Grail - By Elizabeth Bear Page 0,47
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