Grail

“And a lot of folk music.” When she glanced up at him, he grinned.

She answered with one of her own, nodding that he should continue.

“But the amygdalae are still in there, and we still have a response to cathartic emotional stimulation. We’ve removed the crazy from our daily lives, but it’s still satisfying in art, safely removed and bounded. A nice thing, too. I’d hate to think what we’d be missing if we’d removed our ability to enjoy Ovid or Robert Johnson or Akira Kurosawa.” Wincing, Danilaw stopped himself before he could bury himself deeper in pedantry. Pity rightminding didn’t dispense with embarrassment.

But Amanda either hadn’t noticed him rattling on, or didn’t seem to mind. She touched his face lightly with the back of her hand and waited until he turned to her. In the diffuse illumination of their temporary quarters, her eyes were particularly luminescent, the delicate veins and green-gold flecks buried in their brown revealed in the way the light lay against the surface of her irises, as if against the nap of smoothed velvet. A surge of affection tightened his throat.

“Do you ever think we’ve lost something?”

“A lot of misery,” he answered, hearing his own voice trail off in a way he hadn’t intended.

She leaned closer, the resilient slope of her breast brushing his chest. She glossed over him, smooth and soft, the resilience of her skin telling his endocrine system that this was a young, healthy female, strong and capable.

Also, she felt nice.

“I suppose,” he said, making sure his tone stayed wistful rather than condescending or dismissive, “it’s easy to imagine the pre-Eschaton world as more passionate, more interesting. Grander.”

“That’s a romanticized view,” she said. “I mean, yes, of course, it was more passionate. Possibly they felt more deeply than we do. They were certainly less mannered about it. But it’s not as if C21 societies were without their strictures and social controls. And values. And in some of them, community service and responsibility to one’s family and clan were the highest ideals. That’s very adaptive.”

“Pathological competition does not exist only on the interpersonal level.” Danilaw propped himself on his elbows. He caught himself smiling—this was interesting—and hoped Amanda would not think he found her silly.

Well, if she did, she would ask. She didn’t seem troubled at all right now. If anything, she was warming to her argument. “No, of course not. There’s interspecies competition, too, and that between cultures and affinity groups. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about why we’re still embracing mainstream art from a thousand years ago instead of creating more of our own.”

“Entertainments—”

“Sure,” she said. “Entertainments. But who’s the most recent artist, Danilaw Bakare, whose music you really enjoy performing?”

Danilaw leaned back on his elbows. He frowned and felt it furrow his brow.

She had him there.

She stretched against him, warm skin caressing his side. Simple animal comfort, so necessary and so atavistic. “There’re a lot of ethical implications in rightminding that get glossed over when it becomes the standard of existence. Who decides what the boundaries of neurotypicality are? Who decides what a normal range of variation is? Sociopathy can be adaptive for the individual, if not the society—”

“You sound like a New Evolutionist.”

“Just playing advocate.” But the way she lifted her head to examine his face, some evidence of caginess around her eyes, left him wondering.

“When you were younger, did you know anybody out on the edges of the spectrum? Somebody who really needed rightminding to assume a full role in society?”

“My best friend,” she said. “He was an autist. Not as high-functioning as Administrator Jesse. His parents wanted him rightminded, for ease of care. And me.” Her foot jerked restlessly. “I had a few issues of my own with empathy. I’m much more aware of the feelings of others these days.”

“Aware enough—and stable enough—to be a Legate. Congratulations,” Danilaw said, hoping his tone conveyed the affectionate irony he intended. Amanda didn’t jerk away from him, so he’d probably managed an approximation, at least. “Before rightminding, my epilepsy was a death sentence.”

“You exaggerate.”

“A little.” He let his hand drift up, smoothing the slick strands of her hair against her nape and skull. “It’s still one of the less tractable conditions. I have to self-monitor, and I’ve had three adjustments since I was twenty-five. Trust me when I tell you, you wouldn’t want to know the me I was born to be. He’s a crazy person. Angels come and talk to him.”

She grimaced. It wasn’t unheard of, but three was a lot. Most people were stable past twenty-five, at least until they got up past the centennial mark and degradation set in. “Angels come and talk to both of us,” she said.

He smiled. So they did.

She huffed lightly in frustration or concentration. “I’m not saying rightminding is a bankrupt technology. What I’m saying is that we lose something irreplaceable when we apply it broad-spectrum. We lessen our diversity. My friend Claude—”

“The autist.”

“The same.” She sighed. “He wasn’t—he didn’t read people, not the way most of us do. He was very … literal. But I still don’t see what’s wrong with that. Rightminding him made him more like other people, easier for them to deal with. It may have made it easier for him to navigate among them. It certainly lessened conflict. But did it make him happier or more useful to society? I mean, dealing with sophipathology is one thing, forcing people to think instead of believing, but when do we take it too far?”

“But rightminding you,” Danilaw said, “you and those like you. That benefits society.”

She smiled. “It doesn’t necessarily benefit me.”

“Not as an individual genetic competitor, no. But evolutionarily speaking, we’ve won. We can afford to be magnanimous.” Danilaw felt as much as heard the strands of her hair rasp between his fingers when he rolled them there. “This is a reversal for you. In the Council meeting, your concerns were focused on what effect a large group of unrightminded individuals would have on our society. Now you’re arguing against rightminding on principle? That’s inconsistent logic, unless I’m missing something.”

She shook her head and waved around the green walls of the ship that embraced them. “You keep talking about how we can afford to be magnanimous. But I don’t think we can, not anymore. How does noblesse oblige stand up in the face of this? If this isn’t competition, Danilaw, I don’t know what is. And if we don’t welcome them to Fortune, what’s to stop them from taking whatever they want? Fighting is so antisocial. A compromise position would serve everyone better, right?”

Her anger startled but did not shock him. It was a natural response to frustration. Still, he pulled away slightly, leaning his back against the mossy bulkhead as she sat up.

She shook her hair back. “Rightminded people find solutions. They find common ground. They make sacrifices and consider the impact of their actions on future generations. These people do what they do and take what they want, and spend a lot of time sorting or putting off their legacy of inherited crises.”

“You do realize that they serve as an inherited crisis of our very own?”

She snorted, waving a hand that encompassed his objection as much as dismissed it. “Are we too fucking post-evolution to fight them? Are we going to lie down and surrender because it’s the civilized thing to do?”

“Of course not,” he said. “We were here first. Did you blow up the scull?”

He’d hoped to blindside her, to surprise her into a revelation. He got one—a look of utter horror and denial. “I—Danilaw!”

“I had to ask,” he said gently. Torn between relief and concern. If it had been her, that would at least have been a mystery solved. “Amanda—”

“Mm?”

“If you want to learn to manage an unrightminded society,” he said, “it occurs to me that the Jacobeans are