13
this lord of grail
All red with blood the whirling river flows,
The wide plain rings, the dazed air throbs with blows.
Upon us are the chivalry of Rome—
Their spears are down, their steeds are bathed in foam.
—MATTHEW ARNOLD, “Tristram and Iseult”
The research scull Quercus was tiny and cramped. Her forty square meters of living space were adequate for one individual, as long as that individual wasn’t claustrophobic and didn’t mind exercising in the sort of wheel one used for caged pets, but it necessitated close cooperation if two unrelated adults were going to inhabit her for any length of time. Every so often, Danilaw found himself pausing to stare out viewports into the velvety space beyond, wondering how human beings had managed under these circumstances before the application of rightminding technology had become so trivial and precise.
Fortunately, Captain Amanda’s basic personality was healthy and resilient, her rightminding was solid, and the earlier evidence of her robust sense of humor proved no fluke. Danilaw had no idea how she put up with him, but as a Free Legate she had effective training in dealing with disparate personalities, and as a social scientist and an expert in C22 society, she was without a doubt more comfortable with the range of human variation than were most people.
Which worked out well for Danilaw, who knew he was quirky. Not everybody’s brain chemistry was as solid as Amanda’s. Danilaw’s underlying genetic issues meant his own emotional balance could stray from perfection, and his inherited neurochemistry meant that his rightminding fell in need of more-frequent-than-usual maintenance. Not enough to cause a social disadvantage, or free him from his Obligations—but enough to make him wish sometimes that it might.
But Captain Amanda knew about that now, and had seemed neither startled nor horrified by the revelation.
On the other hand, staring out the ports of the Quercus made him aware that sometimes the annoyance of civil service was worth it. This was not a view everyone got—or even most people. Space travel was expensive and resource-consuming—an extreme privilege accorded him in extreme times.
There were a few other things to be grateful for. Though the research vessel was cramped, her engines were state of the art. She used a quantum drive that took advantage of the same ancient technology that allowed gravity control—and FTL, though the Quercus was strictly an in-system, sublight vessel.
In any case, Danilaw hoped he didn’t prove too much of a disruption in Amanda’s routine. She spent the voyage much as he imagined she usually did—buried in research, checking telemetry, and in general doing all three of her jobs simultaneously and well. Meanwhile, Danilaw discovered he could run a city just as well by remote control as while living in it, or so he flattered himself. Admittedly, running Bad Landing was mostly a matter of checking to make sure it was properly running itself and giving it the odd tweak when it didn’t, but there was a level of expertise in knowing what those tweaks were.
In his off hours, Danilaw read up on C21 and C22 customs and cultures, and practiced his guitar, using a pair of induction clips rather than a speaker out of consideration for his passagemate.
At least, he did so until Captain Amanda looked up from her desk, which she had dragged into her sleeping cubby, and said, “You know, music won’t bother me unless it’s bad, and since you earned it out as a secondary, I can’t imagine it would be.”
He heard her clearly—a benefit of the clips was that they left his ear canals clear—and probably (he thought) failed to hide his surprise. “You can concentrate with all that going on?”
“Crèche raised,” she said. “I can concentrate through anything. Besides, you’re the best entertainment on this tub.” She stretched sturdy legs out of her bunk and stood, bending her spine and leaning back to balance under the lip of the cubby like a cave-climber. The desk she left parked in the bedclothes.
“Tub? Is that any way to talk about your vessel, Captain?”
She grinned and plunked down on the matting. It was soft, conducive as a surface for resting, stretching, or acrobatics—and unlikely to damage anything you dropped on it. Danilaw was growing quite attached to it as a floor covering. It was even easy to vacuum, and if they lost gravity abruptly, it wouldn’t hurt to smack yourself into.
“Well, this is a glorified tugboat run,” she said. “Come on. Play me something our visitors’ umpteen-great-grandparents might have listened to. Didn’t they have genres of religious music?”
He hefted his guitar. He knew a couple that were actually pretty good. If they were anything a Kleptocrat-duped religious fanatic might have grooved out to, that was anybody’s guess. But that wasn’t the point, exactly, was it?
“Sure,” he said. “We can call it research.”
* * *
The trick, Dust thought, always lay in speaking to his patron without alerting her host. It would be a hazardous game. But he knew where to find her—she’d made sure he could follow her movements—and a toolkit could go many places unnoticed, especially in Engine. Dust now took advantage of that freedom.
Travel in this new world was easy. Dangers were clear to see—structural weaknesses and the lairs of ambush predators delineated by caution zones and warning buzzers. There were highways, access shafts, lifts, and functioning air locks everywhere.
Travel in Engine was even easier. The Dust toolkit joined his scurrying brethren, sweeping-whiskers-to-fluffy-tail along the margins of wide corridors, scuttling over cable bridges and through valve doors sized just right for a creature no longer than a man’s forearm.
When he came at last by secret ways to the place his program had summoned him to attend, it was deserted. A cube with twining vines up every wall, nodding flowers of jimsonweed and morning glory basking in the mist that condensed on each petal. The cube’s resident had folded the bedding away before the irrigation cycle, and Dust climbed up on the transparent, bevel-cornered box that housed it and several changes of clothes.
There he sat, grooming the moisture from his tail and hunting up scraps of edibles in the cracks of the mossy sleeping platform, until the cube divider slid aside and a pale hand parted the hanging vines. A face and a shoulder followed; hazel eyes widened in greeting. “Hello, toolkit. Do you have a message for me?”
The host was dressed as an Engineer, but looked like a Conn. Dust knew he should recognize which Conn, but those were among the details that had been scraped away by his reduced circumstances and lost.
Dust did have a message, however. Embedded in his program, a string of phonemes that made words in no language the world had ever heard. A key. A trigger.
That head-tilt melted into something else. The same gesture, the same face—but a different intention behind it.
“Wonderful,” Ariane Conn said. “That worked beautifully. We may speak freely here. Welcome, ghost of Dust. Did you arrange a conversation for me?”
“I did,” the toolkit said, whiskers twitching. Subtlety was another element of his former skill that had been lost in the interests of data compression. He needed information, and so he spoke his question to her. “I do not understand why you would reconstitute me, when we were enemies. Your ally, as I recall, was Asrafil.”
She slid the door closed and set the privacy filter. “I went to great lengths—risking this body and the revelation of my own existence—to free my daughter Arianrhod from Caitlin’s machinations.” Her face compressed with grief. “Arianrhod loved Asrafil. She served him. And Asrafil betrayed her to her death. Cynric consumed her.”
Dust nodded his pointed face. Death was always a relative function, a complicated thing when you were dealing with angels or Exalt. People died in pieces, by increments, or were transformed into something else. For Means, death had meant something concrete, a hard limit.
“For certain is death for the born / And certain is birth for the dead,” he quoted, stumbling over a scrap of contextual memory. But that wasn’t quite right, so he choked to a halt and began again. “I am sorry for your loss.”
“One cannot serve angels, Angel. One must own them.”
Dust nodded again. Agreeing with Conns was what you did with them. Whether this one knew he was patronizing her or not, she reached out and stroked the fluff behind his spotted ears. Her touch—or his fur—was so soft that he felt it only as he might have felt a wind.
“You should have been mine.” She smiled. “And now you are.”
By stellar-system standards, it wasn’t a long trip—measured in weeks rather than months, which had something to do with the velocities involved, both of the inbound, decelerating vessel and the massively overpowered-for-her-mass Quercus.
They had the Jacob’s Ladder on telescopic and various other sensory systems (mass detector, q-scanner, electromagnetic, radio telemetry) long before they made direct visual contact.
But there was something about that first real sight of her, with Danilaw’s own eyes, nonetheless.
She began as a bright dot, a reflective sparkle of obviously variable albedo and mass. As they came up upon her, she gradually resolved into a spiderweb, and then a sort of scaffolding.
Danilaw kept thinking they were closer than telemetry indicated, which alerted him intellectually to her scale. But he couldn’t integrate her true scope until they came within about a kilometer. Then Danilaw’s world-bred senses could no longer mislead him that this looming skeleton was anything other than gargantuan.
Superlatives and adjectives failed him simultaneously. The Jacob’s Ladder hung against its backdrop of stars, covering the entire horizon as revealed to Danilaw and Amanda where they stood before cramped screens in the scull, which did not have a discrete bridge. Danilaw had studied the generation ship’s schematics and designs, such as were still available after an elapsed millennium. He had thought himself prepared, and yet now that it was real, the discomfort of awe humbled him.
She was the largest man-made thing he had ever seen. And that comparison failed to do her justice, because she was orders of magnitude more enormous than the next biggest. Whole ranks and families of planetesimals had died to build her; the raw materials of a man-made world.
She might once have been a wheel, of sorts, although one oppressively vast—or, more precisely, a nested series of skeletal wheels set at angles to one another, like a wirework wind sculpture reproduced at unimaginable scale. Danilaw could see how each had once turned inside the next, how they had been angled to catch available light and cast each other not too much in shadow. He could even see where the immense full-spectrum light cannons had been mounted, aimed so that the pressure of escaping photons would contribute to the great ship’s gentle propulsion. Each turning ring had stabilized the ship, and all together they had acted to make her akin to a giant gyroscope, balanced by her own spin.
She had been lovely once, the Jacob’s Ladder. But now she was an enormous scarred skeleton of nodules joined by tubes, twisted in places and in others crudely repaired. Danilaw could make out generations of technology at work on her hull—hulk would have seemed the better word, except she was warm, a living ship, glowing softly in the infrared.
And she was, unmistakably, moving forward under her own power. He could see the gleam of her engines through the gaps in her frame, and the long cometary plume of her exhaust glazed with reflected sunlight when they came around to approach her on a diagonal, matching trajectories.
Some repairs seemed crude—machine-shop things, scrap metal hammered into place and spot-welded or even riveted to cover the scars of some of her traumatic amputations. Some were more craftsmanlike, with matched edges or careful jury-rigging. There were aluminum, plastic, ceramic alloys, titanium, even cloth painted with a doping compound in evidence, depending on where he looked and which schematic he glanced at.
And then there were the repairs and reductions which seemed almost clean in comparison. As the Jacob’s Ladder moved against the starfield, bathed in her own lights, the rays of the distant sun, and the floods of the scull, he caught how beveled edges gleamed here and there as if they had been sliced with a knife so hot it left fused edges behind. Other surfaces resembled the sanded luster of frosted glass, as if the metal and ceramic of her hide had itself sublimated into space. Scorch marks, blisters, craters, and volatilized surfaces scarred her everywhere.
When the sharply held breath finally whistled out through his nostrils, it stung. Beside him, Captain Amanda slid her hands into her pockets, flat-palmed, fingers arched back and tendons in relief as if she were packing all the stress away in them.
She said, “When she left Earth’s system, she was the size of Manhattan Island.”
“Well, she isn’t now,” Danilaw answered. “Although I think you’d have to measure her to know. Open a hailing channel, please, Captain?”
The jewel in her forehead flashed as she nodded. But she didn’t move immediately; she stood, watching the vast, battered armature of the alien vessel glide across the darkness behind.
“Captain?”
She shook her head as if rattling herself back into her body. “Sorry. Just thinking. This is the last moment of the world we know, isn’t it? This is history.”
He nodded. “I’ve been having that sensation a lot.”
She blew out through her nose—more a sigh than a snort, but just barely—and looked down at her slippered feet on the decking. “I thought it would feel like more.”
There was so much to consider, so much to negotiate. Perceval’s head spun with it before the conversation was halfway through. Medical issues, in particular, concerned the Fisher King—Danilaw Bakare, she supposed she was going to have to get used to calling him, this strange gravity-stunted humanoid. He seemed seriously put out to learn that Perceval’s people did not require quarantine precautions or what he referred to as “a gene scrub.”
“We adapt,” Perceval said. “Our immune systems are evolved to handle most pathogens. Even novel ones.” Except the ones that have been engineered to exploit our colonies.
She barely remembered the engineered influenza that Ariane had infected her with, though it had wiped out most of the Exalt denizens of Rule, and she herself had only survived because of the intervention of Rien and Mallory the Necromancer. And this was not the venue to bring up the inducer viruses, spliced and machined from the silicon-based symbiotes of the Leviathan into agents for the mental and physical manipulation of any creature they should be introduced into.
The Fisher King—Bakare, Bakare—shook his head. “That doesn’t address the issue of protecting my people from your pathogens.” He smiled, softening stern words, and made a point of saying something playful. “Unless you can count on your microbes going where they are directed, I think, at this point, it’s wise to maintain quarantine protocols. We’ll come over in suits, if we’re still welcome, and we’ll bring sampling equipment. Once we’ve gotten an idea of what your microfauna are like, we’ll be able to tell if we need to vaccinate, and what sort of isolation and sanitation protocols are necessary before you land on Fortune.”
His choice of words and sentence structures was like something Dust would have recited, flowery and archaic. The good news was, if what he implied in his speeches could be trusted, being granted leave to land on Grail seemed a foregone conclusion. They would have to borrow lighters from the onworlders, or cannibalize the world in order to build their own—a prospect that filled Perceval with wide-eyed discomfort—although there was no telling what hoops they would have to jump through, and to which indignities they would be subjected, before that came to pass.
And there was always the possibility that Administrator Danilaw was lying. Perceval could not figure out what he’d gain from it—but then, if he was deceiving, it would be in his interests to hide the motives as well as the act. Or acts, for that matter.
Whatever went through the Fisher King’s mind in the moments he stood with his eyes downcast, studying the tips of his boots (if that’s what he was wearing, there below the vidmote’s pickup range), when he raised his gaze to Perceval’s projected image again, his expression was that of a man resolute. He spoke as if he had prepared a speech, as before, but this time there was no resorting to notes. Perceval found herself flattered that he—a Mean—had memorized what he wished to say to her.
Her, in her personage as Captain. Not her-Perceval. He was a Head of State speaking to another Head of State, and foreign as that was, she needed to recollect it. This was not like speaking to Dorcas, or one of the Decker leaders. She was not this man’s liege lord, nor his conqueror.
He said, “We mourned you.”
A simple sentence. Three words: subject, verb, object. So unlike his usual elaborate eloquence, but when he said it, it echoed around her with the weight of his emotion and intention.
“We?” she said, already half knowing. He hadn’t mourned her, not in his own person or hers. But she understood where he was going; she just wanted to hear him say it.
“Earth,” he said. “Earth, her people, mourned your ancestors. We believed that the Kleptocracy had killed you all, that they sent you into space to freeze and die.”
Perceval smiled. The Kleptocracy. So it had a name.
“They tried.”
As if the weight of her admission had bowed the conversation, they both remained silent for a moment. Perceval supposed it was her place to open the discourse again. When she spoke, she imagined that this Fisher King, this lord of Grail, would understand that her we was for her forebears and antecedents, and not relevant to her speaking in her own person.
“We mourned the Earth,” she said.
The Fisher King smiled. “Actually, they did okay.”
Her surprise—shock; call it what it was—must have showed in her face, because he hastened to add, “In the long run, I mean. The late-twenty-second was a nightmare, from all I’ve heard. Deaths measured in the billions, famine, savagery. But the population crash proved a sort of blessing in the long term, because when they began to rebuild, they no longer needed the infrastructure that had been necessary at peak population.”
Perceval licked her lips. “It’s an established principle,” she said. “The survivors of a crisis and their immediate descendants flourish in a wide-open ecology. There is a proliferation of available niches.”
The Premier said, “The survivors don’t have to strive for resources or subsistence. They can turn their attention to less banal pursuits than outcompeting their fellows. And the survivors institutionalized that. They abolished sophipathies, and we took steps to protect our societies from their recurrence. Many of the descendants of those same regulations and procedures are still in place.” He paused. “Do you understand what I am saying?”
“Your legal system,” Perceval said. “You will expect us to abide by it, and cede authority to your leaders.”
The words came with a rush of relief; she hoped she didn’t sound as excited as she felt by the prospect of not being in charge anymore. She’d never wanted this role of Captain; she’d never wanted the opinions of dead antecedents echoing through her aching head. And though she had accepted leadership and symbiosis as part of the cost of saving her people, acceptance was not the same as celebration.
She was no longer the girl she had been when she became Captain. She was a woman now, and a leader, and she had accepted that a good deal of life entailed doing the sorts of things one really would rather not. But Perceval looked into this strange man’s face and glimpsed release, and it excited her.
His reaction did not fill her with confidence, or even allow her to long sustain that welcome relief. He glanced at his colleague, the Captain. Perceval was coming to understand that Captain meant something different to these alien humans than it did within the walls of her own world.
He said, “Do you understand what I mean by sophipathology?”
“The etymology,” Perceval said carefully, “suggests that a sophipathology is an illness of sophistry, which is to say of illogical or self-referential thought. Perhaps an ingrained or circular sort of reasoning?”
“In C21,” the Fisher King said, “which is our last cultural referent in common and one with which both my colleague and I are familiar—so please forgive me if I rely overheavily on its structures—they would have called it a toxic meme. A poisonous and conventionally ineradicable self-perpetuating idea. Because of the vagaries of our evolutionary heritage, it is easy for us to become irrationally loyal to these destructive patterns.
“We have learned to treat for this genetic illness. That treatment is one of the root causes of our prosperity; we require it of all citizens and productive members of society, and we will not permit sophipathologies to become reestablished in our culture.”
The old Perceval would have licked her lips and glanced aside at Tristen, seeking the counsel of his expression. But she and her colony had weathered many storms and attempted revolutions, and she would give nothing away to this representative of the potential enemy.
“Perhaps you could give me some examples of what you consider an illness of the thought,” she said. “I suspect there are many possible definitions.”
“I have heard you mention angels,” he said, with all the care of a diplomat who expects his words to be unwelcome. “Considering the history of the Jacob’s Ladder as a vessel for the Kleptocratic exploitation of those infected by New Evolutionist religious memes, we would consider a belief in angels as a likely pathology. Especially as it is historically and epistemologically linked to similarly illogical and toxic beliefs such as idolatry, worship of one’s own culture as chosen and deserving above all others, and religious and ideological fanaticism. It is our experience that these belief structures are exceptionally virulent, only matched for pathology by irrational economic and moral codes, and capable of persisting in the face of all evidence, suffering, and reason.”
“Angels are real,” Perceval said, measuring her tones, permitting her brow to furrow so the Fisher King would know she struggled to understand. “I am in the presence of one right now. We make them.”
“But in so constructing the metaphors surrounding your relationship with your artificial intelligences—if I understand correctly what these servants are—you reinforce a historical sophipathology which has resulted in untold billions of deaths, both of humans and other biologicals.”
“So by sophipathology, you mean … a heresy?” That was familiar ground, and Perceval for a moment breathed easier. “We do not prosecute heresies anymore, Administrator Danilaw. That, for us, is ancient history.”
But rather than similarly relieved, the Fisher King looked if possible more tired and distressed. “I mean the kind of ingrained flaw in one’s reason that would lead one to align one’s self so strongly with a brand of dogma that one might identify others as heretics, actually.”
Perceval pressed her fingernails into her palms. She had anticipated that the cultural disconnect would be vast, and she was only just coming to understand how vast it might be. He spoke. For the most part, he used words she understood. But the manner in which he used them left her feeling as if she had just listened to a recording of some nonhuman creature reciting abstract poetry. It was easier to follow the thought processes of an angel.
She said, “I do not understand. How is it that you live without angels?”
He rubbed his face in what she thought was exasperation, though it could have just been exhaustion. She was learning that these alien humans were much like Means—fragile, of fragmented memory, and prone to easy exhaustion—and that in other ways they were not Mean at all.
“How do you live with them?” His irritation, if that was what it was, turned into a headshake. “We just do.”
She folded her hands together, interlacing the fingers. She huffed across the knuckles, producing a whistling noise. “I think we should conduct further conversations in person,” she said. “You and Captain Amanda have my permission to dock your ship and come aboard.”
“We will have to observe quarantine,” the Fisher King said. “It will not be so different than this.”
“Different enough,” Perceval said. “The Angel Samael will assist you with your docking arrangements and requirements for environmental isolation. That is my will.”
With a mental signal to Nova, she cut the connection. Tristen had not moved from his seat on the grassy berm opposite, but his hands were folded and he was regarding her. “Turning them over to an angel when they’ve expressed such a strong distaste for the whole concept? I’m not sure that’s politic.”
“Maybe they’ll find out how useful angels are and suffer a thought infection.”
Tristen smiled. “He gets on your nerves.”
Perceval shook her hair back, smoothing the locks behind her shoulders with both hands. “He’s a smug, self-righteous, condescending Mean,” she said. “If he thinks we’re uncivilized thugs, well—”
“We need him, Perceval,” her First Mate cautioned. “Unless you really want to go and take his planet from him.”
Her toes curled into the verdant green turf underfoot. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t tempt me.”