Grail

“A … mine?” asked the alien diplomat, with a weighty pause as if he had to search for the word in long- archived memories.

The alien Captain, Amanda, folded her arms. “I’m afraid not,” she said. “Did you see the way the debris imploded?”

Tristen, for one, was still watching. The majority of the wreckage settled again into a lumpy near sphere, shifting against itself as if vibrations through the frame of the world sieved it down. Relative acceleration meant the debris cloud was gliding out in advance of the Jacob’s Ladder, trailing rent cables from the docking cradle that reached after it like hungry tentacles. “I’ve seen something like it before,” he said. “When I was young.”

Perceval stood calmly, frowning, concentration deepening all the creases of her countenance. “The Breaking,” she said, in the tones of one who already knows the answer to her question.

“It’s a typical pattern when a gravity drive explodes due to mechanical failure or sabotage.”

Tristen thought Captain Amanda spoke with fair calm and pragmatism, for somebody who was now— temporarily—stranded on an alien spaceship. The jewel embedded in her forehead flashed through the faceplate of her armor.

Nova said, “It is my estimation that if I had not been able to use colonies to absorb and attenuate the shock wave, that explosion was powerful enough to have rendered the world inoperable.”

“Somebody tried to kill us all,” Tristen said.

Amanda continued, “I can’t be sure of anything until I have the opportunity to take a forensics team through the wreckage, but given the evidence of a smaller shock wave preceding the main explosion, I would lean toward the explanation that an explosive device was concealed in the Quercus’s quantum engine core, where it would not be evident to crew inspection while she was under way, and that it was triggered by remote. Not a proximity sensor, or it would have gone off before Danilaw and I were able to disembark.” She wet dry lips with a Mean’s pink tongue. “You know what? It’s stupid of me to waste my resources now. May I unseal, Captain Conn?”

“The offer stands,” Perceval said. In the command space they shared, Tristen was aware of her effortless ownership of the crisis. As Captain—a mature and integrated Captain—her awareness of the world was as preconscious and prescient as her undermind’s awareness of her physical body. The ship was the Captain, and the Captain the ship. And yet, if he had not been in there with her, he would never have realized her attention was mostly directed away from the alien diplomats.

Administrator Danilaw stared at Captain Amanda, but nodded. “We won’t make it back to Fortune on suit reserve.” He touched both hands to the sides of his helmet, and after a few manipulations lifted it off. Captain Amanda followed, though Tristen watched her throat work under the smooth pink-brown skin before her nostrils flared on the first indrawn breath.

However unsettled she was, neither she nor the Fisher King let it affect their demeanor. Two slow drags of air and she spoke again, her voice shaking only slightly. “The obvious conclusion is that the Quercus was sabotaged while I was dirtside, picking up Danilaw.”

“We’ll see that you get home,” Perceval said. “After all, we’re headed that way.”

Captain Amanda’s eyebrow arched at the joke. “I guess you are.”

“You’ll want to contact your people; you may use our arrays to do so.”

“We have q-sets,” Danilaw said. “Without the relay on the Quercus, we may need a power boost, but we can manage to call home.”

Captain Amanda set her helmet down on the table and leaned her hands on either side of it. “How heavy are your casualties? How may Danilaw and I assist in your salvage operations?”

“Correlating,” Nova said out of the air. Tristen made a point of not noticing when the Fisher King and his companion reacted with startlement. “Please carry on.”

Tristen could have wished that she’d given a number—preferably a small one—but he understood. Her sensors and proprioception had been damaged in the explosion, and Tristen knew from eavesdropping her feed that—under Perceval’s guidance—she was already engaging search and repair parties, conducting survivor interviews, bringing in medical details. Organizing her immune response, like any organism in the face of attack. He gave her a part of his attention and felt Perceval doing the same.

“It’s deeply problematic that one of our people would resort to terrorism,” Danilaw said. “It’s not that rightminding removes the capability for violence, you understand. But it addresses the irrational evolutionary triggers—territorialism, dominance—that result in a great deal of fighting.”

“Rightminding,” Tristen said, fastening on the unfamiliar word. It sounded somewhat ominous.

“Humans,” Danilaw said, “evolved to collaborate—but also to compete. For resources, status, reproductive success.”

Mallory said, “Competition is essential to evolutionary development.”

“Ah,” Danilaw said. “But after a certain point, evolution is no longer essential to existence.”

It was a peculiar sensation, Tristen thought, to hear a sentence, to understand each word in it, and yet to have the abiding conviction that one had entirely missed the sense. He wasn’t alone: beside him, Perceval—who, like Tristen, had half her attention on Nova’s disaster-remediation efforts—cleared her throat uncomfortably.

And Samael said, “That is a heresy.”

“By your standards,” Danilaw said, “I have no doubt. And by ours, most of the foundations of your society are untenable abominations. Which is going to make things interesting if we have to share a planet.” He glanced at Amanda, who in continuing to strip off her primitive armor had revealed an off-white jumpsuit of some fiber Tristen did not recognize. When she was out of it, her suit softened, compacting neatly to a small bundle attached to an oversized set of oxygen tanks—further evidence of the fragility of these Means, and their requirements for a rich atmosphere. She retrieved some sort of instrument package from the helmet and slipped it over her head, to dangle on a lanyard.

“Please explain what you mean by rightminding,” Tristen said.

“These days, whenever possible, we do it through genetic surgery,” Danilaw said. “But in an adult, it’s a combination of microsurgery, chiefly to the temporal lobe, and therapeutic normalization of the neurochemistry. We use this process to mitigate some of the atavistic, self-destructive impulses of the human psyche—blind faith, sophipathology, tribalism—so that rational thought can prevail.”

He hesitated. Perceval made a noise of encouragement. It sounded to Tristen as if what Danilaw was describing was evolution. Or evolutionism, anyway, so he wasn’t sure where the touchiness lay.

But Danilaw looked at Captain Amanda, and she nodded. “One of my roles is historian,” she said. “I’m here in part because of my interest in C22. And my esteemed colleague is worried about causing you offense because we are unused to dealing with, uh—with natural-minded individuals such as yourselves. And because resistance to the mandated administration of early forms of this process is one of the reasons why your ancestors left Earth.”

“And the other,” Danilaw said, “was because decades of irrational human competition had driven the homeworld into a state of ecological catastrophe, such that it could no longer support large human populations.”

“We were not supposed to survive,” Perceval said.

“We know,” Danilaw said. “The Kleptocratic government—and what they did to your ancestors—was the final weight that really spun public opinion in favor of rightminding everyone. At first it was used to treat incurable ideologues and criminals. Then we moved on to sophipaths and Kleptocrats. The arcane priests of destructive religious systems such as Capitalism and—forgive me—Evolutionism came next. This was around the time your people moved on. Eventually, the rightminded population exceeded the unrightminded, and the procedure was made mandatory. Those were the last extensive wars Earth fought. Since then, they’ve managed through negotiation and compromise.”

“It’s not so shocking,” Tristen said, thinking of the modifications he’d made to his own mind, memories, and emotional landscape over the years. “The romanticization of a natural human state as somehow superior to a managed one is—your word, I am not certain I’m using it properly?”

“Sophipathology?” Danilaw asked.

“Thought-sickness,” Mallory supplied. Tristen smiled over his shoulder at the necromancer, and was rewarded by a flash of angelic grin through dark coiled hair.