Grail - By Elizabeth Bear Page 0,62
“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