Grail - Elizabeth Bear [58]
“The real irony here,” Gain said at this second Alien Invasion Policy Meeting (though nobody outside of Danilaw’s head was actually calling it that), “is that we finally make first contact with an alien race after centuries of looking, and they’re us.”
“Not us,” Jesse said. “Something consanguineous. But that’s a different species. Subspecies. Whatever.”
“We can’t state that categorically until we get a look at the DNA,” Danilaw reminded them. “It’s only been a thousand years of divergence. Speciation can happen fast, but it’s a long shot.”
Gain looked more tired than the rest of them. She leaned forward on her elbows, blinking owlishly. Her hands were folded around a mug of stimulant. But tired or not, the mind behind those bleary eyes remained sharp. “And if they’re as different from us as neandertalensis from sapiens?”
Danilaw nibbled his cuticle. “We try not to compete for the same habitat.”
He didn’t state the obvious—that sharing an environment with a competitive, hierarchal, primitive version of humanity would require his people to either enforce their own social adaptations on the newcomers, or adopt a more aggressive stance of their own and deal with the long-term repercussions as they occurred.
Many of the most aggressively hierarchical humans had left while the world was collapsing, fleeing in the Jacob’s Ladder—an artificial world salvaged from the extravagant wreckage of humanity’s near self-immolation, fueled and funded by a Kleptocracy that did not outlast the launch of more than the first of the elaborate, flimsy, sabotaged vessels. To those who remained behind on an Earth like a gnawed husk, subsistence seemed luxury enough.
Those forebears had already begun rightminding themselves—the decision that provoked the flight of the Jacobeans in the first place. It had been the intentional self-handicapping of a competitor with no equals on the playing field.
To save themselves as a species, Danilaw’s ancestors had bargained away a good deal of the fear, the primate antagonism, the power structures that had driven them to mastery—even overlordship—of their environment. It had required a radical realignment of society and the human brain—forces that had driven those primitive humans to such intense competition that their entire worldwide society had been designed to contain and facilitate nothing else.
Instead, they had decided to shift the social focus to another, less expressed potential of the human animal—that of peaceable, advantageous cooperation and compromise. In selecting—in engineering—for self-sacrifice, commensalism, and negotiation over individualism, hierarchy, and authoritarianism, they had saved the world. They had ushered in an enduring age of peace and—if not prosperity—adequacy of resources for the new, reduced demand.
But it had required a reworking of the entire architecture of human neurology. Centuries later, the extinction event, ecological crisis, and massive population crash that had provoked it—dubbed the Eschaton by various factions at the time—was still remembered with a sort of hushed awe.
A remnant of the human race had emerged from the Eschaton with a renewed sense of desperation, if not purpose. They had refined the crude early techniques of rightminding into a comprehensive program of surgery, chemical therapy, and scientific child-rearing that had allowed humanity to finally do something about the clutter of its awkward, self-defeating, self-deluding evolutionary baggage.
Danilaw was grateful for the world they had left him—one in which sufficient resources were assured for each person’s comfort and livelihood, barring catastrophe, and in which pleasures were balanced off against obligations in an endurable and even enjoyable fashion. Like many, he maintained a certain bittersweet nostalgia for the glittering excesses of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—he played in a rock band, and he was not the only one to