Grail

hair and pale olive complexion—a tidy medium-sized young citizen serving his first stint as a Councilor. He wasn’t using a chair. He perched, legs drawn up, in an observation blister. A mathematician and farmer, he’d passed the suitability tests with flying colors, and so far Danilaw had enjoyed working with him, but the relationship hadn’t been tested yet.

On the left was Gain Kangjeon, whose hair was as black and straight as Amanda’s, though her skin was paler and her eyes creased at the corners by epicanthic folds. She was bigger than Jesse, broad-shouldered and broad- hipped. Danilaw, in particular, liked her hands. They were lean—not elegant, but capable—with defined tendons across the back. When she wasn’t serving out her Obligation, she was a primary musician, with civil service as her secondary. Danilaw thought maybe, when their term of Administration Obligation was up and there was no longer a conflict of interest, he’d ask her if she was interested in a date.

He wouldn’t mind if she even wanted more than a date, although he couldn’t imagine that she didn’t have half a dozen potentials already bidding on her reproduction contracts. And there was the marketability issue of his genetic disadvantage.

By the time Danilaw settled the work coat’s collar around his neck—a smidgen too tight; his predecessor had not been such a muscular man, but the coat fit otherwise, so there was no reason except vanity to replace it— Danilaw had his face under control. He surveyed the room, assessing the citizens assembled, their strengths and weaknesses, and that let him offer a small, honest smile.

Danilaw liked to handle briefing his staff personally when possible. He thought it led to increased rapport.

“Administrators, posterity”—he acknowledged the recording device—“this is Captain Amanda Friar, of the research scull Quercus. She’s an expert in antique Earth cultures, among other things.”

Amanda pulled out his chair and her own, and they both sat. Jesse drew his legs up higher into his bubble, while Gain seemed composed and at ease in a chair. If they shared a glance, it was a concerned, collegial one.

Danilaw folded his hands in front of him and drew in a focusing breath, arranging his report in his head before he began to deliver it. “Captain Amanda informs me that an antique ship, possibly derelict, is headed in- system.”

The faces of his colleagues reflected a host of emotions. Not disbelief—there was no reason for Danilaw to summon them to a midnight meeting in order to lie to them—but concern, confusion, and shock. He saw it in the way Gain sat straighter and Jesse hunched tighter, grasping his ankles in his crossed palms.

Gain was the closer to impassive, and even she blinked and frowned. He could tell, from the way the tiny muscles of her face rearranged themselves afterward, that she was having a conversation with herself not dissimilar to his own earlier worries. And that she was already considering implications and opportunities.

While he, Danilaw, was stalling.

If you can’t figure out a better way to get there, Danilaw told the self-critical voice, just jump right in.

He picked up a hand pointer and used it to illuminate the blip, which caught the light and sparkled like a faceted stone against the empty spaces of the hologram. He glanced down from the glitter—the instinct bred of old experience rather than necessity.

“We have reason to believe,” he said, “that the object indicated by that icon is a sublight colony ship from Earth, which has been lost and presumed destroyed since the time of the Kleptocracy.”

He paused to let the centuries stretch out in his audience’s mind. A rustle as Jesse shifted, restless, told him he had waited long enough. Jesse was an autist, one of the protected mutations, and he’d chosen to retain his neuroatypical status. He did not deal well with boredom. Danilaw tried to accommodate him as much as possible.

“We’re not expecting anything incoming from Earth this year, and there’s been no communication suggesting otherwise. Captain Amanda assures me she has people checking with the home planet right now.”

Outside, the dodecapodes were finally arriving, drawn by light and activity. A tentacle as long and thick as a big man’s leg glided sinuously across the transparent material of the blister behind Jesse. It coruscated in bands and leopard spots of violet and black, brilliant to Earth-adapted eyes but ideal for vanishing into the dappled shadows of Fortune’s underwater vegetation.

Danilaw would have liked to measure the width of the dodecapus’s arm against his palm, but he thought it would forgive him the lack of a proper greeting this one time. A sense of awe, of connection and affection, swelled in him, and he frowned. Time to get his rightminding adjusted, before something in there cascaded.

He said, “The vessel is using old-style broadband casting to send out an identity tag. After rounding up some obsolete radio equipment and contacting some experts in archaic languages, Captain Amanda has been able to associate those tags with a sublight colony ship that left Earth during the Kleptocracy.”

He glanced at her.

She picked up the thread as if they had rehearsed it. “There are a number of possibilities. The ship may be broadcasting a false ID tag. It may be the vanguard of some sort of attack. It may be a derelict, under remote control or AI guidance—or just drifting, in which case it is merely an archaeological treasure and a hazard to navigation.”

“But setting aside those possibilities for the moment”—Danilaw paused for emphasis, and to get his breath under his words so he would sound calm and capable—“Ciz, it is entirely likely that we are about to reestablish contact with the Jacob’s Ladder, a vessel whose notoriety should require no exposition.”

It might not require it but, if necessary, the exposition was there, keyed into every attendee’s infothing and available for perusal at the slide of a finger. Both of the Councillors ducked their heads, flicking through the information while Danilaw paused to let what he’d just said sink in. Yet despite that, Danilaw was confident that all three of his colleagues knew the basics.

And if they didn’t know the history, they’d have heard of the legends. The Jacob’s Ladder showed up regularly as a plot point in fashionable entertainments, cast in the role of an enclave of fanatics, an insane asylum, and a lair of monsters all in one.

It was a trope so hoary and reliable that Danilaw thought of it as a predictable cliche. So he folded his arms on the table and tried not to feel like a character in a drama. The holographic representation in the center of the table helped. Watching the nearly invisible blip that was the Jacob’s Ladder’s estimated position float apparently motionless in a 3-D model of the Sanctuary system made it seem manageable, a crisis on a human scale.

“Which means,” said Gain, her voice crisp with authority and good sense, “we are in all likelihood also about to reestablish contact with unrightminded, primitive humans. Possibly a large number of them.”

“Barbarians,” Captain Amanda agreed. “It may be impossible to relate to them without conflict.”

“Barbarians is a loaded term,” Danilaw said, “and one I’d prefer to avoid. They’re premodern humans.”

Captain Amanda shook her head, the sharp edge of her glossy black bob moving against the brown skin of her neck. She disagreed, but not strongly enough that she would countermand Danilaw’s command. He watched as she drew a breath and re-aimed the conversation, feeling lucky in the egolessness of this unexpected addition to his team. If she really believed he was misguided, he thought she would intervene more strongly. For now, she’d registered her opinion and was content to trust his judgment.

Instead of arguing, she began providing historical context. “They left Earth, among other reasons, to avoid rightminding. There’s no telling what they are like, after all this time, or what their society has become.”

Danilaw nodded. “At this point, depending on how fast they’ve been moving, we can assume they have undergone at least a few centuries of social development. They were radical Christians, and we’re a millennium out of practice in dealing with people who are locked into anomalous temporal lobe feedback. We just don’t know how to handle the faithful anymore. They may be pacifists or militant, religious or atheistic. Or both, or all four, in Mendelian combinations. At this point, if any significant number have survived for any length of time, they probably no longer represent a homogenous society.

“Worse, approximately one percent of unrightminded humans are psychopaths, and a considerably larger proportion—perhaps as much as thirty percent—are sophipaths, leading to entire societies devoted to upholding untenable ideologies. The pathological brain is no more wired to accept evidence contradictory to its dogma than a