Grail - By Elizabeth Bear Page 0,26

from legends.

At last, at last, Dorcas the Engineer folded the words of her story away. She regarded him through escaping strands of hair, but Dust was content that he had her attention now.

“She will sell us to the lords of Grail. She will buy whatever safety she can for herself and her family, buy landfall, buy land—and what in this new world can she do with the rest of us?”

“Sports,” Dorcas said. “Monsters, mistakes. Would you unleash us on an ecology? What evolved thing could live with us? We would eat it.”

“The strong survive,” Dust said. “Existence is evolution. Equilibrium is extermination.”

“The Captain would regard me with favor if I turned you in,” Dorcas said, her eyebrows amused.

“The Captain’s Angel would eat me, as she ate my ancestor. I am but a poor scrap of backup. Is your heart so soft for xeno-starlings and exo-bunnies, and so hard as death against me?”

“Nova allows other scraps to persist. Does an angel fear for its life?”

Dust let his foxy muzzle nod. “This angel does. Tell me, Dorcas of Engine, if you believe God has a plan, how can you be sure it is not best proved by whatever will grow from our meeting with these aliens?”

Dorcas flicked him away with a fingertip. “We are monsters, monster. But I recollect you, and you were the worst monster of all. I think not, Master Dust. God shall have to sort this one without me.”

7

if you can hear me

I must be careful now. I have such plots—

Such war plots, peace plots, love plots—every side;

I cannot go into the bloodless land

Among the whimpering ghosts.

—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, “Time and the Witch Vivien”

Given the astronomical travel distances involved, the decision regarding what to do about the incoming generation ship was not overwhelmingly time-sensitive, so Danilaw gave his people as much time to argue it out as they wanted. He’d rather repent a reasoned and considered decision than a hasty one. In the former case, he could comfort himself that whatever had gone wrong had been by lack of foresight rather than haste or carelessness.

The discussion ranged along predictable paths and, other than occasionally restraining Captain Amanda’s passion for the topic of the awfulness of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries, Danilaw did not intervene. He sat at ease, watching, considering, waiting to see what the expression of disparate viewpoints might trigger as an eventual gestalt or compromise position.

Outside the observation blisters, dodecapodes came and went, the majority displaying their default swirls of violet, lavender, and black. Danilaw had never been able to tell most of them apart except by size, but there was one particularly large critter with a scar along the underside of two arms that he recognized as a frequent visitor. It pressed close to the right-side blister as if listening at a door, its beak scraping poly. Danilaw entertained himself imagining what it might make of the conversation.

The ping light on his infothing brought him back from his attempts at right-brain creative problem solving. A glance at the summary of contents told him the situation was still developing along the projected lines. He glanced at Captain Amanda, but apparently, now that he had been brought into the loop, he was being given priority information; her device lay quiet and devoid of signals.

Danilaw cleared his throat. Around the table, conversation quieted, and his cabinet directed their attention to him. Trying not to feel like he was pronouncing words he’d be hearing repeated back on news programs and documentaries for the rest of his life, he said, “We’re receiving a radio transmission.”

Somewhere out there, archaic technology was spinning out of dormancy. Technicians or Gain’s recruited hobbyists were hovering over fragile antennae and instrumentation, breaths held, hands instinctively—protectively—outstretched as if cupping the air around a toddler taking her first steps.

Jesse lifted his head. “Answer them.”

Captain Amanda glanced at him with a scientist’s patience. “We can’t, not immediately. Lightspeed lag, remember? Can we see it, Premier?”

Danilaw keyed his infothing to display. An image flickered into view. It showed two—people; Danilaw corrected himself before he could think of them as creatures. They were something like people, anyway—upright, bipedal, with eyes and nose and mouth in the familiar biologically convenient arrangement, two ears on either side of a primate head with a flat muzzle and a domed skull. They wore clothes, and they had hair, and—

—that was where the resemblance ended.

Danilaw suspected, from the size dimorphism, that he was looking at a male and a female. They were so thin, so attenuated,