Grail - Elizabeth Bear [56]
11
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For the deed’s sake have I done the deed,
In uttermost obedience to the King.
—ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, “Gareth and Lynette”
Before any final decision could be made, Danilaw and his cabinet had to take their deliberations to the people. Bad Landing was still a community small and tightly knit enough to manage nicely under government by direct democracy, and Danilaw secretly dreaded the day when that changed. The good news, he comforted himself, was that he was likely to be long in his grave—and certain to be long done with his stint as City Administrator—before the population reached a crisis point.
Unless they wound up having to assimilate a few hundred thousand genetically engineered space refugees. In that case, all bets were off.
Bad Landing’s infosphere was more than adequate to the task. Because of the strength of some of the opinions expressed, Danilaw made the executive decision not to release the entire tapes of the Cabinet session, but he did cause Captain Amanda’s objections to be summarized and appended, and he made the original broadcast from the Jacob’s Ladder available, as well as a translation prepared by Captain Amanda and vetted by himself—though neither would be available to anyone who did not first sit through Danilaw’s brief, trenchant, and carefully worded introductory speech. But sometimes listening to politicians blather was the price you paid for participating in the process of government.
He also got the remainder of his staff rousted out of bed and released from conflicting primary, secondary, and/or tertiary engagements so they could get started building an information bolus for packet-burst home to Earth. He’d probably have a course of action under way by the time the home government sent him an advisory note, but the newsfeeds would thank him for the consideration.
Danilaw didn’t delude himself. It wouldn’t be long before cracked and edited versions of the alien broadcast were all over the feeds; he’d be surprised if there weren’t a few already, given that the transmission had come unencrypted via primitive tech, and most of the people capable of receiving it had been Gain’s hobbyists. But he also knew that it didn’t hurt to get his own version out as fast as possible, and one of the things he could offer that the hobbyists couldn’t was production quality. His version would be the most complete and, frankly, the one that looked the best. And though he could try not to say the sorts of things that were making ledes all over the network—a ship out of legend has returned—Danilaw was confident that human nature would provide the rest.
That finished, he changed into the exercise clothes he kept in a locker in the residential and security barracks, took a seven-kilometer run with his morning-shift bodyguards, and went out to the tables by the water to share a cup of tea and some protein biscuits with the sunrise. He then showered in reclaimed water before falling into the bed set aside for his use.
He dreamed of muscular twelve-armed knots of dodecapodes spelling arcane runes across the ocean floor, and woke in a cold sweat of fear because he couldn’t understand what they were trying to tell him.
He rose from his bed and paced the cold floor in slippered feet, the fear-induced nausea retreating slowly as he walked back and forth before the portal, watching sunlight shift through the dappled water of Crater Lake. Bits of things—organic matter, sand—danced like dust motes in the rays, and as he watched, a sense of lightness filled him. The scarred dodecapus was the only one in evidence, smooshing its sucker-mouth across the outside surface of the port, scraping up algae and tiny crustaceans.
Fear was not a familiar sensation, and this fear—stranger-fear, fear of the unknown—even less so. Among the legacies of atavism corrected by rightminding was the