Grail

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 the perfect love washed over him and he fell.

   When Danilaw opened his eyes again, it was in the same darkened room, and Captain Amanda sat on the edge of the bed—beside him—with a bud in her ear and her eyes tuned to her infothing. He lifted his head and she turned instantly, dropping the interface into her shirt pocket.

“Hey,” she said. “Feeling better?”

“How much time did I lose?”

She tipped her pocket open with a fingertip and glanced at the infothing. “Ten minutes,” she said. “I was napping in the next room and heard you fall. So. Temporal lobe epilepsy?”

Gingerly, he moved his skull and then his limbs, testing them. “Rightminded out years ago. Or so I thought. I still see visions sometimes, but I haven’t had the full tonicclonic experience since I was a student.”

No facial bruising and no pain in his limbs, for a wonder. His ribs ached when he breathed deeply, from which he deduced that he’d fallen across the foot of the bed, and the mattress had protected his head.

“Anything hurt?” Amanda asked.

“Just my pride.” Honesty compelled him. “And a few bruises.”

She was studying his face, frowning. The line it drew between her eyes puckered the skin around the Legate’s jewel. Danilaw imagined the shine of it recording, and looked down. Then she extended a hand, as if to assist him to his feet.

“All right,” she said. “Come on. We just have time to grab some food before duty calls.”

   The Council reconvened after lunch, when everybody else had also gotten some sleep and the infosphere had had a good six hours to start consensus-building and weeding out the opinions of the hysterics and the intractables. By then, they were in possession of another transmission from the Jacob’s Ladder, this one granting permission for an envoy to be sent.

“The real irony here,” Gain said at this second Alien Invasion Policy Meeting (though nobody outside of Danilaw’s head was actually calling it that), “is that we finally make first contact with an alien race after centuries of looking, and they’re us.”

“Not us,” Jesse said. “Something consanguineous. But that’s a different species. Subspecies. Whatever.”

“We can’t state that categorically until we get a look at the DNA,” Danilaw reminded them. “It’s only been a thousand years of divergence. Speciation can happen fast, but it’s a long shot.”

Gain looked more tired than the rest of them. She leaned forward on her elbows, blinking owlishly. Her hands were folded around a mug of stimulant. But tired or not, the mind behind those bleary eyes remained sharp. “And if they’re as different from us as neandertalensis from sapiens?”

Danilaw nibbled his cuticle. “We try not to compete for the same habitat.”

He didn’t state the obvious—that sharing an environment with a competitive, hierarchal, primitive version of humanity would require his people to either enforce their own social adaptations on the newcomers, or adopt a more aggressive stance of their own and deal with the long-term repercussions as they occurred.

Many of the most aggressively hierarchical humans had left while the world was collapsing, fleeing in the Jacob’s Ladder—an artificial world salvaged from the extravagant wreckage of humanity’s near self-immolation, fueled and funded by a Kleptocracy that did not outlast the launch of more than the first of the elaborate, flimsy, sabotaged vessels. To those who remained behind on an Earth like a gnawed husk, subsistence seemed luxury enough.

Those forebears had already begun rightminding themselves—the decision that provoked the flight of the Jacobeans in the first place. It had been the intentional self-handicapping of a competitor with no equals on the playing field.

To save themselves as a species, Danilaw’s ancestors had bargained away a good deal of the fear, the primate antagonism, the power structures that had driven them to mastery—even overlordship—of their environment. It had required a radical realignment of society and the human brain—forces that had driven those primitive humans to such intense competition that their entire worldwide society had been designed to contain and facilitate nothing else.

Instead, they had decided to shift the social focus to another, less expressed potential of the human animal —that of peaceable, advantageous cooperation and compromise. In selecting—in engineering—for self-sacrifice, commensalism, and negotiation over individualism, hierarchy, and authoritarianism, they had saved the world. They had ushered in an enduring age of peace and—if not prosperity—adequacy of resources for the new, reduced demand.

But it had required a reworking of the entire architecture of human neurology. Centuries later, the extinction event, ecological crisis, and massive population crash that had provoked it—dubbed the Eschaton by various factions at the time—was still remembered with a sort of hushed awe.

A remnant of the human race had emerged from the Eschaton with a renewed sense of desperation, if not purpose. They had refined the crude early techniques of rightminding into a comprehensive program of surgery, chemical therapy, and scientific child-rearing that had allowed humanity to finally do something about the clutter of its awkward, self-defeating, self-deluding evolutionary baggage.

Danilaw was grateful for the world they had left him—one in which sufficient resources were assured for each person’s comfort and livelihood, barring catastrophe, and in which pleasures were balanced off against obligations in an endurable and even enjoyable fashion. Like many, he maintained a certain bittersweet nostalgia for the glittering excesses of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—he played in a rock band, and he was not the only one to engage in recreational re-creation.

But it was playacting, an exercise in creativity, and any rational, rightminded individual had to accept that a world without avoidable hunger and war—a world in which diverse human beings could work together to find compromise positions without the crippling barriers of fanaticism and ideology—was superior to one where they were at one another’s throats constantly.

Sophipathology had not been eradicated. But it was a treatable illness now. Danilaw wished he could be more certain that the incoming Jacobeans would see it the same way.

Captain Amanda spoke first, with the most aggressive analysis. “We have to be prepared to defend ourselves, Administrator Danilaw.”

“You’re in charge of that,” he said. “Have a defense plan for me in two days, please. You can work on it while we pack.”

“We?” Jesse looked like he wasn’t exactly overjoyed by the idea of a field trip. Danilaw knew his primary was heavily pregnant, and the culmination of a reproduction license wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted to miss just because you’d drawn City Admin duty. Especially when you were working on making the psychological shift to primary nurturing duty any day now.

“Captain Amanda and I,” he said. “We’ll go out to greet them, barring any major pushback from the Ciz. We both speak their language, passably if not fluently. And it will appear to be a gesture of trust and goodwill if I go.”

“They’re hierarchical,” Captain Amanda said. “If you go yourself, you will weaken your apparent position with them. They will be used to dealing with administrators as persons of rank, veiled by layers of flunkies and functionaries whose only purpose is to create a haze of isolation around the decision maker. We’re talking about an extremely alien manner of thinking.”

“Well, then,” Danilaw said. “They’re supposed to be New Evolutionists, aren’t they? They’ll adapt.”

   Dust’s second visit to Dorcas came in the dead of her local night. He found her in a low tent, pitched