Grail - By Elizabeth Bear Page 0,76

one of the necessities of evolution.”

“The world,” Danilaw said, “is quite capable of producing crises of its own, without our self-justifications. You—your people, some of them, anyway—believe in a God, do they not?”

“And yours don’t,” Perceval said. “I understand that this, like so much else, will be a subject for much negotiation and compromise.”

Danilaw sucked his lips into his mouth and chewed them for a moment, as if he were nibbling his words into shape. He was pretty sure he still had them wrong, but now wasn’t the time to mention again that the notion of God was an illness. But he was also supposed to be a diplomat, and part of diplomacy was being able to speak in the metaphors of the enemy.

He considered carefully—the history, his limited experience. He needed to speak with them, not at them. He needed to embrace their metaphors, even when the metaphors distressed him.

He drew a breath and began. “You believe in Gods. Or God. Or at least some of your folk are open to the possibility of a divine influence.”

“Some of us are,” Tristen affirmed. “It’s sometimes curable.”

Danilaw caught his eyes, and the lifted eyebrows over them. The First Mate had the arch wit of a sharp old man, and despite the youth of his features, Danilaw had to remind himself that these people were all older than he. It’s like dealing with elves. But it’s not elves exactly.

Danilaw said, “Bear with me. Will you admit for the sake of argument that we—humans, in our current technological state—are not, except under extreme circumstances, experiencing any competition in the natural world except among ourselves?”

The alien Captain steepled her fingers. “If, by the natural world, you exclude the Enemy.”

“The Devil,” Captain Amanda said.

Perceval’s lips compressed into the thing they did to hide a smile, but it was Cynric who answered. “Space,” she said. “Entropy. The inevitable heat death of the universe. That is the Enemy. I suppose you could call it the Devil, if you liked. It is the opposite of life and breath and negentropy, in any case.”

Danilaw heard Amanda breathe deep of the thin alien air. “The Enemy,” she said. “It is the Enemy of life.”

Perceval smiled.

Danilaw could not restrain himself from glancing around the table. But having done so, and nodded in understanding, he forged on. “I believe finding yourself neck-deep in space, or deprived of all the fruits of our primate ingenuity in any hostile environment, counts as an extreme circumstance for purposes of this discussion. Can we agree on that?”

After a glance at her Captain, Cynric said, “We can.”

“At last,” Amanda said. “Common ground.”

That, at least, startled Mallory into a snort of laughter. Perceval was still smiling, if you could call that a smile. If smiling, for her, were not a prelude to aggression.

Danilaw raised and spread his hands, drawing attention, gathering focus. “In short, we have outcompeted the Hell out of everything. Thus, in that we are as Gods to the rest of”—he flagged, until Amanda mouthed a word at him—“of creation, it is incumbent upon us to treat with that creation as would honorable Gods—to protect and preserve, to limit our influence, to allow it scope.”

The aliens were frowning at him, or at least that was how he interpreted the variety of their expressions. Tristen scratched the side of his nose. Perceval, around her scowl, remained impassive.

Cynric breathed deep and sighed. “I do not mind sounding ignorant,” she said. “The part of me that was easily shamed is dead—and good riddance to it.”

Even, Danilaw thought, if it was a fragment of your humanity?

But apparently she wasn’t actually a mind reader after all, because rather than reacting with indignation, she continued the thread of her question. “If you coddle the world,” she said, “how does the world grow? As we are a part of creation, part of our purpose is to produce stress on other elements of creation. We force the evolution of other species as they force—or facilitate—ours.”

There was something behind that word, facilitate, Danilaw thought. He didn’t have the time to ferret it out now, but patience would be his reward.

“We have a thing,” he said, “that we call The Obligation. It is made up of many smaller Obligations, each carefully defined, but the essence of it is this: leave the world better—healthier, more complete, more diverse—than you found it.”

“Isn’t that,” Cynric said, “condescending? Doesn’t that set humankind in a kind of stewardship over every other species? Doesn’t that make us the colonialists, responsible for the