Grail

18 a sort of embrace

Benedick was often intentionally infuriating. Tristen thought he cultivated the air as a sort of privacy shield, a means of keeping the world at arm’s length and maintaining the distance, and thus the authority of command.

But it had never worked particularly well on Tristen, being older, and Tristen thought that quite possibly infuriated Benedick. Also, for now, Tristen made allowances, remembering his wife Aefre and how well he himself had dealt with that; Benedick was deep in the throes of grieving his lost love. Tristen harbored no illusions that the fact that Benedick and Caitlin were separated had meant that either of them cared less for the other.

In any case, his priority call was met with a skeptical eyebrow and a reserved expression until he began to talk. “The Captain has a task for us, O Brother. One perhaps best carried out by you, in Engine, although you will want support. And also to inform Jordan, before you act.”

It was typical of Benedick that he neither asked foolish questions nor assumed answers were implied in what went unsaid. “Support?”

“It’s likely that Caitlin’s killer was a martial revenant of Ariane Conn. We believe she planted the daemon-seed for her resurrection in Oliver’s body when she toured Rule. After her bioweapon had taken its toll of the servants and family.”

Benedick’s jaw firmed. It was the only outward symptom of distress—or determination—that Tristen was likely to get. “Evidence?”

“The Captain—” Important, that, for if Tristen had put them on equal terms when he called Benedick brother, now he reestablished the chain of authority. “She went through Ariane’s memories.”

Again, Benedick showed that firming of the jaw that could not exactly be termed a flinch. “I would have expected her to wipe something like that at the hippocampus. Or at the very least, have it on a dead-man’s switch so that, when Perceval ate her, she wouldn’t get access to Ariane’s failsafe plan. But then, Ariane always was an overwhelming egotist.”

“She did wipe it.” Tristen enjoyed watching the surprised mothflutter of a smile at the corners of Benedick’s mouth, gone as quickly as a flicker. No matter what else came between, paternal pride was beautiful. “Perceval found the repeated segment.”

“So it’s conjecture that the daemon-seed went into Oliver.”

“Conjecture supported by circumstantial evidence. A newly installed personality—Jsutien—would grow around the daemon-seed and disguise it.”

“And Jsutien was the person present when Arianrhod escaped,” Benedick finished.

“Also, Nova cannot confirm his whereabouts for the duration of the attack on Engine.”

Benedick was also too disciplined to curse. And although Tristen knew he had a startling, mercurial sense of humor, it was not on display now. “You’re assuming he’s not aware of the daemon he carries.”

“If you were Ariane, would you place that much trust in a mule?”

Benedick wrapped a long hand around the squareness of his jaw. “I’ll bring him into custody. Cynric can take his head apart and see what’s hiding in there. She’s more likely to put something functional back together when she’s done rooting around than anyone else would be.”

Tristen laced his fingers together, squeezing for comfort and control. “How far are you willing to trust Cynric?”

Benedick’s smile was wider, this time, and ever so much less genuine. “I could throw her pretty far, if I had to.”

Danilaw and Amanda didn’t exactly have the run of the ship, but they didn’t exactly not have it, either. Samael returned when they had had a few moments to assemble their facades and assess their situation. He showed them to rooms where they could cleanse, take exercise, and refresh themselves as it became necessary. If anything could have convinced Danilaw of the sincerity and the divinity of the patchwork Angel, clean clothes and a chance to bathe and sleep were high on the list.

Mallory, too, came by to check on them and deliver supplies. The pajamas were soft, clean, worn—Danilaw was comforted by the Jacobeans’ ethos of reuse, repurposing, and recycling, when everything else about them seemed alien—and woven of some fabric that Danilaw did not recognize. He was fairly sure it was a natural fiber, something that grew on an animal or a plant rather than in a manufacturing vat, but other than that he found himself disinclined to inquire too closely.

Having shown him how the controls on the cleanser worked and made sure he knew how to operate the connecting door, the Angel and the hermaphrodite left Danilaw and Amanda alone again to bathe and dress. And sleep, he thought, luxuriously. It occurred to him that perhaps he and Amanda should arrange watches, or make sure they slept in some orderly fashion or protected location, but after a moment he dismissed that as foolish hyper-vigilance.

Whether he liked it or not, they were totally at the mercy of the Jacobeans. There was no escape, no place of refuge if their hosts chose to turn on them. He could trust, or he could worry, but the end result would be the same.

And so Danilaw shrugged, sorted out his confused thoughts, and went to restore himself. Standing in the hall by the cleanser, he stripped off the sweat-soaked garments he’d been wearing under his pressure suit and all through dinner. There was a niche in which to stow such things, and he availed himself of it.

That done, he climbed into the steamy environs of the cleanser. The tiny room was warm—almost too warm—and fitted with benches for relaxing while the vapor and sonics worked. Danilaw lay back, his head on his arms, and willed the heat and relaxation into his bones.

Perhaps it was antisocial—and definitely a little bit greedy—but he was still there fifteen minutes later, though he had switched to a lower, cooler bench. His eyes were closed, his muscles blessedly painless. He was reminding himself not to doze off when the old-fashioned manual slider eased open just a little and a familiar brown face poked through the coils of steam that billowed on a cooler draught. The sonics made her voice seem to reverberate. “Danilaw?”

“Amanda.” It seemed like a pretension of modesty to cover himself when she’d just wandered into his shower. It wasn’t as if this were an inappropriate setting for nudity, and they had been living in each other’s pockets aboard the Quercus, so he just sat up—a little too quickly for the heat, it turned out. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and let his head hang until the dizziness subsided.

She had an old-fashioned cloth towel in one hand, and was otherwise nude. As best he could see through the steam, she stood with her arms pressed to her sides and shoulders up, as if she were chilly. “Come in,” he said, as she said, “Do you mind if I join you?”

They laughed and she stepped inside, shutting the slider behind. She laid the folded towel on a higher bench as a pillow. “I wanted the company,” she said, reclining.

It was a relief to speak his native tongue, familiar words and known patterns that had settled into his bones with father’s milk and rooted deep. “Not sick of me after all that time on the scull?”

“Shocking, I know.” She slid a generously curved leg across the bench and pressed the side of her foot to his thigh. Warm flesh, calloused, the contact lubricated by condensation and his own slick sweat. “It’s going to be a long, boring trip home.”

He could have moved away. It was an unnecessary complication, and his rightminding was robust enough that the prospect of combining romantic and professional entanglements set off all kinds of alarm bells in his head. But then again, he and Amanda were both responsible, rightminded adults, and zero-tolerance policies about office romances were a thing of the benighted past. A modern, suitably adjusted, evolved human being was presumed capable of balancing complicated decisions without resorting to anything so crude as a rule of thumb.

He put his hand over her foot, a sort of embrace, and said, “Boring? When we have a whole new culture to interact with?”

“So you’re thinking of yourself as a tourist now?” It could have seemed harsh, but her tone of voice made it dreamy.

“I’m thinking of myself as a student.”

“An anthropologist,” she said. “Going to get yourself another tertiary in science?”

“That’s what you’re for.”

He squeezed her foot. She prodded him lightly with her toe and laughed. The steam and sonics were making his head spin; he let go of her foot and moved up a shelf to lie down beside her. “It’s an endocrine reaction,” she said. “Just enough stress, and not too much. The proximity of an attractive member of my preferred gender. The evolutionary response says ‘Get a piece of that while you have the chance and make a strong baby now.’ ”

“The world is uncertain,” Danilaw answered. He put a hand out; she took it. Her fingers, too, were wet. “I don’t have time to make any babies until my Administrative Obligation is done. After that, I’ve earned out two years of personal project time, and I was thinking children might be a pretty good personal project. But that’s a bit in the future.”

“The future’s even more uncertain than the world,” Amanda said. She drew up one knee. “But I don’t have any objection to practicing. Maybe when the time is ripe we’ll have gotten really good at it.”

“Maybe we will,” Danilaw said. He sat up more slowly this time. “Let’s rinse off and find out where we’re starting from, shall we?”

A perfectly satisfactory first attempt, he thought later, licking her salt from his lips and trying to summon the energy to lift a hand and stroke her hair. She seemed to have dozed off, head on his shoulder, her leg thrown across his and her compact heel dug into the mossy cover on the bunk they occupied. The room felt cool now that they were quiet. Danilaw saw gooseflesh prickling across her shoulder. Mallory had shown him where the blankets were, in a cubby under the bed. With a groping hand he found one and managed to shake it open and drape it—somewhat haphazardly—over the two of them.

If Amanda had been sleeping, it was not heavily. She lifted her head from his shoulder and blinked. “Well,” she said. “In one regard, at least, I think I will declare this mission a success.”

Danilaw kissed the top of her head, straight hair slick against his lips. She smelled of crushed grass and clean woman and sweat and sex—an appealing combination. “But that was only the proof of concept,” he said. “We’ll have to run more extensive testing for a definitive result.”

She turned her face into his shoulder and snorted against his skin. A pause before she lifted herself up on an elbow and said, “You know all those tunes you sing? The ones from before the Eschaton and rightminding and The Obligation?”

“They’re songs,” he said, eager to assuage what he perceived as her concern. “I have not ever, nor do I ever intend, to shoot anyone over a quaint concept of infidelity. You have my word.”

“Your word? I shall have it bronzed.”

Because she made him laugh, he swatted her shoulder lightly. She laughed, too, before her expression settled into seriousness. “Why do you suppose we still find all that art from the bad old days so compelling?”

“Easy,” he said. “There have been studies. Which I have, as you might imagine, taken a professional interest in.”

“I might,” she admitted.

“Rightminding mitigates the conditioned emotional triggers for adrenaline response, among other things. We’re still capable of it, of course—adrenaline is useful stuff when a slarg is chasing you down the beach—but it used to manifest as a conditioned response to childhood trauma and hardwired primate social-dominance schema.”

“The source of a lot of irrational conflict,” she said.

“And a lot of folk music.” When she glanced up at him, he grinned.

She answered with one of her own, nodding that he should continue.

“But the amygdalae are still in there, and we still have a response to cathartic emotional stimulation. We’ve removed the crazy from our daily lives, but it’s still satisfying in art, safely removed and bounded. A nice thing, too. I’d hate to think what we’d be missing if we’d removed our ability to enjoy Ovid or Robert Johnson or Akira Kurosawa.” Wincing, Danilaw stopped himself before he could bury himself deeper in pedantry. Pity rightminding didn’t dispense with embarrassment.

But Amanda either hadn’t noticed him rattling on, or didn’t seem to mind. She touched his face lightly with the back of her hand and waited until he turned to her. In the diffuse illumination of their temporary quarters, her eyes were particularly luminescent, the delicate veins and green-gold flecks buried in their brown revealed in the way the light lay against the surface of her irises, as if against the nap of smoothed velvet. A surge of affection tightened his throat.

“Do you ever think we’ve lost something?”

“A lot of misery,” he answered, hearing his own voice trail off in a way he hadn’t intended.

She leaned closer, the resilient slope of her breast brushing his chest. She glossed over him, smooth and soft, the resilience of her skin telling his endocrine system that this was a young, healthy female, strong and capable.

Also, she felt nice.

“I suppose,” he said, making sure his tone stayed wistful rather than condescending or dismissive, “it’s easy to imagine the pre-Eschaton world as more passionate, more interesting. Grander.”

“That’s a romanticized view,” she said. “I mean, yes, of course, it was more passionate. Possibly they felt more deeply than we do. They were certainly less mannered about it. But it’s not as if C21 societies were without their strictures and social controls. And values. And in some of them, community service and responsibility to one’s family and clan were the highest ideals. That’s very adaptive.”

“Pathological competition does not exist only on the interpersonal level.” Danilaw propped himself on his elbows. He caught himself smiling—this was interesting—and hoped Amanda would not think he found her silly.

Well, if she did, she would ask. She didn’t seem troubled at all right now. If anything, she was warming to her argument. “No, of course not. There’s interspecies competition, too, and that between cultures and affinity groups. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about why we’re still embracing mainstream art from a thousand years ago instead of creating more of our own.”

“Entertainments—”

“Sure,” she said. “Entertainments. But who’s the most recent artist, Danilaw Bakare, whose music you really enjoy performing?”

Danilaw leaned back on his elbows. He frowned and felt it furrow his brow.

She had him there.

She stretched against him, warm skin caressing his side. Simple animal comfort, so necessary and so atavistic. “There’re a lot of ethical implications in rightminding that get glossed over when it becomes the standard of existence. Who decides what the boundaries of neurotypicality are? Who decides what a normal range of variation is? Sociopathy can be adaptive for the individual, if not the society—”

“You sound like a New Evolutionist.”

“Just playing advocate.” But the way she lifted her head to examine his face, some evidence of caginess around her eyes, left him wondering.

“When you were younger, did you know anybody out on the edges of the spectrum? Somebody who really needed rightminding to assume a full role in society?”

“My best friend,” she said. “He was an autist. Not as high-functioning as Administrator Jesse. His parents wanted him rightminded, for ease of care. And me.” Her foot jerked restlessly. “I had a few issues of my own with empathy. I’m much more aware of the feelings of others these days.”

“Aware enough—and stable enough—to be a Legate. Congratulations,” Danilaw said, hoping his tone conveyed the affectionate irony he intended. Amanda didn’t jerk away from him, so he’d probably managed an approximation, at least. “Before rightminding, my epilepsy was a death sentence.”

“You exaggerate.”

“A little.” He let his hand drift up, smoothing the slick strands of her hair against her nape and skull. “It’s still one of the less tractable conditions. I have to self-monitor, and I’ve had three adjustments since I was twenty-five. Trust me when I tell you, you wouldn’t want to know the me I was born to be. He’s a crazy person. Angels come and talk to him.”

She grimaced. It wasn’t unheard of, but three was a lot. Most people were stable past twenty-five, at least until they got up past the centennial mark and degradation set in. “Angels come and talk to both of us,” she said.

He smiled. So they did.

She huffed lightly in frustration or concentration. “I’m not saying rightminding is a bankrupt technology. What I’m saying is that we lose something irreplaceable when we apply it broad-spectrum. We lessen our diversity. My friend Claude—”

“The autist.”

“The same.” She sighed. “He wasn’t—he didn’t read people, not the way most of us do. He was very … literal. But I still don’t see what’s wrong with that. Rightminding him made him more like other people, easier for them to deal with. It may have made it easier for him to navigate among them. It certainly lessened conflict. But did it make him happier or more useful to society? I mean, dealing with sophipathology is one thing, forcing people to think instead of believing, but when do we take it too far?”

“But rightminding you,” Danilaw said, “you and those like you. That benefits society.”

She smiled. “It doesn’t necessarily benefit me.”

“Not as an individual genetic competitor, no. But evolutionarily speaking, we’ve won. We can afford to be magnanimous.” Danilaw felt as much as heard the strands of her hair rasp between his fingers when he rolled them there. “This is a reversal for you. In the Council meeting, your concerns were focused on what effect a large group of unrightminded individuals would have on our society. Now you’re arguing against rightminding on principle? That’s inconsistent logic, unless I’m missing something.”

She shook her head and waved around the green walls of the ship that embraced them. “You keep talking about how we can afford to be magnanimous. But I don’t think we can, not anymore. How does noblesse oblige stand up in the face of this? If this isn’t competition, Danilaw, I don’t know what is. And if we don’t welcome them to Fortune, what’s to stop them from taking whatever they want? Fighting is so antisocial. A compromise position would serve everyone better, right?”

Her anger startled but did not shock him. It was a natural response to frustration. Still, he pulled away slightly, leaning his back against the mossy bulkhead as she sat up.

She shook her hair back. “Rightminded people find solutions. They find common ground. They make sacrifices and consider the impact of their actions on future generations. These people do what they do and take what they want, and spend a lot of time sorting or putting off their legacy of inherited crises.”

“You do realize that they serve as an inherited crisis of our very own?”

She snorted, waving a hand that encompassed his objection as much as dismissed it. “Are we too fucking post-evolution to fight them? Are we going to lie down and surrender because it’s the civilized thing to do?”

“Of course not,” he said. “We were here first. Did you blow up the scull?”

He’d hoped to blindside her, to surprise her into a revelation. He got one—a look of utter horror and denial. “I—Danilaw!”

“I had to ask,” he said gently. Torn between relief and concern. If it had been her, that would at least have been a mystery solved. “Amanda—”

“Mm?”

“If you want to learn to manage an unrightminded society,” he said, “it occurs to me that the Jacobeans are our only modern-day example.”

“You make a compelling case for the surgery.”

“We’re better people when we’re sane.” He shrugged and spread his hands. “There’s a tension in your ideas. That’s all I’m saying.”

“I know. That’s the problem with rightminding.” She rose from the bunk, shedding the blanket, and crossed the mossy floor to where her borrowed pajamas waited folded on a shelf. “You get to see all the sides of the issue. Mature consideration of the options can be paralyzing.”

He nodded. “What if we offer the Jacobeans resources to repair their ship, and send them on?”

“What if they agree to rightminding?”

“What if they have a civil war over what they’re going to do?” She pulled a camisole over her head, covering the rise of her breasts and the curve of her waist.

Danilaw was sad to see them go, but as much as he would have liked to prolong the interlude, she was right.

“We need to call the Council.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I think we do.