Grail - Elizabeth Bear [74]
Her, in her personage as Captain. Not her-Perceval. He was a Head of State speaking to another Head of State, and foreign as that was, she needed to recollect it. This was not like speaking to Dorcas, or one of the Decker leaders. She was not this man’s liege lord, nor his conqueror.
He said, “We mourned you.”
A simple sentence. Three words: subject, verb, object. So unlike his usual elaborate eloquence, but when he said it, it echoed around her with the weight of his emotion and intention.
“We?” she said, already half knowing. He hadn’t mourned her, not in his own person or hers. But she understood where he was going; she just wanted to hear him say it.
“Earth,” he said. “Earth, her people, mourned your ancestors. We believed that the Kleptocracy had killed you all, that they sent you into space to freeze and die.”
Perceval smiled. The Kleptocracy. So it had a name.
“They tried.”
As if the weight of her admission had bowed the conversation, they both remained silent for a moment. Perceval supposed it was her place to open the discourse again. When she spoke, she imagined that this Fisher King, this lord of Grail, would understand that her we was for her forebears and antecedents, and not relevant to her speaking in her own person.
“We mourned the Earth,” she said.
The Fisher King smiled. “Actually, they did okay.”
Her surprise—shock; call it what it was—must have showed in her face, because he hastened to add, “In the long run, I mean. The late-twenty-second was a nightmare, from all I’ve heard. Deaths measured in the billions, famine, savagery. But the population crash proved a sort of blessing in the long term, because when they began to rebuild, they no longer needed the infrastructure that had been necessary at peak population.”
Perceval licked her lips. “It’s an established principle,” she said. “The survivors of a crisis and their immediate descendants flourish in a wide-open ecology. There is a proliferation of available niches.”
The Premier said, “The survivors don’t have to strive for resources or subsistence. They can turn their attention to less banal pursuits than outcompeting their fellows. And the survivors institutionalized that. They abolished sophipathies, and we took steps to protect our societies from their recurrence. Many of the descendants of those same regulations and procedures are still in place.” He paused. “Do you understand what I am saying?”
“Your legal system,” Perceval said. “You will expect us to abide by it, and cede authority to your leaders.”
The words came with a rush of relief; she hoped she didn’t sound as excited as she felt by the prospect of not being in charge anymore. She’d never wanted this role of Captain; she’d never wanted the opinions of dead antecedents echoing through her aching head. And though she had accepted leadership and symbiosis as part of the cost of saving her people, acceptance was not the same as celebration.
She was no longer the girl she had been when she became Captain. She was a woman now, and a leader, and she had accepted that a good deal of life entailed doing the sorts of things one really would rather not. But Perceval looked into this strange man’s face and glimpsed release, and it excited her.
His reaction did not fill her with confidence, or even allow her to long sustain that welcome relief. He glanced at his colleague, the Captain. Perceval was coming to understand that Captain meant something different to these alien humans than it did within the walls of her own world.
He said, “Do you understand what I mean by sophipathology?”
“The etymology,” Perceval said carefully, “suggests that a sophipathology is an illness of sophistry, which is to say of illogical or self-referential thought. Perhaps an ingrained or circular sort of reasoning?”
“In C21,” the Fisher King said, “which is our last cultural referent in common and one with which both my colleague and I are familiar—so please forgive me if