “There is too much evil in the idea of evil. But greedy and childish and toxic.
That
is what we try to correct for. Still, it sounds like we’re both getting some opposition.”

Danilaw’s stage persona was deadpan as any ice man. His political construct was cool and soothing. Once Amanda laughed at his intentional understatement, the aliens figured it out and followed suit, or rolled eyes at one another, according to their natures.

“This opposition may be to us making landfall,” Perceval said, her gaze level and assessing, “or it may be to us negotiating with you at all.”

“Rather than taking what you want?”

The boldness in his own voice startled him. It startled him, too, when she made a plain, frustrated face and said, “I have figured out that you will fight for your lives.”

“We will fight for our world as well,” Danilaw said, aware of the hush that had fallen around the table, the pairs of eyes trained on him and Perceval both. “We will
fight for its sovereignty, and we will not allow its equilibrium to be destroyed.”

“But a punctuated equilibrium is one of the necessities of evolution.”

“The world,” Danilaw said, “is quite capable of producing crises of its own, without our self-justifications. You—your people, some of them, anyway—believe in a God, do they not?”

“And yours don’t,” Perceval said. “I understand that this, like so much else, will be a subject for much negotiation and compromise.”

Danilaw sucked his lips into his mouth and chewed them for a moment, as if he were nibbling his words into shape. He was pretty sure he still had them wrong, but now wasn’t the time to mention again that the notion of God was an illness. But he was also supposed to be a diplomat, and part of diplomacy was being able to speak in the metaphors of the enemy.

He considered carefully—the history, his limited experience. He needed to speak
with
them, not
at
them. He needed to embrace their metaphors, even when the metaphors distressed him.

He drew a breath and began. “You believe in Gods. Or God. Or at least some of your folk are open to the possibility of a divine influence.”