Grail

16 a girl who had no wings

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.”

“Some of us are,” Tristen affirmed. “It’s sometimes curable.”

Danilaw caught his eyes, and the lifted eyebrows over them. The First Mate had the arch wit of a sharp old man, and despite the youth of his features, Danilaw had to remind himself that these people were all older than he. It’s like dealing with elves. But it’s not elves exactly.

Danilaw said, “Bear with me. Will you admit for the sake of argument that we—humans, in our current technological state—are not, except under extreme circumstances, experiencing any competition in the natural world except among ourselves?”

The alien Captain steepled her fingers. “If, by the natural world, you exclude the Enemy.”

“The Devil,” Captain Amanda said.

Perceval’s lips compressed into the thing they did to hide a smile, but it was Cynric who answered. “Space,” she said. “Entropy. The inevitable heat death of the universe. That is the Enemy. I suppose you could call it the Devil, if you liked. It is the opposite of life and breath and negentropy, in any case.”

Danilaw heard Amanda breathe deep of the thin alien air. “The Enemy,” she said. “It is the Enemy of life.”

Perceval smiled.

Danilaw could not restrain himself from glancing around the table. But having done so, and nodded in understanding, he forged on. “I believe finding yourself neck-deep in space, or deprived of all the fruits of our primate ingenuity in any hostile environment, counts as an extreme circumstance for purposes of this discussion. Can we agree on that?”

After a glance at her Captain, Cynric said, “We can.”

“At last,” Amanda said. “Common ground.”

That, at least, startled Mallory into a snort of laughter. Perceval was still smiling, if you could call that a smile. If smiling, for her, were not a prelude to aggression.

Danilaw raised and spread his hands, drawing attention, gathering focus. “In short, we have outcompeted the Hell out of everything. Thus, in that we are as Gods to the rest of”—he flagged, until Amanda mouthed a word at him—“of creation, it is incumbent upon us to treat with that creation as would honorable Gods—to protect and preserve, to limit our influence, to allow it scope.”

The aliens were frowning at him, or at least that was how he interpreted the variety of their expressions. Tristen scratched the side of his nose. Perceval, around her scowl, remained impassive.

Cynric breathed deep and sighed. “I do not mind sounding ignorant,” she said. “The part of me that was easily shamed is dead—and good riddance to it.”

Even, Danilaw thought, if it was a fragment of your humanity?

But apparently she wasn’t actually a mind reader after all, because rather than reacting with indignation, she continued the thread of her question. “If you coddle the world,” she said, “how does the world grow? As we are a part of creation, part of our purpose is to produce stress on other elements of creation. We force the evolution of other species as they force—or facilitate—ours.”

There was something behind that word, facilitate, Danilaw thought. He didn’t have the time to ferret it out now, but patience would be his reward.

“We have a thing,” he said, “that we call The Obligation. It is made up of many smaller Obligations, each carefully defined, but the essence of it is this: leave the world better—healthier, more complete, more diverse—than you found it.”

“Isn’t that,” Cynric said, “condescending? Doesn’t that set humankind in a kind of stewardship over every other species? Doesn’t that make us the colonialists, responsible for the well-being of primitives?”

Danilaw sat back. He would need time to consider this tack, he thought, before he could argue it successfully.

But Cynric wasn’t done. “Doesn’t that deny the agency of the nonsentient? Doesn’t it argue that we are somehow responsible for them?”

“When we became more able to compete,” Danilaw said, uncomfortable, “we became responsible. We become responsible to protect the natural world. When we become stronger, we become stewards.”

“The world does not reward timidity,” Cynric said.

Tristen placed a hand on her forearm, his long fingers so pale they barely showed against her garb of purest white. “Sister,” he said. “This might not be the time to plumb the depths of philosophy.”

But Cynric shook him off. “Does your philosophy not set humankind apart from nature?” she said. “You speak of protecting the natural world, but nature protects nothing. Nature does not believe in a fair fight. For every mouse, there is an owl. For every spider, there is a wasp. The world destroys to feed itself; it is a zero-sum game, and life consumes life. There is only so much carbon in any given carbon cycle.” She smiled now, as if confident she had one. “Who the hell set you up in loco parentis to the natural world?”

“With power,” Danilaw said, “with strength, there comes responsibility. With maturity come the burdens of maturity. Self-discipline. The acceptance that we do not always get to have what we want just because we are strong and we want it. You are stronger than me. Does that give you the right to take what is mine? Does that give you the dispensation to rob or rape me?”

“Not the privilege,” Tristen said, fingers lacing and unlacing, fisting and unfisting. “But the facility.”

“And in your world, are such things permitted without question?”

Perceval’s hidden smile was growing more patent by the moment. “To prevent such things,” she said, “such abuses of power, that is why we have knights-errant, and Captains, and all of Rule.”

“When they are not abusing that power their own selves,” Mallory qualified. “Not that that would ever happen.”

Perceval snorted. Danilaw decided he rather liked the androgynous necromancer after all.

“When you have an extreme advantage,” Danilaw said, “the gentlemanly thing to do is to reserve its use for those who share it. Or to choose to compete only with equal opponents, and leave the bullying to bullies.”

Cynric leaned forward on her elbows. “I’m not sure if that’s egalitarian or condescending.”

“Cynric,” Perceval said warningly, as Amanda stiffened beside Danilaw. Under the table, Danilaw placed the back of a hand against her thigh. She startled almost imperceptibly before releasing her held breath and turning to him. Primate pissing contests.

Having studied Danilaw’s face for a moment, Amanda turned back to the aliens across the table. “I understand your point,” she said. “In assuming the role of protector, we deny agency. But we deny agency to creatures that may or may not desire it—”

“When you assume stewardship for everything, you domesticate everything,” Tristen said.

Out of the corner of his eyes, Danilaw saw Amanda nodding, though he kept his attention firmly on Perceval and her crew. “And if we do not assume stewardship, we exploit everything.”

Tristen let his folded hands fall apart to lie on the tabletop, pressed flat. “Except for what exploits us,” he said. “Tell me, Administrator Bakare. Does your world have rats on it?”

“Rats?” He nodded. “Rats and roaches. They follow humanity everywhere.”

“Mmm,” Tristen said. “In that relationship, who has evolved to exploit whom?” He shook his head. “I do not think, Administrator Bakare, that we are all that different. I do not think that we interact with the world and each other with such deep moral differences. I think we have different terms for what we do—that what you term The Obligation, we term Chivalry. But I do think we have common ground, and I think we can find more.” He paused. “My people, you understand, are very adaptable.”

* * *

After the meeting, Samael in all his patchwork magnificence showed Danilaw and Amanda to the quarters they’d inhabit for the rest of their trip home. It was not a long walk—apparently Captain Perceval had seen merit in keeping them centrally located—but it was as full of revelations as every other walk around the corridors had been.

Walking on yielding moss down a spaceship gangway, Danilaw began to understand that the entire starship was an ecosphere—an ecology far more delicately balanced than that of Fortune. And far more aggressively managed. It revealed something to him about the Jacobeans’ culture and experience, if he thought on it carefully. Of course, evolution must be managed. Of course, a biosphere must be maintained.

They had never known another way.

Thinking distracted him, but neither Amanda nor Samael seemed inclined to make small talk, so he needed not divide his attention. It might have been better if he had, however, because he tripped and almost fell when he realized that the large, ornately floral shrub that they were about to pass along the corridor wall was in fact moving. Walking, or not precisely walking, toward them.

It was a bundle of spear-shaped leaves and boles, six tiger-striped, fuchsia-and-lemon flower heads bobbing above its back. Danilaw shied back against the corridor wall as it turned to him; on his left, he felt Amanda do the same.

The giant, self-mobile orchid turned to them and bent its thorn-fanged flower faces into something that looked like a smile. “Welcome, visitors,” it said, and kept walking.

Samael had drawn ahead, and with a glance to Amanda, Danilaw hurried to catch up. Beside him, Amanda stretched her legs. “Talking plant,” she whispered.

He nodded. “I noticed.”

On behalf of his Captain, the Angel of Biosystems apologized for the size and inelegance of the quarters before vanishing in a scatter of withered petals and beetle wings, leaving Danilaw feeling as if he had just choked on his tongue.

The “cramped” quarters they would share were half again as large as the crew habitat on the Quercus, and every square millimeter was soft with life. Mosses ran up the bulkheads so that Danilaw could not tell if the architecture of the space—an anchore, Samael called it—was truly all but cornerless or if it had merely been softened by centuries of growth. Vines—heavy, swaying, and hung with flowers Danilaw did not recognize—curtained two padded alcoves lined with fluffy blankets and pillows absorbent, springy, and soft.

After the Angel left, Amanda took a slow spin at the center of the room, diffuse light dappling her hair. “I don’t know how we’ll adapt,” she said, giving Danilaw a glance through her eyelashes he could only regard as flirtatious.

He smiled back and plunked himself on the mossy edge of the nearer bunk. The tough, yielding little plants were warm above and cool below, exactly as if they had been warmed by the sun. He held his hand out into those spots of light that had scattered across Amanda’s head and shoulders. They shifted, the vining leaves draping the ceiling turning in the breeze from the ventilation ducts. Full-spectrum, warm against his skin.

Behind the vines, rusty stains climbed the mesh the plants twined through, and Danilaw could see where centuries of growth and death had stretched the holes and torn the strands.

Danilaw felt his face prickle. He took a breath and let it out again—moist, verdant, and warm.

This world was old and worn. And if they could give this much space to two itinerant diplomats, it was not as full of strangers as Danilaw had feared. Actually, the near emptiness of all those corridors was beginning to sink in and make sense.

“They are underpopulated,” he said, with a gesture to this space, empty and just waiting.

Amanda, frowning, nodded and glanced aside. For a moment, they were in silent understanding. It had been a long, hard road in coming here. What compassionate human being could ask them to move on?

Yet what merely natural world could assimilate everything that surrounded him now without being consumed or destroyed?

Danilaw got up, crossed springy turf, and took Amanda’s hand. She turned to him, startled; he hoped it would look to the observers he presumed existed as if they were secret lovers. He couldn’t risk speaking; he could not even risk spelling against her palm.

Probably every word that Danilaw and Amanda said to one another was being recorded, every gesture analyzed. Probably, they had no privacy at all. These were not people, Bakare thought, who were likely to discard any available advantage. They were not stupid, they were not prone to losing for its own sake, and they were accustomed to constant struggle.

He compared that to his own people, who were no longer accustomed to playing to win, and felt a chill.

So he looked in her eyes and thought, as hard as he could, We cannot allow these people to make landfall, and hoped the message would be read in the cast of his features, the alteration in his pheromones.

And maybe it was, because she held the eye contact for almost ten seconds, and after she looked down, she nodded.