Grail

folded her arms and stood before the table in her long robes like some attenuated representation of a wingless angel.

“Captain,” she said. “I suppose you’re wondering how I managed to walk between the raindrops when I came in.”

“Passing Nova unnoticed is a feat,” Perceval agreed. “I presume you wouldn’t mention it if you didn’t mean to explain.”

Danilaw spared a moment to reflect on whether this discussion of business in front of new guests was honest indifference to what he learned of his hosts’ capabilities, or saber rattling for his and Amanda’s benefit.

Cynric smiled, showing the tendons around her mouth. “I learned it from what Mallory and Tristen uncovered among the Deckers.”

“The parrotlet,” Tristen said. His studied impassivity dropped away, leaving the traces of a smile that startled Danilaw a little. It looked so human amid the alien architecture of his face. “Which begs the question. Was it a miscalculation that it survived, or did they want us to find it and learn this?”

“I did not ingest original material from the parrotlet,” Cynric said. “That seemed rather obviously unwise, even before I located the Trojan in it. But I reproduced the design, and wrote my own code. And I learned some things about who killed the Deckers.”

“Pardon me,” Danilaw said, trying to remember to keep his elbows off the table when he leaned forward, “but do I understand correctly that someone is dead?”

“Murdered,” Cynric agreed, crossing to stand beside the table, one hand resting on Perceval’s shoulder, her body so slight inside her robes that she seemed made up more of the sway of fabric than any other thing it might be hung upon. “Dozens, murdered.”

Perceval cleared her throat. Cynric looked down at the top of her head, fingers rippling as she squeezed the Captain’s shoulder. “Is there any point in hiding it from them that we have factions in this world, and some of those factions are violent? What does that make us, other than a human society?”

An unrightminded human society. But Danilaw didn’t think this was the time to raise that specter again. “Terrorist trouble?”

“More like a garden-variety mass murder in order to hide the identity of a criminal,” Mallory said, when it seemed that no one was going to demand that information be withheld from the newcomers. Danilaw felt Amanda stir on his left, heard the rustle of her clothes.

Cynric said, “Someone arranged the assassination of our Chief Engineer, and then killed a deck full of accomplices, accessories, and probable innocent bystanders who might have been able to provide an identification. I have been working with the limited physical evidence that was left behind. I should not have interrupted your dinner”—she gestured to the table—“but I admit, I found my new toy clever enough that I wanted to show it off to anyone available.”

She smiled winningly, and—as with Tristen—the very existence of that smile made Danilaw reconsider her.

Amanda cleared her throat. “I was going to say that if you already have terrorists, that explains why you’re so willing to give us a pass on blowing up your ship.” She shrugged. “But this wasn’t someone attempting to influence political policy through the slaughter of innocents?”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Perceval said. “But I don’t think that was the primary motive for these deaths. You seem more familiar with the varieties of criminal activity than I would have expected from a people who practice routine psychosurgery.”

“We don’t remove the capability for violence,” Danilaw said. “Just the more irrational motives. The purpose of rightminding is to reinforce free will and to remove the atavistic urges that underly it, not to create a perfect, bid- dable army of human robots.”

“For one thing,” Amanda said, letting her biceps brush his elbow, “who would do the bidding? As we attempted to explain before, sometimes people have perfectly rational reasons for violence.”

“Ours don’t,” Mallory said, one curved brow arched over a chocolate-colored eye. “And I guess I fail to understand how what you describe differs from the evils of the Kleptocracy.”

Unlike the other aliens, Mallory did not stumble over the term, but spoke it as if it were familiar. Interesting. And how close to the devil immortality is this one?

“Not evil,” Danilaw said. “There is too much evil in the idea of evil. But greedy and childish and toxic. That is what we try to correct for. Still, it sounds like we’re both getting some opposition.”

Danilaw’s stage persona was deadpan as any ice man. His political construct was cool and soothing. Once Amanda laughed at his intentional understatement, the aliens figured it out and followed suit, or rolled eyes at one another, according to their natures.

“This opposition may be to us making landfall,” Perceval said, her gaze level and assessing, “or it may be to us negotiating with you at all.”

“Rather than taking what you want?”

The boldness in his own voice startled him. It startled him, too, when she made a plain, frustrated face and said, “I have figured out that you will fight for your lives.”

“We will fight for our world as well,” Danilaw said, aware of the hush that had fallen around the table, the pairs of eyes trained on him and Perceval both. “We will fight for its sovereignty, and we will not allow its equilibrium to be destroyed.”

“But a punctuated equilibrium is 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?”