11
adapt
For the deed’s sake have I done the deed,
In uttermost obedience to the King.
—ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, “Gareth and Lynette”
Before any final decision could be made, Danilaw and his cabinet had to take their deliberations to the people. Bad Landing was still a community small and tightly knit enough to manage nicely under government by direct democracy, and Danilaw secretly dreaded the day when that changed. The good news, he comforted himself, was that he was likely to be long in his grave—and certain to be long done with his stint as City Administrator—before the population reached a crisis point.
Unless they wound up having to assimilate a few hundred thousand genetically engineered space refugees. In that case, all bets were off.
Bad Landing’s infosphere was more than adequate to the task. Because of the strength of some of the opinions expressed, Danilaw made the executive decision not to release the entire tapes of the Cabinet session, but he did cause Captain Amanda’s objections to be summarized and appended, and he made the original broadcast from the Jacob’s Ladder available, as well as a translation prepared by Captain Amanda and vetted by himself—though neither would be available to anyone who did not first sit through Danilaw’s brief, trenchant, and carefully worded introductory speech. But sometimes listening to politicians blather was the price you paid for participating in the process of government.
He also got the remainder of his staff rousted out of bed and released from conflicting primary, secondary, and/or tertiary engagements so they could get started building an information bolus for packet-burst home to Earth. He’d probably have a course of action under way by the time the home government sent him an advisory note, but the newsfeeds would thank him for the consideration.
Danilaw didn’t delude himself. It wouldn’t be long before cracked and edited versions of the alien broadcast were all over the feeds; he’d be surprised if there weren’t a few already, given that the transmission had come unencrypted via primitive tech, and most of the people capable of receiving it had been Gain’s hobbyists. But he also knew that it didn’t hurt to get his own version out as fast as possible, and one of the things he could offer that the hobbyists couldn’t was production quality. His version would be the most complete and, frankly, the one that looked the best. And though he could try not to say the sorts of things that were making ledes all over the network—a ship out of legend has returned—Danilaw was confident that human nature would provide the rest.
That finished, he changed into the exercise clothes he kept in a locker in the residential and security barracks, took a seven-kilometer run with his morning-shift bodyguards, and went out to the tables by the water to share a cup of tea and some protein biscuits with the sunrise. He then showered in reclaimed water before falling into the bed set aside for his use.
He dreamed of muscular twelve-armed knots of dodecapodes spelling arcane runes across the ocean floor, and woke in a cold sweat of fear because he couldn’t understand what they were trying to tell him.
He rose from his bed and paced the cold floor in slippered feet, the fear-induced nausea retreating slowly as he walked back and forth before the portal, watching sunlight shift through the dappled water of Crater Lake. Bits of things—organic matter, sand—danced like dust motes in the rays, and as he watched, a sense of lightness filled him. The scarred dodecapus was the only one in evidence, smooshing its sucker-mouth across the outside surface of the port, scraping up algae and tiny crustaceans.
Fear was not a familiar sensation, and this fear—stranger-fear, fear of the unknown—even less so. Among the legacies of atavism corrected by rightminding was the overactive fear response of the human amygdala to anything foreign or strange. Of course, a certain sense of self-preservation had to be left intact, and for some individuals whose baseline stability was particularly high, the whole threat-response endocrine package could be left intact without making them unsocializable.
Captain Amanda, the Free Legate, would be one such. It was a necessary precursor to the red jewel over her eye; no peace officer could afford to be too trusting. That was why she was so adamant about the potential dangers of the Jacobeans. And, still floating on that sense of goodwill, Danilaw reminded himself that it was her job to be so. He should respect her judgment. She had been left with those emotional cautions for a reason—to make her more able to protect the rest of her species from threats they might not otherwise recognize.
There had been species on Earth—island species, isolated populations—without fear of humans or any other predator. They were gone now, every dodo and Galápagos tortoise among them.
Danilaw smiled at the dodecapus, placing the palm of his hand against the portal near its limb. It curled a tentacle toward him, pressing sucker-feet against the transparency that divided them. A surge of fellow feeling and a fierce protectiveness filled him, warm and unmistakable as the sunlight. It had never learned to fear humans either, and if Danilaw had his way, it never would.
He’d find a way. He’d find a solution. For Fortune, for the Jacobeans, and for the future. He was suffused with vigor, with joy and hope. He turned from the portal, feeling as if his footsteps should have been effortless. Instead he dragged, heavy-limbed, as if still in a dream. The tiny bedroom, too, was full of light—streamers of it.
Everything surrounding Danilaw took on a crystalline super-reality, bright and warm and perfect—a holy and delighted space. He floated in the center as if the sun and water bore him up, filled with an ecstatic rapture. He let his head drop back on a soft neck. He spread his arms wide and breathed deep to fill his lungs with that divine, that healing, that heavenly light. Something touched him—something that loved him, that would protect him. Something vast and essential, that cared.
He knew the symptoms, though it had been years since he’d experienced them.
Seizure, he thought. A bad one.
The light gave way to darkness. He tried to cry out. But he could not tell if he made a sound as the perfect love washed over him and he fell.
When Danilaw opened his eyes again, it was in the same darkened room, and Captain Amanda sat on the edge of the bed—beside him—with a bud in her ear and her eyes tuned to her infothing. He lifted his head and she turned instantly, dropping the interface into her shirt pocket.
“Hey,” she said. “Feeling better?”
“How much time did I lose?”
She tipped her pocket open with a fingertip and glanced at the infothing. “Ten minutes,” she said. “I was napping in the next room and heard you fall. So. Temporal lobe epilepsy?”
Gingerly, he moved his skull and then his limbs, testing them. “Rightminded out years ago. Or so I thought. I still see visions sometimes, but I haven’t had the full tonicclonic experience since I was a student.”
No facial bruising and no pain in his limbs, for a wonder. His ribs ached when he breathed deeply, from which he deduced that he’d fallen across the foot of the bed, and the mattress had protected his head.
“Anything hurt?” Amanda asked.
“Just my pride.” Honesty compelled him. “And a few bruises.”
She was studying his face, frowning. The line it drew between her eyes puckered the skin around the Legate’s jewel. Danilaw imagined the shine of it recording, and looked down. Then she extended a hand, as if to assist him to his feet.
“All right,” she said. “Come on. We just have time to grab some food before duty calls.”
The Council reconvened after lunch, when everybody else had also gotten some sleep and the infosphere had had a good six hours to start consensus-building and weeding out the opinions of the hysterics and the intractables. By then, they were in possession of another transmission from the Jacob’s Ladder, this one granting permission for an envoy to be sent.
“The real irony here,” Gain said at this second Alien Invasion Policy Meeting (though nobody outside of Danilaw’s head was actually calling it that), “is that we finally make first contact with an alien race after centuries of looking, and they’re us.”
“Not us,” Jesse said. “Something consanguineous. But that’s a different species. Subspecies. Whatever.”
“We can’t state that categorically until we get a look at the DNA,” Danilaw reminded them. “It’s only been a thousand years of divergence. Speciation can happen fast, but it’s a long shot.”
Gain looked more tired than the rest of them. She leaned forward on her elbows, blinking owlishly. Her hands were folded around a mug of stimulant. But tired or not, the mind behind those bleary eyes remained sharp. “And if they’re as different from us as neandertalensis from sapiens?”
Danilaw nibbled his cuticle. “We try not to compete for the same habitat.”
He didn’t state the obvious—that sharing an environment with a competitive, hierarchal, primitive version of humanity would require his people to either enforce their own social adaptations on the newcomers, or adopt a more aggressive stance of their own and deal with the long-term repercussions as they occurred.
Many of the most aggressively hierarchical humans had left while the world was collapsing, fleeing in the Jacob’s Ladder—an artificial world salvaged from the extravagant wreckage of humanity’s near self-immolation, fueled and funded by a Kleptocracy that did not outlast the launch of more than the first of the elaborate, flimsy, sabotaged vessels. To those who remained behind on an Earth like a gnawed husk, subsistence seemed luxury enough.
Those forebears had already begun rightminding themselves—the decision that provoked the flight of the Jacobeans in the first place. It had been the intentional self-handicapping of a competitor with no equals on the playing field.
To save themselves as a species, Danilaw’s ancestors had bargained away a good deal of the fear, the primate antagonism, the power structures that had driven them to mastery—even overlordship—of their environment. It had required a radical realignment of society and the human brain—forces that had driven those primitive humans to such intense competition that their entire worldwide society had been designed to contain and facilitate nothing else.
Instead, they had decided to shift the social focus to another, less expressed potential of the human animal—that of peaceable, advantageous cooperation and compromise. In selecting—in engineering—for self-sacrifice, commensalism, and negotiation over individualism, hierarchy, and authoritarianism, they had saved the world. They had ushered in an enduring age of peace and—if not prosperity—adequacy of resources for the new, reduced demand.
But it had required a reworking of the entire architecture of human neurology. Centuries later, the extinction event, ecological crisis, and massive population crash that had provoked it—dubbed the Eschaton by various factions at the time—was still remembered with a sort of hushed awe.
A remnant of the human race had emerged from the Eschaton with a renewed sense of desperation, if not purpose. They had refined the crude early techniques of rightminding into a comprehensive program of surgery, chemical therapy, and scientific child-rearing that had allowed humanity to finally do something about the clutter of its awkward, self-defeating, self-deluding evolutionary baggage.
Danilaw was grateful for the world they had left him—one in which sufficient resources were assured for each person’s comfort and livelihood, barring catastrophe, and in which pleasures were balanced off against obligations in an endurable and even enjoyable fashion. Like many, he maintained a certain bittersweet nostalgia for the glittering excesses of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—he played in a rock band, and he was not the only one to engage in recreational re-creation.
But it was playacting, an exercise in creativity, and any rational, rightminded individual had to accept that a world without avoidable hunger and war—a world in which diverse human beings could work together to find compromise positions without the crippling barriers of fanaticism and ideology—was superior to one where they were at one another’s throats constantly.
Sophipathology had not been eradicated. But it was a treatable illness now. Danilaw wished he could be more certain that the incoming Jacobeans would see it the same way.
Captain Amanda spoke first, with the most aggressive analysis. “We have to be prepared to defend ourselves, Administrator Danilaw.”
“You’re in charge of that,” he said. “Have a defense plan for me in two days, please. You can work on it while we pack.”
“We?” Jesse looked like he wasn’t exactly overjoyed by the idea of a field trip. Danilaw knew his primary was heavily pregnant, and the culmination of a reproduction license wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted to miss just because you’d drawn City Admin duty. Especially when you were working on making the psychological shift to primary nurturing duty any day now.
“Captain Amanda and I,” he said. “We’ll go out to greet them, barring any major pushback from the Ciz. We both speak their language, passably if not fluently. And it will appear to be a gesture of trust and goodwill if I go.”
“They’re hierarchical,” Captain Amanda said. “If you go yourself, you will weaken your apparent position with them. They will be used to dealing with administrators as persons of rank, veiled by layers of flunkies and functionaries whose only purpose is to create a haze of isolation around the decision maker. We’re talking about an extremely alien manner of thinking.”
“Well, then,” Danilaw said. “They’re supposed to be New Evolutionists, aren’t they? They’ll adapt.”
Dust’s second visit to Dorcas came in the dead of her local night. He found her in a low tent, pitched against the sheltering trunk of a bent palm. Fur-tips wet with the irrigation falling in the Heaven, he crept to the edge of the pallet where she slept, arms folded mantislike to her chest and mouth open, breath rasping in and out with rough regularity. A black-backed synbiotic snake curled against the backs of her knees, basking in whatever heat radiated through her blankets. A sheen like oily rainbows covered its back. Its tongue flicked out when Dust approached; he made well sure to keep the sleeping woman between the rodentlike form he inhabited and the curious snake.
He touched the damp tip of his nose to the woman’s eyelid, prepared to jump back if, on awakening, she swiped at him. But not prepared enough, apparently. She might be Sparrow Conn no longer, but the body she inhabited had all of Sparrow’s hard-won reflexes.
Dust found himself on his back, spine twisted and pinned to the ground, the Go-Back’s hand pressing into his belly. He squeaked surrender, going limp, and bared his minuscule throat to her.
A too-long silence followed. When he opened his eyes again, he found her still shoving him against the ground, the heavy head of the cybernetic cobra swaying at her left shoulder as it regarded him with baleful, candy-colored eyes.
“So,” Dorcas said. “Are you volunteering to feed my snake?”
“However this small one may serve,” Dust said. “But if this small one may suggest, it may be more advantageous to you to listen to the message I bring.”
“Still looking for alliances?” Her voice was not friendly, but she lifted her hand and let him right himself. If he’d chosen to fight, he could have made her regret laying hands on him—but that was hardly in keeping with his current mission of diplomacy.
“I bring more this time.” Because he could not bite, he groomed, busily washing his face and paws. His fur was gritty with soil. Also, the washing made him look inoffensive. “My patron would like to speak with you in person.”
The Go-Back reached out and let the back of her hand brush the cheek of the cobra. It did not withdraw, but its flared hood smoothed back into the taut black-and-buttercream column of its neck. Dust was a construct, and could not feel fear exactly. But he could feel the toolkit’s arousal levels lowering, its tiny, trembling heartbeat slowing to a mere whirr.
Well, if Dust was going to be eaten by a synbiotic snake, it was probably within his powers to possess that snake’s colony from the inside. He’d fight that war when he came to it.
“Patron,” she said. She pushed herself more fully into a sitting position, adjusting her weight on her seat bones by pushing down on the ground. The snake flicked its tongue once more and seemed to resign in favor of the woman, whipping its long body into a fold of the blankets. It was too bulky to vanish completely, but the bulge could have been a pillow if Dust had not known otherwise. “All right, Dust,” she said. “What is it that you want from me? Other than allegiance, because you must know now that my goals are not yours—”
“Parley with my sponsor,” he said. “I am under the command of another, Go-Back. That is all. She seeks an alliance, and your goodwill. Or at least your sworn word not to oppose her.”
She tapped her fingers on her thigh, twice. She looked down at him, where he huddled by her knee. “What are the politics of Conns to an Edenite? I’ll parley. But she must come to me.”