Grail

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 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 fanaticism. It is our experience that these belief structures are exceptionally virulent, only matched for pathology by irrational economic and moral codes, and capable of persisting in the face of all evidence, suffering, and reason.”

“Angels are real,” Perceval said, measuring her tones, permitting her brow to furrow so the Fisher King would know she struggled to understand. “I am in the presence of one right now. We make them.”

“But in so constructing the metaphors surrounding your relationship with your artificial intelligences—if I understand correctly what these servants are—you reinforce a historical sophipathology which has resulted in untold billions of deaths, both of humans and other biologicals.”

“So by sophipathology, you mean … a heresy?” That was familiar ground, and Perceval for a moment breathed easier. “We do not prosecute heresies anymore, Administrator Danilaw. That, for us, is ancient history.”

But rather than similarly relieved, the Fisher King looked if possible more tired and distressed. “I mean the kind of ingrained flaw in one’s reason that would lead one to align one’s self so strongly with a brand of dogma that one might identify others as heretics, actually.”

Perceval pressed her fingernails into her palms. She had anticipated that the cultural disconnect would be vast, and she was only just coming to understand how vast it might be. He spoke. For the most part, he used words she understood. But the manner in which he used them left her feeling as if she had just listened to a recording of some nonhuman creature reciting abstract poetry. It was easier to follow the thought processes of an angel.

She said, “I do not understand. How is it that you live without angels?”

He rubbed his face in what she thought was exasperation, though it could have just been exhaustion. She was learning that these alien humans were much like Means—fragile, of fragmented memory, and prone to easy exhaustion—and that in other ways they were not Mean at all.

“How do you live with them?” His irritation, if that was what it was, turned into a headshake. “We just do.”