Grail

again.”

24 the world and the world

Then was there a maiden in the queen’s court that was come of high

blood, and she was dumb and never spake word. Right so she came

straight into the hall, and went unto sir percivale, and took him by

the hand and said aloud, that the king and all the knights might hear it: Arise,

sir percivale, the noble knight and God’s knight, and go with

me; and so he did.

—SIR THOMAS MALORY, Le Morte d’Arthur, Book X, Chapter 23

The man Captain Amanda had shot was dead, and it was not Amanda’s doing. The sedative rounds hadn’t killed him; the poison capsule in his mouth had done the work instead.

Danilaw couldn’t blame Amanda for the fatality, especially when she so patently blamed herself. But he did find himself confused by it, distressed and befuddled.

“It’s like something from the bad old days,” he said, drawing his legs up into the window embrasure of the conference room. Dodecapodes and small darting fish moved in his peripheral vision. “It doesn’t make sense to sacrifice your life for a political point.”

Across a narrow gap, Amanda perched on the violet glass conference table, her feet kicked up and her ankles crossed. “It does if you think not in terms of politics but revolution. The would-be assassin was named Pan Kagan. A review of his posts and conversations for the past month suggests he was heavily involved in the isolationist movement, and he supported Administrator Gain’s attempt at a bloodless coup.”

“We know she’s behind it,” Danilaw said. “So he killed himself because he believed strongly enough in her cause to die for it. To die to protect her. He had to be viewing himself as a hero.”

“He needed to avoid interrogation. To withhold proof of her complicity.” Amanda slid off the edge of the table and began to pace restlessly.

Danilaw’s mouth filled up with bitterness. He had to give it voice to get it off his tongue. “You know, our system of government is predicated on the idea that nobody in their right mind would ever actually want my job.”

Amanda gave him a look under her eyebrows. “We can prove Gain was behind it.”

She seemed very bright, very certain, almost outlined in light. Oh, not now, he thought, and wondered if he should warn her—but the seizure aura didn’t worsen, and he breathed slowly to calm his racing heart.

“What’s your evidence?”

She folded her hands open before her. “Free Legate,” she said. “I was looking at her when the shot went off, and I have her reaction on record. I’m also trained in semiotics and microexpressions. She was the only person in the group not surprised when the shot was fired.”

“She was expecting it.”

Amanda touched the tabletop, summoning up a three-dimensional image of the rain-soaked party as they had looked at the time—from Amanda’s point of view. Danilaw was amused by the way her attention rarely wandered to him, and when it did, brushed quickly away again.

She was conscientious. And from that, he determined that she was consciously deciding not to let his presence dominate her attention.

He hid his smile—then had it quickly wiped away as Gain’s shoulders stiffened, as Perceval jerked with reaction to the bullet, as Tristen and Amanda turned to run after the shooter.

Amanda froze the playback. She circled the frozen, miniaturized tableau, examining it from all directions. “Did you see it?”

“She didn’t just know in advance,” Danilaw said. “She triggered it. She sent a signal.”

   When Tristen entered the sickroom, he found a scene substantially unchanged from what he’d seen the last time. Perceval had turned on her side, which he took as a positive sign, and curled around a pillow like a snuggling child. Cynric stood beyond the sickcot, centimeters from the observation bubble, peering into the water beyond as if the shifting shafts of sunlight that pierced it had divinatory uses.

She turned as he entered. Because her hands stayed lost in the folds of her robe, he knew she had already identified him. He squeezed his mouth together until the words filled the space, then let them out, still not quite knowing what they would say.

“They won’t let us stay. Not unless we become like them.”

She smiled before she turned back to the water. The echoes from the curved port carried her voice back to him, full of strange resonances. “I’m staying. I’ve had enough of Cynric the Sorceress.”

“What do you see out there?”

“Friends, perhaps? There’s life in the waters,” the Sorceress said, with a lift of her pointed chin that reminded him suddenly, painfully, of every proud woman their family had ever spawned.

“Generally speaking,” Tristen said, “that’s where one finds it, if one is going to find it anywhere.”

He came up beside her. Beyond the glass, something big and convoluted rested, mottled limbs like textured scrollwork surrounding a central mass big as a lion’s head. As he watched, colors chased one another across its surface, bands of orange-gold, and dappled purple and periwinkle. When he raised his hand to the glass, it moved abruptly, tentacles uncoiling from their intricate, sinuous twelve-limbed swastika to realign in the opposite direction.

Tristen cleared his throat. “I think it says hello.”

Cynric’s caryatid expression remained unchanged, except for the lift of her brow and the answering quirk of one lip corner. “Generally speaking,” she said, “when one finds life anywhere, does it ask salient questions?”

He’d been joking about it talking, but Cynric wasn’t. Danilaw hadn’t said anything about the native fauna having sapience. That, too, Tristen realized with a sickening twinge, limited the availability of Grail’s resources to him and his people. Swallowing barbed disappointment, he said, “They’re talking to you?”

“Well,” she said, as if explaining to a child, “they don’t use words. Not even Language, which suggests a neurology not at all like ours.”

“Not at all like ours as modified by the symbionts, you mean,” he said. “Not at all like what you and the Leviathan’s get have made us into. We are a hybrid creature, and you know these Means are right to call us alien.”

“Earth octopi were supposed to be quite intelligent.” Cynric pressed one hand to the glass, fingers whitening at the tips, the nail beds flushing cerulean. “We have some DNA. I could build one.”

“What good does that do us if there’s nobody to teach it to speak its own language? Besides, what are the odds, similarity of morphology and habitat aside, that an octopus will speak an alien creature’s language any better than we will? It’s not like we ever learned to talk octopus.”

A change in Perceval’s breathing told Tristen she was awake. Cynric would know it, too, but so long as Perceval did not choose to announce herself, neither of her elders would embarrass her.

Cynric said, “In assuming that it has a language at all, you are commiting an error of cognition. We’re pack animals. We have to talk to survive. What does a solitary intelligence need language for?”

He’d never considered it. Evidence of his own egocentrism etched a path through him; he wondered if it changed anything as it passed. “Some things are just too alien.”

Cynric’s half smile turned inside out and came back up as a sardonic smirk. “Fortunately, so am I.”

“Too alien?”

“You say we are half Leviathan, Brother, and you do not say untrue.” She pressed a hand to the glass, and