Grail - Elizabeth Bear [112]
“I may have a partial solution to your situation,” Danilaw said. He did not look at Amanda, not wanting to reopen their old argument about rightminding. “You understand that a majority of the citizens of Fortune are taking an isolationist line—”
Perceval lifted her chin and looked at him. Just looked, but Danilaw felt the heat of embarrassment in every limb.
He swallowed and forced himself on. “We have a world. We can spare a little of it. Just this once. It’s not like generation ships are going to be a common occurrence.”
Tristen huffed. “You’re offering us resources to move on.”
“It’s a shameful bribe,” Danilaw said. “The alternative requires you to submit to rightminding, and integrate into the Fortune colony.”
He did not expect them to like the options. Judging by their thinned lips and sidelong glances, he had been right. But Tristen said, “What about your secondary, Favor? The binary world. You haven’t settled it—”
“It’s still got an ecosystem,” Danilaw said. “A toxic ecosystem, but the potential for introducing an imbalance—”
“Toxic for you,” Tristen said. “We would adapt. We will be forced to adapt to gravity, in any case. We’re not”—he hesitated, as if searching for a sufficiently emphatic word—“inexperienced when it comes to balancing biospheres.”
“I’m sorry,” Danilaw said. “There’s too many of you. And you’re not rightminded. It’s the rightminding, frankly, that will be the biggest sticking point for my people. Without it, they will always see your people as aliens. As the sword of Damocles.”
“I see,” Perceval said.
Amanda pressed a belated cup of tea into Danilaw’s hand, which had dropped away from the neck of the guitar. He sighed and sipped it.
She said, “Why don’t you come down to Fortune with us? When we descend?”
“Excuse me?” Perceval said.
“There’s room in the lighter,” Amanda said. “Come down. Meet a rightminded planet. Then make up your mind.”
Perceval opened her mouth. Tristen placed a hand on her shoulder. “I’m not sure—”
“Oh, never fear,” Amanda said. “I am going to inspect every inch of that lighter before I put anyone on it. A person really only needs to be sabotaged once.”
21
for the descent
O true as steel come now and talk with me,
I love to see your step upon the ground.
—WILLIAM MORRIS, “The Defence of Guenevere”
Nothing could have prepared Perceval for the descent.
The shuttle-pod—a lighter, Captain Amanda said—that would bring them into Grail’s gravity well and (at last) its atmosphere was a dart-shaped creature like a bird, and she stared at it for long moments before she realized that, of course, it was streamlined—aerodynamic. Because they were going into an atmosphere, and that was this vessel’s primary purpose.
An atmosphere.
The world was too brittle and unwieldy to bring in close to anything that generated the tidal stresses that wracked the Fortune-Favor system. Two planets of comparable size in an endless falling ballet around each other and their sun made for challenging close orbits, and Perceval was all too aware of the fragility of her old and battered world.
So now she was seeing Grail with her own eyes, for the first time, from the habitation deck of a ship named Metasequoia, in honor of a tree genus from old Earth. The so-called dawn redwood was a living fossil species, native to the continent of Asia. According to Nova, there were a number of Metasequoia clones aboard the Jacob’s Ladder. Perceval recognized the tree easily when her Angel provided maps and images.
It was not so easy to reconcile the maps and images of Grail—of Fortune and Favor—with the reality. The orbital simulations showed two worlds, one twenty percent smaller than the other, circling a common center of gravity in an elegant dance. It showed the moment when Favor whipped between Fortune and the sun, and the more leisurely transit behind. It showed the beautiful, braided pattern of the two orbits sliding over and under one another.
It could not show what she witnessed now—the dark worlds,