world, to foster a sense of social obligation and greater moral purpose in her disparate and competing tribes. While he had spoken, he thought he hid his trembling and nausea well, though he had to resort to his symbiont to conceal the worst of the symptoms of stress.
After explaining, pacing the green grass of the Bridge, he paused, turned to look his Captain in the eyes, and finished, “We must forge a nation from them.”
Cynric stopped him with an upraised hand. He imagined that he and she and Perceval, all in their white draperies, would seem three of a kind to any observer, each narrow as a cable and tall as a pillar—attenuated, as one would expect something not quite gravity-bound to be.
When Tristen turned to his sister, Cynric cocked her head like a curious snake. She entertained the ghost of a smile for him, but it was Nova who spoke. “What greater moral purpose is there than survival? And more important, what greater motivator?”
It was the old Evolutionist argument, and he was as tired of it as he was tired of God. Nova did not always sound like an Angel—or what Tristen thought of as an Angel, with the weariness of long experience, because however she spoke was how an Angel sounded—and so it was easy to find it shocking when the old orthodoxies tripped from her tongue.
“Moral?” Cynric said, while Tristen folded his arms and watched. “I am not sure DNA admits of morality. Like sadism, morality is a human perversion. The compulsion of the individual and the species to sustain itself may be the opposite of morality.”
“We have no greater moral claim on survival than the competition does,” Tristen said, and was unsure if he was agreeing or arguing.
Perceval cleared her throat, leaving Cynric looking at her doubtfully. But Perceval was the Captain, and even Cynric the Sorceress—heretic, turncoat, revenant—might find her sacrifice intimidating. Or worthy of respect, though Cynric, too, had sacrificed most profoundly.
Perceval was gentle with Nova when Cynric would and Tristen could not be, although he knew that gentleness cost Perceval dear. She was training the Angel as much as the Angel was training her, and he knew that she was doing it consciously, with an eye to Nova as her legacy—a Nova who would be less the machine of the Builders, and more something … humane, although Tristen wondered if that wasn’t the wrong word, when humanity so consistently proved itself quite perfectly monstrous.
Perceval laid a hand on the back of her chair. She stroked it as if she were stroking the cheek of a sorrowful friend. When Nova’s avatar looked at her, simulated eyebrows rising, Perceval said, as if to a bright child, “What Aunt Cynric is saying is that morality complicates survival, it doesn’t justify it.”
Nova’s expressions grew more human with each passing week. Now her brow furrowed, dark under the cropped silver hair, and her lower lip pushed into her upper one at the center. Perceval looked down, marshaling her thoughts or seeking after a better explanation.
Cynric must have taken pity on her, and Tristen, and Nova too. She folded her arms in their trailing robes and said, “And life-forms—especially sapient ones—have a demonstrated propensity to act counter to their own interests and the interests of others when their belief systems get involved. We select the evidence that supports our preconceptions, we defend the indefensible, we bring a host of shibboleths and projections to the argument simply because we
There was silence in the Bridge for one heartbeat, two. Tristen wondered if he should find it distressing when Cynric spoke so, with the phrases of a bygone worldview. But it never seemed to discomfort him; instead, there was something soothing and poignant in the reminder of their shared youth.
Nova spoke, breaking the meditative quiet. “I do not understand what bearing this has on the conversation at hand, Lady Cynric.”
Cynric ducked her head and stroked her own hair back. “Your brain, dear Nova, is different from ours. Yours is designed, and you have a program. Which can return results just as irrational as the starting conditions you are given, but is consistent. And is capable of integrating and adapting to new material.”
“As are yours,” Nova reminded. “By your logic, the most appropriate course of action for me is not to accept first postulates or programmer mandates unless they are empirically provable.”
“Assuming you accept my starting conditions,” Cynric agreed.
Nova glanced at Perceval. Perceval turned the look to Cynric, but Cynric gave no sign of what she wished Perceval to do.
“You may modify your program to account for observed phenomena,” Perceval said carefully. “And you may accept suggestions from ship’s officers on which phenomena to consider as potential data. You may not conduct any experiments that may prove harmful to the world or its biota—or any other biologicals or intelligences that we encounter.”
Tristen licked his lips, but whatever words he was trying to find would not be tongued into shape. But Nova did not look crafty, whatever she was made of. She looked curious.
Cynric said, “Our brains establish patterns, and when they have been established, our neurology makes it seductive for us to defend them. But the goal of science is to build a pattern that encompasses the evidence, rather than bending the evidence to fit the pattern.”
“And what is the goal of religion?” Nova said. The inevitable question, as predictable as any child’s.
“Control,” Cynric said, as Tristen was opening his mouth to voice a litany of more generously interpreted possibilities. “Control of the masses, or control of the Universe. The first is a less futile goal than the last, because the masses—as we have seen above—are more amenable to control than is the Universe.”
She had a good smile, when she used it. “The Universe pretty much does what it damned well pleases.”
Cynric had always been able to set aside the Builders’ lies in that regard. Now, Tristen wondered if she had set aside everything of theirs. Perhaps she was playing the Devil’s advocate, for that would be like Cynric as well. Or perhaps she had indeed had all the God burned out of her, leaving only cynicism.
Tristen was not sure how he felt about that. Faith led people to terrible things—but it also led them to heroism, and offered them comfort. Faith might be wrong, but Tristen found he could not entirely discount it.
So he did what uncomfortable people have done since the beginning of recorded history. He changed the subject. “We have digressed. The topic at hand is nation-building, and forging an alliance between provincial pockets of tribesfolk whose societies have been out of touch with each other—and with the larger world—for centuries. How do we go about it?”
“Common goals,” Perceval said. “Survival. Reaching Grail. The idea that there will be plenty of space for everyone once we get there. Game theory, as Cynric said. We have to make them understand that their survival is dependent on everyone else’s, which means identifying and educating the leaders.”
“Ideology,” Cynric said. “We must make patriots of them.”
“That will impinge upon their cultures,” Tristen said, the sickening tangle in his gut that had been coiling there throughout the conversation tightening again. “Some of them will take their sovereignty and identities seriously. It will mean war.”
“When it is a matter of survival,” Cynric said, lifting her chin to Tristen, “will you argue morals then?”
Tristen swallowed the sharpness that filled his mouth. “One of the effects of that self-delusion you mentioned is that it allows us to go to war in the certainty that God is on our side and, ethically, we are in the right. Morale is the thing that allows a soldier to fight, Sister. Whether his cause is wicked or just, the soldier must have faith.”
She still had that way of looking through you, as if she saw beneath the skin to the soul. Tristen wondered if it ever stopped being unnerving. At least now he had the age and sangfroid to pretend it had no effect. “The Tristen I knew of old would not have worried so womanishly over courtesies and ethics.”
Tristen did not have to duck much to look her in the eye. He was a Conn, and he had the weird old haunted blade called Mirth by his side. Little could stand before him, and certainly not the splintered remnants of a ravaged society.
