Grail - Elizabeth Bear [15]
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 cliché. 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