Grail - By Elizabeth Bear Page 0,63

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