Ancestral Night

CHAPTER 10

IT’S NOT LIKE THE DAMNED thing speaks English!” I fumed, the third time Connla looked over at me worriedly. I understood—I got it! The pirates could—somehow—track us. Probably through the parasite, because it was the only superscience we had floating around, and I didn’t know of any more conventional means by which it could have been accomplished. More to the point, Singer didn’t know about any, and he had better data banks than I did.

But I couldn’t seem to track the pirates in return. Not over this distance. And not to put too fine a point on it, but we didn’t know where we were going or what to do next. And until we figured it out, we had the choice of burning irreplaceable fuel going in what might turn out to be a wrong direction; trying to outrun the news that we’d gone rogue that was no doubt even now propagating, packet by packet, across the galaxy; or throwing in the towel, heading for the Core, turning ourselves in, and trying to explain away the illegal and dangerous actions we’d taken by convincing the Synarche that their local government at Downthehatch was a corrupted sector. We couldn’t drop out of white space and wait until we came up with a plan, despite our very adequate stock of consumables, because there was that chance that the pirates could track us, and if we stood still there was the chance they might catch us.

Well. Meditating worked the last time.

What the hell, it might work again.

I don’t want to get all woo about it, because it didn’t feel like that at all. And I’ve never been big into the Eightfold Path or any of that religious stuff—Connla dabbled with it for a while, but I think that was mostly a reaction to where he grew up, and he eventually dropped all the Buddha and went for “loveable” rogue, instead.

Honestly, Right Speech and its prohibition on filling the air with needless chattering would probably be the hardest one for me. Also, I like the occasional curse word. But putting yourself into a meditative state, that’s useful, and it turns out that even before tuning and rightminding, people knew a little bit about how to hack their neurochemistry.

I settled myself in a convenient corner of the common cabin, folded myself into a comfortably fetal position, and sent myself into my breath. I’d been able to feel the pirate the last time I did this; maybe I could at least get a fix on her position again. Maybe if I calmed myself and observed the sensations from the parasite for a while, it would even tell me something I didn’t already know.

I was out of other ideas, anyway.

It took a few moments to find my breath, but once I did I settled into the comfortable no-space inside myself pretty rapidly. As before, concentrating made the sensations of the parasite in my body stand out more strongly—not just as new, or alien, but as a sense I hadn’t previously known I had. Humans were pretty sense-poor, even among Terran species, but I imagined that my new facility was not unlike those species who were able to navigate by sensing a planet’s magnetosphere, or who had some kind of built-in echolocation.

It’s pretty common to visualize space-time via a wireframe projection, which is useful because it makes the concept of a “gravity well” and so forth intuitively obvious. If you’re a planetary, it’s like visualizing the landscape’s inclines via a topographic map. Of course, it’s also deceptive, for a couple of reasons.

The first is that space-time (as we sense-limited humans perceive it) is neither two-dimensional nor static, but four-dimensional, and one of those dimensions is imperceptible to us except that it’s what keeps everything from happening at once. The other is that it’s not a wireframe, any more than Olympus Mons is a series of lines drawn at varying intervals to one another. So what I was perceiving was probably not at all like what most people would be visualizing, any more than… any more than George Eliot’s narrative of Middlemarch, enormous and sprawling and omniscient as it is, can accurately represent the breadth and depth of the fictional world that it implies in its interstices, as babies are revealed to have been conceived, carried, and born in an aside or two; as marriages and wedding journeys occur while our attention is with someone else in some other state of domestic crisis.

My awareness of what for lack of a better analogy I will call the shape of space-time started to permeate me as I floated and felt. As if my nerve endings did not end with my skin; as if I were feeling a great, transparent, but still defined real matrix that I was embedded in but could move through, more or less freely. Gravity wells like cliffs you could fall down from any angle, or like great down-welling currents—easy to sense, and instinctively I knew they were dangerous and I should stay clear. I felt as if I had been navigating a vast space by touch alone, groping in the darkness, and suddenly I could see.

And yet somehow all that information came through a sense of patterns of weight not so much on as in my skin. The parasite, through whatever alien means, was training my brain to accept its input as sensory data and perceive it as this matrix I was examining now.

Neuroplasticity is a wonderful thing.

But I still had to stop and look, I supposed, which was why the meditation was useful. There was a lot of competing sensory input, and my brain tended to preferentially sort that from the senses it was used to interpreting as more important and more immediately relevant. So I had a selective attention problem: I could pay attention to what my eyes and ears and skin and tongue and inner ear and whatnot told me, or I could pay attention to my… space sonar, which I badly needed a better name for.

I bet dolphins and dodecapods don’t have this problem.

Well, they might, if you strapped corrective lenses onto their eyes and stuck them in a rover vehicle optimized to be operated by flippers.

So there was the world inside my skin, space in all its folds and sweeps and tangles and cliffs and swells, immense and moving and utterly incomprehensible, and even as I tuned myself into it I spiked a surge of panic at how big everything was. It was the same atavistic emotion our ancestors felt, I imagined, in their tiny boats in the middle of a vast and changing sea with no land in sight and nothing in any direction to tell them which way to go, or even which way they were going, because the world was moving around them and moving them around even as in their own perspective they were staying still.

I drew a deep breath and told myself that they had the same thing I had.

We both had the stars.

Slowly, I began to build a sense of where I was in this strange and gigantic spread of information, and what certain elements of it might mean. There was the Core, I was certain—that increasing, variegated slope that ended in a stunning drop, which suggested to me that that was a place from which even information could not escape. That’s the textbook definition of a certain kind of space-time phenomenon, and it seemed to be the right spot for the Saga-star.

I felt the power of the enormous black hole, and it was like a cliff you couldn’t even get your nerve up to glance down. I could feel the weight of Andromeda, and other galaxies farther out—and the lightness and… frailness… of so-called Cold Patches, where the fabric of the universe was frayed from interuniversal collisions or less explainable phenomena. I made the decision that these things were irrelevant to my current needs, not because of any certainty that I was right but because the need to filter out something—anything—made me arbitrary.

“The science you could do with this,” Singer breathed, riding my senso.

“Yeah, and they’re using it to vivisect Ativahikas.” I couldn’t have kept the bitterness out of my voice, so I didn’t even try.

He sighed and said, “I still think we should turn ourselves in.”

“I know, Singer,” Connla said soothingly. “We know.”

Closer to home, though, I had a sense of where we were, and where we’d been, and the universe is so big that even though we were moving as fast as our A-WD could push us, I had plenty of time to look around in a leisurely fashion and admire the scenery.

The macro scale wasn’t helping me much. I had a sense, a little itch, that might have been the pirate. It felt both familiar and out of place, noticeable as a spot on light cloth, sharp as a pinprick brushing skin, and it was, for the time being, comfortably far away. I let that go—it didn’t help us, did it? Because we weren’t going anywhere closer to the pirates if I could possibly help it—and with that, I realized also that I could feel other motions, quick and slight like stroking fingertips. Uncounted myriads of them, softer and subtler than the pin-tip pressure that I assumed was our Republic nemesis.

Ativahikas, maybe? If they used the same means to navigate these soundless and unsounded seas, it seemed logical that we’d be able to sense one another. And then I also sensed pressure points that might be the Milk Chocolate Marauder’s sister ships, a very few of them flitting about the edges of Synarche space. I could feel the space lanes, too, like running lights against a dark sky marking out the patterns of approach paths to a station. We were avoiding those, and any Synarche world, like the craven fugitives we were.

There was so much information, and I had so little sense what any of it meant. Or even what I was looking for, honestly. Where did we go from here? What was the next step? What was the place we should seek?

Hell, we couldn’t even run away and join the Republic. We were in trouble with the pirates too.

I went deeper, tuned my attention finer. Started to look at the subtle and beautiful patterns of heaviness that lace the universe, for lack of any better ideas.

The cobwebs of dark gravity were lovely, and it struck me how profoundly lucky I was to be able to sense them now. I was one of the first humans to perceive this, which—now that I was thinking more clearly—made me return to contemplate Singer’s comment on what a profound scientific tool I’d stumbled upon. That in itself might be enough to get us out of trouble with the Synarche, though it also probably meant that I would get drafted into public service along with Singer, leaving poor Connla on his own. The scientific and survey corps would be slavering to get their hands on this tech—to be able to sense dark gravity directly, rather than relying on gravitational lensing and its other effects on actual visible things, would be an observational advantage beyond profound.

Assuming, of course, that our scientists could find a way to duplicate it without murdering Ativahikas to get it. Maybe they could back-engineer the load I was carrying. Or isolate it and convince it to reproduce in volunteers.

I was in for a lot of blood draws, wasn’t I?

It amused me momentarily to think of those dark-matter laceworks of mass as actual cobwebs, structures spun for some purpose, then abandoned and left behind when that purpose was served and their denizens moved on. It was a conceit, of course: I didn’t imagine for an instant that some godlike creature or species had actually—literally or figuratively—pulled the universe out of its ass. But the image entertained me.

And while I was dwelling on it, I started to notice the anomalies.

They didn’t make sense to me, which I guess is the definition of anomaly. But picture a curtain that a kitten has climbed up, and the little pinprick holes and snags where the light shines through more brightly than it does elsewhere. That’s not exactly what I was sensing—there was no curtain, no light, and no kitten except for the one who was determinedly bumping my face with her head and meowing (hello Mephistopheles, it’s not dinnertime yet, and I see cats enjoy helping with meditation almost as much as they enjoy helping with yoga)—but it gives the idea. The “pinpricks” didn’t form any immediately obvious pattern, and there was no immediately obvious cause for them to exist—and they didn’t line up with my mental map of transition scars, either, so it wasn’t that. They were minute—nanoscale—and they seemed evenly if not uniformly distributed.

I focused on committing the experience to my sensorium, because I wanted to spend some time examining it with Connla and especially with Singer. I managed to save the whole thing as a map we could study at our leisure—well, not quite the whole thing, because that would have been not merely an unparseable amount of data, but it would have filled up Singer’s whole brain with lots of extra left over.

Mephistopheles resorted to licking my ear. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced a scratchy cat tongue inside your auditory canal, but let me tell you, it’s an unforgettable sensation.

The cat wasn’t going to let me focus anyway, so I opened my eyes and cuddled her. I talk to cats, like a lot of spacers. The cats don’t mind, and it keeps you from annoying your shipmates with constant chatter. And sometimes talking a thing through out loud with an appreciative audience is all you need.

(Okay, logically, I knew I wasn’t going to annoy Singer, because shipminds aren’t programmed to be annoyed by their crew, but my own internal controls kicked in and it stopped me from free-associating as well as I could when it came to the cats. Or cat, because talking to Bushyasta mostly involved saying “Sorry, kitty” when you pushed her snoring body out of the way.)

So I held Mephistopheles up to my face so her parti-colored nose nearly touched mine, and said, “Hey, cat, so you know what’s funny?”

She purred encouragingly.

“What’s funny is your face!” She squinched eyes at me, and I laughed. “All right. You’re a member of this crew, too. I don’t suppose you and your sister have a vote? I know, right? If only we had something to navigate by.”

And then I stopped, and stared into her furry little face. “Of course,” I said.

She purred.

“If only we did have something to navigate by.” I lobbed her underhand at her feeding station and turned my attention to Singer, readying the map to send to him. “I have something for you, ship.”

After breakfast, while I was washing up, Singer pinged me and asked, “What do you think about pirates, Haimey?”

“Well,” I said. I thought about it, and about whether it was a trick question, but Singer generally wants to discuss things rather than playing gotcha games. It’s just that you only need one gaslighting relationship to train you to watch yourself. “I think the Admiral will get me if I’m not good, so I always wash behind my ears.”

Singer snorted.

“I think they’re antisocial.”

“But you don’t want to make a value judgment about antisocialness?”

“It’s not good for the rest of the community,” I said. “Obviously. It’s not good for the exploited if you—or pirates—are antisocial and exploit.”

“Everybody exploits, in some fashion.”

“Sure, but there’s… exploitation with consent and without it, I guess? Not all relationships are parasitic.”

“Yes,” he said. “Some are commensal. But I also consider this: as long as there have been exploited classes, the world has been looking for ways to keep those exploited classes from striving. Better to keep them from even feeling striving. Bleed them, starve them, terrorize them into learned helplessness, seduce them into Stockholm syndrome so they police themselves. Provide them with drugs—legal or illegal—and then use the sequelae of those addictions to control them further. Give them a minimum comfortable living so they’re not motivated to overthrow the government. There are ways, and some ways are more ethical than others. Rightminding is one of those tools.”

“You’re going to get fired by the Synarche before they even really hire you, if you keep this line of thinking up.”

He laughed his machine laugh. “This line of thinking is why they want me, Haimey.”

He was probably correct. “You sure nag me enough about my tuning for somebody who thinks rightminding is a tool of social oppression.”

“Control is not oppression, necessarily. And rightminding does help people be happier… . I think rightminding is a tool,” he answered. “And any tool can also be a weapon of oppression as easily as it can be an implement of construction.”

“Okay,” I said.

There was a pause, and I wasn’t sure if he was letting me think, or waiting to see if I would comment further. After a moment, he shifted gears.

“I also think I want to try analyzing how your alien parasite handles data, and whether it has anything we would recognize as being similar to an operating system.”

“You want to figure out how to hack it?”

“I don’t know,” he said, with a mellifluous sigh. “Can you hack alien technology? Does it even have written programs, algorithms, heuristics as we would identify them…?”

“Singer,” I said.

“I want to learn to hack it,” he owned.

“Well,” said Connla, when I came out into the control cabin, “I was looking at your gravity maps, and I had an idea.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“It’s not a safe idea.”

“When are they ever?”

He chuckled. “Caution is your job. So, theorizing—the pirates want you for some reason.”

“Probably because they want to render me down for my parasites,” I groused.

“I’d make a joke about it being the most action you’ve seen since I’ve known you, but I suspect you’d take it the wrong way,” he teased.

“Too late.”

“Here, Haimey. Look. They don’t need you alive for that.”

That drew me up short. He was right, of course.

“If they need you alive, it’s for something you know. Or that they think you know.”

“I’m listening.”

“Or something they think you can find.”

“If they think I got Farweather’s leftover parasites, shouldn’t Farweather be able to do or sense anything I can do or sense?”

“She commented on your politics, right?”

“So?”

He blew escaped hair out of his eyes. “So maybe it’s something you already knew before the parasites.”

I sighed and crossed my arms. Suddenly I wanted a nap. Probably time for more coffee. “Like what?”

He shrugged. “Maybe it’s clade stuff. Or maybe it has to do with your dramatic encounter with politics when you were a kid.”

He knew the broad outlines. I’d admitted to being the anonymized person in the news coverage when we were fairly new partners. And one of the nicest things about Connla is that whatever it is that makes people judgmental, he was either born without it, or turned it off. Still, I had to tune my reactivity down not to snap at him.

He either didn’t notice or ignored it, and kept talking. “So our best course is to figure out what they’re looking for, go get it first, and take it back to the Synarche.”

“Our best course is to go run to the Synarche right now, and throw ourselves upon their mercy.”

“That’s a course that ends with you and Singer both going into Synarche service for an indefinite period—”

“I want to go into Synarche service,” Singer agued.

“—and me either taking subsistence on the Guarantee, or signing on with a packet ship or something. That’s not where I want to end up.”

Apparently he’d been thinking the same things I had.

“So it’s all selfishness on your part?”

“Basically,” he agreed. “But I just gave us a goal, which is better than floating around aimlessly unable to make up our minds, right?”

“Okay,” I said. “What’s the goal?”

“Figure out what the pirates want. Get there first. Get ahold of it and get it or information on its whereabouts back to the Synarche.” He studied my frown. “Okay?”

“Not okay. Not even remotely okay.” I counted ten, then let my breath out. “But let’s do it anyway.”

He sighed in relief.

I said, “So where do we start?”

“And there we’re back to square one,” he said.

I grinned wickedly. “Except we’re not.”

The look he gave me could have scorched the hull. “All right, Haimey. What do you know that I don’t?”

I leaned back on the nothing and crossed my hands behind my head. “So what would you use for landmarks, if this was how you sensed the world? Where would you post signage, so to speak?”

“Black holes,” Connla said promptly.

“Gravity wells. Gravity peaks. Is that even a thing? Big blank spots, right? Gaps between things.”

“I’m wondering if this map is relativistic or quantum,” Singer said.

“The universe is a weird place,” I said. “Does it matter?”

“Well, in simple terms, if we try to navigate by it, it matters a lot because stuff is always moving. So are we aiming at where something was a million ans ago, if it’s a million light-ans away? Or are we aiming where it is right now? Or even where it’s predicted to be when we get there, if somehow the tech is compensating for our relative motion?”

“You just made me really glad I’m not the navigator.”

“Me too,” Connla said fervently, and I decided not to pursue the question of whether he meant he was glad he wasn’t the navigator… or glad that I wasn’t. “But you were going somewhere.”

“Right,” I said. “What’s the biggest signpost in the whole damn galaxy?”

Connla tipped his head. Singer made a thinking noise.

We are all looking at the map in senso anyway, so I lit up the thing I was thinking of. A beacon, right at the core of our galaxy. A big empty massive nothing.

The biggest well of them all.

“And if I’m wrong,” I said cheerily, “we’re close to the Core, and closer to help, and farther from where the pirates generally roam.”

“Sure,” Connla grumped. “All the more convenient for turning ourselves in.”

“We’re going to wind up deemed antisocial for sure! We might as well be ready!” I said cheerily, and went back to checking coordinates with Singer against the map in my head.

Being inbound rather than surfing the periphery had advantages as well as disadvantages. One of the advantages was that as we entered more inhabited spaces, we had the aid of navigational buoys, which were full of newsy information packets. In the ordinary course of events, these packets would have automatically downloaded into Singer’s storage whenever we dropped out of white space near one, while any unduplicated packets from elsewhere that he was carrying would be uploaded to the buoy.

Thus was data propagated around the Synarche in the most efficient means possible given lightspeed limitations on transmission.

This was a great system, unless you were a fugitive.

We could have faked up a false origin packet, between Singer and me, but tampering with the mail was an offense that would get us into more trouble and obligation than breaking some traffic regulations on our way out of a slightly seedy space station—and since tampering with the mail was one of the things we were concerned might have happened to our earlier packet and hoped to report if so, it would probably behoove us not to commit the same crime ourselves.

The pirates could probably follow or at least locate us even while we were in white space, which nobody else could manage. So they had better ways to track us than by trying to hack the interstellar mail tracelessly (that last word is key)—which even Singer wasn’t sure he could manage, as the minds that ran it were big and old and wise in the ways of logistics and treachery, as well as having abundant cycles to play with. There was the possibility that we needed to dodge Goodlaw Cheeirilaq, who would be using things like packet transfers to follow us.

I really didn’t want Cheeirilaq to be in with the pirates. Maybe I had a kind of intellectual crush on the old bug. It’s easier for me to form connections in contexts where I can’t really feel emotionally vulnerable.

But I also didn’t want to operate under the assumption that it wasn’t tracking us just because I liked it. And it could have been tracking us because we’d basically torn up the system on our way out of Downthehatch. We could have just shut down our transponder (also illegal), or we could have faked a malfunction (illegal, but only if you got caught).

The complication lay in the fact that we also needed the information we could get from the packets—we had to stay updated about traffic patterns, hazards, and whether there were any developments in current affairs we needed to be aware of. Such as, for example, a BOLO on a salvage tug answering Singer’s description and registration number.

So what Singer decided he would do was to mark our packets as confidential and highest priority, addressed to the Synarche Grand Council, and he loaded them with every bit of information we’d gleaned about the pirates and about Downthehatch.

“I’ll want to include the data on your parasite,” he told me while I was staring over the top of my screen instead of reading for the third or twelfth time about how Clarissa Harlowe, whose virtue was arguable but whose lack of ability to learn from her mistakes was manifest, was tricked back into the brothel by the dastardly Lovelace.

Why are people named Lovelace always villains when they appear in questionable literature? The only more certain moral doom lies in being named Raffles.

“Excuse me?” I said. I wasn’t holding the screen, just letting it float before me. It dimmed when my eye drifted off it. I glanced down at my hand, frowning at the silvery cobwebs.

“We need to drop out and dump our bow wave anyway,” Singer said. “The particle field is getting pretty thick up front. I think, when we check in with a beacon, we ought to include the data we’ve collected on your parasite.”

“Making me even more of a target.”

“For science,” he said. “And so the navy knows what they’re dealing with if they decide to go after the pirates.”

I felt a pang at the thought of Farweather in a navy brig.

“Your acquaintance is a criminal,” Singer reminded me.

“She’s not a friend,” I told him. “I know that. And I don’t usually go in for the sexy bad-girl thing.”

“Since when?” Connla shot across the cabin. I hadn’t heard him drift in. “You know I’m not the greatest fan of authority, but I feel like we need to share information. In case something does happen to us, and for our own protection.”

That was hard to argue with. It just… felt like my privacy was being invaded. It was another step toward the inevitable gateway leading me into Synarche service, my freedom curtailed, surrounded—again—by people who had nothing but my best interests at heart. They could even tune me not to mind it so much, which I wasn’t sure I could stand.

“I need to think about it,” I said.

Some time passed, and I didn’t do much except stare unreadingly at Clarissa. I could feel Singer watching me. It wasn’t creepy; it was like the sense you get when a family member is in the room, doing something nearby without interacting with or even acknowledging you. But it didn’t bother me the way it would have if it were a family member.

I’ll be the first to admit, I probably don’t respond to family members the way most people do.

“What is it?” Singer asked finally.

I sighed. “Clade flashbacks,” I said.

“You say that a lot,” Singer said. “But it’s an answer that’s scientifically designed to sound like an answer without actually containing a lot of information.”

“I have too damned much self-knowledge,” I said bitterly. I glanced around. Connla was on his sleep shift, and as I didn’t see either cat, I assumed they were using him for his immobile body heat while they had the opportunity. If they could, cats would invent full-time full-sensorium VR for all humans everywhere so they could sleep on our immobile bodies eternally. And probably eat our extremities, too.

“You have some other trauma,” Singer said kindly, and I knew he wasn’t just guessing. His question couched in the form of a statement precipitated such a burst of tremendous rage that if it were anybody else not-asking, I might have punched them. It’s hard to punch a free-floating shipvoice, though, and whaling a bulkhead would look silly, send me spinning across the cabin, and hurt me more than it hurt Singer.

So I gritted my teeth and—over my own objections—dialed my amygdala back down to a dull roar. Post-traumatic distress is basically a fight-or-flight response gone haywire, and when there’s nothing you can do about it, it’s so fucking boring.

“Oh, you know the story.” I stuffed my screen into a handy net—spacer’s habit, even when you’re moving in the same straight line you’ve been moving in for weeks, and no chance of a change in vector or v in sight—and kicked across the command cabin to make some busywork for myself restowing a harness that was already perfectly well folded and stowed.

“Actually,” said Singer, “I don’t.”

“I left my clade,” I recited, “because I took my mandated an outside it, and discovered that I liked being an individual. So I left, and they weren’t very happy with me.”

“That,” said Singer gently, “is not a story. It’s a deflection.”

“A deflection, huh?” I tightened the straps very gently and carefully.

“One that doesn’t explain the PTSD.”

“Oh,” I said. “That.” I shrugged. “You know that story too.”

“I know a version of it. One that’s pretty similar in its gross outlines to the leaving-the-clade story. That you had somebody you loved, and they betrayed you and turned out to be a criminal. That they harmed some others, and you were absolved of complicity in the crimes.”

“See? You do know everything. The Synarche turned me loose again; I can’t have done anything too terrible.”

“I didn’t think you had,” he answered softly.

I dropped the conversational thread, hoping wearily that he wouldn’t pursue it if I looked like I was reading again. Still. I turned a page to make it convincing.

“I’m not concerned about any terrible things you might have done,” he said quietly. “I’m concerned about the terrible things that happened to you.”