Grail - Elizabeth Bear [83]
And Samael said, “That is a heresy.”
“By your standards,” Danilaw said, “I have no doubt. And by ours, most of the foundations of your society are untenable abominations. Which is going to make things interesting if we have to share a planet.” He glanced at Amanda, who in continuing to strip off her primitive armor had revealed an off-white jumpsuit of some fiber Tristen did not recognize. When she was out of it, her suit softened, compacting neatly to a small bundle attached to an oversized set of oxygen tanks—further evidence of the fragility of these Means, and their requirements for a rich atmosphere. She retrieved some sort of instrument package from the helmet and slipped it over her head, to dangle on a lanyard.
“Please explain what you mean by rightminding,” Tristen said.
“These days, whenever possible, we do it through genetic surgery,” Danilaw said. “But in an adult, it’s a combination of microsurgery, chiefly to the temporal lobe, and therapeutic normalization of the neurochemistry. We use this process to mitigate some of the atavistic, self-destructive impulses of the human psyche—blind faith, sophipathology, tribalism—so that rational thought can prevail.”
He hesitated. Perceval made a noise of encouragement. It sounded to Tristen as if what Danilaw was describing was evolution. Or evolutionism, anyway, so he wasn’t sure where the touchiness lay.
But Danilaw looked at Captain Amanda, and she nodded. “One of my roles is historian,” she said. “I’m here in part because of my interest in C22. And my esteemed colleague is worried about causing you offense because we are unused to dealing with, uh—with natural-minded individuals such as yourselves. And because resistance to the mandated administration of early forms of this process is one of the reasons why your ancestors left Earth.”
“And the other,” Danilaw said, “was because decades of irrational human competition had driven the homeworld into a state of ecological catastrophe, such that it could no longer support large human populations.”
“We were not supposed to survive,” Perceval said.
“We know,” Danilaw said. “The Kleptocratic government—and what they did to your ancestors—was the final weight that really spun public opinion in favor of rightminding everyone. At first it was used to treat incurable ideologues and criminals. Then we moved on to sophipaths and Kleptocrats. The arcane priests of destructive religious systems such as Capitalism and—forgive me—Evolutionism came next. This was around the time your people moved on. Eventually, the rightminded population exceeded the unrightminded, and the procedure was made mandatory. Those were the last extensive wars Earth fought. Since then, they’ve managed through negotiation and compromise.”
“It’s not so shocking,” Tristen said, thinking of the modifications he’d made to his own mind, memories, and emotional landscape over the years. “The romanticization of a natural human state as somehow superior to a managed one is—your word, I am not certain I’m using it properly?”
“Sophipathology?” Danilaw asked.
“Thought-sickness,” Mallory supplied. Tristen smiled over his shoulder at the necromancer, and was rewarded by a flash of angelic grin through dark coiled hair.
Tristen rubbed his hands together. “So the implication of what you are telling us is that whoever sabotaged your vessel did so in a spirit of complete rationality?”
“Yes,” Amanda said. “And in the spirit of the public good.”
“That is useful information.” Perceval inclined her head like a queen, leaving Tristen to wonder what the squat, earthbound alien couple made of her. “Please, I must address the crisis now; Samael will see you are made comfortable. Now that the autonomous response is complete, there will be decisions that require my full attention.”
Amanda looked at Danilaw, seeking support, Tristen imagined, for whatever she would say next. His nod must have offered it, because when she turned back she spoke directly—and passionately—to Perceval.
“Captain,” she said. “I understand that you have exceptionally