Ancestral Night

CHAPTER 11

THERE WAS A GIRL. THERE’S always a girl, they say, and in this case it was true. Her name was Niyara, and she had green eyes, and she said she loved me. She said she was my best friend, that I was family to her. She said a lot of things.

She was a walking time bomb.

In more ways than one.

Oh, you know. The clues were there. The clues are always there. You just… well, you get good at constructing a narrative that explains them away, don’t you? If you’re only supposed to call at certain times, it’s because she’s working and needs to concentrate. If you always seem to meet at your place, it’s because she likes your cats, and because her ex is still sharing the suite with her and having you over is awkward. Housing is at a premium on stations, and it’s hard to get reassigned. Lots of people share space.

If she seems to forget a lot of things that are important to you, well, she’s distracted; she probably needs to tune her reactivity a little more carefully and she’s one of those people who are reluctant to bump.

You know how it is. Sometimes you’re a little reluctant to bump as well. You want to have an honest feeling and find out what your subconscious really thinks about something. Except you keep getting weirdly anxious for no reason, and you seem to be bumping a lot to keep that under control.

Did you know that people with PTSD, when under stress, often use the second person in order to distance themselves from events?

By now, you’ve figured out that she was married. And lying to me about it, and I guess probably lying to her spouse about me, which are the two significant details, because it’s not like everybody is monogamous, and most people who aren’t, aren’t assholes about it. But she… liked being in control, and she liked having secrets, and she liked drama.

And I knew it, on some level, and I ignored it. I chose to trust, because my hormones were surging, and I was limerent and infatuated, and I wanted with all my heart and soul to believe. In us.

In her. So once I found out about the wife, I believed her when she told me it was long over, that they were just still living together for convenience. And when I found out they were sleeping in the same bed, I… believed her again, and I honestly don’t even remember what the lie was and I cannot bear to go look at my senso logs and find out.

She was an awful person, and she was using me, and I should have known better. But I was very young, and very in love.

She was also, it happens, a terrorist.

I’d just re-upped for my second an of release from the clade—to be with Niyara, as much as because I hadn’t yet decided if I was going to give up the clade for her. I was pretty sure I was, but I was also trying to talk her into coming home to visit.

“It’s great,” I told her. “Nobody ever argues.”

“Nobody ever fights for what they believe in, you mean,” she said, which should have been a clue.

I knew she was a political radical, but when you’re nineteen that’s sexy. I remember one time when we were lying in bed together and just as I was drifting off to sleep, she woke me up to tell me all about why the Synarche was a corrupt institution and must be brought down.

“It’s a corrupt institution that protects your right to say it should be changed or replaced, as long as you use legal means to do so,” I reminded her. “You’ve got a better system in mind?”

“One without forced government service,” she said.

“So you think people who want to run the government should?”

“You approve of conscripting people instead?”

“Well, we have enough evidence that making people compete for the job attracts a lot of narcissists. Part of being a community is being part of the governing body. Taking responsibility for its actions and helping to make choices that benefit all the citizenry. Taking responsibility for its well-being, just as you do when you’re part of a family. It’s an obligation and a nuisance, sure, but it’s one we accept for the common good.”

She had rolled over, and was staring at me. “It’s a draft.”

“So is jury duty. And required voting on referendums.” I sighed. “Besides, community service builds a sense of community. It allows us to meet our systers and come to regard them as people rather than alien others. It helps hack our neurology and makes us better citizens of the galaxy.”

“Now you’re just mouthing your civics indoctrination at me. What about freedom? What about individual rights?”

I was young and self-righteous, and I didn’t know when to quit. We’ve all been there. Anyway, I was, as I believe I said, nineteen. And I’d aced this test. “Nonautocratic government is a meme. It’s a set of ideas arrived at by common agreement and enforced by institutions and the individual consent of the governed. The purpose of nonautocratic government is to provide for individual rights and freedoms, protect the body and welfare of the governed, and engage in projects that exist on too large a scale for individuals to reasonably be expected to complete them. So we serve, if we’re called. It’s a couple of ans, and in return we get stability and livelihood and the personal freedom to, among other things, criticize the system.”

“I had no idea you were this naive,” she said, in a voice that made me bump hard to dial back the sudden reflexive anger I felt at her dismissal.

My voice was still keen and too high when I replied, “Sure. And what are you, a pirate?”

“Freeporter,” she said automatically.

“So you are one!”

“No,” she said. “They’re parasites. But they have a few good ideas about personal freedom.”

“Well, I have a few good ideas about personal responsibility.”

She got up in a huff and went home.

To her wife, I suppose.

I spent the rest of the night cold, alone, and crying—too invested in my own misery and the certainty I’d done it to myself and deserved it. The worst thing you can do to somebody clade-bred is abandon them. We don’t know how to handle it. We don’t know how to handle conflict at all.

It occurred to me much, much later—after a lot of rightminding—that Niyara knew that, of course, and had used it against me. If I questioned her, if I stood up to her, if I expressed a boundary or told her where to get off, she withdrew. And she made out that it was my fault, also.

I never fought with her about it again. I went to her meetings, after a while, though I figured out pretty fast from things people would say that I wasn’t invited to all of them.

I wasn’t a revolutionary—I didn’t become a revolutionary. Okay, maybe slightly; there’s still some things about the Synarche that I think are poorly managed, such as the way they can, in fact, require anyone’s service at any time, taking them away from their careers and loved ones, no matter what else they might have going on.

And my clade had left me a little… embittered isn’t the right word. Ready to interrogate and perhaps reject the values I had been raised with, let’s say.

So if I were to rebel against my upbringing, political revolutionary on a small scale would be a—reasonable is the wrong word—likely thing for me to pursue. It would certainly shock my clademothers.

I didn’t understand any of this at the time, mind you. I was too inexperienced for that kind of self-knowledge and had the juvenile kind instead, which mostly consists of finding logical ways to justify whatever it is you feel like doing.

Nobody ever mentioned terrorism to me.

Nobody ever mentioned bombs.

Maybe they knew I would balk. Maybe my indoctrination hadn’t yet proceeded to that level.

We fought a lot, in retrospect. Constantly.

I didn’t realize it at the time for several reasons. First of all, because I was from a clade, where nobody fought. Second, because I watched a lot of pipeline dramas, where everybody yells at each other all the time because melodrama is interesting. Third, because… well, I’d never been in a relationship before. And because I didn’t have a lot of experience with conflict, I didn’t realize when I was being manipulated into it, or when the conflict itself was being manipulated to direct me in unhealthy ways.

Case in point, the last argument Niyara and I ever had. I remember that one in particular, because it was the last argument we had. And because I underwent enhanced recollection under Judicial supervision, for the trial, and now I can’t forget. Selective memory, it turns out, is a blessing.

Even with the enhanced recollection, I can’t remember exactly how it started, because the conversation was so profoundly trivial. We were on couches in one of Ansara Station’s observation pods, drinking tea and staring out the big bubble ports at the universe scrolling past outside. And I was trying to have, well, what I thought was a serious discussion of my prospects for leaving the clade, whether I should, and my prospects for becoming a pilot.

My prattling trailed off when I noticed Niyara staring at me with incredulity.

“What?” I said it nervously, looking for reassurance. “You don’t think I have what it takes to be a pilot?”

She mouthed one of her refrains. “I can’t believe how naive you are.”

I had been lying sprawled on the couch, my legs kicked over the back. It suddenly felt like far too vulnerable a position to have put myself in. I swung my legs around and sat up, hugging myself. “It can’t be that impossible to get into pilot training. I have good engineering and crisis-response aptitudes.”

“I’m sure,” she said mockingly.

I felt scathed, struck. Disemboweled. I opened my mouth to defend myself, and nothing came out.

She said, “But you’d be giving all your skill and talent to a corrupt system that would exploit you, and not give you anything in return.”

“I don’t think that’s fair—” I started.

She interrupted me with a snort. “Spend your whole life running errands for the Synarche, and what do you get out of it?”

“Stability?” I said. “Adventure? Contributing to the well-being of the commonwealth? Giving back something in exchange for your oxygen ration and livelihood? Feeling useful?”

“ ‘Feeling useful,’ ” she mocked.

The skin on my face felt dry and tight. I was angry, but I didn’t really know what angry was, or what to do with it.

“I think you mean ‘being exploited,’ ” she continued.

“If you say so.”

But the seed of doubt was in me, doing seed-of-doubt things—sending out curling green tendrils and raveling down threadlike roots. I grew up in a clade. What did I really know about whether or not the Synarche exploited its citizens? I was coming to the conclusion that the clades did, which left me deeply uncomfortable and unsettled in my identity and existence.

“But what’s the better system, then?”

She guffawed. “If you have to constantly alter your natural mental state to survive a situation, doesn’t it follow that the situation is toxic?”

“It might follow that your brain chemical balance is maladaptive,” I countered. “We didn’t evolve to live in a galaxy-spanning interdependence. Are you going to argue we should leave psychopaths untuned in order to let them prey on the rest of us because our species somehow evolved to have a certain number of self-eating monsters in it?”

It had felt like firm ground when I started the argument, but Niyara shaking her head and frowning at me made me trail off in insecurity.

“We evolved to be competitive and hierarchal,” she said, pitching her voice so it sounded like she was agreeing with me and felt sorry for me at the same time. “We evolved to excel in order to increase our own status and desirability.” She shrugged. “Denying that doesn’t change it.”

“Indulging it doesn’t make it right!” I shot back.

“Like I said”—she shook her head sadly— “naive. But you’re willing to go do something that is a total betrayal of my feelings?”

“So I should care about your feelings in a way you never cared about mine? It’s my life. I’m the one who has to live it.”

“I care about your feelings. There are lots of things you could do to have adventures, to explore!”

“You give my feelings a lot of lip service,” I admitted. “In between trying to control me.”

I have no idea where I found the spunk to stand up to her. And managing the conflict reasonably was beyond me at that point in my life. I got up, turned around, and walked away from her, because the alternative was starting to shout and throw things, and I was much too thoroughly socialized and programmed against what my linemothers would have called “displays” to create such a scene as that.

Five hours later, when I was lying on my bunk resisting the urge to tune and even more strongly resisting the near compulsion to send her a long, sorrowful mail, she texted me.

I’m sorry. I was a jerk. Meet me for dinner and I’ll make it up to you.

I wasn’t sure I believed her, but I was sure that I felt miserable when we were fighting, so I messaged back: Tell me where.